Comment on Stories and Mechanics around punishing over-aggression

Katana314@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Some games that come to mind:

Dead by Daylight has an issue with killers that keep their focus on one of the four survivors, ignoring the core objectives and other players. Worse, it often works well. There are many videos out there of experienced teams that find karmic counters for this practice, helping the victim escape the killer to some completely unknown location on the map, and often leaving the killer late-game with little to work with.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (a 4v3 horror game), on the other hand, developed some issues where the prevailing strategies for the victims involve stacking up abilities that let them ignore attacks so there’s no need to hide or move slowly. It ends up taking long enough for the family members to even strike them down that some will brute-force objectives right in the family’s face. Part of the game’s issues is, the maps are developed to be relatively tight, so there’s fewer places for family to check, but it also made stealth strategies relatively ineffective.

An old favorite of mine for countering “Rush Meta” is in Team Fortress 2. For single players hoping to run past players to objectives, the Engineer’s sentry locks on to them pretty quickly, and no matter how fast they’re moving, it spells death within a certain bubble. Being automated, it also means no one has to camp for this to stay around. The sentries still die to inexperienced players that are making a unified push.

TF2’s other “rush punisher” is the Heavy - a class with a low skill cap, but a high health pool. He deals ludicrous damage up close, but can’t move quickly. So, he’s most lethal to people that are running at/past him instead of attacking from a distance. He says it right in his intro - he can’t outsmart people. He’s just a strong presence in a push for anyone that doesn’t have a plan to slow themselves down in order to deal the ton of damage needed to kill him. For a long time, in matches where the enemy team stuck to having 3 pyros rushing the frontline, my sole strategy was to pile up on Heavy, forcing the enemy team to consider ranged attackers like Demoman and Sniper, slowing the game down as a result.

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