No game design should ever involve the words "Force the player...." Because a player should never be forced to use a tactic that doesn't agree with their playstyle. To literally offer the gamer options of countless weapons but then deny them the right to chose what they like best is simply a stupid design.
The counterpoint being, pick a Bethesda game made since Oblivion. Where enemies do have individual strengths and weaknesses and do nominally require the player switch it up to prevail...none of which matters, because crafting, grinding, and certain skill selections are imbalanced to a point of allowing players to brute force basically the entire game with a single given behavior. And guess which behaviors gamers gravitate towards and base their
entire perception of the game around?
Just consider how most gamers perceive Skyrim's magic system. Pound for pound it was the most powerful and accessible magic's been in the entire game series for how prohibitively expensive powerful magic was in past installments, and it's constantly bashed for being "weak" (a lot of which is misplaced anger over removal of spellmaking). Most players don't even seem to consider Destruction "viable"...but only by way of comparison to the game's broken and imbalanced blacksmithing and enchanting, even destruction is perfectly adequate to continue playing through high levels.
It just requires not running around trying to blast mobs in the face like an absolute prat.
And actually, in BotW I was
perfectly able to pick and choose whichever weapons I wanted for any given encounter. Because I picked and chose my engagements, avoided those that weren't worth my time or the resources, kept weapons in my inventory proportionate to unavoidable lower-level encounters, kept stuff in my inventory to play to the key attack combos, and still had ample room to spare for the high-powered shit when it came time to fight Lynels which were the only genuinely challenging encounters in the game.
It's funny, because
another Bethesda game
forced players to change weapons and tactics on the fly in a way
much more restrictive and overt than BotW ever did: Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal. 'cause health/armor were limited, you ran out of ammo quickly, the only sustainable way to replenish either were to perform executions, and even imps were powerful enough to wreck your face unless you adapted your weapon choice and tactics to the circumstances. For all intents and purposes the Bethesda Doom games are
heavily influenced in terms of resource management by survival horror games, despite that being obfuscated by the game's '90s mobility shooter pace and gameplay loop.
Yet, for some reason that never really seems to come up when discussing this aspect of game design in various discussions across the internet.
And of course, basically the entire RTS genre bases its core gameplay around adapting to constraint, and forcing players to adapt even though they may not "agree with" a given playstyle. Sure, in for example SC/BW or SC2 you could turtle every game, but good luck beating the single player on higher difficulties or getting out of silver league doing that shit. I don't
agree with six ling rushes, but I'm
forced to scout that out, and if I spot an early spawning pool I'm
forced to react...and if I say, "no I don't think I will, I don't agree with that and I should get to play the way I want, that's just bad game design", I fucking lose the match.
Just like they're
guaranteed to when I successfully defend the six ling rush and play to macro, because the other player chose a high-risk all-in play and have zero choice from that point forward other than doubling down hoping I fuck up my micro. Now I ask, is
that bad game design?
Far Cry 2 had a shotgun that visibly degraded with every shot. And enemy-dropped weapons were always worse off than those the player unlocked from an arms dealer (some guns would break after a couple dozen shots)...
There's more realism in that than you may realize with smoothbore guns. Shotguns are dirty as hell, and fouling of the barrel and chamber can cause pattern degradation, jams, worst case scenario if you haven't done your maintenance in a while are broken firing pins and springs. If you're in a survival situation, at that point the gun's basically toast. That's actually one of the reasons the Henry AR-7 survival rifle has been considered one of the worst rifles ever made, its cheap manufacture and propensity for jams and mechanical failure...in a rifle that's
supposed to be for wilderness survival, where your absolute priority is reliability.
The issue is, that's a concern over the span of
hundreds of shots, and weeks or months of regular use without proper maintenance, as opposed to dozens of shots or over days outside some pretty extreme scenarios. Like, for instance, the debacle that was the rushed design, production, and introduction of the M16 in Vietnam.
The
far bigger gripe to me with shotguns in video games is range. Shotguns in video games are represented accurately...if you're firing #9 birdshot. My home defense load of choice is #7, in fact. Buckshot is lethal out to 80-100 yards, though pattern spread and reliability limits its effective range to about 50 yards, and slugs are lethal out to like a thousand yards provided you can hit at that range (meaning its effective range is about 150-200 yards).
The most realistic depiction of shotguns in a game I can remember off the top of my head is Battlefield Bad Company 2, where shotguns have real life effective ranges. My loadout of choice was recon with a Model 870, and my favorite moment from that game is still the time I scored a 600-yard headshot with a slug.
But I get it. I don't like it, but I get it. If shotguns were depicted accurately in most FPS games, maps tend to be so small the only guns anyone would ever use would be street sweepers.
I'd argue the best way to make players shift tactics and adapt is to make the enemy AI and armor/defense actually force a change in tactics, not gimp the weapons.
We're not talking limiting the Infinity + sword to a couple uses or a long recharge to keep you from spamming it to victory(unless you get it at the end of the game where that's the point), we're talking about "My IRON SWORD somehow broke from hitting a squishy mook too many times" because that's how iron works now.
Counter-example: Halo 2. Halo 2's AI was just downright
evil, it was the apex of the series and in my opinion better than Half-Life 2's. You can visibly see the change in Covie behavior between difficulty settings: not much difference in easy and normal, but when you get into heroic and legendary it gets pretty obvious when the AI starts engaging in covering fire, rolling advances, area denial, and lateral movement from points of defilade.
Most gamers just didn't seem to notice how damned good Halo 2's AI was until viewing it in retrospect, contrasted against Halo 3's and Reach's comparatively poor AI. I'd chalk that up to how overpowered and common Halo 2's power weapons were in the campaign, Halo 2's ludicrous health/shield regen, and the questionable balancing of the BR, in addition to exploit-y ish like BXR/BXB. Phenomenal AI, it just didn't have a whole lot of impact in terms of influencing how players engaged with the game.
