I'm looking for example games that are PVE with an "intel driven loadout challenge" that's actually a challenge?

This is an idea that has long fascinated me, and so I'm trying to find any games that have tried this to see how it worked out (or didn't).

TL;DR - the game(s) I'm looking for would need to have randomly generated challenges, and before you go into a mission/level it would need to let you see the random challenges/maps/enemies that were generated so you could configure a loadout that would help you beat the challenges.. and probably for it to be a good example, not all challenges would even be beatable.

Background

Many many games have sources of intel for missions, but they end up being tuned where this intel just never matters... and moreso, these games have so much "progression strength increase" that even if it was tuned to be important, people would just "get more XP and power" first and then the loadout challenge goes away.

For example, EVE online missions, they tell you the race of the enemies, which tells you the type of ships and weapons they will be using... you can even use a special scout ship to run in and see what is actually there. You *could* use all this to make a loadout that is efficient against that set of enemies or for that mission type, but ignoring this information does not make anything impossible, just marginally harder, which leads almost everyone to just ignore it in all but the most extreme scenarios. EVE also has much coarser types of different missions, such as combat vs mining vs scouting, but there is no **decision** for the player here, it's a requirement. To complete a mining mission, you simply have to bring a mining ship, and if you bring the wrong ship, you fly back to base and get the other one. Not a challenge.

Warframe, tells you some tiny details about the mission (and a few more details in nightmare missions), but it's not that detailed, and all the frames and weapons in warframe are so friggin overpowered, that you can complete nearly any mission in any frame... The only exception I can think of are defense/escort missions, which are substantially easier if at least one player has Limbo or Frost (and it's probably required so use Limbo/Frost if doing it solo)....or things like nightmare energy sap, where you basically have to use a frame with no energy (also not a decision, just a requirement).

In WoW, different enemies do different types of dmg (fire, nature, frost, elemental, physical) and has different type of weaknesses... and in theory one could do something to prepare for these dmg types.. however, in reality each player class/race has built-in advantages that you can't change... so you are not free to "use the other class" to beat this challenge. Which means players beat a challenge that is harder for their class by just getting 2-3 levels higher, or they skip it on that class. In softcore, everyone basically just ignores all this and just plows through. In hardcore, these types of details provided an absolutely *tiny* amount of challenge, but the only way to know the information is to look it up or have memorized it from previous playthroughs, which made it not feel like what I'm looking for.

An analog for this concept might be what happens in a higher level Starcraft 2 match, where in the early game any ability to scout what the enemy is doing gives you a big advantage in making build choices that counter their choices.

Game Elements I'm looking for

A game with the kind of loadout challenge im looking for would probably need to have a combinatorially larger multi-dimensional rock-paper-scissors type of mission challenge, instead of just "kill everything" when you are strong enough. For example, if a mission has challenges and bosses with permutations of 7 challenge elements, but a loadout only has **3** capabilities.. so you have to consider the challenge combinations to decide which loadout advantages you want, and which things you will overcome with player skill.. Some mission challenge permutations might be entirely impossible (like when Diablo 3 elites spawn with a horribly hard set of three affixes)... other mission challenge permutations might require using a small set of viable loadouts, each requiring a different type of high level player skill to fill in the gaps. Yet other missions might turn out to be basically easy with almost any loadout that meets the requirements.

A game doing this would need to have some kind of "mission intel" that was pretty detailed. Imagine Diablo 3, but where before going into an instance, it would tell you there are three elites in the instance, of types (mortar + vortex + reflect) (missle dampening + illusionist + jailer + teleporter) and (health link + shielder + fire chains + waller)... so you could then bring the right class or gear to deal with those types.

What games would you recommend I look at to learn about mechanisms like this?

I've worked on unreleased games with a similar mechanic, that unfortunately I can't go into detail on as some may eventually see publication.

Yes, it can be be a good mechanic.

I've seen it done to a varying degree in extraction shooters, several of them have loadout selection as you described so go play a few. Megaman had several times where you picked your weapons. Plants vs Zombies is another example, choose your plants from the pool and you're stuck with them through the level. The latest round of the Zelda franchise had a bit of that where you can pick up weapons only among those dropped by enemies which falls away late game, but there have been plenty of games, especially in the 8-bit era, where you only had a single weapon option and needed to choose to pick up what was dropped, or leave it behind.

Back in the old NES days there was a game Bionic Commando like that, choose between several different weapons for the level, do you want the general purpose gun, a slow, high damage rocket launcher with a slow fire rate, the wide cannon that shoots 3 bullets at once rapid fire in 3 directions but only reaches a short distance? Similarly, which accessory item do you want, the energy recovery item, bombs, the iron boots to enable kicking? You had to make some choices, and some of them you had to learn through play like which communicators worked in which areas, bring the wrong one and it is useless.

Design-wise, it's best to allow players to have the potential to succeed even if they don't have the ideal loadout. A sufficiently skilled player or that god-tier QA person should be able to beat the game with a kitchen knife and no armor. There can be a natural fit for a level where certain tools are far better than others, but a player who picked badly shouldn't be forced to restart to go pick the one-and-only solution.

Thanks for your reply.. I must have been a bit unclear in my description… (probably its too long)

I'm looking for example games which give the player a chance to “scout into challenges” they will be facing before they actually face it, and then build a semi-complex loadout to optimize their chances, because the challenges are randomly generated unique and not repeatable once they fail. (they get a different random challenge next time) I'm trying to research good (or bad) ways to present this “scouting” mechanic, so games without it are not very useful.

The example games you listed, if I understand them, the player just plays and if he fails he learns about the hard-coded repeatable challenge and tries again, maybe with a different loadout, and the loadouts are very one dimensional. I don't believe they have a “scouting” mechanic other than just playing the game. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

frob said:
Design-wise, it's best to allow players to have the potential to succeed even if they don't have the ideal loadout. A sufficiently skilled player or that god-tier QA person should be able to beat the game with a kitchen knife and no armor.

There is no “best” without an evaluation function, there are different designs for different types of goals, and your comment is the opposite of what I'm interested in. One way to think about this is that your comment describes a game where player dexterity skill >> preparation decision making, and I'm looking for examples where preparation decision making >> player dexterity skill.. because I want a huge part of the challenge to be the scouting→preparation part of the game.. instead of that being potentially irrelevant with enough raw player skill. You may personally not care for this type of game. but that has nothing to do with my question.

For example, PvP Starcraft 2 has a form of what I'm looking for (and BTW it's quite popular, arguably the “best” RTS). You try to scout the enemy early in the game, and then change your preparation (teaching/buildings) to prepare for your future conflict. You can have 2000 APM of micro control, but If you build 50 units of rock and he builds 50 units of paper, you still lose. And you can't take last match's failure and apply it to the next match, because every PvP opponent choices a different random challenge for you…. Thus the scouting→reacting becomes a greater part of the game at higher levels.

League of Legends (one of the “best” MOBAs) also has a tiny bit of this pattern, in the form of the draft. The enemy team draft is showing you a set of challenges, and you are free to pick your champion and runes to do your best at countering what you've seen in the enemy draft. Some counters are harder than others. At wildly different player skills, the player skill matters more.. at close player skills, the counter picking has a big effect. Some games are virtually won in the draft.

I'm looking for games with this kind of pattern applied to PVE, ideally with a bit more front-loaded scout→loadout phaze like the LoL Draft, rather than the fluid tech-ing/building of RTS. The game would be hard, with players “losing/failing” often, like in PvP games.

If you want to emphasize “scouting” it's probably better to let the player perform it in the game, with nontrivial skills and decisions. In Starcraft 2 the player needs to send suitable units across the map, exploring without being detected and attacked: the same gameplay as combat, and often more difficult than a straightforward assault, In a FPS the player could, for instance, pilot a stealth drone in the dangerous part of the map in order to locate and assess enemies.

On the other hand if the LoL draft observation and counterdrafting you describe is a good example of wht you are looking for you care only about sophisticated loadout planning, not about scouting; you need detailed and useful information as a starting point, but not the effort of gathering that information.