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

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.

I totally agree. It’s one thing to just decrease the enemy health, but you can decrease their damage or aim like stormtroopers. On top of that, research, recovery, and build times can be decreased or resource costs and income adjusted. There are so many ways to make the game easier or harder.

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?

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.

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’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.

Larian had to dumb the AI down to make normal mode for dos2.

Aggressiveness and pathing are trivial.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.