I've got a few extra Steam Awards trading cards -- the sales event trading cards from the 2016 end-of-year/holiday/Christmas/etc. sale. Does anyone need to complete any sets?
So fighting overleveled enemies in FFXIII is disincentivized, not by, you know, difficulty, but because the rating system gimps rewards and encourages overleveled steamrolling of enemies.
So fighting overleveled enemies in FFXIII is disincentivized, not by, you know, difficulty, but because the rating system gimps rewards and encourages overleveled steamrolling of enemies.
This isn't even remotely distinctive to FFXIII -- there are similar rating systems that incentivize performance over challenge in games like Tales of Symphonia, Mega Man Zero, etc..
(And I'm not a fan of them in those games either.)
Games that do this really need to make level disadvantage part of the rating, like each level you're handicapped by fills in other rating discrepancies as needed.
I can see a rating system to reward cleanly handling something of appropriate level, but if you do something ballsy and win you should if anything be rewarded better.
So fighting overleveled enemies in FFXIII is disincentivized, not by, you know, difficulty, but because the rating system gimps rewards and encourages overleveled steamrolling of enemies.
This isn't true. The more overleveled you are, the faster you need a kill to get a higher rating on the same set of enemies.
So fighting overleveled enemies in FFXIII is disincentivized, not by, you know, difficulty, but because the rating system gimps rewards and encourages overleveled steamrolling of enemies.
This isn't true. The more overleveled you are, the faster you need a kill to get a higher rating on the same set of enemies.
From what I've played so far that decrease in time is made exponentially less important by the massive increases in damage output.
Also the fact that the game punishes you for taking on hard enemies is damn ridiculous
Just beat 50 CENT: BLOOD ON THE SAND with a friend, been slowly chipping away a it every time they're over.
The last few levels of that game are un-be-fucking-lievable.
Alternate ending: As they drive away, in a quiet moment, Fiddy puts his face close to the skull and whispers "Finally got your remains back, Great-Grandad, rest in peace." and gives a little smile
Alternatively DJ Woo Kid finally gets that archaeology degree
Idle game design thoughts: Might've mentioned this before but I think game feel is way more important to turn based (and I consider ATB systems and some d20 games turn based) RPGs than it's been given credit for. I think the importance of feeling the impact of attacks is understated and it's why, for example, something like Artifact Adventure feels kind of empty.
Possible solution: Rather than queuing up actions, some games could benefit from having things resolve as soon as as they're chosen. FFX did this and it felt great as a result. Such a thing would have probably helped Earthbound, for example, though I think Earthbound's general feel of impact was pretty great otherwise and served to elevate the barebones mechanics.
I think Undertale could also have benefited from losing the floating numbers and just saying, like "x damage to y" in the text box to remove the satisfaction.
Possible solution: Rather than queuing up actions, some games could benefit from having things resolve as soon as as they're chosen. FFX did this and it felt great as a result.
Wait, I'm confused by what you mean here. Like, FFX is the epitome of a queue based battle system.
Possible solution: Rather than queuing up actions, some games could benefit from having things resolve as soon as as they're chosen. FFX did this and it felt great as a result.
Wait, I'm confused by what you mean here. Like, FFX is the epitome of a queue based battle system.
I mean queueing the way FFI does, where you select the actions of your entire party before seeing them execute.
Man, every time I post about FF you respond like clockwork. I'm not complaining; I think it's kinda funny
Possible solution: Rather than queuing up actions, some games could benefit from having things resolve as soon as as they're chosen. FFX did this and it felt great as a result.
Wait, I'm confused by what you mean here. Like, FFX is the epitome of a queue based battle system.
I mean queueing the way FFI does, where you select the actions of your entire party before seeing them execute.
Man, every time I post about FF you respond like clockwork. I'm not complaining; I think it's kinda funny
If there's one genre I know intimately, it's RPGs. :P
Idle game design thoughts: Might've mentioned this before but I think game feel is way more important to turn based (and I consider ATB systems and some d20 games turn based) RPGs than it's been given credit for. I think the importance of feeling the impact of attacks is understated and it's why, for example, something like Artifact Adventure feels kind of empty.
Possible solution: Rather than queuing up actions, some games could benefit from having things resolve as soon as as they're chosen. FFX did this and it felt great as a result. Such a thing would have probably helped Earthbound, for example, though I think Earthbound's general feel of impact was pretty great otherwise and served to elevate the barebones mechanics.
I think Undertale could also have benefited from losing the floating numbers and just saying, like "x damage to y" in the text box to remove the satisfaction.
Trails in the Sky does a mix of queue and immediate actions.
If you tell your character to Attack, they immediately move to the closest spot to the target and attack if possible.
If you tell your character to Move, they immediately move to the location specified.
If you tell your character to use Arts, which are like magic spells that you can transfer from person to person using devices called Quartz (similar to Materia in FF7), that has a delay, and there is a turn order bar on the side of the screen that shows you when the Art will be performed so you can strategically choose whether to use the Art. (e.g. you may not want to use it if it means a bunch of enemies will go first)
If you tell your character to use Crafts, which are personal magic-like special abilities that expend part of your CP gauge which is basically a limit gauge (which fills as you take damage or attack), they do them immediately.
Furthermore, there are S-Crafts, which are special Crafts with which you can interrupt turn order. You can only use these if you have at least 100 CP (of a max possible 200), and they always completely expend your CP.
S-crafts also further delay your next turn by quite a bit. Newbies often fall into the trap of frontloading damage and then wondering why the boss got 4 turns before they could move again.
There's also a lot of other ways to screw with turn order. Haste/slow status, hits with delay effects. Impeding casts will stop the cast from going off, but the turn where it would have fired is now a normal turn and they can re-initiate it (fast enemies can often get it off the second time). Later in the series, chain crafts will delay the turns of all characters involved, but are only contingent on who initiates it (and positioning) so you can have fast characters use them to give a slow character like Agate free attacks.
This is all before you get to crazy stuff like Gladiator gear that lets you build up CP so fast that slower characters basically never take regular turns any more because they can S-craft faster than they actually move. Or how Schera gets a particularly broken move that sacrifices her turn to advance all allies in the queue to her spot, which lets you hasten long casts, speed up heals, or do otherwise very stupid things like hit long casts, frontload your S-craft behind them, then just smear them right back into the turn order to take a third turn before anything horrible happens.
The system is surprisingly deep for as little as the first game took advantage of it.
At least nothing in TitS is quite as broken as Fie in Trails of Cold Steel, who can get up to 95% EVA in the first game, and 100% in the second.
That sounds hellaciously good, but not broken. The stuff that kills you usually can't miss anyway. Mostly just means you can disregard about half the monsters you never cared about to begin with.
I wish the effort put into Dragon Age: Origins's ludicrously elaborate scripting was put into literally anything else
The scripting is neat! But man, does it ring hollow when *the game has pissbad writing *it's 100 hours long actively removing any motivation to replay it
You know the more I play it the more I think the issue with Earthbound isn't its combat but its level design.
I think its RPG mechanics are fine in terms of strategy and great in terms of creating emergent emotional beats.
Its level design is... more complicated. It generally amounts to hallways of largely unavoidable enemies and some reeeeeally long backtracking. It gets tedious but I am, to an extent, willing to accept it as contributing to the game's meandering "stroll through the country" feel.
TF2 teams tend to be uncoordinated so it's often about knowing how to read the battlefield quickly, but there are some simple things that people do sometimes coordinate on, and when people actually do coordinate stuff often gets done really gratifyingly so people are at least well incentivized to do so
I finally beat the main story mode for Crypt of the Necrodancer.
It's kind of hilarious to me that the first storymode character is reasonably hard, the second one is much, much easier, and the third one is just...blisteringly hard.
For reference, it took me about 14 hours of gameplay to beat the first, and about an hour to beat the second and I've tried for 15 minutes and I still haven't beaten the first stage of third.
Fucking randos in Monster Hunter. I'm hitting up multi for the rank 1 guild quests to get them done fast. Get into a room with other rank 1s.
They queue up a 3* DLC Glavenus.
I think okay, I'm actually 3* in the main game. Guild quests are usually scaled higher but I'm marginally competent, geared well, and we have 4 people.
Mission starts. Find the Glav. A Maccao attacks basically right as the fight starts, so I dung the Glav to chase it off so we can clear out the trash and not get ambushed later. Paintballed both of them. We move in on the Maccao.
We get three rapid-fire deaths from two of the teammates. To a fucking Great Maccao. Long after the monster that actually deserved 3* was gone.
the firebug's thing is that all of these weapons set enemies on fire, which means they continually take damage until they die or "crisp", which slows them. so... poison and debuff? i guess.
the MAC-10 has an extremely high fire rate which means you run out of ammo pretty fast. the flamethrower has wide spread but doesn't really do immediate damage, ie you light stuff on fire but it keeps attacking you for a bit. trenchgun's an incendiary shotgun, but it's too heavy to use with the flamethrower. nevermind the cannon.
figuring out how to play, i'd get the flamethrower and the MAC-10. then i sit there, flamethrower everything. when something gets too close i panic and give it a MAC-10 clip. simple but not great.
i didn't understand why there was even a trenchgun, because it's too heavy to use at the same time as the flamethrower, and why wouldn't a firebug have a flamethrower?
but as it turns out, it's pretty effective to use the trenchgun and MAC-10 together. the trenchgun is still a shotgun, and it does enough damage that you can take out the midtier enemies that the flamethrower doesn't kill fast enough. you can reconfigure the MAC-10 to fire semiautomatically, so it's just a pistol that also lights things on fire, and that can be your main or long range weapon.
so you can either play the first way, in which case you're doing crap control, or the second way, in which case you're doing crap control but actually killing things, with the drawback that you can't get as good spread as with the flamethrower.
it's just more complex than what i'm used to from FPSs. like, half life 2. SMG is your main gun. pistol is good for longer range picking off. magnum same but more damage/rarer. combine SMG is a bit better at range. crossbow is a bigger magnum. that's mostly it.
(This is for a fight that drops i265 gear and is designed for i250 players. A12S (which is also required for an Alex weapon) is the game's current final raid boss.)
Comments
(And I'm not a fan of them in those games either.)
Also the fact that the game punishes you for taking on hard enemies is damn ridiculous
Lulu's doll holding pose
The way the ratio of magic power vs. physical power fluctuates without ever going full blown linear warriors quadratic wizards
Using Black Magic Spheres to make Yuna an instantly viable damage dealer late in the game
Might've mentioned this before but I think game feel is way more important to turn based (and I consider ATB systems and some d20 games turn based) RPGs than it's been given credit for. I think the importance of feeling the impact of attacks is understated and it's why, for example, something like Artifact Adventure feels kind of empty.
Possible solution: Rather than queuing up actions, some games could benefit from having things resolve as soon as as they're chosen. FFX did this and it felt great as a result. Such a thing would have probably helped Earthbound, for example, though I think Earthbound's general feel of impact was pretty great otherwise and served to elevate the barebones mechanics.
I think Undertale could also have benefited from losing the floating numbers and just saying, like "x damage to y" in the text box to remove the satisfaction.
Man, every time I post about FF you respond like clockwork. I'm not complaining; I think it's kinda funny
On that note I think turn based games with any form of ATB should have commands keyed to button presses rather than menu navigation.
The only exception might be something like Earthbound which plays so fast and loose with its diegesis that it kinda works.
If you tell your character to Attack, they immediately move to the closest spot to the target and attack if possible.
If you tell your character to Move, they immediately move to the location specified.
If you tell your character to use Arts, which are like magic spells that you can transfer from person to person using devices called Quartz (similar to Materia in FF7), that has a delay, and there is a turn order bar on the side of the screen that shows you when the Art will be performed so you can strategically choose whether to use the Art. (e.g. you may not want to use it if it means a bunch of enemies will go first)
If you tell your character to use Crafts, which are personal magic-like special abilities that expend part of your CP gauge which is basically a limit gauge (which fills as you take damage or attack), they do them immediately.
Furthermore, there are S-Crafts, which are special Crafts with which you can interrupt turn order. You can only use these if you have at least 100 CP (of a max possible 200), and they always completely expend your CP.
Fun fact, the pirates can all be petrified. I ended up beating them on Nightmare by fishing for petrify procs on Don. That sounds hellaciously good, but not broken. The stuff that kills you usually can't miss anyway. Mostly just means you can disregard about half the monsters you never cared about to begin with.
The scripting is neat! But man, does it ring hollow when
*the game has pissbad writing
*it's 100 hours long actively removing any motivation to replay it
anyone know any multiplayer shootman games involving some kind of tactics
i play a lot of killing floor and in that game it mostly doesn't matter how good you are, if your group is uncoordinated everybody dies. i like that
i got the impression (from watching xeniera play) that overwatch was like tf2 though. in terms of
I think its RPG mechanics are fine in terms of strategy and great in terms of creating emergent emotional beats.
Its level design is... more complicated. It generally amounts to hallways of largely unavoidable enemies and some reeeeeally long backtracking. It gets tedious but I am, to an extent, willing to accept it as contributing to the game's meandering "stroll through the country" feel.
Things like the way party members start out underleveled, still represent the single greatest increase in power the player can get.
i don't have systems for overwatch or splatoon anyway though :'(
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
the firebug's thing is that all of these weapons set enemies on fire, which means they continually take damage until they die or "crisp", which slows them. so... poison and debuff? i guess.
the MAC-10 has an extremely high fire rate which means you run out of ammo pretty fast. the flamethrower has wide spread but doesn't really do immediate damage, ie you light stuff on fire but it keeps attacking you for a bit. trenchgun's an incendiary shotgun, but it's too heavy to use with the flamethrower. nevermind the cannon.
figuring out how to play, i'd get the flamethrower and the MAC-10. then i sit there, flamethrower everything. when something gets too close i panic and give it a MAC-10 clip. simple but not great.
i didn't understand why there was even a trenchgun, because it's too heavy to use at the same time as the flamethrower, and why wouldn't a firebug have a flamethrower?
but as it turns out, it's pretty effective to use the trenchgun and MAC-10 together. the trenchgun is still a shotgun, and it does enough damage that you can take out the midtier enemies that the flamethrower doesn't kill fast enough. you can reconfigure the MAC-10 to fire semiautomatically, so it's just a pistol that also lights things on fire, and that can be your main or long range weapon.
so you can either play the first way, in which case you're doing crap control, or the second way, in which case you're doing crap control but actually killing things, with the drawback that you can't get as good spread as with the flamethrower.
it's just more complex than what i'm used to from FPSs. like, half life 2. SMG is your main gun. pistol is good for longer range picking off. magnum same but more damage/rarer. combine SMG is a bit better at range. crossbow is a bigger magnum. that's mostly it.
Amazing.
(This is for a fight that drops i265 gear and is designed for i250 players. A12S (which is also required for an Alex weapon) is the game's current final raid boss.)