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BATTLE PACING
Posts
Crystalgate
694
Crystalgate
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Closeauthor=Craze
Crystalgate, if you're trying to make battles end more quickly, then you have a different problem -- you're taking the main gameplay component of the game and saying "NO NO GET OUT OF HERE SHOO" which sounds counterproductive to me.
If that's a concern, you can compensate by giving the enemies higher HP. The difference will then be that you spend a longer time fighting a full force and less time fighting a reduced force.
author=LockeZ
This isn't a solution, this is just accepting the problem as unavoidable and trying to focus elsewhere. Kind of like when FF12 realized random battles were all played the same, but instead of trying to make them more interesting, it let you automate them...
That's true, I was trying to reduce the problem rather than solving it. Back to the drawing board.
Craze, I think designing for the entire dungeon is an especially good approach if you're making a short but highly replayable game, such as a roguelike. One problem with that method in a traditional RPG is it's difficult for players to evaluate their progress. For a moment, consider a dungeon-wide BoD7 mechanic as similar but opposite to resource attrition (mana pool or items). It is an efficiency race until dungeon completion. However, in resource attrition you know you're losing because your MP is empty. How will you communicate that the turn counter is too high? I guess you could color code it to specific dungeons with some math to accommodate a player's avatar strength. Basically, how do I know I lost due to bad tactics during a specific encounter rather than just taking too long to complete the dungeon? Of course, for roguelikes you don't really have to worry about this because a large portion of the gameplay is about the player learning what efficiency even means before actually being efficient, which may be the angle you're going for.
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
It's also much more difficult in a typical RPG to know when you're reaching the end of the dungeon, unless there's either a map or some kind of pattern that all your dungeons follow.
I just remembered Breath of Fire 5. Welcome to the underworld. You have 5000 turns to complete the game before you die; far fewer if you use your abilities. That game was amazing, but at the time time, I'm glad it's one of a kind instead of a common trend in games. That was definitely dungeon pacing rather than battle pacing though - battles still had a definite increasing sense of relief as they went on, because losing that 0.02% energy was a vastly delayed threat, while the enemies were an immediate threat.
I wonder if it's possible to do it the other way around - as battles go on, you're gradually addressing a long-term problem at the cost of increasing an immediate threat. I'm thinking, like, replacing the entire HP system. Maybe in your game, instead reducing enemies' HP until they die, your goal is to, like, draw out enemies' souls or something. This requires reducing their sanity or spirit or something until their soul can be harvested, but once you've taken their soul, the enemy continues to attack you - at greater strength, in a mindless rage now. You don't have to be stealing their souls, you could be taking basically anything from them except their life or their weapons. Maybe it's a game where you're a thief, and you're stealing people's stuff, and they go crazy and start attacking you once you do. And they keep attacking you until the end of the "battle", which happens when you've stolen from everyone and then successfully escaped.
I just remembered Breath of Fire 5. Welcome to the underworld. You have 5000 turns to complete the game before you die; far fewer if you use your abilities. That game was amazing, but at the time time, I'm glad it's one of a kind instead of a common trend in games. That was definitely dungeon pacing rather than battle pacing though - battles still had a definite increasing sense of relief as they went on, because losing that 0.02% energy was a vastly delayed threat, while the enemies were an immediate threat.
I wonder if it's possible to do it the other way around - as battles go on, you're gradually addressing a long-term problem at the cost of increasing an immediate threat. I'm thinking, like, replacing the entire HP system. Maybe in your game, instead reducing enemies' HP until they die, your goal is to, like, draw out enemies' souls or something. This requires reducing their sanity or spirit or something until their soul can be harvested, but once you've taken their soul, the enemy continues to attack you - at greater strength, in a mindless rage now. You don't have to be stealing their souls, you could be taking basically anything from them except their life or their weapons. Maybe it's a game where you're a thief, and you're stealing people's stuff, and they go crazy and start attacking you once you do. And they keep attacking you until the end of the "battle", which happens when you've stolen from everyone and then successfully escaped.
Re: The soul thing, Karsuman and I designed a basic game premise like that once. Enemies had both Health and Soul bars (as did you); if Soul hit 0, the battler would randomly attack or cast spells at anybody. You could win by knocking all enemies' Soul down to 0 (or some down to 0 Health and others to 0 Soul), but you'd get better rewards if you knocked Health down (which was more difficult to do).
It wasn't perfect and not entirely what you were saying, but it'd be an interesting thing to try out. If only the Halloween contest wasn't already halfway over I'd do that instead of my current project! Or maybe... hmm....
Good point! Unless the game is extraordinarily well-designed, however, I (personally) don't much like the traditional dungeon slog. I've always wanted to try to renovate it, but most of my ideas fit the "short but highly replayable" scheme much better. But yeah, Chrono Trigger or Etrian Odyssey III or Dragon Quest VIII or etc. etc. aren't going to be automatically improved by a dungeon-wide system. That said, you could argue that the EO series and Strange Journey have an advantage with their highly detailed maps, since players can tell when a floor is "over" or not very easily.
It wasn't perfect and not entirely what you were saying, but it'd be an interesting thing to try out. If only the Halloween contest wasn't already halfway over I'd do that instead of my current project! Or maybe... hmm....
Jude
Craze, I think designing for the entire dungeon is an especially good approach if you're making a short but highly replayable game, such as a roguelike. One problem with that method in a traditional RPG is it's difficult for players to evaluate their progress.
Good point! Unless the game is extraordinarily well-designed, however, I (personally) don't much like the traditional dungeon slog. I've always wanted to try to renovate it, but most of my ideas fit the "short but highly replayable" scheme much better. But yeah, Chrono Trigger or Etrian Odyssey III or Dragon Quest VIII or etc. etc. aren't going to be automatically improved by a dungeon-wide system. That said, you could argue that the EO series and Strange Journey have an advantage with their highly detailed maps, since players can tell when a floor is "over" or not very easily.
