I've been saying this. Assassinating two cops to start a brawl where you dance through 15 other guys cutting them all down like an Italian John Wick is so much more fun than slamming a sword into a guy's face 8 times because "oouuugh he's 3 levels higher than meeee"
That trailer with Woodkid continues to be one of the best videogame trailers ever made. But its impact would not work without following Ezio's story all the way up to the point it came out.
I dislike levels in action games. Just pick one. Either I click on his face and he dies, or you abstract the attacks and use the stats to determine the results.
It was bad in Morrowind 20+ years ago. And yet people keep doing it.
Ass creed Vikings had archers on this side of the river: easy, identical archers that side of the river but 30 levels higher: deadly. Garbage.
If you're gonna have leveled enemies in an action game, the best way to do it is to make them visually different from regular goons and give them something like more armor, or a helmet, or a bigger weapon that's immune to regular parry.
Do your leveling by gating areas with enemy types that require you to either master the combat or unlock a weapon through story progression that trivializes them.
That's mostly what the dark souls games do. The rotting zombie soldier that can hardly stand up straight is less of a threat than the giant black knight, and you can tell by looking at them.
Unfortunately, it seems a lot of people don't really care about it, and so the people making games don't really spend the effort.
Games are just emulating slot machines. That's fine sometimes, I enjoy RNG stuff being exposed and making number crunching flashy occasionally, but it's kinda weak design when the themes of your game allow for you to mask that stuff behind character design instead of just copy and pasting assets and changing the values
I've been saying this. Assassinating two cops to start a brawl where you dance through 15 other guys cutting them all down like an Italian John Wick is so much more fun than slamming a sword into a guy's face 8 times because "oouuugh he's 3 levels higher than meeee"
Italian John Wick is such a funny phrase given that Ezio predates John Wick
Ezio truly was peak Assassin's Creed.
That trailer with Woodkid continues to be one of the best videogame trailers ever made. But its impact would not work without following Ezio's story all the way up to the point it came out.
https://youtu.be/8-Ixo7QXw_E
I dislike levels in action games. Just pick one. Either I click on his face and he dies, or you abstract the attacks and use the stats to determine the results.
It was bad in Morrowind 20+ years ago. And yet people keep doing it.
Ass creed Vikings had archers on this side of the river: easy, identical archers that side of the river but 30 levels higher: deadly. Garbage.
If you're gonna have leveled enemies in an action game, the best way to do it is to make them visually different from regular goons and give them something like more armor, or a helmet, or a bigger weapon that's immune to regular parry.
Do your leveling by gating areas with enemy types that require you to either master the combat or unlock a weapon through story progression that trivializes them.
That's mostly what the dark souls games do. The rotting zombie soldier that can hardly stand up straight is less of a threat than the giant black knight, and you can tell by looking at them.
Unfortunately, it seems a lot of people don't really care about it, and so the people making games don't really spend the effort.
Games are just emulating slot machines. That's fine sometimes, I enjoy RNG stuff being exposed and making number crunching flashy occasionally, but it's kinda weak design when the themes of your game allow for you to mask that stuff behind character design instead of just copy and pasting assets and changing the values
I don't think all games are emulating slot machines. Chess, for example, has no random factor and no hidden information.
Many games use random factors and other tricks to feel rewarding.
I have a thesis that there's a difference between s good game and a fun game. Something can be one, the other, both, or neither.