A personal word on combat and difficulty, part 2

Bullet sponges, what can I say about them other than that they are the worst thing ever invented.

The big problem with bullet sponges is that they arn't any more difficult then enemies with less health. If you can defeat the enemy when it has less health without taking damage, you can take the same enemy regardless of how much health it has. This make scaling difficulty by increasing health pointless as as you get better, the enemies just gets annoying, not difficult.

This is not how you do good difficulty. You should make the enemies more intelligent. Sadly, I have yet to see a game that did this. Though I have some ideas about how it could be done. If you compare how the enemies in Assassin's Creed and the enemies in God Hand act, you can see that in Assassin's Creed, the enemies wait a lot more for their allies to finish their attacks before attacking themselfs. While in God Hand, they just attack you if they see an opening. In games where you fight a lot of enemies, you could scale the enemies aggresivness instead of their attack pattern. While each individual enemy wouldn't be any more difficult to defeat, groups would be a lot harder.

This became a shorter part, didn't have much to say this time and I wanted to get another post out. Sorry for that.

A personal word on combat and difficulty, part 1

So I recently stopped playing the reboot of Tomb Raider. It wasn't because of the story was bad, I actually liked it a lot. However, for as much as I liked the story, I couldn't continue playing as the combat system is in my opinion broke. To make it clear, I played the game on the PC with a keyboard on the hardest difficulty.

Now, what do I mean when I say that I feel that the games combat system is broken? This is because of a number of factors. One of these is how the cover system works. I like the idea of not pressing a button and gluing yourself to a piece of cover. This is however a mechanic that needs to be implemented with care as if you are not careful you can end up with a cover system that doesn't work to the extent that is needed if the combat system is centered around the use of the cover system. Now the cover system in Tomb Raider isn't that bad, but it could have been better. I have had several time when I have wanted to get behind cover, but as I rush over to it, Lara jumps over the chest high wall and out into the line of fire of every single enemy in the area. This, I feel is becuase the controlls are poorly optimized. However, this alone would not make me feel that the games combat system is bad enough to stop playing the game.

What made me stop playing was when I had to fight two different enemies that require two completely different playstyles. A number of enemies fighting with automatic rifles that shredds your health in a couple of seconds if you are out of cover and a melee enemy that requires you to dodge his attacks to be able to damage him, this is because he has bullet proof shield that you can bypass for a few seconds after he attacks. Might be worth mentioning that the enemy that is melee, kills you in two to three attacks and causes flinch when he hits you. So you end up in a situation where you have to stay in cover not to be killed while you have to dodge out of cover and run around in order to not get killed. This is what made me turn of the game and uninstall it.

This cuased me to think about combat systems in games and how I see difficulty in a game. As a result I will be posting a series on how I view combat and difficulty in video games. Join the discusion down in the comment section, I'd love to hear you you ever have had any experiences like the one I had that cause you to just stop playing a game.

Introduction

Welcome to House Avalon.

Here I and any contributors that joins me down the line will be primarily review video games, talk about up coming games and host game play videos. What is the difference between me and everyone else who does video game review, you ask. Well, to be honest, not that much. I will be striving to be as objective as possible with a focus on making sure that when it is my opinion, that I state it clearly.

I will be posting game play videos of games I play that I like. These will be coming out when I have something to talk about, so they might be a bit inconsistent. However, I will still be trying to post something 2-3 times a week.

Apart from the video game related content, I will be posting other stuff. This could be about anything I feel like taking about, be it politics, religion or what ever else that crosses my mind, for instance, food.

While I will not be censoring the comment section, I will not be tolerate threats and the like. I hope the comments will be a place for discussion of the content.

With that said, I welcome you to House Avalon.