Final Fantasy Hacktics

http://grumpygamer.com/2152210

Ollllllld as fuck (@1989!) but a good article anyways, as it makes a lot of good points that could be applied to today's games as well.

Also check out the other article he links to as well:

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

Morrowind is amazing though

I agree mostly with this author's points about plot, storyline, and their interaction with gameplay.  No game should have difficulty elements that are arbitrary from the point of view of the storyline or have arbitrary and ridiculous minutia inside the plot.  However, I disagree strongly about what we might now term "fake difficulty" in terms of actual gameplay itself.  To be honest, almost all the real challenge in a RPG is a "backwards puzzle"; it should be presented that way and it is not a problem.  Furthermore, the equivalent in RPGs of "I forget to pick it up" would be an optional side-quest that gives you OP items that's hard to unlock and harder than usual to beat.  To be honest, as long as the side-quest is part of the story but not integral to it and the game can be beaten without it (just not as easily), then I see no reason to forbid it.
The only way to "uncage" a RPG, so to speak, is to create a TO style plot (with multiple options at key junctures and multiple endings) and to make all battles as general as possible (meaning most specialist and generalist teams can beat it).  But the latter would make the game too easy (or severely hamper gameplay at the micro-level, i.e. all/most classes/equips are specialists or generalists...most people expect an RPG to be mechanically more than merely chess or soccer on a digitized board) and would be as boring as seeing only mages or only physical strikers in the entire game.  You need a healthy mix (and personally...I think there's actually nothing wrong with a "bait trap" by the maker...something like making the first 5 missions almost jokes if one strategy is employed only to severely punish that strategy on Mission 6 so no one thinks of taking an easy way out...I'd say this is fair as long as the maker gave a warning to the player at the end of Mission 5 to avoid the above strategy).

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The first thing I?d do is get rid of save games.  If there have to be save games, I would use them only when it was time to quit playing until the next day.  Save games should not be a part of game play.  This leads to sloppy design.  As a challenge, think about how you would design a game differently if there were no save games.  If you ever have the pleasure of watching a non-gameplayer playing an adventure game you will notice they treat save game very differently then the experienced user.  Some start using it as a defense mechanism only after being slapped in the face by the game a few times, the rest just stop playing.

I partly agree.  Saved games promote abuse and cheating.  Savestates and TASing (Tool Assisted Speedrun) only make the problem worse.  However, having a game that can beaten in one sitting is often too short, or...to put it this way, we shouldn't stop writing novels simply because poems, short stories, and comics can encompass feelings in a far more condensed fashion.  The best idea, I think, is Fire Emblem's autosave feature.  This way, you live with the consequence of your mistakes (and if you really did mess up, you have to start a chapter or an entire game over...ideally, you'd want that feature on top of a job class + skill + equipment system feature and only a finite amount of Gold/EXP gained in the entire game [i.e. no random encounters], so the players MUST choose out of all the possible paths and can't do them all...adding replay value).

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The thing we cannot forget is that we are here to entertain, and for most people, entertainment does not consist of nights and weekends filled with frustration.  The average American spends most of the day failing at the office, the last thing he wants to do is come home and fail while trying to relax and be entertained.

I think this is my primary point of disagreement.  If any of you see me in real life, you'll notice a person who's literally incapable of relaxing while awake.  I enjoy playing chess, puzzle games where you have to calculate sequences of moves, or figuring out math proofs.  Thus, entertaining myself entails a process of mental frustration and learning followed by the clarity and rush of finding a tough solution.

Good article, Doku. I agree with a lot of the points he makes in there when applied to adventure games. I don't know how well they fit other game genres, as seen with FDC comparing them to RPGs, but for what the author was speaking about it was dead-on.

On game saves: Does it really promote cheating just by making it easier to use a trial and error system? I mean, given enough time and effort I think you can cheat at almost any game, but this comes back to the question of "Is using a built-in feature of the game in a way not originally intended cheating?" (Of course that begs knowledge of the creator's intent...) For example, take the roguelike game Nethack (I'm sure some of you are familiar with it) where saving your game exists solely to continue later. When you continue a saved game, it deletes the save and you can only save when quitting the game. This however leads to what I definitely see as cheating in the form of 'savescumming' where a player can copy the save file and replace it after the game deletes it to continue their game from their last save if they die. This screams to me as obviously cheating. You're going outside the intended use of the game's function. But with adventure games you frequently had the option of using multiple save files within the game's system or just by being able to name your saves differently and load them at will. Most modern RPGs follow this system of multiple save files and always being able to reload your last save.

...in the time I took to type that I have forgotten if I had a point to make, so I'll just stop my rambling here and see if anyone responds.

Depends if the designer's going for a choose your own adventure book type theme (in which case "savescumming" would probably be encouraged so the player sees all the content), or a realism theme (where dying needs the weight of actual dying, not minor inconvenience).


In a game where there's predefined story paths, I do not see savescumming as cheating. Visual novels, role playing games, and adventure games mostly would fall under that. A game like nethack, dwarf fortress, minecraft, etc where the "story" is just you dinking around and creating your own legendary experience, however, needs the weight of consequences to work. Consequences is what makes the difference between roleplaying within a living breathing world and playing with a virtual box of legos.

There's some overlap of course. Suffice to say that if the designer wants to make you feel like your choices have realistic weight, they'll discourage savescumming, thus it would be reasonable to consider it "cheating."