Why are western dev’s incapable of making good boss fights?

Lemme make a list of western and cross check their various traits. I’ve looked up various “Best Boss” lists on the internet to source these. I’m going to try not to cherrypick bad bosses on purpose so I can pick on them, though I will include bad ones I find on multiple lists.

On analysis, I find the primary problem with the bosses I found was that there’s no risk and reward. Everything is defined in clear cycles You’ll notice that in most of these, there’s no movement while attacking, there’s no movement between attacks then stopping to pop one off at a risk to yourself. Generally the players do not damage the bosses while the bosses are attacking them. A lot of it is, “Do this simple skill challenge to avoid taking damage, then do this simple skill challenge to deal damage” A lot of western bosses throw in enemies, because their enemies are better designed than the boss is, but this leads to bosses feeling homogenous with enemy encounters. Bosses frequently get stunned after specific actions, prompting you to wail on them. In Eastern games, you frequently have to work to stun them as a bonus for efficiency and preying on difficult to abuse weaknesses.

Bob Barbas (DmC)

The one is extremely lame. Lasers rotate, you dodge them. Pound sign on ground, beat up stunned boss, fight some mooks w/ alternate camera.

Lady Comstock (bioshock infinite)

It’s an encounter with a mob of regular-ass enemies who revive, and a bullet sponge in the center of them. Boss moves around on cycles after taking enough damage, but it’s mostly to make you move through the other enemies, it’s not really a push and pull type of thing.

Alduin (skyrim)

The boss sits around doing nothing most of the time, there’s no hitstun, so who cares about tanking all the boss’s hits?

Baal (Diablo 2)

Standing still the entire fight just attacking, then moving when the boss teleports.

Vaas (Far Cry 3)

Shooting at a lot of targets rushing in, then a cutscene plays.

Solomon Grundy (Arkham City)

Dodge some attacks, lay explosives when over the 3 environmental points that deal damage and the boss isn’t attacking. Also attack the boss directly when stunned. Every cycle there is something very clearly expected of the player, it is the one right answer.

Hive Mind (Dead Space)

This one, you get a chance to shoot, then you gotta dodge something, very clear cycles here. Then you get to shoot with different controls that are harder to aim. Spawn some enemies, give them time to deal with them, back to the pattern, slam tentacles twice now before showing weak spot.

Poseidon (God Of War 3)

This one is a bit better. It doesn’t always have entirely clear phases, and it lets you damage during the attack phase, though it still has stun phases. Lots of scripted sequences and quick time events.

Raam (Gears of War)

This one actually has some risk. You have to pop out to shoot. Take too long and you get shot. Don’t pop out when he’s shooting. Move away when he’s too close.

Ceraph Warship (Crysis)

Massively shitty boss. Most of the alien encounters sucked because they didn’t utilize stealth in combination with the fighting/suit powers. Duck behind cover. Shoot at a largely stationary target.

Humanoid Reaper (Mass Effect 2)

It’s a cover shooter. Of course the boss is peekaboo. Peek out, shoot until you start getting shot at. Bonus mook included free!

And that’s all I care to go through. Why are they designed this way? Who knows. Lack of creativity? None seem to be pursuing an idea of depth, which in enemy design tends to mean shutting down options the player has in ways that make the enemy vulnerable too, so the player needs to respond to what tactics the enemy is taking, reacting accordingly. The player shouldn’t just get a punish for a dodged attack, they should need to be in position to punish it. If you don’t require the player to make the correct decisions to beat the boss, versus simply following patterns, then winning is a matter of time.

Okay, I’ve thought about this a bit. The obvious answer to a lot of people seemed to be “go dark souls”, but that has a bit of a different character to its combat. Zelda should probably be closer to Witcher 3 (in pace) or the 3d Ys games, except with deterministic sword strikes that vary somewhat in function. The double obvious answer is to go back to 2d and build on link to the past/oracle of seasons/the original, but that’s too easy.

Things that I would consider characteristic of Zelda’s combat up to now include the spin attack, jump attack, down thrust, and basic combo. Additionally there’s the roll, back flip, and side hop. L-Targeting/Z-Targeting have both narrowed the way combat works down to a more one-dimensional type of thing. Enemies also rotate really fast and generally stay locked on to you, rather than really committing to swinging in a specific direction. L-Targetting needs to have drawbacks added into it which make general movement more attractive as an option. Obvious one to start is reduced movement speed, which I think it might already have.

Sidehopping/rolling are the primary defensive options, so they need to be a high enough commitment that they can get out of the way of attacks, but rarely get the chance to get an attack in safely. In order to get an attack in, you should need to do these early enough so they recovery sooner than the attack you’re avoiding is even done, otherwise you’re committed to the act of dodging instead of attacking, you’re giving up your chance to attack in order to be safe. Otherwise they should come out about even with the attack you’re avoiding. Giving the roll iframes may help increase its viability as a combat option and give people reasons to not lock on (because you need to remove lock-on to roll in directions other than forward). The point of making dodge versus attack a tradeoff is to reduce reliance on dodges as a “solution”, dodge then attack. This means that in other to punish enemies, players need to move out of the way of enemies’ attacks, which is harder with the reduced movement speed of L-target.

Shields don’t work in Zelda. There’s no drawback to holding it up while locked on (except you can’t sword attack), and most enemies can’t get past it. Enemies either rebound off it, or are unphased by it, not really pressuring it in any way. You are allowed to side hop and even back flip while blocking, and enemies hitting you during these will still be blocked. Dark Souls has stamina as a regulating measure, Witcher 3 has chip damage. I feel like chip damage is a lame solution in a single player game, but stamina isn’t something that really fits in Zelda. Skyward Sword experimented with shield durability, but this isn’t a strong moment-to-moment reason to not use your shield. In my view, shielding should be another option to negate damage that has less commitment than dodges. So shielding is easier to do, but a dodge will get you further.

To make this work in Zelda, I think the obvious thing to do would be to make shields negative on block. You’re holding off the attack, but the advantage is surrendered to the enemy (and some enemies should probably be designed to take advantage of this). Beyond that, I think it makes sense to have guard breaks, like garou, dark souls 2, etc. Take too many hits on shield, you maybe glow red or something, then you get blown up.

Another potential solution is having shield glue you to the ground practically, and require you to aim in a direction, much like shield in L-Target currently does. Shield defends you practically for free when you’re locked on, and I want to capture more of the movement across and around objects on the 2d plane. Having threats come in from multiple sides and needing to defend them by orienting yourself in that direction is an obvious way of doing this.

The core point of design here is, there needs to be reasons to choose one option over another, and to not have any option be a perfect solution for any given situation. Shield and these dodge options are probably indispensable to what 3d zelda is at this point, these design decisions and good enemy design should help balance them.

Beyond that, I feel like the core of the 2d zelda structure is moving out of the way of enemies, moving to a position where you can orient to face them, and attacking. The darknuts in zelda 1 are probably the embodiment of this design idea. They walk randomly in a way that is biased to face towards you. You need to get around to their sides or back in order to attack them, as you cannot attack from the front. You need to not let them move into you in the process, because you are stuck to the ground while attacking, but they can still move. This is something 3d games are capable of doing, but which they haven’t really tried, because lock-on keeps forcing their hand, and dodge-type moves are used as an easy out. (later 2d zelda didn’t do this as well either due to enemy designs)

2d Zelda is kind of shmup-like in this way, with the additional constraint of facing direction. You can move out of the way of things, with the additional constraint that you must turn to face towards what you attack.

Part of the reason this doesn’t work as well in 3d is the camera systems. If you pull the camera in too much and tilt it too up and behind the character, it’s difficult to see the floor as a 2d plane, and difficult to perceive both that there are threats around you, and exactly where they are positioned relative to you. Fixed camera angles like in Devil May Cry help alleviate this, but they also make siderolls really awkward. For this reason, the camera should be tilted downwards more, and pulled out a bit, it would also help to design areas to be more open and to handle choke points rather carefully. Most Zelda games already have really open environments, so this isn’t too much of a problem.

The camera should ideally not follow the character too hard, sort of like Super Mario Sunshine’s camera. It should immediately be responsive to lock-on and camera stick movements, but otherwise not worry too much about framing the action behind the character’s back. The object of focus is his movement around the enemies, so the whole scene is more important, up until the player decides to lock-on and focus on a single enemy.

I considered the idea of different attacks. 2d Zelda only has one sword attack, it only really needs one sword attack. The depth of 2d Zelda is conveyed through the motions of the player around the enemies. In 3d Zelda, for whatever reason, sword attacks were kept largely the same as in 2d games, they’re really fast to come out and recover and all have straightforward attack areas. There isn’t a lot of differentiation between them or commitment to them. However because touch of death enemies were largely veto’d in 3d zelda and 3d action games categorically, and the number of enemies and their movement complexity around the player dropped, 3d Zelda games don’t capture the same type of combat depth as other games.

I checked out Majora’s mask (because I had it on hand) really quick so I could tell what attack types there were (and I hope this holds true for the other 3d Zelda). In unlocked mode, you have horizontal slices with no direction held, and overhead with a direction held. While locked on you have overhead slices by default, and horizontal slices when moving any direction but forward, and thrusts when moving forward (poor arc on the thrusts if you ask me). All of these have the same range and general framedata. When locked on you can press forward and A to do a jump attack, Link’s only unique attack besides the spin attack (which needs to be charged in majora’s mask, OoT, and WW, poor transition from 2d there, has a cooldown in TP, and costs stamina in SS).

TP has a number of unique attacks, shield bash, back slice, helm splitter, ending blow, mortal draw, and upgraded jump/spin attack. Each of these has a specific function which they’re uncontested at in dealing with specific monster types. Shield bash beats enemies with shields, back slice beats enemies with shield + armor, Helm splitter beats enemies who have shield + armor and move out of the way of back slice. Mortal Draw is a gimmick charge attack, like a better and more gimmicky version of the spin attack. Also interestingly, TP lets you attack while running without stopping your run. This is closer to what I’m going for, though I don’t know if it entirely fits in.

My instinct is to differentiate out into a bunch of attacks that serve different roles, having attack variety when locked on, and less when not, but Zelda isn’t really a game about varying levels of commitment, either in 2d or 3d.

I think a better direction would just to be focusing on the minimum number of attacks necessary to make it work. Don’t worry about the 3d action game standard counterplay of faster attacks versus well timed attacks versus outspaced hits and just focus on avoiding getting hit and getting hits in. Make it so you get all horizontal when not targeting (more forgiving for attack angle), get higher commit and longer range overhead swings when you are targeting, skip on the thrust attacks entirely (or I guess keep them in as a variation on the overhead attack much like they already are), and keep the jump attack as the only slower higher commit move. Keeping the damage the same between the locked/unlocked options should help emphasize the lower-commit unlocked options more, and thereby emphasize moving around enemies more. Honestly the attacks could even stay fast as they are probably, I probably over thought the whole attack business when it’s really more about the enemy designs. Though the issue with keeping them fast is that it becomes that much safer to dodge and attack, which isn’t something I want. Slowing down L-Target attacks at least discourages this behavior with sidehops.

Slightly more startup/end lag on the sword attacks would probably be sane, along with something limiting your ability to slash at an enemy endlessly, like pushback. Darknuts in TP can be beaten by running up to them, slashing them once with the run-by slash to get them to guard, then slashing at their exposed backside, until they arbitrarily put up their guard to repel you, then you can repeat the cycle. In WW they can be beaten by running around to their backside and slashing them repeatedly to death. These are obviously things to be avoided, and they don’t work in the 2d games because of pushback, which is a bit less arbitrary than the darknut just cutting you off in TP. There’s some in TP, but not enough to prevent you from getting heinous amounts of damage in.

Like, this is kind of the type of thing I want to see, no lock on, moving around enemies, though in this way it looks more like abuse, perhaps that’s because of the limited enemy count. I don’t want the system to break when there’s only one enemy, as it clearly does in this video. Perhaps the best answer to that is simply to not have hitstun for enemies, or to go with a hidden dizzy/poise meter much like dark souls or DMC? Do enough damage quick enough, and you can interrupt an enemy attack, and get a free shot or two. Imagine moving around the darknut, but rather than it simply taking the punishment, it keeps actively attacking as you move around it, with attacks that are a step ahead of where you need to move sometimes, so you need to watch out and adapt to where it’s attacking, or back off to where it’s safe.

Of course there’s the issue of enemy design and enemy placement. Darknuts practically design themselves. Their primary issue is their sword swipes have a kind of unclear hit area due to a poor arc in the animation (though it’s always in the front, so mystery solved), they’re not very aggressive, and they auto-block from the front. Darknuts could use attacks that cover a shallow sweep around their front (can be avoided by running around to left or right), sweeps that cover their left and right sides move (avoided by moving around to opposite side), slower wider sweeps in front, and block/dodge for variety. At mid ranges they could have attacks slow enough that the player can see exactly what they are an how to avoid it (25-33 frames), and at closer ranges they could be faster so the player only has time to see it and avoid it (16-20 frames). Mixing up between these will make the player feel unsafe to come too close to it, or press the advantage when they are not punishing a whiffed move.

I want to have blockstring pressure of some kind, otherwise the dynamic of holding up the shield versus getting guard broken doesn’t really work, but I am uncertain of how to implement it fairly. Like, there’s multiple decisions the player should be making there, but all of these decisionmaking processes are hard to implement in a way that are fair in a singleplayer game context and don’t have a clear solution despite being fair. Fair here means that the player must be able to react on some level to the information coming at them in order to make a judgement. They shouldn’t be forced to guess, otherwise whether they get punished is basically RNG, there needs to be a tell. In a multiplayer game, players can be allowed to make hard reads, so things don’t need to be reactable. Kind of a dilemma and a paradox in a single player game though, but whatever. The first decision involved is between blocking versus avoiding the blow entirely. The next is between continuing to keep the shield up, out of fear there may be another blow versus escaping. The last is a hope to punish the opponent for overextending.

My thought for this is to focus on the breaks in the blockstring, when they are, and how long they are. You can have a tell in the form of a glint in the enemy’s eye or a subtle thing at the end of an attack animation to let the player know they have a chance to escape on the next attack. These attacks that give the chance to escape should obviously deal more guard damage since they’re the ones the guy should be breaking out on. On these attacks, the player can jump out without being punished if they react and time it correctly. Then there should be other breaks that have a longer windup to allow the player to drop their guard completely and attack back at the enemy.

So maybe you have a sequence of 5 attacks, so the breaks could potentially come at 4 points between those. Lets say you always have at least one escape attempt, and at least one chance to fight back. If they don’t know when these are coming, then they could miss their opportunity when they do, though the trouble is I don’t see much reason why someone would get caught trying to get out when their opportunity didn’t arrive yet, and I don’t really have a way to fix that flaw that doesn’t result in unfair RNG on some level, so whatever.

Though to be honest, it’s silly to have blockstring pressure in a zelda game, it’s really not what zelda’s about, but that shield taunts me and I can’t think of another way to make it really mesh. If you have guard damage just last for a long time and regenerate slowly, then it would probably work fine as a tradeoff without any silly blockstring nonsense (though it also wouldn’t put people in direct threat of getting guard broken often). But hey, here’s a system that could be used in some other game probably.

The broader issue with most of 3d Zelda’s enemies is that it’s a battle of the quick and the dead. Link is quick, and the enemies are dead. Most of them you don’t really have to think about, you can lock on, their friends aren’t too keen on attacking, and you can wail on them unopposed. Enemies come straight at you, and you can slash them when they’re in range by locking onto them. Refer back to that cave of ordeals footage. A lot of it is seriously just mashing A.

In the original Legend of Zelda, you can have 5-6 enemies all on the screen at once moving around, hurting you if they touch you. You have restrictive terrain boxing you into enemy encounters. You have enemies that appear out of the ground and come at you in the desert, you have lots of enemies that shoot projectiles in addition to approaching up close. Some rooms have turrets that shoot fire in the corners that go off by themselves, some have blade traps that run along the edges of the screen. Some enemies rush at you if you’re in their line of sight, some can only be hit from their sides. Most of them move erratically, some jump faster than you can walk. You have all these threats coming at you from different angles, and you can’t mash A to deal with one without being hurt by another.

Some obvious things to emphasize are movement patterns other than moving straight at you, having some enemies be inclined to try to surround you by moving to a position that is on a side of you where few other enemies are, but also be drawn in to attack you as they get closer into that position and closer to you, maybe teleporting around you, and liberally applying projectiles that aren’t just flaming arrows. Slower windup on the sword and removing hitstun will probably reduce the issue of being able to interrupt enemies before they can attack you, so the player is forced to avoid attacks before attacking rather than hit first ask questions never.

The goal is to keep the player moving around the enemies and finding chances to hit them.

Items like the bow and hookshot could probably be integrated better into combat and the like by not requiring you to go into first person view to aim them. Imagine if holding down the button projected a red line off from the direction you’re currently aiming, and releasing the button fired it off in that direction. You could require the player to stop when doing this, or let them move around freely, it’s your call. If they’re allowed to move around freely, then having the items lock on to targets near the line of fire (by drawing another line indicating the corrected trajectory) would probably be more forgiving. The hook shot could probably see additional use as a movement tool if it could latch onto more walls to pull Link quickly around. Allowing the hook shot and boomerang to be one of the rare ways to stun enemies, interrupting their attacks, would probably help differentiate them, as long as safety measures were set up to prevent stunlocking and easily killing off more powerful enemies (like biasing them towards faster attacks in the short term, and not having the hitstun be very long). It could be tolerable in encounters with weaker enemies if there are multiple of them. Maybe allow people to cancel firing these by pressing another button, maybe have a first person mode by holding a trigger button.

Overall, I’d pare the item selection down to bow, hookshot, bombs, boomerang, roc’s feather/cape, power bracelet, bottles, pegasus boots/pegasus seed, candle/ember seed, and deku leaf. These are the only items that really stand out to me for unique functionality. The magic rod/fire rod is also nice, but it overlaps with the bow a lot.

To give a brief overview, the bow is directed long range projectile damage, the hookshot can stun and be used as a quick movement tool, bombs can be thrown and explode, propelling the player and enemies as well as dealing big damage, boomerang can deal hitstun, and be directed around in funny ways, roc’s feather could add a command jump (missing from 3d zelda, dunno how it would be integrated into the broader system), Power bracelet allows items to be picked up and thrown (passive ability, more related to environmental objects than the player character), bottles function as healing/magic/extra lives, pegasus boots allow you to move faster after a startup period, and rebounding off walls works as an impromptu jump, candle/ember seed can both make fires on the ground that deal sustained damage within an area, deku leaf can hover and push enemies around.

The ranged weapons and bottles present some minor issues in their prior implementations. Bows, boomerangs, and hookshots all hit their targets for free when locked on in previous 3d zelda games. One easy way to solve that is to have the lock-on button be the same as the first person view button for these weapons. Also bottles need to be used in realtime or they’re free healing. The whole dynamic of being able to predict enemies far enough into the future to find a chance to heal from Dark Souls should obviously be the one to aim for here. Long startup time, if interrupted you get nothing and lose a healing item too.

On the UX side. Make all text boxes instantly complete with the B button and progress to the next one with the A button. Maybe have a delay of a few frames to help people read what’s in the box while they’re mashing B and A. Allow any cutscene to be paused by pressing start, and skipped by pressing A after start. Make the pause screen come up a lot faster (seriously, it’s slow in EVERY zelda game, even the 2d ones, I don’t get it). Shorten and eliminate as many mini-cutscenes as possible. Players do NOT need to see that their hookshot connected for the one billionth time. Rupees, have a flag in the goddamn save file remembering if people picked up a given rupee value, and if you’re so damn concerned about them forgetting it, have +30 rupees or whatever pop up over the rupee counter. For that matter, skip the rupee cutscenes altogether.

You could very easily follow the existing control scheme even with my proposed design changes.

B = Sword
A = Dodge/jump attack when locked on, environmental interaction/roll/pegasus boots when not locked on
XYZ = Assignable items
L = L-Target/First Person View
R = Shield
Dpad = Maybe a quick item change menu system?

Bosses could take a cue from the better 2d bosses like Gleeok, Patra, Moldorm, helmasaur king, Mothula, true Agahnim, Onox, later phases of Veran. I admit that even some of these aren’t terribly great. Could probably take cues from Ys bosses too and maybe bloodborne bosses, in particular their varied attack patterns with the randomized fakeouts, since we’re having the whole block and dodge thing in place like a 3d action game.

Invent a random drop algorithm similar to the one from the first game, that let people force certain drops by killing multiple enemies in a row without being hit.
Damage on later enemies in the game doesn’t need to go up significantly as long as enemy patterns remain tough. 3d Zelda has a problem with you getting 20 hearts because they don’t ramp the damage or enemy counts up, so you’re fighting the final boss and it’s like, “damn, that attack only does 2 hearts?” Similar to Metroid, Zelda’s supposed to work by attrition, slowly wearing the player down. Later in the game the player has bottles that can replenish hearts, these probably shouldn’t restore the whole thing, fairies should probably restore less than red bottles, and if actively used, there should be a risk of being hit, losing the bottle completely, stressing that the player can look far ahead enough into the future to find a place where they can heal and nothing will hit them.

I’m too tired to think of a good world structure that incorporates the best elements of open world nonlinearity from zelda 1 and LttP dark world with the sequence breaking of the 3d games. So that’s all I got. Plot could probably follow from that valley of the flood hoax, because I liked that idea. He’s a fake hero, but maybe the spirit of the series might get reincarnated in him, even though he’s not the hero hyrule needs, and the tragedy is he’s doomed to fail? Could potentially be interesting from a meta-narrative point of view if you don’t push it too hard. And you could end with a supposed-to-lose boss fight that you can actually win, or attempt to turn that trope on its head by making the losing process actually engaging or strategic in some way, much like how undertale makes pacifism interesting by requiring you to survive anyway. Perhaps you could have 3 endings, where the easy way out is dying because you think it can’t be won (hell, have a decoy ending cutscene here that can be skipped to go straight to the main menu, but don’t save the game so people can reload and retry), the medium way is to kill the boss, conquering fate and all, and the hardest way is to endure into sacrifice, and come up with alternate uses for some of the weapons.

Would be a fun fan-game idea. Wonder how close the story/characters/setting/naming could get without infringing on copyright.

You find galaxy’s design limited? I mean it could use a 64 movement system to allow for more variety of ways to traverse something and let the player control pacing via speed, but I think they did great for what it was. Then again you probably don’t think Galaxy is a bad or even mediocre game anyway. What your own rating (between 1 and 5) of it would be, also you shouldn’t appeal to me, I’d prefer you’d be honest.

Yeah, the levels are more straightforward with more of a defined sequence. The level designs allow you to mess around with them in less ways and your moveset is more limited in general. A lot more of it revolves around gimmicks than solid platforming, like blasting off from the stars or pulling yourself in bubble sections. The new spin move is cool, but the means of using it is more awkward. A lot of the game revolves around collecting star bits, and I’m not a fan of collectathon type mechanics in general (then you get the purple coin levels). Shooting at the screen is generally not really integrated into standard play, and the need to shake the wiimote to spin makes it so you can’t do both at the same time (not that you’re required to). Many of the levels are small and flat and can frequently revolve around enemy fighting more than platforming which is what the game is strongest at. The focus of the game on planets with their own gravitational fields lends to the flatness of the level design, because a rounded planet ends up functionally as a flat planet, and the wonkiness of the camera that might be invoked with more interesting architecture leads to them making more flat planets. Even some of the more interestingly shaped planets, like a ? shaped one, end up being effectively flat because of this.

I feel like in comparison, Mario Sunshine had more going on with its levels, especially the secret levels, even if the main world levels were frequently a clusterfuck. The rotating puzzle blocks in the secret levels were a genius piece of level design if you ask me. There was a lot you could do with Fludd, even if the hover nozzle was slow and kind of dull. You can even beat the entire game without the hover nozzle. And you can slide on water, shotgun spray, spray while moving. Plus the turbo+rocket nozzles were great. And the game added the 360 spin jump, which you can even do loosely to not get the full spin, but to go higher/further without the same physics as the spin jump, effectively replacing the long jump, though not entirely. It has the best walljump physics too if you ask me.
64 has the best level design of the lot, and a strong platforming moveset overall, with great Z-action on most maps, or at least obfuscated paths forward with a ton of different ways to get around things, and almost never only one path forwards, which I think helps it win by itself.

You get things like mario 64 free running, which can be really varied and technical. Mario Sunshine freerunning is alright, and mario galaxy freerunning is nonexistent, and would probably be a joke. It doesn’t have the levels/moveset for it.

I just see Galaxy and 3D world as weaker games, with the spin attack as a solid addition to games that don’t really demand it, though hey it’s cool that it resets on walljump I guess.

Mario 64, 5/5 (basically perfect)
Sunshine, 4.5/5 (very good, bit shy of greatness for various reasons)
Galaxy, 3/5 (average, doesn’t stand out much to me)

On 3d Mario: http://pastebin.com/BpyS7Y8X

Okay, I’m probably sending mixed messages here.

My primary inspiration here is the secret levels in Mario Sunshine. These are like a playground, generally don’t have Fludd, and the game has enough movement options that there are a lot of ways to deal with each obstacle.

I don’t like the way mario 64 levels and the main levels of mario sunshine are filled with so much unnecessary stuff. I don’t like the 100 coin challenges. I don’t like the scavenging for the stars. I like the Secrets because they’re direct and to the point, but still open enough to allow different approaches. I’d like them more if they had just a bit more leeway, a few more moving parts, bits of geometry.

Mario Galaxy by contrast has fewer movement mechanics and more constrained levels. It’s true that they’re straightforward, but they’re so much so that they kind of force you to rotely follow sequence. Also yeah they’re too slow.

Mario 64 has a lot of little level design elements that are really cool for speedrunning, wrapped up in a cacophany of a level. It would be cool if those could be focused into a more straightforward course, like the bowser levels, or of course mario sunshine secrets.

I’d like to find the middleground between these two extremes of straightforward + constrained and clusterfuck + freedom.

Also 3d world far as I’m aware is really easy except for the green star scavenger hunts and has less movement options than even galaxy.

How would you expand on fludd for a future mario game?

Change the hover nozzle to not be so damn slow or remove it completely.

Add rain sections where you have infinite water.

Maybe let you switch between all the functions at any time.

More traditional dual analog third person shooter controls for fludd starting from whenever the button is pressed. If the console allows light presses, then keep the existing light press function in.

Add in more combination moves, fludd + another move. Like maybe if you dive right when you do a rocket boost, you can do a rocket dive.

Apart from that, I got nothing.

How are you enjoying the new characters in DMC4: SE?

Only played Lady and Vergil so far. I’ve been avoiding grabbing any health powerups for the challenge. Lady is hard to use, has trouble getting in close to enemies, her controls are a bit tricky to manage, but I feel like she has some potential, because she still does have a varied moveset, she just has a very different approach from the other characters. Like she has the extremely slow, but heavy hitting kalina ann attacks to interrupt enemies up close, shotgun stinger and back blast for big damage, a dedicated long distance launcher, launcher on her pistols, charge shots on all her weapons. A bomb type of super attack that makes her temporarily invincible.

Vergil meanwhile is fast and super destructive. He’s more or less just his DMC3 SE self, except with more moves and some minor changes. I’m a fan of the new air trick teleport, using the sword as a device for it, however I’m not a fan of how you cannot trick up if you have that sword in an opponent, and in general how the trick up command has been deprecated. To trick down while fighting an opponent you need to enter DT mode, it’s oddly restrictive to only offer Trick down at the cost of meter, considering it’s not a very useful move to begin with. Vergil can rapid slash like crazy in DT mode, which looks cool but in my opinion is too powerful and free, even compared to dante’s similar stinger ability. Not a fan of Judgment Cut End, the new super ability either. Lady’s super ability is at least restricted to an area, and costs all her meter. It’s weird how he can’t use summoned swords during taunts anymore. Cute is the decision to make Rising Sun DT only.

I like that Vergil can cancel things with his darkslayer teleport now, but I feel like it cancels way too much. It’s especially nice to cancel rapid slash on yamato with the teleport, but being able to cancel attacks in midair with it is overkill, especially with the emphasis the game typically places on jump cancels. Instead of doing the more difficult and limited jump cancel option you can now teleport straight to them even if they’re out of range. Its use as an alternate dodge type attack is still appreciated though. It would be smart if they limited the number of things he’s allowed to cancel with darkslayer to a more specific set that don’t entirely overlap with jump cancels, like more ground options maybe to retain the feeling of commitment most attacks have. Like limit it to things with long recovery times, like rapid slash, or things with low commitment that aren’t performed within JC range in the air. Or maybe it could uniquely cancel things with high commitment like judgement cut, drive, or round trip? I dunno, just pick a theme, make sure it doesn’t overlap with JCs too much.

For the reader’s convenience, the thread in question is here:

http://www.learntocounter.com/forums/index.php?topic=7963.0

DMC4’s enemies aren’t better than DMC3. Not at all. Some people even go as far as to say that they’re like DMC1 enemies, but that’s nonsense. DMC4 has so many problems that create the *illusion* of decent enemies, but really, the enemies are worse than DMC3 and have problems that arguably make them the worst in ‘notable’ brawlers. I wrote about this in the DMC4 thread on LTC (surely you’ve seen it) and its also an opinion held by the expert posters on the GFAQs DMC boards.

I don’t follow LTC, haven’t since I left.

Ey, maybe I’m being a bit harsh, but look over these lists:
http://devilmaycry.wikia.com/wiki/Enemies_in_Devil_May_Cry_3:_Dante%27s_Awakening_and_Special_Edition
http://devilmaycry.wikia.com/wiki/Enemies_in_Devil_May_Cry_4
I’m not doing a comparison to DMC1 here, I haven’t played it enough yet to judge (only beat the spider boss for the first time).

DMC3, most of the seven hells are the same, they’re alright fodder. Wrath sucks, greed and gluttony are alright and stand out a bit. Hell Vanguard is gold, dash attack, slashes, burst from under you, teleports. Enigmas are fodder, only good in combination with other enemies. The damned pawns have lame movement and only one attack, only fun because they’re so easy to jump cancel off of. Rook is simple, only dangerous in tandem with other enemies. Damned Knight is forgettable (does it even appear off the chessboard?). Bishop is alright, but again, needs other enemies to threaten directly with it. Blood Gargoyle is lame, shoot them, then slash them when petrified, avoid them when they dive at you. I liked the Fallen, except for their tendency to fly out of bounds, and the shields. Arachne are alright and unique, still on the simple side. The dullahans are really boring, can only be attacked from behind, in most appearances move in a totally fixed pattern. Soul eaters are simple too, like blood gargoyles, just a different gimmick to turn them solid.

DMC4 has the scarecrows, which are simple and nonaggressive, but have some different attacks, and mildly tricky timing. Not the best, but it’s alright. Frosts have ranged attacks, direct attacks, attacks from above and can juggle you, enter shields to regain health, teleport. Gladiuses are kinda basic and only work well with other enemies, have 2 different attacks. Assaults have a shield, ranged attack, melee attacks, burrow, dive attack, etc. Cutlasses are kind of simple and a pain, like 2-3 attacks. The Blitzes are awesome and have a bunch of nice attacks and teleports, and there’s tons of ways to take them down as Dante, between royal guards, ranged attacks, lucifer, so on. The basilisks are nice at a range, have melee attacks too. Chimeras are dumb and suck the fun out of things for not obeying hitstun rules. Mephisto and Faust have a bunch of cool attacks and are fun to fight as both nero and dante because both have a number of ways of decloaking them (less for nero, but can direct buster them). The angelo armors have unique juggle rules, shields protecting them, shieldbash attacks, melee attacks, rocket rush attacks, combination attacks. The faults are stupid, frustrating, and uninteresting. Mega Scarecrows have rollout, blade boomerangs, melee attacks, and drop the blade on death, Unique physics too.

A lot of the DMC3 enemies’ attacks work well in combination with other more direct threats, but are weak on their own, and only the Hells threaten Dante directly and effectively. Most of them only have one or two combat abilities. It would make sense to roll these abilities together into one enemy that was stronger.

The DMC4 enemies have ranged and melee attacks on the same enemy, allowing for direct aggression and ranged support interchangeably, they interact differently with the different weapons and different characters. They all have different interactions with Nero’s buster and bringer. They dropped some of the niches of the DMC3 enemies, which is kind of a shame, I wish those attacks like the Rook’s laser beam were carried on. However you’ll notice that most DMC3 style videos tend to be fights with the hells, which are rather similar. The armored enemies tend to get a bit samey with the charge shot on Nero, but Dante has tons and tons of ways of taking them down.

And honestly, DMC3’s enemies aren’t even that bad. They attack in large mobs, attack the moment they’re in range, hit hard, and you can approach them a dozen plus different ways (though this is more of a testament to the wonderful combat system). Anyway, the enemies can definitely be better, sure. Though I don’t see why weak enemies are enough to ‘reconsider’ the game. The combat and bosses (barring a couple stinkers like Doppelganger, Gigapede, and Arkham) are top-shelf, and magnitudes better than anything DMC4 has to offer. The reason DMC4 is even worth mentioning is because of how much it

They’re alright. They’re mostly just kind of one-note, and half the enemies you fight are some variation on the same moveset, the hells. I think they could be better, both in overall variety, aggression, team composition, utilization of the environment. I think DMC4 needs better enemies too, but a ton of the DMC3 enemies are totally lackluster (damned chessmen, enigma, blood-goyles, dullahan, soul-eater) recycles from DMC4 (and even then, it recycled poorly with stupid nerfs and gimps on practically everything).

True, it lost some weapons, it lost some style moves (poor wild stomp), had some gimps, Gunslinger sucks. However there are a ton of new combination moves between the tools that you can now use together (like the royal guard momentum tricks, and star rave). Lucifer is totally new, pandora in the air is alright, as is the boomerang function. They added just frames to gilgamesh.
DMC3, a bit like Melee versus P:M, feels better to my recollection, and has a bit more subtle complexity on a number of moves (crazy combos too), not to mention has nevan, spiral, artemis, agni and rudra, cerberus, and kalina ann.

There’s reasons to come back to each game, though I think DMC4 is the one that shines above at this moment in time. Not to mention, DMC4 Bloody Palace is pretty damn fun, more fun for me these days than the campaign, because it really binds together all the different systems of the game in a way that makes sense, and DMC3’s nobody really plays. (wonder why speed running Bloody Palace never caught on, it would probably be interesting).

I figured you still lurked over there, but in any case, here’s my post: http://www.learntocounter.com/forums/index.php?topic=7963.msg81307#msg81307 Please take a look and let me know which parts you disagree with.

I looked it up when you mentioned you made it.

I am fine with enemies having limited super armor, it means that you cannot aggress completely unopposed. Bayonetta enemies act like this for example. Enemies need super armor or something to that effect to be dangerous in a 1v1 scenario in a game where the player has as many infinites as dante does. That’s why the bosses all have it of course. Short of that, to remain threatening, there need to be multiple enemies so that even while you’re wrecking one, you have to worry about the others. If you see them about to attack, then royal guard. I’m pretty sure you can cancel most attacks into that when enemies hit you. And the attacks are properly telegraphed, far as I can remember.

Chimeras are kind of a bitch, but the interval isn’t actually random, I’ve definitely stepped away from them right before they do it (which is lame, drops the combo, they weren’t a very good enemy idea).
Blitzes are dull when you first pick up the game and get more interesting as you get better. Nero can wreck them rather easily and simply with his charge shot and ground buster into air buster, which is kind of lame because you have to wait for that shit to charge. DT burst also works.

Dante meanwhile has tons and tons of options for dealing with blitzes that don’t involve standing around charging, he can honeycomb shot them, fireworks, teleport, DT rainstorm, prickle them with lucifer, do ordinary attacks canceled into royal guard. Omen on Dante breaks any sort of shield enemies have, even if the disaster meter is totally uncharged. You can RG his lasers and royal release for massive damage.

Stinger RG is really easy, even I can do it.

Mephistos and Fausts you can fight in the air. Their cloaks can be removed easily by teleporting to them and DT rainstorm, or you can generally just do air combos like air rave mixed with yamato, with jump cancels thrown in for good measure. With Nero I like how the devil buster is more effective on their cloaks, which can only be used while lock-on is off, because then I need to manually run up to them and aim at them with it.
Dante can close distance easily on basilisks, he has a teleport, airdashes, stinger.

Agnus certainly can be jump canceled, I jump cancel all over him as both dante and nero. He’s really fun to fight with nero, I stay entirely in the air. You can even hit him while he’s flapping his wings hard while getting up, as long as your feet don’t touch the ground (it’s a quake-box).
E&I are useful for honeycomb shot and rainstorm.

The different styles all have useful moves that are in one style but not the others, like aerial rave in swordmaster/darkslayer, teleport and airdash in trickster, RG (which can cancel certain moves, and useful for aerial momentum), rainstorm honeycomb shot and fireworks in gunslinger

Then you get cross-style stuff:

EDIT: This was asked and answered later on

I replied to the DMC4 thread, if you’d like to read it. There isn’t much of interest, I was mostly just deflecting the other guys’ arguments, but yeah. I wanted to write up a pastebin reply to your ask when I linked my original post, but I guess that’ll come at a later date.

I read it.

DRI is OP, kinda sucks I guess. Should have either made landing it harder, or not had DT distortion. Or to have other things that are meter hungry. You can choose to not use it if you want, but I won’t deny it’s a mistake.

The stun doesn’t feel particularly inconsistent to me. I always thought of it like working as Poise did from Dark Souls (or bloodborne, which has really nuanced super armor rules for different enemy attacks versus different weapons), where specific attacks deal specific amounts of stun damage specific to the attack, and past a certain threshold enemies lose their armor for a period of time until it resets. I believe bosses work the same way. Super armor helps make it so you can’t just attack enemies without worrying about retaliation. Besides, Royal Guard cancels everything when you’re actually parrying a hit if I’m not mistaken (I might be, I don’t RG).

Disagree with agnus (hard to stay on top of him and he’s generally aggressive), Berial has good moves otherwise, like flame pillar and explosions + melee, Dante’s weird overall, but good if you don’t cheese him I guess.

Super Armor rules aren’t always about multi-hitting enemies, and I’m pretty sure no enemies have special hitstun rules for their attacks, unless I’m mistaken. I mean, in general you should treat it that enemies have super armor unless you’ve specifically broken their super armor or whatever, and remember which moves do and don’t have hyper armor (uninterruptable attacks) otherwise.

I agree with most of the artistic praise of DMC3, disagree with most of DMC4, especially the character designs which I thought were great except Gloria, and Lady. I think Lady’s change of character makes sense in the absence of her father. She’s allowed to loosen up, but be serious in a different way. I thought Dante and Nero’s character designs were pretty good. I think DMC1’s design is the worst there, with 2 coming in second (though it’s pretty alright, 1 is just silly).

Don’t think you’re right about cloaks, plenty of options work versus them.

Consider taking up speedruns of bloody palace mode, I imagine that will probably bring out the more interesting aspects of the game in a search for efficiency, like DRI wasting time except in boss battles, and I’ll be honest, I want to see what that would look like. I think BP mode in general brings out the best traits of the game. Would rock to get an enemy aggression mod.

Witcher 3 first imps?

It’s leaps and bounds better than Witcher 2 is what I’ll say. The combat feels so much more solid it’s ridiculous, and the addition of the dodge option was very sensible. The spells have all been tuned to make more sense, the parry option works a lot better than the old block option did. The Witcher Sense looks a lot nicer visually. The quest lines do a good job mixing up the gameplay, between chasing people down on horseback, to stalking deadly creatures, to rescuing people from burning buildings, and more. The graphics are perhaps one of the most beautiful 3d graphics I’ve ever seen, and as I typically do, I’ve been screenshotting up a storm. Far as people have informed me and my experiences with the game, it’s like the perfect marriage of Skyrim and Mass Effect, being able to accomplish both the unique open world questing and choices with consequences that neither could achieve individually, let alone together.

So I think it deserves a 3/5.

Despite the combat being tuned a lot better based on visual cues and the like (I haven’t had anyone block any attacks while literally attacking me yet, thank hell), it’s still really simplistic overall, and I have no fucking clue what controls the swings geralt chooses, so frequently I try to move in close and do a fast swing for damage, and I end up with a REALLY long swing animation and get interrupted by the faster enemy. Other times I get a really fast swing, but it’s so short range it misses, so I try really quick to throw out another attack before the enemy can and I get smacked with a long attack. Also he swings at such angles, and the hitboxes are so accurate to the blade that it frequently flat-out misses. Often times I can get crazy combos off of one hit, then others the enemy just falls out of it and is able to attack me before I can dodge. Sometimes dodges and rolls seem like they have iframes, sometimes it seems like they don’t. Sometimes geralt swings in completely the wrong direction, which is aggravating. Sometimes he can fire the crossbow fine without reloading and sometimes you’re forced to reload. It’s frequently flat-out aggravating. That and I’m playing on death march difficulty. It feels more fair than hard difficulty of the prior game, mostly due to the newfound consistency in most of your combat options, but the game is still crazy amounts of random which drives me up a wall sometimes.

Beyond that, it’s not terribly complex so far. Dark Souls didn’t have a complex combat system either, but it was so much more reliable in every way that I could do things like intentionally swipe inbetween two enemies without using lockon and expect to hit them both. I could remember how long my slashes were to interrupt enemies. I could outspace enemies and punish their whiffed attacks as they did them.

They have a lot of content in the game, the content is very nice, but the fighting drives me up such a wall. And it’s so close to being a reasonable, sane system that it’s all the more maddening.

Could you expand on how you feel about Witcher 3’s open-world gameplay? I’ve always felt that as games strived for bigger worlds, the gameplay and design took a hit, became less focused, and couldn’t decide between a cool sandbox to fool around in or proper missions that just took place in different areas. If they did the latter, than you might as well have a mission-based structure instead of wasting money on a large world to explore, it would just be pointless. How do you think Witcher 3 succeeds at balancing this open-world ‘free time’ and actual missions?

Witcher 3’s open world gameplay from what I’ve played so far appears to have a large number of unique quests with unique focuses that usually tie in some way back to making you fight things. Like I get a quest to bring a goat back, they have me track it through the woods with a bell and witcher sense, then carefully lead it back with the bell, and of course a bear attacks and there are wolves in the woods too.

Rather than just having a single open world, they have like 5 big maps, and they have quests and little things you can do, like destroy monster nests, bandit camps, treasure chests, depopulated villages, etc scattered all around them. Unlike Bethesda games, I haven’t been able to identify reused art assets as readily and the dungeons don’t look like they’re put together in a formulaic way. They went a long way in making areas feel unique. All the missions have their own areas in which they occur that fit into the larger world, most don’t even use dungeons.

It honestly feels a lot like Far Cry 3’s theme park approach. There’s all these little things floating around that you can stop by and interact with for a bit, most of the quests are fairly short, and you’re picking up goodies all the time.

I don’t think the gameplay and design takes a hit from being open world intrinsically in any way. You can still make the primary interactions deep. It’s just that open world games tend towards having worse game mechanics because it isn’t the development focus, though I guess that’s what you were saying.

What do you think of denser cities or set dressing in games that involve some sort of adventuring? E.g. villages with buildings and NPCs that don’t fundamentally add anything to the gameplay and are just there to make the world seem ‘real’ or bigger with small talk and lore. By ‘what do you think’, I meant, would you dock a game points for having cities with only quest-related NPCs?

To answer the latter question, no. I don’t really give a fuck except in a tangential sense.

What I said was kind of confusing maybe, but think of it this way: could you have DMC/NG/Bayonetta combat in The Witcher? How about Quake or non-ADS gunplay in Far Cry? Vanquish in GTA? Probably not, or not without destroying something that lets those combat systems work so well.

Yes. You definitely could have that type of combat in The Witcher. A lot of the Witcher’s combat is just fighting enemies in areas without significant environmental interaction, much like DMC, NG, Bayonetta. More difficult would be Dark Souls, which is very level design driven. Quake style combat is harder in Far Cry because it is more environment dependent, but it’s certainly possible and there are a ton of fan maps that have compelling fights in more open arenas. I think Blood Dragon showed it was possible to have less ADS style combat in a Far Cry game. We got Prototype and Infamous, which is pretty similar to Vanquish far as freedom of movement goes in an open world setting, I don’t see what’s stopping something like Vanquish from working on that scale.

The primary issues to consider in porting those are the level design, progression, enemy types and their synergy with the main character’s actions and the environment. The primary thing that tends to get worse in the transition to open world is level design tailored to individual encounters. If a game’s systems would work on a flat empty space without much deficit, then it’ll be fine in open world. Maybe level design tailored to the encounter level is something worth looking into in the future for open world games?

In DMC/NG/Bayonetta, you’re generally in a closed off arena. Ok, not always, but you generally are and it should be that way to prevent the player from running off (of course, they shouldn’t run off by their own choice and fight like a man, for how else would they improve?). In an open-world game you can run off. Also movement options would have to be tailored to the environment. Though I supposed making enemies aggressive and persistent enough would make up for any major design issues.

In The Witcher 3 and Skyrim the player can run off too. So what? The prevention of the player running off in DMC/NG/Bayonetta is because progression is tied not to the accomplishing of objectives, but of reaching the next area. In an open world game, you need to kill the enemies usually, because progression is tied to advancing quest flags, so it doesn’t matter if you can run off really, you have to come back anyway. You could also take the Okami approach and summon an arena when the player engages in combat, problem solved.

You can run away in many encounters in DMC/NG as well, but that’s called cheesing the encounter, since the enemies are more spread out and not as threatening as they are in groups. Furthermore, spreading out the enemy doesn’t require any kind of calculated/tactical approach (i.e. mastery of combat and movement) since you can just take your time, move up to an enemy and slap it with whatever you want. The more ‘abstract’ options are basically useless. Summoning some sort of arena conflicts with the open-world design (I already mentioned this). The whole idea of open-world games is to have one massive, seamless world within which every action takes place. Summoning an arena is kind of antithetical to this and a lazy solution.

It’s called cheesing the encounter because you’re skipping it and don’t have to deal with it. The objectives are different in open world games, usually requiring you to engage the monster, so you can’t run past it. I said this already. Sure, you might introduce issues of being able to kite, but beat em up games have kiting issues already, the solutions that work there work here. If people are allowed to back off and take their time, have the encounter reset, or worse, grow stronger as a penalty.

I’m proposing summoning an arena in the cases where you absolutely don’t want dudes running.

I don’t see how introducing good combat systems equivalent to those mentioned makes running away any more prevalent a problem in these games than it presently is.

“It’s just that open world games tend towards having worse game mechanics because it isn’t the development focus, though I guess that’s what you were saying.” That is what I was saying, though to an extent I do think that open-world intrinsically harms gameplay. I mean, it depends. The larger worlds are often meant to simulate real-world elements like traffic or travelers. There’s nothing deliberate about this kind of design and developers can’t make any kind of interesting gameplay around them. You can have robust combat mechanics, but to make interesting encounters, you’ll have to do something to limit the environment, which will conflict with the open-world design. For the record, I don’t consider Dragon’s Dogma or D. Souls open-world per se. I mostly referring to GTA, Far Cry, Ass Creed, and the sort. combat and movement) since you can just take your time, move up to an enemy and slap it with whatever you want. The more ‘abstract’ options are basically useless. Summoning some sort of arena conflicts with the open-world design (I already mentioned this). The whole idea of open-world games is to have one massive, seamless world within which every action takes place. Summoning an arena is kind of antithetical to this and a lazy solution.

They don’t have to simulate things little unimportant things like that at all (though it is expected by this point). I’m purely thinking about open world as a level design structure, for one.

I’m pretty sure dragon’s dogma is more on the open world end than otherwise (even if it is a small open world).

You don’t have to limit the environment, because the objective isn’t based on getting from point A to B. If you make the objective to kill enemies then people can’t ignore every encounter. If you make fortifications on areas with chokepoints and enemies designed to keep you out, then location based objectives can still be tricky.

This isn’t complicated, this isn’t preventing you from delivering content in an open world style, from wandering all over a large map with tons of tiny objectives dispersed across it. I don’t really care if you consider summoning an arena a lazy solution or not, or whether it doesn’t fit an open world game because an arena means it’s no longer open for the duration of the encounter. It would still be damned better than the open world games we have currently, and that’s good enough for me. Make the enemies tougher if you run away, give them decent aggro ranges, make the character only good at getting close to enemies and not good at getting away.

How would you make sidequests interesting since sidequests in games tend to be fetch quests or kill this enemy or the much hated escort missions?

Lemme think about it. I had some thoughts about this many many years ago before I was really into the whole game design theory thing, and they were so rudimentary it’s honestly not worth recording them. To say the least, they were basically, fetch quest, kill enemy, escort mission, and like 2 other types that were nearly the same. Kind of funny really. To be fair my old notes did say fetch quests were to be avoided like the devil.

I did a quick search on the best quests and the thing I notice they have in common is they introduce unique content, unique enemies, or unique mechanics/controls. In general it seems like the best quests are the ones that are solid content to play through more than anything. You could arguably say the best type of quest is something like the Painted World in Dark Souls, an entirely unique area with a nonlinear structure, unique enemies, and a boss waiting at the end. Kind of begs the question of, “is that really a quest?” though, because it’s more of an optional area. Many people would probably associate quests as being looser more story driven things, like how you keep up with all the different dark souls characters as they travel around Lordran.

So side quests under that definition end up inevitably being about bringing things from one place to another, or killing specific things because what other goals can you set up that make people run from one end of the world to the other? Side quests in this context end up being more about recycling content than anything else.

So what are some ideas for side quests? For optional content really? Here’s some ideas:

Try changing up the world a bit in response to activation of a sidequest or a phase of a sidequest. Add new enemies, change one of the areas, change the functionality of some enemies, try temporarily changing what the character can do, redefine their mechanics and how they interact with enemies in some way. maybe they jump twice as high for a bit, maybe they move slower but ignore hitstun, maybe they drive a vehicle around.

Have them take on optional bonus content. That’s always surefire.

Try having them interact with existing mechanics in a new way. Maybe you need to stealth through this area instead of fight, maybe you need to fight instead of stealth, maybe you need to lure enemies into a trap, maybe you need to separate entities from one another and deal with them when they’re all alone.

When assigning quests focused on visiting a specific node (like a fetch quest, or delivery), make sure it puts the player on an interesting path to get there, with interesting obstacles in their way.

Beyond that, the quests that seem to resonate most strongly with people are quests that have good storylines that involve enacting scripted actions that have no mechanics. That’s just a matter of coming up with an interesting story with interesting things happening in it really.

Coming up with a good sidequest is a lot like coming up with a good alternate game mode or good level design really. Look at Taunt Battle in Dan Salvato’s 20XX hack, you win by getting points from taunting as Mario, and capes can flip which team scores for a successful taunt. Look at the challenges in God Hand, and the arena challenges. Look at Witcher 3 sidequests. They introduce new mechanics with solid level design, enemy design, and enemy placement to highlight those mechanics.

I don’t get the appeal of post symphony of the night castlevania (granted, i haven’t played order of the ecclesia). In older castlevania games enemies took precise positioning and timing to kill, while in the metroidvania games you can slice through enemies like butter. Care to elaborate?

You’re entirely correct, a lot of the post-sotn games did feature weak enemy placement and flat-out weak enemies. I personally feel like the levelup component is almost completely pointless.

The appeal is primarily in the process of figuring out how the whole castle connects together and routing between areas. There are a number of points on the map that contain items you want to pick up, or which trigger events elsewhere, so you want to pass through those points, hitting as many of them in as short a path you can. It’s essentially the traveling salesman problem, which is fairly interesting to solve over and over again as you make treks across the castle. Sometimes you’re just exploring new unseen areas, sometimes you’re connecting new and old areas, sometimes you’re finding a way you can use a power to gain access to a new area, and with new shortcuts the map’s topology practically changes.

The other thing post-sotn games introduced was more complex/varied movement mechanics, like the wolf form, mist form, bat form (wing smash), double jump, divekick, backdash, crouch slide, super jump, and so on. And more complex/varied attacks, like the short sword that can be canceled by landing, fireballs, and a number of other things. These obviously add interest by giving people things that they can master, and which are tricky to use, introducing interesting choices and additional considerations into simple movement.

I felt like Order of Ecclesia was the strongest of the post-sotn games personally, it had a very solid combat system like the others, but generally more linear level design. This arguably lead to it having very solid enemy placement, with enemies that actually blocked your path forward and couldn’t be bypassed very easily. Nice bosses too. I 100%’d the game, and beat locked level 1 hard mode, without death ring.

I feel like there isn’t much preventing metroidvanias from having good enemy placement, except as Egoraptor pointed out, once you get through a tough enemy placement, do you really want to have to redo that every time you go through the area? This is actually where levelups come in. By having levelups, you can make earlier enemies that are previously tough a lot easier. If you can beat enemies in one hit, then it doesn’t really matter if from an execution standpoint they’re really tricky to dodge, damage, or bypass.

Obviously this leads to balance problems, you can get overleveled, underleveled, need to grind, or feel like grinding and just ruin things. The post-SOTN games generally have good level curves that have you at the right level at all times, I honestly haven’t needed to grind once in them except to grab rare drops, which I think are an issue in their own right.

As an alternative to this, I propose that when you grab an orb from a boss, instead of you getting stronger, all the monsters in the area that boss governed get weaker (same thing honestly). This means you can enter ANY AREA and always have the enemies be the appropriate difficulty for that area, and getting through enemies you’ve already beaten is easy. For bonus points, have it scale based on the number of boss orbs you’ve gotten.