anomalouslymandatory

anomalous

@anomalouslymandatory

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Kind of just do stuff, tend to like stuff like Touhou and Doom and Terraria and Serious Sam and things
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R-18 stuff over at @mandatoryanomaly

Basically everywhere else, Discord, Tumblr, Bluesky, Twitter, Steam, Fediverse, etc. I still go by "anomalouslymandatory" if possible

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anomalouslymandatory
@anomalouslymandatory
armormodekeeg
@armormodekeeg
boghog
@boghog

Resisting Claustrophobic Difficulty Design

I recently made a document breaking down beat em up enemy AI. While researching this I had a lot of thoughts.

The thing that I thought about the most is how different the design philosophy was in these games when compared to their modern day equivalents. Especially the philosophy expressed in the GDC talks covering God of War 2018's enemy design, which borrows a lot of beat 'em up dynamics.

Any player character or enemy has a set of natural limitations that stem from how their mechanics work - you can't do everything at once, neither can the enemies. These weaknesses don't stem from meters, cooldown timers, or any kind of "artificial" elements, they stem from the most basic fundamental rules of the games, hence they're natural.

Older games (generally speaking) tended to view these limitations not as a flaw to work around, but as a genuine weakness of the player which they can, and should capitalize on. In modern games, these limitations are seen as something like an inherently undesirable part of the games. They try to soften the blow as much as possible without outright removing those elements.

So when you apply that to enemy AI design, what you will see is enemies avoid attacking or stopping movement entirely when they're off-screen, picking position slots that are convenient for the player (usually in front of them rather than behind), even getting pushed into the screen as the player's attacking. On the player's side this is more variable, but you still see a tendency to add more lenient cancel windows, universal defensive mechanics, overpowered movement that lets you escape anything that would constitute a checkmate scenario, etc.

As a result, designers reduce the viable space in which they can challenge the player, often quite literally. The less of the player's weaknesses the enemies have to take advantage of (such as inability to hit multiple targets on opposite sides, limited FOV, recovery frames), the less they can rely on creating challenge through natural means. And the more they have to start relying on artificial, statistical means of doing this - super armor, meters, stamina, etc.

Or they could embrace the few remaining ways they have to challenge the player and emphasize those, which eventually homogenizes games, or emphasizes those elements to a point where they stop being particularly fun (such as testing reactions to randomized fast attack strings). What's more is, players get conditioned to expect friendlier & friendlier games, so the possibility space won't grow - it'll only keep shrinking.

I'd be surprised if developers don't feel the gamedev equivalent of suffocating claustrophobia when designing games this way.

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in reply to @boghog's post:

MrMandolino
@MrMandolino

Can't help but think of the difference between KH2 and KH3's approach to combat design. It's also an interesting point when compared to some modern games that were hailed as a return to the glorious hardcore gaming of the past like the Souls games. Those games rely on stamina meters for a big chunk of their difficulty

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boghog
@boghog

Never played KH but yea Souls, while popularizing an emphasis on recovery frames which are a natural weakness, also relies a lot on super armor & that sorta stuff for its challenge and increasingly focuses on 1v1 fights with clearly telegraphed attacks and simple dynamics. And they kinda cornered themselves with Elden Ring IMO. They got to a point where the main way they can increase difficulty is with longer, faster, more complex & variable boss strings + shorter/more obscure vulnerability states. As a result the bosses, when played with a minimalistic build, are much harder but learning them just feels like a slog. And where do they go from here, even longer strings? Reaction tests?

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MrMandolino
@MrMandolino

It feels like they are reaching the ceiling of what their design structures can do - I still stand by my claim that Malenia isn't a hard boss fight, it's a bad boss fight that relies on input reading and random attack chaining to a degree that would be deemed unreasonable were the game made by any other studio. That aside from the fact Elden Ring had an extremely noticeable amount of bosses whose attacks were clearly designed as feints to fake out people who are used to Souls combat - and yeah, the strings have also gotten longer and longer and longer. The Dancer in DS3 was already ridiculous on that front

Once I started realizing all this the vastly expanded summons system clicked into place - it pretty much allows those minimalistic builds to have a get out of jail free card, since to this day From hasn't really created AI design that accounts for multiple enemies

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boghog
@boghog

I don't think hard & bad are mutually exclusive, especially if you're talking about fights that can be consistently beaten with practice and not just RNG shit. I actually recall liking Malenia aside from the strings in her 2nd phase (those are way too RNG based and the misdirection strat while unique & interesting is too obscure) cuz for the most part she relied on single attacks or shorter strings and had more reasonable punish windows + actual hitstun, but it's been a while.

There's nothing inherently bad about tricky strings with misleading feints and input reading and all that stuff either, it's just that when a game only pushes those things the boss fights end up feeling pretty samey. And this kinda difficulty deflates quickly once you improve - as you get better the gameplay becomes vastly simpler since it's just gonna come down to doing specific responses to randomized attacks. At that point, isn't it just better to go full rhythm game and remove the ambiguity from attack reading but vastly ramp up speed & executio requirements? Idk

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MrMandolino
@MrMandolino

I guess that's what they tried with Bloodborne? No blocking, just dodging and significantly faster enemy attack patterns. But the feeling I get is they believe that choice strayed too far from the Souls identity to fully commit to it

Which doesn't mean they didn't draw from that imo, DS3 felt noticeably faster than the previous games

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tayl1r
@tayl1r

i worked on viking battle for asgard as a "level designer" (we had no control over the geometry and it would change without warning) and had many combat criticisms, especially the player side. but it does have something objectively very funny.

for context the game has two halves. big set pieces are 100 vs 100 fights, but most of the time you fight a handful of guys solo while doing fetch quests.

ai has all the restrictions you're talking about in one big system called "politeness." enemies would tag each other in and out, not have overlapping attacks, not attack offscreen, back off once you get hit, get less aggressive based on health, etc.

BUT each level also has a patrol of 50 enemies walking around you take out as part of a quest. this is meant to be scary and show our "so many dudes" tech. but level designers found you could just solo the entire thing because the politeness means there's a max amount of active enemies. so there is a line of code that says if you're not in a big battle and the active enemy count is over an abirtary value... turn off politeness. you get smoked in about 5 seconds.

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boghog
@boghog

That's pretty funny, reminds me of Shadow of Mordor which has the same issue but without the fix so no matter how many dudes you're fighting it's always the same ol shit due to engagement limitations (& player mechanics to be fair).

It's something I noticed in SOR4 as well, since only 1 enemy can be properly engaged, them increasing enemy counts (& speeds) in Mania+ is barely noticable until you get to the sections with superarmored dudes cause enemies don't really do anything. Meanwhile you drop 4 extra dudes into any Final Fight screen and it's gonna turn into a survival horror game very quickly

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armormodekeeg
@armormodekeeg

it's almost like an arms race, huh? giving players more powerful options, more tools, less weaknesses means that either the enemies and bosses have to have things that override these buffs or just, idk, lose

the other day I was playing Kingdom Hearts 3 on the highest difficulty with all the extra challenge modifiers stacked on top and I came to notice that, in order to counteract your completely insane mobility, including the ability to essentially teleport to any enemy that you have direct line-of-sight to, enemies tend to come with charging attacks that cross long distances, projectiles that can hit you from long ranges, etc. and many enemies are fully willing to fire off these attacks even if they're not on camera. plus, the more flexible systems allow you to cancel into defensive options in more situations (though your defensive options as a whole are actually less overpowered than KH2's lmao), and KH3 likes to counteract that with larger enemy groups (especially on the highest difficulty, which adds extra enemies to most encounters).

personally, I enjoy how KH3 puts these things together, as it gives the massive combat arenas a reason to exist, and the "grand" scale was clearly an intentional design philosophy as the first KH game to be on a system notably more powerful than a PS2. but it definitely shows that the more you give the player, the more you have to work to challenge them. it's definitely easy to end up needing to design challenges that paradoxically end up limiting gameplay more than you would had the player just had weaknesses that the enemies and bosses could take advantage of in the first place.

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boghog
@boghog

Yeah it's an arms race but the devs also have a strong pressure to not do the things that'd give enemies an advantage despite beefing up the player. By the sound of it (never played KH) KH3's devs realized how OP Sora is and just went into the shmup direction - extremely freeform movement/states but also a lot of shit to deal with. It's as if instead of giving the player limitations, they "went up" a layer and just used the limitations of the arena itself for combat or somethin.

Now imagine being a designer used to funneling enemies into really convenient places, making enemies passive when they're offscreen or even far away from the player, making them take turns and being scared of pissing the player off - how the hell would they build on Kingdom Heart 3's mechanics? There's really not a whole lot of space left at that point, gotta try to wiggle.

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armormodekeeg
@armormodekeeg

oh of course. there's definitely trends and pressure to not have the challenges keep up with the player's abilities so much. continuing the arms race is less common than just throwing up their hands and saying "well all we can test the player on now now is parry timing ig" lol

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