Why would you fight enemies in metroidvania?

Besides a leveling system - what other incentive can a metroidvania give players to fight enemies? Hollow knight for example you can go through without any combat until a handful of monsters and the bosses (granted your platforming skills need to be great), but are the only incentives for combat in this genre for boosting the player in some way? Why don't we see temporary powerups like contra in metroidvanias? I think castlevania aria of sorrow had a very clever "soul" system that really gave players that incentive to fight and see what kind of arsenal the enemies had.

 

JMO but if you have to incentivize core gameplay with a shiny-nothing then you are missing the fun-factor. Should be fun to do because it's fun to do.

This is why 99% of modern games get turned off immediately for me. Too much focus on addiction mechanics and not enough on fun. I don't want to grind for loot and crunch numbers. I want to blow the things up and it feel good to do so.

 

Addiction mechanics are addicting because they're fun enough for some people to get addicted to. That's why they're addicted.

 

I get where you're coming from but I don't think the metroidvania genre's about blowing stuff up. At least not more than the exploration bits and 'discovering' new things which can be addicting in and of itself. Or do you mean about the game-juice of the combat? Wouldn't that fizzle out after about 10 minutes though, if the game's about discovering/platforming etc

 

That's not what addiction means.

@GazingUp I was using "blow stuff up" metaphorically. As in, "whatever the fun thing you do in these games is."

Does it fizzle out in ten minutes? If it does then it's not fun. DIfferent audiences of course but for me those types of games are about the fun in movement and the sense of questing more than anything else.

My point is that if your core game mechanics feel so lackluster that you are looking for justifications to tack on it's gonna be like trying to get a child to eat vegetables - or another ubisoft game with crafting that everyone figures out is pointless in five minutes.

ANother way to look at it is like Marie Kondo philosophy - if something isn't sparking joy in your gamers experience, throw it out.

 

Hey Guys, I'm not around here much - as a developer, but I still get emails in the topics that are dear to me.

Metroidvanias are my top most favorite game to play. Metroid and the original Castlevania are among my top 20 games of all time - ALL TIME! I played them when the came out - not remakes or re-releases. So that tells ya how long I've been playing these games.

The point of defeating enemies is progression plain and simple. We didn't attack the dang thingies that circled around the platforms in Metroid because it was fun - we did it because they were in our way to make progress.
We didn't battle those damn medusa heads because it was fun - we had to get past them in order to progress.
It's all about progression in metroidvania games.

However - since I'm an artist - I would say - if you wanted to spice up the progression - and give the player a bit of "reward" for doing what he needs to do - in order to progress, you could give enemies several different death animations. That would be really cool for the player to see.
You could also make the environments progressively more and more visually splendid.
Like in the Ori games - I really didn't give a crap about the story much - I wanted to see the beautiful environments. And they certainly got more and more beautiful the farther along the player progressed.

Just a couple thoughts from an old artist developer.

GL on your creation.

 

Spoken like an artist XD

But yeah enemy are obstacle, getting rid of them is the function relative to progress, its much easier to go in a sraightline, that trying to jump an enemy that tries to follow you, the thing is to make both challenge compelling, ie shooting or avoiding, generally the choice of which of the action to do should vary based on the context of the level AND te player condition, on top of that in general metroidvania drop healing and other ammo, which mean you have an incentive to kill them (ie teh player condition), random power up like contra can work but be careful to not compete with the main power up that serves as a progression, so temporary buff could work (like invicibility, better defense or attack for x seconds, faster speed) basically like old games anyway (megaman).

also doing these actions should be fun to do by themselves.

 

That's a good point. Basically the enemies are just part of the level design itself like the spikes, lava, tough platforms. Enemies are simply obstacles to overcome. That makes sense to me and why good metroidvanias are popular. In Hollow Knight for example, sure you can completely avoid fighting the enemies but using the platforming skills to dodge/avoid combat is also really fun OR you can fight them your way through.

Definitely learned this by observing Chasm. The reason that and many modern metroidvanias fail I think are the lack of diversity in environments / objects.

Duly noted. Thanks!!

 

This is an excellent question I have often asked myself.

Fighting always needs an incentive.

Here’s a list of incentives I’ve come up with:

-XP (obviously)
-currency (aka, XP with extra steps)

-random drops

-Achievements that unlock bonuses

-a system that makes monsters tougher if you ignore them, such as L4Ds AI director

-use them as ammo and health pots like in DOOM 2016 (not a fan)

-waves necessary to clear to progress (not a fan)

-Enemies gain XP if you don’t kill them like the nemesis system

-make it necessary to cull their numbers to not die (very good design)

-a mechanic I made up and have never seen in a game that I will not share until I’m ready. Sorry.

 

STRONGLY disagree.

 

Consequently, what’s your game?

 

Thanks for the input.
Unfortunately I'm not at a stage to give much information about the game other than that it's a 2D action platformer game with metroid-like game feel (minus the colored doors)