Features every RPG should have

XIII does have magic. There's just no required resource usage to cast it.

That's the problem right there, then.

Magic is best with resources. Otherwise we get the Game-Breaker problem by default. It's why there's been a magic meter/points in just about every rpg. To prevent one from having an infinite source of great power.

But that's a personal problem I have with that idea. I do not believe something beyond a mundane physical attack(and even then, they can cost something) should never have resources. Sometimes it can be done, like in Shining Force. The difference is that most projectile users are a Glass Cannon, etc. It means they can do damage, but take it up the ass rather easily. There's a balance there. Magic without resources sounds extremely inbalanced to me. But eh. I don't think there's much more to go into it anyway. I like resources, I think they have a thought to it. Everybody's free to disagree, of course.

That isn't really a problem with XIII, as regular spells are no longer inherently stronger than physical attacks(it depends on each character's stats), and higher level spells use up larger portions of the ATB meter.

I get what you're trying to say, but you seem completely unable to comprehend that games can be balanced around lack of MP or healing after battles.

@Hydronix: Dude, you're complaining about a single game and tried to equate that to all games...there's still a lot of games that have after battle autoheal that still require you to make a careful resource management to heal yourself in battles...

Hydronix, I honestly have no clue what you're saying half the time. You seem to be connecting "healing after battle" to a bunch of other mechanics. What exactly does it have to do with having no penalties for dying? Rather than complaining about healing after battle, it sounds like you're complaining about a bunch of other random things. I really get quite confused, especially when you start your responses with an indication of agreement and then go on a tangent about something random.

I'm talking about how it's generally not a good idea. It's one of the things that turn me off from it. I don't agree that it's balanced by that alone.

I do not mean specifically that game, anyway. I have a severe distaste for auto-healing at full outside of boss battles. I specified that it can work fine under certain circumstances. But I'm just used to working hard to stay alive in games, so that's a personal style of things.

edited 14th Jan '12 8:30:38 PM by Hydronix

Magic without a resource isn't unbalanced at all, as was pointed out in FFXIII.

Cooldown can also be used for balance, you don't always need resource to do that...unless you count cooldown time as resource that is...

edited 14th Jan '12 8:34:07 PM by onyhow

Cannot agree with that, sorry. A physical attack and magic have both ups and downs, but they were never made equal to begin with.

Either way, as I said before, I cannot work with it unless I have resources what it comes to Video Games. That's how it was balanced. You could do that great attack, but you have to choose how to do it and when. And you don't have a limit. Making it as good as your physical attack feels even blander to me. So now I have a point to choose anything beyond "heal" since I'll do nearly as much, unless it's a multi-hit move. There's a lot more to it than it looks like just from the style.

I prefer resources, that's all. I've made that clear. This is pretty much with everything with slightly exceptions on non-projectile weapons and simple physical attacks like a punch. Everything else? I need to manage my resources. I do not mind if I can slowly heal my resources back, since that's fine, but it also means I have to be patient as well before I can attack, etc. again. Of course, the rate of random encounters can change whether it's a good idea or not. But in general, I'm a man of keeping resources, not anything auto at all.

It's not a resource, true. But it does relate to it in general. It accomplishes the same thing.

edited 14th Jan '12 8:35:57 PM by Hydronix

Properly balanced magic without mana and such isnt a bad thing at all especially with XIII where magic and physical worked off stats.

Commando has Attack (Based off Str) and Ruin (Based off Magic) which did the exact same damage if you had equal stats, with Ao E Blitz (2 ATB physical) doing Aoe but about the same as a normal attack and Ruinga (3ATB magic) doing about 1 1/2 times damage in a larger area than blitz as well as a stun feature.

And Ravager had the strikes and magic each doing the same amount of damage at the same stats. Magic comes in Fire (1 ATB) Fira (2 ATB small Ao E) Firaga (3 ATB Large Ao E about the size of Ruinga) damage is roughly the same 3 Fire = Firaga.

Ravager's special ability is upping the chain gauge. Hitting a target with say 4 Fire spells will up the gauge a lot more than hitting with 2 Fira spells however Fira spells hit an area and can enhance other chain gauges (or keep them from falling off) as well as do damage. (Wind spells always stun so cost one extra ATB Gauge)

Strikes are only 1 level but you can enhance them via Enfire to where you are using Firastrike for aoe as well as more damage for only 1 ATB Gauge.)

Its a balanced system really that turned out really well.

XIII-2 will change it up by making wind a standard element as well as making the En____ spells monster only making it more strategic but allowing you to set your AI controlled guys to focus on Ao E spells, single target or target whatever you are not targeting in the setup.

edited 14th Jan '12 8:46:20 PM by Raso

I think the bigger problem with non-limited magic is "why *can't* you use them out of battle?" Its a huge bit of fridge logic that you can cast a healing spell in a fight, but not when your safe. I don't think I've ever seen a game give a decent explanation.

As for unbalancing magic, well really, that presumes the game and setting actually intend for physical attacks to be comparable with magic in any way. There's no *requirement* that every setting attempt a D&D style "guys with metal sticks are equal to guys who rewrite reality with their mind" balance. On the other end of the spectrum, and this is where Final Fantasy games usually reside, it could simply be that everyone else is as over the top as the spellcasters, ala Exalted. If that "guy with a metal stick" is a superhuman badass swinging a sword bigger than he is, well, I can totally buy that he deals roughly as much damage as a guy throwing fireballs does.

^In most rpgs you CAN use healing magic outside battles.. What rpg are you exactly talking about?(more logical flaw would be unable to use fire magic when you need to burn something =P)

I can't remember the title, but I have encountered at least one RPG that didn't allow out-of-battle healing. I think it was Atelier Iris 3, but I could be wrong.

And yes, those are even more common limits then just healing. . .

Golden Sun allows more than just healing outside of battle. But outside of regular Action RPG's(with no battle transitions), it's not too often you can use just about any magic/whatever outside of battle.

Quest 64 only allowed 4 spells outside of battle, for example. Healing 1, Healing 2, Exit, and Return.

RP Gs should have Leaked Experience for everyone (would 80% work?). And I mean everyone. Including people you haven't added to your party yet. Basically, this avoids Can't Catch Up. Characters that aren't being used are still comparatively strong and new guys won't have to worry about being too underleveled or possibly overleveled for your group.

Persona4's system of giving lower level characters more experience based on average party level and enemy level for that area could work too.

Thoughts?

On the healing question, and whether or not you should have auto heal at the end of battles, make them risky to be reckless. If someone goes down, they stay down until you either exit the dungeon or I guess hit up a save point. This does mean no revive magic though, and that has problems of its own, unless you have a huge party for backup. To make it more dangerous to play reckless save points will be sparse. Even thoughthat contradicts my save points should be used judiciously statement from earlier in the thread. So they'll probably have to be mutually exclusive.

However, this should not be in all RP Gs.

edited 16th Jan '12 7:25:13 AM by hnd03

Every RPG? That would have to be pretty broad, but okay...

• Challenge. Winning should take some effort. I recently started replaying Grandia Xtreme. I got killed by an optional boss and realized that I had just lost several hours of gameplay. And this made me smile, because I realized that it had been so long since I played an RPG where the combat offered me any sort of strategic challenge that it completely slipped my mind that I ought to be concerned with the possibility of losing.

• Good dialogue. If you can't write worthwhile dialogue, don't bother making an RPG. You can have an original setting, an interesting combat system, incredible graphics and music, a creative plot and compelling character designs, but if I have to cringe through the dialogue, I'm not going to stick around.

• Exploration. I don't need a Wide-Open Sandbox. I don't even want one, if it gets in the way of solid plot progression. But there had damn well be more places to go than up the tube or down the tube, and more reason for me to go places other than wherever the next cutscene is than looking to see what items are hidden there.

Personally, I've always hated the "fully heal after battle" mechanic everywhere it's implemented. Lengthy dungeons that demand that require you to keep up your MP and health to the end are a resource management challenge. You might have easily beaten the last ten encounters, but the next one is still meaningful because it can deplete the resources you need to make it to the end of the dungeon. To quote a review I strongly agreed with

Grandia Xtreme has my favorite dungeon implementation of any game I can think of, and that includes

• Visible Encounters which are nearly all challenging enough to damage your party and/or deplete MP to defeat.

• MP restoring items are extremely rare and valuable.

• No save points in dungeons. When you reach designated points, you can teleport out of the dungeon, and teleport back into it at the same point, refreshing all the encounters. Before each boss, there is a one-way teleporter which will allow you to leave the dungeon, but not teleport right back up to the boss fully restored. You have to manage your resources through the encounters (or at least avoid them, which is possible, but leaves you at risk of being ambushed,) in order to reach the bosses in fighting condition.

• All the bosses are strong.

Sure, you're at risk of dying and losing progress. But if there's no challenge, then there's no sense of accomplishment, and if Death Is a Slap on the Wrist, there's no tension. Not every game needs to be this difficult (the game has "Xtreme" in the name for a reason,) but while I'm sometimes in the mood for a game that demands a lot of focus and strategy, I'm never in the mood for a game that demands none.

edited 16th Jan '12 2:28:56 PM by Desertopa

Oh yeah, items. I don't really like consumable items. The concept of having a command that you never really want to use because it's a waste of stuff just encourages Too Awesome to Use and you end up never using half your inventory. And, on the other side of the coin, you might end up with too much stuff and break the game by being able to use powerful abilities with no MP cost or whatever. It tends to act as a sort of MP that you can save up throughout the entire game, with a cap that doesn't scale with level and doesn't replenish in inns. Basically it takes all the problems with MP (impossible to balance in the short term) but throws away all the benefits (items are also impossible to balance in the long term). Items are a terrible mechanic.

Well, I guess you could have a command called "item" that works in a different way. Everything I can think of is just a variation on MP though.

"Impossible to balance"?

Yes.

I meant I'd like you to go into detail, specifically about MP.

edited 16th Jan '12 5:18:42 PM by JotunofBoredom

It's not impossible to balance consumable items. Though how you'd balance them depends on where your complaint is. Do you mean The cap is too high, or that it's too low?

As for scaling with levels, there are games that have skills that affect your inventory in some way, either by adding strength to carry more weight, or "organizing" your items better to give you more spaces.

I fail to see how a status recovery item would be considered unbalanced supposing that you don't have an ability to cure it. Or your healing spells are not recovering the amount that you need and thus a curative item prevents you from being too weak.

Or you have a character that's having trouble doing meaningful damage to a boss because maybe it's a high physical defense boss and they don't have many effective magical attacks to get around that. An item that would do fixed damage keeps them from basically just taking up space. It also means that you can avoid losing a fight simply because it went on so long and thus you ran out of MP.

The former does get phased out as the game progresses, but I feel that the latter can still be applicable all the way up to end game.

edited 16th Jan '12 5:32:12 PM by hnd03

@Desetropa: I agree with everything except 2 things:

MP Items are rare. They don't need to be. At all. If Magic isn't super broken, but is balanced enough, they can easily be somewhat common. In some games, your physical attacks are more deadly than Magic. In fact, Magic is to prevent tons of enemies from being overbearing. Mind you, if you have tons of party members(not a requirement, since 1 person can do the job fine), this isn't as big of a deal. But when you have a maximum of three or less, then you need a lot of it due to being overwhelmed.

Other is Visible Encounters. Part of the strategy, to me, is not knowing what you'll get into, and fighting your way through the other stuff. While it does help fight the overuse of Random Encounters, it's not that hard in many games to just run away. I prefer that only for bosses. Only simply because that's the main thing to plan for.

MP is impossible to balance in the short term because the essential nature of it is to make you play efficiently. You don't want to waste your MP so you use weaker spells or physical attacks. However, this has the side effect of making it such that when you don't need to conserve MP, such as on the boss or if you happen to be fighting next to a heal point or something, there becomes no reason not to splurge. In that sense MP ceases to be a meaningful limitation on what you can do. It's not balanced for the short term, and it can't be because of what it is. The modern trend is to have other limitations such as cooldowns working side-by-side with MP, but you'll always have only one limiting resource.

There are certainly cases where you run out of MP on a boss fight, but if it's not the case that you're supposed to spam your powerful stuff on bosses, when are you supposed to do it? It's not really a choice. You don't run out of MP because you played badly, you run out of MP because the boss has the right amount of health to make you run out of MP shortly before it dies based on your expected damage output (assuming you aren't deliberately attacking it with the wrong element or something). There's no gameplay added by the existence of MP.

Unbalanced doesn't just mean overpowering. In this case, it's unbalanced in the sense that your limitations don't really matter. If it's "something you can do when you don't have any other options" then it's not exactly an interesting gameplay mechanic, is it? It's essentially an afterthought and the game is designed assuming that you always have enough antidotes or whatever. Might as well just give everyone a free ability that cures poison. There's really no difference other than the possibility of failing to buy them the first time they become available. Which isn't exactly compelling.

edited 16th Jan '12 6:09:27 PM by Clarste

What about games like SMT Nocturne where how and when you use magic is used in conjunction with conservation? In that game's case magic is more than just a matter of "don't use" and "spam strongest spell like crazy".

Alternatively, I'm playing a game called Sequence right now. It's a Rhythm-RPG(or a rhythm game with stat based combat, whatevs) where all of your active abilities take up MP.

Here's where I'll need some visual aid to explain.◊

In combat you got three slots where arrows are moving down. Defensive, Spell, and Mana:

• Arrows in the defensive slot are enemy attacks, and hitting the arrows negates the damage from each one. Combinations of arrows fall in intervals, these intervals are not fixed.
• Whenever you use a spell(attacks, healing, etc.), a combination of arrows will start falling in the spell slot. Hitting the full combination will actually cast the spell, missing once means the spell is a dud and nothing happens other than you wasting MP on whatever you cast.
  • The game uses spell cooldowns as well.
• Arrows are constantly falling in the mana slot. Hitting one arrow restores a single MP(hitting it perfectly restores 3).
• You can only hit arrows in one slot at a time.

The combat in Sequence is all about about managing time between protecting yourself from damage, casting spells, and maintaining enough MP so that you can cast spells in the first place. In this case, not having MP means both that:

• You'd only have two slots and the game would be less demanding in terms of timing. The only alternative, decreasing the intervals between arrows falling in the defensive slot, could end up making the game too hard(and exceedingly simple at the same time).
• There'd be nothing to stop you from spamming spells other than the cooldowns. The solution to this, increasing cooldown time, would destroy the pacing of battles and make the game drag.

edited 16th Jan '12 6:53:27 PM by JotunofBoredom