building a better first person shooter part 3: enemy mine
So! First, we talked about a specific subgenre of first person shooter, loosely starting with Unreal and Half-Life and dying off around 2011 or so, with a few last gasps in games like Doom 2016 and Titanfall 2. Then, we talked about guns and how they work. Throughout this series, our goal has been to understand shooters and what makes them fun, because it’s not just the pointing and clicking that makes a shooter.
Now it’s time to talk about the final core component of a first person shooter: the enemies.
But before we get started: hey, I did my taxes a while ago, and apparently doing that broke the plan I was paying off with the state; I hit every payment on time, but apparently just “doing your taxes changes the balance” was enough to break things on Kansas’ side. Federal was easy; we just adjusted the payment plan. But with State, doing my taxes is apparently a bad thing, which means now, my taxes are due PRONTO. My car insurance is also due! I have already had to give up medical insurance so I’m not even getting my diabetic care. So, please, if you like this article or any of the preceding ones, if my work has helped you at all, just 350 of you sending $10 apiece would help me out tremendously. Please. I need help badly.
Look, there’s a lot we could talk about beyond just the basics of “what kind of shooter is this, what are the guns like, and what are the enemies like?” Level design is an obvious big one here, audio design is also crucial, and I could write big essays about those topics all on their own, but I’ve got other things to write, and we’ve been on this FPS kick for three months.
The thing is… we’re talking about enemies, and wouldn’t you know it, enemies are closely intertwined with both level design and sound design.
So! Let’s step back a bit.
First person is “I,” as in, when a narrator in a story says “I went to the store.” Third person is “he/she/they,” where the narrator is telling us about another character, like “she goes to the store.” Second person is “you go to the store,” and you see this most often in choose your own adventure books. Usually, ‘second person’ doesn’t translate to a camera perspective in the way that first person or third person does.
In other words, a first person shooter is a game in which you, the player, view the world from a “first person” perspective — that is, from your point of view. The camera sees what you see, like the eyes in your head. A third person shooter, in contrast, would be a game where the camera is outside the player, looking at them.
First person:
Third person:
Pretty simple, right?
Some people wonder “well, why don’t we have a second person camera?” If ‘first person’ is from the perspective of ‘I,’ that is, the camera perspective is literally emulating what you are seeing, and ‘third person,’ is ‘he/she/they,’ meaning the camera is watching another person, what is second person?
Well, look: we’re not really gonna deal with that because it’s out of scope for this piece, but people always ask because our brains think “there’s 1, then 2, then 3, so if you say 1 and 3, there must be 2, right?” But it’s more that second person is very rare because of how weird it is, and first and third are just way way way more common.
Short version: first person narrative in literature is when a person says “I did this,” and second person is “you did this,” and third is “he/she/they did this,” and when we get to cameras, we can show from the point of view (“I”) and we can witness another person doing something (“he/she/they”) but… “you”? Try to envision what a camera doing “you” is like, and you’ll at least see the nature of the problem. So, yes, the simple human brain demands a “2” between “1” and “3” but cameras are best at showing “from someone’s perspective” or “from an invisible perspective watching a person.”
Second person just isn’t that relevant to what we’re talking about. Sorry.
Now, there’s some basic differences between third and first person games in terms of things like how a game space is set up — for example, Resident Evil 7’s level design isn’t very conducive to a third person camera, because everything is so tight.
A game like Rise of the Tomb Raider has to have slightly bigger spaces so the camera can move freely around the player, right? Since the camera is not in Lara Croft’s head, like in the below image, and is in fact several meters away from her, we need a lot more room, because now we are moving two separate entities — the camera and the player — with a specific distance between them. It changes how we design the level, to some extent.
Third person is great for melee combat games — you can watch the character use their sword, you can help the character dodge around, punch, physically connect with an enemy. You’re getting to see the whole body on display.
In a first person game, because we’re looking at a much more limited field of vision (human field of vision is approximately 200 degrees, as I recall, but in video games, it’s closer to 90, because a monitor can’t wrap around your head), we’re spending more of our time thinking about distant objects in relation to us, and how those objects move around us. While third person games can also do this, there’s a bunch of different ways these things are subtly different.
So, when we design spaces, we’re designing them in part based on what we can see and how the camera behaves.
“But Doc, aren’t you supposed to be talking about enemies?”
Believe it or not, I am! It’s just…
Okay, think of it like this: we’re playing a first person shooter template test project in Unreal or something. It’s just you, the player, holding some temporary gun model, in a small box. In front of you is a stationary target.
The game would get pretty boring if the target stayed stationary, right?
So, okay, now imagine that the target is moving back and forth, like a shooting gallery in a video game. How many shooting galleries do you enjoy playing? Would you, right here and now, pay full retail price for a game that is just a shooting gallery?
What do we do next?
Well, we know, from the last essay, that good gun feel involves everything — the sound of the gun, the animations, and the hit feedback. It’s not just the animated reticle that shows you got a hit, critical hit, or a kill, it’s also the way the enemy responds to being hit.
A target that doesn’t move and just gets a little bullet hole stamped on it (because games rarely create actual bullet holes in the objects you’re shooting) isn’t going to feel all that interesting.
A target that flinches or explodes feels a lot better to shoot. An enemy that moves around so you have to try to get a bead on them, as opposed to standing still, trips that hunter instinct.
Like, check this Destiny 1 clip I made: I’m shooting enemy Hive Acolytes in the head, and they’re exploding. Since this is the text version of this essay, you can’t hear it, but the sounds enemies make when they’re hit is great.
Destiny 2 has some extremely good effects, like when you shoot a gigantic Cabal soldier in the head, and you hear his helmet explosively decompress and he groans his last.
These elements — sound, visuals, and enemy movement — all contribute to a sense of fun. In the same way an empty room full of targets that don’t react is boring, walking into a room where the enemies stand still and don’t react to being shot until they die is going to be boring too.
To design a good shooter, you need fun targets to hit.
To build a good enemy:
- you need to create a space that the enemy is fun to engage in,
- the enemy needs to be fun to engage with,
- taking the enemy out needs to feel rewarding!
This means that enemy appearance, enemy behaviors (do they shoot while moving? do they dodge attacks? do they alert other enemies to your presence? do they have special abilities like grenades?), and the way the enemy uses the level are all part of enemy design, which means that your level designer and your enemy designer need to be on the same page.
That’s why we started this by talking about third and first person cameras — because the way the camera works is going to determine how the level is built. The way the enemies move and how the level is built, together, create a fun combat sandbox. If you build an empty room with nothing in it but stationary enemies that don’t react, the game isn’t fun. Enemies need to get out of line of sight, and you need to be thinking about how to get out of their line of sight and maneuever through the level for the enemies to seem fun.
The other day, my friends and I were streaming games to each other, and I was playing a section of Silent Hill f where the level design was extremely narrow but the enemy felt designed for a much larger space, considering the way they were moving. The combat experience felt like an exercise in frustration, because the enemy’s rapid movement and attacks meant all the player could do was just… back up, attacking blindly.
If part 1 was “shooters are about movement,” and part 2 was “a good gun encourages player movement,” part 3 is… “enemies also encourage player movement,” funnily enough.
Think about a Zoo. If the animals were just locked in a cell with nothing to do, they’d go insane; we’d call it animal abuse. So, when we’re taking care of animals, it’s crucial that we provide them with enough enrichment to keep them happy and healthy.
Human brains are the same way, because we’re animals too — we have a lot of the same basic things going on in our brains as do many other mammals. You know how cats love to chase lasers? The human brain seeks stimulus like that too.
Playing first person shooters is the human equivalent of a cat toy. If we make our shooter, in all aspects — level design, combat, narrative — sufficient enough to be stimulating, we can enrich the audience’s brain, and that’s what we’re here to do.
So, as we design the game and its components, we design them for the sake of mental enrichment for the player.
We do not just build an empty room and have the player walk in and shoot stationary targets. We build a series of different encounters, different enemy compositions, different available weapons and ammunition, different level layouts, different scripted sequences, and so on and so forth.
If the series of encounters in a game —“encounters” are the different individual battles you fight — are all the same, then the game becomes predictable, and the brain is no longer being stimulated.
If one kind of encounter — let’s say 3 small guys, 1 big guy — can be symbolized by “A”, and that’s the only encounter mixup you have, then you have a series of encounters that feel like this:
A-A-A-A-A-A-A.
The game feels repetitive. You know what’s coming, so what’s the point of continuing to play? At some point it’s just groundhog day, and you’re getting bored repeating it over and over again. You’ve got a bunch of games on your Steam backlog, don’t you? Why stick with this one if there’s nothing that interesting going on?
But if we have another encounter, say, small guys who explode, or an encounter where two bigger guys aggressively try to chase you around, and so on, then maybe we’ve got our “B” encounter, our “C” encounter, and so on.
Instead of something as boring as A-A-A-A-A-A-A, we get A-B-C-D-E-F-G, and it feels better, because the game feels more novel.
Now, that said, if the player experiences new encounters with unfamiliar components every time — that is, every single encounter is so novel the player has to figure out what to do every time — then you run into a new problem, where you’re bogging the player down with excessive cognitive load. The player is having to learn too much new stuff too quickly, and it’s wearing their brain out.
When you do that, the player gets out of their flow state — you don’t want “stop-start-stop-start” a bunch. You want that mental wheel greased.
So an ideal encounter is going to have a lot of components we recognize — the big guys that chase you around, the small guys that explode — and we mix them up in ways that feel novel, even if we recognize all the individual components and instantly know what to do when we see them. A bunch of little exploding guys charging us on a bridge is very different than creepy crawly tunnels where little exploding guys lurk in the shadows, you know?
Here’s an example, Halo’s level The Silent Cartographer:
The opening encounter is pretty easy — you fly over a battlefield, and the game clearly sets the stakes for who’s fighting who: it’s you and your fellow marines against a bunch of space aliens, who are shooting at you. The fact that they’re already shooting at you makes it very clear what you need to be shooting at.
You start the level by running straight ahead. It’s a fairly simple encounter. Not a lot of cover, but enough to avoid dying. You’ve got some weak Grunts and a stronger enemy, called an Elite, to take on first. When you take them out, in the distance, some Jackals (and, I believe, another Elite) start shooting on you. Your NPC comrades (non-player character friendly units) help drive the battle forward (giving you a sense of where to go).
Aaaand then the game gives you a Warthog, a kind of jeep with a gun mounted on it.
You hop in, and you start driving. The next encounter, then, is you in a vehicle happening upon some enemy forces, who start shooting you. You can get out and shoot, or you can drive around while the gunner in your Warthog shoots the enemies. The level design has changed, and the way you entered the area is different (on vehicle vs on foot), so the encounter feels very different, despite having the same enemy makeup.
The next encounter — which is further up the road, and features some enemies shooting at you as a way of signaling “hey, there’s more fighting this way!” introduces a new enemy type: The Hunter, who is very tough. Since you’re coming to them with a vehicle, you get a really good sense of just how tough they are. The next time you encounter Hunters in the level, you’ll almost certainly be on foot.
In fact, while Hunters always appear in packs of two, the context often changes. Maybe you see the telltale green flame of their cannons before you ever catch sight of them, so you’re going into the fight anticipating them, or they come running into a dark room from behind cover, catching you off guard and making your fight feel a lot more defensive. The physical layout of the encounter itself shapes, very heavily, how you perceive the encounter.
One exercise I like to do is look at games that are very popular and well regarded, and games that aren’t, and try to figure out why that is. Sometimes it’s simple stuff, like ‘this game launched at the wrong time,’ or ‘a bunch of youtubers were upset they didn’t get early review copies so they started saying the game was bad.’
I’m still going to trust my judgement first (because how miserable would you be if you based all your opinions on other people and liked games people told you to like instead of the games you actually liked?), but it’s worth looking at a broooooooad range of people and try to understand their response to it.
For instance, generally speaking, people think Destiny 2 has unimpeachable combat; even its biggest critics will tell you that yes, the shooting is really good. That means it might be a good place to start. Maybe they’re all wrong, of course, but it’s at least worth dipping your toes into to see if it’s any good.
Noticing how people respond is a pretty good place to start, but it will never tell you the whole story. After all, more people are going to have heard of a game that’s heavily marketed, and their sample pool of video games may be somewhat small overall, so you can’t guarantee that the game a lot of people are recommending is definitively good, but it’s definitely a good place to start.
Now, I’m one of the people who thinks Destiny has extremely good combat design, but I think Bungie’s been perfecting shooter gameplay since the Marathon games in the early 90s, and I think that’s a good place to start looking at how shooters work.
Over the years, lots of people tried to make Halo Killers — games that would topple Bungie’s Halo series — and they all failed. Why? Well, lots of reasons, but the big one is that none of them were as good as Halo.
Take Haze, for instance. I was playing it recently, and a few things stuck out pretty immediately. First, the level design didn’t have much going on — it was lots of big, flat planes where you’d run around. Enemies would be far enough away that they were pretty small, but could still hit you from a distance, and they were largely human-shaped and designed to blend into the environment.
Contrast that with a game like Halo: Combat Evolved, which was most people’s first Bungie game.
Here, you can understand the combat space very, very clearly. Enemy projectiles are extremely visible bright green and blue lights, and enemy physical colors contrast with the surrounding environment. A good friend of mine once said that the thing about Halo was that you could look at a single screenshot and understand what you were facing and how to deal with them — and he was right.
Clarity is the core thing that makes Halo work, and it’s something you see in Destiny as well, whether it’s the lens flare on the enemy drones called Shanks, or the vandals that pop out from the environment. The projectiles wobble around, making them easy to spot.
Haze didn’t have any of that. Player decision-making was slowed down by the way the game looked, the way enemies communicated, and how distant the engagements were, among other things. Players need to see something and go “yes I know how to deal with this,” thinking a few steps ahead like “I want to get up there so I can get the high ground to control the combat space.” Getting a player to think 3–4 actions ahead in a shooter and be able to respond immediately to any challenges or changes is where the juice of a first person shooter lies.
“I am going to go there so I can avoid being hurt and damage my enemies until they are no more” has a trillion permutations, and getting players to make short-term, 5–10–30-second plans is key.
Before you get into the specifics of enemy design, you need to think about what the enemies are doing, and where they’re doing it in, and how they serve the goal of player movement.
Bungie games always make it clear what an enemy can do, will do, and is doing, so when you go into an encounter, no matter how different it is from other encounters, you have a good idea of what’s possible. Then it’s a case of navigating the level based on its unique layout compared to other levels, enemy behaviors you already understand, and changes to the encounter — such as other enemies entering the combat space.
Chain enough variety together this way, and you’ll create a good shooter, but the core of it is level design as a place a player navigates, and enemy design as a way to push (or pull) the player around the space.
In one of the 7 Day FPS Jam videos, Dan Pinchbeck, a game designer who got his Doctorate in shooters (but, as I recall, ended up making nothing but walking simulators instead, tragically), said that there’s basically two types of shooter, Doom and Halo.
In Doom, you walk into a room, a monster closet opens up, and you are ambushed, so you begin fighting the enemies reactively. In Halo, you walk into a room, see the enemies already doing stuff, formulate a plan, and then get to work fighting them.
A lot of boomer shooters pull from the Doom tradition — enemies either run towards you to do melee, forcing you to constantly backpedal or strafe to avoid them, or some of them walk towards you, stop, and fire, with the stop-aim-fire animation giving you a sense of when you need to dodge. If you’re lucky, some have projectiles, like Doom’s imps, throwing fireballs or whatever at you that you can avoid if you’re paying attention.
In a game like Destiny, you’re usually walking up to a space where enemy fire is already happening, or enemy action is extremely visible, like this room pictured below, where none of the enemies are aware you’re entering it. One of them catches you and the firefight starts, but at first, you get to see the enemies, make some snap decisions on who to target based on how many enemies there are and what kind of team you’re facing.
Visible enemy projectiles lazing through the air while explosions blast and enemies howl ahead of you gets you going “okay, I’m about to enter a fight. What do I want to do?” Bungie rarely gives you long to think about it, but they do give you enough time. I can tell the purple plasma fire of a Hive squad compared with the weird pulsing blast left behind by a Vex Minotaur and its Goblin attendants, even without getting eyes on them, you know? Just because I’ve played enough, and the game is designed well enough to make every single enemy distinct and readable, even at a distance, so I am thinking about the encounter before engaging in the encounter.
Thomas Grip, of Amnesia fame, once wrote a very good essay about this, arguing that planning is what makes a game feel good. You should read it yourself, and I’m sure some neuroscientists would quibble with it, but I do believe the core point being made is completely accurate.
When you can A) anticipate something, and B) think about what to do, and C) do that in a nice, quick time frame, it’s going to keep you in an ideal psychological flow state. You’re going to see a bunch of guys, go “I’m going to go get that one,” and then enact your plan. As the situation changes, your plans change, keeping things nice and fluid.
A long time ago, Valve released a ‘director’s commentary’ for Half-Life 2, and it was one of the reasons why people view Half-Life 2 as such a well-made game (I think more people should release dev commentaries; players would realize that lots of games have smart design, not just Valve games, haha); a lot of the stuff in there is pretty standard, some of it doesn’t even work (there was a bit where they were bragging about how their design drew the player eye to something, and it was then that I realized I had always been looking another direction when I came upon the scene they were so proud of)… but one thing I remember clearly was this:
When you come upon a bunch of enemy snipers, they always miss, so that you can be informed “there is a sniper here.” Half-Life 2 wasn’t the first game to do this, by any means, and Bungie was doing similar things with Jackal snipers in Halo 2, which released literally one week prior to Half-Life 2, but “enemies shoot at you to tell you where they are so you can be made aware that you are being shot at before you actually get shot” always stuck with me.
The game is telling you “here is what the game is doing right now,” whether you realize it or not, and it’s doing so through a combination of level design and enemy behavior; often, games like this won’t just shoot at you and miss deliberately, they’ll also have visible lasers to tell you whether or not someone is aiming at you.
It doesn’t feel nearly as good to get sniped out of nowhere, go “oh, there’s a sniper?” and then have to start the fight over; you can get a much stronger flow state by having the game tell players “yes, someone is here” than not.
The monster closet design of games like Doom does this often via loud noises; in horror games, you’re wanting the player on their toes, so having monsters jump out from behind a corner might even be the right move (but players are going into a horror game expecting that). In a game like Destiny, if you want enemies to surprise the player, generally, you’ll design the environment to make the player want to be on their guard, already anticipating that they’ll be ambushed.
But! One time, I was watching a stream by one of the Destiny devs, and they were talking about enemy design, and they started talking about how important it is to let players know when enemies are arriving and that they’ll be fighting the player.
In Destiny, one way they do it is with a dropship that has some somewhat-inaccurate weaponry on it (sorry, this is the best picture I had of a dropship). The ship always flies in slow, shooting at the player to say “hey, look at me, I’m coming in to drop some guys to shoot you,” or, in the case of the Vex enemies, there’s a bunch of smoke that appears, lightning effects, and then the Vex enemies teleport in.
One of the mistakes Destiny 2 made was having Cabal drop pods — big orbs that would kill you if they landed on you that Cabal enemies would emerge from. As Destiny 2 went on, Bungie got way better about having Cabal dropships fly in, dropping off Cabal forces, shooting at you the same way Hive or Fallen dropships would. “Hey, I’m gonna fight you next, okay?” “Okay, I’m ready!”
I remember the designer who was explaining this saying this was one thing Bungie was really good at, and how important it is to communicate to the player that new enemies were on the way. It doesn’t feel nearly as good as, say, fighting in a thick jungle and, after clearing all the enemies you see, suddenly some new guy shoots you from off camera and leaves you dead, you know? “Oh, okay, I just have to know another wave is coming” doesn’t feel very good.
Half-Life and FEAR both excel at letting you know about enemies through sound design. You’ll hear that telltale radio squawk, enemies will shout stuff like “I’m going in!” and other stuff that no one would do if they were actually gonna sneak attack you (because it doesn’t feel fun to receive a sneak attack), which may be unrealistic, but the point of a game is not to be realistic, it’s to deliver a specific, mentally-stimulating fantasy.
Think about a movie scene where a character, facing off against one enemy, suddenly puts their hand up to grab a weapon from off screen that someone else was swinging at them. How’d they know to do that? It makes them look so badass to just be able to tell what’s happening without seeing it, right?
Well, in games, we don’t have any proprioception — which is your body’s ability to sense itself and how it’s moving — much less the ability to ‘sense’ where things are moving around us.
When I’m playing a shooter, I can generally model the space around me in my brain and move my character around as if it’s a real 3D space, which means if I know where enemies are and how they move, I have a general sense of their physical location in relation to me, but I don’t have a sense of what they’re doing or how they’re changing their movement.
Sound design goes a long way toward communicating “hey! I’m doing this.” It ultimately lets us feel like we’re the kind of badass we want to be, by telling us what’s going on. That means great sound design is also clear, easily understood sound design.
It also means that the game can be funny.
I’m not talking like “haha comedy funny,” to be clear, I mean like… actually funny. When you blow up a Grunt in Halo and he screams that little “waaah!” as he goes flying, it’s funny. Now, I’m sure I could write a whole mini-essay on “Halo is extremely funny thanks to AI, behavior, audio, and physics,” but we’ve got more on our plate right now.
What’s important here is that good shooters are all about clarity — the player understands what’s going on, who’s spawning in, where they’re spawning from, what they’re doing, and so on. A lot of amateurish shooters, the ones with bad reviews and the ones your friends will go “ehnh, it wasn’t very good” about are almost always shooters that are not good at providing that clarity.
Now, let’s be clear, we’re not saying “the game cannot be surprising.” Surprises can be fantastic. But we want the surprises to happen in a way where the player is able to make decisions and plan.
All of this goes into making enemies fun to fight. You could watch the Team Fortress 2 director’s commentary stuff and learn how Valve believed distinct enemy silhouettes was good communication and design a series of perfectly visually distinct enemies… buuuuuuuuut if the level design, enemy spawns, audio and the like don’t provide clarity, the game still won’t be fun.
This is all chemistry, right? Like, if I get the perfect vanilla beans and handcraft my own vanilla extract, but then I don’t think about how that vanilla extract goes with the rest of a dish, I might end up tossing in ingredients that overpower it and waste all that effort I did. It won’t matter how good that extract is unless it’s working in harmony with the rest of the dish.
So before we think about things like “enemy AI” and “enemy design,” we need to think about what makes for fun enemies on a basic level, and the context we fight them in.
A blank room with enemies that don’t react is boring.
A blank room with enemies that do react is better, but still boring.
A blank room with enemies that react not just to being hit, but move around and communicate what they’re doing makes us feel like we’re actually fighting something.
What’s going on in our brains is much like a cat toy — we’re channeling that part of the human brain’s hunter instinct, going “oh, that’s interesting, oh, that’s fun, oh, I am figuring out what that guy is doing, and how.”
A level, though?
Take this shot from Destiny. You can see a very clear ramp on the right side of the image. An enemy could be at the top of that. An enemy could run around the side of the building (the edge is near the tip of the gun). We can also see the big enemy ship warping in — maybe that’s going to drop enemies on us (if you know Destiny, you know this ship flies overhead right before a “public event,” which is an activity where a bunch of enemies will be flown in and you have to defend a crashed satellite from them by controlling a point and killing as many enemies as possible).
So, we’re considering the space, and how we move in it.
The enemies — by throwing grenades, charging us for melee, or even just shooting at us — are moving us around the space. If we stand still, we die. Good shooters make sure we’re moving, just like we discussed in both part 1 and part 2 of this article. Enemies are yet another component of getting players to move around the space.
One reason I love Gears of War 3 and think it’s a game every game designer should play is because the whole game is built around not just horizontal platforming, like we discussed last time, but the mechanics are all about getting you to move. They’ll have a big, slow-moving, enemy walk in, loudly shouting “CRUUUUUSH” with a bass reverb that’ll shake your chest if you’ve got a subwoofer, or an enemy will toss an ‘ink grenade’ that won’t kill you, but does get you to run away immediately, or the burrowing grenade will start ripping through the earth toward you, telltale dirt trail flying up in the air to say “I AM GOING TO GET YOU, RUN!” and it’s awesome, but it shows you that cover isn’t something you’re supposed to stay in — it’s something for you to jump between. It’s about getting you to move.
Gears 3 may not be a first person shooter, but an essential action game to learn from.
In a good shooter, you are moving, and you are planning your movement, and all of this is pushing that lizard part of your brain going “food. prey. hunt.” and, like a cat who proudly drops a mouse it hunted on your doorstep, your brain feels a reward when it does the hunt.
This is a small pivot, and not a major part of this piece, but I’d like to throw a theory your way, which is this: I think this is a good thing. I think this is a pro-social thing, in fact.
We know that as video game use has gone up, violent crime has gone down. If we consider humanity’s propensity for violence to be some part of the mammalian hunter instinct, then video games might be serving that enrichment function; a good shooter isn’t just ‘fun,’ in a vacuum, it’s explicitly serving the purpose of satisfying our brain’s desire to hunt and chase things. A first person shooter is a safe outlet for the same mechanism that causes a dog to chase after a mailman, or a cat to go after a bird, or one of those toys with feathers or a fluffy ball on the end of a string.
What I’m saying is that a good first person shooter isn’t merely entertainment, it’s healthy exercise for the human brain.
The best shooters, the ones that really push the gameplay in fun and interesting ways, always seem to line up with enrichment for the brain. Maybe that’s what ‘fun,’ really is — enjoyable recreation, an outlet for some of our baser instincts.
But now that we’ve talked about the core of what makes an enemy… let’s get into some specifics.
enemy design
I mentioned before that Valve has discussed the importance of silhouettes in games like Team Fortress 2, and as you saw earlier, it’s important to be able to instantly determine what threats are facing you. The faster you understand what you’re fighting, the faster you can make decisions, and the easier it is to keep you in the groove.
If you don’t know what you are looking at, this can be a real challenge.
Now, sometimes, that’s just fine, like when a big boss comes in — because you want to be spending a lot of your attention on a boss, figuring out how to go up against it. But generally speaking, if you walk into a room, you should have a good sense of how an enemy is going to behave.
Now, in most first person shooters, you’re going to run up against the same core enemy types:
You’ll have a soldier, who’s a generic enemy with some kind of assault rifle, and wearing normal soldier gear. Then you’ll have a shotgunner, someone wearing body armor; he’ll look a little bulkier, and his job is to run up and force you to scatter or take him out quick. After that, you’ll have a sniper or scout, an enemy usually wearing a poncho or cloak, which sells the idea that he’s supposed to be sneaky and at range. Then, of course, you have the heavy, who is usually wearing a bomb disposal suit, takes a ton of damage, and carries a minigun.
Whether it’s Far Cry 3 or The Division 2 or Grand Theft Auto V or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 or Payday 2 or any one of a number of shooters, these are the general enemy types you fight.
This is largely because human enemies kinda… really only operate within those roles. They certainly can’t perform strange and weird feats that might make the combat experience feel good or interesting, which limits what you can do in a first person shooter.
It’s also why I prefer science fiction or fantasy for first person shooters. When you’ve got enemies who behave in quasi-realistic ways, there’s only so much you can do with the combat space. Like, in the real world, bullets are too fast for you to dodge, or even see, so a lot of shooting with real-world-style enemies ends up pushing you into cover and slowing you down.
If you can come up with a fantastical reason for why things are happening — whether you’re fighting robots or aliens or zombies or wizards —
In this clip from Doom 2016, we watch a pair of Hellknights push the player around the space with pure aggression. They’re melee enemies, highly aggressive, and extremely mobile, while able to soak up a lot of punishment. Their entire job is to get you moving.
Serious Sam achieves a similar idea with the Kamikaze enemies — which scream at you as they run.
Kamikazes are great, in part because everything about them is screaming “I am here to explode.” They are carrying bombs! They scream! You know exactly what they are and what they’re about, and you know you gotta take them out. Or ride them, as in the above video (this is not how you are supposed to play Serious Sam).
Now, these are enemies who push you around, but what about enemies who pull you?
Take Hunters in Halo. They push you — by getting up close and trying to punch you to death — but their weak point is on their back, so you need to try to move around to shoot them there. That’s got more forward momentum, a kind of pull, rather than a push. With Halo’s ‘golden triangle’ philosophy — melee, grenade, gun — enemies like Grunt, and weapons like the Gravity Hammer or Energy Sword encourage you to get up close to your foes.
Some people design their shotguns to do this as well, or have enemies whose purpose is to get close to you so you want to get close to them.
Ever watched a lion or something go after a group of animals on the Serengeti? You watch it dive into a group of scared gazelles or whatever, they scatter, and it chases after them, looking like it’s having the time of its life. It’s fun for that part of the brain — the part of the brain that makes dogs chase after cars or humans enjoy playing first person shooters — to switch on, so designing enemies who you can get you to jump into the fray is a great thing to do.
One of the ways to make that fun is to do it the Monolith way: dive into the fray, use bullet time to dodge enemies — something you can’t do in a realistic shooter, obviously — and listen to them scream “he’s too fast!” “I need backup!” and stuff like that. In Halo, the grunts are all “kill the demon! Ahhh!” and Brutes shout things like “Blood and thunder!” when only one of them’s left.
The audio doesn’t just communicate enemy states — like “throwing a grenade,” which you may note that your character rarely says, but enemies say all the time — because the only person who needs to know that you’re throwing a grenade is you, and the person who needs to know a grenade has been thrown is… well, also you. The AI doesn’t need to know any of that. Those lines are said to help you make decisions in combat, so that the shooter experience is fun.
Generally speaking, I think good enemy design is the following:
- a distinct visual silhouette, one that conveys what the enemy can do and how much damage it can take, and, if possible what critical weak points it has (like ‘this headshot will kill it fast’ or ‘if you shoot the gears on its legs, the big robot will slow down’)
- distinct sound design — ever notice how in Halo, you can tell the difference between a brute, a grunt, a jackal, and an elite just through sound? More importantly, the game tells you “hey, it’s dead” with specific death sounds that only that enemy makes. This is easier to do when it isn’t just human enemies.
- explicit, often exaggerated animations — when a soldier in FEAR ragdolls, you know he’s dead. When a grunt in Halo throws up his hands, you know he’s fleeing, unless he’s got plasma grenades in them, which let off a bright light and distinctive hiss so you know what’s coming. A generic human mook in Far Cry doing the same thing with grenades isn’t going to be as clear, which is why some games will put a bomb vest on a guy that beeps loudly and has a flashing light.
- extremely communicative — the enemy tells you where they are so you can keep track of them in space, and they tell you what they are doing.
All of this is in service to helping you, the player, make plans and react to changes in your environment. How they look and sound is crucial to making that planning — it’s all about telling you “I’m doing this” so you know what to do.
A bad shooter fails to do this, the same way that Souls games are always really good about telling you what an enemy like Bayle the Dread is doing — he roars, he does the windup animation, and so on — all to tell you that “hey, I’m gonna attack now.” A lot of people play the Souls games, feel “wow, so they’re hard,” and make enemies who are actually hard, rather than “tough but learnable,” which results in encounters that end up feeling unfun.
So, enemy design isn’t just “what looks cool,” it’s “how does this enemy tell me what it’s doing, and how does it stand apart from other enemies?” One reason a lot of bad shooters feel bad is because they’ll have tons of reskins of existing enemies; that’s something you can do, but you have to be very clear about what you are doing.
You’ll rarely see a fight in Halo where you, say, encounter every kind of Elite that there is. At best, you might fight three different types. Bungie color codes them — you can tell the difference between a standard blue elite, a tougher red elite, and the white, gold, and black elites at a simple glance, but Halo rarely put every single elite type in a fight, which meant players were avoiding cognitive overload.
I don’t love Warframe, not just because helicoptering made you move so fast that it kind of became the way to move and killed any sense of level design the game might need, but because enemies just kind of became, like… whatever. You don’t really have to think about how to fight an enemy in most content, and they reuse enemy skeletons (there’s a technical explanation for this, but think of it like the basic shape of an enemy and the way it’s animated for now) so often that you can have a ton of guys who kinda look the same and are a little different but not so meaningfully different that you can really think about what you’re doing.
I always thought that was one of Warframe’s big design weaknesses; playing that game never felt like I was having fun playing a shooter at any kind of technical level. I was just mashing buttons killing things to the point it hurt my hands to play. The only saving grace was Ember, and they changed her to require ‘more active play,’ and so I stopped playing.
With a game like Halo, the enemy variations are visible but not so common that players get overwhelmed by enemy types, which means combat can feel too varied without too many changes to the enemies.
So, if we know that having lots of different enemies is good, but too many different enemies will create an experience that gets so overwhelming players stop thinking tactically and just hit enemies with as much damage as possible, robbing the experience of the planning that makes shooter combat so fun and juicy.
One of the core issues I had with Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth (which is not a shooter, but the same principles apply) was that the combat encounters felt like they were designed on a spreadsheet. It was as if someone went “okay, I am going to design one of each and every encounter in the game.” So they took every possible enemy permutation and player team permutation and made sure to put it in the game.
The problem with this is that some combos just… aren’t that fun? Like, “this enemy is weak to magic damage, but we put your party that isn’t really about doing magic damage in the fight, so there’s a lot of waiting around.”
This means that even if you sit down and design a perfect set of enemies on paper, like Halo’s, and you build a bunch of encounters around that, if you aren’t thinking what weapons the players are bringing in — let’s say you had an encounter that was all about shotgun enemies, and you’ve moved to an encounter that’s all long-range sniping — you might end up frustrating your players, because they just got these really fun shotguns they want to try, and you’ve given them enemies who are annoying to fight with shotguns.
So try to think of your enemies, level design, player weapons, all of that as part of a whole — these are complementary aspects of the dish you’re serving up. Don’t put the wrong ingredient in, or the meal won’t be delicious.
artificial intelligence
There are some people who believe that ‘good’ AI is AI that is capable of beating you. A lot of that comes from the research IBM was doing on Deep Blue, a chess machine, and so “the AI is very good” meant that it was capable of beating people.
(hey, we’re talking about game AI here, actual artificial intelligence, and not LLMs or anything; we’re talking about the way the computer enemies make decisions about the things you are doing)
Now, there’s a million ways to do AI, and I am not an AI expert, so I am not going to talk about all of them. Plus, this is an introductory series, so I’m trying to help you understand what’s happening on a basic level. The more advanced lessons can come later.
A while back, a lot of gamers got very upset to learn that the reason there were no difficulty modes in the game Resident Evil 4, long considered a classic action horror game, wasn’t because “there’s just one difficulty and beating it means you’re good at it,” but because Resident Evil 4’s designers knew that people of all different skill levels would be playing the game, so they deliberately had the game adjust its own difficulty as you played so that it always felt tense, no matter your skill.
People who had previously built their self-worth on the idea that they were good players who had defeated the game purely on skill were very upset, because their ability to define themselves as “skilled gamers” suddenly went out the window. If the game could change what it was doing in response to the player, everyone could have fun, and in their minds, that meant they weren’t special.
But good AI? Truly good AI? The stuff that makes From Software one of the best in the world or FEAR considered one of the greatest shooters of all time?
That shit is all about making sure you’re having fun. Like we said above — FEAR always has its enemies tell you where they are. “Smart” AI might be sneaking around behind you to try to get the drop on you and win, but the goal for a shooter isn’t for the enemy to win, it’s to provide you with a challenge that you can overcome.
The enemy isn’t jobbing for you — but sometimes the developers will put in little tweaks here and there to make things feel just a bit better. How satisfying is it to shoot a guy holding a grenade, watch him drop it, and then have him explode? Really fun!
You know what’s not so fun? If he could react instantaneously (because he’s driven by a computer) and jump out of the way every time. Maybe we have the enemy path a little close to explosive barrels, so when you shoot them, boom, you’re more likely to hit them.
You got an enemy near a railing? Of course he’s gonna fall off it if it’s possible, because it’s inherently fun to watch a guy falling off a railing.
That is, of course, not the only way this works.
You ever seen Power Rangers, or any kind of tokusatsu show like that?
Notice something in this gif? The guys in the background aren’t actually attacking the Blue Ranger. If they did, that fight’d be over in a second. They’re moving, sure, but they’re not actually attacking; the goal is to make the fight seem exciting, not realistic. So the putties — that’s what the enemies are called — move around in the background, waiting to get into the fight, not actually fighting the hero, ’cause there’s too many to handle.
Shooters do this too. As I recall, both the Crysis series and Doom 2016 notably do this; in Doom 2016, I believe it’s a kind of ‘ticket’ system, where an enemy is basically given a ‘ticket’ to attack you. Not something you, the player, can see, but that’s what’s happening on the background. So you might see an Imp doing a bunch of animations in the background, but if the Hellknight is the one stomping your ass, the Imp will move around like a putty there, acting like he’s doing something when he actually isn’t.
I believe some games make this more intense by having enemies shoot at you but not actually hit. Kinda like what Half-Life 2 and Halo 2 did with the snipers, but not just to say “hello, I am here,” but “wow you’re getting shot at a lot!!! RUN!”
The idea is to feel like you are under fire, but give you a chance of actually outplaying what are literally impossible odds. They look like they’re shooting… but they actually aren’t going to hurt you. They just make the air feel dangerous and the combat feel intense.
One interesting thing Bungie learned — and discussed in their presentation “The Illusion of Intelligence,” which was a 2002 GDC talk on the AI and level design of Halo, since both of those things are intertwined, as we’ve said — was that if you killed enemies too quickly, the enemies wouldn’t be able to show off all their abilities.
Enemies would seem stupid because you couldn’t see all the things they could do. So, without turning the enemies into un-reactive bullet sponges, Bungie made them react, but gave them enough health to really show off what they could do.
I have a theory that the ideal distance for encounters (which, interestingly enough, is about the same in Halo as it is in games like Unreal Tournament 2004; I remember Cliff Bleszinski, who was a designer on the legendary Unreal Tournament series posting a picture of ‘ideal FPS range’ and it was like sub-20 meters or so), that is to say, the distance most fights should end up in, is closer than you’d want in a real-life gunfight.
The ideal distance needs to be close enough that you really feel like you’re in the fight, the enemies are near you and moving around with you to, again, keep you moving around.
You don’t want every encounter to be like that — you’re going to want some extremely long range encounters to vary things up, like, say, a sniping level — and obviously some games specialize in different styles of shooter combat, like Serious Sam, which is more of a Dynasty Warriors approach to shooter design.
But in general, having a lot of encounters in that 15–30m range is gonna feel way better than having it all much further than that. You can get it closer or further for variance, but that’s the sweet spot for the majority of the game.
If enemies are close, they can also show off what they can do — and Bungie’s quick to assure you of the importance of that. In The Illusion of Intelligence, this slide specifically highlights that enemies need to be capable of being fooled.
One thing I realized very early on when playing every shooter I could get my hands on was that shooters where All Enemies Are Alerted To The Player and Know Where They Are At All Times are boring.
You’d read complaints about games like the first Far Cry, where people were like “yeah, this game sucks because enemies can see you and kill you even if you’re hiding in a bush, and you have no idea what to do about it” because, well, knowing what to do is part of the planning that makes an FPS feel fun.
In Halo, if you dodge behind a rock, enemies might start shooting at the rock where you were. You may be able to sneak around and outflank them, which makes you feel smart, and it makes sense that you might be able to get real sneaky with it. You came up with a plan — trick the enemy — and you executed it. That makes you clever!
AI that’s way too smart would instantly figure out what you’re doing and the fight wouldn’t be nearly as fun.
Another great read is Three States and a Plan: the AI of FEAR. Now, that’s a game that’s widely been considered to have some of the best enemy AI there ever is. Here was the idea driving it:
The design philosophy at Monolith is that the designer’s job is to create interesting spaces for combat, packed with opportunities for the A.I. to exploit. For example, spaces filled with furniture for cover, glass windows to dive through, and multiple entries for flanking. Designers are not responsible for scripting the behavior of individuals, other than for story elements. This means that the A.I. need to autonomously use the environment to satisfy their goals.
Without getting into the nitty gritty, the idea was to allow the AI to be a little bit more thoughtful in dealing with the world, which was something called Goal Oriented Action Planning. Now, there’s a bunch of different ways to do AI in a game, like finite state machines or behavior trees, but the idea behind GOAP was to try to handle a lot of this procedurally — give the AI some basic tools, give it a goal, and have it ‘figure out’ how to do what it needed to achieve those goals.
This meant that, occasionally, the AI would solve problems in a way no one expected, which made the overall combat experience feel a lot more fresh than other AI solutions. Since the AI is basically taking “here’s where I’m at now, what’s available to me, and what I can do,” it’s free to ‘choose’ a solution to get to its ultimate goal.
At the time, it was pretty unique, and still makes combat feel pretty fresh, but GOAP is not always the right tool for the job. Still, it’s worth thinking about what kind of AI you want in a game and how you want it to behave. What works best for Serious Sam is not necessarily the right decision for Call of Duty, which is going to be very different from Halo, and so on.
But… GOAP is about planning, and watching an enemy come up with a plan and execute it can be really, really interesting for an enjoyable combat sandbox, as long as you’ve got something more than just run, move, and shoot going on.
Things like fallibility, not-actually-attacking-but-appearing-to, intentionally making bad decisions that let the player feel good, losing track of the player, and planning can do a great job of making enemies feel way more interesting than just “run at the player shooting,” or “take cover and shoot.”
When you’re designing a shooter, think about what you want the enemy AI to do — it’s the other ‘player’ or ‘players’ in the game, so think about the things AI can do that will make the game more interesting to play. That’s the important thing: if the player ain’t in the groove, you ain’t made a good game.
The enemy’s goal is to work with the player to create a fun experience. That’s what you need to consider when you’re building your game’s AI.
an observation on halo
Before Halo, most shooters would have a mid-point in the game where the player loses all of their weapons and has to pick them back up again. This works great in a shooter where, once you have a gun, it’s in your inventory.
Games like Half-Life go “here’s a pistol, here’s a shotgun, etc” in a specific order, then, when you lose all your weapons, you tend to get them back in a different order. Some games do it in the exact same order (weakest to strongest), but I don’t believe they’re as successful as the games that mix it up, because mixing it up gives you the ability to rework situations in novel ways. A player who has her pistol, shotgun, and assault rifle, in that order, may not end up in a scenario where she’s gotta think about her crossbow ammo because she doesn’t have the shotgun yet, you know?
In a game like Halo, where you’re constantly cycling through guns, picking them up until you run out of ammo, then swapping them for something else, ‘lose every weapon’ doesn’t really work nearly as effectively. So, what do you do?
Well, in Halo, you can’t mix it up that way, so what do you do?
Introduce a new enemy type.
In Halo’s case, it’s The Flood.
Now, my theory for why a lot of people dislike The Flood is because they behave differently than the rest of the game. Bungie introduces you to The Covenant, a bunch of space aliens that you can see walking in, that visually communicate what they’re doing, and all of the other stuff we consider makes for a good enemy in a game. Awesome.
The Flood, on the other hand, spawn endlessly, and you either wade through them, like in Halo 3 (though the level design in the Flood levels is often very intentionally confusing, which I think contributes to some of the frustration), or you backpedal as they attack in a relentless onslaught.
It’s a problem I’ve been chewing on for a while; if people are used to the ‘planning’ type of shooting that we see in most Halo, and suddenly we throw them into an enemy that relentlessly just approaches you to try and kill, and those enemies don’t communicate all that well, how’s a player supposed to plan? The idea of The Flood is that they literally flood the arena. How do you introduce planning?
I think the “just fucking ruuuun!” is a valid thing to do in a game. I think changing up how the game is played makes the game a bit more stimulating, avoiding repetition. After a certain number of encounters, you are gonna hit a moment where that does get a bit predictable.
But how do we get the audience to want to shift modes like that? Sure, me, I love it. I can pivot on a dime and have a blast fighting The Flood for a while. It’s a series of Doom-style enemies in a Halo-like game, and that’s neat. But is there a way we can acclimate players better?
I think there’s a way to do that, but I’m still mulling over how. I think this is a problem I’d like to solve, but I don’t quite have an answer yet, just some ideas. We’ll see.
a conclusion of some kind
So, this has been a three part series. First, we talked about the shooters I love — the grand, big adventures with cool set pieces and a sense that you’re there in all this chaos, mixed with really fun, aggressive gameplay. We really only get the Call of Dutys now, and while I do enjoy Call of Duty from time to time (the last one I REALLY liked was Infinite Warfare, which, surprise surprise, was breaking out of the Call of Duty mold in a fun way that emphasized player movement, wouldn’t you know?), it’s using realistic human soldiers, so it limits what can actually be done in the gameplay space.
After that, we talked about weapons — what makes an interesting one, what makes it fun, what makes a gun desirable or worth using.
And now we’ve talked about enemies (and, to some extent, level and audio design). All these components go into making a great shooter.
I think my dissatisfaction with boomer shooters is that they’re rarely at this level of sophistication. We’ve got a lot of movement, but it’s really fast to the point where you’re not really considering the level design. You’re shooting enemies that are often simplistic — they run at you, maybe shoot, and that’s about it.
Part of this is because boomer shooters are often made by very small teams of incredibly talented devs, and we should never hold a small team’s limitations against it. But some of this is just an awareness thing, an education thing. If you really, truly, study shooters, talk to shooter devs, listen to them, figure out what they’re doing and why, you’ll end up being able to make novel, interesting things people come back to time and time again. Play the ones you like, play the ones you hate. Figure out, mechanically, why the game feels the way it does.
With Bungie games, a big part of the way combat arenas are built are with large blocks of cover… but not the Last of Us-style “waist high oh i’m in a combat space” cover, no. Because it’s not ‘cover,’ in the sense that you’re hiding behind it to avoid damage.
In this Destiny screenshot, you can see how the big wall right above my gun there blocks out the arena. We can’t see what’s on the other side. Other cover is tall enough that you can’t see around it; this is done so that you, and your enemies, have to move laterally. The cover isn’t a place to wait behind, it’s a way to obfuscate vision so you have to reposition, constantly, in order to draw a bead on your enemies.
By blocking player sight, you encourage player movement, as well as get players to ask questions about what’s going on around you. Bad shooters often have big, long sight lines, where it’s easy to see what’s in front of you at all times. It doesn’t get you asking questions, and it doesn’t get you moving.
Shooters, are, at their core, games about moving, and all the mechanics are designed to get you to move in considered, interesting ways. We want you to see parts of the environment and go “what’s up there?” or “where did this enemy go?” We’re playing peek-a-boo, tag, and a bunch of other stuff. As we advance our understanding of encounter design, we can start looking at things like Takeshi’s Castle. We can build more interesting, more stimulating player spaces.
And we do that by getting players to think about moving, not being purely reactionary.
If you do it right, you’ll make a successful game, because it’ll give your players what they need, and they’ll tell their friends they had fun.
There’s obviously a billion other things that go on here — players need a good fantasy, an interesting narrative, a reason to share the game with their friends, and so much more — but at the core, if you can nail what a shooter really is, which is the most sophisticated cat toy on Earth, for players who want to be engaged, want to be stimulated, want to be excited and enthralled…
You’ll make something people love.
I hate rattling the tip jar, but these articles are free and they help pay the bills when people like you decide to tip, so here’s the situation: hey, I did my taxes a while ago, and apparently doing that broke the plan I was paying off with the state; I hit every payment on time, but apparently just “doing your taxes changes the balance” was enough to break things on Kansas’ side. Federal was easy; we just adjusted the payment plan. But with State, doing my taxes is apparently a bad thing, which means now, my taxes are due PRONTO. My car insurance is also due! I have already had to give up medical insurance so I’m not even getting my diabetic care. So, please, if you like this article or any of the preceding ones, if my work has helped you at all, just 350 of you sending $10 apiece would help me out tremendously. Please. I need help badly.
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