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Comments
Saints Row 3 had a pretty good into sequence. Josh Birk should have been in more of the game.
I guess this is why JRPGs are consistently popular, despite detractors complaining about their linearity.
Because of the intros?
^^^Linearity is not an issue, so long as the player feels a part of the story. The issue I have with a lot of JRPGs is how the majority of plot-important stuff happens in cutscenes.
There are exceptions like the Tales and Shin Megami Tensei series, but it's a compltely different issue
I thought JRPGs had been in decline in comparison to their old former self. I mean, I don't think I've heard of any JRPG being as popular these days beyond cult status.
With that said, the problem is not just that they're linear, but the fact that there simply isn't any roleplaying to them. They're just games where your battles take turns.
Plot-important stuff happening in cutscenes is a problem with games in general, and isn't specific to JRPGs, nor does it even seem to be significantly more frequent there (just maybe more noticeable since they tend to focus on the plot more than non-RPGs do).
>Acting as though games like FFVII and Chrono Trigger aren't cult games in the states.
I mean I was around at the 'height' of FFVII's popularity and hardly anyone know who they were. JRPGs were always a cult thing and it's only the nostalgia of 20-somethings that makes it anything different.
Also, people should really, really stop getting hung up on RPG being an abbreviation for "role-playing game." Because RPG video games were never meant to be about roleplaying in any meaningful way until fairly recently (and even then, it still barely counts), and the use of the term has always referred to the game mechanics, and nothing to do with actual roleplaying. JRPGs not containing roleplaying isn't a flaw any more than FPSes not containing roleplaying.
I'd say that JRPGs today not trying to beat and solve that problem is indeed a thing, whereas western RPGs are trying, albeit failing, whether by giving the player more interaction or by making less and less cutscenes.
^^ The states is not the whole gaming world.
I think certain JRPGs... okay only the Shin Megami Tensei series... have managed to turn that weakness into a strength. The thing about, say, the Persona series is that while you are being railroaded into going into the midnight channel, it's properly sets things up so going into the Midnight Channel is the only reasonable option.
wut
...No, I mean, because their using a story as their structural backbone.
I'm having a blast with Skyrim, but I have to agree that it could've done more. It compressed the existing Elder Scrolls experience into something much more accessible and flexible, which is excellent, but no one particular element of the gameplay really shines.
I mean, in a real-time game, we're doing these things:
- Using stats to determine the outcome of close combat.
- Using stats to determine the outcome of stealth operations.
- Using stats to determine the outcome of magi-- okay so this one's a little more permissible given how abstract magic is by definition, but they could've done something that isn't "X spell takes Y magicka to perform, and has entirely linear effects", you know?
I get that one element of RPGs for some people is the abstraction, and that their character's progression means a lot more than their own skill progression. All the same, each element of the game could have a lot more depth and interest. One thing I'm surprised at, for instance, is the lack of a shadow spell, at least in my experience. In a gaming context of very complex lighting that interacts with enemy AI, why isn't there a spell that casts a shadow or quenches a flame? That's a pretty important failure because a lack of such a spell fails to bridge the gap between magical and stealth gameplay, both of which are so simple that they should be able to seamlessly blend together.
But that's not the structural criticism I was making in the first place, really.
As much as the Elder Scrolls games give a lot of options for problem solving, many of them come down to being able to deal large amounts of damage in very short amounts of time. For instance, having a Sneak skill that triples critical damage for bows makes sense from a gameplay perspective, but it doesn't make sense from a real or in-universe perspective. It's a mechanic built on the player's expectation that stealth should be rewarded. I'm not sure how to change this, though; it's so ingrained into TES that if I made all the changes I wanted to, the series would wear the clothes of TES while playing quite differently.
It's interesting, though. I'm yet to play a stealth game where your footprints give you away in the wild, or where walking on ice can break it and clue you adversaries in, or where starting a camp fire can lure adversaries on your trail there while you hightail it out of there. It's true that this would require more advanced AI, but it would also provide a much more tense gameplay experience. Then you could take it a step furthere with the perks; what if one allowed you to change the depth of your steps in the now? Then you could combine your flight with doubling-back, and then change the depth of your steps to make it look like various people of various weights had walked through there. Actual woodsman's tactics, you know? Shit would be cash.
As for magic, I've been playing with the idea of a reversed system. Your magic bar is at 0 by default, but casting a spell fills it to some extent. You need a certain amount of magic in the bar to cast more advanced spells, which in turn fill it further. But exceed your maximum and you could get some negative spell effects, depending on the context. If you're in a graveyard, perhaps corpses rise from the ground. If you're in a ship, winds become furious and unpredictable. That kind of thing. Stuff that would lend the game a sort of unofficial, unpredictable narrative based on your mistakes.
I've spoken at length about what I'd like for a close combat system, so I'll put the short version here. Give me the eight-point strike compass, easily-accessible thrusts, footwork that is uninfluenced by one's strikes, high mobility and weapon-to-weapon impact.
A game that combined all these three approaches would be the Most Fun Fantasy Game, to my mind. Think about the implications of combining these elements. I'll give you a few:
- The complexity of the close combat means that your reward for attacking at range while your enemies are unawares is that you struck freely, without any need to circumnavigate their defenses.
- Stealth can be used strategically to manipulate enemy behaviour to a high degree rather than just evading adversaries.
- Magic, while powerful, has the automatic balancing factor of turning on oneself if they mess up.
- Character build would ultimately be secondary to one's own intelligence and cunning, as the various systems are so flexible. Advancing along the paths would be a matter of specialisation and effectiveness. TES claims this, but by the mid-late game, the skills you didn't develop are so underused as to be useless.
inb4 "That game would be expensive and difficult to make". Sure thing, but it would also rock socks. I can dream of swordfaggotry and the tension of a woodsman's flight, can't I?
I would play that game. What's the closest we've gotten to that thus far? Dark Souls?
Dark Souls is absolutely awesome and I would definitely reccomend it (and Demon's Souls, mind), but its magic and combat work on entirely different virtues. The combat is closer to Monster Hunter, where the often severe restrictions, combined with the fine-tuned sense of timing and balance in the games, provide a tactical experience with significant depth.
Magic is awesome in those games because it's diverse, because of the game's particular character build structure, how that interacts with weapons and because of the difficulty. It's pretty standard, but it's done so well in context of the rest of the game that I don't mind it.
Stealth is almost non-existent, apart from a few magical items which make you harder to detect at range. You can sneak up on enemies, but it can never, ever be a primary tactic.
Insofar as my above idea goes, there's Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy for a similar kind of combat thingy. There's no stealth game I know of which does the above, though, nor do I know of a game that includes that kind of magic system.
Madass, I think it makes sense that stealth attacks do more damage (maybe not the 15x damage though...). After all, take a man when he sees you, and he can block or minimize the damage. Sneak up on them though and how will they keep you from hurting them badly?
Ah yes, Jedi Outcast had some quality combat, I remember that. Though I obviously didn't notice the nuances you would, it felt natural to me, compared to the less-accurate combat in other games.
Ica, the issue is that in TES, there's a block function that represents actively trying to thwart an incoming attack. By reaslistic standards, a sneak attack and an attack that simply connects should do exactly the same damage. As TES currently stands, though, I do think the extra damage is a suitable reward for sneaking, but that's based on the limitations of the game on a systematic level.
Jedi Outcast had excellent combat, but there's plenty of things I'd change. Fine-tunes, mostly, but it got the gist of it down really well, along with the flexibility. When I talk about being able to strike as you please, move freely and have weapons intercept one-another, Jedi Outcast is foremost in my mind.
I'd have liked the ability to kick with a weapon other than the double-bladed sabre in Jedi Academy, most of all.
In Metal Gear Solid, the guards can follow your footprints in the snow, at least.
^^ To be fair, kicking is almost always a horrible idea in weapons combat.
^ MGS4 also had a pretty sweet bit where you track a bunch of enemies. It killed itself by never having a scenario like that resurface, though; it could've been a late, well-hidden tutorial on how to deal with such situations. Instead, it was a single scenario where your hand was held.
Yeah, but in combat, even if you don't block it entirely, you could justify it as them, say, stepping back to minimize damage, or them getting their arm in the way to keep you from hitting anything vital (the game can't really show this stuff, after all)
It can show stepping back, although it doesn't take that into account for combat.
In any case, that's one of my issues with TES -- with all the technology we have at our disposal, it's still extremely abstract. This is more permissable in a turn-based RPG, less so in a real-time one.
Was still annoying when enemies could do it with any sabre >=/
MGS4 also had enemies that could smell you on higher difficulties and see you from ranges you would actually see a human being at.
^^ It would be neat if where I attack, how I attack, how I move, how my target moves, etc. all affected damage
FPS games do it; why not close combat games, right?
You don't understand the point of a sandbox game, apparently.
Skyrim has flaws, but its free roam design isn't one of them.
the problem is not the free roam design, but the expansion of it to unnatural proportions that lead to an unfocused game that does too much of everything good, but nothing in an excellent fashion.
Sounds like Red Dead Redemption to me.