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I hate bullet sponges in FPS especially. Really makes your guns feel stupid when you shoot someone a dozen times in the head and it doesn’t do much.
I remember playing Max Payne. There was some battle in a bar against a guy with a shotgun. If you timed it right between reloads you could run up to the guy, stand on the bar so your guns were exactly level with his face and empty two Uzi clips point blank into his face before he could reload.
Then you would run out of ammo and he would one shot kill you.
It’s bad that I know the exact guy you’re talking about.
Iirc you had to watch the death in slow Mo and wait forever to play?
This plus constantly running out of ammo because apparently the inside of every enemy skull is just hammerspace for more ammunition than the US military budget could ever afford. God forbid a stray shot hits your porcelain character, Thanos snapping you to dust at so much as a stubbed toe.
The old RainbowSix games (pre-Vegas) were absolutely brutal in difficulty. Enemies died in one or two shots, depending on what part you hit. Even a non-mortal wound would cripple them permanently. But the same rules applied to you.
I love this game because it feels like the game is actually playing by rules
Yeah you can cripple someone by shooting their legs, reduce accuracy by shooting arms, or go for a good ol headshot. You can really feel like a tactical badass. Oh by the way same goes for you
It just makes me really happy seeing that
Ofc in practice I am horrible so that sometimes undoes all my excitement
IMO what it should do is:
A) Increase damage falloff. For precision guns that means non precision shots do less. For short range weapons that means the penalty for working outside the effective range is higher.
B) Add more enemies. Especially if there’s any stealth element, you close windows and change how you approach encounters.
C) Depending on the game, increase the range enemies respond at. If that’s sound based, they have better hearing. If it’s enemies calling for help when alerted, they get assistance/raise alert levels from longer range.
Perfect play should be comparable. Mistakes should be punished harder.
- Enemies should have more moves, particularly bosses.
- Enemies should use more cover.
- Enemies coordinate better.
I also agree with all that. That takes more work though.
Bullet sponges are usually companies who can’t be bothered, so I focused on the low cost options. But IMO you should be building for high difficulty, then simplifying by inverting the things I suggested and your removing moves/exposing themselves more, actually slowing movement speed and animations, etc, to make encounters more forgiving at lower levels.
I think even after cutting down, easier difficulties can tell the game is better crafted that way.
The only game that did the difficulty right was doom eternal
All the Dooms got it right. More monsters.
No, no, it’s literally about pathing, aggressiveness, rate of shooting and special abilities, and of the enemy macro.
The extra damage on a higher difficulty is almost not worth mentioning.
I’ll not cotton any slander against Doom of any stripe, be it I, II, Final, TNT, Plutonia, or 2016. (Note that we don’t talk about Doom 3 round these parts.)
There was a doom3? You mean doom64?
Yes there was a doom 3 in the early 00s. It was atleast a good game great graphics fun gameplay etc. But it was more like a horror shooter instead of an action shooter like the other dooms
Did you read the comment above mine?
Yes and I’m against gatekeeping and used the opportunity to write a bit about Doom 3
It was a joke on mine and the other guy. We don’t like doom 3 so we excluded it from the party.
Doom 3 is ass.
Fallout 4 is the worst with this. I never found nished the game because of that. Multiple nukes square in the face of a supermutant and he’s just at half health? I ain’t got time for that.
Borderlands 3 (don’t know about the others) had a brutal postgame of this. Even though new difficulty stuff was added, the real challenge seemed to be collecting enough ammo to actually finish fights. At some point, the sponginess was too much for me to care about continuing.
The BL series just got worse and worse for sponginess as it continued.
big disappointment with cyberpunk because of this.
fallout games comes to mind too.
The problem with difficulties is that it’s much more difficult to design an AI system which you can tweak and make it smarter or dumber as opposed to just increasing damage and health values, so devs will just implement the best AI they can and leave difficulties as afterthought.
After playing a lot of games that don’t even have difficulty settings, I’ve started to believe in the idea that difficulty selection is just outdated game design and that having a single difficulty but optional areas/content that is more difficult is the way to do it. OSRS is one of my favorite examples - everyone plays the same game and going through levelling or whatever isn’t mechanically demanding. However, there are bosses and challenges (like Theatre of Blood which is an end-game raid or Inferno which is an end-game challenge) that are incredibly challenging and require weeks if not months of attempts to master and finally beat, but also are perfectly skippable and most casual players don’t even bother with them.
Larian had to dumb the AI down to make normal mode for dos2.
That’s not at all surprising. PvE game design is almost always about making the computer less competent in fun and/or believable ways. If you’ve got a computer that can simulate every item and skill in an enemy team’s arsenal and game out the best combination in milliseconds, the player is going to be dead by Turn 1 or stun-locked and dead by Turn 2.
I’ve been immensely impressed with DOS2 AI. If an enemy is sleeping, another enemy will use part of its turn to hit the enemy to wake it up. There were several instances where I paused and just stared awestruck
AI will also save up abilities with side effects until armor or magic resistance has been depleted. Such as knockdown on a battering ram ability.
Idk if I noticed that explicitly but I would believe it. The grenade throws early game are also disgusting. Pixel perfect hit your whole team lol
Aggressiveness and pathing are trivial.
I hate bullet sponges, but I do think this joke gets too reductive for my taste. There are many games where enemies die so fast on easy mode that you don’t get to experience whatever mechanics they have. By increasing health it can have the impact of revealing those mechanics that already existed.
It has to be a reasonable increase that doesn’t turn into a slog though.
Middle Earth: Shadow of War got it right with one of its later updates. They added a final difficulty that increases enemy aggression, attack power, and perception. It also increased player attack power. As long as you’re not fighting a massively overleveled enemy, fights are hard, quick, and fairly bullshit free.
Such a great, fun as hell game.
monster_hp=selected_game_difficulty * base_hp
I mean this can work if you also give the player the option to unlock stronger gear by grinding a bit. But yeah i agree its often done really badly.
After I had gotten the hang of Hellblade’s combat on the adaptive difficulty I turned it to easy by the end because killing enemies had become just a slog. Funnily enough it coincided with her getting the new ultimate sword and made the game feel much more epic.
BTW, Baldur’s Gate 3 does difficulty very well. Enemies get better abilities and use the good ones more frequently.
I did this in persona 5 on the last boss, even if you know all the weaknesses it was still RNG and after 3 tries I said fuck it I have other shit to do
Surprisingly, in COD (at least bo2 & 3) enemies get more and more “abilities” the higher you set the difficulty (this means, grenades, better accuracy, use of special equipment, higher burst rates)
When the game is:
Normal mode - made for the absolute lowest common denominator, every challenge is overcome in seconds before you understand what the intended solution was
And
Hard mode - the intented challenge to normal happens 1 pico second in, you now have to solve 20 combinations of different challenges. Not because it’s difficult, because the developers want you to die over and over and over until you understand all combinations enough.
It’s pretty hard to make levels of difficulty that actually change things enough outside of either giving the enemies more damage and HP or simply adding more enemies, or in scored games having higher score thresholds for higher ranks (these can be anything from an actual score to the speed you finished and everything in between that’s basically just a number that you can compare to another number).
It certainly can be done, though. I can’t help but think about the bots in counter-strike. They range from braindead drooling moving targets to Terminator machines that can 1 tap you with a pistol from across the map. They actually have a difficulty scale that’s more than simply being tougher to kill and hurting you more. It affects how they move around, the speed they begin shooting, their accuracy, etc. I don’t know why these kind of bots do not extend to pretty much any game with enemies. Just give them 3 sets of behavior that makes them easier or harder to deal with.
It depends on the genre of course because of the mechanics in play. Sure, FPS with bots are hard but a lot of genres are as challenging because the mechanics usually surround mostly running and gunning with bots (if you’re playing with bots). Making the ‘AI better’ is going to be extremely difficult, especially when balancing resources out for your minimum requirements.
But for say an 3D action game, enemy ambushes, tougher environmental challenges, harder puzzles, more platforming, increase gear rarity for ‘normal’ gear and stuff can add a real challenge. Bullet sponges seems like the path of least resistance to development time. Especially if the 3D action game is single player.
Counter-strike specifically is a tough one because what other mechanics can be involved in it? In the original CS:S there were actual environmental concerns like you could shoot off boards on the rope bridge denying that path. When it released, the rope bridge was static and was always there. I’d imagine this was due to resources on the physics vs. 31 other players having to have a reasonable sync with the server and their updates.
Battlefield has done this over the years but instead of making it really dynamic it has been fairly static, even if it changes the map, it always does it the same way. Blow up a building in BF:BC2? The walls will always fall the same way and the destruction will always be the same, so it’s like a state on or off update for that location for everyone. BF3 which was newer seemed to have even fewer instances where this could happen as just an example but they also doubled the player count. There have been other games that have done more dynamic updates but every engine, fidelity, language, updates/ticks expectations are all different.
Not every genre or game has to be focused on just your targets. The more mechanics that are offered or can be offered are going to be different but certainly, it seems like many games still do not take advantage of that even though they could.
I think the comic is contextually true. What really irks me are games designed to be quick, fast paced and aggressive, stop you dead in your tracks. An example is the Battle Toads reboot (which is great, play it) has these enemies that have shields or you can’t hurt them until after they’ve done their thing, slows down an otherwise fast and fun beat em up. Another is DOOM Eternal, a game where you’re running at Crack addict speed, and then they put in this dude with a shield that reflects your whole way of doing damage. Really jarring to have that speed bump in your experience. It’s for sure a great game, but I think a poor design decision to make the enemy work this way.
Another is DOOM Eternal, a game where you’re running at Crack addict speed, and then they put in this dude with a shield that reflects your whole way of doing damage.
Marauders? I actually kind of like them, they provide a new kind of threat that you can’t just run over by unloading your weapons and quick swapping the gauss rifle. That said, fighting more than one at a time really does suck.
I think you’re hitting on a slightly broader problem. Any game where combat is the major mechanic shouldn’t have a situation where you can’t do any damage for any extended amount of time. The Yakuza series handles this well, enemies can block, but the moment they do you have attacks that can break the block immediately, and start damaging again. (Or you can skill up to that that attack.) As the game goes on, it gets more intricate, different enemies have different blocks that require different moves to break. The player character also has different fighting styles that have different block breaking moves that you have to keep track of, but if you know what you’re doing, you can break almost ANY block with one move.
Far far too many other games decide to arbitrarily create a mechanic where you can’t do any damage for a WHILE. It’s either the invincible enemy that you just have to spend 3 minutes dodging, which is boring and miserable in both action and even turn based RPG battles. Or they have a shield that you have to do some elaborate and rhythm breaking routine to remove the shield. It’s a miserable slog whenever they do that kind of thing. Back in the early 2000s The second game of the Xenosaga trilogy changed the entire combat design and added the thing I hate most, the RPG stagger. You can do no appreciable damage to any thing in the game until you figure out what combination of attacks cause a stagger. It could be a three move sequence involving two characters that has to be done in the right order, or woops! Start all over. If you didn’t give one of your characters a specific ability or attack during leveling, screw you, you’re basically fucked.
The players, rightfully, rejected that crap then and they got rid of it for the third game. Now, it’s everywhere. Every RPG I’ve played recently has that crap. I finally just put down FFVII Rebirth half way through and said, screw this, because it was so exhausting and miserable. Every battle becomes the equivalent of getting on a non-working escalator and your body still jerks because you think you’re going to start moving. I hate this trend and it’s everywhere as developers think, “this battle isn’t bossy enough.” “Add a stagger mechanic to make it last longer” “Brilliant old chap.”
I don’t know what disease is moving through the game development community that boss battles, especially, have to be a certain length. Is this a marketing thing? Is this being handed down from the publishing execs? FFXVI had 20-25 minute battles towards the end that were just repetitive dodging and a kaleidoscope of flashing lights. I could have just had a gummy and watched an old screensaver and it would be more memorable and less annoying.
Okay, I’m done complaining, but the long battle for no reason other than to make it feel like a boss, is, I think, an extension of the collect-a-thon, open world, sandbox mentality that just adds superfluous crap so they can say “This game is 44% larger than the last game we made, and will take you 215 hours to complete!” Who cares if it sucks?
Well said, although I haven’t played Yakuza, I think having enemy depth through their mechanics, while giving the player space to solve the challenge, is good gameplay. This is different from “well they’re invincible for now and you just need to deal with it.” Some games this is appropriate, maybe like Fear and Hunger, but definitely not when the positive experience centers around dealing damage.
Totally resonate with the FF rebirth experience. Although I think the game altogether as one piece is good and I finished it, I have a laundry list of complaints. I generally like the combat system but the challenge fights towards the end are just nonsense. You spent time investing in your teams abilities, but it boils down to enemies that don’t take damage, or get staggered (even from your ATB abilities) and then one shot your team mates just because you weren’t in control of them. Don’t even get me started on the Odin fight. It also feels really bad to slash at something as Cloud, and his sword just bounces off and he’s useless for 3 seconds.
As an aside, XVI seems to be well reviewed and liked by people but I just didn’t find it all that satisfying, I have yet to finish it even though I’m at the last act.
It’s interesting that we had reverse experiences regarding the recent FF titles. I think for me, it was because I played them very close to each other, and I probably would have been fed up by halfway through whichever one I played second. My gaming buddy mostly really liked Rebirth.
But they both had a slightly different version of this same issue, and my tolerance was pretty low by the time I got to Rebirth.
I kinda disagree with your DOOM statement. I assume you’re talking about the Carcass or the shield zombies. They may stop your momentum when you first encounter them, but the game (for me) is all about recognizing each enemy in a flash and quickly dispatching them. It’s not like the shield is super hard to bust for the zombies, just a few plasma rifle shots and they blow up the nearby zombies too. For the carcass, a quick blood punch will one-shot them. Once you’re able to recognize the enemies and their weaknesses at a glance, they become part of your momentum, instead of stopping it.
I appreciate the advice, but I’m talking about the Marauder. I think tankier enemies in doom make it more interesting but the Marauder just has this “no, it’s my turn and you will wait for me to do my thing” energy. Just kind of stops you, when you should be continuing to have fun. I think you can balance powerful enemies while maintaining player agency.
If a game deals with difficulty with this method, I’ll probably end up using cheats in the easiest gaming mode. Hopefully the story won’t suck.
It’s either this, or they just scale up the damage by some arbitrary factor, that is a quantum leap from what the bad guys were doing originally.
oh? he did 10 damage in vanilla?
lazy, underfunded programer: dmg= base.dmg^2 <<endl;
Alternative punchline: “we think we’re dark souls and you’ll die to random shit thrown at you off screen”.
Castle crashers was my first experience with this. Atleast they added some new boss mechanics though
Ghost of Tsushima on Lethal is perfect
