IT'S ALL ABOUT DEM MIND GAMES

post=152473
-The 'stuck boss' phenomenon. People dislike games that are too easy, and they dislike games that are too unforgiving, so what is it about a game that that has that one boss that suddenly stonewalls your progress? I've noticed that many people will quit right away at the sign of a game being really, really hard from jump street, but almost no one quits a game when a boss suddenly comes outta nowhere and puts your balls in a vice. I think some of the most memorable 'can't get past this boss' bosses are when; the player has already invested a significant amount of time into the game (I'VE ALREADY BEEN PLAYING THIS GAME FOR LIKE 20 HOURS I AIN'T QUITTIN' NAW SON FUCK DAT"), or right in the middle/before an important plot twist, and you're pretty much emotionally blackmailed into beating it. And you do! And you enjoy it! Interesting, yeah? Legend of Legaia is a great example of this.

I really wish there was more of this nowadays. The last time I felt something like this was in Tales of The Abyss on my first playthrough in the Largo, Legretta, and Arietta boss battle. We were on multiplayer and we were all down to no life. I was about ready to go 'FFFFFFF NOT ANOTHER LOSS!' and then bam, Mystic Arte, boss battle won. It may sound ridiculous but we actually celebrated like we just saved the world at that moment.

Ah, memories...

-'Gameplay which is compelling but not'. So I was playing Romancing Saga the other day, right? And I was doing a bunch of miscellaneous side quests, just getting gold, equipment, and dicking around. One day I played for about five hours straight, and sometime into I realized I wasn't even really paying attention to what I was doing half the time. I spend most of the random battles browsing the internet or listening to music, I half paid attention to wandering around the towns, and I meandered from dungeon to dungeon. I kinda realized that I spent the last few hours doing nothing but investing in getting pimp ass equipment and class level ups for my characters, simply for the sake of doing the exact same thing for another five hours. And I did. I know I basically described 'grinding', but it's something that people love to hate! Grinding is boring when its boring, but when its not, I like to call it 'spending hours upon hours pimping out my party members'.

Now this I usually can't stand but...for some reason I've been grinding in Tales of Innocence by doing quests and leveling up my styles and building money to get the best available equipment since the last dungeon has been killing me. It's been 2 hour sessions over the past week. It's not like it's even all that fun, but...I'm just doing it. Everyday. I could probably take on the last dungeon now, but I haven't bothered to. I suppose that subconsciously all the reward that comes out of grinding is satisfying, but...I can't really fully explain myself on this matter. :(

post=152473
-The 'stuck boss' phenomenon. People dislike games that are too easy, and they dislike games that are too unforgiving, so what is it about a game that that has that one boss that suddenly stonewalls your progress? I've noticed that many people will quit right away at the sign of a game being really, really hard from jump street, but almost no one quits a game when a boss suddenly comes outta nowhere and puts your balls in a vice. I think some of the most memorable 'can't get past this boss' bosses are when; the player has already invested a significant amount of time into the game (I'VE ALREADY BEEN PLAYING THIS GAME FOR LIKE 20 HOURS I AIN'T QUITTIN' NAW SON FUCK DAT"), or right in the middle/before an important plot twist, and you're pretty much emotionally blackmailed into beating it. And you do! And you enjoy it! Interesting, yeah? Legend of Legaia is a great example of this.

I do not enjoy bosses that are way to hard. I put up with it because the rest of the game has been enjoyable and I assume the enjoyment will return as soon as I beat that boss, meaning beating said boss is a form of investment. I accept some boredom in return of a lot of enjoyment later. That said, if a boss is a plot important character that is supposed to be powerful, then I will approve of it being harder than both previous and later boss fights, but there is a limit to it. If a boss is much harder than other bosses, then either that boss is to hard or the previous ones were to easy.

I do often quit if I notice the game is to hard from the get go. In this case there's only the pain and no promise of something good coming if I put up with it. Also, chance is the challenge is for the wrong reason. In games where I control my character directly instead of giving them orders, I can counter enemies doing more damage by dodging/blocking/whatever better and that way get hit less. When it comes to RPGs, there's often mandatory damage. Alternatively, there's damage that can be avoided, but doing so relies on the RNG being in a good mood making the damage luck based. If the difficulty in an RPG comes from the mandatory damage being jacked up to unmanageable levels, then there's no way to deal with it except to grind. If the mandatory damage can be manageable, but the mandatory damage plus the maximum luck based damage isn't, then getting by means either grinding or relying on luck. As far as I'm concerned, any challenge that you can't get past by just playing the game better is challenging for the wrong reason.

At the beginning of the game, almost all damage is mandatory or luck based. Few RPGs give you the skills needed to avoid or mitigate damage from the get go. You take the least amount of damage by using the most powerful skills and choosing the right target. Any damage you still take cannot be avoided by using better tactics. If a game is hard under those condition, I see it as a bad sign.

This wasn't maybe what the topic is about, but the point is, I don't see and mind trick here. The decision to quit if an RPG is to hard from the get go, but stick to it if later an uncomfortable hard boss emerges, seems rather rational to me.

-'Gameplay which is compelling but not'. So I was playing Romancing Saga the other day, right? And I was doing a bunch of miscellaneous side quests, just getting gold, equipment, and dicking around. One day I played for about five hours straight, and sometime into I realized I wasn't even really paying attention to what I was doing half the time. I spend most of the random battles browsing the internet or listening to music, I half paid attention to wandering around the towns, and I meandered from dungeon to dungeon. I kinda realized that I spent the last few hours doing nothing but investing in getting pimp ass equipment and class level ups for my characters, simply for the sake of doing the exact same thing for another five hours. And I did. I know I basically described 'grinding', but it's something that people love to hate! Grinding is boring when its boring, but when its not, I like to call it 'spending hours upon hours pimping out my party members'.

I define grinding as overdosing on one activity until you can do the activity you want to do. So, if getting the cool armor in the optional dungeon is what you want to do, then that's not grinding as far as I'm concerned. However, if what you really want is to progress the plot, but you need to armor to get an edge over the upcoming boss, then that's grinding. Also, if you want the get the armor, but doing so requires you to first level up a bit to tackle the dungeon, then leveling up is grinding.

Now, I don't think that's your definition of grinding. However, if you don't use a definition for grinding that necessities grinding being boring then there's no surprise if you do find a situation where grinding isn't so bad.

As far as making you definition of grinding enjoyable, I think others have already covered it, grant the player small goals that are reachable within a reasonable time frame, but make reaching all of them taking a long time. More players will put up with 10 half hour grind sessions that each grants a small boost than a 5 hour grind session that by the end of it grants the same boost, but you get nothing prior to that.

-The entire phenomenon of an RPG being about putting virtual stuff on a virtual dude to make numbers go up, to produce bigger numbers to make sure that other guys numbers don't reduce your numbers to 0. This is the beauty of it all.

We play to be stimulated and I assume that most RPG players find figuring out ways to improve the numbers stimulating. The methods to improve out numbers which we view as stimulating varies from player to player. There is as we noticed the whole grinding business which we have a lot of disagreement about. Here's however a trick I think works for stimulating the majority of the players; give the player a choice of how to improve the numbers. I believe that more people find improving the numbers stimulating if there's multiple methods to choose between than if there's only one method available, even if the available method is the one they would have chosen anyway.

A suddenly difficult boss that forces the player to change his strategy and explore his options is blatantly negative?

Difficulty is great. But there's a thing called a difficulty curve. If the boss is difficult, you should be gradually ramping the player up to face that level of difficulty - not jumping from enemies that take away 3% of your HP to ones that take away 75% of your HP. Seriously, it just makes people stop playing the game.

I don't think grinding is an inherently bad thing, either. HAVING to grind, maybe. But the option? Nah.

Encouraging the player to do something is not really better than forcing them to do it. Either way, it results in them doing it. And I don't want them to do it.

I strongly dislike the ability to optionally make yourself retardedly strong via grind. Grind is insanely boring, and the only reason you'd ever do it is to make yourself stronger than your supposed to be. This is a mental compulsion - we want to be stronger, it's how our brain works. There are goals with rewards, so we want to do them, no matter how boring they are. But, the fact is, if you're stronger than you're supposed to be, the game is a lot less fun. All the challenge disappears, replaced by grind. It's lose-lose, and makes the game less fun in every way, but we do it anyway because that's how we're wired.

Really? I actually like grinding to make myself a bit stronger. For me the option to do that is almost a requirement. I would probably be really turned off from a game that didn't allow you to grind. First time when I played FFT I thought there weren't any repeatable battles so I ditched it and didn't come back to it for months.

The ability to train to make your characters stronger is fine. It's basically the definition of an RPG (unless you think the definition of an RPG is something else, in which case you can argue in a different topic). What I want to know is why that training needs to be boring and repetitive. Why do the same exact battle 20 times in a row? If you've done it once, shouldn't that be proof that you can beat it? It seems like battles should all present some sort of challenge and should all be fun and engaging. Why make the player repeat non-fun, non-engaging tasks exactly the same way, over and over? There should be a better way. A way to let people build their power, but without any repetition.

post=152748

Difficulty is great. But there's a thing called a difficulty curve. If the boss is difficult, you should be gradually ramping the player up to face that level of difficulty - not jumping from enemies that take away 3% of your HP to ones that take away 75% of your HP. Seriously, it just makes people stop playing the game.

sounds like some pussy shit to me

Real men have difficulty stairs

Level grinding, maximizing your characters' equipment and stats, etc. can of course make those gimmicks somewhat less useful in the long term - nevertheless, I would still enjoy fighting bosses that require me to think about more than how well-prepared my characters are.

And this is exactly why I hate grinding, right here.

That is an awesome idea, Craze... not only does it a sense of epicness, but I always freak out when I don't know how damn close I am to killing the boss. If you can't see Max HP, you need some sort of indicator to encourage the player he's getting close.

life bars 4 lyfe

One of the things that makes me sad I started my current project in RM2k3 :(
Next time, though. I'll probably go crazy and add a million scripts.