DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

Since I'm involved in the game team anyway, I've sent my comments in a private message, to keep this stuff behind the scenes a bit longer.

author=Magi
Players habitually avoiding battles means that there is something wrong with your system or the frequency of encounters. Assuming your battles are well designed and the players are adequately rewarded, they won't just flee from everything with every chance they get.

I'd like to think this was the case, but I know a fair number of players who I've watched play games where the combat is diverse and well balanced and offers plenty of reward, and they dodge enemies compulsively. And then they end up weak enough that they get stuck, and give up because they "don't like to grind." I'd think that they just preferred games which keep combat to minimal quantities, except I know they've played and beaten games with much larger amounts of combat, which didn't offer them easy means to avoid it. I think some people simply treat it as a default action. It reminds me of the first point from Ramshackin's post here. When I'm offered a free complete healing mechanism, I generally make extensive use of it even if I can get by without it, not because I don't like dealing with resource management challenges (I do,) but because it feels weird to deliberately not use it when I know I can. Some people appear to treat combat avoidance the same way.

I don't mind either, but I think it's troublesome if on-map encounters are made too avoidable, because you get players who compulsively dodge fights, and then miss out on level progression and end up more and more committed to avoiding combat. I prefer if there's actual tension where you can try to avoid fights, but face a real risk of being worse off if you're caught than if you'd faced the enemy head-on.

This is kind of a break from the original topic, but I think it's worth considering the potential of a game without in-battle healing. It's such a convention of the genre that we might ignore the possibility of doing without it, but I think it opens up a lot of potentially interesting and mostly unexplored forms of combat tactics.

author=Feldschlacht IV

author=Destertopa
I think Xenogears is a good example of a game with a lot of very good songs on its soundtrack, which uses those songs terribly

Yeah? I've never heard that particular opinion before. I'm very interested! Elaborate?

Well, there are some scenes which use the songs fairly effectively, basically for lack of an easy way to screw them up. If you have a long dialogue scene accompanied by a single song with no transitions which loops smoothly, then there isn't a lot of potential for outright disaster. But there are frequent occasions where scenes transition jarringly from one song to another, or where scenes are set to music which is poorly timed to the length of the scene and cuts out in odd places. The game has only one ordinary boss theme and one random encounter theme, and they both become tremendously overused, and often cut into other songs at odd times and in places where it doesn't fit the mood of the confrontation. There are some really powerful emotional pieces which are used in scenes which really fail to exercise them to their potential, like the first instance of the song Flight being used for Chu Chu's fight with Achtzenn, an embarrassing confrontation between a major arc villain with strong emotional ties to another member of the cast, and the game's Jar Jar Binks, whose entire involvement in the plot could and should have been excised. One Who Bares Fangs At God, one of my all-time favorite boss themes, is used for what's essentially a post-final-boss battle with practically no risk, in a rather obtuse scene where the player is likely to be uncertain exactly who they're being pitted against and why. The scene is too rushed-into for the music to have its proper impact. Overall, I got the impression that the director didn't really know when, where or how to use the soundtrack he had, and apparently the director himself holds largely the same opinion on his work from that time.