THE CONTEMPORARY TOUCH: TRADITIONAL RPGS FOR A NEW GENERATION

A final boss you defeat with punch cards!

Also a good pace and not absolute shit interface. Old RPGs are made as giant fucking time sinkholes with interfaces about as intuitive and quick as driving an Escher painting.

On the subject of battle mechanics I think rhythm or flow or whatever-you-want-to-call-it is pretty important. In the old method, the rhythm was more or less steady as you damage the enemy and keep your health up in a battle of attrition until your magic points are exhausted.

Things got better when designers gave enemies the capability to vary the rhythm in the form of things like spike damage. That's an example of reactive rhythm, with players now reacting to the enemies' actions instead of just the status of their health bar. The reactive rhythm sort of diversified with reactions like interrupting enemy actions or preemptively using barriers, but the concept of varying combat rhythm was still enemy-driven.

But combat rhythm can also be directed by the player--or proactive rhythm. There have been a lot of ways designers have implemented proactive rhythm such as threat management (common in MMORPGs), but one of the more common methods is resource generation. By that, I mean magic points or a similar resource pool that is restocked when the player takes action (WoW's Fury or 4 Heroes of Light's AP). The rhythm is varied by instances of resource generation and resource expenditure, which are player-driven mechanics.

Two other examples of proactive rhythm are Final Fantasy 13 and Xenoblade. In the former, you manage a resource called chain. Chain is accumulated by damaging the enemy until the enemy is "staggered," which presents an opportunity to do maximum damage in safety. Similarly, Xenoblade has chain/topple mechanics where players proactively try to knock down their foes with a certain combination of abilities, opening their enemies up to even more lethal attacks. Proactive rhythm boils down to the player taking actions to control what's happening in battle.

Anyway, I brought up both FF13 and Xenoblade because they represent an ideal merger between proactive/reactive rhythm and have the kind of battle mechanics the modern jRPG should aspire towards (ignoring FF13's non-combat related flaws). In addition to minding your chain in FF13 you are also reacting to enemy spike damage by shifting your party into defensive formations at the right moments. The combat rhythm alternates between player and enemy control, so a new meta-rhythm emerges where the player has to identify when that switch occurs.

Xenoblade is even more interesting. Enemies emote spike damage which is preemptively mitigated by using a shield or dodge spell. What's interesting is these spells are only useable when you've charged up your own talent art meter (yet another proactive mechanic... there's also tension which is both proactive and reactive... Xenoblade is very layered). So now you're proactively reacting to enemy actions, and who's controlling the rhythm becomes seamlessly blurry. This trend continues once you realize that proactive topple mechanics can also interrupt enemy spike damage, creating wildly satisfying turnabouts in combat rhythm.

While the two former examples don't have turn-based battle systems, their mechanics can translate into one that is. I think the modern jRPG battle system should try to achieve dynamic combat rhythm in the way those games have.

One thing I would recommend when looking at your proactive mechanics is to avoid having them be passive. My example there is 4 Heroes of Light, in which you sacrifice a turn to generate AP. 4 Heroes of Light could've been more interesting if each character class had an actual action associated with AP-generation. Like a Warrior would Taunt or just use a normal attack, or a White Mage uses a small heal to generate AP for "the big one."

Hopefully I wasn't rambling too much. I should organize these thoughts some time.

Quest logs and quest markers are all the rage these days. Also, an easy way to re-read conversation history.

author=NB
Can we lose the token Tolkeinism/Regurgitated Japanese Tolkeinism in all modern amateur rpgs, thanks.

I honestly can't stand that D&D shit anywhere outside of D&D or early videogame rpgs that were doing something that was then NEW when they used Tolkein/D&D expies for their content. Now it just screams "all my ideas are lame and derivative and I have to use the aesthetic and lore of a decades old author and the primordial spinoffs relevant to their era because I can't think of shit for myself"

See: World of Warcraft.

I mean, eh.. If you have to, sure, let's fight more (sn)orcs and kobolds and dragons and and have long hair and a big medieval sword and an elven character who uses a bow and an axe wielding dwarf sidekick but there better be something else going on in the game world that isn't tied up in what is probably the single most recycled set of ideas in the history of the game making enterprise.

Is there any reason other than laziness and unquestioned tradition that this stuff is still used pretty much vanilla in modern games o_o

(to be fair, you already have a good track record of breathing new life into the usual rpg setting/pretty original lore. So, more of that please)

I guess I haven't played enough RPG's to be that tired of it.

If Craze takes these suggestions on, I can see this ballooning from medium-size to large-size pretty quickly!

we should totally get together and make a game-baby out of this

designing Dragon Quest styled games get me pumped.

A major challenge in more traditional RPGs was getting through a dungeon and then beating the boss without using up all your resources. The NES incarnations of the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy series both turned this into a meaningful challenge in different ways - FF by severely limiting the number of times you can cast healing spells, and DQ by severely limiting your inventory space.

In modern RPGs this type of challenge has practically disappeared due to a combination of unlimited inventory space, heal points before bosses, and the ability to save anywhere. As a result dungeons have become much shorter with far fewer non-boss battles. The reasoning behind these changes isn't bad - save anywhere is kind of a no-brainer; unlimited inventory space keeps you from getting stuck if you save in the middle of a dungeon and allows for a lot more strategic options when outfitting yourself; heal points before bosses let the designer fine-tune the difficulty of each boss much more accurately and let the player use their more interesting abilities a lot more often.

It makes me wonder if you could create a game with the same kind of dungeon-delving challenges as these old RPGs had, but without sacrificing these benefits of modern game design. To keep from save-anywhere locking you in, you would need a spell that teleported you back to the inn that costs no MP; maybe it costs experience points? To let the player use their more interesting skills more often, but still have to worry about conserving resources, maybe instead of free healing right before the boss, they could have a skill that can be used 5 times per dungeon that restores their MP, but only works outside of battle? To go a more traditional route, you could just add a solid number of treasure chests in each dungeon that have hp-recovery and mp-recovery items. I am trying to brainstorm here.