Like I get it in principle. You want players to feel unsafe, surrounded, and threaten being overwhelmed. Winning out against impossible odds. I get it.
But instead you have constant, and I mean constant spawns directly behind you. Everything you can try to do can be interrupted by the 8,091st trash zombie to spawn behind you and slap you upside the head. it is relentlessly annoying. During hordes or something fine, but it is endless, multiple times a minute, and it is infuriating before it is anything else.
They make no noise. Itās a punishment for not spinning 360 degrees at all times. Itās a punishment for not seeing behind you at all times. Itās a punishment for not having 1 teammate walking the entire level backwards. Itās a punishment for stuff you canāt do anything about is what Iām saying.
So yeah. I get why you have implemented spawning enemies directly behind players, but currently it only sucks. Give enemies footsteps that fade out as more occupy a certain space so it doesnāt get deafening, but single ones can be heard. Then cut the spawn rate by like 70% at least. it should still happen, but not every ten goddamned seconds.
Iāll be honest this will forever be cope. Not only do you have backstab sounds, footstep noises (which get really loud when thereās only a few enemies behind you targetting you, to warn you), you also have toughness that tanks a melee hit for you. You can also block attacks coming from behind to react to the sound cues.
Thereās also no enemies spawning directly behind players unless youāre talking spawndoors which are kind of a jank mechanic but the solution is to not turn your back to them while staying near them. Youāre probably just experiencing enemies dropping off ledges or climbing fences to get to you as you walk past them.
Iām sure there are cases where enemies spawn out of thin air. I know it can happen on some maps. I think 99% of the time anyone complains about this itās just a skill issue though. Turn off the youtube video or something, and listen to the game.
Donāt forget clearing a room with no spawn doors and the moment you move through it having a group spawn in that room. Funny enough it actually ruins the sense of being in urban combat since you know that clearing anything is pointless so you never stop being vigilant. Most of the tension in those situations comes from the uncertainty where youāre pretty sure you cleared area behind you recently but was it recently enough?
Not surprising though. Lazy company and lazy developers yields lazy scripting. I mean they COULD have implemented a minimum spawn timer plus some conditionals so that as long as the players donāt make too much noise it takes a certain amount of time before mobs respawn in that area. After all this is an urban war in a major hive city. Any noise short of a heavy artillery barrage wouldnāt even phase the locals so its not like something as mundane as gunfire and grenade explosions would register as urgent. Plus even regular patrols wouldnāt missed until they failed to report in at a designated time. Then the higher ups have to decide that this might not be another case of gangers/ mutants/ assorted demon just ate another patrol and send out another group to investigate etc. By which point the players would be long gone along. Instead we get the sort of spawn mechanics where its entirely possible to be brained by a silent pox walker that spawned behind you and speed-hacked into your blind spot due to being more concerned about the latest pack of 6 ragers stacked on top of each other that are trying to beat your face in.
Spawning gets really screwy whenever thereās only one person in a general area. Lord help you with true solos. Iāve watched trappers just kinda pop into existence in my line of sight more recently (I cannot be arsed to dig through my clips honestly, I clip a ton of things, and I donāt remember when it was exactly). It only seems to have gotten even worse over time, not better, likely them trying to make enemy spawns more aggressive to combat player power levels.
This has been going on for a very long time. (Second clip is from 2023) I was baffled seeing it become even more common with stuff like the ogryn clip above upon returning. They either donāt have a minimum spawn distance set or itās so low as to be irrelevant.
EDIT: I lied, I found it pretty fast when I actually bothered checking. Sorry for all the clips but just as evidence of not talking out of my ass:
This was from less than a week ago. I forgot about the sniper popping out too.
Combined with all of the audio issues the game still has, itās no surprise to see people still frustrated with this sort of thing.
I get why itās in game (would be far too easy otherwise), and I donāt mind it as-is, but to your point itās pretty annoying to whip around, kill 2 poxwalkers, then get back to things every ~5-10s. Feels like a speedbump or tax. Always trash too.
Would be interesting if they varied it up and came in larger clumps / more elites, at less predictable intervals.
Gonna have to disagree with this one. Spawns donāt require doors. Enemies can spawn behind pillars, crates, barrels, corners, etc.
If youāre close to one, they can in fact literally spawn in behind you. I have even seen them some times spawn literally in front of me because I was facing a āspawnpoint behind a pillarā.
You are right that the game gives you various ways of dealing with it, but the system isnāt perfect by any stretch. Letās also not forget the soundless specialists. My favorite is the poxburster that spawned behind a corner, with no sound, that you basically walk into just as it explodes no tick-tock warning given. Just SURPRISE MOTHERFORKER!
Iām with OP - Iād prefer if the game director would allow to engage ranged enemies in a shootout without forcing me to melee something behind me every three seconds.
But I also get that some people enjoy this so why not keeping it in game for maelstrom/havoc/auric content and remove it from regular missions (including regular damnation)?
Most of the time itās not going to break the game, itās just annoying. Iām a player who checks corners, looks around, keeps an eye on the enemy, and when an enemy pops into existence all of a sudden in a place I just checkedā¦ itās reallllllly irritating.
It invalidates your attempt at good situational awareness. You did the work and the payoff of knowing whatās around you is stolen.
i just watched for this āback spawningā while playing a round of maelstrom, and yes, they pop into existence out of thin air in your back. especially when youāre trying to hold a position, like: iām sniping at the gunners over there, iām in an open place with not one heretic soul around - and bonk, some dude behind me staring angrily like it was me who made him that ugly.
I mean I agree horde/ambush facespawns is an issue on some maps but OP is talking specifically about getting getting hammered by environmental spawns one by one. Those stray poxers donāt come out of nowhere, heās just not paying attention and so are most people who complain about single enemies spawning behind them.
Like Iāve got a lot of hours in this game, if it was real and happened āmultiple times per minuteā in a mission it wouldāve happened to me by now. At most I get the occasional janky phantom hitreg that makes me think something I shot was dead when it wasnāt, and obviously the ambush closets and facespawn ambushes happen from time to time as you show.
But, they do. They do do that. The game appears, in my experience, to be coded to try to determine what direction you are looking, and the game director will spawn enemies in behind you in some places.
Iām not quite sure whether it can spawn enemies in literally anywhere (but usually in a place not directly in a playerās field of view), or there are just a lot of designated potential spawn points, or perhaps even entire zones, (which, if there is, seem to be placed around architecture) such that you can almost never be entirely sure youāre not standing next to one.
No, it doesnāt happen three times per minute. But some places seem to be much worse than others. IIRC a really frustrating area can be early on the map in Comms-plex, you come down a small ramp of stairs after having fought the first mobs and you cross through an area with arches and pillars. The area below these arches seem to have innumerable potential spawnpoints, so enemies can be spawned in behind you constantly.
There used to be a really terrible place on Power Matrix where the same would happen, but one of the recent changes to the layout seems to have fixed it.
I can guarantee you thatās not whatās happening 99.99% of the time. You walk past a fenced off back alley or dead end with enemies in it, they aggro and then run at you. Especially that area you just described actually has a lot of environmental enemies spawn in tucked away corners so itās typical for that. Next time you go through it explore the spaces you usually just walk past, youāll find they can be full of enemies.
I think itās cool design, too. Cramped, tucked away spaces can have enemies in them, itās like a SWAT teams worst nightmare. It makes those small spaces dangerous instead of just enemy funnels.
It would make me happy if we could have the tools to play intelligently. Like to lock doors, and maybe a more elaborate system of tunnels to those doors on the spawn side.
Like actually build the part of the map that the enemy needs to traverse to get to us instead of spawning them in a closet or (most glaring) right behind you with not even the closet door blocking them off.
Enemies should have a longer period of existing āoff the main mapā before they can spew out into the map, as if they really came from somewhere.
Lot of Aliens games are built that way with the welding torch to seal a door. Vent cover flies off as they redirect, warning you.
We have a back attack sound but we donāt even have footstep sounds before that, and even if we did have footsteps it wouldnāt help with the cheatspawns as most of the time since they spawn into melee range.
This area is unreachable, Iām just peeking in. See the bruiser? He didnāt spawn in, he was always there, just outside of the reachable area. If he aggros because of noise or a horde spawns, heāll hop the fence and come for you.
Not a single of the enemies is just inherently visible when walking through it in a straight line. All of those will aggro onto you and backstab you if you donāt take care. Theyāre not spawning behind you. There are a LOT of cramped areas that are built like this, and as I said, I think itās good design. Peak urban warfare. And you DO have 3 defensive layers: checking corners and keeping in mind spawn doors and fences they could leap, hearing them as they come to you, and as a last resort toughness blocks a full hit.
For me the many videos posted about the cheatspawn problem answered the question part a long time agoā¦ but thatās a very cool mod for those who still deny the cheatspawns happen.
Wish we could make them install it and play until they see one!
I know those spots, and theyāre not āsingle poxwalkers spawning behind youā itās facespawns and they happen either on an ambush trigger or on spawning the environmental mobs in certain spots like that elevator. That elevator was coincidentally fixed I think, at least I havent seen this facespawn in a while. Theoretically one of them can happen behind you when the team walks in very odd ways (thatās why I said 99.99% cases) but itās not something that happens to anyone on a per game basis, much less āmultiple times per minuteā
Seems like thereās several kinds of cheat spawns. One is almost a failure to draw enemies that should be waiting in a room, which is bad but comes off more like a bug, and the other is the more absolute kind where there really isnāt any excuse, and is usually just a single or small group which pop into existance behind a player.
Maybe we could get a mod where those enemies appear with a flash of light like a lightning strike. Would make them more fun.
Yeah Iām aware, thatās another known spot. Itās not a ācheat spawnā, itās just spawn triggers at certain points of the map donāt spawn in static spawns as they should and do it too late, basically a bug. That elevator and that singular bruiser there are the exact same bug in effect. The elevator one was 100% consistent while it was broken, others require the team to split in odd ways.
My point is that these things can happen and the one poxwalker that keeps stabbing you when you donāt pay attention is still just your skill issue 99.99% of the time. Itās not as big of a problem as people make it out to be, in the vast majority of cases it works alright and you can play the game for hundreds of hours without ever coming across broken spawns, other than the janky ambush spots.
