Decline Enemies should react to being hit

[Hell Swarm]

One of the deepest declines in modern gaming is the concept of the huge boss that doesn't flinch when attacked. You ram a rocket into some monster's eye socket and it doesn't register it took damage except a number appeared or a chip off of a health bar. There's no damage to the creature visibility and it doesn't react at all. Games like Monster Hunter do even less where monsters just won't react at all until you hit a damage thresh hold and will immediately fall over and act like an autistic child being told there's no chicken nuggets left. The problem has been around decades now and is especially bad in Japanese games like Monster Hunter, Dark souls/Elden ring/Bloodborne but also common in MMO type games where 40 fireballs hit a boss a second to keep up DPS. The gamification in some of these is off the charts to the point of being insulting to any one putting serious time into them. In Dark souls a boss won't react to being hit, but if you flick your shield at their wrist as they attack you it's time to have a seizure and get stabbed in the face. It's silly and it's insulting to the player. If being a bullet sponge is a bad thing, then being a great sword sponge is even worse.

It's time gaming grew up and started to do high quality animations for being hit and responding to it.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i've had a mauled leg, i started feeling pain hours later. once i smashed onto a wall so hard i looked like a zombie, ripped clothes, dripping blood and all, pain came only about 30 minutes later. one time i was trying to strangle a man, only the next day i realized all the effort it took to take me off him, looking at my body covered in bruises. also, stun mechanics can and will be abused by the players, especially if there's more than one on the field.

 

[Tehdagah]

I like numbers popping in the screen.

 

[Ash]

"It's time gaming grew up and started to do high quality animations for being hit and responding to it."

Time you grew up and played old games. Everything you described is alien to me in many old action games. Hell even Goldeneye, one of the most overrated jank mediocre games of all time, had highly detailed enemy hit reactions. Some games went absurdly detailed. Not to mention they're just more intelligent and high quality games across the board, generally.
There was of course many games with lacking hit reactivity too, but it is ultimately not that important, and enemies reacting to every little thing all the time to an ultra-realistic degree will have a major impact on the gameplay, potentially in a bad way. EMBRACE THE SPONGE!

 

[Zlaja]

I like numbers popping in the screen.

I like seeing damage numbers in turn-based games, but seeing damage numbers pop up all over the screen in fast paced actiony games is fucking retarded.

 

[Harthwain]

One of the deepest declines in modern gaming is the concept of the huge boss that doesn't flinch when attacked.

"Huge boss"? Try "enemies". I can't name many games in which enemies feel pain. Max Payne 3 is one of the very few examples to have something like this:

i've had a mauled leg, i started feeling pain hours later.

This is true for some cases, not for others. You can bump into a furniture and have a really painful response from that instantly depending on what you hit.

 

[Ash]

I like numbers popping in the screen.

I like seeing damage numbers in turn-based games, but seeing damage numbers pop up all over the screen in fast paced actiony games is fucking retarded.

Eh, it works just fine in some.

 

[taxalot]

I'm sorry, AAA teams are too busy progressing things by giving enemies actual names that they call out each others so you feel guilt killing them before buying the Horde mode DLC.

 

[grimace]

It's time gaming grew up and started to do high quality animations for being hit and responding to it.

Games are not animated feature length films.

 

[Maxie]

One of the deepest declines in modern gaming is the concept of the huge boss that doesn't flinch when attacked. You ram a rocket into some monster's eye socket and it doesn't register it took damage except a number appeared or a chip off of a health bar. There's no damage to the creature visibility and it doesn't react at all. Games like Monster Hunter do even less where monsters just won't react at all until you hit a damage thresh hold and will immediately fall over and act like an autistic child being told there's no chicken nuggets left. The problem has been around decades now and is especially bad in Japanese games like Monster Hunter, Dark souls/Elden ring/Bloodborne but also common in MMO type games where 40 fireballs hit a boss a second to keep up DPS. The gamification in some of these is off the charts to the point of being insulting to any one putting serious time into them. In Dark souls a boss won't react to being hit, but if you flick your shield at their wrist as they attack you it's time to have a seizure and get stabbed in the face. It's silly and it's insulting to the player. If being a bullet sponge is a bad thing, then being a great sword sponge is even worse.

It's time gaming grew up and started to do high quality animations for being hit and responding to it.

the monsters are just too alpha to register your bitch ass hits

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

What you are mentioning is only a small subset of a much larger issue with modern games (and arguably far from the most important). While graphics and general physics and audio have all taken giant steps forward since the old days, the level of interactivity in combat remains quite pathetic.

Think about a game like Skyrim, although it's a full 3D first person game with advanced physics and everything, the combat involves just exchanging blows to lower each other's hitpoint bars. The same exact shit as in games 20 years ago. You can hold a shield up, but since there is no support for timed blocks, it's completely nonreactive, hold it up, block a few blows, lower it, spam a few blows yourself, etc.

Newer games are now introducing timed reactive elements like timed blocking or timed dodging, but it's still very simplistic and binary. Think about it, a trailblazer gamer like Gothic already had timed blocking 23 years ago. You time your block and counter and win. Too easy and simplistic. To compensate, games make timed blocking hard by introducing really dumb shit, like parry delay or making timed blocking so precise that you need to get the exact frame, while the enemy alternates between different attack timings. This is real dumb shit, as in RL, blocking is just putting your iron/wood bar in front of the other guy's, it's not that complicated. What they should do instead of this dumb shit, is make the combat MORE reactive, and not just depend on simple binary shit like blocking/rolling on time.

Warband did this with directional blocking, KCD did it with dynamic combos, so a few games are trying new things, but overall the industry is stuck in a rut. So while enemies responding to hits more would be nice, I would much rather they start by making combat more interesting in terms of mechanics first.

 

[Ash]

Think about a game like Skyrim, although it's a full 3D first person game with advanced physics and everything, the combat involves just exchanging blows to lower each other's hitpoint bars. The same exact shit as in games 20 years ago.

Fake fucking news. It's actually FAR LESS than the shit in many games 10-20 years prior. The industry goes backwards as realism and graphics go forwards, when will the imbeciles learn...

 

[Hell Swarm]

Damage numbers are a dopamine hit and nothing more. They're fine in games with little animation but they've become their own genre of number spam to the point where they take up the whole screeen

 

[laclongquan]

React to being hit is a method to create softlock, softcontrol. A way kill overleveled targets.

But if you make only enemies being reactive to being hits, isnt that unnatural.

And if you make player also react to being hit, it would be bloody punishing.

There's a tradeoff, which is why lots of games just ignore this feature.

 

[Odoryuk]

There's good reaction for hitting enemies in FromSoftware games, both short flinches that are dynamically blend into current animations and separate animations when you stagger an enemy. It is very noticeable when you fight larger enemies. Also the hit reaction takes into the consideration the direction of hit, if you swing your sword to the left and to the right the enemy will react accodringly (the ones that are comparable to your size at least, not sure about giant enemies).

 

[Hell Swarm]

React to being hit is a method to create softlock, softcontrol. A way kill overleveled targets.

But if you make only enemies being reactive to being hits, isnt that unnatural.

And if you make player also react to being hit, it would be bloody punishing.

There's a tradeoff, which is why lots of games just ignore this feature.

You are a game designer. You decide what is and isn't a stun lock. Both player and enemies should react to being hit. It shouldn't mean stun locks.

There's good reaction for hitting enemies in FromSoftware games, both short flinches that are dynamically blend into current animations and separate animations when you stagger an enemy. It is very noticeable when you fight larger enemies. Also the hit reaction takes into the consideration the direction of hit, if you swing your sword to the left and to the right the enemy will react accodringly (the ones that are comparable to your size at least, not sure about giant enemies).

Your from fanboyism is insulting to any one cursed enough to read your post. I pointed out specifically that enemies do not react well in From games. You can shove an ultra greatsword up ayslum demon's ass cheeks and it won't respond in any reasonable fashion. Almost every boss in From games ignores what the player does except when you fill the poise break bar or you parry. The exact problem I'm describing.

 

[Hag]

There should be a ten second cutscene followed by a QTE every time you hit an enemy.
Also when the enemy is dead, you should also have to visit his widow and go to the funerals.

 

[luj1]

Does BG3 not have this?

 

[deuxhero]

I've noticed that the best reactions to being hit in shooters come from the T rated ones with firearms (not lasers) that couldn't show blood and thus had to do them show the player they actually did hit.

 

[Baron Tahn]

This is overdue for party based RPGs like Baldurs Gate for sure, but on the other hand there is no way I would prefer devs spend stupid millions choreographing fight scenes as we now might see every voice line mocapped to a greenscreen.

Games have repetition, so unless an ai system for this is developed it's always going to be a baked in set of animations that either looks stupid or only works in certain situations.

In the case of bosses in something like a shooter they have to design the whole thing around making sure it can still fight back even while it's going through seconds of reaction animations.

 

[Harthwain]

Damage numbers are a dopamine hit and nothing more.

It can be used as a way to measure your damage.

I'd like to have localized damage that's reflected somehow gameplay-wise (enemies always fighting at 100% efficiency even on the verge of death is kind of annyoing), rather than just bringing down the HP bar down to 0, by the way.

 

[Hell Swarm]

This is overdue for party based RPGs like Baldurs Gate for sure, but on the other hand there is no way I would prefer devs spend stupid millions choreographing fight scenes as we now might see every voice line mocapped to a greenscreen.

Games have repetition, so unless an ai system for this is developed it's always going to be a baked in set of animations that either looks stupid or only works in certain situations.

In the case of bosses in something like a shooter they have to design the whole thing around making sure it can still fight back even while it's going through seconds of reaction animations.

Use these physics engines they keep making to do hit animations. Especially now as we can train AIs to create animations for these situations. It will be clunky at first but think of how powerful an AI physics creator could be.

 

[Baron Tahn]

I could handle the jank if we get dodging and blows off armor, thrusts, parries, swings that seem organic and all that sure. Seems to me AI is the only way it can be done.

 

[mondblut]

One of the deepest declines in modern gaming is the concept of the huge boss

Sufficit.

 

[NecroLord]

How exactly should they REACT?
"Oooooh! Aaaaaah! It hurts! Ough!"
Autism thread.