Since the advent of First Person Shooter games on console systems, there have been a number of design trends that have negatively influenced the development of the FPS genre, some of these changes to first person shooters were necessary to adapt them to a console setting, while others are arguably arbitrary but have nonetheless become design trends. In brief these trends are regenerating health, iron sights, a limited weapon inventory, reduced weapon variety with a greater focus on hitscan weapons, slow pace of movement, low jump height, linear or front-focused level design, enemy homogenization, and reduced weapon accuracy. It is debatable why these trends have come to pass, from production costs to follow the leader styles of marketing, but their negative influence is undeniable. Continue reading →

What do you think of X-factor in MvC3?

Comeback factors are weird in slippery slope games, that’s what I think. Hell, slippery slope games have a weird sense of fairness to begin with and comeback factors are weird.

Basically, as you lose characters, you lose neutral and combo tools, it’s a slippery slope. X-factor gets stronger in correlation to the number of characters you’ve lost. It’s character loss compensation. Though it does so by making your point character stronger/faster for longer periods of time, so it’s not exactly paying you back the stuff you lost, it’s not exactly counteracting the slippery slope. X-factor can frequently just flat-out win you the match by making everything you do better.

The trouble with comeback mechanics is that they make it so that the game is less consistent. In a game without comeback mechanics, a lead is a lead. If I’ve successfully won neutral on you enough times to to push your lifebar really low, you’ll need to put the same amount of work into winning neutral back at me to even it up. Comeback mechanics give you a chance to even it up without having to work as hard to do so as I originally had to in order to put you in that situation, making it so effectively, a lead isn’t a lead.

Another way of putting this is, there is no such thing as a true comeback mechanic, it’s only that who is in the lead gets abstracted as the game gets further in. If a comeback mechanism is powerful enough, then the game might very well become a race of who can take enough damage to get down to that point where they win. You might look at the guy in first place in Mario Kart and say he’s in the lead, but in reality the guy in last is holding a blue shell, a bullet bill, lightning, or so on. In games with powerful enough comeback mechanisms, you aren’t actually behind your opponents, you just can’t compute the actual state of the game. That’s part of what makes comeback mechanics frustrating, that the actual state of the game so clearly contradicts the apparent state of the game.

A classic example of this type of thing crops up in game shows like Jeopardy; early rounds are for only a few points, and later rounds are for a lot more points. So it may appear that you’re ahead early on, but in reality your current lead has almost no effect on whether you’ll actually win in the long run.

This comes from a corporate sort of thinking, “Everyone should have a chance to win! Games are more fun when they’re close!” But when you’re ahead and you get evened out by a comeback mechanic, it’s really grating. Comeback mechanics mean you need to respect characters more as they are almost about to kick the bucket. Comeback mechanics help strong experienced players, or mid-level players more than the noob trying to get into the game that might get scared off if they don’t have a comeback security blanket, because those mid-level players are the ones who can actually use it effectively, unlike the beginners.

http://xenozipnotes.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/comebacks.html

The trouble with comeback mechanics in my opinion is is, sometimes the worse player wins, and with comeback mechanics, that’s likely to happen just a little bit more. It can help you close the gap in a bad situation that little bit more easily. It makes the game that little bit more inconsistent, and that can be frustrating to deal with.

More so than this:

Thankfully SFV decided to keep its comeback factor toned down, as a simple cancel and a super mode that gives you either the one good move you need, or a couple more options. And there’s different ways to charge the meter besides being hit, like using your V-Skill successfully.

How do you feel about elemental weaknesses? Whether it being individual mons/armor having specific weaknesses and strengths or mons of a type all having the same resistances. I’ve always felt that they were pointless in single player since you can just look up what to bring.

Alright, lets think about it. What are some situations that can occur here? RPGs are games of specialization typically, so you could end up specialized into a team that has their strongest moves resisted, but it still makes sense to use those moves because they do the most damage. You could deliberately construct a team that resists, reflects, nullifies, or absorbs the types they’re going to go up against.

By themselves, these factors are kind of flat, they’re factors of preparation chosen before the battle that apply number buffs to damage without altering how the moves fundamentally work. They’re not as much a counter as most megaman boss weapons are to bosses weak to those weapons. Probably something to consider more from the knowledge perspective is how advance knowledge of your opponent’s strengths against you or resistances shapes the moves you avoid using.

However we could borrow a principle from RTS here. In RTS, some units hard counter others, just the way they’re built, and on the surface it looks like that sucks, except it’s possible to overwhelm lesser numbers of units with a lot of hard countered units, and to mix units together to create a more flexible composition.

If you only had to fight with one pokemon each battle, then yeah, type advantage is pretty sucky. Consider Devil May Cry 3 which surprisingly enough has a type advantage system for its devil arms. You can follow the type advantage system, but it’s just flat number buffs, it doesn’t feel that strategic. Once you’re trying to mix together different types into a coherent composition that needs to maximize its output versus other compositions it gets more tricky.

Add to that the way Pokemon has Same-Type Attack Bonus (STAB), which adds a 50% boost to using the same type of move as your pokemon’s type. I still remember as a kid fighting Erica in pokemon red and having all my pokemon get beat except a low level bellsprout I happened to have. Its poison type helped it avoid getting poison powdered and its grass type resisted other moves and it had a non-grass move on it, so by itself it turned the tide.

Over in SMT3, type weakness has another role of earning turns, not just maximizing damage, and each character has different elemental and buff/debuff moves in the lineup, so hitting enemies with their weakness can potentially not only mean more damage, but more healing or buffs/debuffs depending on your party composition. And given that the enemy teams are mixed too, different characters can share in this potential.

Type weakness is generally so simple that it might be a good dynamic for kids. Match like to like. Probably one of the worst examples is Golden Sun, which had one of the most boring elemental systems ever (hit enemies with opposite element always). SMT does the classic four elements thing better just by having them be arbitrarily weak per-demon, even if it’s confusing to keep track of.

What do you think of random encounters?

I like the undertale/zeboyd solution of having a static number of random encounters per area. Undertale has them occur after a static number of steps too.

I’m generally fine with random encounters, as long as they’re tuned well. The bigger issue with them is they basically give people unlimited resources to grind than their random nature, which is totally acceptable for this implementation in my view.

Perhaps the other issue is that you gotta walk to trigger them which is time consuming. Zeboyd also made the right move here, adding a menu option to deliberately trigger a random encounter. Chrono Trigger and Tales games have a great implementation too, especially the Tales games, which get their implementation from Zelda 2. Chrono Trigger all being static encounters prevents the lame states of having to walk for an unspecified thing to happen, and prevents the scenario of just doing 10-20 random encounters through the menu then walking through an empty area. Tales has the enemies respawn when the screen is switched, so it prevents the chrono trigger scenario of clearing an area then it’s just empty. Tales also has movement patterns for the enemies, and randomly generated enemies on the overworld, and you can shoot these enemies to freeze them and go around them too, so it’s a mini gameplay challenge to bypass enemies.

The Pokeradar in some Pokemon games is also really cool, showing you which patches of grass have encounters.

The key thing is making it so their time moving through areas is populated with encounters inbetween, sometimes allowing the player to have a say over which encounters they go through, but not allowing them to bypass all of them easily.

I mean, random encounters aren’t critically unfair most of the time in most games, and don’t have very strong potential to be unfair because for some reason it occurred to designers a billion years ago to generate them relative to a step counter, rather than just flat-out random chance each step.

re: random encounters. I was mostly asking in the sense, do you think they do a good job of testing the players planning/strategy? E.g. I’ve left a town, have I planned accordingly, brought in potions/items, created a well-rounded party, have enough tactical skill to defeat all the monsters I encounter? I mean, I can think of any games that do this well b/c you can usually just backtrack or in cases like Pkmn, just avoid tall grass. But that’s what I was getting at (in some hypothetical game).

Okay, testing planning/strategy is actually a tricky topic. It kind of comes down to, how much should long term choices affect the outcome of a scenario? In my opinion, testing planning/strategy isn’t really that important, especially in singleplayer games, because the feedback loop, the iteration loop, is so long that it doesn’t really make sense to have players lose an hour from now because they messed up in this moment for something they can’t readily see they messed up until an hour from now.

This question isn’t really about random encounters at all, this is about any type of game where you set a loadout and venture out into the wilderness. Slight randomness, not knowing what you might run into, can promote building flexibly, so you are prepared for a lot of scenarios instead of just dumping all in. Though good encounter design can do this too.

I don’t think backtracking ruins this, because backtracking typically means going back through more monsters instead of pressing on ahead, unless you expend resources to get like, escape rope or something.

Though one scenario that comes to mind out of the blue is that situation in the FOE video where they forgot to buy warp rope. Instead of screwing the player for not having something, always give them an option to come out on top, but maybe it’s a trickier option than otherwise afforded. Suddenly realizing you fucked up a long time ago can be a funny situation, but if you have no form of recourse, then it sucks.

On that note, that video is hilarious, here it is: