Hello and welcome, this is the fifth in a series of opinion pieces I'm doing on the action genre of video games. If you haven't read any of these before, I highly recommend you begin with the first one on the basics and continue from there. Here, I will be discussing enemy design, which is something that I really haven't discussed much in the prior posts.
Something that a lot of action games tend to overlook is enemy designs, what makes a good enemy, and how to design them around the combat mechanics that you've implemented. Of course, since I'm referring to character actions games for the most part, rather than the other subgenres of action games, like say, musou, for example, I'm going to be discussing how you can design your enemies to challenge the players and force them to use their skillsets in a relatively new way.
Now, many of you who are reading this, are probably fans of the "party" approach where you design multiple enemies that have very different, and very specific functions within a game or stage, and put them in combinations to fill different roles. And of course we will be talking about that somewhat but first I want to talk about enemy design in the first Devil May Cry game because it's so genius that I actually didn't even consider the ramifications of this until after MatthewMatosis commented on it in his Commentary on the game, so to you sir, thank you for filling my mind with information once again.
In the first Devil May Cry, the developers on the team were almost entirely incapable of putting enemies of different types together in a single stage. They were entirely unable to put different enemies together because they couldn't work around the RAM and Processor limitations, at least not at the time. The only real exception to this was the marionettes and the fetishes, which could be used together, probably because of how similar they were in terms of model and AI behavior.
So to get around this, the developers at Little Red Devil, which is now defunct and the staff of which have largely joined up with Platinum games, ended up giving two attack types to each of the different enemies, one close range attack, and one long range attack. The marionettes could throw their blades, the shadows could emit spikes from the ground, the plasmas could shoot lasers, and the spiders could shoot meteors.
The reason variety in enemy types is generally considered important is because, different enemy types with different roles, put in different combinations could challenge players to think in different ways, by forcing them to dodge or attack in different ways at different times based on AI behavior. The enemies in Devil May Cry with multiple attack types filled the benefit of having a party layout, without actually requiring different enemy types to compose those parties.
Of course, given that Devil May Cry was an early PS2 title and how long ago the PS2 was released and discontinued, of course modern hardware has fewer limitations than a PS2 does. Hell, even only factoring in console generations and completely excluding PC, PS4 and XBox One are significantly stronger than the PS2 and original XBox were way back then. The Wii U is also quite a bit stronger than the GameCube, but that jump in power is significantly smaller, given that the jump from GameCube to Wii to Wii U is much smaller than the gap from PS2 to PS3 to PS4, and the XBox line falls into that same reasoning.
Anyway, because technology and hardware power have progressed so much in that time, it's easier to fit different enemy types with more elaborate behaviors onto RAM and into the Processor of a PS4 than it is to do the same on a PS2, and even then, PS2 generally handled it pretty well.
Devil May Cry 3 is a great example of this, putting a large number of different enemies together in different combinations and having those enemies be incredibly lethal. Of course, some enemies were less smartly designed in DMC3 than in DMC1, namely the Enigmas, which only fired arrows, and were pretty useless by themselves. On the other hand, the Sloth Hells were enemies that hit hard and teleported at you right as they were about attack. In groups, they could be pretty threatening, especially if you didn't make good use of invincibility frames.
If you were to incorporate elements of both, however, that would really paint a good picture for your enemy designs. Namely, give them multiple abilities, and put them in varying combinations.
Here's a hypothetical party layout to show you what I mean. Let's say the group of enemies you're going up against consists of a tank, a bruiser, a burster, a mage, and a hunter of some kind. The tank has a lot of health and wields a sword. With his sword, he can either slash at you with a single combo or even just one type of hit, and he can also perform a ground-pound to knock you down or deal shockwave damage. The bruiser is a fist fighter. They're fast, light on their feet, and deal loads of chip damage. The burster has really powerful AOE attacks and is constantly using up its energy or mana or whatever energy source you plan on putting into your game. The mage does not fight but they can heal and lend extra energy to the others in its party. And finally, the hunter stays hidden and can either shoot at you from a distance, or can sneak up on you in melee to deal a critical hit.
How do you deal with this party? The tank would be the obvious one to leave alone for the moment, since he's got a lot of health and will probably take you down and regenerate before you have the opportunity to deal enough damage to take him down. The bruiser probably has a small health pool but as fast as he is you'd want to aim your attacks so he doesn't dodge at the last second. The burster would probably be the easiest one to take down, provided you catch him after he exhausts all his energy reserves and can't fight momentarily. However, whether you can take full advantage of that opening or not depends on who the mage is currently stuck on. If the mage is healing another party member or is otherwise preoccupied, the burster would be perfect to take down in that moment.
Of course, all of that hinges on getting rid of the mage so they don't make this harder on you. However, the tank is likely to be protecting the mage, which means damaging him will require you to get past said tank. And, finally, the hunter is completely hidden, so you probably wouldn't be able to damage, or even find him until he reveals himself anyway.
So in this circumstance, the best ones to take down are the bruiser and the burster. The bruiser because his health is so low in comparison to everyone else, and the burster because, without his energy, he's weaker than everyone else on the party and is more likely to die in just a couple of hits. So, of the two, which do you pick?
We can extrapolate this scenario into two different situations: first is that the burster exhausts all of his attacks on you right out of the gate. It's surprising but because he moves in before everyone else, you have a chance to dodge the attacks and survive. Now the burster is completely vulnerable but he's being protected by the bruiser's chip damage attacks that serve to annoy you until the burster's back at full energy. In this situation, it would be wise to kill the bruiser first, since he's the only one who's actually getting in close and protecting the burster, which means you could probably aim a special move at the burster, and the bruiser would protect him with his body.
In another situation, the bruiser attacks first, he gets in and doesn't really do a lot of damage but he does aggro you, which prevents you from seeing the burster's attacks. But if you can time it just right, you can avoid the burster's attack, get over to the burster, and kill him before he has a chance to recover. If friendly fire is active and you play skillfully, you could even have the burster's attack kill the bruiser, doing a two-for-one kill.
But, what if, in either scenario the hunter comes up to deal a critical strike or to pin you right as you're about to deal damage to the vulnerable one. If you're fast enough, you could dodge out of the way and take him down in one hit, since he'll probably have the lowest health and durability.
Finally, there's the possibility that before anyone can do anything, the tank will do his ground pound to shake up the ground and limit your movement options before you have the chance to dodge the others. If your game has a jump, you can jump over it but doing so may prevent you from avoiding subsequent enemy attacks, depending on how much mid-air control you have.
All of these are possibilities that your player will have to adapt to and react to as the fight is happening and, if done correctly, could make for some very challenging mooks.
Of course, I did recommend giving your mooks multiple attack types but in terms of how many attacks each one should get, I would say 2 is good to aim for but no more than 3. You want your enemies to be challenging but you don't want to spend so much time making them that you neglect to make the bosses fully fleshed out. You should reserve the complete movesets for the climactic battles.
That said, all of what I listed is really only applicable with an aggressive AI. Remember when I said I wasn't referring to Musou Games here? You want to know why? Because Musou enemies don't really have much of an AI. They do have one attack or so, but most of them just run around and get tossed around by the player character, which is fine for power fantasies but if you want to design good and challenging enemies, the musou sub-category of the action genre is not a good place to look for that.
And now we get into designing difficulty around enemies. Good difficulty modes that progress your mechanical growth consist of increased damage, yes, but also increase AI aggression that causes the enemies to fight harder and attack more.
Devil May Cry went a step further than that, though, and gave every enemy a Devil Trigger on higher difficulty modes. Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden were designed with the tougher difficulties at the focal point. Ninja Gaiden is hard on pretty much every difficulty, though it is easier on Ninja Dog mode. And Devil May Cry features lower difficulty modes as well but doesn't actually feel like it's being played the way it's supposed to be played until you get to Dante Must Die.
That said, difficulty is not good if it's not fair. Fair difficulty is difficulty that you can get past with the tools available to you but you may have trouble with depending on your actual mechanical skill or skillset choice.
I think the best example of fair difficulty versus punishing difficulty is best exemplified in the first two releases of Ninja Gaiden 2, the OG release and Sigma 2. Now, before I get to that, I want to stress that while these two games are different iterations on the same title, there are a few key differences between each one. The OG Release was exclusive to the XBox 360 while Sigma 2 appeared on the PS3 but the number of distinctions is not skin-deep.The OG release had more blood and gore, more opportunities to upgrade weapons depending on your skill and essence pool, and had at least one more opportunity to heal in the game. In Sigma 2, however, much of the gore was removed, which I suspect was most likely to remove framerate dips in the action, and to make more room for the new playable characters, the weapon upgrading happened between each stage and cost nothing but only one could be done at a time, and that one healing spot was traded in for Enma's Fang, a weapon exclusive to that iteration of the game.
One other area that was changed was the boss roster. Of course Sigma 2 featured new bosses and, for the most part, didn't really remove any of the originals from the lineup. For the most part. There is still one encounter where the bosses that were fought in 2 were swapped for something entirely different in Sigma 2.
In 2, you had to kill two Quetzalcoatl enemies in the fight. They stay high up in the air and have a lot of health, which means you have to aim at them with the bow and fire charged shots at them. However, aiming prevents you from moving and charging does as well. And because there's two of them, it's much more likely that they'll get you during your charge time.
Sigma 2 replaced them with the Black Dragon, which is a significantly larger than Ryu but actually quite small Dragon that is much more about melee combat and being quick on your feet. This boss is widely considered to be easier than the Quetzalcoatl encounter but I believe it's much more fair because it doesn't leave you vulnerable to cheap shots while you're attacking. With the Black Dragon, you have just as many opportunities to dodge its attacks as with every other boss because it's so much more melee oriented.
In these two boss fights, 2 is harder, but Sigma 2 is more fair and also a lot more fun. Even though there's only one dragon in Sigma 2, I find it hard to believe that staying still and firing arrows at a distance is more fun than getting into the thick of it and fighting with your sword or other melee weapon, especially considering that these games are ultimately focused on melee combat.
And that about wraps up everything I wanted to say. Next time, I will be getting more in-depth with enemy design but with bosses instead of mooks, so I hope you'll join me then, thanks for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment