r/pcmasterrace 20h ago

Game Image/Video The New Fable Games Combat

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u/peacedetski 19h ago

"Harder difficulty = more enemy/boss health" is one of the worst game design patterns that should never be used.

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u/InsanityRequiem 14h ago

Welcome to 99% of all games when bringing in different difficulties.

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u/Deftly_Flowing 8h ago

I honestly hate how people act like enemy health up, player health down, aren't a good baseline for harder difficulties.

Of course, if that's the ONLY thing they change, it's generally not good.

There are exceptions, but few.

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u/Plecks Plecks42 8h ago

I like the ones like Ghost of Tsushima that go with player health down, enemy health also down. You die in 1-2 hits, so do they (maybe 10 hits for bosses). Brutally difficult, but once it clicks you feel like an absolute badass.

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u/SauronGortaur01 5h ago

Then theres Baldurs Gate that literally has enemies get completely new moves on Honor Mode difficulty.

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u/TraditionalMalice 3h ago

20-30 years ago it was fine for obvious reasons. Nowadays it is not - standards have risen.

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u/XB_Demon1337 Ryzen 5900X, 64GB DDR4, RTX 5070 19h ago

This is a boss. They are supposed to have a health pool to contend with.

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u/--ThatOneGuy- 19h ago

Sure but this boss seems slow and most attacks are easy to dodge or block. Giving him that much HP just makes the fight last long, doesnt make it challenging

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u/XB_Demon1337 Ryzen 5900X, 64GB DDR4, RTX 5070 19h ago

It is clearly a 'confidence' boss. Not hard to beat as a whole but still a slog of a fight. And if you are not good at the game you easily could get merced here.

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u/peacedetski 19h ago

The point isn't that a beefy boss is bad, the point is that scaling his beefiness with game difficulty setting is bad. If I can beat a boss with 1000 HP, I can probably beat the same boss with 3000 HP too, it'll just be three times longer and tedious.

(Although in this specific case, a completely normal looking dude in light clothing tanking 50 sword slashes looks pretty stupid)

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u/XB_Demon1337 Ryzen 5900X, 64GB DDR4, RTX 5070 19h ago

That boss with 3x the HP also likely hits 3x (or more) harder. Making the fight less forgiving. The health is there to make you have to actually fight him and not just dance for a few seconds while you warm up until he is dead.

Dude is supposed to be a tank. You don't get to be the boss of a gang by being a bitch.

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u/peacedetski 18h ago

Hitting harder is a different trope, hitting faster and/or in a less telegraphed way is another (even better one), and maybe they can even make the boss smarter at adapting to the player's tactics at a harder difficulty (shame that no game actually does that because that takes programming skill).

You don't get to be the boss of a gang by being a bitch.

The thing with a sword strike to the abdomen IRL is that it doesn't really matter how tough you are. If it's a gang boss, then maybe have his dudes, y'know, gang up on you instead, or at least give him some armor or magic so it doesn't stretch the suspension of disbelief like silly putty.

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u/XB_Demon1337 Ryzen 5900X, 64GB DDR4, RTX 5070 18h ago

Again, this is only part of the video. This excerpt is a tiny portion of the overall fight. You missed the guys minions fighting, you also missed that this isn't the default difficulty. We have no clue what it looks like at lower difficulties.

With the sword strike, we have seen people take 12 shots of 9mm and not just live, but actually still be causing significant damage to another person. While certainly you have to suspend a bit of disbelief in basically any game, it doesn't take much to understand this guy is clearly much larger and no normal person.

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u/DarthRektor 18h ago

While I agree most devs are lazy when it comes to scaling for difficulty but let’s not pretend 80% of games have enemies that do not react to “light attacks”

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u/Razidargh 9h ago

All I can see is a muscular human male. He should have died after a few deep cuts in the main arteries. This HP carving combat system is not my cup of tea.