TAKE MY BREATH AWAY.

This is one of the hardest things to do really. Because it's easy to make it too difficult. Once you've died a couple of times in a situation that had you made would have been awesome. You start to see the metagame behind it all. ("alright I've cleared this corridor, next they'll be running in through this door. If I mine it beforehand it'll give me a couple more seconds")

so actually:
On the other hand, how willing are you to play through a boss fight/dungeon/level in another game that has you dying over and over again until you figure it out?
I don't agree with at all.

Trial and error gameplay is not the same as the "FUCK YEAH I MADE IT"-feeling. One example I tend to bring up a lot in the whole fuck yeah is the Resident Evil games. They have a bunch of quite ridiculous bosses that it's always frightening to meet up with (usually because of 1) a scary cutscene beforehand and 2) some heavy buildup) but in the end it's fairly rarely that you actually die against them. Instead you get thrown around a room and hit with all manner of weird special attacks until you manage to kill it.

I hardly ever feel anything else than "finally that was over. let's get back to the real game now" after something that has taken far too many attempts to accomplish.

You could compare it to movies and books. The sense of thrill and scare even though if you were to look at it from an objective standpoint you know that the main character is going to pull through. In a game the feeling should be similar you know that you're going to pull through and the second the "game over, you died" screen pops up the illusion is completely broken.


All this said. Those "near miss" moments are the best ones. And the problem is to make them near misses for all kinds of players. (That's where difficulty levels come in. Though it's still easy to pick the wrong one by mistake) The illusion of a near miss can easily be done with the Resident Evil method though. Having a huge buildup and lots of explosions in (preferably interactive) cutscenes. Running a character through a linear path during an artillery bombardment that will not actually hurt the player as long as he follows the obvious path. That's thrilling and unless you're a metagamer it will also be exciting.

I really enjoyed that mission in CoD4. It's not just that part, though. You are literally holding your breath throughout that entire level, staying prone and taking out enemies, and even going under trucks to hide. The buildup to that final moment is really really incredible.

How they do it is different than how most RPGs create that moment. When you die in Call of Duty, it starts you off right before the place you died. I mean it starts you literally SECONDS before the moment you died. It creates that addiction of knowing that you will eventually pass that roadblock and continue with the game. You can't do this in most RPGs. You can't make checkpoints that go a few seconds back in time, because how well you do is based on how well the player prepared for the encounter. You have to take into account the last 15-30 minutes rather than those last 60 seconds in Call of Duty.

So yeah, the best dungeons and encounters are when you are literally dragging your feet across the exit. Some great ways to create this moment is by taking away privileges the player is used to having. A good example would be an arena in an RPG, where you are limited to the items the arena gives you before you start your battle run. It's up to you how you manage those items, and arenas in general are good at creating those tense moments. Another good example is creating a dungeon that's 20 floors deep, where checkpoints are every 5 floors and there is some great loot the deeper you progress. So if you exit the dungeon or die, you'll have to start from the last checkpoint and attempt to pass those next 5 floors again. It's those moments of "Hm, I could progess to the next level of the dungeon, but if I die, my progress will be for nothing." that are really great in RPGs.

Diablocide is all about this. You get fourteen characters and a restoration point (usually in the form of a boss that heals you before and after battle) every two point five floors. Static encounters, party synergy and harlots add up to create normal-but-interesting encounters leading up to a moderately difficult mini-boss (or bedroom!?) and then a Demon. Capital "D."

The Demon battles in Diablocide are some of the most epic, nail-biting and cathartic battles in RM*, to the point where you need an entire army to take them down.

This post is quite pluggish, but, uh, this is pretty much exactly what you are asking for: EPIC in RPGs that doesn't rely on modified nostalgia.

EDIT: Also, a key point here is STATIC ENCOUNTERS. You will get x-y EXP, no more, no less (well actually there's VANGUARD EXP but whatever, I'm talking about the entire party here). This can be reached in more mainstream jRPGs with biased EXP (Suikoden/Exit Fate (same game)) or EXP based on exploration/bosses instead of normal battles.

This is why Diablocide has static amounts of encounters, Visions & Voices has no levels, and Karsu and I's current project has biased EXP. Balance is everything, and this is how we do it.

from Neophyte
Another good example is creating a dungeon that's 20 floors deep, where checkpoints are every 5 floors and there is some great loot the deeper you progress. So if you exit the dungeon or die, you'll have to start from the last checkpoint and attempt to pass those next 5 floors again. It's those moments of "Hm, I could progess to the next level of the dungeon, but if I die, my progress will be for nothing." that are really great in RPGs.

Reminds me of the "Pit of 100 Trials" Nintendo just loves to keep putting in the Paper Mario and Legend of Zelda series as of late. The dungeons use progressive difficulty and check points to make you wonder whether you really can survive those next ten floors or not.

I'm divided on this issue. There's nothing more satisfying than pulling off something crazy and feeling that rush of accomplishment, but there's also nothing more frustrating than failing to pull it off and losing lots of progress because of it. That is definitely an issue of balance, but I prefer things to be more possible than ruthless. Maybe I'm not hardcore enough.

post=110018
The boss battles in Romancing SaGa really are amazing. It's too bad that the game is so much like Final Fantasy that people were expecting that kind of experience and weren't willing to give it a fair shake and understand its mechanics.

I would LOVE to give it a chance, but I'm afraid literally every translation I've ever found has been absolute awful shit with the menus being unreadable or the important "explanation parts" making no sense et cetera et cetera.


I absolutely loved CoD4. I've beaten MW2, but I never once got the same feeling of "whoooooo" as I did from CoD4. There's a good chance that it's because I played it on Hardened, and without the ability to lean around corners (I only have so many fuckin' flashbangs!) it is nearly impossible to finish a mission without dying around every corner first (like Shinan said, Trial-and-Error elicits nothing but a feeling of "Thank Christ the next checkpoint). Speaking of which: To anyone who has played MW2 through on Hardened, did you find the segment near the end of Loose Ends beatable? Because (EXTREMELY MINOR SPOILER I GUESS) I was killed by the mortar every single time I got down the hill. Every single time, no matter how long I waited or didn't wait, if I crawled or sprinted, if I walked around the final slope or through it... like 30 times in a row, killed by an inescapable mortar. I'm not talking about cutscenes or anything, it just literally automatically killed me 30 times in a row until I lowered the difficulty to Normal, at which point I breezed through it.

To anyone thinking of playing MW2 on Hardened: Don't. It'll remove all joy from the game. I beat CoD4 on Hardened without too much trouble and almost beat it on Veteran (The TV station and Pripyat were next to impossible, Pripyat may have been actually impossible on Veteran) but MW2 on Hardened is just not fun. You have to run blindly into every room, because the game spawns enemies behind you constantly so there is no point in doing it slowly.


BACK ON TOPIC (I just really wanted to rant about MW2 auto-killing me on that one mission because I just died over and over for an hour straight when I first got to that level): I think the absolute best way to handle this in RPG fights is to have the enemy have a few very worrying attacks that bring the player to near death. I find battles that have self-healing bosses are pretty much guaranteed awful (a few healing "bits" or whatever is fine, but a boss who just randomly tops himself up: no!), but in a fight where I just keep healing my party and bashing away at the enemy with whatever I can muster until he dies just as I run out of MP is a great boss fight, I think. I've had instances of both the best strategies going wrong and the worst working, but I've also had some great win-by-the-skin-on-my-teeth moments, too, so I know they're out there!

I think the critical difference in RPGs is that the player has a few more options at his disposal that may or may not be one-shot items. In an FPS like Call of Duty, you can only hold so many bullets and it resets your inventory at the start of each level. That means that the player uses EVERY TOOL at his disposal to finish that level, and at the end he is totally vindicated because he's won (hopefully!). In an RPG, you don't want to blow through all of your elixers in one encounter with Boss 31/50 because you know when you get to boss 32/50 you'll get your ass handed to you. I remember when I first started V&V (and this was seriously my biggest problem with it although I intend to play through it soon) it right away asked me to use up limited-use skills and items. The problem, of course, is that you can keep them for later, and I am always worried that I'll regret not having them in the future. So while I used a few elixers and I beat the boss and I am happy now, I'll never reach that "total elation" point because I feel, somewhere, that I've set myself up for regret later as I find myself really needing those elixers or . Even in Half-Life (and two), when I felt I had really kicked a hard part's ass (there aren't really any bosses, but whatever) I would often go back and do it again so that I wasn't totally out of all ammo and down to 5 health, even though I was probably going to get it back later. I am a hoarder by nature, and I don't like to expend what I've so carefully searched for. It took some of the joy of it (despite the fact that it was my own stupid fault). This problem, I think, manifests itself in a much more obvious fashion in RPGs and some games with integral RPG elements.

post=109991
-You don't heal after each battle. Each battle would be easier, but it would add up to a greater challenge. You get that sense of accomplishment, but to the latter end of a dungeon, the player will start skipping battles.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I find a version that often gets used problematic enough that I wrote an article about it. Basically, if you heal fully at the end of battle, once the player knows he can beat an easy fight he doesn't have any motivation to do better in it, making it more difficult to keep interesting.


I tend to think it's difficult if not impossible to balance a basic <can beat boss?: y/n> problem in an RPG so that most people will enjoy it, and this only gets harder when you're letting people come in with random amounts of experience, items, talent trees, and the like. One of the tools I think can help is movable goalposts. For example:

Tie Fighter missions have optional secondary objectives with no mechanical benefit. It's also notable that, because no state is carried between missions, you have unlimited replay of completed missions, so you can put something aside for a while and come back to it later if you want.
Some Super Robot Wars games attach a secondary objective (skill point) to each mission, with varying mechanical effect, though it usually includes some skill point threshold for opening up an extra-hard epilogue mission.
Disgaea or Lufia 2's item world/deep dungeon, where you can bail out if you get in trouble but you get better rewards for going deeper. (Though the long ones can be tedious if you're not careful.)
Aurora Wing's limited pool of revives has this effect to a large extent: it makes (secondary) character death something to be strongly avoided while usually not giving out a mechanical penalty for it. (If the player finds himself out of revives for a while, I hope and expect he'd do the last battle or two over or drop a difficulty level rather than risk character permadeath for a long stretch.)

All these let you aim for something without catastrophic results if you fail to achieve it (usually); players get the thrill of achievement if they make it, and if they don't, they don't feel robbed of what they did still manage and can move on if they like. You don't even necessarily have to give a mechanical reward: just track something publicly and players can make it a goal.

post=110034
I think the critical difference in RPGs is that the player has a few more options at his disposal that may or may not be one-shot items. In an FPS like Call of Duty, you can only hold so many bullets and it resets your inventory at the start of each level. That means that the player uses EVERY TOOL at his disposal to finish that level, and at the end he is totally vindicated because he's won (hopefully!). In an RPG, you don't want to blow through all of your elixers in one encounter with Boss 31/50 because you know when you get to boss 32/50 you'll get your ass handed to you. I remember when I first started V&V (and this was seriously my biggest problem with it although I intend to play through it soon) it right away asked me to use up limited-use skills and items. The problem, of course, is that you can keep them for later, and I am always worried that I'll regret not having them in the future. So while I used a few elixers and I beat the boss and I am happy now, I'll never reach that "total elation" point because I feel, somewhere, that I've set myself up for regret later as I find myself really needing those elixers or insertnonpurchasableitemhere. Even in Half-Life (and two), when I felt I had really kicked a hard part's ass (there aren't really any bosses, but whatever) I would often go back and do it again so that I wasn't totally out of all ammo and down to 5 health, even though I was probably going to get it back later. I am a hoarder by nature, and I don't like to expend what I've so carefully searched for. It took some of the joy of it (despite the fact that it was my own stupid fault). This problem, I think, manifests itself in a much more obvious fashion in RPGs and some games with integral RPG elements.

This is the player's fault. V&V is not meant to be Final Fantasy. It's a game about survival; you use everything you have to survive. I am a victim of the need to hoard, and I find it horribly disgusting. In that way, I am trying to break out of the constraints of an annoyingly set-in-stone genre (TWEWY is <3). Karsu and I are completely eschewing consumable items in our current game, instead having "equipment" be artifacts that achieve similar results that can be used once per battle (and also slightly raise stats, because normal equipment is also dead). We also have a fucking ITEM USE STAT dedicated to determining the power of artifacts, so yeah FUCK CONSUMABLE ITEM HOARDING FOR GREAT EFFICACY

Suck (that potion) up, Kaempfer.

Great discussion and perfect opening example (COD 4 had so many of those moments!). Oneway I've found to garner that kind of reaction in an RPG is with the occasional major boss. Basically make it a bit of an endurance match.

Crunch numbers on party supplies, HP, and generally staying power. Without making the fight too long try to get the party to use up most of their recovery items and skills. Try to get it so they run out of fighting power barely before the boss is defeated. Nothing puts me on edge in an RPG like nearly running out of options and just praying that the party outlasts the enemy!