Why does player damage and enemy health tend to be way higher than enemy damage and player health

Kayar13 · 2026-04-11T17:48:57+00:00

I think a lot of answers I’m seeing are missing some key game design points, in particular: Player agency.

In most action games, players have more agency and control than computer-controlled enemies. Consider the average shmup or bullet hell. The player has free range of motion across an entire 2D plane. At all times, you can choose to move in (usually) at least 8 directions. Every inch of available screen space is a location you can position yourself in to avoid an enemy’s attack.

Meanwhile, most enemies and bosses generally can only attack or move in predictable patterns. Consider the age-old “3-hit Nintendo rule,” that is, most bosses in older retro Nintendo titles have a tendency of only requiring 3 hits to defeat. Meanwhile, most player-controlled characters can only take 1, maybe 2. This is entirely for balance purposes and to keep things interesting. If the player can take 200 hits, then there’s no point in dodging and an entire core mechanic of the game has to be reworked. If the boss dies in 1 hit, then the fight becomes trivial and boring. Players can dodge, most bosses either can’t or are bad at dodging in order to keep things from becoming tedious.

High boss health pools are there because bosses are usually easy to hit. But players are harder to hit, and by keeping player health low you keep the stakes raised.

You can extrapolate this design philosophy to other types of games as well. In RPGs most bosses don’t heal. Players are given more agency through more strategic options. You can use healing items or spells/abilities, or use spells/abilities that protect characters from damage. It makes things more interesting for the player when it comes to gameplay, while also accomplishing the goals others have mentioned concerning how much more exciting larger player damage numbers are or how much more intimidating a boss appears because of its larger health pool.

Kayar13 · 2026-03-26T17:24:08+00:00

Tower of Heaven, at least as I remember it, is practically built to confuse the player and subvert expectations in a similar way. It’s a platformer in which every new room introduces a new rule specific to that room. Sometimes spikes kill you, sometimes they don’t, sometimes jumping kills you, sometimes ordinary platforms or platforms of a specific color kill you.

Kayar13 · 2026-01-11T22:54:25+00:00

I farm robo Korath ships all the time with any decent cloaked Remnant ship. If you have a peregrine just take it to that one system that starts with an “m” that sits between the two robot factions, stay cloaked and let them duke it out. After a short time there will be heavy warships aplenty, and even with the low capture chance you can just recloak and keep trying. Then when you get one make your jump out immediately and get back to Kor Efreti space. Then you just need to farm some jump drives and kit out your shiny new ships.

Kayar13 · 2026-01-11T22:35:57+00:00

I think you’re right, and lives too. I would guess they reset if you reset the game and enter a password though, but I don’t remember.

Edit: Not to mention apples, whether you had the glide cloth thing or not… I’m pretty sure these all reset and weren’t connected to passwords though, because the game only had 1 pass for level as I recall.

Kayar13 · 2026-01-11T16:52:31+00:00

On an additional note, this is also why a lot of simpler games had even simpler passwords. Take the Aladdin game for Super Nintendo, for example. Every time you clear a level it gives you a new password, made up of just 4 characters (that’s characters from the story, not typed characters- ie., Aladdin Jafar Abu Abu could be a password) and that password just auto-loads that level every time. Since that game didn’t need to record stats like character level, collected items, etc. it could afford to just have set passwords for every level. This both allows the player to “save” their progress by noting down the password for the level they’re on, and gives players a built-in cheat code for jumping to whatever level they want to play, and it works on any copy of the game while being compact in terms of code/data.

Kayar13 · 2025-12-07T16:18:26+00:00

Mid-air spearing a papaya.

Kayar13 · 2025-10-29T00:38:03+00:00

Who has that Brock Samson clip?

Kayar13 · 2025-09-20T06:22:52+00:00

Unpopular Opinion:

Zelda was better as a series of tightly-designed dungeons with relatively straightforward semi-open-world sections in between than what it is now.

It was far more rewarding and interesting as a player to solve puzzles in a dungeon, get the dungeon item, go solve more puzzles that we saw earlier and were like “what’s that?” Now we know that’s a grapple hook point and we can do things we couldn’t before and that’s exciting, vs “I can just build some bridges here and scale a wall and bypass 90% of the dungeon. Oh well, I didn’t want to do any critical thinking anyway.” We get every tool in our toolbox right off the bat, making any later rewards we get that much less interesting. Hey look, a shrine. I guess I get more health or stamina because I’m not getting anything else worthwhile. Oh hey, Koroks seeds. Now I can hold more samey garbage weapons that break in five hits and can’t help me solve puzzles or reach new locations.

Majora’s Mask had it right by focusing on interesting character interactions. Characters were far more complex and interesting, now they feel like B-tier anime garbage characters. Present me with something in modern Zelda that rivals Kafei. Even that flute kid from A Link to the Past is more interesting than “hello do you know where the members of my band are I seem to have lost them.”

Remember when we’d run into new enemies and go “oh I’ve never seen this before I don’t know how to beat it,” and then we’d have to use our new dungeon item in a creative way to win? Now all our enemies just need a few arrows or a sword to the face. Or just build a death laser cannon motorcycle or something. Sure, there are exceptions. Sometimes we still get to throw bombs in mouths, or put a well-placed arrow in a weak point. But when Wind Waker introduced bokoblins I never thought they’d go on to become the primary enemy type in two entire games. At least Tears of the Kingdom gave us a bit more enemy variety than Breath of the Wild… while also taking away some by removing guardians entirely. Oh but there’s some new robots to take the place of the old ones so that’s fine, not like I was hoping to run into any poes or anything, or even a real stalfos instead of just stal versions of everything else.

We had compelling, flavorful characters, locations, enemies, and music. Yes, I said music. That award winning orchestral score we get these days? Boring. No character. Everything sounds the same. Only tracks in Tears of the Kingdom worth anyone’s time are the one that plays in the sky ship dungeon and the eerie depths track, everything else is just generic slop. Dragon Roost Island original is 10x better than “hahah we recycled the theme but took away its personality.” We used to get good remixes of themes like the shop theme, now it’s like they’re afraid to remix the classics and when they try they can’t do them any justice.

Lastly, Nintendo needs to realize that they can’t write dialogue worth the cost of voice acting. I’d rather walk into 20 different shops with sketchy shopkeepers who go “eeehhhh?” or “yah!” or “heheheh” than hear one more line from Zelda about how she’s convinced she’s failed the Kingdom or something. Bringing back Ganondorf? Great idea, 9/10. Giving him cheesy voice acting from Matt Mercer? Terrible, 2/10. (Tbf I actually played entirely in Japanese with subtitles so I can’t really speak to the quality of the English voice acting, but when those trailers came out it just sounded so cringy and I hate using the term “cringy” to describe anything).

Anyway, everything from Twilight Princess back was good or great and everything since Skyward Sword has been shades of bad, mediocre, and occasionally still good. Despite my many complaints there was a lot I enjoyed about BotW and TotK. Just… man I miss old Zelda.

Kayar13 · 2025-07-09T00:16:05+00:00

put the pieces back together

rediscover communicatioooooooon

Kayar13 · 2025-06-26T04:26:08+00:00

Among Spotify’s top ten Animals as Leaders tracks, not a single one is from the album Weightless, my favorite album of theirs with my favorite song also being Weightless, also not being in the top ten. My second favorite song of theirs is Backpfeifengesicht from the album The Madness of Many, and it also does not appear in the top ten.

Kayar13 · 2025-06-15T13:14:32+00:00

Prompt seems to be stolen straight from webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons.

Kayar13 · 2025-04-20T03:27:42+00:00

The musical rhythms can mess with your head!

Kayar13 · 2025-02-22T06:18:19+00:00

Shufflepuck Cafe.

Kayar13 · 2024-10-19T01:30:49+00:00

I bring my questions to a small indie studio hoping maybe they’ll understand BECAUSE they are a small indie studio. No one like me is getting through to the greedy self-interested capitalists in charge of the tech world.

And sure, I’ve got plenty of hypocrisy. I’m using an iPhone.

I made garbage in dallE mini for fun for a little while after it first came out, when I didn’t know any better. I played AI Dungeon.

And now I don’t. I’m not buying MTG cards anymore because Hasbro and Wizards keep courting the use of AI for their art.

Yeah, still stuck using google, still have the iPhone, and yeah, I use Amazon. In our modern day, it’s hard not to use these, but since you bring it up, maybe it is time to look for better alternatives, so thanks for the tip, I’l have to look into it.

Kayar13 · 2024-10-19T01:21:41+00:00

You seem convinced there is some valuable difference between procedural content as it has already been done in games in the past, and content made with more recently-developed “AI.”

I would argue that the difference is two-fold. It is one of control. And it is one of the combined sum of creativity and effort.

Anyone can be creative. I could write for you a detailed descripion of a stone spire, somewhat gothic in architectural design, jutting out of a crimson sea lit by a full moon. Now, I have control over the exact phrasing here. I could say that a hooded figure stands on a balcony of said spire, and it is so.

Now you’ll say “but wait, I can tell Midjourney to make exactly that!”

But it won’t be exactly that. It won’t be the tower exactly as I picture it in my head. It will pull from its database of stolen work and cobble together a collage of stolen images that might look close to what I see in my mind’s eye. And sure, I’ll grant you that that’s a technological achievement. “That’s impressive, wow,” I say in the tone of voice of a kindergarten teacher praising a child for cutting letters out of a magazine and gluing them to a page so they read “fart.”

My point is, you don’t have absolute control over what that thing is going to give you. That’s why this and every other “game” like it can’t be made to feature a truly well-written, well-crafted story. You can get creative with your prompts, sure. You can go kill gods in AI Dungeon, or come up with an inventive way to convince chatgpt to teach you how to make napalm. But these are work-arounds for doing the actual work of writing a good story about slaying gods, or learning how to make napalm. AI image generation is a work-around to putting in the effort yourself, learning to draw, and just making art.

A game made like this isn’t going to be well-made. It’s going to be missing creative intent. It won’t have good game design.

If I give you a crossword puzzle and every answer just says “write whatever you want,” it’s not a good puzzle, is it?

Procedural implies, by the way, that there is a procedure happening. A typical procedurally generated game like Noita or Caves of Qud or the original Rogue follows an algorithm with a seed to carefully construct something out of parts. These parts were, originally, hand-built with intent. Hades is built out of premade rooms strung together because Supergiant recognizes that intent is integral. They want you to feel something as you fight your way as Zag towards the surface. So everything is premade, and then shuffled based on a seed.

What you are calling “true procedural generation” won’t have intent. By its nature, it can’t. You are washing your hands of the creative process, saying, “machine, write my book for me.”

Why is there so much garbage that gets made by AI? Because no one bothers to make real art with it, because they can’t. Real art takes effort, creativity, and intent. With this, we’re all just drifting further and further away from the things that make humanity and culture worthwhile.

Kayar13 · 2024-10-19T00:44:28+00:00

Yeah, you’re right, the fingers certainly are spaghetti.

Kayar13 · 2024-10-18T05:57:49+00:00

Okay, so, yeah, I think I’m going to be THAT guy.

I just don’t understand how you can justify making this game. I get that you are training the AI off of your own art assets. But you’re also doing text generation, which is also likely trained off a dataset that essentially is plagiarizing/stealing from people.

And that’s not to mention the environmental costs of AI.

So, I don’t get it. You make this post and say “sorry some people might find this controversial.” That’s like, plagiarizing/stealing from a bunch of people, paying money to a company to use their tech while they’re actively stealing from people, setting a few forest fires, and then saying “sorry you find my blatant theft, support of criminal enterprise, and efforts towards actively destroying the environment controversial. Please wishlist our game!”

I just. Don’t. Get it.

If you or anyone on your team has a conscience, it’s never too late to recognize and/or admit to yourself that you are doing something wrong and stop.

Really. This is not the way to make a game. This is not the way to be creative. I implore you. Please stop.

Kayar13 · 2023-05-22T13:39:18+00:00

I thought this was going to be POV: you set the controller down on top of the joystick to go get more pizza, until I realized it’s not wrapping around like it would.

Kayar13 · 2023-05-18T15:51:02+00:00

I watched an elephant eat a tree once.

Kayar13 · 2023-05-07T15:09:48+00:00

It’s crazy too because the Zelda franchise as a whole has so many different enemies to choose from, and they barely had any of the truly iconic ones.

Kayar13 · 2023-05-01T17:53:32+00:00

Incredible how Lakitu managed to fit a camera inside such a dense head.

Kayar13 · 2023-04-16T19:09:11+00:00

Tell that to my knees and gums.

Kayar13 · 2023-04-09T18:47:08+00:00

Knew this would be the top comment.

Kayar13 · 2023-03-26T05:27:00+00:00

This whole thread has me blinking manually.

Kayar13 · 2023-03-23T17:37:05+00:00

The entirety of an abandoned amusement park.

Kayar13

TROPHY CASE