Two clarifications about older issues… back in early March,
Mr. Fuzzles discovered that meleeing a multiplayer opponent in a very specific spot (the right shin – the foot won’t do, the hip won’t do, the left side won’t do) results in an instant death. This seemed too specific to me to be accidental;
I suggested it might be an easter egg, of sorts. Well, according to Bungie, it’s not…
Everyone agrees the instant-death-foot-melee thing is a bug rather than a feature, but no one knows (or is willing to say) whose fault it is. Given the team’s fondness for identifying and mocking the perpetrators of WAC, I’m inclined to believe they don’t actually know.
So why does it happen? Good question.
One thing Michael and Butcher both said is that the attacker’s angle on the foot must be so sharp that the engine thinks he’s attacking from behind.
Okay, one ‘egg’ down, one to go. A few days ago, Finn suggested that if you trigger the marines to begin shooting at you, they’ll continue to attack for a fixed amount of time before forgiving you… and that fixed time was 77 seconds. Again, this seemed too good to NOT be planned. Unfortunately, again, I was wrong.
The time is different on every skill level; Heroic, for example, is 60 seconds, and Legendary is 120. But it could be even longer depending on how long a sentence they speak when they first turn on you and whether you’re in earshot when your Traitor Timer runs out. 77 seconds is not hard-coded in the game.
So there you have it – two eggs, cracked and hard-boiled on the griddle of my delusions. Luckily, we still have the Megg left.