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.
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.
the only real R6 games. when everyone was raving about Vegas i was excited to play it and… the intro mission was just a shooter level… i thought ok this is the intro to basic combat… then there was the next mission and no planning section there either. i was puzzled. i closed the game and went on some forum i don’t remember and asked whether i did something that made the game skip the one thing that set the series apart… nope. it doesn’t exist!
from the people who made a heroes game without the town screen, introducing a rainbow six game without planning! i cannot believe reviews i saw weren’t screaming that about the game.
fuck Ubisoft so much. who needs AI in games when we have Ubisoft the ultimate slop machine.
I never really cared for the planning myself but Vegas ruined it for my by introducing that stupid cover system to make it like Gears of War which was popular at the time. They completely removed the ability to lean. You couldn’t properly peek around a corner to take a shot without almost fully exposing yourself anymore. This meant you couldn’t avoid absorbing bullets all the time. This made the game unplayable so to counterbalance that, they’ve added regenerating health. But then it became too easy so they kept putting you in tactically completely unfair positions against hordes of extremely aggressive enemies that can see you and shoot you through walls. They also had a lot of visually busy environments where the enemies are difficult to spot even when they’re shooting at you because the sound mixing was so botched up that often you couldn’t even tell when you were being shot at.
They turned it into a mindless arcade shooter where you constantly absorb bullets like it’s normal and fight a whole army on your own. I wouldn’t be surprised if all of this is because some Corporate dipshit forced the inclusion of that cover system because Gears of War made money.
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
I remember the hype around the division, it looked so cool and tactical. Then the game came out and every enemy was a bullet sponge. Instantly killed any interest I had in it.
Minus the pre release hype, this was how I felt about shadow warrior 2. The first one was so good with the retro updated FPS feel, and even made your starting sword relevant throughout the game. Then 2 came out and it was a bullet spongey, bad craft system crapfest. I didn’t even make it a couple hours after the dozens I spent in the first.
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.
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.
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.)
Metro also comes to mind. The highest difficulty level made both you and the enemies squishier, while also making ammo (which doubled as currency) much rarer. It played so much better that the community even recommended that difficulty level to complete newcomers.
… And then they made the Ranger difficulty a paid DLC in the sequel…
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.
big disappointment with cyberpunk because of this.
fallout games comes to mind too.
Everything about Cyberpunk was a big disappointment. The entire game is a glorified tech demo to show off your $1800 GPU. Which is ironic because it somehow manages to still have mediocre graphics, despite using all the latest path tracing tech to its fullest. RDR 2 looks more realistic than Cyberpunk, and it doesn’t use RT at all!
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.
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.
but there’s so many other ways to change difficulty.
change number of enemies and where they spawn change gear and abilities, the Witcher did that one with how the stamina system worked. it didn’t drain on the lower difficulties. horizon zero dawn made everything in the shops more expensive and made the enemies drop less money. honestly, that one also sucked. only served to make the game grindier.
point is, there’s other options.
I had fun with Zero Dawn but came out with a list of minor improvements that would make the game significantly better. Forbidden West had almost all the same problems, and added several more besides. The game really started to lose me when I was trying to upgrade a particular piece of equipment and just had to keep doing laps up and down a goddamn mountain with no nearby quick travel location, hoping that an elite version of an enemy would spawn, then laboriously killing it in the hopes that a particular resource would drop, only to get disappointed by the RNG and have to repeat the process, because that was the only place where that resource could be got, and that was the only place where that enemy would spawn.
The grind was appalling, and it took what was a moderately interesting fight the first couple of times and turned it into a monotonous chore.
Also the upgrade barely turned out to be worth the effort.
I finished the game more out of spite than anything else, and I did not purchase the DLC, nor do I have any plans of getting any sequels. Damn shame, because there’s an awful lot about both games to like.
I’d like more games to be like FromSoft games. The difficulty is adjusted by what gear you have and what spells you use. None of that turning bosses into bullet sponges nonsense.
Just going to ignore the hundreds of levels most players need to accumulate?
Sekiro was the only one that actually respected players time. Players bitched endlessly it was too hard.
If fromsoft actually gave a shit they’d add in adjustable parry windows and iframes and that works cover 90% of the people who weren’t good enough from sekiro. They won’t because they love to be gatekeepers.
Leveling is a normal thing in any game. You level up in most games.
Also you don’t need to level up in most FromSoft games. The bosses usually have a gimmick or movement patterns that are easy to learn.
Sounds like you just suck at the games. No shame in that but don’t say something is harder than it is.
A lot of people say this and I don’t get it. What would be lost by having each playstyle be balanced properly and then adding difficulty scaling on top of that?
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.
That can be fixed by changing the factors that affect difficulty. Instead of giving the enemies less health or making your attacks stronger, give the player more health or weaken the attacks of enemies on easier modes. This would result in each combat experience being roughly equal in length and intensity, but allowing a more novice player to make mistakes and soak attacks that would be fatal in higher difficulties. You would still be able to experience an enemy’s special mechanics.
This scales well in the other direction as well - say an enemy has a powerful attack that you need to dodge. On easy, you can maybe tank 3 of them from full health, medium is 2, hard is 1, and nightmare is a one-shot kill.
Another scaling option is the speed of enemies either movement speed or the time it takes for them to land hits, attack animation timing, etc.
The only thing i really dislike is that there is often no middle ground. Easy is super easy, normal is still easy, and hard is annoying. I like games that tell you what difficulty the game is made for. Doom for example, the game is geared towards “nightmare” (i think) and the game really is best played on that harder difficulty.
Totally. It’s a hard problem of course. Everyone wants an experience that’s right at their personal edge, but that’s different for every player.
Going from expert to expert+ in beat saber was jarring. Songs that we getting easy on expert still seemed impossible on expert+.
Until I realized the modifiers on the side weren’t just a cheat board, but a way to smooth the curve. And that no fail was essentially free (doesn’t affect score if you pass, reduces score by 50% if you fail).
So you use difficulty increasers on the expert songs and difficulty reducers on the expert+ and the transition is way smoother. I’ve gotten to the point where some of them are fun again at expert+.
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.
You have to beat the game first to unlock it but I love the realism mode in jedi survivor. Lightsabers actually kill like in the movies, but get shot maybe 2x and you’re dead.
This is how harder difficulties should be. You have lower HP, but so does the enemy, forcing both parties to think things through before running in guns a’blazing. If you have to make enemies bullet sponges in order to increase the difficulty, then your AI programming is bad and you should feel bad.
Modern fallout games do difficulty badly. Walked up to one of those boomer guys in fo:NV , he gave me some shit, so I shot him in the face with a revolver. He didn’t fall over dead.
I got a bunch of mods to make everyone a lot more of a glass cannon, but made power armor very effective (and other armor somewhat so). Was a lot more fun. But also there was a lot more reloading because, like, sometimes a baddie would get the drop on me and I’d be dead from two shots.
Still more fun than sponges everywhere
