Enemy Variants

[Dante_Tel]

I realized after many hours of play that few people are talking about the actual game and its deeper mechanics (as is culture these days) so I wanted to start a thread on something I found interesting, enemy variants.

I've scoured the internet and noticed that practically nobody has either noticed or even mentioned this as of yet so better late than never. Note that the 'variants' that I speak of are not entirely of the visual kind, the ones I'm talking about regard differences in damage taken/given and slight deviations in weak point tolerance. As I don't have much professionally pulled together as of yet I thought I would simply start with the one I noticed stood out to me the most, the bubble head nurses.

If paying close attention you will find that there are actually two major variations to the nurses in the normal world that are both visually and physically obvious. The 'regular' nurses which can be taken down in 4 - 7 handgun shots to the body and head (tested in hard mode) and a variant that have orangeish glowing heads that are a bit faster, harder to cripple when going for leg shots and can take a whole clip of handgun ammo to drop normally.

I bring this up because of two reasons: 1) I find it interesting that such sub-variants exist and 2) I'm curious to see if anyone else has even noticed or if anyone has bothered to do the stress/damage testing in the first place. I'm also curious to see if anyone has figured out the differences in other sub-variants as I feel I have recognized most but one in particular keeps eluding me, that being the charred nurses of the OtherWorld.

In my time I have ran across charred nurses that go down fairly easily, then and with seemingly next to no visual differences (unlike other enemies) I run into one that is seemingly (still trying to confirm) faster and an absolute tank managing to take multiple shotgun blasts point blank to the head before going down.

So, I implore you all please share your thoughts and findings with me, I am deeply curious to see what others may have noticed that I have not. For instance, is what I'm mentioning even real? Is it a placebo effect? Are there those out there who can better datamine these questions straight from the source? Again, I'm very curious and eager to start up a rather interesting and friendly topic on this otherwise iffy board. So for now good luck out there in the fog and as always, happy hunting.

[nickolaidas]

I have yet to beat the game, but I just wanted to say that bestiary plays a HUGE role to me - in every action game I play, so yes - I do try to notice enemy species and strains.

[Bankai9212]

It’s a bit more then the original, but nothing new besides what weapons they have and certain behaviors.

[edwvee]

As I hated it in the original, so much I hate it in the remake. Unpredictable monsters' health is nothing good.

[Spar7icus247]

i personally didn't really think about this until i got to the prison and noticed how much more aggressive the mannequins are there, then on my second run i noticed the finer details

[Dante_Tel]

I feel ever-still that it's an interesting topic, mostly because of what things I've noticed so far. I'm on my fifth run while maintaining hard difficulty and that is where the subtle differences in damage given and damage received stand out the most, even if the enemy itself almost appears the same.

Unlike the original SH2 where all enemies have the same static health (only differentiated on whether you hit or miss with a given weapon) this game either does in fact possess sub-variants within the visual variants of the enemies, or it does a really great job of making it seem that way.

I have no datamining skills but I did run some tests via repeatedly saving/loading in the same sections and purposely dealing damage to specific body parts of every enemy in their respective area (usually with the handgun specifically) finding again that with two regular world nurses one of them went down in 5 shots to the head (granted all my shots were perfect headshots) and the other one took 7, bet you can't guess which one took 7 eh? You guessed it, the one with the oddly glowing head.

I'm constantly aware that it could all be a placebo effect but I can't deny that I find it rather fascinating, much like I would have 20 odd years ago in a game like this.

[Bankai9212]

Definitely does, I haven’t counted shots outside of body hits to knock them down and they’ve always been the same. Each enemy only has 2 versions.