Missing link in Gameplay

[ZiltoidiaAttacks]

What they need is more diverse enemy design, mechanically.  (aesthetically its beautiful)

Think of the Immortal unit for Protoss in SC2.  They have a shield that makes them counter high power slow attacking units, but are still vulnerable to high fire rate, low dps units. 

And then think of DT (damage threshold) armor from Fallout NV, which just removes a static number of damage from attacks completely, not a percentage or ratio that scales.  That requires High power (slow fire) weapons to penetrate the threshold.

What they need is smarter enemy design.  They have damage/armor types down pretty good,, and they distinguish the factions. But you can design enemies with other stats in mind, like reload speed (add regeneration to enemy so you have to finish it off before you reload because it will heal by the time you reload), or accuracy/dodge, or require a stun or knockdown because they'll flee and regenerate before coming back to attack.  Or enemies that specifically bide their time waiting for the player to turn their back before pouncing and pinning them down, so you have to focus on taking them out first thing.  Could even put disables that require another player to save you, like think of the different zombies in Left 4 Dead 2, where teamwork is necessitous.

Think of how Kuva guards work. Or Shield Bursas. Or the ability negating bubble shields. Or the rescue Wardens bullet sponge but they're susceptible to finisher damage.  I wish there were a LOT more enemies with this sort of unique pathway to efficiently be able to kill them.  And I wish the difference between using that pathway versus brute force were more extreme. (melee to break their block, or shooting out their feet out from under them, leaving them on their back exposed to melee damage, etc etc etc, you can come up with a ton of combinations of player actions that are pre-requisite to opening up the enemy for "efficient damage".)

What I mean by "efficient damage" is damage that can take them out in a few hits like currently EVERY enemy is now.  Ideally you'd still be able to go overkill on the excessive firepower, but it will take longer, be more ammo/energy intensive, etc etc.

Make each enemy a puzzle in how to effectively kill them, and then throw a diverse group of those enemies at the player and the enemy squad becomes a puzzle that you can approach to solve multiple ways, and this changes combinatorially with the # of type of "puzzle" enemies in a squad, instead of a (Spam AOE) obstacle.  

Think about enemies in FF10, that's a good example, you had to navigate different combos of enemies with different characters.

It would reward players for having a diverse array of weapons so they can adapt to any enemy defense scheme.

Edited November 29, 2018 by FatsackTony

[ZiltoidiaAttacks]

One other idea, is the idea of Speed-running.

Warframe is a very grindy game (not a bad thing) and the criticism I hear from waayyyy too many friends i try to introduce to it is that it's way too easy, repetitive, not challenging, etc.  Especially when a veteran player taxi's and carries newbies through levels. 

Speedrun Timer / Time Trials:

Normal tile missions would benefit greatly, the open world nodes not so much.  Giving an incentive and a measurement ON SCREEN to the player about how long they've been in a mission and how fast they're going, and maybe even putting some unique loot behind fast mission runs etc would incentivize the new players to to master tile-sets, movement, enemies, etc.  

This would fit PERFECTLY into the current mission meta, where you have endless survival/defense type missions, that reward scheme is obvious. 

 

But for exterminate, capture, spy, etc, having a time trial timer and tiered - reward system would get skill based gamers much more interested in those game modes.  Especially if you list the top runs by friendslist/clan/globally for each map node. 

 

Even though the maps are always randomly generated, they're randomly generated by the same algorithm every time, so there is going to be a sort of "averaging" out of the path length/difficulty, and the uncertainty and luck involved with "rolling" a good map set up will also distract the player from the fact that they're grinding, because they'll be focusing on the challenge at the same time. Also adding short-cuts/long-cuts from the NESW entrance of a tile to the NESW side of a tile will give more of a rewarding benefit and sense of exploration and mastery to players for finding these shortcuts to shave time off their speed run.  (lots of map tiles are already like this).

 

Of course there already IS incentive to run maps fast, because you get loot faster, etc.  But alot of gamers don't think that way and so having a direct obvious incentive through an AABC reward rotation, but based on completion time, would help them "get" the random tile missions, I think.

 

What do you think?

Edited November 29, 2018 by FatsackTony