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. 

ah ok, i see what you were going for. 

I like a lot is when enemies or bosses leave attacks on the floor, temporarily closing down the playfield. This could be combined with a directional weakpoint (say 25 degrees to the front) to make the boss playable in both SP and coop.

Delay timed scatter attacks aka airstrikes and area attacks work well as also since they don't necessarily aim at anyone.

My ideal is to change the mechanics as little as possible depending on the game mode - so more health or COOP only mechanics (Cthon with an extra button) are things I'd try and avoid. 

temporarily closing down the playfield

yeah, i like this too.

it's a mechanic that shows up often in WoW. ironically, it's usually regarded as the easiest mechanic in WoW.
still, it works very well in fast paced quake combat. 

Like cheap? I'm not a WOW player so don't know how it works very well.

To be honest I've seen it best used in the recent crop of 3D mario games - back to the arcade but with the third dimension allowing skillful players to avoid it.

I'm looking into atm for some Quake stuff, hopefully it'll work out well, but as always making pools of stuff as opposed to a map tat adapts to the boss (eg. sinking brushes) can be expensive in time (to do) and resources (to use). 

as in simple to do. there's a glowy thing on the floor, don't walk into it.

probably why it works well in quake. it's visually obvious with a straight forward penalty.

there's a few other mechanics i haven't tried yet like requiring the player to defeat 2 monsters at the same time, or they resurrect. or the opposite, 50% damage is transferred to another monster in a pair so they both die at once. 

Are you talking about more of a modified boss already in quake/quoth or like a ground-up boss? 

And yeah, that should be good for Quake - most obvious being lava, which tells the player right away - don't touch it.

Reminds me of the trog ball attack - which would pull the player to its centre before fragging them. It was actually fairly easy to escape from, but the effect made any player pretty much kark it with panic, trying to get free.

For the clones - got another one that (when finished) will spawn mirror images of itself at reduced health an without all of its abilities. Not quite the same idea but thought I'd throw it out there. 

Or a powerful homing attack (e.g. Chthon ball) that requires the player it's aimed at to run/dodge and the others to shoot the missile in order to save their mate and be able to proceed the attack.