Diving in ‘El Paso, Elsewhere’ doesn’t make me feel cool — Game Design Critique

El Paso, Elsewhere, the recently released Max Payne-like third person shooter, wants me to feel like a cool, swift, gun-shooting guy. It succeeds for the most part. However, for me, it fails in one crucial area: its Dive mechanic. I’m going to talk a bit about the reasons for this.

The Dive (GIF and screenshot capture by me)

The Dive mechanic in El Paso, Elsewhere generally serves as a quick maneuver to get you away from enemies quickly, while providing you the opportunity to take those enemies out during its slow motion effect. The game clearly wants you to Dive; it’s practically the main feature of Max Payne, El Paso’s obvious inspiration, and it looks flashy. My problem with it is that I never feel the need to use it all that much. Diving mostly feels like a thing I could just do if I feel like it, if I just want to provide myself with some superficial gameplay variety every once in a while.

The Problems with Diving

The majority of enemies in El Paso, Elsewhere are designed like Pac-Man ghosts; they chase you down and damage you when they touch you. The thing is, you have guns (and a melee attack).

(1) Taking out a bunch of enemies from afar without much stress. (2) Disposing of demon dogs with a melee attack and a gun

Most of the time, you can kill enemies from afar before they ever notice you, or just walk backwards while shooting to take them out. If an enemy does get close to you, you can kill it instantly with one of your Stakes, a limited melee weapon you can collect more of by destroying furniture in the level (of which there is a lot); you don’t need to Dive away from an up-close enemy when you can drive a Stake into it.

Using a quick melee attack to take out multiple enemies at once (a Dive would have just lengthened the encounter, and it wouldn’t provide any immunity to attacks)

Most encounters don’t influence you to Dive

(1) & (2) The most common type of encounter, where enemies stand out in the open for you to pick off.

I played El Paso, Elsewhere for about 3 hours (14 Chapters / levels). During that time, I felt like the vast majority of enemy encounters just required me to lead the enemies around a fairly open room or hallway while shooting them; there wasn’t much required of me other than that basic strategy.

You can also press a button to activate slow motion without Diving, which makes the Dive feel even less useful

Some encounters do take the form of ambushes where an enemy will bust out of a door right in front of you, which may encourage you to Dive out of the area in a pinch, but generally you don’t need to bother. It’s worth noting that even if you do Dive while close to an enemy, they’ll probably still hit you, since Diving doesn’t give you any sort of invincibility.

A far less common ambush encounter that has a higher chance of damaging you if you don’t Dive immediately (though even if you do Dive you can still get hit pretty easily )

The game takes a long time to introduce an enemy that more strongly encourages you to Dive; and even after that point, that enemy doesn’t appear often enough to make Diving feel useful.

(1) and (2) Taking out Mages whose projectiles lightly encourage you to Dive, if you feel like it

The game eventually, in Chapter (level) 13, introduces its third enemy type, a Mage that fires a projectile with a big explosion radius. At this point in the game I was ready to put it down, though I played for two more levels to check out the Mage. In those levels it showed up infrequently enough that it actually made me feel even less incentivized to use the Dive, since I had already refrained from using it up till that point. My thought process as a player went something like, “Well, I haven’t needed to Dive until this point, so why start now? I’ll just heal after this projectile hits me.”

This is the only real satisfying Dive I performed in the game, which took me ~2 hours of Not Diving to reach (I still took damage from the projectile)

How could it be better?

If I were working on El Paso, Elsewhere and I wanted the player to Dive as much as possible in order to feel like the cool Max Payne-esque figure the game wants you to feel like, I’d consider a few different methods to improve the utility of the Dive:

El Paso, Elsewhere’s difficulty modifier menu

1. Make the Dog and Mage enemies lunge and shoot projectiles, respectively, more often (or at least make enemy attack frequency adjustable in the difficulty modifier menu). In the gameplay GIFs above, you can see several occasions where these enemies simply stand still while I shoot them; while playing the game like this I constantly thought to myself, “I just need these guys to attack more often. They’re too easy to react to right now.” If those demon Dogs and Mages were more threatening more often, I’d probably want to Dive more to dodge their attacks.
2. Give more enemies ranged attacks. In Max Payne, you need to Dive to dodge the constant barrage of bullets coming at you. That aspect of gameplay is largely absent in El Paso, Elsewhere. If enemies chased you down and semi-frequently shot a projectile at you, I bet Diving would feel a lot more critical.
3. Increase the movement speed of enemies. If nothing else, if enemies took less time to reach you, Diving would likely be a better strategic option in general. (FYI, the Speed Multiplier in the difficulty menu only affects your speed, not the enemies’)
4. Make the player temporarily invincible when they Dive. Even when I do use the Dive to dodge an enemy in close quarters, I usually end up taking a hit anyway; this feels unsatisfying to me. If Diving gave you a small window of invincibility, I think there’s a good chance it would feel like a more viable option in combat.
5. Design a whole lot more ambush-focused encounters. If a much more significant percentage of El Paso’s encounters involved enemies bursting through walls and doors close to you, I think the Dive would feel much more necessary as a repositioning tool. This runs the risk of making encounters feel monotonous and/or overbearing, but I think it could still feel better than the more open encounters the game currently has.
6. Add more level geometry that gets in your way. The game occasionally blocks your path with some waist-high walls that you need to Dive over to progress; I think that stuff is awesome. But they aren’t common enough to feel particularly useful in areas with combat encounters, which I felt was a bit of a wasted opportunity. If the game’s arenas restricted your movement more with these walls, you might want to Dive away from enemies more lest you get backed into a corner.

I didn’t really need to Dive over these walls to kill these enemies, but it’s such a cool idea

I like El Paso, Elsewhere. I just think its Dive could feel a whole lot cooler. I hope this article helps you understand my thoughts on this core mechanic.

Notes

• I mentioned that I played El Paso, Elsewhere for about 3 hours; I didn’t finish the game. It’s possible that the game ends up introducing a ton more enemies that ratchet up the difficulty and force you to Dive more. Though in my opinion, the Dive should feel useful right from the start of the game; I don’t think several hours into an action game is a good time to say, “Okay, now this core mechanic will finally be useful.” Also, for what it’s worth, while writing this article I watched a Longplay video of some of the game’s final levels, and didn’t perceive much difference in the utility of the Dive mechanic.