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.
Goldeneye and its spiritual sequel Perfect Dark (my favorite game of all time) do this varying AI skill thing along with the mission objectives expanding across difficulties. An argument can be made against it because someone playing on “easy” doesn’t really experience the whole game but it’s also cool to replay levels on a higher difficulty where the map is larger or you’re interacting with more things or you’re starting in a different location.
I remember the Command and Conquer games, namely Tiberium Wars and Kane’s Wraith. You could set the bot behavior and difficulty. Also, when the difficulty was set to brutal, the bot would have all the limits removed and would start the game with double the money the player had. Even tho this is a rts game, I think it’s a good example of how to make bots if devs are given the time and there is an effort for something more.
I’m gonna release a AAAAA game. It’ll cost $95 and when you install it, it’ll just be a romhack of Super Mario World changing all the enemy sprites into butts. There’ll be a link to file complaints that just points to a terrible image made in ms paint that says “lol f u”.
I’ll only support this if I can pre-order it for double the price, and have an option at launch to pay an additional $50 to make the butt sprites into dickbutt instead
The $50 dickbutt DLC isn’t scheduled to be released until a month after the launch, but for an extra $70 you can get the limited edition collectors edition at launch, that comes with a cheaply made Mario-with-a-butt-instead-of-a-head limited edition figurine.
And for $40 you can also purchase the “getting started” pack–that includes a save file where we beat the game, so you don’t even have to play it. Your name, email address, and SSN will be on our first-to-finish list!
And for $70 more you can play it 2 days early! For why? No fucking reason other than to flex! Gotta flex on those poors by getting it earlier than them amirite?? This ensures you will be invested in our product from the very start and you are the type of person who we can do no wrong.
And for $30 there’s 2 extra skins that are just the worst looking piles of shit. But again if you don’t have them how will you flex on the poors? This is lumped in with the earlier assurance that we can do no wrong in your eyes.
And the battle pass is $10 - every 30 days. It has nothing of value except at tier 150, which is a new flagrantly pay to win weapon. This ensures we own your time, every month.
But also we didn’t finish the game, instead we released a roadmap. We will scrap this roadmap a week and a half after the disastrous launch because the game sucks so my donkey dick we cannot possibly add content to the absolute bugfest of a game. This is an abuse of loyalty to our brand, but you’ve stated you don’t care as long as you get to play it.
Now that the game is out for a month, we’ve added a cash shop. This flies in the face of regulation on the box not indicating gambling elements, but fuck those stooges standing in the way of our profits! We can make a new box with the proper markings on them in a month. Surely you would like to buy a sword skin or character skin beyond looking like normal Mario right? Also there will be at least 1 skin that blends in with the background a little too well and attracts p2w allegations for the multiplayer mode. We don’t care and neither do you because you will buy it. You wanna be a winner right?
We noticed you’re already level 8, congratulations! We halved level reward drops, but increased rarity of those items by 30% but from here on we tripled enemy hp at every 10 levels to make sure the game is a slog, so you buy overpowered shit from the shop and battle pass.
You reached level 10 in only 5 hours? That’s amazing! How about a XP Booster? Like the above we actually made progression become ungodly slow after level 10 unless you pay us $35 for an XP booster - in a single player game. We will make sure this pops up every time you level up to remind you we intentionally slowed progression so you make this purchase.
Also we can’t help but notice you picked up a Fancy Locked Box. You can divert from the main quest to grind the crafting materials and it will take 6 hours to craft, OR you can buy a key for ONLY $5! This will pop up EVERY time you pick up a Locked Box with the option to go to the shop, and be SUPER disruptive, to get you to cave.
And lastly, a “donate” button on the main menu where you just give us money for nothing, because at this point why not right?
Don’t forget the meta where a new paid DLC weapon is super unbalanced and great for two weeks until the devs nerf it into the ground and everyone goes back to the default weapons that are just ok.
Oh shoot I knew I missed one! The battle pass is weapon is op and then we will nerf it just before the next battle pass drops, to ensure an OP/Nerf cycle to enforce you always have the newest battle pass and buy tiers and have more time than filthy grinders to abuse it’s OPness
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.
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.
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.
Meanwhile i finished FO4 on hardest difficulty with just the Deliverer. 2 or 3 shots to the dome in VATS gets shit done. But i agree the difficulty is weird in that game. God Of War is pretty bad for this too.
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.
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.
it’s mind boggling that it was so well received. 8s and 9s flying for the most forgettable hodgepodge.
it’s ok if you don’t like the planning but that was what made R6 what it was. you could just go in guns blazing and try to improvise but that wasn’t what the game was about. meticulously planning an infiltration, executing it in real time, communicating and coordinating with bots, and seeing all of it work out at the end was a uniquely satisfying experience that no other game provided, and made you feel like a tactical genius.
the tactical depth of Vegas was boiled down entirely to “go here” commands. tactical shooter gameplay was better implemented by games like mass effect 1 which wasn’t even primarily a shooter, let alone a tactical shooter.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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
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…
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!
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.
I seem to remember MS claiming they were opening the “first AAAA dev studio” (The Initiative). Since then, the studio has been radio silent, lost a bunch of talent, and needed help from Crystal Dynamics to work on their first game (Perfect Dark reboot).
It originated as a marketing term for Skull and Bones, right?
Realistically, its a corporate buzzword that is supposed to mean that the game delivers an exceptionally high quality experience, graphically, narratively, gameplay wise…
…but what it seems to actually mean is that the budget and manhour count and development calendar time ballooned to far greater than the original plan/estimates due to incompetent management.
At this point, I propose that ‘AAAA’ applies to basically any extremely costly game backed by a huge publisher that owns many development studios, that has been in development for over 4 years before any kind of release, ie, stuck in development hell, execs convinced its going to be a massive hit such that they sunken cost fallacy other games or even other studios out of existence so they can keep funding their uber project.
With a definition like this, Skull and Bones qualifies, so does Concord and Suicide Squad.
Basically… it doesn’t have to be from a grandiose marketing campaign attached to a AAA game, its more about being stuck in development hell and continuously funded to the point of destroying other parts of the business making it, like a financial cancer.
I second this, great manufacturer. The 8BitDo Pro 2 is my personal preference. It looks like a Playstation and SNES controller did the fusion dance. I liked it so much I bought two: one for my PC and one for my Switch. It has a quality feel to it, excellent tactile response, and feels very comfortable in my hands.
The Ultimate 2.4 has right now bluetooth and hall effect sensors as well. I couldn’t get it to pair with the switch though I didn’t try super hard. It works on Bluetooth with my Android TV but for whatever reason ignores the customized buttons (I keep accidentally pressing the wing buttons on the bottom) so I use the dongle on the TV.
I use the 8bitdo Pro for platforming because of the d-pad makes it feel like a SNES controller. And the 8bitdo Ultimate for games where I need joysticks.
Second this, just get some thumbstick covers. I have the 8bitdo pro, and I’m getting tired of the joysticks peeling off onto the rest of the controller after a game.
I haven’t had drift on them yet, but if/when I need to replace Old Reliable, I’m looking for hall effect joysticks.
Edit: damn, just found out the pro2 has hall effect joysticks
bin.pol.social
Aktywne