HASVERS'S PROFILE

Sviel> I realize now that it was a slightly obscure reference for anyone outside academia. Nature is perhaps the most influential scientific journal, it was a tad hyperbolic of me to hope to be published there ;)

Playtesting can never be removed entirely, but having some systematic bug testing would help dramatically, methinks. Well, I'll keep thinking about it for a couple of days, to design the calculus of damage rules in an accessible way.

Karins> Ha that's a great idea, although I think I will use it in my next article, about dialogue design; these comments neatly demonstrate something I'm planning to emphasize: contrary to chess, the endpoint of a conversation is not something any of us had planned in the beginning. It's a game of synthesis and learning as much as of persuasion - half chess and half collective jigsaw ;)

I tend to think you would save a lot on the time normally spent balancing your battles by playtesting again and again. It's a sort of investment: a little bit of algebra before adding that skill to your skill tree (or that skill tree to your RPG), instead of a lot of analysis later on.

But it would certainly require a more thorough understanding of the fundamentals than probably anyone has right now. I really like your idea of a contest actually, as a way to explore the full diversity of what people can come with. Let me come up with basic rules for that contest, and I will contact the higher authorities to see if that can be arranged at an official level ;)

Note that if it works significantly, I'm offering anyone who contributed to this topic to be my coauthor for our article in Nature. Or at least our panel at E3.

Kylaila> Interesting, it's still a bit cluttered but there is indeed a very explicit element of manipulation that looks appealing. I've been recommended that game a couple of times now, I should try it someday.


Sviel> You assumed correctly, I edited that now thanks ;) I'll try to rephrase my thoughts more clearly. Imagine a battle system where all characters attack automatically every turn with the same power, and you have just one skill allowing you to delay or advance an attack. Then you would be able to recreate every other RPG battle ever just by changing the patterns of when and how you can use that skill - because that's all the skills of all RPGs ever do: move amounts of potential damage between now and some other time (you could kill a boss by spamming Attack if you had infinite HP, you just need to concentrate that potential damage into a shorter time, and dilute the enemies' into a longer time, to kill before you are killed).

Using this reasoning, whenever you create a new skill, you can evaluate whether it brings any new strategic possibility (instead of just being "Fire 2") by seeing whether it corresponds to a different pattern of "damage delaying" that cannot be recreated by any combination of previously existing skills.


Deltree> Hi! That's fine, we're all old people rambling here ;) Also glad you liked the game, no worries if you don't finish it, there'll be a better one to play someday.

author=Deltree
RPG battles also have a basic goal: defeat all the enemies before they can do the same to me. It also has a variety of basic strategies (melee versus magic, elemental factors, special skills). Much like chess, the strategies' effectiveness varies with the opponent

In a sense, chess on a line has the same goal since you cannot get to the king without killing all the pawns, but I digress ;) Part of the problem is that the strategies you describe in chess are complex actions elaborated from the basic game rules (moving around+capturing), whereas the strategies that you describe for RPGs are implemented as the basic rules.

It's like having a menu to select between 6 different openings, and you need to know which one is good against Kasparov and which one against Vera Menchik. And it will always be good against Vera Menchik because she is of type Ghost/Insect and she has low HP, not just now because she has played this precise sequence of moves. And which moves you can or cannot do at any given time will depend only barely on what you and the opponent have done so far anyway, as long as you have enough MP.

Of course I am exaggerating a bit, but I guess you can see what I mean - this is the reason why it seems to me that RPG battles are closer to chess puzzles than to chess itself: their interest comes from being unique handcrafted tactical situations to solve, not from the possibilities of the game rules themselves.

But let's roll with it and say that every RPG battle is a tactical situation. Then to have something more like strategy, there should be rules determining which enemies you will encounter next depending on those you've beaten so far, so as to have a chain of tactical situations with different effective techniques every time that you can somehow plan for and influence ahead of time.
I'd play that game, actually.

I'm not saying that multiple paths to victory are bad, as long as they are really different. It's having many paths that boil down to the same age-old effects (healer/hitter/tank) that is frustrating in most RPGs.

But really, while I'm using this discussion as a critique of the typical RPG battles, you could reverse the direction and use it as a method for designing them. Try to find the most elegant way to represent this "bar juggling", without obscuring it by false choices. Adding secondary effects to skills is not sufficient, you should check that those effects add something truly new that couldn't be done otherwise in terms of what I've said above.

And at a deeper level you could even push the reasoning to do away entirely with some aspects of the system, perhaps multiple characters or turns or items, that exist only by tradition. What if for instance the system worked better if there were no HP and MP, only status conditions that can combine or interfere with each other? This is what made abstract strategy games so good, they were trimmed down to the essential by generations of people who had seen the big picture.

And by the way, as I said above, this applies to dungeon survival mechanics and gamespanning gold/item/health management, since they are also the same sort of one-dimensional battle.

author=Sviel
To be concise (is it too late for that?!)

I think it is too late for all of us ;)

To put it another way, you cannot really release a demo and expect not to be judged on it. If you want to release another demo, with some other limitations but making a better showcase for the real game, please do so and I will amend my review accordingly.