• tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • Funwayguy@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      This plus constantly running out of ammo because apparently the inside of every enemy skull is just hammerspace for more ammunition than the US military budget could ever afford. God forbid a stray shot hits your porcelain character, Thanos snapping you to dust at so much as a stubbed toe.

    • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      The old RainbowSix games (pre-Vegas) were absolutely brutal in difficulty. Enemies died in one or two shots, depending on what part you hit. Even a non-mortal wound would cripple them permanently. But the same rules applied to you.

      • pyre@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        the only real R6 games. when everyone was raving about Vegas i was excited to play it and… the intro mission was just a shooter level… i thought ok this is the intro to basic combat… then there was the next mission and no planning section there either. i was puzzled. i closed the game and went on some forum i don’t remember and asked whether i did something that made the game skip the one thing that set the series apart… nope. it doesn’t exist!

        from the people who made a heroes game without the town screen, introducing a rainbow six game without planning! i cannot believe reviews i saw weren’t screaming that about the game.

        fuck Ubisoft so much. who needs AI in games when we have Ubisoft the ultimate slop machine.

        • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          I never really cared for the planning myself but Vegas ruined it for my by introducing that stupid cover system to make it like Gears of War which was popular at the time. They completely removed the ability to lean. You couldn’t properly peek around a corner to take a shot without almost fully exposing yourself anymore. This meant you couldn’t avoid absorbing bullets all the time. This made the game unplayable so to counterbalance that, they’ve added regenerating health. But then it became too easy so they kept putting you in tactically completely unfair positions against hordes of extremely aggressive enemies that can see you and shoot you through walls. They also had a lot of visually busy environments where the enemies are difficult to spot even when they’re shooting at you because the sound mixing was so botched up that often you couldn’t even tell when you were being shot at.

          They turned it into a mindless arcade shooter where you constantly absorb bullets like it’s normal and fight a whole army on your own. I wouldn’t be surprised if all of this is because some Corporate dipshit forced the inclusion of that cover system because Gears of War made money.

          • pyre@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            it’s mind boggling that it was so well received. 8s and 9s flying for the most forgettable hodgepodge.

            it’s ok if you don’t like the planning but that was what made R6 what it was. you could just go in guns blazing and try to improvise but that wasn’t what the game was about. meticulously planning an infiltration, executing it in real time, communicating and coordinating with bots, and seeing all of it work out at the end was a uniquely satisfying experience that no other game provided, and made you feel like a tactical genius.

            the tactical depth of Vegas was boiled down entirely to “go here” commands. tactical shooter gameplay was better implemented by games like mass effect 1 which wasn’t even primarily a shooter, let alone a tactical shooter.

      • FlihpFlorp@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        I love this game because it feels like the game is actually playing by rules

        Yeah you can cripple someone by shooting their legs, reduce accuracy by shooting arms, or go for a good ol headshot. You can really feel like a tactical badass. Oh by the way same goes for you

        It just makes me really happy seeing that

        Ofc in practice I am horrible so that sometimes undoes all my excitement

    • Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      I remember the hype around the division, it looked so cool and tactical. Then the game came out and every enemy was a bullet sponge. Instantly killed any interest I had in it.

      • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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        2 months ago

        Minus the pre release hype, this was how I felt about shadow warrior 2. The first one was so good with the retro updated FPS feel, and even made your starting sword relevant throughout the game. Then 2 came out and it was a bullet spongey, bad craft system crapfest. I didn’t even make it a couple hours after the dozens I spent in the first.

    • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • brygphilomena@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago
        • Enemies should have more moves, particularly bosses.
        • Enemies should use more cover.
        • Enemies coordinate better.
        • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          I also agree with all that. That takes more work though.

          Bullet sponges are usually companies who can’t be bothered, so I focused on the low cost options. But IMO you should be building for high difficulty, then simplifying by inverting the things I suggested and your removing moves/exposing themselves more, actually slowing movement speed and animations, etc, to make encounters more forgiving at lower levels.

          I think even after cutting down, easier difficulties can tell the game is better crafted that way.

    • Maestro@fedia.io
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      2 months ago

      Fallout 4 is the worst with this. I never found nished the game because of that. Multiple nukes square in the face of a supermutant and he’s just at half health? I ain’t got time for that.

      • teft@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Meanwhile i finished FO4 on hardest difficulty with just the Deliverer. 2 or 3 shots to the dome in VATS gets shit done. But i agree the difficulty is weird in that game. God Of War is pretty bad for this too.

        • where_am_i@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          No, no, it’s literally about pathing, aggressiveness, rate of shooting and special abilities, and of the enemy macro.

          The extra damage on a higher difficulty is almost not worth mentioning.

      • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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        2 months ago

        I’ll not cotton any slander against Doom of any stripe, be it I, II, Final, TNT, Plutonia, or 2016. (Note that we don’t talk about Doom 3 round these parts.)

      • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Metro also comes to mind. The highest difficulty level made both you and the enemies squishier, while also making ammo (which doubled as currency) much rarer. It played so much better that the community even recommended that difficulty level to complete newcomers.

        … And then they made the Ranger difficulty a paid DLC in the sequel…

    • dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Borderlands 3 (don’t know about the others) had a brutal postgame of this. Even though new difficulty stuff was added, the real challenge seemed to be collecting enough ammo to actually finish fights. At some point, the sponginess was too much for me to care about continuing.

    • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      big disappointment with cyberpunk because of this.

      fallout games comes to mind too.

      • Psythik@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Everything about Cyberpunk was a big disappointment. The entire game is a glorified tech demo to show off your $1800 GPU. Which is ironic because it somehow manages to still have mediocre graphics, despite using all the latest path tracing tech to its fullest. RDR 2 looks more realistic than Cyberpunk, and it doesn’t use RT at all!