/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5176886
>>5182389
>>5176871
All of this basically.
Best way to screw with lost souls is to shoot them "once" while they're charging, they just kinda float backwards because they were interrupted with a painstate. Just dont do it again otherwise they go back to normal roam and can attack you again (shotgun, pistol).
The real reason they're used is to prevent rocket spam, thats why they're in E2M8 instead of a bunch of Barons. You've got rockets to burn against the Cyber, the lost souls are there to get in your face and make you eat your own explosives.

Good Doom style game?
I suggest 4 weapon switchout similar to Rise/Triad and allowing melee to use with any weapon you've got (similar to duke's boot or halo's rifle butt mechanics).

Also shotguns dont have to be shotguns...
- Some kinda thing that sprays projectiles in rapid succession, I like the idea of a goop gun that spits out a bunch of low gravity blobs, then they detonate 1-2 seconds later. So its like a flamethrower with more range but does damage like little grenades.
- Burst fire weapon that sprays shots all over the place because of recoil, but it fires real fast. Secondary fire mode shoots 1 shot at a time with reasonable accuracy.
- Grenade Launcher that shoots low powered grenades (20mm?) but its got a canister buckshot load it can also fire. Separate ammo type pickup. This one you can give it a wide spread because IRL those actually do spread kinda wide. There's a future-setting gun in Black Ops 2 like this which you get early on during a hang-gliding mission.
- Also you can go tandem with Shotgun blasts... have it shoot a strong reasonably accurate projectile (a small slug) with a pattern of buckshot around it. So close counts, but it still favors accuracy.
- Dont make shotguns do "per hitscan" damage that stacks up * number of hits. Use a mechanic where single hits do crap damage but can still faze targets, while the more hits you take, and the closer you are, the more damage gets caused in total.

>>5110101
One good balance idea to do with this is make rockets do 40 dice of projectile damage but you only get 3 or 4 rockets per rocket box. Thats more realistic since taking a direct hit from an explosive will fuck up your world alot more than the external blast will.

Then make Shotguns do shit damage inherently and just provide a damage multiplier against enemies who are most affected by it. I would even make the damage more random so it doesnt feel so robotic and systematic (use the 1d5 calculation the enemy hitscans use). Maybe Dice x2 damage and soft targets or flying enemies take x4 damage.

The SSG is also a classic example of a need for Damage Typing. They gave it 20 pellets because they wanted it to do 200 damage on a full blast. But that could have been accomplished by making it shoot 14 pellets, natural and logical considering it fires two shells, and give it a damage multiplier of x7 to the bullet dice instead of x5 so that each pellet did 14 on average.
> well thats not actually an average of 200, its 4 points shy
> this only matters when you're trying to kill Cacos though, everything else that matters is far below that or its 300 or 500 hit points
> besides Cacos should have one more chance to kill you

Another thing game designers frequently did back in the 90s was administer rules on a case by case basis. Like how the Shambler in quake "takes half damage if its a rocket or grenade" or the aforementioned in Doom making a major boss "does not take splash damage". This too was very lazy with no forward thinking involved, if it gets the job done then good type of attitude. I think it hearkens back to Dungeons & Dragons since that game is pretty much duct taped together with this kind of rules mentality.
> if its not sunday and its not wednesday, but its also not tuesday or friday, then add a +3 bonus to whatever is being rolled