Remnant: From the ashes (Gunfire Games, 2019)
Attributes:
- Boss fight design with certain patterns
- Souls – like shooting game
- Cooperation up to 3 players
- Various Gear builds and multiple playthrough required
Remnent: From the ashes is a brave tryout in Souls-like games, based on From Software’s well known Soul franchise. It has a punishing difficulty curve which will bring sudden death to unprepared players. But the innovation and combination of TPS and Teamwork against monsters is still worthy playing for 20 hours. I personally play through the game solely which makes it even harder. In different gear builds, players will have the chance to try many build plans, which is the progression loop that drive players to challenge themselves. Besides, the strictly control of materials output ensures that the levels are always challenging. According to developers, players can only reach 45% of the game content during their first playthrough, so each player will experience different dungeons and bosses’ combination.
The reason that I choose Remnent: From the ashes is its boss design. Even though some critics and players do not enjoy it that much judging from game mechanics, there are still a clear pattern in boss design. The skills of each boss are normally restricted within 4 kinds. And they can be dealt with 1 move (Dogde, in Remnent: From the ashes) towards different directions. So in balancing with learning cost and playability, they found the combination is suitable.
Elements can be used:
- Boss fight design
Alien: Isolation (Creative Assembly, 2014)
Attributes:
- AI-driven stealth game
- Perfect art design and details based on original film in 1979
- Great horror atmosphere
Alien: Isolation is a great salute to the famous Ridley Scott’s sci-fi film Alien. It has a breathtaking horror atmosphere which reminds me of Amnesia and Outlast. (Which two, by the way, I am just too scare to finish). Player cannot kill the Xenomorph during the gameplay. Only choice is to sneak away from him. But as the alien is extremely sensitive to any sound, players are still hard to escape from it.
So in this game, the AI design of the Xenomorph is critical. Player must feel that the alien is dreadfully smart. Then they will be satisfied when they are “smarter” by finishing the game. This experience is ensured by 2 AI system in the game: Alien AI and the Director AI. While the Director AI knows player’s position the whole time, it can only tell the Alien AI roughly where the player are. And then Alien AI is there to hunt player down. This design is much like the director AI design in Valve’s Left 4 Dead, which can track how much pressure the player is taking and adjust zombie’s aggressiveness from it. This works similarly in Alien: Isolation. And in Xenomorph itself, AI is based on behavior tree containing over 100 nodes in total and almost 30 nodes in the highest level. Certain parts of the behavior tree are locked as the game starts, but in late game phase, these will be triggered to make player believe that – the Alien are learning from my pattern. This is what I what to achieve in my game.
Elements can be used:
- AI-driven mechanism
- Behavior tree design (unlock certain nodes under conditions)
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Kojima Productions, 2015)
Attributes:
- open world stealth game
- a Hideo Kojima production
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is an open world stealth game developed by Kojima Productions and published by Konami. The game has large content that I could possibly use, so I will just focus on one design. In MGS V, there is an enemy response system. Once you clear the camp with more of headshots than other approach, the soldiers in the next level will wear helmets avoiding the player finishing the game with only one way. This AI-based system is to ensure the complete player experience in combat system, lowering the marginal benefit of using only one method. In my game, it could be used as a core mechanism that player cannot use one method to play through the whole game. They are encouraged (and forced) to discover other way to achieve the goal.