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I happened to think about the AVGN's video about vampires and how it's stupid that water kills them or whatever, and generally I was thinking about enemy weaknesses.
What are your opinions on what types of enemies should have what types of weaknesses?
My main point of thought is, I don't think fire should be effective against the undead.
First of all, undead is a broad category. People associate it with zombies, but think about all the things it can contains! Skeletons. Zombies. Ghosts, Tons of crap.
Skeletons don't care if there's fire. Bones don't even catch fire. Stick a bone in a furnace, you know what you have? A bone. Maybe it would burn you if you held it, but it's still just some random bone.
And for zombies, why should fire be especially useful? Yes, the fire could burn them, but that's not special. Lots of things catch on fire. It's not like the zombie has to care about pain or oxygen deprivation. Plus, why not cold? You think a zombie can move as efficiently if it's frozen and all the water in its cells burst? Or if electricity from lightning spells is coursing through it, triggering nerves at random? I don't think so.
If you want to have a Holy or Silver type of element (Pearl if you're on the SNES), that's fine. Make it effective against the undead, werewolves, tons of stuff. But don't try to tell me that fire should be effective against all this crap. Don't sell me a jar of decade-old milk and tell me it's tofu.
Now one thing I can get behind is what Diablo 1 did. Blunt weapons do more damage to skeletons. That makes sense! You can't cut bones, really, but you can break them.
Machines being weak to lightning? I guess. I mean, they should overheat from fire, too, but lightning does make sense. And short circuit from water. And maybe break down on some level from cold????
ONE MORE THING. What's with flying enemies being completely immune to Earth-elemental attacks? If they're flying so high you can't launch a rock at them, how can you hit them with a sword or anything? Maybe make them resistant to Earth-elemental stuff, sure, but immune? Screw that.
From the conclusions I'm jumping to, it seems like enemies should only be resistant to certain things, not weak to them, except in special circumstances (like a specific elemental being weak to the opposite or something). It makes more sense in some games than others.
Thinking about this kind of makes me want to design a medieval fantasy-ish version of Fallout 2 where you get various kinds of melee weapons with blunt and cut and pierce type attacks, maybe a quarterstaff gets a critical bonus from a thrust, but it has no ability to pierce, that kind of thing.
Please use this topic to gripe about the enemy weakness schemes that you've encountered that don't make sense to you. Or tell me that my conclusions are dumb for X Y Z reasons.
