REVOLUTIONIZING MENU-BASED BATTLE SYSTEMS

Clyve accepts only one form of battle system.

author=McDohl
Menu-based battle systems were strategic in nature. The hidden nature of how damage was calculated, where things were, how to progress, etc. made for the game experience.

Hmm. This is not true; at least it's not any more true for menu-based combat than for other types. All games hide these things. How is damage calculated in Halo? What combination of skills works best against five enemies on a flat surface in Arkham Asylum? How long does being stunned last after you're damaged in Mario?

In a menu-based battle system you inherently have more of this information, not less, because the menu is telling it to you. You equip a new armor and it tells you that it has 10 more points of defense than your old one. You don't know how effective those 10 points are exactly, but you know more than you do before using body armor will in Goldeneye. You move the cursor over Regen and it tells you "Causes an ally to gradually regenerate 15% of their max HP per round for 10 rounds." Even in old NES games that didn't tell you anything but the skill's name, naming the skill XLIT and listing it under MAGIC was more informative than having no name at all except "the A button." It certainly wasn't less informative.

What is true in menu-based battle systems is that you have more time to think about these things. And so the games expect you to, and are designed with the assumption that you will. And so the complexity level is allowed to be much higher. The player working to understand this added complexity creates the second layer of gameplay that is missing, where other games would have timing and coordination instead.

The reason they died off is because of that complexity. Games are for little kids, dumb frat boys, and tired people on their day off who don't want to think, so the simpler and easier to understand a game is, the better it'll sell. Strategy games have all but disappeared for the same reason. You can still find them (and menu-based RPGs) in handheld and indie games, but triple-A games that make you think are as rare as a virgin porn star. There's a common saying that no one ever lost money by underestimating the audience's intelligence.

Explaining the complexity in a strategy guide doesn't really make a big difference, I don't think. Obviously you can look up explanations online now, basically removing the key gameplay. But you can do that in puzzle games too, and puzzle games are doing fine. Because they typically only require learning one or two key elements of gameplay for the entire game, and then applying that actually very small amount of knowledge to lots of different situations.

Don't forget Kotor in that list, I think they did a pretty good job in balancing real time action with preparing strategy to your battles =).

author=Trujin
Don't forget Kotor in that list, I think they did a pretty good job in balancing real time action with preparing strategy to your battles =).

"Real-time." Like Baldur's Gate and NWN before it, KotOR is pseudo real-time. It's turn-based with a play button. I dislike it but tolerate it. Dragon Age is a better example of real-time.

Make a JRPG based around the roguelike genre with permadeath, randomized items/weapons/spells/enemies, bam, you have revolutionized the turn-based battle 'cuz now it's not about gaming the system, it's about desperately trying to game the system with whatever pile of crap that the game gave you.

I'm starting to wonder if there's a genre that can't be revived by throwing roguelike mechanics at it.

German is actually closer to English than French is.

The German link doesn't connect even remotely close to the actual download. It linked to one site then another site, and then a forum.

Here.

That said, I can't get either to run since I don't have RTPe.

I'm a lazy gamer. I don't care how advance the battle system is 9 times out of 10 I'm going to trick out all my characters and mash away at the attack button despite whatever tactical incentive you make for me not to do just that.

In fact the less developers muck around with the battle system, the more I like it.

That said I still HATE auto battles. I may only be pressing the same button over and over again but I want to press it myself dammit.

Is this the part where I point out that even the RM2003 version of Necropolis was CTB?