With regards to melee and hand-to-hand, will there be counters?
TL;DRHand-to-hand counters are probably coming, since the sync tech behind stealth takedowns would also enable them, but melee won't be at Dishonored or For Honor depth, and more melee work is scheduled later.
There are currently design discussions on full hand-to-hand combat. So a couple months ago, I did some just rough blockouts for punching, blocking, and things like that. Counters, these are all the... Quick answer to this is probably. There are design docs floating around for things like this. We have talked about things like what happens when you get into a bar fight or something like that. The piece of technology that actually creates the stealth kill result would be in part some of that same technology that creates a counter. So if you're just going to do a block, you don't really need anything from the other character, right? Your hand is just going to go up and you're going to block or something like that. But if you're going to counter, like he's going to come barreling down on top of you with something and you're going to go into, I don't know, a shomen-uchi iriminage or something like that, you need the two characters to be in sync. And that in-sync connection then is the same piece of technology that would be a takedown.
Yeah, and maybe to manage expectations here a tiny bit too, we're not talking Dishonored-level type melee combat, and we're not talking For Honor or anything quite as involved, right? This isn't the core of the game we're going to have. We hope to have pieces of that, of course. I can't even say where it's supposed to happen, but just to maybe manage the expectations there a tiny bit. We're not making Dishonored, is the thing.
I mean, a lot of the further-down-the-line melee system stuff is scheduled for later on this year.