What happened to Varied enemies?

Necron_warrior

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funguy2121 said:
Necron_warrior said:
daydreamerdeluxe said:
In two relatively simplistic games that are not generally seen as combat focussed have this. Minecraft enemies die easiest when you use different tactics for each of them, and the varied AIs in Terraria need different methods to kill them. Not to mention that I've never seen a Zelda game in which all of the enemies fight exactly the same.
Ahh minecraft. teres nothing more fun than when you get the skeleton to kill it for you :)

For zelda, I was actually trying to stay in the realm of first person, if you didn't have varied enemies in an RTS or RPG, then you'd have a pretty shitty RTS or RPG. :p
Zelda is most definitely NOT a RTS or an RPG. I get your point, though. FPSs are all about engaging and taking down the enemies, so the homogeny you're describing is central to the lull we're experiencing in the genre. Truly sad. I think the Uncharted games are a little too watered down and mass marketed, but they're still engaging even when you fight a boss character on a train and empty a couple of clips into bare skin and he still doesn't go down, because the levels, the challenges and the nature of the gameplay keeps changing. The nature of FPS gameplay doesn't really change all that much. Goldeneye gave us objectives, the Rainbow Six games were more tactical and focused nearly as much on being a leader as on shooting, and Crysis 2 lets you take advantage of the skyscrapers to get around/take down your enemies, and gives you superhuman jumping, speed and strength. Most everything in between suffers from the technology making the illusion more difficult to maintain because everything around the illusion is fast approaching photorealism.
Oops. Sorry about that, my brain still says Role-Playing Game. Which is kind of any game as you play a role :p

Hmm I see your points, and they ARE good. Its just many games have adopted and replicated many of the innovations you mentioned, while enemies are all similar in their roles/actions (besides bosses) in recent games. I guess I can only really find what im looking for in sci-fi.
But hell, even army of two had a semi-different enemy with its differently armoured guys...

I think I just want to hope that the tactics of taking down different foes will come back :p
 

Robert Ewing

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Varied enemies are awesome. I remember in my youth when I played Spyro 3. Jesus I loved that game, you can't get much more varied than that! One minute I was fighting a small devil on a volcano, the next I was owning crab pirates in the underworld, then I was bowling in an ice cavern. Fucking awesome game.
 

M-E-D The Poet

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Hagenzz said:
Well, it got killed because everything is modern warfare nowadays.
And modern warfare games have only 1 enemy, a dude with a gun.
The dude with a gun is a depressingly predictable foe. He spawns, takes cover, then pops out of cover every now and then to shoot at you for a bit. Then goes back into cover.
The only thing that you cannot accurately predict is which piece of cover the dude with the gun is going to be sitting behind, but that doesn't really matter.

It's not just limited to "realistic" games either. Gears of War? Dudes with guns. Sure, they're giant monster dudes with guns, but they're still just dudes with guns.

And yes, occasionally you fight a dinosaur or a helicopter or whatever, but that usually involves sitting in the same piece of cover you were already using, and shooting at the big thing with a different gun.

Man oh man, I cannot wait for Serious Sam 3. I am sick to death of dudes with guns.
gears of war throws different dudes with guns at you
Gears of war invented the tickers in the form lots of games ripped them off
Gears of war has had berserkers,corpsers,kraven(those things in gears 1 that would nearly instant kill you if you stepped in the shadows) the brumak,the flood beasts, the priests

Gears of war actually has much more variation on this side then most games this generation

Edit : you do know most people don't just sit still in one spot whilst fighting a priest with his torque bow and gas atacks right? just an example.
The fact that you manage to beat parts after a gazilion tries by sitting in the same spot doesn't mean there aren't other ways to play the game
 

plugav

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I'd say high production costs happened, mainly.

I suppose that, in the case of shooters, the fashion for "realism" is not without blame, either. Firstly, it usually means that you'll be shooting people, more people, some vehicles, and even more people. Secondly, with a forced two weapon loadout, you can only be prepared for two types of enemies at a time.

A fairly recent game I've played that had truly varied enemies requiring different tactics? Dragon Age: Origins.
 

SoopaSte123

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There's always Demon's Souls and now Dark Souls. I've noticed the lack of unique enemies in games as well... It's disappointing. I guess when you spend so much time on graphics for each baddie you can't have too many without spending a lot of time.
 

Upbeat Zombie

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Well the most recent game that has varied enemy's which you need to react to differently, would be Gears of War 3 the enemies in that are very different.
 

Saviordd1

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Lets be honest, the only games that kill varied enemies are the COD games (and any related COD like games such as medal of honor or battlefield), all other games I can think of have varied enemies.
 

jonyboy13

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Well, you got slow zombies, fast zombies, hiding zombies, tough zombies and shooting something zombies. Isn't that enough? /sarcasm

Duruznik said:
... Is that a dick?

In this generation for variety you need to play RTS/TBS, it seems can find it only there.
 

Russian_Assassin

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jonyboy13 said:
... Is that a dick?
No it's a mob from Minecraft.

"The creeper is an infamous, green-camouflaged, near-silent kamikaze mob that will chase players and sizzle for 1.5 seconds before exploding. "

Anyway, the lack of variety, I believe, has to do with this whole "ultra gritty realism" bullshit that plagues us. Besides, just think about the context of the stories in games lately. Does any of them have room for anything other than terrorist/mercenary/cop with a gun?
 

M-E-D The Poet

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Hagenzz said:
M-E-D The Poet said:
gears of war throws different dudes with guns at you
Gears of war invented the tickers in the form lots of games ripped them off
Gears of war has had berserkers,corpsers,kraven(those things in gears 1 that would nearly instant kill you if you stepped in the shadows) the brumak,the flood beasts, the priests

Gears of war actually has much more variation on this side then most games this generation

Edit : you do know most people don't just sit still in one spot whilst fighting a priest with his torque bow and gas atacks right? just an example.
The fact that you manage to beat parts after a gazilion tries by sitting in the same spot doesn't mean there aren't other ways to play the game
Honestly, I only ever played Gears 1.
Different dudes with different guns may be all well and good, but at the end of the day they're still sitting behind cover popping up every now and then to fire off a few rounds.
That one is wearing a funny hat wielding a shotgun while the other wears a bowtie and wields a sniper rifle doesn't really change anything does it?

I have no idea what tickers, berserkers, flood beasts or priests are.
Corpsers are not dudes with guns, sure, but the only one I can remember was just a bossfight.
AKA a Big Thing you shoot at with a different gun, only slightly different from say the helicopter in CoD4 when you're shot down in Russia somewhere.
Kraven, I assume, are those bat-things, which amounts to little more than a movement tutorial midgame. OOOOoooo, stay in the light. Challenging stuff for anyone who's got no legs.
I think a brumak is that dinosaur thing, so... see corpser.

I'll grant you, there are more enemies than the guys with guns, but they are bossfights.
Set pieces, never encountered anywhere else than spots A and B, and never fought in any other way than what the game tells you to.
The only brumak I can remember I beat with a laser from space. If I play the game a million times more, I will encounter it every time at that location, and I will shoot it with my space laser every time.
The point being, while the action fighting dudes with guns is sometimes interrupted to fight something else, you spend 90% of you time fighting dudes with guns, occasionally stopping to fight Big Things With Ridiculous Weaknesses.

If you put that up against Serious Sam, where at any given time you can be fighting 8 different types of enemies with radically different ways of attacking, PLUS Big Things every now and then just for the hell of it, I don't see how you can claim Gears is varied.
Well, maybe Gears, a little bit, but sure as shit not CoD or 75% of the horseshit that gets released nowadays.
you only played gears 1 ? what gives you a right to speak for the series then anyway?

Also kraven are kraven, you can't just dismiss them cause you feel like it
There were at least 5 corpsers in gears 1 , each having to be defeated with the hammer of dawn
Sure same goes for the berserker but you had to frkking barrel roll across the world to beat them (corpsers spawned flying shit at you)

Corpser/berserker was never a boss fight, the only boss fight in gears 1 was RAAM
Tickers are those little ant like things that run up to you and that explode on you, games like space marine blatantly ripped this off
in gears each dude in the enemy line had his own look aquitted to his weapons
Boltok pistol? the guy with brown pants and white scaley skin
Hammerburst?white guy in power armour
Torque bow? those big brown bastards
Semi automatic pistol/gas grenades/stunning screams? Kantus
Chainsaw sword/duel fandango? the guys summoned/controlled by locust priests/specific white locust who happen to own the weapon.
died in the shadows? kraven
Big dinosaur with rocket launchers mounted on him? Brumak
trust me there's variation
 

XT inc

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Corperate greed and cookie cutter Ideals.

I dunno seems like everyone wants to make games look pretty and then get them out asap.

There is no on the fly change ups. The whole Black ops campaign was run and gun nothing you couldn't solve with bullets. Oblivion to me became chameleon and hit things while they are like oww wtf.

Team fortress 2 is kind of like that because you interact with the classes differently than other games, because the classes are different, not just has a sniper rifle or has a rocket launcher.

10 minutes ago on 2fort there was a soldier and demoman in our sewers and I ran my engineer straight down the long pipe near the stairs with only my wrench out, side stepping rockets in the tube and clubbed them to death for a double kill while they reloaded. Slow rockets with a set path and nades that only work if enemies are retreating let me waltz through open fire and get humiliating melee kills.
 

j0frenzy

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I'm going through my memories of recent games and comparing them to my memories of more classic FPSs (namely Doom and Quake games) and I honestly can tell a difference in how I play and the enemy variety I come across. This may just be a symptom of only buying a couple of really big and long games and replaying the hell out of them. I think the worst offender of games that I played with homogeneous enemies was the Mass Effect series and that still had some variety. There were a lot of enemies that are just people behind cover with a machine gun but between geth, krogan, biotics and other things that I am sure I am forgetting there is a decent variety to Mass Effect.
 

Lunar Templar

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Mr.K. said:
Well developers got the concept of minimum development requirement down to an art, varied enemies(complexity on the whole) take alot of extra time that the publishers don't want to give them, so they cut corners and release the simplest still sell-able product.

And publishers know full well marketing sells alot more then quality, so we get fucked.
this.

doesn't apply to every game mind you, but if you want verity your gonna have to search for it, this is also the reason boss fights are a joke now as well.

genericusername64 said:
Games started to be made out of more than 2 pixels
they've been made of more then 2 since the NES took over :p
 

M-E-D The Poet

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trollpwner said:
M-E-D The Poet said:
Corpser/berserker was never a boss fight, the only boss fight in gears 1 was RAAM
Tickers are those little ant like things that run up to you and that explode on you, games like space marine blatantly ripped this off
in gears each dude in the enemy line had his own look aquitted to his weapons
Boltok pistol? the guy with brown pants and white scaley skin
Hammerburst?white guy in power armour
Torque bow? those big brown bastards
Semi automatic pistol/gas grenades/stunning screams? Kantus
Chainsaw sword/duel fandango? the guys summoned/controlled by locust priests/specific white locust who happen to own the weapon.
died in the shadows? kraven
Big dinosaur with rocket launchers mounted on him? Brumak
trust me there's variation
Oh sure, they look different and have different attacks, but when you're in cover-based shooting with 2 weapons, there is very little variety in how you fight them.
nonetheless they're varied to such a degree that they can be called varied

And as I said before, you never fought everyone the same way. that's not how gears worked, sure cover based shooting was a main part, but using specific guns in specific ways in combination with specific grenade types made the difference between living or dying

You had to fight both berserkers and corpsers with the hammer of dawn, but no way in hell the fighting experience was similar in any way.
even fighting brumak A as compared to Brumak B differed thanks to the terrain or your own particular aesthetics
 

Valdsator

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Duke Nukem Forever has varied enemies.

Pig Cops have a lot of health, and when they rage they're extremely dangerous (on the hardest difficulty 2 swipes will kill you). The pigs also have different types. There's the rocket launcher dude, the ripper dude, the shotgun dude, and the dual wielding pistol dude (these hurt).

Then there's the different aliens, like the Assault Troopers, who fly around and teleport behind you. The Assault Enforcers are almost like mini bosses, with their heat seeking missiles, and large amounts of health. Sometimes they have shields (which you can take out with a pipe-bomb).

The Assault Commanders fly around and fire missiles at you. They can also fly towards Duke and cut him with their blades, which knocks Duke down, making him vulnerable if other enemies are around. There's also the Octabrains, which shoot glowing ball things that you can destroy if you're quick enough. Octabrains can throw your pipebombs and rockets back at you, so you want to keep those weapons away when they're around. They also explode when they're killed.

Lastly, there's the smaller enemies that are somewhat quick, and come in swarms.

I know everyone thinks Duke Nukem Forever is a piece of shit, but it does have a nice variety when it comes to enemies!
 

dickywebster

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Yeah ive noticed games tend to just spray paint enemies instead of thinking up new ones, probably saves them money or something...