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View Poll Results: What would you like a future game's Mercenary system to be like?

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  • I'd want a system more similar to Odyssey's

    1 9.09%
  • I'd want to lean closer to the Nemesis System

    8 72.73%
  • I have other ideas (share in comments)

    1 9.09%
  • Not sure yet

    1 9.09%
  1. #11
    SixKeys's Avatar Senior Member
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    I've only played a little bit of Mordor, but Odyssey seems to take that system and divide it in two for some reason. Random mercenaries constantly respawning and having special strengths/weaknesses is one half of the Mordor system. The other half is nation leaders, whom you are free to stalk or kill out in the open. In Mordor the captains have special fortresses or areas they like to roam, they can be cowardly or aggressive, they can run from a fight or call for backup. All of Odyssey's mercenaries are suicidal brutes who just come at you without a second thought. Taking them down requires no special planning, just decent gear. Nation leaders allow for more pre-planning, but they have no special weaknesses or strengths which kind of defeats the purpose of bothering to stalk them. In every situation you can just storm the holdout and every leader will react in the same way.

    If a bounty system is to be brought back in future, I would prefer it be more like Origins, where mercenaries don't automatically hone in on your location with laser precision and there isn't a literally endless stream of them.
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  2. #12
    cawatrooper9's Avatar AC Forum Moderator
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    You bring up a good point about the nation leaders, Six.

    In fact, there are even tiers of leadership in Mordor. That opened up a lot of options for interplay. For instance, you could dominate a lower level Captain, and send him off to meet with his Warchief, waiting to "activate" when you arrive and ambushing his own master.

    I know it's a tall order, but the ability to manipulate the relationships between AI without fully controlling them really seemed like an effective method of making the world feel bigger than the player, while still making the player a major influence in it.

    Also, yeah- the roaming Phylakes were simultaneously much scarier than the mercenaries, while also being a lot less annoying. Often, merely avoiding them was the best strategy, and their patrols made that a valid way of maneuvering around them. My only issue was that once they were defeated, that game system was gone (which I realize seems to kind of contradict the issues I had with Odyssey's system not leaving a lasting impact on the world).
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  3. #13
    pesto.'s Avatar Senior Member
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    I liked the randomness of the phylakes too, but perhaps that's a better way to have the mythological creatures?

    I think there's room for many different types of enemy in a game like AC, no need to shoehorn everything into a single system. You've got soldiers and the military hierarchy, the political structure and hierarchy, police or mercenaries which is the civil enforcement wing, then increasingly fantasy elements, and of course the order and bosses / cults. There's no reason why you couldn't also have disgruntled employees or victims (or families of victims) employing assassins of their own to hunt you down.

    I like that there can in fact be many mechanisms in the game. So if the political system and soldiers were based around a nemesis system that doesn't mean you can't have the rest as well (to me anyway). Mercenaries as hired guns with no loyalty except to money (wouldn't it be great if you could hire them too?). Random super high level elite enemies patrolling the map that you cannot bribe or assassinate your way out of. Fixed location bosses. Outbreak/limiting enemies (infection/zombies essentially, imagine the current "there's an infected guy I want you to kill" mission actually having the possibility of him infecting others and you having to overcome or dose the horde, bubonic plague style). General guards and grunts on patrol and in forts. Wildlife. The Order. Pirates or unaffiliated factions.

    That's the nice thing about this being pre-brotherhood. There's no rules that say you're off limits to anyone, including other assassins, no code of conduct to worry about. Just a world to be tamed, but even then will still be full of scary stuff. It can all work together and be in there, the more the merrier because to me the problem with Shadow or War and Shadow or Mordor was simply that it wasn't diverse enough, Nemesis helped a lot but imagine it as the basis of a underlying RTS meta game to improve the political aspect in addition to everything else that we all like, including I think the current mercenary system and I think you're on to a winner.
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  4. #14
    ballon009's Avatar Senior Member
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    sorry to be my typical cheery me but... It WONT Happen. Simple reason really. The nemesis system is a exclusive property. AKA no UBI will not be able to do so out of legal reasons. Sure they can try to pay a large amount of money to rent it, but lets be real here they wont- as CEO is a money hungry meat bag.

    And it takes a lot of time to create a code that will function in ANVIL engine. Do not forget monolith it took them close to 13 years to design the code. As they slowly updated it over each Arkham game. If you look at Arkham Knight- you will see the nemesis system there.

    Then they spent YEARS to polish it- and it still sucked at first. AKA shadow of mordor.

    Because of the above reasons it is unlikely they will even consider adding a nemesis system. As it is much more complex then have a random pool of physical characteristics and behaviors and randomly pick them.

    ---> you have thousand uppon thousands of unique voice lines, avatars, outfits, locations etc that interact dynamically.

    Ubisoft has never attempted to use dynamic rendering ever- the closest they tried is basic stuff in Far Cry games- which also was abysmal.

    So sorry if i raining on the hope parade- but lets be real here folks. It will not happen
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  5. #15
    SixKeys's Avatar Senior Member
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    Originally Posted by pesto. Go to original post
    I think there's room for many different types of enemy in a game like AC, no need to shoehorn everything into a single system. You've got soldiers and the military hierarchy, the political structure and hierarchy, police or mercenaries which is the civil enforcement wing, then increasingly fantasy elements, and of course the order and bosses / cults. There's no reason why you couldn't also have disgruntled employees or victims (or families of victims) employing assassins of their own to hunt you down.

    I like that there can in fact be many mechanisms in the game. So if the political system and soldiers were based around a nemesis system that doesn't mean you can't have the rest as well (to me anyway). Mercenaries as hired guns with no loyalty except to money (wouldn't it be great if you could hire them too?). Random super high level elite enemies patrolling the map that you cannot bribe or assassinate your way out of. Fixed location bosses. Outbreak/limiting enemies (infection/zombies essentially, imagine the current "there's an infected guy I want you to kill" mission actually having the possibility of him infecting others and you having to overcome or dose the horde, bubonic plague style). General guards and grunts on patrol and in forts. Wildlife. The Order. Pirates or unaffiliated factions.
    There's nothing wrong with multiple enemy types, the problem is that all of Odyssey's are so samey. What exactly separates Cultists from nation leaders besides their title? You can run into Cultists at a small bandit camp, headshot the leader from a distance and presto, supposedly major threat to world peace defeated. They don't even get White Room speeches. Similarly you can accost a nation leader while they're out taking a walk in broad daylight, and bystanders will barely even react. Mercenaries have these little backstories next to their name but no unique dialogue or behavior alluding to said backstory (like "Raahh, you killed my brother, prepare to die!").

    Proper enemy classes should come with unique behaviors and personality. Odyssey's approach is "make an infinite number of NPCs classed as "Enemy" spawn in the world whenever the player kills one, and just designate them as Bandit, Leader, Cultist, Mercenary or Daughter of Artemis". All their animations are the same. Their faces and poses are the same. A Daughter of Artemis has no more grace than a bandit or a political leader. It gives the whole game a copy-pasted, artifical feel. These aren't people, they're AI behavior routines renamed for various situations with no other discerning features.
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  6. #16
    pesto.'s Avatar Senior Member
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    Originally Posted by ballon009 Go to original post
    sorry to be my typical cheery me but... It WONT Happen. Simple reason really. The nemesis system is a exclusive property. AKA no UBI will not be able to do so out of legal reasons. Sure they can try to pay a large amount of money to rent it, but lets be real here they wont- as CEO is a money hungry meat bag.

    And it takes a lot of time to create a code that will function in ANVIL engine. Do not forget monolith it took them close to 13 years to design the code. As they slowly updated it over each Arkham game. If you look at Arkham Knight- you will see the nemesis system there.

    Then they spent YEARS to polish it- and it still sucked at first. AKA shadow of mordor.

    Because of the above reasons it is unlikely they will even consider adding a nemesis system. As it is much more complex then have a random pool of physical characteristics and behaviors and randomly pick them.

    ---> you have thousand uppon thousands of unique voice lines, avatars, outfits, locations etc that interact dynamically.

    Ubisoft has never attempted to use dynamic rendering ever- the closest they tried is basic stuff in Far Cry games- which also was abysmal.

    So sorry if i raining on the hope parade- but lets be real here folks. It will not happen
    Well initially I thought so too, but then if you consider it a little more closely it's a pretty hard thing to IP. The actual code yes. The concepts though individually aren't anything new, it's the particular mix when used in a fantasy brawler that was the innovation. I think any hierarchical lieutenants to boss system would be open-field day in the courts otherwise, and it clearly isn't as it's the basis for pretty much every open world game story out there (defeat the lieutenants then defeat their boss to get to their boss).

    I think you're placing too much emphasis on the idea of complexity too. The complexity isn't in the idea or the code, it's really in the refinement. It wasn't that it was particularly difficult for them to code, these are talented guys after all. I think it was that it took a long time for the ideas to coalesce into something tangible that made sense as a game mechanic. They probably went through a lot of iterations trying to get that really good feeling version.

    Same thing is happening with AC though. Look at how the game has evolved over the years. Ubisoft will continue to refine the systems in place, no matter which direction they go in. Obviously it's a real question for the lawyers, but I think the ideas suggested in this thread are already divergent enough from the idea of Nemesis and closer to classic RTS mechanics that this wouldn't be that huge of a problem.

    The problem as I see it is timing. i.e. around this time I would expect the next game to be well under development, this sort of thing meanwhile is something you want to have as a discussion at the start of development. That means any ideas posted on this forum are only likely to make it into a general pile of feedback and requests. But who knows. It's fun to throw out ideas and see what everyone comes up with.
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  7. #17
    pesto.'s Avatar Senior Member
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    Originally Posted by SixKeys Go to original post
    There's nothing wrong with multiple enemy types, the problem is that all of Odyssey's are so samey. What exactly separates Cultists from nation leaders besides their title? You can run into Cultists at a small bandit camp, headshot the leader from a distance and presto, supposedly major threat to world peace defeated. They don't even get White Room speeches. Similarly you can accost a nation leader while they're out taking a walk in broad daylight, and bystanders will barely even react. Mercenaries have these little backstories next to their name but no unique dialogue or behavior alluding to said backstory (like "Raahh, you killed my brother, prepare to die!").

    Proper enemy classes should come with unique behaviors and personality. Odyssey's approach is "make an infinite number of NPCs classed as "Enemy" spawn in the world whenever the player kills one, and just designate them as Bandit, Leader, Cultist, Mercenary or Daughter of Artemis". All their animations are the same. Their faces and poses are the same. A Daughter of Artemis has no more grace than a bandit or a political leader. It gives the whole game a copy-pasted, artifical feel. These aren't people, they're AI behavior routines renamed for various situations with no other discerning features.
    I agree, that could definitely be improved and one of those ways to improve it is to have different mechanisms involved in each rather than just a single mechanism for everything. AC Odyssey is still better than Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War when it comes to enemy uniformity and repetition. Additions both to the systems and to the diversity of animations/attack patterns/audio files would fix that.
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  8. #18
    cawatrooper9's Avatar AC Forum Moderator
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    Originally Posted by SixKeys Go to original post
    There's nothing wrong with multiple enemy types, the problem is that all of Odyssey's are so samey. What exactly separates Cultists from nation leaders besides their title? You can run into Cultists at a small bandit camp, headshot the leader from a distance and presto, supposedly major threat to world peace defeated. They don't even get White Room speeches. Similarly you can accost a nation leader while they're out taking a walk in broad daylight, and bystanders will barely even react. Mercenaries have these little backstories next to their name but no unique dialogue or behavior alluding to said backstory (like "Raahh, you killed my brother, prepare to die!").

    Proper enemy classes should come with unique behaviors and personality. Odyssey's approach is "make an infinite number of NPCs classed as "Enemy" spawn in the world whenever the player kills one, and just designate them as Bandit, Leader, Cultist, Mercenary or Daughter of Artemis". All their animations are the same. Their faces and poses are the same. A Daughter of Artemis has no more grace than a bandit or a political leader. It gives the whole game a copy-pasted, artifical feel. These aren't people, they're AI behavior routines renamed for various situations with no other discerning features.
    Absolutely, and I think that really feeds into part of the reason why I find the Mercenary encounters a lot less engaging than I was hoping they'd be.

    Even games like Black Flag and ACIII had different types of enemies who were more or less vulnerable or resistant to different types of attack.

    I remember having a discussion with some people a few months ago (Six, I think you might have been included in this) about how Odyssey's focus on heavier RPG combat seems to have limited some of the cooler aspects of the game- for instance, at higher levels it's much more difficult to get a satisfying Spartan Kick kill on a big enemy, or how catching an area on fire does extremely little damage to enemies. Combat encounters typically boil down to just hitting the enemies until they're dead.

    I think Shadow of War also becomes limiting as the Uruks level up, in that they become immune to certain abilities. But it's done in a way that they still have weaknesses, other than just being hit to death.

    For instance, it often happens that if you're using a Combo, the orc will adapt to it and become immune to that attack. This means you'll need to switch up your combat tactics mid-fight, but if you're clever you could try dropping some Morgul flies on their head, or setting them on fire- things that could quickly turn the tide of the fight back in your favor.

    SoW isn't quite as heavily RPG as ACODY, but I think these things could have still been applied.
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  9. #19
    Drex404's Avatar Senior Member
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    I fully agree with Six about enemies feeling samey. They did a great job with ep1 of FoA though with the new enemy types.

    An idea about the merc system:
    When we have a 1 helm bounty on us, it makes sense to only have 1 merc tracking us. If we have a 5 helm bounty, why not have a 'band' of 5 mercs tracking us, tied together like a leader and his 4 guards? It would make a 5 helm bounty more punishing that way vs having 1 merc at a time funneling in. Also, there could be 1-5* bounty contracts available where we could team up with up to 4 other mercs, taking down an increasingly difficult merc. Going for immersion, I think it would be better to have the red helms removed from the map until we're in their general vicinity, similar to undiscovered mercs. It doesn't make much sense to be gifted the knowledge they're after us, and we should have to discover the mercs that are hunting us.
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  10. #20
    The first Mordor game was better than Odyssey
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