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WHY DOES DYING HAVE TO SUCK?
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post=133713
I've been thinking on having a sort of pseudo-retry where only your HP and conditions are restored - consumables like SP and items are lost, as the penalty for losing. Sure you can retry to get your SP's worth in EXP/currency, but maybe you won't be so keen to burn all of your SP on a fruitless battle? It seems to me like a good way to shut down players that have no idea what the fuck they're doing, but without penalizing the "oh goddammit" type of death that can occur in even the most forgiving RPGs (oops party's charmed/any similiar no-control effect), because in those kinds of deaths you haven't spent anything. Of course, this really only works in games where SP costs/item reserves are carefully managed, and really come down to "You have to get to the next save point with a budget of this much SP/this many items/etc.".
That said I think bosses and similar challenges should get to full-on die -> menu -> retry treatment, hands-down.
What's cool is that with VX someone could potentially create one highly customizable script called "Alternate Gameover" that replaces the Game Over scene and lets you set and modify detailed gold/item/XP/progress penalties for losing a battle, therefore taking a lot of the work out of setting up whatever kind of system you want.
Sorry for being a communist, guys.
Edit: I am pro mass-confusion because once you get HIT you stop being confused (at least in most games). This stops it from being "everybody DIE now" (dun dun dun dun dun dun dun) unlike say, "mass-paralysis" (with any reasonable accuracy).
post=133734
mass berserk the party to enemies that resist all physical attacks.
this is one of my oldest (and favorite) tricks in the book. <3
post=133745post=133734this is one of my oldest (and favorite) tricks in the book. <3
mass berserk the party to enemies that resist all physical attacks.
"Lie to them. Rob them. Drive them mad. Concoct impossible scenarios whose only outcome is their death. And then, when their eyes glisten with shame and rage, drink their tears."
Tonfa
150
Mass status effects can definitely be abused to make for a very cheap kind of encounter. Take the Shadow Hearts series for example. Fights are utterly laughable until out of nowhere something hits you with a 100% mass Petrify attack. Did you block Petrify today, kids?!
...
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Yeaster
6164
post=133745post=133734this is one of my oldest (and favorite) tricks in the book. <3
mass berserk the party to enemies that resist all physical attacks.
I think there's a regular enemy on SMT2 that casts a Berserk-like skill on the party and then proceeds to cast reflect on itself the next turn. Brilliant.
Yoshio
774
post=133535
The game I hate dying in the most is Final Fantasy Tactics because every goddamn battle takes like 30-60 goddamn minutes.
The less shit I already did and have to redo, the less game-overs bother me.
I love FF Tactics but the battles do take a ridiculous amount of time so I was always so pissed when I did get in over my head and lose
If you don't need to grind you're not playing right!
....is what I have convinced myself.
In fact I dislike FF13's retries. I took the cutscene rewatching as 'NEXT TIME, DON'T LOSE'. I got punished for losing, and I would return with a stronger party and more knowledge of the enemy.
Personally, I try to save at every available oppurtunity in most FF's (not 13, I don't bother with about 3 because of their frequency) and hope to GOD that there is a save point near the boss.
If not, I shouldn't have lost! :V.
I grind to the maximum so I don't lose for this exact reason. It's the whole point. And I make my games with that mentality.
I plan on warning of it, too. There's my piece.
....is what I have convinced myself.
In fact I dislike FF13's retries. I took the cutscene rewatching as 'NEXT TIME, DON'T LOSE'. I got punished for losing, and I would return with a stronger party and more knowledge of the enemy.
Personally, I try to save at every available oppurtunity in most FF's (not 13, I don't bother with about 3 because of their frequency) and hope to GOD that there is a save point near the boss.
If not, I shouldn't have lost! :V.
I grind to the maximum so I don't lose for this exact reason. It's the whole point. And I make my games with that mentality.
I plan on warning of it, too. There's my piece.
post=133961
In fact I dislike FF13's retries. I took the cutscene rewatching as 'NEXT TIME, DON'T LOSE'. I got punished for losing
You can skip cutscenes love.
LightningLord2
230
I proposefully avoid levelgrinding as much as I can, in protest of all those who always want to do that if they don't win a boss fight. For instance, in KH2, guides recommend to be at level ~60 when battling him. I won on level 48; as my only loss came from not knowing his attack pattern (maybe 2-3 times more from screwing up). Also, I NEVER battle the E4 in Pokemon Firered with any Pokemon at Level 50 or beyond. Yet I still don't have any problems, since I carefully plan out my battle.
Dying really sucked back when it meant paying another quarter to the game to continue (this is why some arcade games were so hard to get the hang of!).
Heck, in games like Gauntlet II you took damage while not even doing anything (that that was included in the DOS port annoyed me, that stuff should stay in the arcades).
Heck, in games like Gauntlet II you took damage while not even doing anything (that that was included in the DOS port annoyed me, that stuff should stay in the arcades).
WolfCoder
3554
Well, while I didn't particularly like FF13 that much, you can see the effect of game over on each fight.
Before, there were enemies you could take down and a save point right before the boss. That's the classic setup and Grandia XTreme made me want to break my controller when you lose to the boss because you have to do the entire huge long and boring dungeon AGAIN. Sure they gave you a return point, but you would have to go back through the entire dungeon again anyway to get back to the boss chamber. Why couldn't they just put a save point there?
Anyway, now that FF13 lets you restart, your health is healed after battle and there's only the tech points, it gave them an excuse to have really hard battles for even just normal encounters.
If I want to make my game harder, I would actually have less harsh game overs. That sounds funny, but if you make a game where the player eats it really often, you'd want to make the game overs less harsh. However, in Bioshock the game gets too easy because I can just Rambo charge any of the big daddys and run back there after I respawn- the damage I did to the enemy remains so you can just go all kamikaze and have no sweat.
Then for games like Touhou, those games are absolutely insane but you get tons of chances to continue before you lose your place in the current stage. The game is still one of the hardest games you could possibly think of, but it's still tons of shoot-em-up fun. Of course if you had to continue once it doesn't give you the full ending- to get it you would have to do it all without continues.
I don't like being able to just progress too fast in a game, I actually like it when the game starts to push back as I get further. But then again there's the lets-run-in-circles-right-before-the-boss-and-grind tactic that's a difficult problem to solve without removing leveling up entirely. I think the most fun cure for that is to just have side quests that help you prepare for different things- like you'll find something to slay a boss.
I think the opposite holds true for the money-patience part of a game. I actually download indie games (like Touhou of course) because they're really hard and take real skill to beat vs. the cakewalk some of these new games are. It's the fire and fury action I really like. I beat the hardest setting on Elite Beat agents/Ouendan but it was still easier than 90% of the hard difficulty maps from Osu! for example.
I died like hundreds of times in Touhou but I didn't care because the game is really fun. The actual attention-keeping factor of a game is it being fun and that's why game design is a challenge in itself.
Before, there were enemies you could take down and a save point right before the boss. That's the classic setup and Grandia XTreme made me want to break my controller when you lose to the boss because you have to do the entire huge long and boring dungeon AGAIN. Sure they gave you a return point, but you would have to go back through the entire dungeon again anyway to get back to the boss chamber. Why couldn't they just put a save point there?
Anyway, now that FF13 lets you restart, your health is healed after battle and there's only the tech points, it gave them an excuse to have really hard battles for even just normal encounters.
If I want to make my game harder, I would actually have less harsh game overs. That sounds funny, but if you make a game where the player eats it really often, you'd want to make the game overs less harsh. However, in Bioshock the game gets too easy because I can just Rambo charge any of the big daddys and run back there after I respawn- the damage I did to the enemy remains so you can just go all kamikaze and have no sweat.
Then for games like Touhou, those games are absolutely insane but you get tons of chances to continue before you lose your place in the current stage. The game is still one of the hardest games you could possibly think of, but it's still tons of shoot-em-up fun. Of course if you had to continue once it doesn't give you the full ending- to get it you would have to do it all without continues.
I don't like being able to just progress too fast in a game, I actually like it when the game starts to push back as I get further. But then again there's the lets-run-in-circles-right-before-the-boss-and-grind tactic that's a difficult problem to solve without removing leveling up entirely. I think the most fun cure for that is to just have side quests that help you prepare for different things- like you'll find something to slay a boss.
I think the opposite holds true for the money-patience part of a game. I actually download indie games (like Touhou of course) because they're really hard and take real skill to beat vs. the cakewalk some of these new games are. It's the fire and fury action I really like. I beat the hardest setting on Elite Beat agents/Ouendan but it was still easier than 90% of the hard difficulty maps from Osu! for example.
I died like hundreds of times in Touhou but I didn't care because the game is really fun. The actual attention-keeping factor of a game is it being fun and that's why game design is a challenge in itself.
Dying doesn't suck when it's only every once in a while. You're just a bitch. "Your" meaning anyone who hates dying.
Seeing as I play games that have high amounts of challenge I've gotten a little used to seeing the Game Over screen alot (More so over the past few days, Persona 3 and DDS don't like me much) but it still sucks a little. Main reason for this is I have to go through the process of skipping the intro, waiting for the Mem Card to be checked and then loading (And occasionally running) back to where I was in-game.
FFXIII is probably best for averting this at the moment. Although dying still sucks, you can retry just outside the battle, which lets you switch members, play with your Paradigm settings, even leave and come back later. This lets you switch between different strategies quickly, and doesn't penalize you too much.
Although that said, there are a few fights where it can be ridiculously cheap, for example your leader being set upon by EVERYTHING, along with some status effects (Stop on a Sentinel, hello high damage to the rest of the party).
FFXIII is probably best for averting this at the moment. Although dying still sucks, you can retry just outside the battle, which lets you switch members, play with your Paradigm settings, even leave and come back later. This lets you switch between different strategies quickly, and doesn't penalize you too much.
Although that said, there are a few fights where it can be ridiculously cheap, for example your leader being set upon by EVERYTHING, along with some status effects (Stop on a Sentinel, hello high damage to the rest of the party).
Shinan
4314
Tangentially related article
There's definitely a reason we moved on from trial and error. There's definitely a reason why we demand fairness from games. Failing in order to succeed is a strange attitude, a mindset into which one must insert oneself. You have to pop into the right department of your brain and make a note on a whiteboard saying, "It's okay that I keep dying â€" don't fling PC through window."
The direction in which Valve is taking games is tremendously exciting. Intuitive design, barely consciously recognised prompting, and behind-the-scenes difficulty rebalancing if you're struggling.
It's creating a single-player standard where it just isn't okay to die. The player is having fun when he's succeeding, winning, overcoming. He isn't having fun when he's being killed by the same boss creature a dozen times in a row. And when a game lasts six to 12 hours, you want to be progressing, seeing what comes next.
Another bonus to FF13 retry: If you can slip past enemies but they get you before you can get out of their pursuit-zone, you can immediately retry a battle and appear on the other side of the enemies, effectively avoiding the encounter! It certainly beats getting into another encounter with no(n trivial) rewards.
post=135102
Another bonus to FF13 retry: If you can slip past enemies but they get you before you can get out of their pursuit-zone, you can immediately retry a battle and appear on the other side of the enemies, effectively avoiding the encounter! It certainly beats getting into another encounter with no(n trivial) rewards.
On the other hand you can get put into a situation like I did one time, where you get positioned after a Retry where the enemy can touch you AGAIN immediately after you get control back. Happened to me with a King Behemoth (Pain for all the family :S), thankfully I got away after the third retry, which was when I got to my limit of patience
I wouldn't mind getting Game-Over in FF13 at all... if it wasn't so ridiculous. There's one-hit kill enemies, and if by happy chance they target the party leader, you lose? That's so lame. Moreso is when you're stupid healer gives you one cure when you need like 4 and you die for the same reason. It's just like a big raspberry by Square-Enix and a massive time-kill. You can sometimes spend ten minutes or so on a fight if it's a particular bitch, only to die from some stupid attack or shitty healer. (this is probably more prominient early in the game?) even still... change party leaders, give the healer a chance to cast Raise... SOMETHING. It's just completely unnecissary to do this. Makes the game feel almost like an MMO because yet again we control one person with a couple lackies doing what they will. Kingdom Hearts pulls this off better. KINGDOM HEARTS.
post=134845
Dying doesn't suck when it's only every once in a while. You're just a bitch. "Your" meaning anyone who hates dying.
This is the most egregious example of "look at me I'm so hardcore" *waves dick in the air* I have ever seen on this forum.
Bonus points for misspelling a quote of yourself where you had initially spelled "you're" correctly.
