VG247: How do you balance that, because you said about recoil, right? And when I think of shooting in an RPG, and the RPG levelling making recoil better, the first thing I think of is the first Mass Effect game, where you start out and your reticule is this big, and then as you level up, it gets smaller and smaller to represent your accuracy. But that also led to the frustration where you’d be pointed straight at someone, pulling the trigger, and bullets would be going off and missing.
Kapala: Yes, absolutely. That was the biggest problem I feel like we needed to solve. So, basically, to merge those two systems like you noticed, if you start on the heavier side of the RPG, I would say. If your spread is too big, like if it envelops one fourth of your screen, it makes it impossible to hit anything. And that brings that frustration to the player. We really don’t want to create that feeling. However, you also need to have that sizable portion of all the variables to be tweakable, and to be progressive.
So, in general you have two types of variables on the weapon side. You have variables that are controllable by the player, or semi-controllable by the player, like, for example, the recoil. Recoil can be smaller or larger, so this would be the movement of the camera as you’re firing. Something like CS:GO has big recoil, right? But proficient players can still control it. However, spread is the size of the crosshair as you’re firing the gun, and that’s something that’s completely random. You cannot foresee where the bullet will go next, because it’s just a huge chunk of your screen. And what we learned during our development process is that we much prefer scaling recoil, so something that the player can control still, even at the beginning of the game, than scaling spread. So, spread will still be scalable, but it’s not infuriating at the beginning. And it scales a little bit less than recoil, which you can still control as the player. And that alleviated a lot of that frustration, at least for us. And I think that players will experience a similar thing, that basically, you can learn the guns.
VG247: Obviously, in an RPG, at a point, you need to have enemies that can take a lot of punishment. But how do you avoid these bullet-spongey enemies, where encounters seem to drag on, and you’re shooting someone over and over again? I’m thinking about the big fella you see in the Braindance, who’s heavily augmented…
Kapala: Adam Smasher.
VG247: Right. He’s clearly not going to be somebody that goes down in a few hits, no matter what weapon you’re using. Even if you’re using a rocket launcher, I would assume. So, how do you balance that, to make sure it doesn’t cross from challenging to frustrating?
Kapala: So, in the core of the game, if we’re talking about the normal NPCs that you meet on the street, they can have different rarities to them, I would say. Most of the NPCs that you will meet are normal, just goons. And if you’re continuing to level up, and if you’re on the level of the enemy, you should never experience bullet sponginess. They will feel quite fast to kill, quite fast to engage. However, they’re quite deadly as well, so you need to basically use cover, and move around a lot.
Some of the NPCs will be more armoured, or more, how do I say? Some of the NPCs would be, like at officer level, so they’re more elite enemies that deal even more damage, and they take a little bit more punishment. However, what we opted to do there is that, we basically ensure that hit reactions on our NPCs are always played. This is a big problem in most of the games that I played that have bullet sponges – that basically you don’t see any type of reaction on the NPC as you’re hitting him. It feels like you’re literally shooting a sponge, like there’s nothing there. And we never want to have that. So, we will still play hit reactions on those NPCs. You will still see that they’re getting hurt. They will stumble, they will fall from your gunfire. So, that’s still in place. And as far as boss fights are concerned, well, I think it would be best if players see it for themselves. However, I can assure you that we took the necessary steps not to have them feel like bullet sponges as well.
