Attrition and resource management in an FPS

Working on a Doom Metroidvania and am wanting the game to be very focused on the idea of attrition as you move from save room to save room.

What suggestions do you have for this?

What I’m doing so far:

When you pick up a new weapon it’s available at the save room with full ammo, but you are limited to 4 weapon slots. Also, weaker weapons have more ammo, so while not doing as much damage in bursts they can potentially do more damage if you use up all your ammo. And of course additional weapons will drop during the leg of the map.

You have armor similar to quake, but can only restock it at save points, meaning that as you take more damage the damage increases, in turn increasing the pressure to reach the next check point.

It will feature a mechanic similar to L4Ds AI director that increases in intensity and frequency as time between the save room progresses.

I feel like that may be enough, but just wanted some input or suggestions.

 

Play through Doom Eternal on ultra violence difficulty and watch the video below.

Sounds to me like a system that could easily lead to players going for overcautious boring playstyles to preserve rare resources. Or if they don't they could end up in dead-man-walking scenarios where they already have no real chance anymore, they just don't know it yet.

 

I have a couple mechanics that will force players to use "push forward combat". For one, I'm using something similar to the AI director from L4D. Also, getting kills and damaging enemies is create breathing room.

I have zero intention of doing anything like Doom's glory kill system, since I absolutely hated it and felt it ruined the game for me.

 

i actually didn't enjoy the new dooms that much either. glory kills is whatever to me. What bothered me is that the best way to play is to switch weapons every split second to use one special shot after another. kind of like doing a combo in fighting games. I find it kind of anti-flow and draining.

i'd be happier if you have shotgun and assault rifle the entire game. Especially nowadays there is so much more games available i kinda dont want options and complicated metas.

@NotSure92 , I like the idea of a knock-down drag out fight where you feel like you can't make it but something compels you to keep going. But I think it has to be delivered in a deliberate obvious way, and not too often. Like a boss fight sort of. Let the player know, "okay here comes the big test, no ammo or shiny-shiny things for a bit".

i wouldn't restrict ammo - i might restrict healing or powerups and ask the player to go a little further than they have before.

 

I could write a book on all the reasons I disdain glory kills.

but here’s the main reasons:

-It’s quintessentially the game equivalent of dangling keys in the players face like you do a baby. It’s totally condescending.

-It’s mandatory. You can not play the game without doing them because you need it for health and ammo.

-It stops the game dead in its tracks again and again and again, breaking flow like you said, but also forcing you to reassess the field every time.

-It eliminates many would be clenched moments.

-It wears thin on novelty extremely fast. Once you see the same mini cutscene for the 3rd time there is absolute no charm left in it.

 

yeah this was the big thing for me. It's cool in advertisements and certainly builds hype but by the time you get to the last level its kind of annoying.

Then again, doom 2016 is the only modern shooter I've actually played to the end, so... they did a lot of good things for sure. But I havne't played eternal. i watched a couple videos and it seems like the went too far for my taste.

 

In Doom 2016 the glorykills were especially annoying because of the way audio changed while the animation played. In Eternal I found them much less grating. I didn't love Doom 2016 by the way, I had a long break before finally finishing it and to be honest if I hadn't liked the soundtrack so much, I probably never would have finished it. Looking at videos of Doom Eternal I expected to like it even less, because I found those colorfull ammo pinatas immersion breaking. But I actually loved that gameplay because it is cognitively so demanding and high level play offers so many choices and combinations that there's always something you could have done better. On the plus side it's a very cleverly designed game that a lot of thought went into. On the negative site you can almost feel how clever the designers thought they were for making it that way. I can totally see how it would rub some people the wrong way, but I think there's still plenty to learn from it about being deliberate with how the rules of the system shape the play. Imho there aren't that many games where you can see this clearly how good gamedesign was achieved through intentional tweaking instead of pure luck. I played Eternal almost twice as long as Doom 2016. Finished it once on hurt me plenty and once on ultra violence. I played through a couple early levels on nightmare, but wasn't quite motivated enough to grind through the whole game that way

 

i hardly play games anymore, if i do its like for ten minutes just to get the gist of the game, so certainly my taste nowadays are very different from when i was a real gamer.

all the juice in eternal was a huge turn off for me. i mean as soon as i saw it i thought, "this looks like a cartoon." Even when i was a kid i didn't like stuff like that so, basically the art style cut my interest in half.

then when i heard interviews about all this new design i thought, geez i just want to play classic doom but with modern environments. i dont wnat to learn new metas and if i got to make quick reflex decisions i don't want it to be from a stack of 20, i want it to just be "who do i blast first?"

i just dont got brain energy for games that demand so much anymore. probably why my go to shooting game is still zombie army

still, i can appreciate the developers enthusiasm and love for the craft. i just would rather work like that be done with a new IP, and let doom just be blasting cyberdemons with shotguns in a cool maze like mars dungeon.

 

@BIGTIMEMASTER
I think that NotSure92 is another/different Not_Sure on this forum.

 

I quite enjoy Doom 2016 overall, despite not being a fan of the art style and also not liking the flow of the glory kills. I'm fine with making the player use melee attacks, but stopping the fast paced / flow oriented gameplay at regular intervals to play a repetitive animation that doesn't fit the rest of the fast action... why? The rest of the time in combat you have to be constantly moving, but you can stop for three whole seconds to hit some zombie with his own arm and his mates will just chill while you do that.

Just give the guy a sword and let him Ninja Gaiden a limb or two off without stopping, or something. Don't wreck my flow.

One thing they could have done is make the slow-down animations a reward the first time you find each new way to dispatch a particular enemy. Slow motion, nicely framed shot, show it's name on the screen, tell you how many of the unique kills you've discovered for that enemy. That encourages players to experiment to find the different ones, without constantly slowing down the game. Next time you do the same kill just play the animation at full speed and keep right on going, don't even slow down.

Now I'm typing that I wonder if those flow-breaking animations were deliberately put in to give a mini-break for players? The presentation is telling you how hardcore you are, but in reality each time I went in to grab some health / ammo I was also taking a 3 second breather while that animation played.