Deathloop’s melee system was initially much more detailed, but these detailed mechanics were abandoned during development and kicking action was added to the game.
A Noclip In a video interview, Deathloop creative director Dinga Bakaba revealed that Deathloop originally had a parry system similar to Dishonored. This idea was shelved to add Deathloop’s simple and very powerful kick to the game.
“Initially, you could defend with your machete, dodge and block your opponent’s attacks, we said, ‘Okay, let’s ask ourselves all the questions that make Dishonored’s sword mechanic so good and we’ll figure it out later,’ but as soon as we added the multiplayer mode to the game, we said, ‘Okay. Things went wrong,” he said.
Bakaba explained that the invader “has a short latency relative to the player he’s connected to his game.” This revealed major gameplay differences between multiplayer invaders and NPCs. Thus, the parry system was shelved, but the developers were not satisfied.
“Then we removed the parry and just kept the blocking in the game and it was super boring. So we said, ‘Forget the defense, let’s replace it with a big kick that will surprise the players,'” Bakaba said.
Then the parry was removed from the game and the fan-favorite kick mechanic was added to the game.
Petey Oneto is a freelance writer at MRT.
