So we have hell on earth so I propose Extinction or perhaps a better name. So like wave 1 is your like typical starter wave then from wave 2 and so forth constant enemies flood in constantly instead of in batches and big zeds spawn also and if you make it to the boss pretty much the same idea but probably make it to where its not exactly overwhelming but its harder still?
New Difficulty
- Thread starter Deemos18
- Start date
That honestly sounds boring as hell. "Just add more enemies" is on the same level as "just give it more HP!" for me. Nobody likes bullet sponges, and I don't like to lose because I had no chance to escape. If anything, a new difficulty should either allow more resources to your opponents (new abilities for example) or limit your own (no upgrade system for example, less money per wave...)
Keep in mind that no matter the game's difficulty, the game still throws the same amount of zeds at you. They're just tougher and possibly spawn earlier in case of bigger zeds. But you'll always have the same limit.
Keep in mind that no matter the game's difficulty, the game still throws the same amount of zeds at you. They're just tougher and possibly spawn earlier in case of bigger zeds. But you'll always have the same limit.
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There's a good argument to be made for "more enemies," but specifically, "more trash."
I suspect the max monster count standard of 32 was set as an upper limit in order to ensure smoother technical performance on the consoles the game was designed for (at the time).
However, as players get better at the game, they'll often find that 32 Zeds isn't that big a deal to a coordinated team who can shoot well. There's the multitudes of mixed hordes that one can get, but as teams improve, they'll get better at shooting down trash before the trash Zeds reach the team.
This would also explain why TWI favored QPs as an enemy choice: they break the usual flow of the game by spawning almost as frequently as medium Zeds, yet have the health of a Fleshpound's head and are constantly sprinting, and are not as easily cut down by headshot teams. Easy way to inflate the difficulty without adding more actual Zeds to the counter: just add more tanky stuff!
This, however, skews the balance out of favor of perks like SWAT, and why TWI has been trying to counter that by giving SWAT so many buffs over the game's lifetime as of late.
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Consider instead: what would happen if the threat came from additional trash Zeds (and arguably more mediums)?
Say you increased it to a max of 40 or 48 Zeds, with a higher-than-normal chance of spawning Gorefasts/Gorefiends, Stalkers, and Crawlers? Outside of poorly designed chokepoint-heavy maps, you give SWAT a chance to prove their worth by giving them more trash to shoot, and the heavy-hitter perks will need to be more in lane with trash sweepers to ensure protection from the hordes.
I suspect the max monster count standard of 32 was set as an upper limit in order to ensure smoother technical performance on the consoles the game was designed for (at the time).
However, as players get better at the game, they'll often find that 32 Zeds isn't that big a deal to a coordinated team who can shoot well. There's the multitudes of mixed hordes that one can get, but as teams improve, they'll get better at shooting down trash before the trash Zeds reach the team.
This would also explain why TWI favored QPs as an enemy choice: they break the usual flow of the game by spawning almost as frequently as medium Zeds, yet have the health of a Fleshpound's head and are constantly sprinting, and are not as easily cut down by headshot teams. Easy way to inflate the difficulty without adding more actual Zeds to the counter: just add more tanky stuff!
This, however, skews the balance out of favor of perks like SWAT, and why TWI has been trying to counter that by giving SWAT so many buffs over the game's lifetime as of late.
----
Consider instead: what would happen if the threat came from additional trash Zeds (and arguably more mediums)?
Say you increased it to a max of 40 or 48 Zeds, with a higher-than-normal chance of spawning Gorefasts/Gorefiends, Stalkers, and Crawlers? Outside of poorly designed chokepoint-heavy maps, you give SWAT a chance to prove their worth by giving them more trash to shoot, and the heavy-hitter perks will need to be more in lane with trash sweepers to ensure protection from the hordes.
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^this I can get behind.
I'll admit I wasn't exactly clear in my previous message : I'm not saying that a massive amount of enemies to deal with can't be a good thrill. Otherwise, Left 4 Dead wouldn't have worked that well. Neither would have Dead Rising.
Similarly. While I don't think a new difficulty level would work merely by cranking up the number of zeds to ridiculous amount... It is true that 32 zeds at once, for a team of six, is not a whole lot.
Lastly, I would also lie if I said that I didn't enjoy coming across an all-clot or all-slasher wave in Endless... Sometimes it's great to just blast away !
So yeah, more accurately, I should say that I don't want to be FLOODED by zeds to the point where it's just too much to gulp. It's already mad frustrating when you steamrolled on the game for 8 waves, then suddenly the game throws at you three fleshpounds, two scrakes at your ass, and a bloat/siren combo sneaking on your only escape road and you're a goner.
I guess the issue is not that much the amount of zeds and more accurately the way zeds spawn though?
I do maintain that a new difficulty should have more than that however. And the increase of zed on the map at once should be increased for all difficulties.
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It's a fun subject to discuss.
Currently I've been sidelining most of my other titles to play Back 4 Blood, where I've beaten the entire game on Nightmare (difficulty 3 of 4) and have started, albeit very slowly and clunkily, working my way though No Hope (difficulty 4 of 4, the hardest one) on solo with bots.
Enemy balance and special/mini-boss spawnrate in horde games matters so, so much. B4B's entire lifespan has gone up and down with this, but I'll say this much: the times the game is overall at its hardest is when they've "accidentally" bumped the special spawn rates too high in a given patch. There are some days where...I dunno if you ever played the "Hard Eight" mutator in L4D, but it feels like that sometimes; where your team is getting tennis ball'd from literally every side by back-to-back specials that require a lot of firepower to put down, and any one mistake sets off a horde alarm on top of all those specials...oy. It's still fun, but man, it drags out stages to a hellish degree and it's exhausting.
The way KF2 deals with enemy spawns involves picking from a set of various spawn clusters that can happen (say "3 crawlers, 2 sirens" as a hypothetical example) and lining many of those spawns up throughout the match, with the "game director" changing up a lot of factors in how those enemies are spawned in, how fast they move, etc. This is opposed to KF1 which IIRC was basically "keep spawning stuff in at a consistent rate to fill in for the dead ones."
To greatly simplify it, there's "standard pools" which the game is supposed to be able to pick at any time, and "special pools" where there's usually nastier combinations of enemies that can only be picked in certain rounds a limited number of times. There's other exceptions to the rule like EDARs being picked by having a percent chance to replace Stalkers or Husks on the fly when those Zeds are spawned into the game.
Where this spawn system can get ugly is when it happens in tandem with the more dubious level layouts.
One such example in early waves is "X bloats, X sirens" flanking trash. Sirens hide behind the bloats to surprise projectile spammers and melee players by screaming from behind them and dissolving grenades, usually in the middle of clots and/or crawlers.
Open area? Not bad, just inconvenient. Crowded space? Game just got tougher unless you're Firebug.
Then there's stuff like "1 Fleshpound, 2 Scrakes." Rough, and you need to make decisions on how to prioritize killing them, but it's doable.
The most infamous example of a "special pool" in late-game waves on high difficulties, however, is "6 Quarter Pounds, 2 Fleshpounds." I probably don't have to elaborate on why that one sucks. But if you're trying to kite late-game and you roll something like that? Especially in a cramped hallway? That's GG for most slow/no-health classes.
The QPs, in particular, gum up a lot of spawns for all the reasons I mentioned above: they're an easy way to pad rosters with high-damaging enemies that sponge more damage than one might expect, move fast for high-damage tanks, and almost always spawn in packs.
Which sucks for trash specialists, and it sucks for anyone not playing perks that can spam a lot of damage in a general area. I've had HoE 6P games (not modded) where I've been soloing a lane and had to deal with ~20 QPs in a single game as Commando (Outpost likes to do this in my experience). And that's not fun, that's bullsnot and I'm here to kill trash and chew bubblegum.
Currently I've been sidelining most of my other titles to play Back 4 Blood, where I've beaten the entire game on Nightmare (difficulty 3 of 4) and have started, albeit very slowly and clunkily, working my way though No Hope (difficulty 4 of 4, the hardest one) on solo with bots.
Enemy balance and special/mini-boss spawnrate in horde games matters so, so much. B4B's entire lifespan has gone up and down with this, but I'll say this much: the times the game is overall at its hardest is when they've "accidentally" bumped the special spawn rates too high in a given patch. There are some days where...I dunno if you ever played the "Hard Eight" mutator in L4D, but it feels like that sometimes; where your team is getting tennis ball'd from literally every side by back-to-back specials that require a lot of firepower to put down, and any one mistake sets off a horde alarm on top of all those specials...oy. It's still fun, but man, it drags out stages to a hellish degree and it's exhausting.
This is one of the major issues, in tandem with stage design, more in practice than in theory; KF2 actually uses a pretty neat enemy spawn control system that differs from KF1 in a lot of ways.
The way KF2 deals with enemy spawns involves picking from a set of various spawn clusters that can happen (say "3 crawlers, 2 sirens" as a hypothetical example) and lining many of those spawns up throughout the match, with the "game director" changing up a lot of factors in how those enemies are spawned in, how fast they move, etc. This is opposed to KF1 which IIRC was basically "keep spawning stuff in at a consistent rate to fill in for the dead ones."
To greatly simplify it, there's "standard pools" which the game is supposed to be able to pick at any time, and "special pools" where there's usually nastier combinations of enemies that can only be picked in certain rounds a limited number of times. There's other exceptions to the rule like EDARs being picked by having a percent chance to replace Stalkers or Husks on the fly when those Zeds are spawned into the game.
Where this spawn system can get ugly is when it happens in tandem with the more dubious level layouts.
One such example in early waves is "X bloats, X sirens" flanking trash. Sirens hide behind the bloats to surprise projectile spammers and melee players by screaming from behind them and dissolving grenades, usually in the middle of clots and/or crawlers.
Open area? Not bad, just inconvenient. Crowded space? Game just got tougher unless you're Firebug.
Then there's stuff like "1 Fleshpound, 2 Scrakes." Rough, and you need to make decisions on how to prioritize killing them, but it's doable.
The most infamous example of a "special pool" in late-game waves on high difficulties, however, is "6 Quarter Pounds, 2 Fleshpounds." I probably don't have to elaborate on why that one sucks. But if you're trying to kite late-game and you roll something like that? Especially in a cramped hallway? That's GG for most slow/no-health classes.
The QPs, in particular, gum up a lot of spawns for all the reasons I mentioned above: they're an easy way to pad rosters with high-damaging enemies that sponge more damage than one might expect, move fast for high-damage tanks, and almost always spawn in packs.
Which sucks for trash specialists, and it sucks for anyone not playing perks that can spam a lot of damage in a general area. I've had HoE 6P games (not modded) where I've been soloing a lane and had to deal with ~20 QPs in a single game as Commando (Outpost likes to do this in my experience). And that's not fun, that's bullsnot and I'm here to kill trash and chew bubblegum.
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Well, the OP obviously not into details and didn't think through his suggestion, but since we are at it, new difficulty makes sense.
Here are the arguments for it:
1) hardware advanced since 2015, both consoles and PC. On a PC it's feasible now to have 150 FPS (variable frame rate in-game setting) on detailed maps such as Burning Paris and 70 maxmonsters present on the map;
2) increasing maxmonsters doesn't bugsplat the game due to high MaxObjectsNotConsideredByGC setting;
3) the game isn't new and those players who kept playing have accumulated hundreds if not thousands of hours and learned the game well enough to not feel challenged anymore by HoE, more like frustrated by its "artificial difficulty" mechanics, one of the most ridiculous of which is the "spawnrage".
This builds a solid case for a new difficulty.
But there are counterarguments as well.
1) nobody at TWI plays this game or cares about the game (which isn't the same as caring about the cash flow from the game) enough to feel the need for a new difficulty;
2) TWI has a history of a heavy handed approach, introducing power creep weapons and breaking things (Prohibiting web console admin kicks altogether to address a barely existing abuse case, HRG Kaboomstick, Incision, FAL on Commando, Locust, had to release THREE out-of-band patches in Summer 2022);
3) They are very likely to stick to their bad, almost universally hated by the playerbase, mechanics and contents changes, such as QPs, EDARs, spawnrage mechanic.
Thus, it's very likely that whatever they can come up with will be far from satisfactory.
I would argue that they should team up with community instead. They have a history of making community maps official. Many of these are high quality material and well received by the playerbase, good examples are KF-Spillway, KF-AshwoodAsylum and some others. They could've worked with the community on new weapons as well, instead, they opted to do it themselves and guess what, a good share of their weapons aren't well received by the community and often an object of sorts of ridicule and disappointment.
The CD community came up with rather well tested and well discussed rules for HoE+ which are uniformly well received, don't break the game and are modestly popular. Some of these are:
- steady progression of maxmonsters starting from 25 solo to 70 6 players;
- no EDARs or QPs;
- no spawnrage;
- normalized as compared to vanilla spawn cycle (no random chance to spawn 2FP+6QP spam or 8 stalkers or 10 crawlers squads);
- more big zeds and earlier with emphasis on scrakes, as unfortunately fleshpounds have issues and are thus less enjoyable to fight by the community.
Just one of the many reddit surveys regarding some of these issues:
Overall, teaming up with the community I feel could've advanced the game in this regard, but the chances of it happening are rather low in my opinion. The main obstacles here is TWI is highly unlikely to rollback content, e.g. EDARs and QPs. Stubborn, but it's just how it is. And their general lack of interest. They'd rather do a shark game or a toy story spies game.
Here are the arguments for it:
1) hardware advanced since 2015, both consoles and PC. On a PC it's feasible now to have 150 FPS (variable frame rate in-game setting) on detailed maps such as Burning Paris and 70 maxmonsters present on the map;
2) increasing maxmonsters doesn't bugsplat the game due to high MaxObjectsNotConsideredByGC setting;
3) the game isn't new and those players who kept playing have accumulated hundreds if not thousands of hours and learned the game well enough to not feel challenged anymore by HoE, more like frustrated by its "artificial difficulty" mechanics, one of the most ridiculous of which is the "spawnrage".
This builds a solid case for a new difficulty.
But there are counterarguments as well.
1) nobody at TWI plays this game or cares about the game (which isn't the same as caring about the cash flow from the game) enough to feel the need for a new difficulty;
2) TWI has a history of a heavy handed approach, introducing power creep weapons and breaking things (Prohibiting web console admin kicks altogether to address a barely existing abuse case, HRG Kaboomstick, Incision, FAL on Commando, Locust, had to release THREE out-of-band patches in Summer 2022);
3) They are very likely to stick to their bad, almost universally hated by the playerbase, mechanics and contents changes, such as QPs, EDARs, spawnrage mechanic.
Thus, it's very likely that whatever they can come up with will be far from satisfactory.
I would argue that they should team up with community instead. They have a history of making community maps official. Many of these are high quality material and well received by the playerbase, good examples are KF-Spillway, KF-AshwoodAsylum and some others. They could've worked with the community on new weapons as well, instead, they opted to do it themselves and guess what, a good share of their weapons aren't well received by the community and often an object of sorts of ridicule and disappointment.
The CD community came up with rather well tested and well discussed rules for HoE+ which are uniformly well received, don't break the game and are modestly popular. Some of these are:
- steady progression of maxmonsters starting from 25 solo to 70 6 players;
- no EDARs or QPs;
- no spawnrage;
- normalized as compared to vanilla spawn cycle (no random chance to spawn 2FP+6QP spam or 8 stalkers or 10 crawlers squads);
- more big zeds and earlier with emphasis on scrakes, as unfortunately fleshpounds have issues and are thus less enjoyable to fight by the community.
Just one of the many reddit surveys regarding some of these issues:
Overall, teaming up with the community I feel could've advanced the game in this regard, but the chances of it happening are rather low in my opinion. The main obstacles here is TWI is highly unlikely to rollback content, e.g. EDARs and QPs. Stubborn, but it's just how it is. And their general lack of interest. They'd rather do a shark game or a toy story spies game.
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