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MAKE THE PLAYER USE OFFENSE
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
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CloseHi, my name is LockeZ and I hate boring fights. By default, the best strategy against any enemy that just attacks you is to focus on defense as much as possible. If you don't die, you will eventually win, no matter how little damage you're doing. That's stupid! It happens more often than I wish it did, though. Even in the top commercial games.
Designing battles shouldn't just be a choice between making them super easy vs. making them require turtling. The player often (almost always, in fact) has a choice between gearing and preparing for offense vs. defense - this should be a more meaningful tactical decision, instead of defense letting you win fights and offense letting you get the fights you were already going to win over with faster.
What are some ways you can think of to make battles require offense? Lots of ideas. Fill this thread with ALL the ideas.
Which ways do you think are more fun, or work better than others? Can you articulate why?
Designing battles shouldn't just be a choice between making them super easy vs. making them require turtling. The player often (almost always, in fact) has a choice between gearing and preparing for offense vs. defense - this should be a more meaningful tactical decision, instead of defense letting you win fights and offense letting you get the fights you were already going to win over with faster.
What are some ways you can think of to make battles require offense? Lots of ideas. Fill this thread with ALL the ideas.
Which ways do you think are more fun, or work better than others? Can you articulate why?
Increase the damage output of the enemy every round (Breath of Death 7, I think did this)
Instant Death timers cast at the start
Have the boss enter an enraged state after X amount of time rendering it essentially unkillable, so you either run away or die/respawn and have to try again (there is a term for this, but it escapes me)
Instant Death timers cast at the start
Have the boss enter an enraged state after X amount of time rendering it essentially unkillable, so you either run away or die/respawn and have to try again (there is a term for this, but it escapes me)
Skyrim Guard
The best offense is a good defense, am I right?
That said, my answer to turtling? Just give enemies the option to heal so that you'd need to deal out damage only possible through offensive builds.
Large
332
Have the boss charge a skill that can be unleashed every x rounds, unless certain amount of damage is dealt, which interrupts it (Or delays it more rounds)
kentona
Increase the damage output of the enemy every round (Breath of Death 7, I think did this)
this is the backbone of my entire project right now
Dungeons last 3-7 fights (there are typically 7 fights of varying difficulty in a dungeon, and so far you MUST do at least 3 to get to the boss. Either number might change in later dungeons!), and then a boss. Every single turn spent in battle raises Monster Rage by 3% for the rest of the dungeon. Monster Rage is a 1:1 ratio in damage dealt by monsters, and to a lesser extent their HP and defense.
The idea is that you can risk building a higher Kill Kount (#encounters defeated) to get more post-boss awards, and that the risk becomes more manageable if you kill enemies quickly so as not to build MonRage. You can ONLY get your KK rewards if you defeat the boss. Any battle (including boss battles) can be escaped from without failure, but any accrued MonRage remains. You can also leave the dungeon at any time you desire, forfeiting your KK.
Naturally, this means that characters are built more offensively than "normal," but there are means of defense and pure support characters. Still, take Jesse - he's a Medic, but his heals and his ailment cure are tied to ATK/MAT/AGI buffs (AGI is an offensive stat in this game). Leon, another support character, follows his attacks with party-wide heals.
SO YEAH I HAVE ALSO BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS
EDIT: Guess I should mention that I'm not making a traditional RPG, but rather a game that allows you to do 15-minute dungeon crawls and slowly build up an army of characters... much more like Diablo or, I dunno, a turn-based League of Legends. Bite-sized adventures that grow you in power overall, without really much tying it all together beyond pure enjoyment of the game. I'm not sure I'd call the Zeboyd games mentioned GOOD, but they're probably more successful at implementing this sort of system in a traditional RPG.
author=kentona
Have the boss enter an enraged state after X amount of time rendering it essentially unkillable
They called it a "hard enrage timer" in WoW, to distinguish it from "soft enrages" that were meant to be counterable. All your suggestions are excellent, by the way.
One thought is simply removing healing abilities from said game. If you combined no-healing with the ability to predict the enemy's next target, you would add a huge incentive for players to use the all-too-ignored "Defend" command too.
EDIT @ Craze: Did you ever play Desktop Dungeons? I love 15-minute dungeon crawls.
slashphoenix
If you combined no-healing with the ability to predict the enemy's next target, you would add a huge incentive for players to use the all-too-ignored "Defend" command too.
it's ignored because it's fucking boring
author=Crazeslashphoenixit's ignored because it's fucking boring
If you combined no-healing with the ability to predict the enemy's next target, you would add a huge incentive for players to use the all-too-ignored "Defend" command too.
Agreed; it's boring because it's not satisfying at all, it doesn't accomplish your goal (winning) and only slightly postpones your loss. But then again healing is kind of boring too. We gotta juice those commands up or just cut 'em.
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
Since no one mentioned these yet:
- MP recovery limitation or nullification. Via enemy MP-burning skills, battle-inventory limitations, or other methods, you can prevent MP recovery in battle. If you can only heal, say, five times in a battle before you run out of MP, then it's just a matter of making battles long enough (or damaging enough) that those five times feel like a limit that you're actually in danger of hitting if you don't win fast enough. You can do something similar over the course of a dungeon instead of a battle, too, by limiting inventory size.
- Enemy attacks that one-shot you. Someone already mentioned dealing a certain amount of damage to interrupt an enemy's ultimate attack, but I'm talking about something more basic. If all the enemy's attacks kill you in one hit, then healing and defense have no effect, so offense matters most by default. You can revive allies, but anything beyond that is useless. Not super fun, since you've just swapped from making offense useless to making defense useless. But a possible option for one or two bosses - maybe they also have some other additional gimmick that makes them more interesting.
There's something really intrinsic here that I think is worth looking at.
Dealing more damage to enemies helps directly accomplish your primary goal, but often doesn't change the outcome of the battle - it just speeds up the battle. Meanwhile, healing and defensive skills actually postpone your primary goal, but are way more likely (in many games, against boring enemies) to be the difference between success and failure.
This topic is about flipping one of those upside-down, but the other one suddenly piqued my interest too. I'd be interested to see more fights not only where offense can be the difference between life and death, but where at the same time, your primary goal is simply to survive. Flip the entire paradigm. The first example of something like this that comes to mind is a battle with continuously spawning enemies, where you have to survive for a certain amount of time, but if you don't kill the enemies you'll be overwhelmed. A gauntlet, I guess.
- MP recovery limitation or nullification. Via enemy MP-burning skills, battle-inventory limitations, or other methods, you can prevent MP recovery in battle. If you can only heal, say, five times in a battle before you run out of MP, then it's just a matter of making battles long enough (or damaging enough) that those five times feel like a limit that you're actually in danger of hitting if you don't win fast enough. You can do something similar over the course of a dungeon instead of a battle, too, by limiting inventory size.
- Enemy attacks that one-shot you. Someone already mentioned dealing a certain amount of damage to interrupt an enemy's ultimate attack, but I'm talking about something more basic. If all the enemy's attacks kill you in one hit, then healing and defense have no effect, so offense matters most by default. You can revive allies, but anything beyond that is useless. Not super fun, since you've just swapped from making offense useless to making defense useless. But a possible option for one or two bosses - maybe they also have some other additional gimmick that makes them more interesting.
author=slashphoenix
Agreed; it's boring because it's not satisfying at all, it doesn't accomplish your goal (winning) and only slightly postpones your loss. But then again healing is kind of boring too. We gotta juice those commands up or just cut 'em.
There's something really intrinsic here that I think is worth looking at.
Dealing more damage to enemies helps directly accomplish your primary goal, but often doesn't change the outcome of the battle - it just speeds up the battle. Meanwhile, healing and defensive skills actually postpone your primary goal, but are way more likely (in many games, against boring enemies) to be the difference between success and failure.
This topic is about flipping one of those upside-down, but the other one suddenly piqued my interest too. I'd be interested to see more fights not only where offense can be the difference between life and death, but where at the same time, your primary goal is simply to survive. Flip the entire paradigm. The first example of something like this that comes to mind is a battle with continuously spawning enemies, where you have to survive for a certain amount of time, but if you don't kill the enemies you'll be overwhelmed. A gauntlet, I guess.
Avee
5794
A few examples I can think of:
Azala & Black Tyranno: Kill the boss' helpers to make him drop his special defense.
Grandia: Implement a system where attacking delays or cancels the enemy's next move or death move.
Wild Arms: When a character chooses to Defend, he reloads his gun or gets a temporary ATP boost.
If dealing status ailments can be viewed as offensive, ailments such as poison, blind or mute will definitely help you survive as well as potentially speed up the battle.
Brad VS Kuiper Root: When you sustain damage your Force/MP rises. Use Defend every turn (otherwise you wouldn't survive) until you have enough Force to use your uber-powerful move and then heal/repeat.
When you raise your Mirror Shield by using the Defense command, Medusa turns herself to stone.
Azala & Black Tyranno: Kill the boss' helpers to make him drop his special defense.
Grandia: Implement a system where attacking delays or cancels the enemy's next move or death move.
Wild Arms: When a character chooses to Defend, he reloads his gun or gets a temporary ATP boost.
If dealing status ailments can be viewed as offensive, ailments such as poison, blind or mute will definitely help you survive as well as potentially speed up the battle.
Brad VS Kuiper Root: When you sustain damage your Force/MP rises. Use Defend every turn (otherwise you wouldn't survive) until you have enough Force to use your uber-powerful move and then heal/repeat.
When you raise your Mirror Shield by using the Defense command, Medusa turns herself to stone.
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
I would view stunning, delaying and lowering the attack power of the enemy as all being defensive actions. They must be done before the enemy strikes, instead of in response to enemy attacks, so they have more in common with casting a defensive buff on yourself then they do with healing. That said, adding these kinds of defensive bonuses as secondary effects of attack skills is a nice touch. It doesn't really make offense helpful to the player, but it at least makes it happen anyway. I guess it counts in the same way that killing the enemy so they can't deal damage counts.
Giving secondary effects to the defend command is neat, but I'm not sure how it helps out with this problem. You're making defense better, not offense, right?
And man, Azala is just a two-stage battle where both stages consist entirely of the thing I'm trying to avoid: you will eventually win if you just survive long enough and deal non-zero damage, because the boss does nothing but attack.
At the core, I think the only ways of making the player want to go on offense are these: if you don't go on offense, either the enemy will gain power or you will lose power. And for the player to need to go on offense, that power gain/loss needs to be enough to cause the battle to end in defeat. This power gain/loss can happen all at once, or gradually, and it can happen a lot of different ways (enough to fill this topic, hopefully!). But I think if you spin it down in a centrifuge, that's what it comes down to.
Giving secondary effects to the defend command is neat, but I'm not sure how it helps out with this problem. You're making defense better, not offense, right?
And man, Azala is just a two-stage battle where both stages consist entirely of the thing I'm trying to avoid: you will eventually win if you just survive long enough and deal non-zero damage, because the boss does nothing but attack.
At the core, I think the only ways of making the player want to go on offense are these: if you don't go on offense, either the enemy will gain power or you will lose power. And for the player to need to go on offense, that power gain/loss needs to be enough to cause the battle to end in defeat. This power gain/loss can happen all at once, or gradually, and it can happen a lot of different ways (enough to fill this topic, hopefully!). But I think if you spin it down in a centrifuge, that's what it comes down to.
Seeric
2155
Here are a few ways I can think of to encourage offensive play:
1) Make healing magic nonexistent, barely useful while in combat, or extremely costly while making healing items either difficult to acquire or only able to be carried in a limited capacity. This will encourage players to constantly be on the offensive with buffs and debuffs in order to avoid needing to use a valuable consumable.
2) Make defense a gamble. Who said there should only be one way to defend? Make it so players can choose to either defend against physical or against magical attacks, but not both at the same time so choosing incorrectly would equate to skipping a turn.
3) Make support magic important in general. Defense is useless if letting a debuff wear off means the boss will suddenly start dealing quintuple damage so players will want to divide their strength between dealing damage and keeping up buffs and debuffs.
4) Why have defense at all? The Defend command is boring to use in nearly every game and is generally only useful for predictable things like 'the boss is about to use a big attack next round!' moments. Between disabling enemies with status ailments, using support magic, creating gimmicks like a way to split damage between party members, and other neat tricks there are plenty of ways of mitigating damage without relying upon an outright Defend skill and overly powerful healing.
5) Make defense fun for offense. Avee above me gave some great examples of this as players will want to attack more often while only defending occasionally if defense itself is encouraging to them switch to offense.
6) Just do something which is somewhat the opposite of Breath of Death VII. Make player attacks get stronger with each successive offensive ability and reset this damage boost when the player defends, heals, or buffs; this could work as a cumulative buff across the party or for individual party members.
7) A fun gimmick which I've been thinking about for a while would be to make hitting 0 MP fatal and allow many enemies to directly attack MP as well as HP. Players would want to be careful about consuming too much MP when using spells and defense would only protect against physical HP-reducing attacks.
8) Too much health kills you. This is another gimmick I've been thinking about for a while and could be fun for use with undead characters. Basically, characters still die upon hitting 0 HP, but hitting maximum HP makes them 'too full of life' and it also leads to death. Powerful healing spells or party healing would be risky unless your health is extremely low as it could lead to accidentally killing one or more party members so players would have a reason to actively avoid healing or to use something other than the most powerful healing abilities/items. Make some enemies which 'attack' the party with healing magic, and you have a reason to actually attack your own party members from time to time (seriously, when has this ever been useful other than to cure confusion?) and spells which reduce all sources of damage or all sources of healing would need to be used in a much more reserved manner.
Well, those are all the ways I can think of for making defense more interesting or discouraged and some are almost certainly better than others in execution, but I wouldn't mind experimenting with some of them myself if I ever get around to making an actual RPG.
1) Make healing magic nonexistent, barely useful while in combat, or extremely costly while making healing items either difficult to acquire or only able to be carried in a limited capacity. This will encourage players to constantly be on the offensive with buffs and debuffs in order to avoid needing to use a valuable consumable.
2) Make defense a gamble. Who said there should only be one way to defend? Make it so players can choose to either defend against physical or against magical attacks, but not both at the same time so choosing incorrectly would equate to skipping a turn.
3) Make support magic important in general. Defense is useless if letting a debuff wear off means the boss will suddenly start dealing quintuple damage so players will want to divide their strength between dealing damage and keeping up buffs and debuffs.
4) Why have defense at all? The Defend command is boring to use in nearly every game and is generally only useful for predictable things like 'the boss is about to use a big attack next round!' moments. Between disabling enemies with status ailments, using support magic, creating gimmicks like a way to split damage between party members, and other neat tricks there are plenty of ways of mitigating damage without relying upon an outright Defend skill and overly powerful healing.
5) Make defense fun for offense. Avee above me gave some great examples of this as players will want to attack more often while only defending occasionally if defense itself is encouraging to them switch to offense.
6) Just do something which is somewhat the opposite of Breath of Death VII. Make player attacks get stronger with each successive offensive ability and reset this damage boost when the player defends, heals, or buffs; this could work as a cumulative buff across the party or for individual party members.
7) A fun gimmick which I've been thinking about for a while would be to make hitting 0 MP fatal and allow many enemies to directly attack MP as well as HP. Players would want to be careful about consuming too much MP when using spells and defense would only protect against physical HP-reducing attacks.
8) Too much health kills you. This is another gimmick I've been thinking about for a while and could be fun for use with undead characters. Basically, characters still die upon hitting 0 HP, but hitting maximum HP makes them 'too full of life' and it also leads to death. Powerful healing spells or party healing would be risky unless your health is extremely low as it could lead to accidentally killing one or more party members so players would have a reason to actively avoid healing or to use something other than the most powerful healing abilities/items. Make some enemies which 'attack' the party with healing magic, and you have a reason to actually attack your own party members from time to time (seriously, when has this ever been useful other than to cure confusion?) and spells which reduce all sources of damage or all sources of healing would need to be used in a much more reserved manner.
Well, those are all the ways I can think of for making defense more interesting or discouraged and some are almost certainly better than others in execution, but I wouldn't mind experimenting with some of them myself if I ever get around to making an actual RPG.
slashphoenix
EDIT @ Craze: Did you ever play Desktop Dungeons? I love 15-minute dungeon crawls.
Hells yeah.
LockeZ
At the core, I think the only ways of making the player want to go on offense are these: if you don't go on offense, either the enemy will gain power or you will lose power.
VARIABLES! DYNAMIC BATTLES!
When you have HP and maybe a resource pool, all you can do is play with HP and that resource. Stuff like limited MP meaning you can only heal X times, or having to sacrifice potential healing for offense, is worth considering. At the same time, you can always just... add... more. Add more stuff. This sounds like "CRAM UR GAM W/ SYSTEMZ!!!!" but it's not like that at all. By adding another variable or two, you give both sides something to play with and be offensive with/to.
Using my example in my previous post, you have MonRage (in LockeZ's terms, the enemy will gain power if you don't go on offense). Every character also has Morale, which starts at 100% each battle (by default, things factor into this but w/e) and ranges from 0-200%. A character at 200% will deal more damage/take less damage (and, for support, heal more/take more healing), and at the other extreme the opposite is true. Enemies actively damage your Morale with every hit, with certain moves being more terrifying than others. Only certain characters can restore/build Morale, and as such you're keeping that in check in order to maintain your offense. Does this sound like defensive playing? Maybe, but in practice it hasn't felt like it to me. My thought process is "I know that enemy is weak to Storm damage, so I'm going to have Seth use Mind Shatter (target's spell damage decreases, Seth gleefully gains 10% Morale), then have Wish use Cheer (LUK Up/+25% Morale on target) on Seth, and then Seth will use Electrocute to kill it in one go, or severely weaken it for next turn."
Are there defensive elements in that? Of course, but at the same time it's via offense. Offense is more fun. And, besides, if you don't kill or stun foes (Electrocute, especially with LUK Up, has a good chance to stun) then they're going to bust up your Morale... lowering your offense, prolonging the battle, and ultimately raising Monster Rage even further.
In another battle system, I had "Burst Points" that your nuker-type characters spent to deal huge damage. To get BP, you had to hit enemies. Every hit was +2 BP, and your rogue-type characters could get in a lot of hits. So, in order to get a truly damaging offense you had to be offensive. There was still defense and support (plenty of it by spending BP!), but the main goal was to beget offense with offense.
Seeric
6) Just do something which is somewhat the opposite of Breath of Death VII. Make player attacks get stronger with each successive offensive ability and reset this damage boost when the player defends, heals, or buffs; this could work as a cumulative buff across the party or for individual party members.
LouisCyphre, the guy behind Ill Will, never released but had a proof-of-concept demo about this idea; it was pretty fun. The idea was MOMENTUM; every attack built M and every defensive action cost M. M was literally a multiplier for damage and healing - at 546M you'd deal 54,600% damage (fun fact: this was absolutely necessary for the giant foes you'd be facing). You'd also heal 54,000% more than the base healing, but then lose 1/3 of your M. That's a lot of damage lost!
Avee
5794
author=LockeZ
I would view stunning, delaying and lowering the attack power of the enemy as all being defensive actions...
I'd rather see these actions as "preventive" offense and not as preventive defense. Maybe one could play with both prevention and reaction to achieve different results, as a designer I mean.
While a reactive action is an attempt to reclaim power after having suffered from a loss, preventive action is an attempt to reduce an upcoming loss. Ex:
Preventive defense: Defend command, Stat buff...
Objective: Reduce potential damage received.
Preventive offense: Dealing ailments, debuff, delay...
Objective: Reduce foe's attack power, stop his actions.
Reactive defense: Healing...
Objective: Regain HP = increases your chance of survival.
Reactive offense: Attack after the boss lowered his barrier...
Objective: Reduces the boss' chance of survival, therefore increasing your own.
I'm not sure if my viewpoint really makes sense anyway. Some actions can become quite difficult to categorize.
The Wild Arms/Medusa examples show that an action can be both offensive and defensive. It boosts your DFP but it also increases your offensive capabilities/hurts the enemy, so should we consider it to be exclusively defensive?
Then you could view all buffs as defensive, or consider ATP-reducing to be defensive while DFP-reducing is offensive...
Any viewpoint is fine I guess, but I believe what's most important for this thread is to suggest lots of ideas.
BTW good topic as usual. 'makes us think ;)
DFalcon
2141
Not to discount them as potentially good ideas, but delay and debuffing enemy offense are still things to watch out for by the standards of this thread.
The problem isn't that it's bad to have players play defensively, it's when the players' defense can be too good for enemies to pose a credible threat so things just drag on. If at some point a defense doesn't wrap back around to "I have to kill something so it will STOP HITTING ME" or some sort of time limit, it may be too effective.
The problem isn't that it's bad to have players play defensively, it's when the players' defense can be too good for enemies to pose a credible threat so things just drag on. If at some point a defense doesn't wrap back around to "I have to kill something so it will STOP HITTING ME" or some sort of time limit, it may be too effective.
Something I have been thinking about, it's very minor but an attack that does 50/%100 more damage if the target has a status ailment. Like you poison an enemy then use venoshock(pokemon if anyone is curious) I've always liked this idea, that you can DOT something up then use a skill to do mass amounts of damage for a low cost. I can see this better of use on bosses or harder enemies endgame. You deal a lot of damage but then you still have the poison effect on them to continue doing damage.
And of course if they aren't poisoned, etc. the skill doesn't do much damage for its mana cost.
And of course if they aren't poisoned, etc. the skill doesn't do much damage for its mana cost.
Killer Wolf
1235
My first battle script in VX Ace made it so that the party members go into an uncontrollable status if their TP gauge (renamed to Fury) maxed out. In the main character's case, it "kills" him outright. The idea is to fight as efficiently as possible to prevent either eventuality. (Yes, Shadow Hearts Covenant is one of my favorite PS2 Rpgs)
It lent itself to an interesting mechanic. Instead of having the "Special" Skills consume TP, I have them ADD Fury, which limits their use in a similar way. One such skill allows a party member to grab a ton of aggro and act as the pain sponge, but with every hit he takes his Fury increases.
Bosses who heal huge amounts of health every couple of turns are really annoying. Even if you aren't "turtle-ing" your way through, a couple of unlucky missed attacks in a turn, and your whole strategy is shot.
In Breach:Awakening, you get special stat upgrades and rare items from beating bosses in the fewest possible number of turns.
I like the idea of rewarding people who play well better than the idea of punishing people who choose to play their own way.
It lent itself to an interesting mechanic. Instead of having the "Special" Skills consume TP, I have them ADD Fury, which limits their use in a similar way. One such skill allows a party member to grab a ton of aggro and act as the pain sponge, but with every hit he takes his Fury increases.
Bosses who heal huge amounts of health every couple of turns are really annoying. Even if you aren't "turtle-ing" your way through, a couple of unlucky missed attacks in a turn, and your whole strategy is shot.
In Breach:Awakening, you get special stat upgrades and rare items from beating bosses in the fewest possible number of turns.
I like the idea of rewarding people who play well better than the idea of punishing people who choose to play their own way.
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
author=Killer WolfThese are the same thing, just worded differently. As the game designer, by creating goals in the game, you are defining which ways of playing count as "playing well."
I like the idea of rewarding people who play well better than the idea of punishing people who choose to play their own way.
Now, getting the player to think of the progress he's making as a reward instead of a lack of punishment, that's the trick. I'll let you know when I've figured that one out.
I really like the idea of basing an entire game around each character having a rage meter like that, though. I should play SH:Covenant, apparently. FF13 did a similar thing to Breach:Awakening, except it was for every enemy. Your battle speed affected the drop rates of items. It was such a small thing and honestly didn't even make a difference because most enemy drops were so crappy for 90% of the game, but I found myself going YESSS FIVE STARS BOOYAH and OMG NO, YOU DID NOT JUST GIVE ME ONE STAR, HOW COULD I HAVE DONE THAT FASTER!? after every battle.
Killer Wolf
1235
author=LockeZ
These are the same thing, just worded differently. As the game designer, by creating goals in the game, you are defining which ways of playing count as "playing well."
I hated Xenosaga 2's battle system. Breaking the enemy so you could deal extra damage was nice, but toward the end of the game it was just too much of a chore. The enemy didn't have to break you (if memory serves) and could just wail away with heavy hits, meanwhile I had to charge up combos between a couple of characters just to break an enemy to the point I could damage them. It padded combat out just for the sake of padding combat out. This is what I would call an example of punishing people for playing the game.
The original Xenosaga's battle system was a lot more fun to exploit/abuse. I got in the habit of assigning "enemy all" skills to my shorter combos so I could reap groups of weaker enemies easily and harvest the points I needed to pick the skills I wanted. By using the combat system well, I was able to beat battles that were supposed to be challenging for AWGS with regular party members. Once I realized how smooth the combat could actually be, I avoided using mech suits and stuck to decimating everything. I actually thought one of the Albedo fights (I think it was him) I fought was a joke boss/scripted victory. I was kind of surprised when my friends told me they were having trouble with it, and asked me what AWGS I was using. "Uh, none of them?" That would be an example, to me, of a game rewarding people who played it well.
Of course, since they went to the combat style I hated instead of continuing the one I really liked, I might be in the minority on this. I think 3's combat was fine, because I don't remember it clearly enough to have hated or loved it, although the Ambush feature in the mech fights came in very handy.
Wait I’m confused. You want people to attack things more?
From what I’ve seen more people concerned with finding interesting ways to incorporate the Defend command, because nobody uses it because they’d rather spend their turn attacking or healing.
Yes I understand the complaint; you want to shift the focus away from spamming healing and status buffs gaining victory by pure attrition because it’s slow and boring as hell. But why are you bothering!?
Personally not me, or anyone else I know, has ever played a game purely defensively before, because as people here have pointed out, it’s boring, boring, boring! I’m fairly certain when playing games most people focus on offence so I really can’t see how it’s that big of a problem.
So what if there are people who rely on “turtleing” to win? If they want to make their experience with a game as boring as possible let them. It’s there time there wasting, not yours. So why the hell do you care how someone else plays a game!?
Am I missing something here? Is there some small obvious detail I’m overlooking? Dose it offend you that these people aren’t playing the game “correctly”? What games is “turtleing” a massive problem in anyway? Maybe you self proclaimed “game design gurus” can enlighten me. Because I’m failing to see how “people aren’t attacking enough” is even really a problem.
From what I’ve seen more people concerned with finding interesting ways to incorporate the Defend command, because nobody uses it because they’d rather spend their turn attacking or healing.
Yes I understand the complaint; you want to shift the focus away from spamming healing and status buffs gaining victory by pure attrition because it’s slow and boring as hell. But why are you bothering!?
Personally not me, or anyone else I know, has ever played a game purely defensively before, because as people here have pointed out, it’s boring, boring, boring! I’m fairly certain when playing games most people focus on offence so I really can’t see how it’s that big of a problem.
So what if there are people who rely on “turtleing” to win? If they want to make their experience with a game as boring as possible let them. It’s there time there wasting, not yours. So why the hell do you care how someone else plays a game!?
Am I missing something here? Is there some small obvious detail I’m overlooking? Dose it offend you that these people aren’t playing the game “correctly”? What games is “turtleing” a massive problem in anyway? Maybe you self proclaimed “game design gurus” can enlighten me. Because I’m failing to see how “people aren’t attacking enough” is even really a problem.
