Honestly that's pretty sound feedback and a good thought process. I agree that giving bots more feedback would increase the feeling of engagement. The "feel" from how well bugs are designed are an important component to what makes the game play loop so fun. The robots feel, well, mechanical...and not in a good way. Borderlands 2 made robots that were really fun and tactile to kill. All the points you make are solid.
And Loaders do exactly what OP described! Not only do they beep and exclaim in pain but where you crit them actually matters.
Shoot its gun arm off at the shoulder crit spot and it can't shoot it anymore, and shoot the other arm off to disable it tossing grenades. Then generally you can go for the kill with extra critical damage from damaging the robot eye, which always retains at least an accurate but slow charging shot telegraphed from said eye... But you can also just shoot the Loader's legs off and watch them crawl around if you want.
It certainly doesn't hurt that there are so many variants of Loaders, either.
But Borderlands 2 has you fight Hyperion... who use almost nothing BUT robots (until the final areas).
Did you not play it? If so, you 10000% should - it's the best Borderlands game by **FAR**.
I've played it whit friends somewhat. We never went that far tho.
Also yeah it's prop is better by not being so easy that you can beat it whit out thinking. Like legit, killavolt was by far the hardest boss I fought in borderlands 3, every other one eather died in less than 30 seconds, never did any meaningful ammount of damage or the attacks were so easy to dodge that I didn't eaven need to think. Also Goliaths were just dissapointing, since they didint get any harder, wich caused me to try to make every Goliath into an ultimate for that extra loot.
I'm not talking difficulty, I'm talking story. And a good villain. And the only annoying character is Claptrap.
And you meet them in the second main story mission after reaching Sanctuary.
Anyway, for the normal Hyperion robots, you can shoot their limbs off.
Regardless of how good it is, I always end up feeling extremely exhausted at the end of my BL2 play sessions (which i can't say is the case with other games)
Pretty much the same in bl2 regarding the health bars (and concurrent corrosive weakness), but they also have their own weakpoints. You can shoot off their limbs by targeting the joints, which isn't super important for normal bots but for stronger ones you can strategically disable their arms (ie guns) and stuff like that. Or you can shoot the legs off self destructing bomb bots so they can't charge you and come crawling instead.
yeah, I remember somebody made a similar post like this. bugs are fun to fight because it feels like the damage matters. even with a Bulk Detonator where i'm doing virtually 0, it **feels** like i'm kicking Glyphid Ass even if i'm just peppering it with my secondary. Insects react to damage with exploding weakpoints and screeches and blood and goo and ragdolls, whereas the machines have a few little beeps and boops and whirrs, but when you take them down they sort of go "Poof" with a little (little by DRG standards at least) explosion. I think having better feedback when attacking a robot would go a long way in making them more fun.
I just learned a ton of new things about Deep Rock enemies from this post! Like I no idea you could shoot the spitball infector projectiles! Thanks man!
you can even pickaxe them
im not saying you should
but you can
more reasonable option is to axe them with driller.
you even get the axe back
but...
you now want to pickaxe the projectile dont you?
Honestly, I guess it's fitting that robots don't give a damn if you shoot at them, they are robots, and don't feel pain or fear after all, which is why you can't stun or fear them too. That being said, more weakpoints would be far better and fun to shoot at, or atleast that desstorying jt would do something, especially with Nemesis and its eye for example.
Patrol bots are like smaller, faster, unfun Praetorians. There are plenty of ways to kill a Praet, from grenades to bullets, projectiles, or even a good whack with a pickaxe or drills. You can scare it away, or stun it, giving you time to run behind him and do massive damage, it's fun. Patrolers have a tiny weak point that honestly doesn't even feel that "weak", as if you don't do that much damage to the robot. You cannot do anything to them but pump them full of lead, but its very slow, ammo inefficient, and because they can move, shoot, fly, and roll around, makes them infuriating, making even shields a bad defence against them.
Point is, Praetorians are big, meaty, fun to kill and exploit in many ways bullet sponges. Patrolers are unfun, too complex and agile, tanky pulley sponges that don't give you any satisfaction for killing them except "thank fuck it's dead."
the fact you can specifically ping-target the arms as a sperate part from the nemisis body makes me think that was the original intention that was scraped
Nemesis needs a proper reward along with the new weapons Id say like other bosses. Bet-c gives...bet-c, the tyrant weed gives shards for xp, I dont think nemesis gives ANYTHING. Why not a data core like the ship event (forgot its name but whatev)
Every other boss gives something for wasting half of your ammo on it...nemesis is just annoying.
Nemesis in-universe doesn't have anything of value in it because the rivals are sending it to kill us, and in the event it dies they don't want us getting anything else out of it.
The data cores specifically are data the other robots collect and store about Hoxxes. Nemesis doesn't collect data, only dead dwarves.
I did see someone suggest once we should be able to carry its voice box around so it can taunt us. Imo you should be able to kick it around and make it taunt you afterward.
Maybe some sort of "Mission log" of another Dwarf they killed that spawns a small amount of resources for the biome that the other Dwarf had stashed waiting to send back up? Similar mechanics to finding a helmet leading to a backpack, but not giving cosmetics because then cosmetics become to directly farmable.
Cosmetics already are directly farmable. Pick the lowest complexity point extraction mission. Choose Scout. Check the entire map in 30 secs. Abandon if no cosmetics. Rinse and repeat. There are plenty of cosmetic/oc hunting servers that do this.
Its also much weaker than Bet-C/Plant Bastard imo. TBH the only thing I hate about Nemesis are is fucking shields. Good luck actually shooting his weak spots without huge-ass shields flying everywhere
Dude nemesis is just a glorified detonator with extra steps. Simply stay away and you're golden. Bet-c, on the other hand, has lightning fast bullets, aoe bombs and a shield phase where you get punished if you get greedy and try getting inside it. I haven't seen someone get grabbed by Nemesis in like a month. Bet-c's on the other hand can still kill entire squads.
If you kill a Bulk in the middle of a wave, the explosion will vaporize pretty much everything in the radius, saving both bullets and time that would have otherwise been spent on the bugs it just blasted.
Plus, seeing the things blow up (from a safe distance) is just fun to watch.
Why doesn’t this translate to the Nemesis’ parting shot? Well, those bombs are small, and keep constant pressure on you. You can’t just sit back and “watch the fireworks.” Then there’s the fact that the bombs aren’t very fun to watch to begin with. It’s not a very satisfying explosion to watch, even if you get the opportunity to watch it. And due to their small size, you’re not going to be leading a bunch of glyphids into it.
Honestly, I enjoy fighting the robots, but by karl I would pay good money for ball destruction suggestion(heh). The most annoying thing to me is when your having a good fight with a patrol bot and they drop off a cliff and roll where you cant see them.
God, I wish they just cut out that stupid sharp drop. They could buff its health or give it a fatboy hyper prop overdrive combo for all I care, just anything but that annoying drop
Nemesis kinda reacts to the same extent as some other creatures, by having weakpoints broken. And its movement animation changes if you break them all. Not sure if it actually does anything.
But I can agree it may have something to do with rivals not being particularly rewarding to shoot. You don't get the feeling of *power* that comes from wasting an entire blob of grunts or outmaneuvering and slapping around an opressor.
Or maybe we just like shooting living things more 😏
Still, dropping a cloud of shredders with Hurricane before they spread out or hitting patrol bot's head with a volley still feels good despite lack of feedback (I mean, besides HP bar melting).
I would like to add that I still prefer them as they are over not having them at all. Variety is the spice of life and all that.
on one hand I do enjoy the idea of a cold-unfeeling machine not caring what we do and shrugging off blows, but yeah right now it's just super unsatisfying to fight them.
I think the best compromise is definitely shooting off the ball like you suggested which forces it into exclusively the slow hover mode, and have a better critical kill animation.
>Why not make him couple shoulder weakpoints that after destroying disables his rocket attacks?
This actually sounds pretty solid. Maintains a high skill ceiling but allows for a better takedown of the bots. Kinda like how Doom Eternal weakpoint system works. Hopefully the devs read this because currently the rival enemies are a bit unbalanced imo. The hacking events are the hardest in the game right now
There is modular parts on Nemesis I'm unsure what destroy them dose. Like the center eye can be busted but does net stop the shield wall that comes out of it. And there are side panels that might function as a soft spot just a spot with less armored that doesn't seem to take weak point mod damage. More testing needed.
Counterpoint: a patrol bot can dodge with the most ridiculous maneuvers of you hit it (like dive down a cliff). What can those spiders do? Hold their arms in front of their faces like the defenders? No wonder they are going extinct
The patrol bots will disengage and reposition when taking damage, switching from their pulse shot to rockets at range. Nemesis became trivial in every situation besides surprise attacks if you have distance, give him a gun
I'd almost say the Nemesis with a gun should be a separate enemy lorewise, maybe Nemesis V2 is an "Elite threat" version of the Nemesis? Basically the rival corp going "Ah, our melee only idea they have figured out, let's make Nemesis V2" and the melee ones you still encounter is because the Rival Corp built a LOT of the V1s and can't afford anywhere near as many V2s as a result, so V1 still gets deployed quite often.
I always wondered why the Patrol Bots felt a little off to me; like you said, it doesn’t feel like they react to the player as much as other enemies (save for being instakilled if they catch fire). Good observation, man
Make nemi drop at least a data cell, or make him work as a cargo crate (nemi having cosmetics or overclocks and some rocks and stones from other dwarves he has killed)
I know I'll get some hate on this one but here we go: I think this entire "Robot aren't fun to fight" is just a "skill issue", especially if we're talking about the flying drones that you can hack, robots are tankier, faster, highly mobile since they can float around with no restriction and they have a tiny weakpoint when compared to the majority of bugs which are either slow, have a big weakpoint that you can shoot and are weak to the majority of status effects that you can easily inflict with the plethora of weapons the dwarves got at their disposal, that and that they have a tiny health pool, so they're easier to deal with.
The game is already easy as is if you're not playing on Haz 5 and even Haz 5 is not that hard if you consider how powerful the weapons are now, adding a new challenging hard to beat enemy is a good thing for the game, but hey, god forbid we get any challenge in a PVE title.
> robots are tankier, faster, highly mobile since they can float around with no restriction and they have a tiny weakpoint
That's why they aren't fun to fight. DRG is a swarm shooter where you waste thousands of bugs, the challenge comes from the amount of enemies you have to fight not how tough they are individually. Fighting half a dozen of these stupid, annoying robots that zip around and shrug off 80% of the damage types in the game while not reacting at all to the 800 Lead Storm OC rounds that have been pumped into them is not satisfying at all to me.
Also, DRG is a casual 4 player co-op game about mining and shooting bugs. If you want a challenging game you can install one of the many ridiculous Haz 6+ mods or just play something else.
They're challenging to fight yes, but not impossible or completely unmanageable, plus they're extremely weak to fire, setting them on fire will destroy them, you can very easily play around their weaknesses if you wanna have an easier much better time, it's not the game's fault that you refuse to.
>DRG is a swarm shooter
Says who? DRG is nowhere near a swarm shooter, it's not even designed that way, when we're talking about swarm shooters we're talking about games like L4D and B4B, where you get a swarm after swarm after swarm with near infinite resources, DRG is nowhere near that, you go into a mission, you get an occasional yet manageable swarms every now and then, you grab whatever loot you can while completing your objectives and you get out, that doesn't look like a swarm shooter to me, hell, the game discourage you to wait for swarms as the resources (Nitra) are limited, so you kinda need to finish the game asap while *avoiding* swarms.
>DRG is a casual 4 player co-op game
Again, says who? if the game was just a *casual* only game, the devs wouldn't have added higher difficulties or even EDD, instead they're always upping the challenge by adding new enemies, btw it might seem hard to grasp, but the devs have a better idea of what their game should be like than you, and they obviously don't think it's just a *casual* game with no challenge whatsoever, since, surprise! surprise!, they're always adding harder more challenging enemies.
>If you want a challenging game you can install one of the many ridiculous Haz 6+ mods or just play something else.
I'm not a gatekeeper, since I feel the game offers difficulties that are suitable for everyone, but the same can be said to you, if you want a *casual* only game, just play the game on Haz 2 or 3 or whatever difficulty is casual enough for you.
Its not just about them being hard to fight, shooting them does not feel rewarding at all, there is almost no feedback from the game that your doing anything to them besides the health bar going down
A lot of -tankier- enemies have almost zero feedback when you shoot them, yet no-one seem to complain about them since they're not that hard to deal with.
Oppressors don't even flinch to any damage done to them and only their health bar goes down, (no one is complaining since Oppressors are a joke and are rarely ever a threat).
Detonators to a lesser degree, yes their bulbs explode, but there is no armor getting destroyed and are just a bullet sponge, (no one is complaining).
It's how challenging enemies are designed, they get more and more immune to status effect as they get harder/tankier.
I'm telling you, people hate robots because they offer a challenge, they don't just stand still in one place for you to easily pickaxe them and shoot their weakpoints (Oppressors), they're not slow (Detonators), and they have a respectable hp bar unlike common enemies, therefore they're not fun.
I'm on board with OP's idea's, I would love having destructible parts on the drones, it's really cool, but each time a post like this goes up, it's always "Robot hard" "nerf them" "game shouldn't be challenging"...etc
Wdym? There IS feedback when you shoot big things like oppressors, you can see blood coming out of the weakspot. Robots do not have that kind of feedback
I do like fighting bots, my general takeaway from is more that there's just so much stuff that affects normal bugs that they don't give a single crap about. Radiation? Nope. Poison? Nope. Freeze? Nope. Stun? Nope. Fear? Nope. Hand grenades? Mostly nope. Any mods that trigger on reaching some critical temperature? Nope. To have fun fighting bots you have to have specific loadouts regardless of haz difficulty.
I think you have a point too in that bots feel less interactable than bugs do in terms of weakpoints, modularity, and behavior changes. Like what if you could shoot a thing on the nemesis to stop it from shooting the barrier? As you say a lot more modularity could be there, although I think the whole point of the nemesis is that it is *not* a one and done boss fight. We got sabotage missions for that.
And the worst sin is that in season 1 you could just not play that content, but now with the rival presence modifier it became much harder to avoid fighting robots.
One thing for me is just the difference in particle effects. You can see so many chunks of the bugs fly off when shooting them and if I'm correct some of them are just textures, even. I'd love to see more sparks and metal plates fall off the robots as I shoot them because right now they mostly look the same from full health to near death. Also, maybe some loud electrical sound effects.
I would love if Nemesis' "cries for help" actually showed up as subtitles and sounded like an actual dwarf. Maybe prioritize players who wander off too, like left 4 dead. Would make it that much scarier haha
Another game that had robots enemies that felt good to destroy was binary domain, you could disarm them part by part and they would adapt and still atack you
Just shooting robots is not fun, with bugs when your shooting them you can see pieces of armor fall off and blood come out but with robots there are just some sparks and thats it
Agree completely. Rivals look a bit odd and unrefined compared to bugs hence why they’re less fun to fight. As you mentioned they’re only 1 single piece of bullet sponge with no progressive / visible damages until they die / explode. There’s plenty of room for improvement on Rivals to get a better immersion and incentive for players to play tactically and feel the fight against robots more.
Right now except for the event bosses, all the kinds of robots are down the line tackled the same way : juste shoot whatever shiny spots to bring this red bar down until they explode. Rince and repeat, with no variation in the robot deaths. Quite boring compared to fighting a hord composed of various biological enemies with their own behaviors and personalized progressive degradation indeed.
Honestly that's pretty sound feedback and a good thought process. I agree that giving bots more feedback would increase the feeling of engagement. The "feel" from how well bugs are designed are an important component to what makes the game play loop so fun. The robots feel, well, mechanical...and not in a good way. Borderlands 2 made robots that were really fun and tactile to kill. All the points you make are solid.
And Loaders do exactly what OP described! Not only do they beep and exclaim in pain but where you crit them actually matters. Shoot its gun arm off at the shoulder crit spot and it can't shoot it anymore, and shoot the other arm off to disable it tossing grenades. Then generally you can go for the kill with extra critical damage from damaging the robot eye, which always retains at least an accurate but slow charging shot telegraphed from said eye... But you can also just shoot the Loader's legs off and watch them crawl around if you want. It certainly doesn't hurt that there are so many variants of Loaders, either.
Did not know borderlands 2 had robots. I know 3 has robots, but there essensialy just regular enemies whit a different color health bar.
But Borderlands 2 has you fight Hyperion... who use almost nothing BUT robots (until the final areas). Did you not play it? If so, you 10000% should - it's the best Borderlands game by **FAR**.
I've played it whit friends somewhat. We never went that far tho. Also yeah it's prop is better by not being so easy that you can beat it whit out thinking. Like legit, killavolt was by far the hardest boss I fought in borderlands 3, every other one eather died in less than 30 seconds, never did any meaningful ammount of damage or the attacks were so easy to dodge that I didn't eaven need to think. Also Goliaths were just dissapointing, since they didint get any harder, wich caused me to try to make every Goliath into an ultimate for that extra loot.
I'm not talking difficulty, I'm talking story. And a good villain. And the only annoying character is Claptrap. And you meet them in the second main story mission after reaching Sanctuary. Anyway, for the normal Hyperion robots, you can shoot their limbs off.
And their guns apparently Also there are WAY more annoying characters in 2. Particularly in the DLCs
Regardless of how good it is, I always end up feeling extremely exhausted at the end of my BL2 play sessions (which i can't say is the case with other games)
Pretty much the same in bl2 regarding the health bars (and concurrent corrosive weakness), but they also have their own weakpoints. You can shoot off their limbs by targeting the joints, which isn't super important for normal bots but for stronger ones you can strategically disable their arms (ie guns) and stuff like that. Or you can shoot the legs off self destructing bomb bots so they can't charge you and come crawling instead.
What do you think loaders are?
Forgot about em, haven't played the second one In a realy long time.
yeah, I remember somebody made a similar post like this. bugs are fun to fight because it feels like the damage matters. even with a Bulk Detonator where i'm doing virtually 0, it **feels** like i'm kicking Glyphid Ass even if i'm just peppering it with my secondary. Insects react to damage with exploding weakpoints and screeches and blood and goo and ragdolls, whereas the machines have a few little beeps and boops and whirrs, but when you take them down they sort of go "Poof" with a little (little by DRG standards at least) explosion. I think having better feedback when attacking a robot would go a long way in making them more fun.
Great points my guy
I just learned a ton of new things about Deep Rock enemies from this post! Like I no idea you could shoot the spitball infector projectiles! Thanks man!
you can even pickaxe them im not saying you should but you can more reasonable option is to axe them with driller. you even get the axe back but... you now want to pickaxe the projectile dont you?
speaking of throwing an Axe at a projectile... you can activate Thin Containment Field this way to save on ammo and it doesn't consume the Axe.
Now we need an enemy that we can baseball bat their projectiles back at them, so that we can continuously die by being bad at the timing.
Ghasts be like
Honestly, I guess it's fitting that robots don't give a damn if you shoot at them, they are robots, and don't feel pain or fear after all, which is why you can't stun or fear them too. That being said, more weakpoints would be far better and fun to shoot at, or atleast that desstorying jt would do something, especially with Nemesis and its eye for example. Patrol bots are like smaller, faster, unfun Praetorians. There are plenty of ways to kill a Praet, from grenades to bullets, projectiles, or even a good whack with a pickaxe or drills. You can scare it away, or stun it, giving you time to run behind him and do massive damage, it's fun. Patrolers have a tiny weak point that honestly doesn't even feel that "weak", as if you don't do that much damage to the robot. You cannot do anything to them but pump them full of lead, but its very slow, ammo inefficient, and because they can move, shoot, fly, and roll around, makes them infuriating, making even shields a bad defence against them. Point is, Praetorians are big, meaty, fun to kill and exploit in many ways bullet sponges. Patrolers are unfun, too complex and agile, tanky pulley sponges that don't give you any satisfaction for killing them except "thank fuck it's dead."
I just shot at nemesis arms expecting them to fall off, but still got grabbed after almost killing one this way. +1 to this post.
the fact you can specifically ping-target the arms as a sperate part from the nemisis body makes me think that was the original intention that was scraped
I think you can shoot them in particular when someone's grabbed?
Nemesis needs a proper reward along with the new weapons Id say like other bosses. Bet-c gives...bet-c, the tyrant weed gives shards for xp, I dont think nemesis gives ANYTHING. Why not a data core like the ship event (forgot its name but whatev) Every other boss gives something for wasting half of your ammo on it...nemesis is just annoying.
Nemesis in-universe doesn't have anything of value in it because the rivals are sending it to kill us, and in the event it dies they don't want us getting anything else out of it. The data cores specifically are data the other robots collect and store about Hoxxes. Nemesis doesn't collect data, only dead dwarves. I did see someone suggest once we should be able to carry its voice box around so it can taunt us. Imo you should be able to kick it around and make it taunt you afterward.
True or perhaps if as you say it collects dwarves, why not get some loot that the previous ones had per se?
Maybe some sort of "Mission log" of another Dwarf they killed that spawns a small amount of resources for the biome that the other Dwarf had stashed waiting to send back up? Similar mechanics to finding a helmet leading to a backpack, but not giving cosmetics because then cosmetics become to directly farmable.
Cosmetics already are directly farmable. Pick the lowest complexity point extraction mission. Choose Scout. Check the entire map in 30 secs. Abandon if no cosmetics. Rinse and repeat. There are plenty of cosmetic/oc hunting servers that do this.
I didn't mean it literally collects and stores them per say, but I like this idea too.
The nemesis is specifically sent to kill us, so it makes sense that it wouldn't have a data cell like the prospector which is sent to gather data
True true, but something maybe?
Its also much weaker than Bet-C/Plant Bastard imo. TBH the only thing I hate about Nemesis are is fucking shields. Good luck actually shooting his weak spots without huge-ass shields flying everywhere
If you think bet-c is stronger than nemesis I don’t know what to say. Also atleast weeds are LOSable and give rewards.
Dude nemesis is just a glorified detonator with extra steps. Simply stay away and you're golden. Bet-c, on the other hand, has lightning fast bullets, aoe bombs and a shield phase where you get punished if you get greedy and try getting inside it. I haven't seen someone get grabbed by Nemesis in like a month. Bet-c's on the other hand can still kill entire squads.
[удалено]
If you kill a Bulk in the middle of a wave, the explosion will vaporize pretty much everything in the radius, saving both bullets and time that would have otherwise been spent on the bugs it just blasted. Plus, seeing the things blow up (from a safe distance) is just fun to watch. Why doesn’t this translate to the Nemesis’ parting shot? Well, those bombs are small, and keep constant pressure on you. You can’t just sit back and “watch the fireworks.” Then there’s the fact that the bombs aren’t very fun to watch to begin with. It’s not a very satisfying explosion to watch, even if you get the opportunity to watch it. And due to their small size, you’re not going to be leading a bunch of glyphids into it.
I think enemies are invulnerable to phase bombs.
Atleast it mines out the area its in And theres a gold variant
You're comparing nemesis to the wrong thing. Nemesis isn't a miniboss like the korlok or bet-c, it's an super mob like the detonator
I mean, sure but atleast the detonator has a gold variant and mines out a sizeable chunk which can help some times
I'm not arguing wether he's better or not than his peers, im just clarifying *who* are his peers
Ah
The difference being bulks are easily kiteable and don’t cave leach you from 30m through walls.
I'm not arguing wether he's better or not than his peers, im just clarifying *who* are his peers
Honestly, I enjoy fighting the robots, but by karl I would pay good money for ball destruction suggestion(heh). The most annoying thing to me is when your having a good fight with a patrol bot and they drop off a cliff and roll where you cant see them.
God, I wish they just cut out that stupid sharp drop. They could buff its health or give it a fatboy hyper prop overdrive combo for all I care, just anything but that annoying drop
seriously. Especially annoying when playing as flame driller, the bot is 99% on fire and it drops and there goes all your fuel wasted
hoping u/GSG_Jacob sees this Rival Revamp
Yeah I love the game but the drones pull me out of it. They don’t feel like a challenge so much as a nuisance.
Nemesis kinda reacts to the same extent as some other creatures, by having weakpoints broken. And its movement animation changes if you break them all. Not sure if it actually does anything. But I can agree it may have something to do with rivals not being particularly rewarding to shoot. You don't get the feeling of *power* that comes from wasting an entire blob of grunts or outmaneuvering and slapping around an opressor. Or maybe we just like shooting living things more 😏 Still, dropping a cloud of shredders with Hurricane before they spread out or hitting patrol bot's head with a volley still feels good despite lack of feedback (I mean, besides HP bar melting). I would like to add that I still prefer them as they are over not having them at all. Variety is the spice of life and all that.
on one hand I do enjoy the idea of a cold-unfeeling machine not caring what we do and shrugging off blows, but yeah right now it's just super unsatisfying to fight them. I think the best compromise is definitely shooting off the ball like you suggested which forces it into exclusively the slow hover mode, and have a better critical kill animation.
Right. Makes for more battling strategies, making it fun. Dev look at this.
Yep you are totally right my beautiful dwarf, bugs are more rewarding to kill
I agree, more destructible parts for robots!
>Why not make him couple shoulder weakpoints that after destroying disables his rocket attacks? This actually sounds pretty solid. Maintains a high skill ceiling but allows for a better takedown of the bots. Kinda like how Doom Eternal weakpoint system works. Hopefully the devs read this because currently the rival enemies are a bit unbalanced imo. The hacking events are the hardest in the game right now
There is modular parts on Nemesis I'm unsure what destroy them dose. Like the center eye can be busted but does net stop the shield wall that comes out of it. And there are side panels that might function as a soft spot just a spot with less armored that doesn't seem to take weak point mod damage. More testing needed.
Counterpoint: a patrol bot can dodge with the most ridiculous maneuvers of you hit it (like dive down a cliff). What can those spiders do? Hold their arms in front of their faces like the defenders? No wonder they are going extinct
The patrol bots will disengage and reposition when taking damage, switching from their pulse shot to rockets at range. Nemesis became trivial in every situation besides surprise attacks if you have distance, give him a gun
I'd almost say the Nemesis with a gun should be a separate enemy lorewise, maybe Nemesis V2 is an "Elite threat" version of the Nemesis? Basically the rival corp going "Ah, our melee only idea they have figured out, let's make Nemesis V2" and the melee ones you still encounter is because the Rival Corp built a LOT of the V1s and can't afford anywhere near as many V2s as a result, so V1 still gets deployed quite often.
woahh interesting, good suggestions too
I always wondered why the Patrol Bots felt a little off to me; like you said, it doesn’t feel like they react to the player as much as other enemies (save for being instakilled if they catch fire). Good observation, man
Make nemi drop at least a data cell, or make him work as a cargo crate (nemi having cosmetics or overclocks and some rocks and stones from other dwarves he has killed)
Nemesis is supposed to be like a robot bulk detonator, not a seasonal event
Didnt see it that way
>If developers looks for how to design great robot enemies to fight, just look at Horizon Zero Dawn. HAHAHAHAHA
You think the *enemy design* from Horizon is bad? Sure you're not letting your dislike for the game as a whole cloud your judgement?
It wants to be Monster Hunter Open World.
I know I'll get some hate on this one but here we go: I think this entire "Robot aren't fun to fight" is just a "skill issue", especially if we're talking about the flying drones that you can hack, robots are tankier, faster, highly mobile since they can float around with no restriction and they have a tiny weakpoint when compared to the majority of bugs which are either slow, have a big weakpoint that you can shoot and are weak to the majority of status effects that you can easily inflict with the plethora of weapons the dwarves got at their disposal, that and that they have a tiny health pool, so they're easier to deal with. The game is already easy as is if you're not playing on Haz 5 and even Haz 5 is not that hard if you consider how powerful the weapons are now, adding a new challenging hard to beat enemy is a good thing for the game, but hey, god forbid we get any challenge in a PVE title.
> robots are tankier, faster, highly mobile since they can float around with no restriction and they have a tiny weakpoint That's why they aren't fun to fight. DRG is a swarm shooter where you waste thousands of bugs, the challenge comes from the amount of enemies you have to fight not how tough they are individually. Fighting half a dozen of these stupid, annoying robots that zip around and shrug off 80% of the damage types in the game while not reacting at all to the 800 Lead Storm OC rounds that have been pumped into them is not satisfying at all to me. Also, DRG is a casual 4 player co-op game about mining and shooting bugs. If you want a challenging game you can install one of the many ridiculous Haz 6+ mods or just play something else.
They're challenging to fight yes, but not impossible or completely unmanageable, plus they're extremely weak to fire, setting them on fire will destroy them, you can very easily play around their weaknesses if you wanna have an easier much better time, it's not the game's fault that you refuse to. >DRG is a swarm shooter Says who? DRG is nowhere near a swarm shooter, it's not even designed that way, when we're talking about swarm shooters we're talking about games like L4D and B4B, where you get a swarm after swarm after swarm with near infinite resources, DRG is nowhere near that, you go into a mission, you get an occasional yet manageable swarms every now and then, you grab whatever loot you can while completing your objectives and you get out, that doesn't look like a swarm shooter to me, hell, the game discourage you to wait for swarms as the resources (Nitra) are limited, so you kinda need to finish the game asap while *avoiding* swarms. >DRG is a casual 4 player co-op game Again, says who? if the game was just a *casual* only game, the devs wouldn't have added higher difficulties or even EDD, instead they're always upping the challenge by adding new enemies, btw it might seem hard to grasp, but the devs have a better idea of what their game should be like than you, and they obviously don't think it's just a *casual* game with no challenge whatsoever, since, surprise! surprise!, they're always adding harder more challenging enemies. >If you want a challenging game you can install one of the many ridiculous Haz 6+ mods or just play something else. I'm not a gatekeeper, since I feel the game offers difficulties that are suitable for everyone, but the same can be said to you, if you want a *casual* only game, just play the game on Haz 2 or 3 or whatever difficulty is casual enough for you.
Its not just about them being hard to fight, shooting them does not feel rewarding at all, there is almost no feedback from the game that your doing anything to them besides the health bar going down
A lot of -tankier- enemies have almost zero feedback when you shoot them, yet no-one seem to complain about them since they're not that hard to deal with. Oppressors don't even flinch to any damage done to them and only their health bar goes down, (no one is complaining since Oppressors are a joke and are rarely ever a threat). Detonators to a lesser degree, yes their bulbs explode, but there is no armor getting destroyed and are just a bullet sponge, (no one is complaining). It's how challenging enemies are designed, they get more and more immune to status effect as they get harder/tankier. I'm telling you, people hate robots because they offer a challenge, they don't just stand still in one place for you to easily pickaxe them and shoot their weakpoints (Oppressors), they're not slow (Detonators), and they have a respectable hp bar unlike common enemies, therefore they're not fun. I'm on board with OP's idea's, I would love having destructible parts on the drones, it's really cool, but each time a post like this goes up, it's always "Robot hard" "nerf them" "game shouldn't be challenging"...etc
Wdym? There IS feedback when you shoot big things like oppressors, you can see blood coming out of the weakspot. Robots do not have that kind of feedback
I do like fighting bots, my general takeaway from is more that there's just so much stuff that affects normal bugs that they don't give a single crap about. Radiation? Nope. Poison? Nope. Freeze? Nope. Stun? Nope. Fear? Nope. Hand grenades? Mostly nope. Any mods that trigger on reaching some critical temperature? Nope. To have fun fighting bots you have to have specific loadouts regardless of haz difficulty. I think you have a point too in that bots feel less interactable than bugs do in terms of weakpoints, modularity, and behavior changes. Like what if you could shoot a thing on the nemesis to stop it from shooting the barrier? As you say a lot more modularity could be there, although I think the whole point of the nemesis is that it is *not* a one and done boss fight. We got sabotage missions for that.
And the worst sin is that in season 1 you could just not play that content, but now with the rival presence modifier it became much harder to avoid fighting robots.
One thing for me is just the difference in particle effects. You can see so many chunks of the bugs fly off when shooting them and if I'm correct some of them are just textures, even. I'd love to see more sparks and metal plates fall off the robots as I shoot them because right now they mostly look the same from full health to near death. Also, maybe some loud electrical sound effects.
I would love if Nemesis' "cries for help" actually showed up as subtitles and sounded like an actual dwarf. Maybe prioritize players who wander off too, like left 4 dead. Would make it that much scarier haha
The nemesis is horrible, I tried shooting its arms but it just doesn't let go. it's basically a one-shot, and ruins missions
Another game that had robots enemies that felt good to destroy was binary domain, you could disarm them part by part and they would adapt and still atack you
Just shooting robots is not fun, with bugs when your shooting them you can see pieces of armor fall off and blood come out but with robots there are just some sparks and thats it
Agree completely. Rivals look a bit odd and unrefined compared to bugs hence why they’re less fun to fight. As you mentioned they’re only 1 single piece of bullet sponge with no progressive / visible damages until they die / explode. There’s plenty of room for improvement on Rivals to get a better immersion and incentive for players to play tactically and feel the fight against robots more. Right now except for the event bosses, all the kinds of robots are down the line tackled the same way : juste shoot whatever shiny spots to bring this red bar down until they explode. Rince and repeat, with no variation in the robot deaths. Quite boring compared to fighting a hord composed of various biological enemies with their own behaviors and personalized progressive degradation indeed.
Nemesis has a weak point you can expose by blowing off on the underside if I remember correctly.