Full Games List
Featured Games
New Games
Reviews
Media
Images
Blogs
Game Updates
Images Feedback Summary
Game Design Highlights
Tutorials
Articles
Scripts
Utilities / Plugins
Resources
Engines
Engine Bulletins
What is Makerscore?
Past Events
Achievements
Misaos
Forums
Post History
Chat
New to RMN?
Full Store List
RMN Music Pack (free)
REPLACING LEVELING WITH DIFFERENT PROGRESSION IN ESTABLISHED GAMES
Posts
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
LockeZ
View playlists
Closeauthor=Craze
You should want your game to be as hand-crafted and tight an experience as possible. A system that allows you to (or heaven forbid WANTS you to) grind excessively makes me sad. Why should that even be an option!??
There are a lot of people who would say that any attempt to make something not be possible for a player to do is bad design, no exceptions. Those people are fucking idiots, but they make up a very vocal majority of players, and they are the reason why every big budget RPG and action/adventure game is open world now with a focus on freedom, almost always at the expense of failing to successfully lead the player towards doing fun things.
Anyway, more to the point, if a certain method of gaining power in your game is the path of least resistance and is also reasonably effective, a huuuuuge number of players will A) follow that path and B) not have fun, because that's how the human brain works. Our primitive bags of brainmeat cause us to instinctively avoid risks and to do things that we're comfortable with because we've done them before, but overcoming challenges is a huge part of the fun of games, so you have to drive the player into those risky situations to force them to have fun. You can make a linear game with no other options except fun, or you can make an open-ended game where the game stops rewarding you for things after they stop being fun. Both ways work, though the former is way easier. Try to make your most fun way of playing also be your most optimal way of playing!
Also, as a separate point, people like to gain power, because that's a huge part of RPGs. What makes leveling up important to RPGs isn't the way the experience point system is displayed and the way the points are distributed. It's that getting better at something is fun, and level ups allow you to "get better" on a second layer in addition to the player getting better at playing the game. That's why the RPG level up system works so well, why it's been integrated into every genre. However, if you make it so that leveling up replaces getting better at the game, you totally missed the point. Ideally the player should have to keep getting keep overcoming challenges in order to keep leveling up, otherwise they're missing out on the original, much more effective layer of fun via getting better.
Grinding can be cathartic but it is not fun. Catharsis is a type of leisure that some people want sometimes, and if you want to make a cathartic game then grinding is a good way to do it - but your experience points will be serving a very different purpose from the ones in an RPG, and if you do a good job at making a game built around catharsis, the game you end up with will have far more in common with Farmville and Cookie Clicker than Dragon Warrior and Elder Scrolls.
author=LockeZ
Grinding can be cathartic but it is not fun. Catharsis is a type of leisure that some people want sometimes, and if you want to make a cathartic game then grinding is a good way to do it - but your experience points will be serving a very different purpose from the ones in an RPG, and if you do a good job at making a game built around catharsis, the game you end up with will have far more in common with Farmville and Cookie Clicker than Dragon Warrior and Elder Scrolls.
I think this is an important point too; there's a difference between fighting for fun/mad gainz and grinding. I remember I was playing Romancing SaGa for PS2 once and a convo went like this
guy: why are you still in this cave you've been here fighting shit for a while
me: because the battle system is dope; i like fighting cool shit and doing sick combos and gaining stats and shit
guy: oh so you like to grind
me: no are you on fucking drugs
Okay that's sort of an approximation but still. What is grinding? What's the difference between grinding and someone just really, really liking your battle system and getting stronger? Maybe we should examine that.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Oh man. Romancing SaGa is the weirdest example, because the combat is fun enough to just keep doing, but the game punishes you for leveling up by making you permanently miss plot events, AND it makes the enemies scale to your level. Then it also gives you a massive open world full of interconnected quests that eventually link together to form a cohesive story, but punishes you the same way for exploring as it does for battling - every time you go from one place to another, several days pass in the world, and some story events permanently end and all the monsters get a little stronger. To actually gain strength faster than the enemies do while also seeing the whole story, you have to avoid all the battles while following a precise path that you had to look up in a strategy guide. So it does the exact inverse of what FF5 does, but with the exact same result - the game rewards you more for doing the less fun parts.
It has a serious identity crisis. All it really needed was for events to not end after a certain number of days, and it would have been a perfectly acceptable game.
It has a serious identity crisis. All it really needed was for events to not end after a certain number of days, and it would have been a perfectly acceptable game.
Okay, some points here.
This gripe I can sort of understand. To elaborate, there's a hidden counter that goes up after battles, and certain quests can only be done with that counter below certain levels; this represents the passing of time. I can understand this being annoying, but it didn't bother me too much since there's so many different playable characters, and some things carry over between playthroughs.
You're not meant to be able to do every quest with one character, and that was implemented to artificially give every playthrough a different experience. Weird and unfair, yeah, but it didn't bother me too much.
This is a SaGa staple, but I don't mind. It constantly keeps combat interesting, and being an open world game that it is, it keeps players on their toes and ensures that they didn't accidentally overlevel and end up crushing garden bunnies with cosmic spells or some shit. Every area has a 'cap' though, which is basically the average strength of mobs in that area, and once enemy mobs hit that cap, they can't get more powerful. Some areas have higher than average monsters, and some areas have mobs that stay weak.
Are you talking about Minstrel Song? This isn't true, the Battle and Event Ranks only climb via battles.
I think this is exaggerated. My first playthroughs, I had no knowledge of this mechanic and still found plenty of quests, almost too many to do. You need a strategy guide if you; 1. want to find the more obscure quests, you know, classic SaGa shit, or 2. You want to compulsively do every quest with one character, which is still pretty much impossible.
Either or, there were some funky design choices in Minstrel's Song, but a lot of them are overstated.
author=Locke
but the game punishes you for leveling up by making you permanently miss plot events
This gripe I can sort of understand. To elaborate, there's a hidden counter that goes up after battles, and certain quests can only be done with that counter below certain levels; this represents the passing of time. I can understand this being annoying, but it didn't bother me too much since there's so many different playable characters, and some things carry over between playthroughs.
You're not meant to be able to do every quest with one character, and that was implemented to artificially give every playthrough a different experience. Weird and unfair, yeah, but it didn't bother me too much.
author=Locke
AND it makes the enemies scale to your level.
This is a SaGa staple, but I don't mind. It constantly keeps combat interesting, and being an open world game that it is, it keeps players on their toes and ensures that they didn't accidentally overlevel and end up crushing garden bunnies with cosmic spells or some shit. Every area has a 'cap' though, which is basically the average strength of mobs in that area, and once enemy mobs hit that cap, they can't get more powerful. Some areas have higher than average monsters, and some areas have mobs that stay weak.
author=Locke
t punishes you the same way for exploring as it does for battling - every time you go from one place to another, several days pass in the world, and some story events permanently end and all the monsters get a little stronger.
Are you talking about Minstrel Song? This isn't true, the Battle and Event Ranks only climb via battles.
author=Locke
To actually gain strength faster than the enemies do while also seeing the whole story, you have to avoid all the battles while following a precise path that you had to look up in a strategy guide.
I think this is exaggerated. My first playthroughs, I had no knowledge of this mechanic and still found plenty of quests, almost too many to do. You need a strategy guide if you; 1. want to find the more obscure quests, you know, classic SaGa shit, or 2. You want to compulsively do every quest with one character, which is still pretty much impossible.
Either or, there were some funky design choices in Minstrel's Song, but a lot of them are overstated.
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
author=zeello
Taking out leveling puts the focus more squarely on skill, but occassionally less skill is a good thing and makes a game more accessible. In this way rpgs are rather a casual genre.
A casual 40 hour (5 hour story/35 hour grind) genre.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Yeah, it's not really ruinous to the game, especially if you don't know it's happening, but I thought it could've been done a lot better. Oh wait, this is a topic for imagining exactly how! I think I'll do that.
Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song
You have two types of progression: character stats and world stats.
Like in the original game and the rest of the SaGa series, characters gain stats based on what they do in battle. If you cast magic, you get willpower and intellect. If you use sword attacks, you get strength and agility. If you get attacked, you get HP and stamina. If you spend SP, you get SP. If you spend WP, you get WP. This is how the original game's stat growth works - mostly like FF2, except without the random stat-downs, and without any benefit to staying in battle longer (since a stat can only grow by 1 point per battle, and it's equally likely to do so whether you attacked the enemy one time or fifty).
The world, like a character, has its own stats. These stats can be viewed on the world map. The world has politics, conquest, adventure, crime, secrets, occultism, and romance stats. These stats increase any time you do a quest that is related to them. If you do the butterfly quest in the Forest Maze, where a woman's husband died trying to find a cure for her and turned into a butterfly spirit, it will increase the world's Romance stat. If you successfully follow the butterfly through the maze on your first try without getting lost, the world's Secrets stat will also have a chance to increase. Other quests will work similarly: they'll always give at least one stat point, but secondary objectives will have a chance to increase the world's stats that are related to those objecties, similar to how character stats increase after battle based on what actions you took. Many quests involve a choice - steal a sacred goblet or leave it undisturbed - and different choices will increase different stats.
The world's stats are required to unlock new events and quests, many of which also open up new locations or let you recruit new characters. Many quests will be available from the beginning of the game, but most of them will have stat requirements to start them. There's no time limit on starting events, and there are enough guaranteed stats from all the world's quests that you can never permanently miss out on any quests, but you can access new events more quickly if you succeed at the secondary objectives in other events.
The world's stats also affect the availability of weapons and armor in different shops. Different towns will have different stat affinities, and their shops will get better stock as those stats go up. The shops in the pirate town will get better equipment as your crime and adventure stats go up, for example.
Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song
You have two types of progression: character stats and world stats.
Like in the original game and the rest of the SaGa series, characters gain stats based on what they do in battle. If you cast magic, you get willpower and intellect. If you use sword attacks, you get strength and agility. If you get attacked, you get HP and stamina. If you spend SP, you get SP. If you spend WP, you get WP. This is how the original game's stat growth works - mostly like FF2, except without the random stat-downs, and without any benefit to staying in battle longer (since a stat can only grow by 1 point per battle, and it's equally likely to do so whether you attacked the enemy one time or fifty).
The world, like a character, has its own stats. These stats can be viewed on the world map. The world has politics, conquest, adventure, crime, secrets, occultism, and romance stats. These stats increase any time you do a quest that is related to them. If you do the butterfly quest in the Forest Maze, where a woman's husband died trying to find a cure for her and turned into a butterfly spirit, it will increase the world's Romance stat. If you successfully follow the butterfly through the maze on your first try without getting lost, the world's Secrets stat will also have a chance to increase. Other quests will work similarly: they'll always give at least one stat point, but secondary objectives will have a chance to increase the world's stats that are related to those objecties, similar to how character stats increase after battle based on what actions you took. Many quests involve a choice - steal a sacred goblet or leave it undisturbed - and different choices will increase different stats.
The world's stats are required to unlock new events and quests, many of which also open up new locations or let you recruit new characters. Many quests will be available from the beginning of the game, but most of them will have stat requirements to start them. There's no time limit on starting events, and there are enough guaranteed stats from all the world's quests that you can never permanently miss out on any quests, but you can access new events more quickly if you succeed at the secondary objectives in other events.
The world's stats also affect the availability of weapons and armor in different shops. Different towns will have different stat affinities, and their shops will get better stock as those stats go up. The shops in the pirate town will get better equipment as your crime and adventure stats go up, for example.
author=RMN
blah blah what IS power what IS exps WHY NOT GRIND what is the thing why are we all here if not exps
no.
Stop trying to make the argument that by pushing \for expansion away from 'traditional EXP' that there is someone stating traditional EXP is a bad thing in every way. This is clearly not the case and you are straining the point by pretending someone is arguing a nonsensical argument that isn't being presented. This is about power as a currency and has nothing to do with declaring imaginary EXP points in an imaginary bar as universally evil.
EXP points are not, in any way, necessary and I feel it's more important to question why you SHOULD include them over motives to the contrary/motives for starting a conversation that can push the concept of power progression. Romancing SaGa are some of the weirdest-designed games in recent memory and any effort not to mire someone else's entire creative topic in it is much appreciated
/annoyance
Crystalgate
694
Chrono Cross had an interesting system, or it would if the system had worked as you'd think it does when playing the game.
Every time you win a battle, you can get stat increases. You get them for most battles until you hit a limit and it stops. Usually when you beat a boss, you get a star level which grants you a greater boost in stats than you get from cannon fodder enemies and they unlock the ability to get more stat boosts from winning battles.
You'd think that the star levels would work as a cap for how high the stats could progress, but that's not the case. Instead, the star levels gives you new amount of stats you can gain, overwriting the old amount. If you didn't get all the stats you could get in the previous star level, too bad because they are now lost forever. One consequence of this system is that the main character ends up far more powerful than anyone else. He is the only you must, or even can, always include. At least until new game+.
The system would have been great if it worked in the intuitive way instead.
Every time you win a battle, you can get stat increases. You get them for most battles until you hit a limit and it stops. Usually when you beat a boss, you get a star level which grants you a greater boost in stats than you get from cannon fodder enemies and they unlock the ability to get more stat boosts from winning battles.
You'd think that the star levels would work as a cap for how high the stats could progress, but that's not the case. Instead, the star levels gives you new amount of stats you can gain, overwriting the old amount. If you didn't get all the stats you could get in the previous star level, too bad because they are now lost forever. One consequence of this system is that the main character ends up far more powerful than anyone else. He is the only you must, or even can, always include. At least until new game+.
The system would have been great if it worked in the intuitive way instead.
Versalia
EXP points are not, in any way, necessary and I feel it's more important to question why you SHOULD include them over motives to the contrary/motives for starting a conversation that can push the concept of power progression. Romancing SaGa are some of the weirdest-designed games in recent memory and any effort not to mire someone else's entire creative topic in it is much appreciated
I bolded my hidden reason for making this topic.
zeello
I agree that games should be a hand crafted, tight experience wherever possible. But part of the point of an RPG is the leveling system (although certainly not the only way to make an RPG) and this means that the player can be overleveled. But that's part of the fun of playing an rpg, and not the worst thing in the world IMO.
http://rpgmaker.net/games/5703/
http://rpgmaker.net/games/4526/
http://rpgmaker.net/games/1212/
http://rpgmaker.net/games/3937/ (warning: this one's not as fun)
I mean... I feel like I make RPGS? There's so much more to them than JUST the bar filling up. Is it the worst thing in the world? No. And I never said it is, I just personally think it's a poor choice! All I want is for people to not just blindly include traditional XP and defend it as The Default.
Liberty
No, I mean like a cave full of treasures where you have to fight in order to progress. What would matter is whether or not the battles are well-balanced, fast-paced and interesting. You don't need XP and gold from them because the rewards are behind them - new weapons and armour so that you can beat stronger monsters to get better weapons and armour to beat better monsters to beat the last boss. I don't see how that would be a bad idea, honestly, and don't see why you'd think it would be a bad base for a game. It's all about balance, as with any of the options explained in this thread.
This is what those games above are at their core, and it's an idea that I like a lot.
MOG
I'm not saying not getting XP for fights is a terrible idea all of the time, and I applaud other ways of exploring progress, but what I'm saying is, at its core, the traditional mode of gaining strength isn't bad, and rooted in common sense; you get better at fighting by fighting. I just think a more productive path would be improving that, and not outright replacing it. I feel the mindset of "KILL THE GRIND" is just working backwards.
okay but it's like. that's what i'm putting forward? improving the results from battle so as to allow for people to get stronger but in a way that the developer is in almost complete control? i feel like you're looking solely at my DA:I idea and not at any of the rest of them. how does traditional XP benefit the games i talked about more than my or others' ideas?
I guess it's inevitable that the topic turned to this. Oh well. :<
author=Ver
no.
Stop trying to make the argument that by pushing \for expansion away from 'traditional EXP' that there is someone stating traditional EXP is a bad thing in every way. This is clearly not the case and you are straining the point by pretending someone is arguing a nonsensical argument that isn't being presented. This is about power as a currency and has nothing to do with declaring imaginary EXP points in an imaginary bar as universally evil.
EXP points are not, in any way, necessary and I feel it's more important to question why you SHOULD include them over motives to the contrary/motives for starting a conversation that can push the concept of power progression. Romancing SaGa are some of the weirdest-designed games in recent memory and any effort not to mire someone else's entire creative topic in it is much appreciated
what are you even saying dude
author=Craze
okay but it's like. that's what i'm putting forward? improving the results from battle so as to allow for people to get stronger but in a way that the developer is in almost complete control? i feel like you're looking solely at my DA:I idea and not at any of the rest of them. how does traditional XP benefit the games i talked about more than my or others' ideas?
I guess it's inevitable that the topic turned to this. Oh well. :<
I guess what I'm saying is...
Put it this way. When I was on deployment 2 years ago, I did a little bit of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Well, I dabbled in it. I'm not that good, but when I first started, I sucked. The best way I got better? More Jiu Jitsu. I could read about it, talk about it, practice by myself, the whole nine, but the best way I got better at Jiu Jitsu was actually getting down on that mat with others during practice and hashing it out, no matter how much it may have sucked or if I was sick or something.
Not only that, it was the reward. Getting better an an activity via 'doing' that activity is it's own and best reward. Let's say I won a bunch of money by placing in a Jiu Jitsu (lol, I'm not that good at all, but let's). Sure, that's tangible, and that's great, but that money isn't an inherent addition to my skill. Most importantly, it's not lasting by nature, because I can spend it, or I can waste it, or it can fall down a well and float away.
What is tangible is the fact that whatever increase in skill I gained from placing in that tournament, and even the gain in skill it took to place in that tournament in the first place via countless bouts, is something you cannot substitute when it comes to that, or any real life skill, for that instance. If you want to get better at doing, you have to do.
Basically what I'm saying is, that's the basis for traditional XP systems at its core, and that's why it exists. It's the basest, most cathartic feeling for anyone ever to a progress in skill, for displaying that skill. Beat a mighty dragon? Wow, you must be pretty dope at fighting! Here's some progress (XP) for your trouble! Whether it's tossing a football or math, continual practice at any activity in 9 out of 10 cases is going to be the best way of getting better at it.
That's my defense of the traditional XP system and why it's lasted, and propagated far beyond its RPG roots into almost every genre of game. Tweak it, mess with it, alter it, hell, improve it, but I don't think it's a poor system, and the reasons I outlined above are part of why I think it's there.
LightningLord2
230
I do agree that the traditional XP system makes sense and is easy to understand (kill things = get stronger) and it sure has it's place. It's not the only way to do growth, though.
okay but god doesn't care if you grind to a higher level in jiu jitsu while you're in the first dojo. as a developer i do.
like i get the psychological aspect of filling up the bar, but videogames aren't reality. xp is a way of describing something incredibly abstract, and it's only one way to interpret it. i mean it's not like a level even means anything, or +2 ATK from filling out a wolf's bestiary page, or unlocking the Falcon Punch skill by talking to the old sensei in town #4.
you're defending the traditional xp system psychologically and i'm attacking it as a developer. i have never said that it doesn't make sense or that people don't like it. i'm saying that in my game made from 1s and 0s i would like to see more variety that's tuned specifically to a game INSTEAD OF "fight slime, get 3 xp, repeat as long as the player wishes." there's a HUGE design space when it comes to character progression and as long as the player is getting stronger, they're getting stronger. you can still fill bars. you can still give power. i just don't think it needs to be the same in every single game because of how muscles work in reality.
i dislike corf's item-based idea just as much as traditional xp (for similar reasons) even though the latter makes more "sense" than the former. sense and reality don't mean a damn to me!
what versalia is saying is that some people in this topic seem grumpy about traditional xp being questioned and aren't actually talking a lot about why we need traditional xp in the first place. some people are seeing the following question:
"Why should we use a different method for progression instead of the vanilla default"
when what this topic is meant to be about is:
"How can we design progression from the ground up to fit a game, its themes, and its core mechanics"
seriously. i mean this is an exaggeration (SOMETIMES) but man.
yeah pretty much.
like i get the psychological aspect of filling up the bar, but videogames aren't reality. xp is a way of describing something incredibly abstract, and it's only one way to interpret it. i mean it's not like a level even means anything, or +2 ATK from filling out a wolf's bestiary page, or unlocking the Falcon Punch skill by talking to the old sensei in town #4.
you're defending the traditional xp system psychologically and i'm attacking it as a developer. i have never said that it doesn't make sense or that people don't like it. i'm saying that in my game made from 1s and 0s i would like to see more variety that's tuned specifically to a game INSTEAD OF "fight slime, get 3 xp, repeat as long as the player wishes." there's a HUGE design space when it comes to character progression and as long as the player is getting stronger, they're getting stronger. you can still fill bars. you can still give power. i just don't think it needs to be the same in every single game because of how muscles work in reality.
i dislike corf's item-based idea just as much as traditional xp (for similar reasons) even though the latter makes more "sense" than the former. sense and reality don't mean a damn to me!
what versalia is saying is that some people in this topic seem grumpy about traditional xp being questioned and aren't actually talking a lot about why we need traditional xp in the first place. some people are seeing the following question:
"Why should we use a different method for progression instead of the vanilla default"
when what this topic is meant to be about is:
"How can we design progression from the ground up to fit a game, its themes, and its core mechanics"
CorfaisuszeelloA casual 40 hour (5 hour story/35 hour grind) genre.
Taking out leveling puts the focus more squarely on skill, but occassionally less skill is a good thing and makes a game more accessible. In this way rpgs are rather a casual genre.
seriously. i mean this is an exaggeration (SOMETIMES) but man.
LightningLord2
I do agree that the traditional XP system makes sense and is easy to understand (kill things = get stronger) and it sure has it's place. It's not the only way to do growth, though.
yeah pretty much.
Yeah, traditional leveling is great and has its place. Heck, I've used it almost exclusively for leveling. I don't think anyone's trying to get rid of it for good. This is brainstorming about alternative methods. No one way is perfect for every game.
I eventually want to make a game where evasion and avoiding encounters is crucial, and escaping alive is the high priority, not defeating foes. In such a case, I definitely don't want traditional leveling. I don't want the player to be overly rewarded for killing enemies, as that's not the point of the game. How "realistic" it is or not doesn't make it better for gameplay.
I eventually want to make a game where evasion and avoiding encounters is crucial, and escaping alive is the high priority, not defeating foes. In such a case, I definitely don't want traditional leveling. I don't want the player to be overly rewarded for killing enemies, as that's not the point of the game. How "realistic" it is or not doesn't make it better for gameplay.
author=Craze
what versalia is saying is that some people in this topic seem grumpy about traditional xp being questioned and aren't actually talking a lot about why we need traditional xp in the first place
But I am! Or at least, I'm trying to.
I don't want my intentions to be misunderstood, I'm not saying DEATH TO ALTERNATE WAYS OF PROGRESSION nor am I trying to say traditional is the only way. But if a question posed by this topic is 'why do we need traditional xp', I'm not trying to answer that perse, as we don't 'need' anything as long as it's fun and done well, but I am trying to advocate for the traditional way of doing things in respect to XP.
Is it the only thing I enjoy? No! I've enjoyed games with way different systems. But if its true that our own biases determine our thoughts on design (and it is), then I admit that my bias is towards the traditionalist way of doing things, because in this aspect I think it's fine. I'm definitely not trying to argue against changes or improvements, but I am arguing for traditional XP. I don't think they're mutually exclusive.
As far as contributing to the purpose of this topic, how do you guys feel about the way SaGa does it? The grandfather of SaGa was FF2, but I feel the reason why FF2's leveling system was so bad was because it was poorly done, but I liked the concept, and that carried onto the SaGa games.
In SaGa, progression is simple, your stats increase individually after battles depending on what your characters do during battle. In a very broad sense, magic stats go up when using magic, and physical stats go up when fighting physically. This allows every character to be truly unique, as players can basically guide how their characters grow stat by stat.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
FF2 was ultra fail mode, but SaGa games generally do fine with the stat growth and the skill sparking. It's a system that lets everyone do anything, but doesn't let everyone do everything. A lot of games that give you that much freedom to build your characters, like FF5 and FF7 and FF10 and FF12, will cause you to eventually end up with a party of near-identical omnimasters.
On the other hand, SaGa games often have very large casts of characters that you can choose between, which is an odd counterpart to everyone being able to do anything. Each character has things they can't do, but because they all have the same potential, you're probably going to end up with most of your characters still being near-identical in the end. Once you find a strategy that you like, you can do it with everyone. This problem is sort of attributable to the level up system, but not really, since SaGa Frontier and the game boy games solved it by having different races. You can use the same level up system for different characters but also give them their own unique traits. A lot of the SaGa games (like Minstrel Song) just don't do that enough.
On the other hand, SaGa games often have very large casts of characters that you can choose between, which is an odd counterpart to everyone being able to do anything. Each character has things they can't do, but because they all have the same potential, you're probably going to end up with most of your characters still being near-identical in the end. Once you find a strategy that you like, you can do it with everyone. This problem is sort of attributable to the level up system, but not really, since SaGa Frontier and the game boy games solved it by having different races. You can use the same level up system for different characters but also give them their own unique traits. A lot of the SaGa games (like Minstrel Song) just don't do that enough.
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
author=Craze
i dislike corf's item-based idea just as much as traditional xp (for similar reasons) even though the latter makes more "sense" than the former. sense and reality don't mean a damn to me!
I see there's no pleasing you (and it's not just because it came out of my mouth or anythingrightImeanreally). This method was designed solely to work within the scope of my game and it does so incredibly well. I'm not just pulling shit out of my ass to see if it works; this is a tried and true practice. Isn't this what your whole parade was about? Here's a good idea that has nothing to do with traditional exp or items.
Every fight yields a level. Every NPC gives you a skill.
noeffortgimmethechocolate
I seriously don't think you had a solid idea going into this thread and just wanted a pretentious echo chamber. Like, literally anyone can see a world where a specific something isn't the norm. It's idealism and it's child's play.
author=CrazeCorfaisusseriously. i mean this is an exaggeration (SOMETIMES) but man.zeelloA casual 40 hour (5 hour story/35 hour grind) genre.
Taking out leveling puts the focus more squarely on skill, but occassionally less skill is a good thing and makes a game more accessible. In this way rpgs are rather a casual genre.
You want a game that isn't centered around a million throwaway battles? I've done that. It's RTP (EWWWWW) but it exists. You fight all of 7 battles throughout the entire game.
I've been around long enough to know how to tie my own shoes, thank you very much.
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
author=Craze
don't flatter yourself, you're not the only person i have disagreed with
I don't doubt that; I'm just your current low-hanging fruit-style punching bag.
The takeaway here being that you honestly need to try harder.
author=LockeZ
On the other hand, SaGa games often have very large casts of characters that you can choose between, which is an odd counterpart to everyone being able to do anything. Each character has things they can't do, but because they all have the same potential, you're probably going to end up with most of your characters still being near-identical in the end. Once you find a strategy that you like, you can do it with everyone.
This isn't really true. Reasons why;
-In almost all of the SaGa games, every character has a hidden 'growth rate'. Meaning, that while all characters can gain stats in anything, every character has a hidden slight predisposition to certain stats. You could make Myriam from a spellcaster into a heavy hitter like Sif, but since Myriam is biased towards magic stats, it subtly discourages you to do so and it takes almost twice the time.
-You can only hold so many skills at one time. You can learn all of the sword skills and then all of the magic skills, but you cannot hold all of the skills at once. In addition, in SaGa games there's usually a hidden attribute called 'Mastery' that requires total devotion in one trade or the other.
-The gradual stat development in SaGa takes a really, really long time. It's scaled so that by the time you finish a character quest, which is about 20-30 hours on average, you're strong enough to finish it, but even then, whatever you've trained your characters in, they're probably not masters at their trade.
To truly become god fighters or mega mages, which is really cool, mind you, requires much more time and usually devotion to many of the optional quests. Grinding out a character to become both ULTRA MAXXED at both magic and physical combat takes like 40 fucking years. Even well rounded characters become capable, sure, but never masters at both. The game discourages mega grinding by just kinda stopping giving stat ups after a certain level of strength.
