>>723880583
“Aggressiveness” on its own isn’t always interesting. What makes enemies with a lot of attacks fun to fight is that the game is able to check your knowledge and responsiveness more thoroughly. All the moves in the world aren’t interesting if the boss only has 2 things it can do because once you know the answer to those two things, you don’t NEED the rest of your kit.
And yes, I know it’s reductive as fuck to approach action game design by suggesting every player attack must have a unique use-case, that’s stupid. But when what makes the games fun is figuring out how to deal with threats, making those threats actually threatening is about more than just making them spam nonstop offscreen rockets.
I think action games should aspire to do both. Give the player a wide kit that accomodates a lot of techniques and playstyles, and also give enemies a wide kit that forces the player to be adaptable. It’s rarely seen for action games to do this mostly because it represents a huge workflow issue. But if you think about fighting games, that’s what makes them work; you and your target both have a comparable diversity of moves. You have to think about all the ways you can threaten your target AND all the ways your target can threaten you.
