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I hate bullet sponges in FPS especially. Really makes your guns feel stupid when you shoot someone a dozen times in the head and it doesn’t do much.
I remember playing Max Payne. There was some battle in a bar against a guy with a shotgun. If you timed it right between reloads you could run up to the guy, stand on the bar so your guns were exactly level with his face and empty two Uzi clips point blank into his face before he could reload.
Then you would run out of ammo and he would one shot kill you.
IMO what it should do is:
A) Increase damage falloff. For precision guns that means non precision shots do less. For short range weapons that means the penalty for working outside the effective range is higher.
B) Add more enemies. Especially if there’s any stealth element, you close windows and change how you approach encounters.
C) Depending on the game, increase the range enemies respond at. If that’s sound based, they have better hearing. If it’s enemies calling for help when alerted, they get assistance/raise alert levels from longer range.
Perfect play should be comparable. Mistakes should be punished harder.
- Enemies should have more moves, particularly bosses.
- Enemies should use more cover.
- Enemies coordinate better.
The problem with difficulties is that it’s much more difficult to design an AI system which you can tweak and make it smarter or dumber as opposed to just increasing damage and health values, so devs will just implement the best AI they can and leave difficulties as afterthought.
After playing a lot of games that don’t even have difficulty settings, I’ve started to believe in the idea that difficulty selection is just outdated game design and that having a single difficulty but optional areas/content that is more difficult is the way to do it. OSRS is one of my favorite examples - everyone plays the same game and going through levelling or whatever isn’t mechanically demanding. However, there are bosses and challenges (like Theatre of Blood which is an end-game raid or Inferno which is an end-game challenge) that are incredibly challenging and require weeks if not months of attempts to master and finally beat, but also are perfectly skippable and most casual players don’t even bother with them.
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.
A lot of people say this and I don’t get it. What would be lost by having each playstyle be balanced properly and then adding difficulty scaling on top of that?
