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1st person dungeon design
The biggest difference that strikes me is how much harder it is to navigate in first person. If you have played Phantasy Star, check out the maps. They are way smaller than you'd think after playing the game. Navigating becomes a lot easier if the dungeon isn't as samey looking and you have proper landmarks though. It becomes even easier with in game maps.
As has already been mentioned, first person dungeons also seems much more slow paced. I'm not so sure whether it's a natural consequence or if it just happened to become this way and continues to be so because we expect it.
As has already been mentioned, first person dungeons also seems much more slow paced. I'm not so sure whether it's a natural consequence or if it just happened to become this way and continues to be so because we expect it.
Balancing challenge and hype
author=Red_Nova
Well, Zeromus was just an example.
Yes, but I think not spending a lot of time on the chatter or on a scripted fight before the final boss is a good advice for the majority of times. A quick scan trough my memory tells me that it more often feels cheesy or cheap than energizing anyway.
Depends on the story. If you've played Silent Hill 2, the story does quite a bit more than present an evil in front of you and builds tension and expectation about that one, singular evil.
If you can not only tell the players about the stakes, but also make them feel that their task is very important, that will build some hype for the final confrontation. Likewise, if you can get the player to take the idea that the main villain is very dangerous to her/his heart, it will also build some hype. This way will not require you to put a lengthy cut-scene or scripted fight before the final fight and you also don't rely on single instance that has to be repeated in case of a game over.
I think this idea can be applied to most RPGs.
Balancing challenge and hype
Generally, I would recommend against trying something like Final Fantasy IV Zeromus. The more games there are that have already tied this, the harder it is to hype the player. The problems will however remain even if you got no benefit from the cutscenes.
Ideally, you want to build the hype prior to the fight. You have like the whole game minus the ending to do it. However, it is alright to build hype shortly before the last fight or during it if you can do so without wasting time.
Ideally, you want to build the hype prior to the fight. You have like the whole game minus the ending to do it. However, it is alright to build hype shortly before the last fight or during it if you can do so without wasting time.
[Design/Marketing] Why so secretive?
author=Sooz
Yeah generally the stuff that gets swiped is finished because thieves are generally disinclined to do actual work.
I tend to play my cards close to my chest only because I find that giving out too much info makes me less excited to put a work out.
That is a problem I have heard actually exist for many people with talking about your work. It can make you less exited as you said, but I have also heard that it can make you erroneously feel that actual work has been done even though it hasn't.
Being secretive may actually be a good idea, not because of danger of stealing, but because giving out to much can stop you from doing the actual work.
Please, Stop Writing Happy Endings
I did not claim that human bias is the result of happy endings, but I did detail how human bias and happy endings can interact. If that wasn't what you were saying, then I don't know what it was you were saying. I'm afraid I do not understand what point you were trying to make either.
Please, Stop Writing Happy Endings
author=unity
Again, the fact that you think people equate fiction with reality and assume that people will believe that they deserve a happy ending just because a narrative device said so sounds deeply flawed to me. Again, I never had that misunderstanding as a child, and found happy endings a bright spot when my actual life was shitty, without believing there was some "magical force of Justice" that was going to give me good things.
author=Solitayre
I think you're devaluing the intelligence of players/readers in this article. People can decide for themselves what a story or ending means or whether or not the ending was right or just, or if the player characters/villains were in the right or not. And people do this kind of thing all the time, whether the ending was happy or dark or ambiguous, so I don't think you have grounds to call players or developers intellectually lazy for doing this.
Contrary to Sailerius' example, the real danger is not what you think, rather it's when you don't think. If you intellectually dismiss the idea that good people always get a happy ending, this is not a guarantee that you won't nevertheless factor that in when something bad happens to someone.
Assume you watch a movie or play a game where the good people get a happy ending. You notice that they got a happy ending due to dumb luck rather than because of whatever the fiction is trying to push as the source of their success. This does help, but the fact that good things happened to the good people still enters your memory. If you keep consuming fictions where good people get a happy ending, this will be etched into your brain. It will not make you actually believe this is true, but the idea will nevertheless be planted in your consciousness.
Next, assume you hear about something bad happening to someone. You won't think "he must have done something bad for this to happening to him". You may however think in line of "he probably didn't deserve this, but such is life". If you think this, then you're in the clear, you consciously acknowledged the fact that bad things can happen to a good person. There is a third option though, namely that you don't think at all in terms of whether or not bad things can happen to a good person. This is when you can accidentally fall into the trap of victim blaming.
Or brain is made so that we don't necessarily have to consciously think about something in order to factor it in. Even though you intellectually dismiss the good person = good ending idea, it's still sitting in your mind. You brain is perfectly capable of factoring this in even though you are not consciously thinking about it. Of course, there's no guarantee it will do so. Still, being intellectually aware of something is not a 100% protection.
That said, I think the divine intervention happy endings are just a minor part of a much bigger problem. Sad endings can push the wrong ideas into our brain just as much as a happy ending can.
how do you make a traditional rpg
Typically, JRPGs plot lock equipment. You can't get better equipment than your current progression allows. Further, your are assumed to be able to afford the latest tier of currently available equipment. This makes it very easy to predict how strong your equipment will be. If they don't use this method, it's usually just two tiers the player is hovering between so the balance just need to work between those two tiers.
Items are handled on a "the player has more than enough" basis. The player is assumed to have items left once the dungeon is completed. In some games I've bought 50+ antidotes at some point and then never used them up. This combined with how armor is handled also takes care of gold, the player can grind infinitely, but will quickly run out of useful things to buy.
Left is levels. This usually is where the player can break the game without having to be clever. The most common approach seems to be to assume the player will fight anything it encounters, but not purposefully run in circles to grind. This gets trickier with event based encounters since you can't as easily predict how many the player will fight then. Still, the approach will be to make a reasonable guess and then leave to the players whether or not they want to break the game.
After that is done, the battles are usually a contest of spamming the same skills over and over. Despite knowing (or assuming in case of levels) how strong the player will be, the developer still cannot create encounters that encourages different approaches other than match the element.
This was probably not very helpful. I'll be happy to share my ideas of how a traditional RPG can be balanced, but the question is what challenges you want to subject yourself to. For example, if you plot lock equipment and give the player enough gold to afford a full upgrade, then equipment is no longer something you need to worry about. Of course, it also makes equipment pointless, so maybe you don't want to do that. If you don't make equipment predictable, you can make it so that the tier of equipment the player will have is not predictable, but you can also instead make it so that each tier has multiple choices with different strengths and weaknesses. The more variances you leave, the harder it will be to balance.
I think I'll detail my thoughts on solutions on a later post.
Items are handled on a "the player has more than enough" basis. The player is assumed to have items left once the dungeon is completed. In some games I've bought 50+ antidotes at some point and then never used them up. This combined with how armor is handled also takes care of gold, the player can grind infinitely, but will quickly run out of useful things to buy.
Left is levels. This usually is where the player can break the game without having to be clever. The most common approach seems to be to assume the player will fight anything it encounters, but not purposefully run in circles to grind. This gets trickier with event based encounters since you can't as easily predict how many the player will fight then. Still, the approach will be to make a reasonable guess and then leave to the players whether or not they want to break the game.
After that is done, the battles are usually a contest of spamming the same skills over and over. Despite knowing (or assuming in case of levels) how strong the player will be, the developer still cannot create encounters that encourages different approaches other than match the element.
This was probably not very helpful. I'll be happy to share my ideas of how a traditional RPG can be balanced, but the question is what challenges you want to subject yourself to. For example, if you plot lock equipment and give the player enough gold to afford a full upgrade, then equipment is no longer something you need to worry about. Of course, it also makes equipment pointless, so maybe you don't want to do that. If you don't make equipment predictable, you can make it so that the tier of equipment the player will have is not predictable, but you can also instead make it so that each tier has multiple choices with different strengths and weaknesses. The more variances you leave, the harder it will be to balance.
I think I'll detail my thoughts on solutions on a later post.
Arbitrary damage cap
author=Rine
Quick Edit: I feel designers should aim to keep numbers low, and scaling equally low, because if nothing else it encourages players to experiment with non-direct damage more often. One of the biggest differences between SMT and Square games for me is the former heavily encourages status effects, buffs, debuffs, and focusing on weaknesses. In the latter, after the early game weaknesses don't matter, since everything is hitting max damage anyway, and barring FFXII and FFXIII-Series, buffs/debuffs don't tend to matter.
Paper Mario keeps numbers even lower, but I rarely bother with status effects and debuffs when playing that game. I don't see why low numbers would change the tactics either. How does you having 1,000 hp and enemies doing 300 damage a hit differ from you having 10 hp and enemies dealing 3 points of damage? Perhaps there could be a psychological effect going on, but I doubt this alone will get players to use up turns for defense.
Anyway, I think that damage caps are an ugly half solution to a problem the designer caused in the first place. Damage caps are not needed unless the designer already messed up. If you don't want the player to deal more than a certain amount of damage, why then are you even designing you game so that the player can with reasonable effort reach that amount?
Often the damage cap only works for some attacks. It will cap massive single hit attacks, but multi hit attacks are free to exceed the cap. Even if the game doesn't allow multi hit attacks or restricts them, it still messes up the balance. Suppose among two characters, one deals 120% the damage of the other. Supposedly, the weaker character has another thing going for it. However, once they hit the cap, both are now dealing the same amount of damage. Either the previously weaker character is now obviously superior because it keeps the advantage that was supposed to compensate for having a lower damage output while losing the disadvantage or it also loses the advantage at some point, making the characters more sameich.
Arbitrary damage cap
author=LockeZ
If you're bad at gameplay balance, damage caps can be a really simple bandaid for certain problems, since they can help ensure that your most important bosses at least survive long enough for the player to see them do some shit. It won't make the boss interesting or engaging, but it'll make it not so completely anticlimactic.
So, I can understand why amateurs would add damage caps to their games. I don't know why Final Fantasy 9 or any professional game has them.
Even if you're bad at balancing, the damage cap will most likely not come into play unless you either use a formula with a strong exponential growth or you purposefully design your game so that it comes into play (characters attack for 600 at endgame and damage cap is 999). As long as damage goes up linearly as your attack goes up, you should not get into a situation where you need a damage cap.
About professional games; I've come to learn that professional =/= skilled. I know for sure that professional RPGs often have poor writers, so it stands to reason that whoever balances the game may also not be very skilled. You'd think that a good balance would be critical for a number based game, but most RPG battles consists mainly of spammign the most convenient offensive ability and healing when needed. This holds true for the final fantasies that I know of where the damage cap is a big deal.
Game length and maintaining player interest
I think the beginning should be designed so that the player won't fail as long as she/he is willing to go along with whatever the game requires of you. However, a player that isn't willing to do whatever the game asks of you does not need to succeed. If the game teaches the player that maching attack won't work and the player still does so, then it's okay if she/he gets a game over early. That player is a lost cause anyway. Heck, it's actually better if a player that isn't part of the intended audience quits very early than 25% into the game.
I don't think it's merely a question of how much you fail. I have experienced cases where I just barely failed, but still choose to grind because there just didn't seem to be such a thing as playing the game better. Either you were strong enough or you were not. On the flip side, I can continue to try even if I get decimated as long as I can see what the problem is. Assuming a boss hits me with strong fire attacks and summons a lot of minions which hits me with physical attacks, I can start looking at whether or not I have the tools for mitigating those two problems at my disposal.
author=Liberty
Failing is fine, I think, as long as you feel that you were 'almost-just-a-little-more' there. If you get completely decimated, even though you fought every enemy (or almost) you've come across and got the best armour/weapons at that point, then you are very likely to just stop playing.
Our job as game designers is to allow a challenge, but not so hard a one that the player feels that they need to work in order to get past a required (note that word usage, yo) stopper. Optional bosses are a different beast altogether, but anything that a player is required to do must present enough of a challenge to make it seem worth doing, but still be something that can be done with the tools you give.
I don't think it's merely a question of how much you fail. I have experienced cases where I just barely failed, but still choose to grind because there just didn't seem to be such a thing as playing the game better. Either you were strong enough or you were not. On the flip side, I can continue to try even if I get decimated as long as I can see what the problem is. Assuming a boss hits me with strong fire attacks and summons a lot of minions which hits me with physical attacks, I can start looking at whether or not I have the tools for mitigating those two problems at my disposal.
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