User blog:PurpleIsGood/A Guide to Recognizing and Avoiding Overpowered Monsters

I’ve seen a lot of these cropping up lately, and while I like the creativity behind any monster design our users come up with, the technical part needs serious, serious work. I’m talking about attack design, armor design, gameplay aspects. When creating new monsters, it’s hard not to want to make it super-powerful, or the best ever, or an apex predator.

But if you’re trying to make a monster that might eventually be featured in a game; a monster that the player wants to hunt, a monster that, in universe, a hunter would want to hunt, then you’re not allowed to make the monster the best ever. If you make a monster with unavoidable attacks, huge damage, and extreme skills, the player is not going to enjoy fighting it. The hunter will never survive against it. The game dev’s will not accept it.

In this guide, I’m going to help you guys out a bit. Let’s start with the main issues.

There are three big U’s I associate with overpowered monsters. These three U’s are ranked in order of overpowered-ness, so to speak:

1. Unavoidable – Your monsters attacks are so good, so quick…that the hunter can’t even avoid them.

2. Unblockable – Your monsters attacks hit so hard that it’s impossible for the hunter to block them.

3. Unpredictable – Your monster is blindly fast and agile, so quick that the hunter can never tell where it will come from.

The worst offender by far is the unavoidable attack. Tell me, people, is there a single attack in the game that is unavoidable? Can you even think of one that is literally impossible to dodge, literally designed to hit you no matter what?

No, there is not. Why? Because that would be grossly unfair to the player. Imagine if White Fatalis’s lightning attacks were designed to hit you. You would have to wear armor with the Guts Skill if you even wanted to try and survive the quest. An unavoidable attack is a broken attack. It’s something that does not exist in Monster Hunter and should not exist in your monster designs. You have to give the hunter, and the player, an actual chance at winning.

The next most common trait of these overpowered monsters is the unblockable attack. Unblockable attacks do exist in Monster Hunter; it’s true. But if you take a look at any and all of them, you’ll see a common trait. These attacks are all completely avoidable. They don’t home in on the player, they don’t cover massive areas, and they rarely insta-kill the player. Gravios’s fire beam and Akantor’s wind tunnel might do some heavy damage, but their fairly linear and only KO you if you’re wearing subpar armor.

Even I’m having trouble thinking of examples, because these attacks are so rare. This is how your monster design should be. If it does have an unblockable attack, it should have no more then one or two, and it should not be a theme when it comes to your entire monster portfolio.

And the third factor in an overpowered monster is unpredictability. I would be the first one to advocate for a healthy dose of unpredictability in a monster; this trait is what makes monsters like Nargacuga, Barioth, Jinouga, Diablos, and Rajang so difficult and so fun to fight. You’ll never know what they’ll do next, and their speed makes them difficult, but not impossible, to track.

So why is this a bad thing, you say? Because when you combine this trait with one or both of the aforementioned traits, you create something that is literal hell for the hunter to face. You make a monster that the player will come to hate fighting, and not just because they’re stuck on it, as many of us were on Khezu, or Uragaan, or Tigrex. If you make a monster that hits ridiculously hard, that cannot be blocked or dodged, and that can change direction mid-hit, fly across the screen, or disappear from the players’ sight, you create something that has no semblance of fairness to it. You’ve created an actual monster, a thing that will receive no praise from any player or hunter.



Now that the big part is dealt with, I can address some smaller factors and give some pointers. 
 * A common trait to all OP monsters is a holier-then-thou attitude that makes them “better” or “stronger’ then all other monsters. This is just not good. There’s no other way to put it. In any game, there will be monsters that are bigger and stronger then others, this is true. But in no way, shape, or form are these stronger monsters leagues more worthy or dangerous. Monsters should command the same respect, and the same goes for your fanon monsters.
 * Another common issue is size. For some reason, some authors have a compulsion to make their monsters many times bigger then they should be, in attempts to make them more epic or more difficult. An agile, super-powerful dragon the size of a Shen Gaoren is not fun. Nobody wants to have to deal with that. Instead of godmodding the size of your monster, think of how effective the monster would be at different, normal sizes. Think of their environments and the abilities of your monster. Monsters in the forest (Kut-ku, Nargacuga, Rathalos/Rathian), for instance, tend to be smaller then volcanic monsters (Gravios, Uragaan, Brachydios). The tundra, too, is a habitat for slightly smaller beasts (Blangonga, Gigginox, Great Baggi). Deserts, however, often have much larger monsters (Diablos, Tigrex, Plesioth).
 * Vocabulary is a good indicator of OP monsters too. If your monster is “godly”, “legendary”, “amazing”, “unbeatable”, “epic”, or the like, you’ll want to rethink some things. If it always wins its fights, and has powers beyond the scope of other monsters (i.e. crushing mountains, making the seas boil, etc), then you can be sure your monster is pretty damn OP. A good idea is to figure out what attacks your monster could use, and then focus on one that gets the flair and power you’re after. See: Rathian’s wyvernfire, Agnaktor’s circle laser, Ukanlos’s ice beam, Gypceros’s flash, or Rajang’s spinning lighting strike.
 * You’ll also want to check the actual design aspect of your monster. Sure, spikes, spines, blades and horns all are good and fine, but if you’re constantly trying to take it to the next level, then you’re going too far. A monster with 30 foot spikes on its shoulders, a huge, mace like tail covered in spines, and unbreakable, razor sharp shell is not going to go over well. Focus on an aspect of your design that you want to be prominent; in doing so, you can make your monster unique and lessen how OP it is. If you cover your monster in bells and whistles, it’ll turn into a convoluted mess that looks like it’s trying to hard.

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