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DFalcon
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Software engineer and amateur game developer with a focus on challenging non-twitch gameplay. I set the bar for "challenging" pretty high.
Other major chunks of interest go toward reading, math and tabletop games of many stripes.
Other major chunks of interest go toward reading, math and tabletop games of many stripes.
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The RPG difficulty problem
Basically, the built-in difficulty players encounter in battles has nothing to do with how good they are at battles.
If you look at the very earliest video game RPGs, the difficulty paradigm seems clear: if you're having trouble fighting someone, go explore for loot or level grind for a while to bring your stats up. While that takes some time, there's an interesting idea here: automatically self-selecting difficulty at a pretty fine grain. (We can leave the fairly unwarranted assumption that our hypothetical game's battles are interesting at any difficulty level for another time.)
Fast forward and add another layer, and we begin to have a problem: exploration is kind of fun, and a lot of the people who play RPGs do so because that's what they like. But the bulk of rewards are recognizable as such because they have stat effects, and often:
a) exploration automatically adds level grinding due to random or hard-to-avoid encounters;
b) exploration is required often enough (to find a switch or the like) that people won't be able to recognize many of the times it's optional until too late;
c) level grinding is out of fashion, so the developer makes sure anyone who's been through all the optional parts of the dungeon is set up to pretty well breeze through;
d) the player isn't certain how hard a boss is until he fights it, and who wants to waste time losing?
Putting these together basically eliminates the feedback between effectiveness in battles and effort spent making battles easier; how strong the characters are no longer has much relationship to how skillful the player is.
IMO making a battle interesting is a very difficult thing to do at any level of character power; so why go out of our way to make the problem harder by varying the in-game resources players can have so wildly? Anyway, I'm curious what people think are the best solutions/ameliorations. Certainly not everything follows the stereotypical pattern I've presented.
If you look at the very earliest video game RPGs, the difficulty paradigm seems clear: if you're having trouble fighting someone, go explore for loot or level grind for a while to bring your stats up. While that takes some time, there's an interesting idea here: automatically self-selecting difficulty at a pretty fine grain. (We can leave the fairly unwarranted assumption that our hypothetical game's battles are interesting at any difficulty level for another time.)
Fast forward and add another layer, and we begin to have a problem: exploration is kind of fun, and a lot of the people who play RPGs do so because that's what they like. But the bulk of rewards are recognizable as such because they have stat effects, and often:
a) exploration automatically adds level grinding due to random or hard-to-avoid encounters;
b) exploration is required often enough (to find a switch or the like) that people won't be able to recognize many of the times it's optional until too late;
c) level grinding is out of fashion, so the developer makes sure anyone who's been through all the optional parts of the dungeon is set up to pretty well breeze through;
d) the player isn't certain how hard a boss is until he fights it, and who wants to waste time losing?
Putting these together basically eliminates the feedback between effectiveness in battles and effort spent making battles easier; how strong the characters are no longer has much relationship to how skillful the player is.
IMO making a battle interesting is a very difficult thing to do at any level of character power; so why go out of our way to make the problem harder by varying the in-game resources players can have so wildly? Anyway, I'm curious what people think are the best solutions/ameliorations. Certainly not everything follows the stereotypical pattern I've presented.
Underrated RPG Maker Games
author=Max McGee link=topic=3597.msg74031#msg74031 date=1241802428
Hey, DFalcon, you should post here more! :)
Will do!
author=Karsuman link=topic=3597.msg74037#msg74037 date=1241804036
I remember that I was really mad when Meria died. Not so much because of the story (though it was sad!), but because she was one of the game's best characters, and had a unique function unto herself. (If I am recalling correctly!)
Quite true - I did make an effort to keep the characters' abilities diverse, but there's no question Meria was one of the top few characters. Heck, even if you just always have her give Nash an extra 2-3 attacks per turn, she's probably still one of the game's top few characters.
In fact wondering about totally hamstringing people who'd made her their primary healer (and therefore missed out on a lot of experience for their other healers) was a small part of giving me the idea to do the Chapter 4 branching. Though the original plan was flexible, bare-bones, and underwent a lot of revision, its intended ending was essentially the Valar path.
Inspiration and Work Ethic
There's not necessarily anything wrong with losing interest. It can take a few tries to find a project that you really feel is worth taking all the way. That said, of course, it's helpful to be able to reject useless paths as fast as possible...
My advice, which may not be widely applicable, is to as quickly as possible build to the point where you have something you can enjoy playing. Note that you don't necessarily have to start with the intended beginning of your game. Then if you feel yourself losing interest or are having trouble getting started after not working on it for a while, play the game. That reminds you what you like about it, and helps you notice things that you can still improve, big and little - at least, it tended to work for me.
My advice, which may not be widely applicable, is to as quickly as possible build to the point where you have something you can enjoy playing. Note that you don't necessarily have to start with the intended beginning of your game. Then if you feel yourself losing interest or are having trouble getting started after not working on it for a while, play the game. That reminds you what you like about it, and helps you notice things that you can still improve, big and little - at least, it tended to work for me.
RPG Intros
I think Max pegged the most important point here. It's not even necessarily a question of whether you can grab people with a super-terrific first paragraph; you need to capture the player's attention so he actually reads the super-terrific first paragraph (or whatever) and gives it some thought, instead of just racing through or half-ignoring it. Making the player do something automatically engages him more.
If you can get the rapt attention of every person starting up your game based just on the strength of advertising then more power to you, but there's no question that freeware is at a disadvantage here.
If you can get the rapt attention of every person starting up your game based just on the strength of advertising then more power to you, but there's no question that freeware is at a disadvantage here.
Underrated RPG Maker Games
Boy, you're making me think back...
I don't think the Follow battle really got the same kind of difficulty balancing other battles in the game did. I probably only played it a couple times at most. (Though I always tested on Hard - the other two settings were built half on educated guess, half on tester feedback.) In the end the thought process went something like, "It's optional, there's even an easier optional battle they can take instead, so what's the harm?"
(The harm, at least, aside from wishing I'd done a better job of letting people know what they're up against before they chose to go on an optional-battle path or picked a team for any battle the first time. The flames working vs. magic defense in the Valar battle is a good example: unpreparedness is a recipe for even more complete murder than usual there.)
I probably forgot to remove Valar's potion to match his AI - that battle doesn't need to be any harder. Can't easily check right now.
Hmm, I could really get going on this, even just addressing the rest of your post, but other people might still want to use this thread for other games? I am curious how you handled the flames, because I'm pretty sure I would've pegged the Lath mediator battle as easier than Valar. At any rate, you've got my approval to brag. ;D
I don't think the Follow battle really got the same kind of difficulty balancing other battles in the game did. I probably only played it a couple times at most. (Though I always tested on Hard - the other two settings were built half on educated guess, half on tester feedback.) In the end the thought process went something like, "It's optional, there's even an easier optional battle they can take instead, so what's the harm?"
(The harm, at least, aside from wishing I'd done a better job of letting people know what they're up against before they chose to go on an optional-battle path or picked a team for any battle the first time. The flames working vs. magic defense in the Valar battle is a good example: unpreparedness is a recipe for even more complete murder than usual there.)
I probably forgot to remove Valar's potion to match his AI - that battle doesn't need to be any harder. Can't easily check right now.
Hmm, I could really get going on this, even just addressing the rest of your post, but other people might still want to use this thread for other games? I am curious how you handled the flames, because I'm pretty sure I would've pegged the Lath mediator battle as easier than Valar. At any rate, you've got my approval to brag. ;D
Underrated RPG Maker Games
author=ShadowBlade link=topic=3597.msg72849#msg72849 date=1240996207author=iishenron link=topic=3597.msg72812#msg72812 date=1240962641
Aurora Wing is criminally underrated.
Seconded. My only problem with Aurora Wing is that the game allows the player to save every turn - and, in fact, some missions *rely* on having you reload a lot, especially the final battles. Your hit rate against Valar's flames is so ridiculously low that you have to reload quite a bit, and when fighting the Lath Mediator on Hard, "Random" type healing items are so unpredictable that success heavily depends on reloading a lot.
Other than that, a truly great game. Very good character system, very good maps, very good items, very good custom abilities, very good nearly everything.
Actually even the criticism here is quite heartening - this is the first time I've seen anyone else say they played on Hard, much less beat the game that way!
The earliest versions only allowed saves at the beginning of the turn, but this was basically unsupportable with the length of time turns took. In RM2k this didn't leave a lot of options, unfortunately. If I ever came back to AW or used the mechanics again I would make this a delete-on-load quicksave.
MMORPGs
Most free MMOs I've seen (and I've tried quite a few for short periods) astound me that they can put so much work into art and so little into anything else.
The only online games I've sunk serious amounts of time into are MUDs, specifically Aardwolf and Discworld, though it's been a while since I've been active on either. There are some other games that I enjoyed but that didn't really hook me, like Gunbound.
The only online games I've sunk serious amounts of time into are MUDs, specifically Aardwolf and Discworld, though it's been a while since I've been active on either. There are some other games that I enjoyed but that didn't really hook me, like Gunbound.
Panoromas in RMXP
Your best bet is to set it up so you can switch between behaviors just by changing a global variable.
Games - Tester
Games - Other
