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.