GET GUD: THE PLACE OF PURE SKILL IN GAMES

Keep in mind, it's been years since I've played, Feld,

But the most recent unrelated SaGa example I can think of is the the Astos boss in Final Fantasy 1:

@0:59

He has a death spell he will randomly cast on either the first turn, or the second, completely wiping out one of your party members: - there is absolutely no way to avoid this attack at this point in the game, other than resetting your game and hope he doesn't cast it in the battle - because he casts it randomly, without warning.

Similarly, for SaGa , there are numerous monsters and boss monsters that have these instant-death-skills that directly attack your LP points, especially the Final Bosses,

I recall numerous moments while playing a SaGa game, where I would be grinding stats in the Bio Research Lab in Frontier 1, some random area in SaGa Frontier 2, or traveling over some area in Unlimited Saga or Romancing Saga, where a minor enemy or even a boss, would have some skill that would directly attack your LP points, causing instant death - (which is why you have to Quick Save often)

This became absolutely brutal with final boss battles, especially in Frontier 1, where you're facing something like the Hell Lord, Diva or Spriggan who are allowed to have two turns, per turn.

Often, they'll have a spell that deals massive damage, wiping out more than half of your party and if you're really unlucky, as I have been, they'll either follow it up with an instant-death-skill, in the same, or following turn, on anyone whose still alive, without warning, while you're scrambling to revive your party.

Many of my friends and colleagues, do not like the SaGa series for this very reason.
and to this day, this is the number 1 reason why I've only been able to beat SaGa Frontier 2, once. (…Not because I don't like Saga Frontier 2 - I love Saga Frontier 2, I think, it has a very interesting story about overcoming genetic discrimination in the face of adversity - but because I've truly, only ever been able to actually beat that game once.)

Like, I can totally understand why these games are appealing (I'm probably one SaGa's biggest fan); Growing up, I could only buy one or two games with what little allowance that I had, so something like SaGa Frontier 1 and 2 took me two years each, to beat, even with a strategy guide, it was fun.

But for the rest of us, SaGa games kind of suck - when it came to playing through Unlimited Saga and Romancing Saga Minstrel's Song; I just couldn't get into them. You have to have some sort of guide, knowledge beforehand, or play through it terribly the first time, in order to understand how these games fundamentally work at their core.

…Which is perfectly viable for the kid growing up or the customer who doesn't have a whole lot of options to choose from and has a whole lot of time on their hands. But for everyone else, they've just passed over these games or returned them, for something that's much more accommodating, because the time required to invest in this series, is just way too time consuming. It's too much of time investment.

Like, the difference between other RPGs and SaGa is that, Other RPGs, will often have some sort of skill or opportunity to completely negate this occurrence in battle to make it more fair, (like FF6's Life 3 or casting Reflect or how Level 5 Death, only KOs enemies whose levels are multiples of 5) SaGa doesn't - it just happens; if someone dies, you have to scramble to get your party back to life or the game doesn't even give you the opportunity, you just die - that's it.

I would not use SaGa as an example for a game that requires skill because, even when you do everything right, your success in the game it solely comes down to having a whole lot of luck through a series of turns.

And there are much better and more interesting ways to make your RPG genuinely challenging, than having the computer throw you an unavoidable, instant-death-blow at your party, that's determined by luck.

(Now, I'm not saying these games are unfair, because they throw instant-death-kills at you - I like challenging games just as much as everyone else - I grew up on Battletoads, I love Demon Souls, I play SaGa Frontier - But what I am saying is that, you severely risk alienating your potential audience by choosing to making your game this difficult, for all the wrong reasons and that this is something that you should heavily consider while making your game.

Cause if you wanna make your game like SaGa, and SaGa's never been genuinely successful here in the west, a game which people have actually returned, how successful is your game honestly going to be?)

SaGa is known and embraced for it's obtuse game design choices, but there are much better ways at creating genuinely challenging difficult games than SaGa's as I stated in my previous post.

EDIT: Lockez, kind of disappointed in you. I thought you'd know me better by now.

What I'm hearing is that you got to the final boss of SaGa Frontier 2 without understanding how to shield your LP, and apparently also without even understanding that losing LP is okay because you have a bunch of it and you don't actually die until you run out.

The final boss of SF2 attacks your LP directly as a way to create a time limit for bad players. If you understand how to learn all of the spells, understand how all the buffs work, and know how to use Permanence to prevent your buffs from wearing off, then it's not a big deal. If you don't know all those things (get gud) then the direct LP damage forces you to instead know how to deal a lot of damage fast, before you run out of LP. This creates a different kind of skill test which is ALSO completely winnable and not remotely random or bullshit.

SaGa Frontier 1 has basically the same thing going on with its direct LP hits. It's a timer, forcing you to win within a certain number of turns. The number is randomized because the LP hits aren't consistent, so if you get lucky then you might get extra turns before you run out of LP, but every boss in SF1 is beatable in one turn if you're good.

You're just bad at the games.

-------------

This is actually a PERFECT example of how skill tests in RPGs can be extremely frustrating to players who are not good enough at them. We are seeing this live, in action! As you can see, from the perspective of the bad players, they don't even realize they need to get gud - because the skill in an RPG is understanding the system, and they don't understand the system. They don't even realize they're doing anything wrong, unlike a player who's bad at a timing-based or reflex-based game, who can typically see what to do but just can't do it. Players who are bad at RPGs think there's no path to success, and that the game is just bugged, or that it kills them at random.

I think this is a big reason why so many RPGs are absurdly, disgustingly easy. Because if they're hard, people complain that the game is badly designed, that it's full of RNG bullshit and they think the numbers are just broken. This sort of complaining prevents other potential players from trying the game, in a way that simply complaining that it's too hard wouldn't do.

-------------

Although yeah FF1 is a badly designed game. Like, no shit, it was the first time an instant death spell was ever in a video game, so they obviously had no idea what they were doing. That is basically the lowest hanging fruit conceivable.

author=LockeZ
This is actually a PERFECT example of how skill tests in RPGs can be extremely frustrating to players who are not good enough at them. We are seeing this live, in action! As you can see, from the perspective of the bad players, they don't even realize they need to get gud - because the skill in an RPG is understanding the system, and they don't understand the system. They don't even realize they're doing anything wrong, unlike a player who's bad at a timing-based or reflex-based game, who can typically see what to do but just can't do it. Players who are bad at RPGs think there's no path to success, and that the game is just bugged, or that it kills them at random.

This is why it's difficult to make a challenging RPG Maker game without frustrating the players, because most people will assume you'll need to grind gold or EXP to overcome an obstacle, and if they can't do that, they'll assume the game is poorly balanced and not worth their time.
Basically, you can't leave it up to the player to find things out themselves, because most won't. You have to spell it out for them, shove the information into their faces and force them through tutorials until they understand the game mechanics.

I've seen it happen with my game. People have called it imbalanced or too difficult, but then I've seen them use only half of their characters' skills, and some didn't even bother to try to understand skill texts.

The entire challenge of an RPG is figuring out how the game works. There's definitely a point where explaining it ruins the game. Adding tutorials to an RPG is like adding auto-lock-on to a first-person shooter, or adding ledge-snapping to a platformer. It removes the player's sense of satisfaction for doing it on their own, and grants them guaranteed successes at, at least, a specific sub-portion of the gameplay. And while tutorials in a platformer or ledge-snapping in an RPG is almost always appreciated, the reverse is not true, because then you're removing something that's considered a core aspect of that genre's challenge. There are certainly situations where a game will still definitely be improved by that, and it's even possible to design games that wouldn't work without the reduced level of challenge, but it's definitely not appropriate for every game.

So, how to prevent players from getting frustrated without any tutorials?

Part of the trick is, instead of telling the player what they need to know, you design the process by which they will discover it on their own. This is a type of game design that I don't think a lot of people even realize exists. The idea of controlling the player's subconcious, and secretly directing them to realize things, while making them feel like they are brilliant for having figured it out on their own. Controlling when, at what point in the game, they will become frustrated enough with their lack of damage to stop and experiment with other builds. Controlling the player's damage is easy, but controlling the timing of their frustration is hard, and trying to react to that frustration by experimenting with a specific part of your game that they've never touched before is a real challenge. You may require a few dozen playtesters before you can really pull it off.

This is really close:

author=LordBlueRouge
Get the player to think like you do.

Except that in a hard RPG, you don't want them to ever quite get there until near the end of the game. You want them to gradually figure it out, and dole out the challenges appropriately. You want them to understand it, but to feel like they struggled to understand it. To feel like most people wouldn't have been able to figure out how to play properly, and they're really smart for pulling it off. That gives them a huge sense of accomplishment, in a way that most other genres of games can't pull off - it's why people like RPGs and strategy games.

Legend of Mana is a good example of this with a lot of parts about how it works. Definitely not the God-forsaken crafting system, but certain other things. How to find pets and mana coins for example. You have a chance to find a pet or a mana coin when returning to a place where you previously killed a boss. The game never tells you this. It never even tells you that you CAN find pets or mana coins. But at a certain point in the game, as part of an optional quest, you're going backtrack into an area you already completed. While you're there, you're going to find a quest that wasn't there the first time... but that is clearly outdated, and you should've done ten hours ago. The enemies will all die in one hit and the boss will take two or three hits tops. At this point, without anyone telling you, you'll realize that you've probably been missing new quests that appeared in other old areas too. So ten hours later, as you run out of quests to do, and have a few that amount to "find an NPC but we're not telling you who or where," you'll start backtracking into other old areas, searching them for new content. In some cases you'll find more quests like you thought, but in other cases you'll find catchable pet rabites, or undine silver coins. After doing this enough you'll learn the pattern. And not because the game told you, or even led you there with breadcrumbs - it happened because the game predicted and manipulated what you would do when you no breadcrumbs left. It planted a seed of an idea in your head, waited several hours until you'd forgotten about it, and then intentionally made you frustrated - but not frustrated enough to quit, just enough to make you wonder what the hell you're doing wrong.

The mechanics in question are "choose the correct sequence of choices from the menu." Of course that's garbage, I won't even pretend otherwise. So yes, you have to obfuscate what that sequence of choices is.

You can give too little information and you can give too much.

Obviously, telling the player in every single screen of the game "Now press A to choose Cure. Now press down to put the cursor on Cecil, since he is missing the most HP. Now press A to cast the spell on him." is too much information. That is too easy for anyone except babies.

Obviously, dropping the player in a game of Dwarf Fortress with all the help files disabled and all the menu commands in a fake fantasy language is too little information. That is too hard for anyone except the developer.

But where's the middle ground? How much is too little or too much depends on the skill level of the player. In a menu-based game like an RPG or strategy game, every piece of information you give the player makes the game's primary challenge easier.

Some players will be thankful that you added tooltips to spells indicating which ones are stronger before the player purchases them. Some players will think that removes the challenge of discovering the best strategies, but would think it's an appropriate amount of challange if the spells followed a naming convention that could be learned, like Cure/Cura/Curaga. Some players will recognize such patterns too quickly because they've seen them in too many other games, and so that won't be challenging enough for them - they'd have more fun (but sometimes won't admit it or even realize it) if they had to test the spells on the fly and figure their precise effects out in a combat scenario where it's actually risky to do so.