So it’s his fault
Just a little bit of online play
I replayed this on Ultraviolence. The experience was very similar to Hurt Me Plenty: I think there isn’t a huge difference between those two difficulty levels, and a bit of extra skill easily made up for it. I tried Nightmare but gave up midway through through the second level because it’s only borderline doable with console controls and I got tired of how much dead time this game has before you can get back into the action after dying. I could foresee that the Foundry in particular was going to be absolute suffering given how atrocious the checkpoint design is on that particular stage (it makes you backtrack through huge amounts of empty level on every death).
I watched someone else play through on Ultranightmare on Twitch. I think that’s the best use yet of Dark Souls-style death markers – because they only show up for max-difficulty permadeath runs, each one carries a lot of weight knowing that it was the untimely end of a highly skilled and cautious player. It’s either hilarious what kind of silly thing they died to, or dramatizes how difficult a particular encounter is. In Dark Souls I started totally ignoring them as useless noise because naturally some player will die in any possible place, but in this game they’re cool again.
Also, I was surprised to see that even in Ultranightmare, the late game (starting in Titan’s Realm) is mostly trivial. The combination of weapon masteries and some sick rune synergies (Equipment Rune giving armor bonus to absorbing grenades + rune that gives infinite ammo at high armor) trivialize the late game at even this difficulty. Also, the very large, flat and open late-game arenas are inherently easy, since basically challenge in this game comes from enemies ambushing you from crannies and taking the high ground. The peak of this game is the midgame, at all difficulties.
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enjoying this a lot more than i expected to
Also: can it be that the Imps have the best FPS enemy AI of all time? They keep their distance and hide around corners or cling onto walls, then unexpectedly run up and melee you when your back is turned. They track their charge shot (but not their regular shot) forward to where you’re moving to. They have a ton of map knowledge programmed into them and their behavior is carefully designed to exploit potential player weaknesses. It’s such a devilish reinvention of the iconic basic enemy and almost single-handedly why this game is fun (imagine this game with all imps replaced by another of the enemy types: it would be the meh generic FPS shit that it initially appears to be).
It’s funny how much of that is present in other games but doesn’t work as well. AI taking cover, adjusting to be almost-out-of sight with nook points calculated based on enemy line of sight…this is standard technique for at least 5 years. The level designers have marked spots on the map where imps can hang, where they can jump, where they can hide, and the game re-updates the ‘desirability’ of those spots as the player moves around.
But it doesn’t do a thing if they can’t move fast enough or they’re dropped too fast to get to where they’re supposed to. The general speedup of everything makes the AI tactics get pulled off successfully and it’s sooo much better.
We had an AI developer working full-time and the biggest hurdle was getting behaviors to execute. There was a ton of interesting behavior based around calling reinforcements and taking cover to replenish shields at different ranges of engagement but the common result was that the player just shot them and they died.
He was a former Boeing engineer who had never played or worked on modern games so he would actually test his routines by running the game at half-speed. It was therefore a constant battle to get the AI to run fast enough to actually make meaningful decisions that impacted the fight. (He honestly had no idea how fast and aggressive a real player is).
And AI is the most fragile thing in a game. One wrong value or even a new player tactic can disrupt all their behavior and leave them as dumb meatsacks. It’s why so many games have evidently bad AI-- no one had time to properly stabilize the game and work out all the little kinks to get enemies working with all the features they’d been programmed with.
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Play Warhammer Space Marine (I feel like this game is seriously not talked about enough)
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It’s a damn shame the Chaos-themed sequel never happened.
I ALWAYS TALK ABOUT SPACE MARINE.
Sup did someone mention Spice Meringue?
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I thought the first rule about space marine was that we didn’t talk about space marine
Who ever told you that is a heretic. Of the highest level.
Yeah its great. The execution kills as healing thing comes from space marine
I don’t know that it “comes from” Space Marine, but it’s in Space Marine.
I feel like I ate some crazy pills I played that game and was so “meh”. Maybe I should have stuck with it longer.
I had the same experience as Mikey and assumed it was another Dog Days deal
I’m never going forgive SB for making me play Dog Days
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I can think of worse ways to spend 5 bucks and as many hours than Dog Days
Doom is 20 bucks off today at Amazon on all platforms and also there’s that demo up for the week
I can remember getting pretty bored of the level design but it wasn’t a total shitshow or anything
Bite me Sykel Dog Days Rules.
More like Dog DOO Days
get it
because it’s poop
dog poop to be precises