SAILERIUS'S PROFILE

author=LockeZ
But you can absolutely make characters/classes in a turn-based, menu-driven game have at least as much variety in play style, if not more.

Ehh... I'm not really sure that's true. In a real-time/continuous game, you can do anything you can do in a turn-based game and more. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with turn-based games, but there's a *lot* you can do with continuous real-time gameplay that's either walled off to you in turn-based or is prohibitively difficult to design or implement. A good example is anything involving three-dimensional spatial awareness. For instance, aiming a spell or ranged weapon. While you can switch into an aiming mode in a turn-based game (Eternal Sonata did it), it's always a really awkward context switch because it basically thrusts an FPS minigame into the middle of a menu-based game. It's just not a natural transition.

Back on topic, I do think that the big stigma against turn-based games by players at large is due to how poorly most games implement it. Especially with how many bad RPG Maker games are on Steam now, players are just inundated with terrible turn-based gameplay and this creates a negative connotation, rather like how awful Myst clones completely ruined the point-and-click genre.

I've been playing Lara Croft GO recently, which is a mobile Tomb Raider game that's incredibly well-designed. It distills the gameplay mechanics of Tomb Raider down to the purest essentials and makes it work in a turn-based fashion. I think most turn-based games suffer from a lack of imagination, thoughtlessly copying oldschool games instead of really innovating and trying something new. If you're talking in terms of classes, status ailments, and attacks, I think you're already making way too many assumptions about the way the game should play. The fundamental paradigm of RPG character classes choosing skills from a menu one at a time is always taken for granted, but there are a lot more imaginative things that you could do in a turn-based game and still capture the same feel, or even convey it better.

If for some reason having random encounters in your game is part of your religion, then the best option at your disposal is what almost every major game with random encounters from the past few years has done: an option to turn them off and on at any time for free. Even the more recent FF ports have allowed you to do this.

If you're worried about players not being high enough level to beat your bosses, then consider making your random encounters fun so no one wants to skip them. If you believe your battle system is fun and players are still skipping them, then it's time to consider why you put them there in the first place.

author=Sooz
Why is it not acceptable now?

Because we no longer are restricted by hardware anymore and players have been spoiled on more fun implementations of encounter management than random encounters.

As was mentioned before, the number one problem with random encounters, and one which is fundamentally unmanageable no matter how "well-implemented" your system might be, is that they interrupt the flow of gameplay and punish exploration. As a designer, you need to get into the head of players and consider what it is that they want to be doing when they're playing your game. On a moment to moment basis, there are lots of different goals they could be pursuing: exploring, searching for combat, trying to advance the plot, admiring the scenery, etc.

If your current objective is anything other than searching for combat, then having a random encounter thrown at you is an unwanted interruption of what you were doing before and forces a context switch in your head as you're forced to shift your way of thinking to engage with combat gameplay, interrupting the flow you were in, and then you need to try to pick up where you left off again when the battle ended. If your current objective is searching for combat, then random encounters still fail you because there's no in-game feedback presented to direct you toward your goal; you have no action you can perform that will get you what you want except randomly running around in circles until the RNG lands in your favor.

In every use case, random encounters are the single most annoying possible mechanism for managing the occurrence of combat.

FFXIII-2 had the best implementation of the concept I've ever seen but it was still a huge jump backwards from where XIII was: in it, when random encounters trigger, they spawn on the map near you and you can avoid them. But it's still more annoying than regular touch encounters because of how frequently they pop up when you want to be doing something other than combat. Or, worse, when you are actively trying to fight encounters and have to dance around in a circle like a chicken with its head cut off waiting for one to trigger. Except, crap, it's not the encounter you were looking for! Try again.

By all means, make the game you want to make, but don't blame players for having moved on decades ago. Indie RPGs are a dime a dozen.

Am I the only one who finds it weird that someone has been supposedly lurking on an RPG Maker forum for ages, but it was a post about a scammer that made him want to register and post here, and has posted nowhere except some extremely long and very defensive posts defending the scammer? It sure is weird how this seems to happen everywhere people start suggesting that something's fishy about Star Citizen...

I got a box of dark chocolates filled with alcohol.

I don't drink.
And dark chocolate makes me sick.