NEOPHYTE'S PROFILE

post=134076
Well... I like these puzzles in reverse order. The last one looks too complicated. You said the shorter the better, but that one is clearly the longer one.

Nooooo. The interactions are still shorter. If you're looking at the thing as a whole, then yeah sure it's longer. But you aren't doing the same exact thing for over 2 minutes like in the first video. You're moving around and sometimes there is some dialogue showing that you are at least making progress.

I guess you guys like that first one because it has 4 TREASURE CHESTS, which gives you incentive. And I don't disagree with that. But seriously, fuck that puzzle. It is infinitely times harder without a walkthrough than the third video I posted.

After you play Alundra, all puzzles are easy. I dare any of you to play Alundra without a walkthrough. That being said, Alundra is a bad example of how to do puzzles. The game isn't accurate enough to execute it's Zelda like interactions, and its combat isn't accurate enough to be like an action game. =|

I have a problem with puzzles/interactions in RPGs. I could write a whole article about this, because I think I know what I am talking about for once. My point is, there is almost no RPG that can do them right. Block puzzles suck, ice sliding sucks, arrow ones suck, riddles suck. And they suck because developers half ass them. Not only that, but for some odd reason, there are almost never any puzzle/interactions outside of dungeons. Why is this?

Answer: Look above. Because they half ass them.

There are 2-3 game series I know off the top of my head that do these correctly. The Golden Sun series, the Wild ARMs series, and the Zelda series. No, not even Lufia 2 does this right. Even though the dungeons are filled with logic puzzles and all that (which it does very good), it doesn't take that extra step and implement them in places other than dungeons, even though it was perfectly capable of doing so. It's the first game of its kind, so I give it some slack. However in Golden Sun or Wild ARMs, every town has secrets that can be found through interacting with the tools at your disposal. These games realized that the interaction between your environments has to be constant, and not broken up into disjointed segments. To get all the Djinn in Golden Sun, you have to break holes in peoples roofs, dig holes to go underground in a town, and read peoples minds (among the dozens of other things you had to do). Likewise, in Wild ARMs AF there is a town that's flooded and you need a certain ability to raise/lower the water level (it was something like this, it's been awhile since I played it). Zelda does this too, I don't think I need to explain how. I absolutely love these games because of this.

I know you add interactions to break up the repetitive nature of dungeons, but to me they feel tacked on for the reasons I stated above. I know dungeons are the meat of a game, but it just blows my mind that not many people think about adding them to other environments. Either do it well, or don't do it at all!

At least that is how I feel. Also I don't like to use the word puzzle because it makes my brain puzzled and I associate the word with bad rpg puzzles. I prefer to call them interactions, because the games that do it right are about interactions and not making your brain hurt if that makes any sense.

Man, there are other mechanics involved with the whole mp thing. =/

Final Fantasy Tactics and The Legend of the Philosopher's Stone are good examples of it. If you used a really powerful summon or spell in Tactics, it took you ages to get your turn again. If you can incorporate MP into other statistics (such as speed in these cases), you will want to use other spells or skills.

But in a turn based or ATB type system where it isn't incorporated into anything, it doesn't work too well.

Nah, he's talking about Crimson Echoes. There are some people out there who actually e-mail SE about these things. They lie and say the modders were going to sell the game for actual cash, which is totally false. They simply want to see things crash and burn.

http://crimsonechoes.com/

But JKB is really talented and it's good to see him getting so much publicity. Every single game I've played and seen from him is pretty much top quality.

post=133512
Blaming the creators is not going to help, if you keep dieing then your doing something wrong, people need to stop blaming other people and just try harder.

Wait a minute. This doesn't make sense. People by default try their hardest to beat a game. You're going under the assumption that the developer has done no wrong in creating the game, when in fact, they are the ones who make the most mistakes.

What if the developer didn't mention that one core mechanic or strategy that is necessary to win the battle? What if you accidentally skipped a line of important dialogue and have no option to go back and reread what was just said? The people playing your game have every right to complain about these things. It's one thing to make things difficult, but it's a whole different ball game when a developer hasn't used the proper steps in getting you prepared for the difficult section.

I can see the other side of the discussion, though. Some people like to be punished for their mistakes. That's why Demons Souls and older Castlevania games are very popular to a certain crowd. That's why people turned off vita chambers in BioShock 2. And that's why I said there isn't really a proper system for this.

You really should make it so you can save anywhere, though. That's more for convenience than difficulty. If something unexpected pops up in real life, I would like to have the option of closing the game immediately without losing progress, thank you very much.