GDC: Arkane's Colantonio Takes On First-Person Melee

At a game design lecture held the morning of the first official day of GDC, Raphael Colantonio, creative director at Arkane Studios, explained many problems faced by designers in the realm of first-person hand-to-hand combat, a challenge it faced head-on in its Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.

The team made the choice of going with a middleware engine, specifically Valve's Source engine, which helped define one of the main goals of the project: "We didn't want Half Life 2 with a sword instead of the crowbar." The other main challenges, as the team saw things at the start of the project, were working on an aiming system that made sense for close range moving targets, giving a strong sense of damage feedback, and gaging distance.

More After The Jump.