I’m working on enemies right now on my Doom Metroidvania and am just wondering what pitfalls I should avoid.
I figure a good way to gather info is to ask you all what enemies were just the worst and why.
Doesn’t have to be an FPS game.
I’m guessing I’ll here some usual suspects like marauder’s, zubats, and cliff racers. Feel free to mention them too.
This thing.
To the right.
It is a statue. When you walk in front of it, it silently spits poison at you. That doesn’t sound that bad, right? Well…
Why don’t we make a level that is:
I don’t really remember anything this infuriating in any game I played.
Well, there are also those guys, I suppose they deserve a honorable mention.
Those fire spear-sized, I mean, log-sized arrows at you. The area with those archers has a TON of narrow walkways, roofs and so on, where you need to climb up, and those dudes knock you OFF the ledges with their huge arrows so you fall to your death. But those feel fair, You develop hatred towards them, and when you finally reach them they knock you off the ledge again and then if you keep doing bunch of more times, you can have your sweet sweet revenge.
But. Those somehow feel fair. The spitting statue hell is just infuriating in comparison.
P.S. It is interesting that both examples are from Dark Souls series.
Those type of close ranged combat heavy enemies, that can strangely avoid and evade, or even block the majority of your attacks, and unfortunately have some weak spot that is hard to hit, because they move around alot. And it gets worse, when you are in an area, or worse a closed area, with a bunch of them surrounding and attacking you at the same time.
A good example of this, are the dog knights in Zelda The Wind Waker, who wear knight armour and carry huge swords. Fighting one is almost medium level easy, well almost, but when 4 of them are in a room, chasing after and surrounding you, that’s when it gets tough and annoying.
For me, I was the opposite. The statues were annoying sure, but after about three runs we kind of knew where your safe spots were and you restarted right at the start of that leg. Where is those dragon arrow heart archers, they were at the very end the very long huff and instantly killed you, while rendering blocking worthless.
That section nearly broke me and I seriously put in about 5 hours on that leg alone when I first played it.
The archers are fairly easy, because you have about a second between their arrows, the arrows are indicated by a loud crash, so you can either block an arrow with a shield (that will push you back, but if you get position right, it won’t knock you down), or hide behind scenery. Dark Sousl 3 had a nice hiding spot for example. In this scneario you only will have trouble if you get invaded on top of the archers.
THe statues are ridiculously time consuming, because you’re encouraged to go forward, and if you go forward, you’ll want to destroy all of them, as every single one adds an element of risk, because if you step at a wrong point, you’ll eat poison damage. Destroying all the statues eats your durability, getting hit eats your hp, and there’s high chance that because of either factor you’ll get murdered in the middle of the trip.
The sane way to beat this level is to use secret passages, skip half the level, then rush towards the end of level while cursing Dark Souls 2 level designer and unlock secret campfire right before the boss room, while dodging the scripted invader. Because there’s OF COURSE a scripted invader at that point. Right in the middle of statues, worms, near the ledge you can fall off and so on.
The issue basically, that dark souls 2 instead of being challenging focused on being annoying. Which reminds me.
The Surge. 1st one. “Big Sister” fight.
So, what’s going on there.
First, Surge has a fun lighting method where everything is either pure darkness or blinding light and very little in between. It’s hard to see in it.
1st phase of the boss is two hands that bash you in distinct patterns and a laser that will try to fry you. They operate pretty much asynchronously.
In the 2nd phase, however, it builds a floor before you, destroys floor behind you, and you’ll be fighting 4 manipulators and middle robot.
Now… the problem is that in this fight phase your camera, your targeting and your attack moves will break.
When you approach the boss “core”, the camera will lock in place, and you won’t see the whole scene.
That won’t stop you from locking on remaining manipulators behidn the camera.
Due to control method the game uses it is also possible to fire a wrong attack sequence, with player character having tendency to pick one that will put him in more danger.
So, you’re fighting the boss, the manipulators, the camera, lock-on targeting doesn’t work anymore, and the character periodically tries to kill himself.
Fun times.
Yeah, fighting cameras is the zenith of unfun gameplay.
My personal “favorite” is a game where there’s a tall boss and the camera drops to the players feet while looking up, making it absolutely impossible to see the areas around you at all.
Zelda II. Last boss. Horrible boss gameplay for an already bad game.
I feel like when they were brainstorming for Zelda II someone said “This is great! Let’s just get all the bad ideas out of the way.” And someone only heard the first half.
I hate enemies that grab onto you and you have to shake them off by jiggling the control stick, or some other QTE. Especially when it can happen several times in row.
Of course, an annoying enemy might work if you can get revenge later on. Like if later on in the game the same enemy grabs on, but in the mean time you’ve acquired some kind of human torch power or something.
I don’t like when enemies are invulnerable to most weapons. I know this is done to force the player to use a certain weapon to defeat the enemy, and this weapon probably has certain limitations which make it more difficult to use, but I have always thought doing this is just evidence of lazy or bad design.
What about Half-Life’s barnacles?
I had not committed to it, but I had thought an enemy that latched tentacles onto you and dragged you towards its mouth would be interesting if used sparingly.
But this would be more like the worms from tremors.
I was planning on having a some enemies with shields that immediately break from a melee attack (after its upgraded), but could also be beaten down with other weapons.
The idea being to encourage player mobility.
Also, the shields were going to have a certain color that would become synonymous with “melee this for something cool”.
Like enemy shots that can be bounced back, doors that can be opened, or whatever.
Any thoughts on making this less annoying?
They’re pretty much “watch the ceiling” environmental trap which i sometimes used as a puzzle element. For example, if you place barnacles very high, it can be used to detonate an explosive at ceiling level, much higher than where you could possibly throw a grenade or a barrel.
Those are different from QTE enemies which are usually very disruptive to gameplay and use different controls compared your usual control scheme.
Basically, the issue with QTE is that they’re placed inside a cinematic, but because the cinematic has QTE, you can’t really focus on it, and instead you need to watch for the moment where buttons finally appear.
honey badgers.
ie the annoying tendency to ridiculously overpopulate an area with malevolent fauna (including npcs) in the name of ‘emergent gameplay’ or whatever.
On other hand, there’s Dead Rising and Dynasty Warriors.
Having enemies more vulnerable to certain weapons (as you’ve described) is far better than completely invulnerable to many weapons. That lets the player still think about how they want to approach attacking the enemy. They can still go with the weapon you are encouraging, but they aren’t forced to just do it exactly the way your design is telling them they have to.
The super ridiculous “large number of easy enemies,” where there are hundreds of them surrounding you, but they seldom attack even when they are close to you. Making them way too easy to defeat.
Enemies that kill you in 1 touch, I am of course referring to the recent Alex Kidd in Miracle World remake, I’m normally a decent gamer, but this game is so hard because of the 1 hit kills that I can’t even clear the first level.
Yeah, I think QTEs can be used to great effect, but peppering them in normally non-interactive cutscenes is highly cursed. I think the most egregious I ran into was Resident Evil 5. I played it to completion twice, co-op with two separate friends who wanted to play it. I despised the “watch a cutscene, oh hit this random button prompt quickly and accurately or you die and have to replay it” mechanic they would pull out constantly, and it only got worse the further you got in the game. I think a QTE that is more of a sub-segment of normal gameplay with consistent button prompts is probably the best way to handle it.
