Some notes and suggestions

[EvilChaosKnight]

Some notes from my experience so far on Exterminatus. Currently on e1m7.
The game looks pretty in its pixel form and feels great when it works. But when it doesn't it gets frustrating for all the wrong reasons really.

- Damage feedback, where art thou? I can't tell if I lost 5, 25 or 100 health. It's just a tiny grunt and a minor indicator on the screen.
- Automap? Or at least a kills and secrets counter? Not a fan of getting 99% kills or 6/7 secrets after a 40 min map.
- Related to the above, some of the levels block backtracking for no apparent reason whatsoever, so I can't even go back to find that corner camping cultist or a nurgling stuck behind level geometry.
- Enemy telegraphs vs danger ratios are all over the place. CSM grenades take ages to detonate despite tiny blast radius, bullets and bolts are slow and tickle you, plasma cultists seem to be MLG pros together with nurglings and damn toads, pink horror fireball has tracking which either doesn't work or works extremely well (RNG?). Terminator autocannons are firing rubber subsonic ammunition. Aspiring champions installed suppressors on their incredibly sharp chainswords.
- Imperial barrels are full of pure promethium. It's the only explanation I have for the amount of damage they do (instant deletion of tactical CSMs and massive chunks of my HP).
- Nurgle toads, big and small. The adult form is tougher than a damn terminator. More damaging, too.
- Enemy precognition is ridiculous. Enemies leading shots are alright. Enemies without LOS knowing when I turn corner before I do are not. There also has to be some reaction time on the AI side, too. So many times I got hit at close range because enemy somehow knew I shifted my strafe direction the moment I pressed the key.
You could even make it so that marines have way better accuracy and reflexes than common cultists (which aren't supposed to be superhumans ya know), and Tzeentch daemons could indeed have actual precognition built on input reading. On the other hand, Nurgle daemons are supposed to be slower (in every sense) but tanky. That would be lore-accurate at least.
- Related to the above, trying to play melee/close range is basically suicide on Exterminatus. I feel like a damn Tau, picking off enemies from a safe distance, because trying to be brave/adventureous mostly gets me killed.
- Feels like Nurgle has more/better ranged units than Tzeentch. Aren't blue horrors supposed to also be a weak ranged unit? While nurglings certainly do not need a spit attack which is also not telegraphed at all, can be done mid-leap, and has projectiles faster than bullets XD
- Purge screen overlay. In some areas, can't see shayte, captain, (namely e1m7). You can also mix it with a powerup overlay if you don't want to witness the horrors you are fighting. I wish damage feedback was this obvious and in your face. Plasma "100 DMG" cultist sprites are also conviniently very dark, and their plasma weapons don't have any glow effect. Plasma balls do, but it's kinda too late at that point, isn't it?
- Music is alright, but kinda doesn't hit the right spot for me. Combat music starting and stopping is also kinda grating. I'd much rather have it play more consistently, like:
Enter area with lots of enemies > music picks up > kill all enemies > music goes back to ambient. Stray cultists and lesser daemons IMO do not warrant epic combat soundtrack.

[Blünderboy]

very good suggestions, there should be a sticky for this type of input

[Shrinkshooter]

Plasma cultists do have guns that glow, it's just not super bright. Pay attention next time you come across one and you'll see the stripes. I think those go away when they point at you to fire, though, for obvious reasons.

[EvilChaosKnight]

Having finished Act 1 and beginning with Act 2, I got some more notes:
- Aspiring champion does damage at the very start of a swing animation instead of when the strike actually happens. Doom from 1993 got it right with Pinkies, why can't Boltgun do it right in 2023?
- Lord of Change boss encounter went hilariously well because his AI bugged out and shut down a minute or two into the fight. He just stood there taking shots as if he didn't want to live anymore. I guess he got tired of being a pawn in Tzeentch's games so he decided to end it all. Understandable.
- The Chaos Sorcerer boss battle felt more like "Find Waldo". He kept running away, and if you don't try to give him a friendly hug, he's barely a threat. Also from the distance in poor lightning + purge + pixels he's not too different visually from all the other Chaos marines/terms. Using Alpha Legion tactics, eh?
- Had a Screamer stuck inside a wall in Act 2. Took some frags, shoulder bashing and about 10 minutes to locate it and bring it down.
- Why does one of the monorail horizontal elevators on e2m2 go back the moment you step off it? It basically blocks backtracking (not without a major health loss anyway) for no reason whatsoever. It wouldn't be so bad by itself, but the enemies along the way hide in the rocks, and killing them all in one trip is harder than it looks.
- In Act 2 Nurgle gets another ranged unit (the drone), and Tzeentch gets more melee (ambulls, as it seems)? Since when is Tzeentch a melee faction? More importantly, since when is Nurgle a ranged faction??
- No seriously, give blue horrors a ranged attack. They are big slow targets. They have to have something to make them at least slightly a threat other than being a walking bodyblock.
- All Nurgle spit, acid and tongue attacks travel faster than enemy autogun/heavy stubber bullets/bolter rounds/autocannon shots. But why?
- A very minor thing. Casings ejected from weapons are a part of weapon sprite animation and aren't "actual" casings. Of course, it's a pure visual thing, but it kinda cheapens game's appearance.

@Shrinkshooter
> Plasma cultists do have guns that glow, it's just not super bright. Pay attention next time you come across one and you'll see the stripes. I think those go away when they point at you to fire, though, for obvious reasons.

Well, it's not very bright + purge screen effect is a thing.
Also when they point their gun at me is EXACTLY when I need to see them MOST, not least. The solution IMO would be to make them a constant light source similar to the plasma bolts they fire. Like a small walking lamp of plasma, ready to fry you + add some fullbright pixels inside the barrel as they ready up to fire.

[Blünderboy]

Once more, very good points.
+1

[recursor]

Y'know, someone mentioned the high amount of leading that the enemies do before. Made me realize the next time I played that in the purge arenas I was changing direction at the sound of enemies firing. End result can look funny as plasma bolts miss you by miles, but works out fairly well.

[Blünderboy]

Yes, it's actually a nice touch from a game that not only implemented a couple new features, but thought about doing so.
Lemme zoom out for a moment:

Doom established most of the early FPS rules. Most so-called "boomer shooters" (a terrible
nickname btw) copy and paste those. Shotgun and some type of an automatic weapon as your main tools. Backtracking for some medkits which get used up completely, even if you only need 1%. Even the Doom style vertical menu has been copied to death.
Most deviations were a serious deal. Halo was revolutionary with its regenerating shield and two weapon slots.
Boltgun does a few things radically different from classic FPS. For those who don't know:
Most enemies Doom established would use hitscan weapons.
But here, most shots are ackshually visible and can be dodged. That's a rare feature. But as recurser said, enemies lead! And it actually makes sense!
That means that you can pop out from around a corner, take out two or three baddies and take cover if you're quick enough. But when in the open, you must zigzag as you cannot rely just on speed.
It's what makes this game good.

[StronkiTonki]

Originally posted by Blünderboy:

Boltgun does a few things radically different from classic FPS. For those who don't know:
Most enemies Doom established would use hitscan weapons.
But here, most shots are ackshually visible and can be dodged. That's a rare feature.

This is nothing special. Quake did this.
This game in general is a lot more like Quake than Doom, yet I see everyone constantly compare it to Doom, and I have no idea why, since Quake comes so much closer to this in every way. From powerups to movement, weapons, quick weapon switching, enemy projectiles, verticality in map design.

[Blünderboy]

You miss the point. Doom already had various projectiles. I wrote that MOST (shooting) enemies, which were the grunts, used hitscan shooting. The imp threw this weak fireball - which didn't lead or track. Very easy to avoid.
Quake's grunt and enforcer use hitscan, too. There's arguably a bit more diversity to the enemy's projectile attacks. But they don't lead their aim!

Thus, in Boltgun, you need to learn to read the environment on the fly. When a difficult purging is in progress, too much is going on at the same time. You need to move, but how? Will you just pop in-and-out of cover for a couple strategic kills? Can you outrun the projectiles? The only remaining option is to zig-zag which is lots of fun once you realise why you're being pounded so expertly in the open.
it's a shame the game doesn't address this.

I agree about the verticality of Quake.

[redsargeant]

These are REALLY GOOD suggestions and observations! Devs, please look.

[Masoterian]

i dont need a map, but damn that secret counter should've been in there, i mean i understand that secrets are supposed to be, well, "secret", but still, would appreciate that.

[Kamen Kreuz]

I agree with basically all of this. Game is fun, but the balance is all over the damn place and the feedback/visual ques are poor. I find it very hard to process when enemies are attacking and when I'm taking damage. I love 40k, but Dusk, Amid Evil, and Hrot were way more fun to play.
Edit: Throwing my own minor complaint in here. The servo skull talks a lot, and I actually don't mind this, except I can't read a lot of it. I would like to hear what that one boss is telling me, but how am I supposed to read a whole paragraph during a boss fight? You can change the "servo skull display time" in the accessibility settings, but this option kinda stinks because it also slows the text speed to a crawl, which is kinda annoying to read and spams you with skull-talking-sound-effects.

Originally posted by EvilChaosKnight:

- Aspiring champion does damage at the very start of a swing animation instead of when the strike actually happens.

I noticed they damage me the frame they get within melee range, this explains a lot. I hope this is a bug and that it will be fixed. I probably would've just quit the game at the last level of chapter 2 if I hadn't looked up the trick to """parry""" their attacks by slapping them with the chainsword charge.

[DarkFire]

Boltgun get a lot right. The impactful but still nimble movement for example is something that's very difficult to get right but the game nails it. Weapons are also impactful, fun to use and all sound great.

My main complaint with the game is around enemy & encounter design.

- Nurglings. Setting aside the fact that they're ****ing annoying to deal with, they're very mobile, have a very fast ranged attack, hop around making them more difficult to hit and are frequently immune to chainsword lock-on. En mass they represent a far greater threat than should be the case for a low-tier enemy. The reason to my mind is that there's no appropriate tool to deal with them. Yes they can be easily killed with the bolter or shotgun or plasma, but in the case of the plasma the player should not be forced to use ammunition for their top-tier weapon clearing trash mobs. The game needs an STR-3 flamer to deal with them. They should also not have a ranged attack.

- Plague toads. The small & standard varieties feel much too tanky, especially as they are also fairly mobile and have a ranged attack. Make them a bit more mobile but reduce their HP by about 40%.

- Chaos champions & terminators. If the player is suitably equipped they don't really present much of a threat. This needs to change. The chaos marine feels about right but chaos termies and aspiring champions should be, with the arguable exception of the greater unclean and lord of change, the biggest threats in the game. The termie in particular feels much too weak.

- Great unclean and lord of change. I understand that they're supposed to be top tier enemies but I'm unconvinced by their massive health pools. I think there's more of a case for the great unclean having a massive HP as it's not particularly mobile and isn't a critical threat at unlimited range. The lord of change however I think should be made more akin to the Archvile from OG doom - make it more mobile, make it proactively hunt down the player rather than teleporting randomly around and then reduce its HP by probably around 40%. Essentially make it an aggressive, highly damaging unit that has decent but not massive HP.

- Encounter design. I think some of the encounter design in Boltgun is quite uninspired, specifically in the 'purge' arena sections. Simply spawning a boss and then flooding the arena with huge numbers of distracting trash mob enemies isn't nuanced encounter design, it's simply difficulty via overwhelming numbers. I actually think the physical design of most of the arena areas is good but they dropped the ball with the encounter design. As it is now the trash mob flood doesn't particularly encourage the player to make tactical use of the arena layout and doesn't encourage the player to make appropriate targeting prioritisation decisions. This is exacerbated by the poor design of nurglings in particular and the lack of an appropriate low-tier AOE weapon. As it is now player success in the arena areas is governed solely by appropriate timing of health & armour pickups. The arenas don't really feel satisfying, they're much more of an annoyance to be completed before moving on.

[NJ_>]

Chaos Space Marine grenades need to have the same detonation delay and radius as the frag grenade. They just take too long to detonate and as a result, some CSM are walking into their grenades killing themselves without doing any damage to the player.

[Lordwar]

Very good points which i agree 100% on, i may add to the nurglings: Please for the love of the Emperor made them have no collision, there are arenas that spawn both Screemers and Nurglings whit so many cultists. "But charge?!" Yes, but also cooldown and also its a straight line charge while enemies shoot ahead of you.
I'm replaying the game right now on last difficulty and understanding the weapons more and how the level plays is making it quite easy, to be honest i died less in same "PURGE ZONES" on EXT. then on hard. Which is a compliment to the devs for awarding the player for learning, but i'm so so annoyed by "i cant see enemies" from above mention combat arenas.
Flash red then switch to normal vision and let our ever friendly servo-skull preach that there is no heresy in the currect area.
I notice that a lot of big combat sequence's, i'm running in circles bunnyhopping my way to victory. Which is kinda meh from map design. Visuals are stunning thou.

[Blünderboy]

Some great suggestions yall.
However, i don't really get the Nurgling hate. Sure, they are annoying but the Bolter (even on hard) makes em pop with only one measly bullet needed.
Annoying enemies are terrible if they are difficult to dispose. It's good design if the bigger weapons are worse against some of the creeps.