Micro-Goombas: http://www.mariowiki.com/Micro-Goomba

;) 

let's say a boss fight has two methods to defeat it. the gimmick way and the shoot it dead way. the gimmick way is not immediately obvious and must be discovered. (like telefragging shub)

so, for this example, let's imagine if it was possible to defeat shub by either shooting her or telefragging her.

easy skill: it is easy to telefrag shub but shooting her is more difficult. shooting her might be considered one skill level higher.
hard skill: it is easy to telefrag shub and shooting her is very difficult, bordering on impossible.

in both scenarios, the fight is designed to be defeated via the gimmick but the penalty for not using the gimmick is worse in harder difficulties.

should the penalty for not using the gimmick then always be death so as to not fool the player into thinking they don't need to use a gimmick? or is it better to offer this choice in lower difficulties?

or perhaps makes the gimmick the scaling value instead of the shooting option?

ie:

easy: telefragging shub is simple but shooting her is very difficult.
hard: telefragging shub is difficult, and shooting her is the same difficulty as it was on easy (very difficult)

..and my batteries are running out so i'll just post this. :P 

Scaling sounds right. Easy: telefragging Shub is 'simple', shooting her is more diffcult. Hard: telefragging her is hard, shooting her is much more difficult.

Of course it depends on other factors as well. Like the environment and if/how the boss fights back.

I tried the scaling model in my coag3 tower fights. The monsters are intended to be killed through special tricks/gimmicks, but shooting them is also possible (at the cost of a large amount of ammo). It wasn't done in a very sophisticated way, however, in terms of balancing - still they do take more damage on harder skills - and properly getting the player to realize how to gimmickill them to begin with. 

Personally I wouldn't split it. Just give the player the single path to victory with a boss fight. It must be assumed that a boss fight is going to test the player on what they already know, but with the difficulty cranked up.

In this respect, I'd say the original id1 bosses are somewhat broken since they both require a trick.

If you allow a trick then it must be very clear what it produces. Either it kills the boss dead (and is the only way to kill it) or does massive damage saving the player some time plugging away conventionally.

The worst case scenario of having a trick that kills it or being allowed to plug away for ages is that a player might do the second one for what seems like ages, then accidentally come across the trick and feel cheated for wasting all that time shooting at the thing.

Time is the most important resource of the player and they get pissed if they feel like its been stolen. Same could be said of intricate labyrinths without any guiding factor pointing to the exit, or a seemingly unfair save system. 

Quake is first and foremost a shooter, so the reason I play and enjoy it is for the combat. A little exploration can be interesting, but it is ultimately about shooting things.

I half raised this in a different thread iirc. I think Quake�s core mechanics are better than Doom. Firstly it is less random. A Shambler will always hit you for the same amount. A Revenant missile can be anything from a light glance to most of your health. Quake�s monsters are also far more mobile, which makes them more interesting to fight individually, and Quake�s melee monsters are far more dangerous (even the Knight is more dangerous than a Demon because he has more range and can attack whilst moving). So this whining comes with a caveat. Whatever extras I say Doom has that Quake doesn�t, I still prefer Quake�s fundamentals.

Anyway, I think Quake has an issue with variety when compared to Doom. I�ve played a lot of Doom and a lot of mega wads (wads with a full 32 levels, usually community efforts) and such, and it did lead me to a few conclusions when I came back to playing Quake.

Quake�s downside is that it can�t stretch to as many combat forms as Doom:
> Quake doesn�t have the tech to include huge monster counts, so even if you did add a BFG style super weapon, you still couldn�t make proper zerg style game-play.
> It also doesn�t have a substantial standard weapon upgrade like the Doom Super shotgun, which instantly upgrades your ability to take on tougher monsters and thus allows the general count and toughness to increase together.
> The berserk power up and chainsaw mean that low ammunition or even purely melee based levels can really work in Doom. Putting together a level like this in Quake you quickly realise that it was a real step back in that regard. The fact that the axe has no decent hit sound when you hack at monsters is very off putting on its own, and the basic Quake shotgun isn�t exactly meaty in audio either.
> The fact that the most played Doom extras are community episodes means that levels have to feel like they are progressing in complexity and size. I think a lot of Doom wads go overboard with this, leading to the last ten levels all being huge and pretty dull. But downloading Quake maps it feels like 90% just have to leave you with a basic shotgun and maybe a nailgun or something for half the map, often leaving anything more powerful until right at the end.

I�d like to add that I think Quoth is great as it adds some great monsters in the area Quake is lacking (ie a sort of mid to high range). Mainly the Death Guard and Drole. So despite my general dislike of weapon mods, that�s what I�d like to see added to Quake. Not gimmick weapons, that weapons that expand the forms of combat you can create.

I think if you were looking into adding more than just expanding combat, you'd be looking at adding Heretic or Hexen style features like Inventory items and such. You'd also probably want a Use key :p


TL:DR -> add a new set of weapons and work on engine modding to support larger monster counts and expand the variety of combat available. 

What do you consider gimmicky weapons? I love it when some game company comes up with a 'new' weapon that behaves in a way I never thought of, or that allows me to do things I can't do in most other shooters. Bulletstorm is a good example of this, the weapons are a big part of why I'm excited for that game. 

You bring up some good points. What I like better about DOOM is that the overall speed is higher. In Quake, it takes NINE shotgun hits to kill an ogre, and still 4 to kill an enforcer. That's outrageous.

Quake is also very snipey because of the shotgun. You can snipe a Vore dead by wanking corners with the shotgun, while in DOOM, you'd blast said shotgun into the monster's face and move on. I prefer the latter.

Quake's weapons suck. The shotgun is boring, but effective, which makes you run around with a boring weapon a lot of the time. Often, the double barrel shotgun is given right at the start to make things more exciting. That's a band aid which doesn't solve the underlying problem. The axe sucks. The shotgun sucks. The nailgun sucks. Deathmatch is about grabbing the rocket launcher first. Why even have all those weapons?

The individual monster designs are more interesting in DOOM IMO. I'm not saying they work better, but things like the Archvile and Revenant are just pretty crazy. Far-out stuff. The monster lineup is bigger in DOOM / DOOM II, which makes for more variety. Also, Quake has no imp. DOOM's imp is a perfect low-level all-round cannon-fodder monster design; little hitpoints, melee attack, hurls fireballs, can be used in hordes, fits everywhere in the game. It's a great monster, much like a cannon-fodder version of Quake's hellknight. And the combination "imp + shotgun" is superb. Imp + shotgun made DOOM, and it beats anything Quake has to offer.

Quake is missing a lower-tier all-purpose melee/distance monster. Why they didn't give the Grunt a melee attack is a mystery to me. Then again, grunts don't have the general usefulness of the imp. Imps fit everywhere, the same can't be said of grunts. Plus, grunts don't die in one shot.

The pinky is almost as good a monster design as the imp; it's still relatively low HP, ubiquitous, and when I first played DOOM, pinkies were even scary because of their attack. The Spectre variety is genius.

Lost Souls clearly leave the Scrag in the dust, although the scrag is a nice monster (one of my favourite Quake monsters). DOOM has two other fliers though: the Cacodemon and the Pain Elemental. I'd say DOOM's air force outclasses Quake's.

I agree that some individual Quake monsters might be more interesting to fight, though. The fiend is the prime example. Ogres, vores, and shamblers are also fun. Hellknights are similar to imps, but have a lot more HP which can be both good and bad. The knight tries to be a pinky.

Quake doesn�t have the tech to include huge monster counts

This is incorrect. You can have 100 knights or 20 fiends coming at the player pretty easily. Especially with halfway modern graphics hardware and current engines.

I mostly agree with the rest. 

�This is incorrect. You can have 100 knights or 20 fiends coming at the player pretty easily. Especially with halfway modern graphics hardware and current engines. �

Well, I generally use Fitzquake, and I�m using a machine that can just about handle UT3 or crysis with everything turned down, and it easily chokes when you�re over a few dozen enemies. I�ve tried out fights with 40 odd death guards, and that fight is on the limit of playable. And this was just in a box, no detailing at all. 100 Knights might work, but Knights and Fiends are only melee. As soon as you add something with projectiles it quickly becomes unplayable. In a fast action game dropping a few frames is often more than enough to make it pretty frustrating to play, especially if you�re trying to make it challenging too :) Certainly something like Warp Spasm is to me pretty much unplayable toward the end as it�s just too big with too many monsters.
And example of what I have in mind:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmQO_qQTpf8

The super shotgun in Quake certainly lacks oomph. But remember the Doom SSG is very slow firing, and still takes two shots for a Revenant, three for Arachnotrons, four for a Mancubus or Archvile. So the number of shots isn't too much of an issue to me as it delivers them quickly. I would rather have Doom's shotguns, but it would need an upgraded chaingun to go with it I feel, the chaingun is really boring to use after you get the SSG :E

�What do you consider gimmicky weapons?�

Well, examples would be proximity/trip mines (in both SP and MP), Spammy �excessive� mode stuff like cluster rockets or what have you, and the ever popular �Bouncing shots!� :)

At the end of the day I think there is a reason why not many more weapon types have really been added to shooters. The first very generations of shooters pretty much covered all the bases as far as functionality goes. You have to start thinking really hard to come up with something that would genuinely add much to gameplay, rather than just having some extra effect for the sake of having an extra effect. Proximity mines wouldn�t add much to Quake. A BFG style weapon probably would.
Imo :p 

That map is rather extreme. You're right, something like that might choke Quake. I was thinking of slightly more normal maps than that :-P

Although Tronyn's latest maps contained a fuckload of monsters, including things that shoot projectiles, at the same time. And running those maps wasn't the problem, surviving them was. :-P 

I agree with your comment about the Imp by the way gb. Quake has no light ranged attack beastie to fit into its medieval/hell areas.
Crossbow knights could work, but personally I'd go for some kind of modified Ogre type enemy. Deformed human.

Demons > Medieval stuff. Demons can be put anywhere and work. Knight is essentially the same as the Pinkie demon, but you can't put knights in base levels without people complaining!

Toss to a mod remake of Duke 3D, someone should do a current gen remake Doom II...I don't trust iD to do much good with Doom 4. Expecting them to just miss the point as with Doom 3 :( 

Crossbow knights are promising. Need a lot of tweakage though, and should ideally switch to the sword when in melee range, like the hellknight does.

A crossbow in melee doesn't make much sense, if you're wearing a huge ass sword.

The base variety of this would be a grunt that switches to axe for melee.

Both of those are harder to kill than imps, though. At least with vanilla Quake weapons. 

 

I think the weaponswitch would have to be around about as fast as the player's. 

and should ideally switch to the sword when in melee range, like the hellknight does.

I think the weaponswitch would have to be around about as fast as the player's.

I suggested exactly this for our Crossbow Knights, guys, months ago :( 

I think it was one of those things that have floated around for a long time (I suggested that as well) but needed time to settle.

ijed: Yeah. 

...but I didn't get the why. 

first, let's look at what makes bosses easier in coop mode.

1. There's that aggro juggling aspect present in standard quake progs where a monster will only attack it's last attacker, so two or more players firing at the same monster basically makes it freeze in place.

This kind of thing is easily fixed by implementing a basic timer that enforces a wait before shifting to another player.
You can get fancy and calculate the relative damage rates of each player or factor in visibility of the current player vs visibility other others, distance, % of time spent visible or whether the player is in front of the monster or not. probably even other things i never thought of.

2. Focus fire creating huge amounts of incoming DPS (damage per second). If all players are equipped with the SNG (a reasonable assumption considering they are fighting a boss), each player is pumping out 180DPS. With two players, that's 360DPS (more than a single player with the LG).
With four players, that's 720DPS. Imagine, if you will, a shambler with a measly 600HP. It would take less than a second to drop dead.
Bosses who are shootable will survive for extremely short amounts of time in coop.

This one is more difficult to solve.
In WoW (and i guess all mmos), this problem is solved by giving bosses ridiculous amounts of HP. Where players would have about 25-30k HP, boss HP numbered in the millions.
This, obviously, only works because those bosses are not designed to be killed by a single person.
In quake, this is not an option as we need to have a boss that is killable alone or with friends.

So... what options do we have to somehow increase a boss' uptime without making it a chore and bore to kill alone? 

One option to reduce the effects of focus fire is to artificially gate the encounter.

Chthon is one such. He is killed by a gimmick and the gimmick (electrodes) require a certain amount of time before they can be used again.

This is effective in making the boss have more uptime but at the expense of not rewarding players for playing in coop.

This does bring up a point in that players playing in coop mode are expecting... not a reward, exactly, but some kind of compensation for taking the time to play in a team, as opposed to just loading the map up alone.

A certain amount of quicker killing is then probably expected. 

In WoW (and i guess all mmos), this problem is solved by giving bosses ridiculous amounts of HP. Where players would have about 25-30k HP, boss HP numbered in the millions.
This, obviously, only works because those bosses are not designed to be killed by a single person.
In quake, this is not an option as we need to have a boss that is killable alone or with friends.

if (!teamplay)
self.health = 3000;
else
self.health = 6000; 

It seems to me that a reasonably 'boss-like' mechanism to make co-op damage less of a problem is to make the boss invulnerable for some or even most of the fight - with periods of vulnerability where the players can team up to do the required amount of damage to move to the next boss phase.

The periods when the boss is invulnerable are then mostly about staying alive against his more dangerous attacks. If the boss is also less dangerous during the times when he's vulnerable, then the increased damage rate would have the effect of intensifying the battle. You'd spend more time (relatively) fighting him in the dangerous passages than in the safer ones where you can harm him.

This still doesn't fix all the problems though, an extra player will still be a resource. Unless you do some kind of sniffing for coop players, the fight will be always be easier with two. 

One aspect of quake juggling is it's trivial to do, since any amount of damage will switch the boss's aggro. In a game like WoW the bosses have more complicated aggro rules and so juggling actually becomes a tactic which requires some attention. And usually the bosses (and player classes) are set up so that you really need to manage aggro.

Of course you want a boss that is still beatable in single player, so you can't create something that requires two players to survive.

One thing you could do is scale up his attacks instead of his health. So if you had three players, chthon could launch three missiles with a single swipe, and each missile would aim specifically towards one of the players. So effectively all players have the same frequency of missiles to dodge as if they were playing SP. 

chthon could launch three missiles with a single swipe, and each missile would aim specifically towards one of the players.

yes, this is more along the lines of thought that i was hoping to go for.
simply increasing health is a boring way to make a boss last longer.
otoh, this still doesn't really address the focus fire problem, because players are still capable of firing while dodging. unless this is some kind of overpowering attack that you have to hide completely from, like a doom bfg ball or something.

make the boss invulnerable for some or even most of the fight - with periods of vulnerability where the players can team up to do the required amount of damage to move to the next boss phase.

this would work, but making the boss completely invulnerable feels kind of heavy handed, especially if it only does this during coop play.

ideally, you'd want a mechanic that is the same in both sp and mp and yet somehow slows players down more in mp. 

one thing that jumps out is a health leeching attack that hits everyone in a radius+LOS.

the more players present, the more healing it would receive. 

this would work, but making the boss completely invulnerable feels kind of heavy handed, especially if it only does this during coop play.

I totally imagined that this would apply to single player as well. It's a classic arcade boss set-up where you have to spend most of the time forcing the boss to expose its Achilles' Heel, then take advantage by doing some damage, before repeating until the fight is of the desired length.

An example which can be found in a fps and so relates well to quake is the end boss in Half Life: Opposing Force. The weak point is inside the creature's stomach. However, to get it exposed, you have to use mounted guns to blind it temporarily - and to reach the guns you have to use the grappling hook the game has trained you on. Once you hit both eyes the stomach opens and you can pop at it with whatever powerful weapons you have. After a short time the monster resets to being able to see with a closed stomach, and spawns a monster for you to fight while you start the sequence again.

The difficulty ramped up a little bit midway through the fight, as parts of the level collapsed, making it harder to get to the mounted guns safely. It was a nice touch, but it's a shame it couldn't have been explored a bit more. It also didn't communicate the need to shoot the stomach very well, I think I needed to look that part up after having shot the eyes successfully 5 times without making progress. 

There is an old chestnut of a setup where a big bad monster is only vulnerable to their own attacks turned against them. This would certainly deal with the problem of coop focus-fire, but would it leave each player with too little to do?

Maybe if the boss's attacks are e.g. sometimes homing projectiles and sometimes bursts of direct fire attacks you'd be set. Everyone would be at risk and occupied by the latter, plus whoever has a homing attack target them has to try and turn it back on the big bad.