I made the design decision early in development that I wasn’t going to ‘pad-out’ the game with different colored enemies and cheap gimmicks. One of my central design principles is to treat the player’s time with respect. That means, less repetition (a certain amount is necessary for honing skills), no re-skinned enemies and each enemy has a unique behavior pattern and vulnerabilities.

These are really basic and essential staples of design philosophy. It’s a shame that more developers don’t take them seriously!

This kind of thing is especially evident in even AAA MMORPG titles. At level 1 you fight a rat. At level 20 you fight an ogre. The only difference is a model-swap and stats being higher numbers.

I’d even go further and say that even when the enemy has some sort of purported “weakness” like vulnerability to fire, or ice, it rarely matters. You might just as well bash away at it until dead. There’s never a NEED to use fire/ice/whatever.

It would be very refreshing to see a game with a variety of enemies who have to be tackled in a certain way: learn a pattern, use a certain type of weapon, use a specific tactic, etc.

Some might complain this is either a) too hard or b) leads to repetitive encounters. I would suggest that the “next level” would be to make those same dozen enemies (you don’t need 100′s!) have abilities and unique features that can eventually interlock together to present more difficult challenges: abilities that complement/augment one another, attack patterns that are more difficult in unison…