In a game where you can dodge attacks 2x damage makes a lot more sense than 2x health. They could also just increase game speed by 10-20% to make everything more chaotic. More enemies + more drops also works pretty well IMO but a sponge just makes everything take sooooo long. RPGs already often have long battles that can take 10 minutes and making the 20 where you use up all consumables, ammo etc is just bad.
I have been playing Abiotic Factor with a friend. Most fun I have had since lethal company. Really cool progression and the map is just amazing. The new update has a few rough edges, but otherwise good.
As for single player, terrafirmagreg in Minecraft.
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.
try fo4 survival mode. you can actually die from a bloatfly swarm if you arent careful, but can also eliminate an entire raider base with 1 well place molotov cocktail
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.
I’ve been playing Mario Galaxy 2 for the first time. It’s pretty good, but I’m wondering what the hype was about. Perhaps it’s a product of its time in a way, but overall, it’s still a lot of fun. I keep dying at stupid parts, which is really funny. You can tell the developers really pushed their skills to the limits as all of the levels seem like they’re really well done.
I’ve been streaming a playthrough of Ghost of Tsushima, and I recently got to the DLC. I think the game does so many things right, but I have a few minor gripes. Overall, I really like the atmosphere and the world design. The environments are gorgeous.
I’ve been playing Mario Galaxy 2 for the first time. It’s pretty good, but I’m wondering what the hype was about.
Does it feel like anything more than a level pack for Galaxy 1? That was the general impression that I remember. My lil bro beat Galaxy 2 but I never got around to it.
So far, that’s exactly what it feels like. Which is good! But I think it could have been better?
I haven’t seen any Rosalina yet, which is a bummer, and the hub area is less exciting. But yeah, overall, the levels are just as solid as I remember them being in Galaxy 1. The music is definitely a highlight so far. Amazing tunes. And playing the game in co-op is actually kinda fun.
My friend hosted a valheim server on idk hard or very hard. The parry mechanic didn’t work since it would let a percentage of damage through. So even with the current highest obtainable shield enemies we were not able to use parries (or blocking lol) at all and had to dodge everything. At boss 4 or so I BEGGED him to lower the difficulty, since the lingering damage would almost one-shot us and we just kept respawning over and over for an hour.
I was just about to comment exactly this. Complete with finally changing the difficulty back to normal while fighting Moder.
We also found that Moder’s health was so high that the fight was not doable in a day, leaving us fighting packs of wolves (which could two shot us while blocking) during the night as well.
Moder was so painful. Queen and Yagluth were so much easier in comparison.
Working our way through the Ashlands now and well, what a frustrating area as well. Had to campfire like crazy a kilometer out just to be able to breathe for two seconds without being swarmed. We ended up going kamikaze to siege a fortress for a base and suddenly I can actually play for more than 5 seconds without being attacked.
A lot of Valheim bosses are only difficult because of the massive amounts of health. Without the crazy high amounts of health, none of them seem to have difficult mechanics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Plenty of people’s edge is somewhere around Weenie Hut Junior which definitely complicates things when you also want to capture the “uses all the hard skulls in Halo” crowd.
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+.
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.
I think having multiple things change with difficulty is good just as you say. I was focusing only on raising health because that was the joke in the comic.
Ps5 controller is Bluetooth, works for me without any special drivers. Has native support in some games for the haptic triggers and touch pad. It’s a fantastic general purpose unit. The Nintendo switch classic NES controllers are awesome for retro emulation too- also Bluetooth. They make NES/SNES/N64 variants- but really the ps5 will handle all those use cases and feel just fine for any modern gaming.
For PC, I would personally suggest looking for a controller with two things. Number 1, Hall effect sensors. Eliminate stick drift entirely with that alone. Number 2, replaceable joysticks. If the sticks last a long time, then the controller is expected to last longer. I just think having a way to replace work rubber is a good thing. Personally, I have loved Gulikit. My controller also happens to work on switch as well. Here is a link of you are interested in checking it out. Note that that is the controller I have, but you should definitely look at the different models. My controller has lasted about 3 years now. I used to go through PS5 controllers in about 6 months.
That is a totally fair question and one that I simply overlooked. Technically you can buy Gulikit through Amazon. I personally appreciate that the cost of it doesn’t go up over like a regular controller. Scuf did me dirty, I had a scuf for all of two months before the lb button fell apart and they refused to repair it. That thing cost me $185. This controller cost me $70.90 and has lasted me about two years. Here is a link to the Gulikit store on Amazon. I do recommend making sure it is from that store. I don’t know anything about it, but there is a AKNES store which sells gulikt controllers. amazon.com/…/BCC8C06B-7BF5-4D6C-A9A0-6290B8091F02…
On an unrelated note, if you have joy cons with stick drift (who doesn’t have these) then Gulikit also sells just the stick modules so you can fix it for good.
Amazon still does that dumb shit where they allow them to sell a dozen different products on the same listing. And the names are all mislabeled so I don’t even know what product I’m looking at.
While others have answered your question, I just wanted to go on a tangent and add to some of the same frustration that you felt.
I hate hand holding in this game. I feel like missions trap you into playing a certain way. You have to treat the missions like they are an interactive movie experience. But otherwise, the open world exploration is fun.
For future, If you really like freedom but also need some goals and story and not just a sandbox, I would recommend trying either legend of zelda botw or totk. I think you can emulate BOTW on steamdeck.
If you can take some punishment then Elden Ring is also a great choice.
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Aktywne