RPG Planning Thread

#1

I’ll save the other thread for releases. The majority of our discussion is happening over irc, but this is probably a good place for rujasu, marcavis and I to place anything “long-form”, which needs to be saved for comparative purposes.

Namely, one of our upcoming tasks is to iron out a stat system for this rpg; how characters will level, how they will switch/change classes, how hitpoints, damage, and combat will be handled, and how equipment will work. We’re gonna come up with several drafts for this, relatively different, so we have multiple options to try if one’s not working out. These ideas are cheap for us to develop, so there’s no sense in not coming up with several.

What is fairly settled is:

  • that we’re going to have a gridless(?) tactical combat system. During combat, you’ll have “action points” per round, and you’ll have the choice between walking around, and/or attacking, each proportionally detracting from the other. Like Nippon Ichi’s “Makai Kingdom” did with attacks, we’ll just draw a ring for how far you can walk. All attacks will have limits on distance; some attacks, even melee, will have reasonable range to them (rather than all being a warcraft 1-style “point blank”), and may have area-of-effect.

  • Like wesnoth did, we’re going to work very aggressively to kill the menu-hell that poisoned FFTactics (honestly, with that fixed, I think FFT would have had much broader appeal).

  • Also taking a page from wesnoth, we’re going to have some level of randomness, so fights aren’t something you can just deterministically solve (which, once you figure them out, ruins their ability to be enjoyed as a challenge). Unlike wesnoth, I’d like to cap the extent to which random factors can have an effect; you’ll always be guaranteed a certain minimum degree of effectiveness in your protection or offense. Probably the easiest way to describe what bugged me about wesnoth’s randomness was that it was like rolling dice that had one side with a 0 on it - it just doesn’t feel right for “hitting nothing but air” to be an occurrence that ever happens in regular gameplay. At least, not for some stuff like running up to anything less than a shaolin master and swinging a sword at him (archery from a distance is another ball game). It’s a balancing act, but hopefully we can work that out.

  • We’re going to avoid FF-style potion-spamming. Unlimited potions basically break the entire combat model of a FF-style game. They become the single most important factor; the only thing that really matters in a FF-style fight is usually if you have enough healing capacity to overcome your opponent’s DPS. The litmus test on battle complexity is really whether you could trivially write a script to fight battles for you, and considering that square made a system so users could do that in FF12 (the “gambit system”), that’s probably a Bad Sign?. Zelda:LttP did this right. You have four potions, max, and thus the effect of them on combat is a really low ceiling. Similar ideas might be a “lucky amulet” that will save your life like a zelda fairy-in-a-bottle during combat, but which only works once per battle.

  • One thing I personally want to avoid is “consumable epic items”. A really rare item (acquired so rarely that they’re effectively like a fixed number of appearances across the entirety of a game, perhaps as low as once) that has a really powerful effect, but which, once you use it, is gone forever. I hate these with a passion like the burning of the sun. They’re basically something you can never use, unless you’ve already played the game, and know the one point they’ll be most useful - because without prior knowledge, there will always be some point in the future where you might need them more. They’re kind of a slap in the face - they’re like “ha, ha, here’s a really sweet item, but you can’t use it.” A bit like considering chopping up the white tree of gondor for smokehouse wood.

#2

Stats:

“Hit points” shouldn’t be the rapidly increasing number it is in many FF-style RPG’s. In fact, I wouldn’t even make it a number, as far as the player is concerned. Instead, I’d make it a bar, so that the player can only see the percentage of health that their characters have remaining. Under the hood, the max health is a static number, say 1000. Thus, improving your party’s ability to stay alive is predicated on things like agility, physical defense and magic resistance, rather than just getting that HP number high enough. This may seem counter-intuitive for a somewhat tactically-based system, but I’d like to avoid the sort of number-crunching seen in FF Tactics.

Classes:

Classes should be unique to characters. I’m envisioning a system where you’re only bringing 3-5 characters to battle, and each of them should be different. However, at certain points throughout the game, the character reaches a “branching point” where he or she can pick a new class. For example, a gladiator might have the choice of one class tree that specializes in weapons skills (think of, for example, the sword techs that Crono had), one that focuses on defending allies but has less offensive versatility, or a “magical swordsman” type of class that has strong metaphysical attacks and resistance.

Combat/Inventory:

I agree with Jetrel’s points about not being able to carry tons of potions. It may be best to have each character able to hold a certain number of items, rather than a catch-all inventory. Also, I think we should consider a system where the party’s health is restored entirely once combat is completed – SaGa Frontier did this with success, and many tactical RPG’s in the FF Tactics or Shining Force did as well (though in SF you had to go to the temple to revive the dead).

More thoughts to come, eventually.

#3

[quote=“rujasu, post:2, topic:169”]Stats:
“Hit points” shouldn’t be the rapidly increasing number it is in many FF-style RPG’s. In fact, I wouldn’t even make it a number, as far as the player is concerned. Instead, I’d make it a bar, so that the player can only see the percentage of health that their characters have remaining. Under the hood, the max health is a static number, say 1000. Thus, improving your party’s ability to stay alive is predicated on things like agility, physical defense and magic resistance, rather than just getting that HP number high enough. This may seem counter-intuitive for a somewhat tactically-based system, but I’d like to avoid the sort of number-crunching seen in FF Tactics.[/quote]

Yeah, we especially don’t want to do crazy stuff like the calculator class. That’s just so meta - the first time I saw that, I was like “what the fuck?” … “way to break my sense of immersion, guys.”*

As for hitpoints, I essentially agree with you - I think we should have some HP increase, and I wouldn’t mind showing that to the player via some means (longer/fatter bar?) but I’d like to keep it below, maybe 10x your initial HP. Maybe even really low, perhaps less than 2x, if the business about evade/etc skills works out well - which I could see it doing.

Likewise, I see the point you’re making about the psychological effects of “just seeing a bar”, and judging it based on “feel” rather than numbers. Not many games do that these days, but I do recall one in particular, Oni, as working very well with that kind of system (hitting an enemy gave a “color-flash” which indicated their current HP; green<->yellow<->red). I could be down with a system like that; we’ll have to judge it by feel.

[quote=“rujasu, post:2, topic:169”]Classes:
Classes should be unique to characters. I’m envisioning a system where you’re only bringing 3-5 characters to battle, and each of them should be different. However, at certain points throughout the game, the character reaches a “branching point” where he or she can pick a new class. For example, a gladiator might have the choice of one class tree that specializes in weapons skills (think of, for example, the sword techs that Crono had), one that focuses on defending allies but has less offensive versatility, or a “magical swordsman” type of class that has strong metaphysical attacks and resistance.[/quote]

Yeah. I think we’ve got a good consensus on that, so we can call that settled.

One possible twist would be to have each class only accommodate X number of skills (say, 3-4), and have one or two of them possible in both class branches, so you can borrow a bit of the other class if you really REALLY want “that one skill”. To riff on a game people are familiar with, let’s say chrono trigger had class changing. Frog starts out as a Fighter, and can become either a Knight or a Gladiator. He gets the following skill choices, but can only learn 3 per class, and can’t ever become a Gladiator if he becomes a Knight (and vice-versa):

Knight:

  • Bless weapon with holy element
  • Heal
  • Raise Defense
  • Cross-slash
  • Charge

Gladiator:

  • Cross-slash
  • Charge
  • Ground-slam
  • Stun
  • Berserk

[quote=“rujasu, post:2, topic:169”]Combat/Inventory:
It may be best to have each character able to hold a certain number of items, rather than a catch-all inventory.[/quote]

We’d want to be careful with this - Diablo 2 did this, and it was extremely anti-fun to make hard choices about what to get rid of for no reason other than your “stash space” was running low. AFACT, they really did it for no “fun” merits, but just for weak “realism” causes, especially weak because your stash was seemingly part of a moving “caravan” or seagoing ship, and those things can reasonably hold more stuff than you could ever get in a game.

That said, limiting what a character can take into battle is totally reasonable. Maybe you’re limited to 3 or 4 “on your belt” items per person, and don’t have time to dig around in your baggage. There’s a bit of UI cost in doing this every time before battle though.

Interesting. I was considering rapid, Warcraft3-style regeneration. It seems like that could eliminate consequences for getting hurt in combat, rather than forcing you to play conservatively. We’ll have to think about it, but I’m definitely open to the idea. The question really is “do such consequences create fun?” There would be enough danger from simply letting your HP fall too low of being incapacitated, especially if there’s no in-combat ressurection, to keep players conservative.

Conservation is important because if you don’t have it, “danger and excitement” only kicks in during a small window when the whole party is at risk of a GameOver. The rest of the time, you’re totally safe. If you’re able to take big gambits, and just resurrect the char if they get killed doing them, those individually don’t create excitement. Whereas, if you’re down to 2 characters for the rest of the fight, because you pulled a risky move, it gets exciting. A much larger spectrum of situations in a fight, even ones where most of the characters have >50%hp, are dangerous and exciting.

  • at the same time, I can see a counter-argument: there’s fun, and there’s fantasy in having a magician class that manipulates otherwise unseen subtleties in an opponent. Flavorwise, this brings to mind, say, kung-fu guy who knows feng shui, and is able to perceive astrological/chi-related facts about the opponent, such as what astrological-cycle his body is in (in chinese medicine, astrology essentially goes in nested cycles of equal numbers of units, with one set mapping years, another days, and another hours, or so I recall), and then being able to manipulate the opponent by striking them with a spell of an opposing sign. This is a complicated idea outside our purview, but who knows?
#4

More random brainstorming:

I don’t like for characters to have huge lists of stats. I’m perhaps a bit extreme in this regard; I think you could really get by with 3-4 base attributes for a character (besides HP/MP/EXP type counters). Physical Strength (STR), Magic Ability (INT), and Speed/Evade/Accuracy (AGI). Now, for a game that is going to have a small handful of characters, I do think we should go with more than this, but I don’t want it to go up to a dozen, either. The list of attributes should be manageable, relatively balanced (no obvious dump stat like “charisma”) and shouldn’t be a mystery to the player (WTF does Luck actually do?)

So, here’s a first shot at an attribute list:

Strength - This is widely accepted as the “physical attack power” indicator in RPG’s, and I don’t see a reason to deviate.
Endurance - Since there’s no HP, this is what affects how hard an attack in general will hit, be it physical, magical, or anywhere in between.
Dodge - Ability to avoid physical attacks, partially or totally. A skilled dodger should be able to deflect some part of the attack 50% of the time, but still only results in about 10% full misses.
Speed - Turns come up faster and more often. Doesn’t affect much else, since more turns is obviously a big deal in its own right.
Magic Power - The magical counterpart of strength, affects how effective your spells/magical abilities are.
Magic Resistance - Similar to Dodge, for magic attacks.

In addition, characters can develop skill levels with certain classes of weapons, but this isn’t a base number and doesn’t increase with experience. Instead, it’s a percentage based mainly on class, and possibly also based on how often the character uses a specific class of weapon. Skill affects mainly accuracy, boosts damage slightly, and has more of an effect on certain skills/techniques than others.

For example, our gladiator is best with a spear (175% skill) but good with an axe (125%) or sword (125%). He’s not good with a knife (75%) or martial arts (50%). He’s average with a crossbow (100%). The bard is good with a sword (150%) and average with most other weapons, but isn’t able to use an axe well at all (25%). 200% is best, 0% is an absolute can’t-use, and anything below 100% can’t use varying levels of that weapon. (For example, the Giant Gigaton Battle Axe requires high strength, two hands, and a skill of 100%, maybe 125%, but the Hand Axe behind your shack can be used by anyone with a measly 25% in axes.)

#5

I agree the list of stats should be kept fairly simple, since I’ve seen a number of games really do it wrong (more pics here for those interested: http://www.juggle.com/realmz ).

I agree with the player needing to know what skills do; I disagree with not having “ambiguous” names like luck and such, because that just bars way too many great names. Rather, I think we need to be forthcoming about what the hell skills actually do in-game, because even for seemingly basic skills, they often have hidden properties. An easy example was “vitality” in SD3; everyone can immediately see that it boosts your hitpoints, but it wasn’t until I read some walkthroughs that I found out it multiplied(!) your body-armor value as well. Explanation only needs a sentence or two (essentially exactly what you just wrote about your skill list), and we’ve got plenty of onscreen room for that - especially if we’re only showing the description of the selected skill.

Regarding weapon specialization, I kinda think it’s a bad idea. I found in Diablo2, that the amazon/barbarian’s weapon specs looked cool on paper, but in practice ended up limiting my choice of weapon. I’d start focusing on, say, axes or such, and it got powerful enough that after a while, I couldn’t use anything else because my power-level was so much weaker on the others that I’d just get killed if I didn’t use the annointed weapon-of-choice.

For art reasons, our weapon choices are going to be quite limited, because regardless of what system I use, very different weapon types would require a bunch of additional animations (or worse, would just not be displayed).

What might be a fun idea would be to take a cue from diablo3’s skill runes, and instead of having weapon specs, have a bunch of skills that are channeled through your weapons, but which have a very different effect depending on the weapon they’re used with. (D3’s skill runes are items you can apply to any skill, but which have different effects for each skill). For an example in our game, the “power strike” ability, used on a spear, would give a critical hit; used on a hammer, would give a “stun”.

#6

I had considered the issue of allowing skills to be “levelled-up” being detrimental, and I agree. We don’t want to fall into the traps that made the original FF2 such a disaster. I hadn’t considered the art factor, though.

It could still be done to some extent where certain classes get a slight bonus using their favorite weapon, but I’m thinking it’s not all that useful if it’s just a minor bonus. Keeping KISS in mind here.

I was thinking it would help to determine accuracy, but it might be better to not have “accuracy” at all and instead follow what FF Tactics did, where your accuracy was basically 100% - target’s evade. Depending on the skill being used, it could be less than 100%, of course, but there’s no attribute on the attacker’s side that affects it.

#7

Which bears elaborating. Although I’m new to walking/running animations, I’m pretty experienced at weapon-swinging animations from wesnoth, so I have a little confidence in how these plans will turn out. The cost of one of these is roughly a night per animation, given fluff room.

Characters will be animated for attacks -only- on the diagonals if at all possible. This has worked well in wesnoth for virtually everything except spear thrusts; the character swings in a wide arc, and because at most they are 45? away from the direct facing toward the target, the wide arc still looks appropriate. In fact, it’s precisely the same difference in facing seen in NSEW rpgs, since at worst they strike an opponent directly on their diagonal with a directly-cardinal animation.

In fact, unless damage type in the form of stabbing versus slashing is an integral part of our game, we can easily get away with making pole weapons use a “sweep” attack like you’d see from a poleaxe. Perhaps even if damage type is; as long as it looks cool, only the most pedantic audience members would take offense, and frankly, its probably still worth it if it spares us having to do 5-way animations.

The key question is whether we’ll do “modular” animations, and I’d really like to try. That is, animating the character with an empty hand, and compositing the weapon onto them in-game, on the fly. With (roughly) the same motion being acceptable for a wide variety of weapons, this would let us create one soldier sprite w/ animations, and give it a whole array of different weapons. Swords, hand-axes, maces, clubs, even morning-stars. I’d also quite consider applying this method to: 1] shields 2] heads 3] capes In fact, this could even let me cheaply add a bunch of decorations to monster sprites to give them more variety (the general principle being like differences in plumage on birds, or differences in antlers on deer).

I don’t know how well this will work, and I also know this will be rather tedious to wire up in terms of animation scripting, since we’d need to tune keypoints for every single frame, but once that’s done, we wouldn’t have to do it again for additional weapons, since they’d just be positioned in the same place in their animations frames as the previous weapon.

#8

Sorry for leading away from the animation issues again, but there’s two things which I’d enjoy a lot:

  1. NO time-freeze for special actions. That was very annoying in the Mana series, for example, because it just made repetitive actions consume a lot of time and I caught myself often wondering how to finish a fight rather quickly [in real-time] rather than effectively… for example by not using spells like Agility Boosts, which would have allowed me to finish the fight undamaged.

  2. Give the player no exact values for hitpoints, skills, damage etc. - This has been discussed already, especially concerning hitpoints, but I’d like to extend the idea to your skills and gear: keep the values obscure, just give hints like “massive”, “average” or “slight damage” and let the player judge his strength by exercise: i.e. test his new weapons on known enemies (“I usually slay a giant spider with three slashes, now”) or even go to NPCs / special areas to test one’s skills (“I hit the bull’s eye three times with ten arrows at a distance of 50m”). This way you could still measure your improvements in a certain way - don’t know whether this idea follows the KISS principle, though, but that probably depends on whether you consider calculations an easy job and essential to strategic gameplay (there are even strategy games, though, where the player usually doesn’t know exactly the effect of his unit’s weapons and armor, like old C&C).

This would make fights less predictable (more thrilling/fun?), skilling more intuitively (just continue doing what “felt” good) and - in case a multiplayer option is considered - would allow non-aggressive PvP competitions like an archers’ or wizards’ tournament (which would be in no way interesting if you could calculate your chances to win).

You probably can’t avoid that some people learn the values nevertheless (as they can be seen in the source code) and still calculate every step they do. If the games is aimed mainly at casual players, though, chances are rather higher that they don’t care about numbers if they’re not confronted with them in game. This concept would work best with a learning-by-doing skillgain system, but that’s yet another problem you’ve been talking about, before…

#9

I really appreciate your participation in the discussion. I’d love to have more people involved, but this forum ain’t exactly a hopping place. :frowning:

Yeah. I was going to point-out how we’re a TB rather than RT game, so that wouldn’t apply … except it does apply. The problem you’re describing in the mana series really had little to do with time-freezing, and everything to do with a clunky UI. It was also compounded by “time-to-cast”, where you didn’t just immediately cast spells, but had to sit and wait for several seconds whilst your characters mumbled the magic words - a touch that was aesthetically cool, but would have been better reserved for super-high-level spells and such. In fact, it actually neutralized the usefulness of several spells, such as hawk’s sleep-flower in SD3; were it an insta-cast, you could reasonably use it to keep selected enemies out of a fight, but as an delayed thing, by the time it cast, all the enemies were tightly grouped, and you couldn’t avoid hitting them.

Another compounding factor was the tiny size of battles, and how such effects expired after you left every single “screen”, which was really overbearing IMO, since some screens lasted mere seconds. It felt like they ought to last a minute or so, at minimum.

What it chiefly had to do with, though, was the whole ring-menu UI. In order to cast a spell in that game, it took sometimes 4-6 UI steps, mostly just a big drawback of a tiny screen size, and an old-fashioned console-ui. I can propose a trivial solution which would work on the DS. Given the low # of total skills, when battle began, you could turn the lower screen into an array of buttons corresponding to your skills. Boom - now it’s just one step.

I’d have to try it out first-hand to know if it’d work well, but it’s certainly a promising idea.

The apprehension for me is a certain potential for “missed features”. I played an rpg as a kid named Taskmaker, and it had a whole bevy of expensive, hard-to-get items. Problem was that they were stat-hidden like this, -and- many of them had subtle-but-powerful magic effects such as recharging your strength or whatnot much faster (arguably the only thing justifying their purchase price, which you’d have to grind pretty aggressively to pay). But you couldn’t know about these effects up-front, unless you bought them and painstaking tested them, and in practice, it’s often really difficult to judge stuff like this.

For example, I mentioned that “hidden stat” about the armor in SD3, where the formula for how much defense it gave (with a system that seems pretty close to just enemy damage - armor = final damage) was simply something like 18+14*vit. See, I missed this. That’s a huge, earth-shattering difference, there - a mere 4 points of vit nets you an additional 56 armor, which could potentially completely defuse enemy attacks, but I never figured that out even with a ton of playtime. And the problem with that stat was that it wasn’t just a “moderate bonus if you get it, but largely unnecessary”, it was crucial to know, because the game could be so tough without it that you’d be nearly ready to curbstomp the cartridge. I remember of a number of stretches where, having not known it and neglected both strength and vit, I had characters dealing 1 damage per hit, and receiving 40+ from regular enemies on every blow. Ick. I mean, hell, I remember the first time I played the game, due again to hidden knowledge, I picked the one single party combination, out a possible 120 variants, which couldn’t ever level into having a healer (angela, hawk, lise). Whoops.

So it’s a tough decision, and I can see the pros and cons of each approach.

#10

Yes, for 1. all of the problems you mentioned diminished the fun of executing special actions, but I really mainly referred to special effects (especially those of spells: after mumbling, before coming into effect), during which time did stand still: e.g. when crystals assembled in the air and turned around for a few seconds before they struck the enemy, who waited for them patiently. While ring UIs were a technical issue (not necessary anymore) and the drawback of a certain mumbling duration (during which enemies could act) was probably wanted (albeit exaggerated), time-freeze for special effects had no in-game advantages or disadvantages: they were simply fancy, but obstructive to a good gaming experience - they might be justified, as you said, for really exceptional actions, but not for all kinds of basic spells, which in some fights were used every 5th second.

Look at this as an (extreme) example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAqyslWz4_4
Here the special effects take even more time than both mumbling and choosing from the ring menus.

Concerning 2nd suggestion, the principle of obscure values, there is of course a vast scope of how to implement them… I wanted to suggest a rather strict and experimental way of concealing exact values (rather close to realistic possibilities of measurement - primarily in order to enhance the fun [?] of experiencing rather than calculating the effect of your latest improvements.).
You’re definitely right that “hidden stats” become a nuisance when some “magical” effects are rather absurd and you don’t even get the slightest clue about them. The idea was rather to give clear hints at an item’s (dis-)advantages, merely without revealing the numbers (which are given in detail for example in all Blizzard games). Using your examples this would mean: the vendor of a sword would tell you that the bearer of this sword would fight with nearly interminable endurance (but you wouldn’t find out it increases your regeneration rate by 200%), if the effect of an armor is multiplied by your own constitution, the character who wears it would realize that the armor imitates the shape of his body or both seem to be associated in symbiosis as soon as he puts it on…
The bigger problem behind this solution is probably that you need to think about paraphrases for each item’s effects (which are triggered either when offered, when picked up, when worn or when used [in combat]). This would only be reasonable if you use “magic” effects rather rarely (unlike in Diablo games :stuck_out_tongue: ) and without too many absurd combinations like a sword that gives you armor points… With a set of paraphrases for rather common effects, some randomly generated items would still be possible.
The “softer / more conventional version” would be to include something like mouseover descriptions like this, rather straightforward, but not too detailed (“makes your recover faster” / “armor points are multiplied by your vitality”).

The latter (“armor points are multiplied by your vitality”) wouldn’t make sense, of course, if you didn’t know about your vitality value, but you’d only know that you are fast enough to run away from the town’s dog, long enough to run all the way from Navarre to Tristram and that you can take five punches from an ogre without fainting. (Those could be “achievements” at the same time…)

So, yeah, it’s a rather basic decision for an RPG, as it has far-reaching effects on what can and what can’t be done in the game - well, and it’s merely brainstorming… I’m more than satisfied if you consider these options in the process of making your RPG-mod. If you decide against the radical version, I might still someday give it a try, myself. :wink:

#11

Customization is such an important part of making a good rpg. Giving the player the ability to taper the experience and their party to fit their individual playing style. Final Fantasy Tactics may have gone a bit overboard in terms of learning curve and features, but once you learn all that stuff, the experience becomes incredibly in depth. We do need to err on the side of caution I think with making things TOO convoluted and trying to make a game with mass appeal for sure must be easy to get into, but hard to master. Part of the challenge and fun of playing rpgs is traversing these roads and making them work within the parameters of game mechanics to provide a balanced challenge.

Also… would there be a way where we can allow the game player to write their own notes on a map? We probably will have some huge areas for the game … I know this type of feature is more typical with dungeon crawlers, but allowing the game player to use the cursor to write important routes on a map, treasure, important locations for save points, whatever has the potential to make the gaming experience REALLY REALLY intense.

#12

I can whip up such a system in FML right now, but it’ll be somewhat limited with regards to amount of ink available for writing.

#13

There is a limit on ink? really?? haha. That is actually really awesome. By limiting the resources availabe for writing, forces the game player to be more efficient and discriminating about how they mark the information on the map…

To give you an idea of a map marking system that works REALLY FREAKING well, check this out.

This is so cool! I know it probably wouldn’t work the same for our game, but it’s JUST COOL. 8)

#14

Basically, each pixel has to be an object atm. A very simple object, but nonetheless. The game will start to stutter after a couple hundred objects, especially on the iPhone. (An object being something like Frogatto, a bat, a tree, etc.) Basically, this is the Wrong Way To Do It, but it can be done. :slight_smile:

#15

Ah. Hmmmmm… :o I see how that would definitely be problematic. Is there ANOTHER way to make markiongs that is more efficient?

#16

Not really, right now. However, we could supply numbered pegs and let the user jot down notes with reference to those. I’d say that we can safely provide maybe 50 pixels of ink, right now. Perhaps more, I should whip up a demo sometime.

#17

:-\ I’m sorry, but this looks like the antithesis of fun for me. Not gonna happen.

It’s also incompatible with what I want to do with the maps, which is a certain amount of random chaining, kinda like diablo 3 will be doing. Note that this is extremely different from what diablo 2 did: diablo 2 had (mostly) massive random maps, with monotonous, winding passages that were auto-generated by an algorithm. Diablo 3 has little mini-levels, all created by human hands (so they’re all unique and interesting), but randomly plugged together in sequences to fill in an entire dungeon.

#18

Sounds awesome. Can’t wait to see it in action.

#19

[quote=“EELuminatus, post:10, topic:169”]the drawback of a certain mumbling duration (during which enemies could act) was probably wanted (albeit exaggerated), time-freeze for special effects had no in-game advantages or disadvantages: they were simply fancy, but obstructive to a good gaming experience - they might be justified, as you said, for really exceptional actions, but not for all kinds of basic spells, which in some fights were used every 5th second.

Look at this as an (extreme) example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAqyslWz4_4
Here the special effects take even more time than both mumbling and choosing from the ring menus.[/quote]

Yeah, I mostly agree with that. I’m not sure I necessarily have an absolutist position on it like you forwarded, but a policy of “they never take more than 2 seconds” might easily have removed all complaints (if I remember right, some epic megaspells like “ancient” took something ridiculous like 30 seconds). For me, the big culprit was most of the offensive magic (especially angela’s spells, lise’s and carlie’s summons, and a few of hawk’s longer techniques. Simple stuff like hawk’s “dart” technique were fine.

One possibility that recently occurred to me about SD3 would have been to combine mumble time with visual effects; giving spellcasters warm-up animations as they start to cast the spell (largely similar to the existing animations, some half of which were usually some sort of warm-up, like jewels erupting from the ground for the basic earth-elemental attack spell. It would have made use of that dead time, and would have been a cool warning for the player about what was about to hit them (assuming the player had a good variety of instant-cast techniques - which I’ll note they didn’t, this would have offered a good deal of tactical variety, especially if you had some techniques that could silence a spellcaster, or at least interrupt many low-level spells).

Since I just brought that up, that I felt was largely missing from SD3; there were many techniques in the game that were nearly worthless because they had a long casting time, but would have been immensely useful with near-instant casting time. Especially, if you had some spells with low damage but low cast time, and some other spells with high damage but long cast time, it would’ve offered a good amount of tactical variety.

A display issue related to this that occurred to me: the action game “ONI” had a cool system for displaying health in a “fuzzy”, but quite effective way. When you hit an opponent, you had a rather SD3ish impact flash. These were colored according to the remaining-post-hit health of the victim, giving you a good sense of how near-death the enemy was, which (mostly) eliminated a need for health bars.

Although good enough for ONI, it’s not complete. A desire remains for indication during times when enemies aren’t being hit, of how much HP they have. A potential thought might be a demon’s-crest style red tinting when something’s close to death; also possibly the release of D2 “open wounds” style blood-effects as the creature stands around (with their frequency mapped to how wounded something is, and with appropriate analogues for non-corporeal or otherwise unusual creatures).

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[quote=“Jetrel, post:19, topic:169”]A display issue related to this that occurred to me: the action game “ONI” had a cool system for displaying health in a “fuzzy”, but quite effective way. When you hit an opponent, you had a rather SD3ish impact flash. These were colored according to the remaining-post-hit health of the victim, giving you a good sense of how near-death the enemy was, which (mostly) eliminated a need for health bars.

Although good enough for ONI, it’s not complete. A desire remains for indication during times when enemies aren’t being hit, of how much HP they have. A potential thought might be a demon’s-crest style red tinting when something’s close to death; also possibly the release of D2 “open wounds” style blood-effects as the creature stands around (with their frequency mapped to how wounded something is, and with appropriate analogues for non-corporeal or otherwise unusual creatures).[/quote]

I like this idea.

Unrelated statement but kind of building on this from the visual side of the effect… … Remember the Critical hits in Final Fantasy VI ? during battle these hits were accompanied by a subtle screen flash of white. Certain spells and esper calls also had the same effect. It’s a really cool effect that it probably overlooked by most but it’s nice touch work.