Yeah Fatshark, don’t ignore the Enemy Spam this year.
Take it aside for a little one on one talk, maybe a work lunch. Tell the Enemy Spam that you appreciate the way it works hard, the good joob it does, perhaps ask about how the family is doing and so on, just get in touch. Don’t ignore it Fatshark!!!
And then…and then keep the Enemy Spam the way it is, because if they want to play Malice nothing stops them from queuing for one, which by coincidence is a better option than having balance and gameplay ideas that would make the game allegedly better for the reasonable price of driving half the players away
To me, “enemy spam” is a problem only insofar as it contributes to sound/performance issues. If a technical solution isn’t feasible, then they could address it through balance but that is such a massive undertaking. You’d be looking at rebalancing spawns, enemy parameters, weapon stats, and class power. For FS the juice isn’t worth the squeeze to re-do the combat in the game to fix a sound bug that really only happens in Auric+. What would Malice even look like in this vision? Four rejects all fighting the same Bruiser?
Perhaps new enemies could address this is some fashion, e.g. slotting in a new enemy where normally 3 ragers would be. In fact FS just add a whole new enemy faction just to see what happens. Plz
It literally does, like, inherently. There are other issues that I personally have with it but those are matters of taste and therefore not too relevant. I want to remain as objective as possible.
Just look at the dynamic between Malice and Auric prior to Patch #13 and you’ll get your answer.
To be honest, I’ve even noticed these bugs in Damnation. Enemies need to spawn less and be greater individual threats, because not only is constant Enemy spam to the extent we’re seeing too much for the engine to handle, it’s also just an incredibly poor way to instil challenge in response to powercrept Players.
Players have been completely and utterly powercrept against anything that isn’t Carapace or a Disabler, so the AI Director just constantly spams those two types of Enemies ad nauseam. This makes the game less engaging than it used to be before that was the case.
No it doesn’t, the sound bug is a small telltale of a bigger issue. The “sound bug” and bunch of sniper/gunners kicking empty air is the same thing, just as it was and is with the unpushable/silent bursters!
The engine was handling the enemy spam just fine for a large portion of players until the incompetence incarnate callled Hive Scum patch happened!
Should we be really rebalancing the game over joke of a developer releasing a broken patch and then leaving for 2 and a half month long vacation?
You wanna get it fixed? Push them to fix the massive backlog of issues they caused!
Right, but the game has also changed drastically with and since P13. Every major update there are weapon buffs to bring classes of weapons into the post-P13 world. Classes have been balanced against each other’s post-P13 power level. Actual years of updates and decisions around combat. To get to a state of Malice density in Auric, as the OP mentioned, FS would have to update a massive number of systems. Yeah it would help performance and you’d hear every special spawn and move around, an undeniable benefit there.
For instance, say power is just cut in half. I now have to shoot a special twice in the head instead of once for him to die. But also there are half as many specials. What was really gained here for the level of effort necessary to produce the result?
Do you know of any examples of games where increased challenge comes from non or appropriately slight increases to enemy density?
funnily enough, i had a similar experience when arby and scum were released and i had to level them up. i didn’t like that because these low difficulties have often completely new players who don’t know their way through a map yet, and i only wanted my guys to get to 30 and have all weapons and curios so i can play as usual. but not having 100 enemies at once stacked into each other is fine, it makes the game look clear and tidy. i’ve said a few times that i’d like a game with less, but more significant enemies, where one must think more about blocking and dodging, rather than bashing into a literal clump of them.
Of course. But there’s a bigger picture to what I argue that would address this, and I’ve gone over it over and over and over again to a point of exhaustion, and I just don’t have the motivation to retype it all. I’ll put it simply… Enemies can be made more challenging as individuals in ways that make them fun and engaging to fight like they once used to be, but buffs and nerfs here and there are necessary.
There’s a middle ground between what was and whatever the power level of the current meta is, that if utilised for an equilibrium would achieve a fun and engaging synthesis. Some people are just too myopic to understand it before they can actually try it out themselves. I can’t expect everyone to be able to understand the full picture, I guess.
Where did I ever state that I want their HP to get buffed or for us to get a universal -50% Damage nerf? This is false equivalence and isn’t what I’m advocating for.
I’m having trouble with your grammar. What, exactly, are you asking me ?
I read all your posts, I understand your argument. For those that feel that elite and special spam is a problem, if you want an individual enemy to be as threatening as they were pre-p13, how do you realistically achieve this? My point is that it’s actually a significant undertaking on FS’s part and it’s not just nerfing OP outliers or buffing woeful underperformers. Malice density is less than half of what currently spawns in Auric. Virtually every single combat system would have to be updated to make what the OP suggested a reality.
I think you, personally, are advocating for a less extreme version of that which wouldn’t require as much of an overhaul but without a heavy lift I think you will still be unsatisfied. I guess I don’t have a strong sense of at what point the number of enemies you have to fight goes from appropriate difficulty scaling to spam, so maybe I’m mistaken.
One main reason I think this is because I have been testing a lot of the suggestions on the player power-side in a private mod and running solos and testing in Psykhanium. Adjusting meta weapons and blessings and talents and such make the game like single digit percent more difficult than the live version. Cutting like 5-10% of the enemies that spawn, will that go from spam to not spam? I don’t really know.
Since I ended up not really engaged in watching baseball this afternoon, I had a little more time to dive into this.
In the mod, I’ve reduced weapon perks to a max 10% damage, gave the Duelling Sword the same Uncanny (8%/stack) and Precog(45% finesse) from the Shivs, and nerfed a few of the damage talents on Veteran. Specifically, I nerfed the following damage talents by 20%:
I then ran the Crushers and Maulers test from Datatide with and without the mod enabled on Auric and H40, no starting buffs, no grenades, and no shout. The average modded version was around 30% slower than vanilla when comparing the best runs. Running the same exact test with one Crusher and one Mauler removed (i.e. 4 → 3 per enemy), TTK decreases by about that same 30% amount.
My point here is that significantly reducing damage output to try to balance the weapon that the game is considered balanced around lets you remove 1 Crusher out of the 4 that comprise a typical spawn wave in Auric to maintain the same relative challenge. Over the course of the game that is 5-6 fewer enemies on average. Lets say FS also adjusts player mobility, gives the Crusher some new attacks, and maybe a new mechanic like a “Crusher Captain” or something. We remove a second Crusher from the spawn wave. Now the number of threats are fewer but I just shout and three shot them even with the nerfed DS before they even get out of their stagger animation and all that work by FS was for naught.
In other words, to reduce the number of elites in your game by like 30, it’s actually quite a bit of rebalancing work. It’s been 2.5 years since P13 and there are still things that need balance passes. From where I’m sitting it just doesn’t make sense for them to go through that all over again to cut the enemy spawns in the game. Nearly all the people who play DT that would get excited by a massive rebalance like that post on this forum.
That’s why I lean towards a new enemy faction being the best we should expect. If you design enemies given what the player’s current power is, then it has a better chance of being more fun and able to exist in fewer numbers. Especially when compared to basically VT2-style enemies that we more or less currently fight. Also a new enemy faction probably means new locations and advancements in the story which are all more appealing to the average DT player.
If the effective HP and damage didn’t increase across the board with increases in difficulty, the amount of enemies at once would be less of an issue (I prefer a middle ground of some sort). I’d still rather see less special spam with heartier more threatening specialists/elites combined with actual horde spam.
Doesn’t matter really much to me anymore, though. Havoc isn’t for me, Auric being a “last” difficulty tier instead of a separate option with more spawns ruined my desire to engage with Auric.
Since HD2 is in the dumps with how they handle balance (eg no, you’re not allowed to have fun or effective tools and you’re made of wet paper), and with difficulty effectively being how borked your kit is and how many enemies spawn out of thin air, that’s also been pushed to the wayside.
I had hoped Expeditions would be interesting enough to get me to come back fully, but nope. It’s a worse version of what already exists, just another tacked on mode for no reason other than an attempt to appease.
