Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Thad]

Well, the whole thing should be remappable.  I should be able to use a gamepad.

In fact, I would venture that every control scheme in every game should be fully customizable.

Also: as recently mentioned in another thread, Xenogears has one good battle system and one shitty battle system.

[Norondor]

The question is: which is which??

[Kazz]

It's fresh and cute for the first five hours but for the last five hours you tend to be FUCKING TIRED OF IT.

I think the problem is that the button-press system lacks complexity.  Of course, once you add that, you've probably gone from RPG to action-RPG, which is usually fast-paced and real-time, necessitating a reduction in strategic depth.

Fuck it, can every game be Gitaroo Man now?

[Norondor]

I'm actually of the opinion, and said as much many, many times during my playthrough of Persona 3, that RPGs are just a worse genre than action games. I loved that game to death, as is evidenced by the fact that i played it for ONE HUNDRED FIFTY HOURS, but that doesn't in any way change the fact that during the mandatory grinding and boss battles I would rather have been running about in the halls of Tartarus stabbing enemies in the heart with a spear in real time, with the help of computer-controlled allies and dogs and my homie for life, Satan. When you look at the RPGs i've actually enjoyed PLAYING the most, it comes down basically to TWEWY, Parasite Eve, and all the Mario RPGs.

The problem is that when you combine an action game with the volume of expository dialogue found in your average RPG you end up with Metal Gear Solid 4. In fact, that's really the problem with the entire RPG genre -- somehow in this one little corner of the world it's totally acceptable to tell the whole story instead of showing it, which itself is pretty much the retard version of what a game's narrative should be, which is LETTING YOU PLAY THROUGH IT. I think this is partly the fault of developers for not having any restraint and partly the fault of developers for not having any imagination and feeling comfortable for sticking with genre tropes -- and of course both those problems can be in turn laid at the feet of 14-year olds (and morbidly obese man-children like myself) for giving them enormous piles of cash money as an incentive to keep doing the same thing over and over even if it pretty much sucks.

of course all this has been said a million times before by people cleverer than i and honestly when i'm not in the mood to rant like this i think that it's ok that something like the RPG genre exists for totally low-impact minimally interactive storytelling, so i guess before this has to be split or deleted i'll go ahead and say that i liked parasite eve's battle system alort even if it was kind of strange that you had to keep two suits of armor with you so that you didn't run out of mp midbattle

EDIT TO ADD: also the rocket launcher totally sucked, what was up with that

[Thad]

The question is: which is which??

The one where you could fucking heal was the good one.

I'm actually of the opinion, and said as much many, many times during my playthrough of Persona 3, that RPGs are just a worse genre than action games. I loved that game to death, as is evidenced by the fact that i played it for ONE HUNDRED FIFTY HOURS, but that doesn't in any way change the fact that during the mandatory grinding and boss battles I would rather have been running about in the halls of Tartarus stabbing enemies in the heart with a spear in real time, with the help of computer-controlled allies and dogs and my homie for life, Satan.

It bears repeating at this point that Mega Man Zero was either A) an side-scrolling platform game with grinding or B) a game that punished you for using powerups.  In either case, I would rather play a real RPG.

Killing the same enemies over and over again to become more powerful is much more acceptable in menu-based combat than platform combat.  Because in menu-based combat, I can fucking go read the news or something while I just keep tapping X rather than have to pay attention the whole time.

In fact, with a sufficiently strong RF signal, I could grind in a menu-based RPG from a DIFFERENT ROOM.

In fact, that's really the problem with the entire RPG genre -- somehow in this one little corner of the world it's totally acceptable to tell the whole story instead of showing it, which itself is pretty much the retard version of what a game's narrative should be, which is LETTING YOU PLAY THROUGH IT. I think this is partly the fault of developers for not having any restraint and partly the fault of developers for not having any imagination and feeling comfortable for sticking with genre tropes -- and of course both those problems can be in turn laid at the feet of 14-year olds (and morbidly obese man-children like myself) for giving them enormous piles of cash money as an incentive to keep doing the same thing over and over even if it pretty much sucks.

It bears noting, too, that writing narration is a fuck of a lot easier than coding up a cutscene.

KotOR 2 is a great example of a game that was clearly under the gun of a deadline and wound up with a narrated ending full of gigantic plotholes.

[Kazz]

Killing the same enemies over and over again to become more powerful is much more acceptable in menu-based combat than platform combat.  Because in menu-based combat, I can fucking go read the news or something while I just keep tapping X rather than have to pay attention the whole time.

I hope you're not saying this is a plus.

I enjoy playing my games, not waiting for the point where they're fun.

[Norondor]

i think he was saying that grinding is better if it's mindless than if you have to dodge instant kill spikes, in response to my accidentally appearing to claim that. whoops @ me!

What i meant to say, really, was that I'd rather have had an even moderately good action-rpg combat system (or, dare i dream, a legitimately awesome one, like fucking Onimusha or something) to deal with the exploring-the-tower-of-demise or battling-the-giant-naked-black-and-white-skank-on-the-train parts of the game. Including the word "grind" in there was just meant to imply, in as many words, that i was fucking insulted by the fact that in this day and age and in a game where at least the STORY has had so much thought put into it, and such daring in its execution, i was expected to spend hours happily killing slimes for EXP, particularly since in that game the dropoff in experience gain for killing stuff below your level basically means you don't GET to be tougher than you're supposed to be when you fight the next big shadow. It's a stupid holdover from when random battles were a good way to pad the length of a game so you didn't feel cheated with how little content was really in it,* it's serving filet mignon and lobster with a side of pasta-roni, and it bugs the hell out of me.



*today

[Thad]

Killing the same enemies over and over again to become more powerful is much more acceptable in menu-based combat than platform combat.  Because in menu-based combat, I can fucking go read the news or something while I just keep tapping X rather than have to pay attention the whole time.

I hope you're not saying this is a plus.

I enjoy playing my games, not waiting for the point where they're fun.

My comments on sitting around pressing the same button over and over are well-documented.

That last part was supposed to have a link on it, but whee!, my website appears to be down again.  Fixed!

Point being, grinding is stupid, but sometimes it's stupider than other times.

i think he was saying that grinding is better if it's mindless than if you have to dodge instant kill spikes, in response to my accidentally appearing to claim that. whoops @ me!

Close, but I was thinking more of just wandering back and forth re-killing the same infinitely-spawning enemies over and over again than worrying about spikes.  (I can help out in the damage zone!)

That said, infinitely-spawning enemies are another fucking 8-bit holdover that need to die a cold death.

[MadMAxJr]

Clearly all of this means we just need to see Valve (spend ten years to) make an RPG so we can see how it is correctly done.

[Niku]

It bears repeating at this point that Mega Man Zero was either A) an side-scrolling platform game with grinding or B) a game that punished you for using powerups.

No it wasn't.  It's sequels did, sure, when you could only get the boss powers by having a certain rank.  But unless I'm remembering things wrong, the ONLY thing that your rank does for you is allow you to unlock a completely useless game mode.  This would be like an Xbox live game not giving you achievements for using power ups.  It actually has no punitive effect on the game, only on your e-penis.  But having your rank go down in Mega Man Zero really meant diddly squat.  Personally, I think Zero was elegant in that you could make the game as easy or as hard as you wanted and they psychologically encouraged you to play it the hard way, but it's not like you were missing out on amazingly helpful tools or unlockable bonuses to play it the easy way.

Now the sequels, where you had to get a certain rank to unlock the boss weapons?  That was a special kind of retarded.  Not that I didn't love the games to death, but I'm not going to call that good game design by a long shot.

[Thad]

Actually, all quibbling over what constitutes "punishment" aside, a look at Wikipedia shows I was wrong: you have to grind to use Cyber Elves if you're playing like a normal person, AND you have to grind to level them up and then NOT use them if you're one of those people who hates himself and wants to unlock everything.

Which brings us back to the part that's relevant to this thread: grinding is bad in menu-based combat, but it's much worse in a side-scrolling platformer.

[Kazz]

We should define "grind" more specifically.

I would say that Call of Duty 4's challenge system is a grind, because it takes a long time to unlock a lot of stuff for each weapon, but then again, you're playing a fun action game the entire time.

So, is it the unlockable/level-up setup, or just the fact that the game isn't fun?

[Koah]

Also: as recently mentioned in another thread, Xenogears has one good battle system and one shitty battle system.

That would be the stock Squaresoft active time battle one, only you needed to press three times as many buttons and sit through seven-second animations in a mockery of interactivity to accomplish what other RPGs with no pretenses of fooling you into thinking you're doing more than you are do with a fraction of the time and effort; grind for better combos with an experience system that was never actually explained; and contend with a spectacularly imbalanced array of characters with a bevy of skills that would never see use, up to and including attack spells coupled with a chance that the caster could fuck them up completely, right?  Y'know, not that I've got a one-track mind about this or anything.^*

Although it's not a completely generic turn-based one and it's not Gear combat, so I guess that's something.


^* Paragraph may contain hyperbole.

[Norondor]

Having just played Legend of Legaia before Xenogears i actually liked gear combat better. The martial arts/combo system in LoL had some actual depth to it, whereas in XG... well, what hakubi said.

Also, naming your spells after Piers Anthony novels is not a recipe for success.

[Koah]

Yeah, Legend of Legaia and the Tales of series both struck me as games that did what Xenogears wanted to do, only better: The former in a martial arts sense, like you said, and the latter in a real-time combo-y, brawl-y sense.

[Shinra]

No random encounters, a gambit system of sorts on your comrades, and a combo system that actually made sense (Swinging your sword up then back down was a perfect combo with no attack time delay, where as doing the attack where you slam your axe into the ground and trying to tie it into the attack that makes you spin the weapon in a circle takes about ten minutes, which it should.) and being able to pick a fight with any NPC in the game didn't hurt, either.

Good on paper, but in practice ended up boiling down to predefining the best combo you can and spamming the attack button on enemies while occasionally calling out for healing.  Basically like Kingdom Hearts, only you trade the the ability to cast spells directly for the ability to play with your combo a little.

The .hack games were kinda fun - basically the exact same shit, but it flowed much better.

Always wanted to see another ORPG with PSO's deliberate combat pacing, but without the awkwardness.

I really enjoyed .hack's battle system; It played a little like PSO without the extremely easy to kite monsters. Very much a fan.

My favorite battle system would probably be Monster Hunter's, which was once described to me as 'like PSO'. I'm really not sure how they came to that conclusion. On the PS2, you move with one analog stick and attack with the other. Except the battle system is less revolved on the control scheme, and more what weapon you're using and the specific delay on your weapon, the sharpness of your weapon, the toughness of your opponent's armor, the part of the monster you're attacking, the amount of fatigue you have, and whether or not you're able to dodge the attacks of your enemy, which against the more powerful monsters, will also determine whether or not you die instantly when hit.

Seriously, though, you will shit yourself the first time you run in to fight a giant red dragon, hit them once, have your weapon bounce off with no effect, and then get pelted with a fireball for 90% of your health before you can recover enough to roll away. Monster hunter was a great game. Also: extremely fucking skill based.

Also, traps, stun grenades, explosive barrels, and leading dragons into traps surrounded by explosive barrels.

Yeah, Legend of Legaia and the Tales of series both struck me as games that did what Xenogears wanted to do, only better: The former in a martial arts sense, like you said, and the latter in a real-time combo-y, brawl-y sense.

The problem I had with legend of legaia, is that I got the vibe that they made battles delibrately take longer than they should have just to show off the batlte system. After five hours of this battles became painful; I literally found myself in tears I was so frustrated at this game. I eventually just gave up.

[Brentai]

We should define "grind" more specifically.

Grind (v): to repeatedly or constantly execute an implied action that one would not normally wish to do for the purpose of gaining a reward.

Examples:
1) I had to grind Greater Demons to get enough gold to defeat the False God.
2) My gut was getting huge, so I grinded sit-ups for a week until I lost a few inches.
3) If I keep grinding away at this project, sooner or later I'll finish and receive a bonus.