One of the main things that we’ve had in mind since the beginning was multiplayer. When we first started testing multiplayer , we quickly found out that balancing enemies for multiple players needed multiple approaches to make it engaging.
Just scaling enemy health wasn’t enough, as it felt artificially difficult. Enemies felt oddly tanky, even the lost souls, who were relatively easy to kill. So Jensen came up with a way to adjust how enemies should feel not just based on health, but across many things at once.
So lets dive into how these things affect the experience for the player.
Health
Scaling an enemies health depends on their class. We can scale a Lost Soul to go from 2-3 attacks gradually to 4-7 attacks depending on how many players are in the session. Its not a large increase, but it makes a difference when there are more of them, and your usual attacks, leave them just barely alive.
In contrast, enemies that are meant to take a lot of damage, like the Heavy Archer, scales their health much more. They move and attack slowly, and considering that many players can attack them at once, they should be able to take a significant amount of punishment before finally going down.
Poise
A character’s poise determines how much physical force they can withstand before they poise-break and get locked into a hit-reaction. The difference in poise varies greatly between each enemy class. So lets compare two enemies:
Lost Soul
- Total Poise: 2
- 2-3 Light attack break poise
- 1-2 Heavy attacks break poise
- 1 Charged Attack breaks poise
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤWeak Enemy – Light Attacks
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤWeak Enemy – Heavy Attacks
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤWeak Enemy – Charge Attack
We don’t scale this for multiplayer, as it feels odd to have the weakest enemy in the game suddenly able to withstand incredibly strong attacks.
Cultist Knight
- Total Poise: 5
- 6-10 Light attack break poise
- 2-5 Heavy attacks break poise
- 2-3 Charged Attack breaks poise
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤStrong Enemy – Light Attacks
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤStrong Enemy – Heavy Attack
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤStrong Enemy – Charge Attack
Since the player can almost never break their poise in a single attack, we’re free to scale their poise slightly per player that joins. This means that players piling up on this one stronger enemy becomes less effective as they can now respond to being overwhelmed.
Damage
We’re pretty careful with how much we scale damage, as we don’t want to always have the player at risk of dying from a single attack, but it does scale slightly with multiplayer to account for the increased player count. Right now its around a 5% increase per player. Not a lot, but should add up over the course of fighting multiple enemies.
Enemy Behavior
Enemies are constantly checking to see how they should respond to a players actions, and one of the things they can check, is not only how many players are around, but how close they are. So if players decided to swarm a a single enemy, they can respond by triggering a unique skill for when they’re surrounded. The Sword Knight will do a sweeping attack all around to try and hit all nearby players. or if they’ve taken too much damage too quickly, they build up a pulse of magic to knockdown anyone nearby.
This isn’t limited to just swarming though, they can even change tactics based on the specific character that they’re targeting. For instance, Lost Souls aren’t particularly fond of being being absolutely pummeled by Shold, so they tend to dodge around more if they see him.
In addition, Enemies have one more trick up their sleeve in multiplayer. If an enemy kills a player they become empowered, healing for a portion of the damage that they’ve taken, and gaining a damage buff until they’re killed. This means that any enemy can potentially become a significant threat if players are dying often.
That’s all for this week, catch y’all next time.