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
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.