Thursday 20 September 2012

Now that's some bullshit #9: Infinitely Respawning Enemies

I can't believe I've been reduced to making a post about this fucking topic, it should be obvious to developers that putting in an infinite amount of enemies in a section is bullshit, so why do they fucking do it?
So let me tell you a story, about how I became all frustrated and red faced about this topic.  I am currently playing Etrian Odyssey on the DS, a fun little dungeon crawler sort of similar to that Legend of Grimrock thing, but the combat is all turn based and encounters are random and character management is completely different....OK so it's NOTHING like Grimrock, but you have to draw your own fucking map so shut up.

Anyway, to illustrate my point, I'm going to show you a picture!
So you see those two purple arrow things?  They are called FOEs, and they are basically big nasty monsters that you can kill for better rewards and shit.  However in this case, the monsters are just ants, ants with high defence and the ability to call for help.  Now that doesn't sound so bad, it's not exactly uncommon to have enemies in RPGs that do this kind of thing, BUT, when you kill one of these FOEs, another one will take it's place straight away.  It's fucking arse because the ants in this particular corridor have something like 3 different respawn points, so it's almost impossible to make any fucking progress.  On top of that, if you manage to be unlucky enough to fight them on one of the respawning squares, you're just fucked, the fight will never end and you should just run.

But you know what?  As I'm sat here venting about this particular corridor, which I'll get through by the time the next subway trip is over, I can't actually think of another game that has this, apart from fucking Doom, and even then it's only on the highest difficulty. 

I know they exist, I've seen it, experienced it, raged at it before but I can't bring another title to mind right now.  But the point still fucking stands, don't have your enemies respawn till the end of time, it brings everything to a fucking standstill and does nothing but piss off and bore the player as he or she kills the same fucking enemies a million times over.

So if you are a game developer, and you put this kind of thing in the game, go and fuck yourself with a burning cattle prod.

2 comments:

  1. .... a burning cattle prod ... but how can you not laugh at that

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  2. 21 September is World Alzheimer's Day so everyone reading this please support the cause

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