If you’ve played the Battlefield 1 beta — and let’s face it, who hasn’t" — then you might have noticed a significant change to the franchise’s melee system. 
Over on the official Battlefield site, DICE details how the Battlefield 1 melee weapons and systems work, which means that the melee weapons aren’t just re-skins of the same thing. There are three Battlefield 1 melee weapon types: knives, clubs and bladed/specials. Each melee weapon type has three stats (speed, damage and rate at how easy it is to do a brutal takedown with said weapon).

Roughly speaking, there are three distinct melee weapon classes in Battlefield 1, each with their own pros and cons: knives, clubs, and bladed/specials. They primarily differ in three stats: the speed at which you can swing them, the damage they deal with each hit that connects, and how easy they are to perform a brutal takedown with. World War I saw many trench raids where soldiers needed to stay relatively silent. The cramped spaces meant that there was not a whole lot of room to maneuver, so these operations typically saw great use of various melee weapons. While some carried small trench knives with knuckledusters, others fashioned crude battering weapons from anything that they could find. One example that we have implemented in Battlefield 1 is simply a heavy club, fitted with spikes to inflict maximum damage.
So while a knife, for example, deals a low amount of damage, it is by f...