Some ideas to revamp RPG battle systems

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Some random ideas I've been tossing around with...

1. Some kind of movement. A simple, Tactics-style grid would suffice. However since grid tends to imply SRPG and SRPG do not typically have good sales, perhaps it can be disguised in some other way. Lunar's system would work reasonably well, but allow more freedom of movement. Why is movement necessary? Because it allows meaningful formation of your party. More on this later...

2. Non 100% to hit attacks. Not even special attacks unless it is something like a once or twice per battle thing. Tactics had a good idea with this except it is utterly trivialized by the fact that any attack that really mattered always hit 100% (swordtech, Holy, summons, etc).

3. Cover. This type of command has been in RPGs since FF4, and it has been a 100% useless command. Beyond the fact that your AI will do something like have your 1 HP character cover someone at full strength, the lack of distinction between characters makes it absolutely pointles to cover anyone to begin with. This is also allows you to have stuff like having bosses able to kill your weaker character in one hit and yet still winnable. The cover AI should exercise reasonable amount of intelligence. For example you shouldn't cover for someone if it'd get you killed unless the person being covered is guaranteed to get killed without the cover (this should be more character relationship based, i.e. in Suikoden 1 Gremio and Pahn covers for McDohl, but not in reverse). Going back to #1, there should be some distance limitations. Also, there is no reason why cover can't work for magical attacks, though its property is most likely reversed from physical (generally speaking weaker characters tend to be better against magic overall). Take Fate, there is no reason why Saber who possesses magic immunity should not defend against every possible magical attack directed at her Master, Shirou. Thus Shirou, despite having no magic resistance whatsoever, is for all practical purposes immune to magic as well when working as a team. Speaking of which, there's no reason the enemy can't do this either.

4. Area Effect attacks. Never should such attacks by the most powerful attack unless it comes with severe limitations. Going back to #2, I really like the idea with Fate how most powerful AE attacks are actually used on a single person (including Gilgamesh's attack which is classified as anti-planetary) since the AE nature of such attacks prevent evasion (characters presumably try to avoid attacks, and if you put a character at the certain of an AE attack, evasion is very unlikely). Similar to how in some FFs you can make spells target all enemies but do less damage, AE attacks should be like this. You can either use it on one target for a lot of damage, or use it on many targets for significantly less damage. When combined with #3 above it should work out that it is generally better to use 100% of AE on one person, as opposed to spread out over say 3-4 people, knowing the person with the best defense (within covering range of coures) will also defend your already spread out attack. So we actually end up with a situation like say:

Boss A B C

Boss uses some powerful magic (say, Ultima). A has extremely high magical resist, B and C does not. If boss targets A + B + C or even just B + C, A will defend for B & C's share, and with the spell's power dissapated over a large distance, the part that actually hits B & C is relatively insignificant when checked against A's magical defense. Therefore, the best thing here to do is to cast the spell on just A (covering enough area to deny evasion) and hope it punches through A's magical defense. If A was not in range to cover, the spell could kill B & C outright (at full health). This allows you to make counters where the enemy can one-hit kill your people without making it reliant on enemy being stupid and just never taking out your character in one hit.

5. Different characters should lead to very different battles. Why should you have a hard time dealing with random fiends when you have Auron, the legendary Guardian on your side? RPGs already force you to rotate your party based on some nonsensical story element (e.g. people always happen to leave and someone else happen to join to fill the role they left behind) so why not take advantage of it? Take FFX, when you get Auron, he should be like 90% of your party's power. Going back to the earlier concepts, he should also defend well over 90% of whatever comes your way (because he is obviously much stronger and ends up taking signficantly less damage). But another battle, when Auron mysteriously leaves, you have to figure out how to distribute the hits more evenly or whatever. Maybe for a battle where you're stuck with say Yuna, Lulu, and Rikku, it'd be a good idea to keep everyone spread out since no one in this party is supposed to be good against physical attack so you should always be trying to running away and put some distance while the other two range attackers (all 3 characters there strike me as range attackers) can attack without penalty of distance.

6. Teamwork. Althuogh your band of heroes are supposed to be working together to defeat an impossibly strong enemy, it sure never feels like it. I want to see teamwork actually matter, and not teamwork like 'if you put character A and B together they do this super combo move that you would be stupid to not use'. I want something like the way Fate goes. Take 2 of the game's main pairs: Shirou and Saber, and Rin and Archer. Archer can beat Saber 1vs1, even by melee (he is the game's 2nd strongest hero out of the starting 7) and Rin will totally destroy Shirou 1vs1 as well, but Saber + Shirou pair is stronger than the Rin + Archer pair. Why? Because although Rin is the 2nd most powerful Sorcerer in the game, her magic has no effect with Saber, who possesses magical immunity, in the way. Further since Saber can kill Rin easily (since Rin cannot use spells to defend herself against the magic-immune Saber), this forces Archer to stay close to protect her and despite his considerable abilities, he's obviously weaker at melee range compare to range, as his summon class would suggest. Speaking of which, this also allows more flexiblity when you can have totally different battles based on the # of characters present. Speaking of which, this allows you to have pretty interesting 'unwinnable' battles. In most RPG an unwinnable battle just means you run into some super powered guy who for some reason can't figure out he's supposed to kill you. Why not have unwinnable battles because the characters present just aren't the right type? In FF4, you can't beat Golbez until Rydia shows up, except with the system way worked there was no compelling reason to believe why you couldn't have beaten Golbez. I'd like to see battles where it is believeable the arrivial of someone actually turns the battle around. They can always copy Fate's idea... at least it's believable that having a magic-immune summon arriving tends to help a ton against the world's top 2 Magis (Rin and Ilya, who can both beat you in a matter of seconds when you fight them 1vs1).</div>

[the Gray]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Don, have you ever contacted some studios about game design?</div>

[Ganath]

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Or just grab a copy of Allegro and crack out a game? Damn, I'd really like to see any game that comes out of Don's hands. BTW, if you need a graphics artist... *waves hand*</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>And even the Japanese, only Typemoon do I even have any faith in their ability to understand an intricate RPG system (though Konami hasn't screwed up enough for me to give them up). I don't really think the average player would appreciate the intricaies of a game I design anyway. Certainly looking at the US message boards to Fate does not give me much help that complexity is even appreciated.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>And even the Japanese, only Typemoon do I even have any faith in their ability to understand an intricate RPG system (though Konami hasn't screwed up enough for me to give them up). I don't really think the average player would appreciate the intricaies of a game I design anyway. Certainly looking at the US message boards to Fate does not give me much help that complexity is even appreciated. Heck, my favorite character in Fate, Ilya (girl on bottom), is such a wonderfully design character. In a RPG world, she'd have stats of like 5 HP, millions of MP, and 0 defense against physical attacks, and nearly immunity to magic (due to the fact that her spells are more powerful than anything you can throw at her, since she's the world's most powerful Magi). Can you imagine a boss that will die to the first physical attack that landed on her? But she is such an overwhelming presence in Fate because it is simply not possible to hit her because she has the strongest summon on her side to protect her too. And actually her summon-less version is even harder because she can cast grand Sorcery almost instantly and no one can survive her grand Sorcery, not even Saber who has magic immunity, and to defeat her you pretty much have to drop her mana low enough while she's maintaining a summon (can't use grand Sorcery while summoning) so she can't use grand Sorcery when her summon dies. Can RPG even support this complexity? But more importantly, would the average gamer even care?</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>

1. Some kind of movement. A simple, Tactics-style grid would suffice. However since grid tends to imply SRPG and SRPG do not typically have good sales, perhaps it can be disguised in some other way. Lunar's system would work reasonably well, but allow more freedom of movement. Why is movement necessary? Because it allows meaningful formation of your party. More on this later...

Aye. It's an idea that's tossed around in some RPGs, but not others. I think the biggest problem is the amount of turn-wasting it does in certain SRPG-style implementations.

Grandia 2 had a great movement system, if I remember correctly. It didn't really require commands to move, but characters would move to a target to attack. If they didn't have enough time for it, they would have to run over to the enemy until they were on them. Of course, enemies are moving, too. They could be running away from you to waste your time, or running towards you, which would half your running time.

2. Non 100% to hit attacks. Not even special attacks unless it is something like a once or twice per battle thing. Tactics had a good idea with this except it is utterly trivialized by the fact that any attack that really mattered always hit 100% (swordtech, Holy, summons, etc).

That's not always true. There were actually only a rare few skills/spells that hit 100% of the time, and usually it was just a higher level skill that they gave you the 100% hit rate as a reward for going that far. (Hey, if you're going to waste that much MP on Holy, it better damn well hit.) Hit rate was a big factor on whether you actually did something or not. But, like FFT, you should have a number or at least some generalistic indicator to show what your hit rate is, since that is a factor in your choices.

3. Cover. This type of command has been in RPGs since FF4, and it has been a 100% useless command. Beyond the fact that your AI will do something like have your 1 HP character cover someone at full strength, the lack of distinction between characters makes it absolutely pointles to cover anyone to begin with. This is also allows you to have stuff like having bosses able to kill your weaker character in one hit and yet still winnable. The cover AI should exercise reasonable amount of intelligence. For example you shouldn't cover for someone if it'd get you killed unless the person being covered is guaranteed to get killed without the cover (this should be more character relationship based, i.e. in Suikoden 1 Gremio and Pahn covers for McDohl, but not in reverse). Going back to #1, there should be some distance limitations. Also, there is no reason why cover can't work for magical attacks, though its property is most likely reversed from physical (generally speaking weaker characters tend to be better against magic overall). Take Fate, there is no reason why Saber who possesses magic immunity should not defend against every possible magical attack directed at her Master, Shirou. Thus Shirou, despite having no magic resistance whatsoever, is for all practical purposes immune to magic as well when working as a team. Speaking of which, there's no reason the enemy can't do this either.

I would also put a cover rate on this, too. In your example, Saber could cover for others, but maybe only 50-75% of the time. After all, he can't always guess what kind of attack the enemy will pull next. Factor that in with movement, as well. (How are you going to cover somebody that is a hundred feet away?) So, with a maximum cover distance, you could probably tone the cover rate up a bit to something like 75-85% (or simply base it on the distance between the "coverer" and "coveree").

4. Area Effect attacks. Never should such attacks by the most powerful attack unless it comes with severe limitations. Going back to #2, I really like the idea with Fate how most powerful AE attacks are actually used on a single person (including Gilgamesh's attack which is classified as anti-planetary) since the AE nature of such attacks prevent evasion (characters presumably try to avoid attacks, and if you put a character at the certain of an AE attack, evasion is very unlikely). Similar to how in some FFs you can make spells target all enemies but do less damage, AE attacks should be like this. You can either use it on one target for a lot of damage, or use it on many targets for significantly less damage. When combined with #3 above it should work out that it is generally better to use 100% of AE on one person, as opposed to spread out over say 3-4 people, knowing the person with the best defense (within covering range of coures) will also defend your already spread out attack. So we actually end up with a situation like say:

I would call this a spread-damage AoE spell, where the focus is on one character, but lesser damage spreads to other. This is in a lot of MMOs, and a few single RPGs, but not used in the latter very often. I agree that it should be used more often.

Boss uses some powerful magic (say, Ultima). A has extremely high magical resist, B and C does not. If boss targets A + B + C or even just B + C, A will defend for B & C's share, and with the spell's power dissapated over a large distance, the part that actually hits B & C is relatively insignificant when checked against A's magical defense. Therefore, the best thing here to do is to cast the spell on just A (covering enough area to deny evasion) and hope it punches through A's magical defense. If A was not in range to cover, the spell could kill B & C outright (at full health). This allows you to make counters where the enemy can one-hit kill your people without making it reliant on enemy being stupid and just never taking out your character in one hit.

I disagree with one-hit kills. Nothing should kill the entire party in one-hit, unless the player is just stupid and forgot to put on his armor, etc.

I abhor party death spells (chance of killing the whole party). Spells like that should be based on a random percentage of damage. For example, instead of a 65% chance of killing you, why not a 50-65% damage (of your max HP) spell that has a 85% chance of hitting. In this case, you can die, yes, but it's because your HP was low enough to get you killed, and not on a pure luck basis.

There's no reason to have an low-class enemy that you can usually kill easily get lucky with a 5% chance death spell. (In that case, have it do 0-5% damage with a 85% chance of hitting.)

5. Different characters should lead to very different battles. Why should you have a hard time dealing with random fiends when you have Auron, the legendary Guardian on your side? RPGs already force you to rotate your party based on some nonsensical story element (e.g. people always happen to leave and someone else happen to join to fill the role they left behind) so why not take advantage of it? Take FFX, when you get Auron, he should be like 90% of your party's power. Going back to the earlier concepts, he should also defend well over 90% of whatever comes your way (because he is obviously much stronger and ends up taking signficantly less damage). But another battle, when Auron mysteriously leaves, you have to figure out how to distribute the hits more evenly or whatever. Maybe for a battle where you're stuck with say Yuna, Lulu, and Rikku, it'd be a good idea to keep everyone spread out since no one in this party is supposed to be good against physical attack so you should always be trying to running away and put some distance while the other two range attackers (all 3 characters there strike me as range attackers) can attack without penalty of distance.

The early FF games had this on a very basic level, where a hero-type would be on the front row to do more damage (and take more damage), with the back row for the mage/range types. This can be refined better, and Suikoden actually did a decent job with the S/M/L system. But, since we could be talking about a game with movement involved, the distance between the attacker and defender could be a part of the character, or an adjustable trait (outside of battles, like the front/back rows). For example, some attackers like to get right on top of the enemy before striking, which would yield a better chance to hit (and maybe tie into damage, too), but it would also give the enemy the same thing when he might attack back. Others would like to stay their distance, just within sword range to hit them. Range weapon folk would stay as far as possible (while still having a decent to-hit rate).

However, it's almost like your saying that Auron should be able to deflect just about every enemy with ease. This totally fucks up the difficulty in these cases. Sure, it's semi-realistic, but I don't see people complaining about realistic need to eat and drink put into the game. It's a kin to Nash (when you first meet him) in Lunar:SSS or Mr. Ten Seconds in Star Ocean 2.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>RPG battles are really just longer, not harder.

Aye. It's an idea that's tossed around in some RPGs, but not others. I think the biggest problem is the amount of turn-wasting it does in certain SRPG-style implementations.

Grandia and Lunar's system both work. Or even Skies of Arcadia, where there is apparent movement but not really (since there's no really area of efect or line of sight atacks). The battle against Spectral Keeper in FFX can be considered *movement*. You have to place your people in a way so that you avoid Spectral Keeper's counterattack (which hits 3 out of the 6 places you can be). It's having stuff like this that makes battle more interesting, and allow for the possibilty of challenging.

That's not always true. There were actually only a rare few skills/spells that hit 100% of the time, and usually it was just a higher level skill that they gave you the 100% hit rate as a reward for going that far. (Hey, if you're going to waste that much MP on Holy, it better damn well hit.) Hit rate was a big factor on whether you actually did something or not. But, like FFT, you should have a number or at least some generalistic indicator to show what your hit rate is, since that is a factor in your choices.

The MP you pay for Holy is the fact that it does a lot more damage than your generic spells, especially for a white mage that is not supposed to specialize on attack. There's a character called Lancer in Fate whose attack NEVER misses. And in all 3 of the game's arc it is necessary for him to get ambushed and die early, because 100% to hit attack are simply too powerful. If he didn't die so early, there would be no convincing way to believe why you can't defeat the boss in question when Lancer can just come and pierce the enemy's heart with 100% accuracy. Note that Lancer is actually not the strongest hero, even though he can beat anyone except Archer 1vs1. It is even said on the character profiles. Lancer's attack is called Piercing Spear of Death Thorn. This is a move that never misses and pierces the target's heart with 100% certainty. It uses a low amount of mana and there is no reason not to use this move over and over. That's why Lancer's personality ends up like being a Ryu kind of guy, i.e. someone who loves to fight just for the sake of fighting, because otherwise he'd have killed everyone else right away, so he basically just messes around in combat and never uses his ultimate moves even if he is going to die, unless he finds someone he considers worthy. This is why Lancer, despite his low combat stats, is feared by all other heroes. That's the problem you get with 100% to hit attacks. Unless the attack is horribly weak there is no reason to not always use this attack. In Tactics why would you ever do anything besides Holy Sword Tech or cast Holy (especially swordtechs that don't even have a charge delay)? The answer is you do not. This makes the game too easy to figure out, and too predictable.

I would also put a cover rate on this, too. In your example, Saber could cover for others, but maybe only 50-75% of the time. After all, he can't always guess what kind of attack the enemy will pull next. Factor that in with movement, as well. (How are you going to cover somebody that is a hundred feet away?) So, with a maximum cover distance, you could probably tone the cover rate up a bit to something like 75-85% (or simply base it on the distance between the "coverer" and "coveree").

There should be a rate as a function of distance, speed, and possibly other character abilities. I don't see why you can't have 100% cover rate though. It makes perfect sense characters with strong magical/physical defense should always be defending against the respective attacks. Saber (who is a she) always defends magic for her Master Shirou, just like Berserker always defends physical attack for his Master, Shirou's archrival, Ilya (who, at melee range, can probably be overpowered by a normal human being because she's incredibly frail). Ilya and Berserker would be like when you fight Seymour and he has the two guards that always block for him, and it makes perfect sense. Now if the characters are separated, that's fine. In fact that should be incorporated into the battle.

I would call this a spread-damage AoE spell, where the focus is on one character, but lesser damage spreads to other. This is in a lot of MMOs, and a few single RPGs, but not used in the latter very often. I agree that it should be used more often.

Well I'm thinking more of something like, say an attack does 4000 damage. But if you spread it out over enough distance to hit 2 people, each person takes say 1500 damage. If you spread it out enough to hit 4 people, maybe they each take 500 damage. Mathematically, it should be total damage / (amount of area needed to cover) = damage done per person. Also, it should be impossible to focus your attack on anyone in the backrow, because otherwise in such a system the best thing to do woudl be always to focus all attack power on the weakest person, and if that attack gets covered, so be it. Tactic's 'charge time' concept would help here. There should be huge penalty for ignoring people closest to you to charge up to attack someone from behind. Also there should be least penalty to attack someone closest to you (since once you've charged up you can unleash the attack right away). To borrow from Fate again, Gilgamesh, the game's ending boss, has an attack that's considered anti-planetary and genericly DBZ-ish powerful. However, during the charge time he is very vulnerable, which is why he is weaker moves that occupy the enemy to give him time to charge up. There are two ways to defeat him. Either you can pull some generic RPG miracle and defeat his ultimate move with Saber's Far Away Utopia move (path 1), or you can never give him a chance to have the time he needs (path 2). Both I think should be valid options. And ideally, both options should be roughly equal challenging.

I disagree with one-hit kills. Nothing should kill the entire party in one-hit, unless the player is just stupid and forgot to put on his armor, etc.

I abhor party death spells (chance of killing the whole party). Spells like that should be based on a random percentage of damage. For example, instead of a 65% chance of killing you, why not a 50-65% damage (of your max HP) spell that has a 85% chance of hitting. In this case, you can die, yes, but it's because your HP was low enough to get you killed, and not on a pure luck basis.

Well status effect spells are just a bad idea in general I think. Powerful characters, good or evil, should have significant resistances to everything. Ilya in Fate is pretty much imprevious to all status/elemental magic. You'll see stuff like Saber's holy-based Promised Victory or Sakura the Anti-Guardian's darkness spells just bounce off her and I think that's what you'd expect from powerful characters. I don't see why certain attacks can't instant kill some members of your party. That's % to hit and cover is for. Heck, whenever you fight Ilya it is always understood that it only takes one physical hit to actually kill her, but good luck trying to hit her through her sorcery barriers and her summon.

The early FF games had this on a very basic level, where a hero-type would be on the front row to do more damage (and take more damage), with the back row for the mage/range types. This can be refined better, and Suikoden actually did a decent job with the S/M/L system. But, since we could be talking about a game with movement involved, the distance between the attacker and defender could be a part of the character, or an adjustable trait (outside of battles, like the front/back rows). For example, some attackers like to get right on top of the enemy before striking, which would yield a better chance to hit (and maybe tie into damage, too), but it would also give the enemy the same thing when he might attack back. Others would like to stay their distance, just within sword range to hit them. Range weapon folk would stay as far as possible (while still having a decent to-hit rate).

Yeah, the front/back row is kind of artificial, but it does get the idea I want. The positioning of character should matter a lot. Characters should have preferred combat style (melee/range/magic is simple but a reasonable breakdown) and not fighting in the character's preferred mode should impose significant penalties. The problem with that is that current RPG systems do not have any way to impede overcoming this. There is no real way in a RPG system to stop an enemy melee from beating up your caster/range attackers, so basically it becomes just hoping the weak versus melee guys won't get hit due to enemy stupidity.

However, it's almost like your saying that Auron should be able to deflect just about every enemy with ease. This totally fucks up the difficulty in these cases. Sure, it's semi-realistic, but I don't see people complaining about realistic need to eat and drink put into the game. It's a kin to Nash (when you first meet him) in Lunar:SSS or Mr. Ten Seconds in Star Ocean 2.

Why not? Why shouldn't the legendary Guardian clean house with mundane junk that's in your way? They are supposed to be powerful characters, are they not? As for this making the game boring, first, games usually take care of this already by having the said characters mysteriously leaving. Second, you can tune an encounter that is actually appropriate for the said characters. For example even as powerful as Auron was you shouldn't expect him to take on Spectral Keeper (Yunaelseca's guard) easily. You can make a battle like say Auron is roughly 75% of your party's attack and defense, but the rest of your party still has to come up with the 25% that is needed, and this also allows you to make a battle that's utterly unwinnable if Auron wasn't present. Also this allows you to have actual character growth. I mean consider most RPG have the generic 'legend' guy and the generic 'newbie hero' guy, shouldn't the legends start at the top but stay static while the newbie eventually catch up and surpass them? But rather in RPG you get walking legends like Auron or Citan, the High Guardian of Solaris who starts out at level 5 even though it makes no sense whatsoever. Take your Dias example, no reason Dias should be babysitting Rena and Claude all this time, so for the time you do join up with him, either stuff is ridiculously easy (because he's much more powerful than what you're fighting), or stuff is hard AND it requires his presence to be defeatable. In Fate, virtually every one of the fight you get Rin on your side would not be remotely winnable if she was not present, which is why you get to fight things that you're not supposed to be winning against. And anyway, I think RPG writers are creative enough to come up with ways not to let your overpowering characters trivialize everything. For example in Fate's first story, at the very end you fight the Magi Kirei with his ultra powerful summon, Gilgamesh. In Fate battles are usually Magi vs Magi and Summon vs Summon, so the logical choice would be to have Rin take care of Kirei in about 30 seconds even if Gilgamesh is far too strong for your summon to fight directly. But Rin was heavily wounded by Kirei earlier since she didn't know Kirei is her master (she has surpassed her master a long time ago), so she can't fight for that day so instead you get her dagger (which is also one of the more ridicously overpowered weapons in the game) which is what you need to defeat Kirei (who is obviously stronger than the main character). And hey, a little overkill isn't always a bad thing. People do get Knights of the Round and stuff that utterly trivalize the game, do they not? Compare to that, I'd rather have in game legendary characters trivializing the encounter. As horrible as Fate's final story is relative to the other two brilliant arc, getting Rin AND Ilya for the final battle is pretty sweet when you watch the two most powerful characters in the game demolish the force of Darkness. Basically it turned out that Ilya and Rin are the ones who are supposed to be watching the Holy Grail, which is your generic artifact of incredible power that promises stuff like eternal life, godhood, etc... from falling in the wrong hands. Ilya and Rin disagrees on what's the right way to use it that's why they fight each other throughout the game, and at the 3rd story they both actually agreed on what to do. So you have Sakura, the Anti-Guardian who sold her soul to the darkness and trying to resurrect the dark god Angra Mainyu and Rin challenges her single-handed, because at last Ilya agreed not to hold back Rin's powers (Rin's ultimate weapon is sealed within Ilya's memories). You have Rin's infinite mana pool toying around with the clueless Sakura who thought with her power from the darkness she shouldn't lose in a straight magic vs magic duel, not that Rin couldn't kill Sakura outright if she wanted to, but Ilya's condition to help Rin was that she will have to bring Sakura back to the light safely. And then Ilya actually raised Shirou from the dead just because she can (and a real resurrection, not like the RPG-ish raise), and it was abundantly obvious that she was at least as powerful as Rin (her mana is likewise infinite). Of course Rin already killed whatever hell's legion that were trying to come through the portal Sakura was creating, so Ilya didn't have anything else to do. Yeah, this is kind of cheesy too, but I'd rather have something like this over KOTR doing 9999 X 13 and killing the last boss instantly any day.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Currently there is almost no such thing as a dificult RPG battle. All you have is longer battles, or battles that require more leveling up.

Aye. It's an idea that's tossed around in some RPGs, but not others. I think the biggest problem is the amount of turn-wasting it does in certain SRPG-style implementations.

Grandia and Lunar's system both work. Or even Skies of Arcadia, where there is apparent movement but not really (since there's no really area of efect or line of sight atacks). The battle against Spectral Keeper in FFX can be considered *movement*. You have to place your people in a way so that you avoid Spectral Keeper's counterattack (which hits 3 out of the 6 places you can be). It's having stuff like this that makes battle more interesting, and allow for the possibilty of challenging.

That's not always true. There were actually only a rare few skills/spells that hit 100% of the time, and usually it was just a higher level skill that they gave you the 100% hit rate as a reward for going that far. (Hey, if you're going to waste that much MP on Holy, it better damn well hit.) Hit rate was a big factor on whether you actually did something or not. But, like FFT, you should have a number or at least some generalistic indicator to show what your hit rate is, since that is a factor in your choices.

The MP you pay for Holy is the fact that it does a lot more damage than your generic spells, especially for a white mage that is not supposed to specialize on attack. There's a character called Lancer in Fate whose attack NEVER misses. And in all 3 of the game's arc it is necessary for him to get ambushed and die early, because 100% to hit attack are simply too powerful. If he didn't die so early, there would be no convincing way to believe why you can't defeat the boss in question when Lancer can just come and pierce the enemy's heart with 100% accuracy. Note that Lancer is actually not the strongest hero, even though he can beat anyone except Archer 1vs1. It is even said on the character profiles. Lancer's attack is called Piercing Spear of Death Thorn. This is a move that never misses and pierces the target's heart with 100% certainty. It uses a low amount of mana and there is no reason not to use this move over and over. That's why Lancer's personality ends up like being a Ryu kind of guy, i.e. someone who loves to fight just for the sake of fighting, because otherwise he'd have killed everyone else right away, so he basically just messes around in combat and never uses his ultimate moves even if he is going to die, unless he finds someone he considers worthy. This is why Lancer, despite his low combat stats, is feared by all other heroes. That's the problem you get with 100% to hit attacks. Unless the attack is horribly weak there is no reason to not always use this attack. In Tactics why would you ever do anything besides Holy Sword Tech or cast Holy (especially swordtechs that don't even have a charge delay)? The answer is you do not. This makes the game too easy to figure out, and too predictable.

I would also put a cover rate on this, too. In your example, Saber could cover for others, but maybe only 50-75% of the time. After all, he can't always guess what kind of attack the enemy will pull next. Factor that in with movement, as well. (How are you going to cover somebody that is a hundred feet away?) So, with a maximum cover distance, you could probably tone the cover rate up a bit to something like 75-85% (or simply base it on the distance between the "coverer" and "coveree").

There should be a rate as a function of distance, speed, and possibly other character abilities. I don't see why you can't have 100% cover rate though. It makes perfect sense characters with strong magical/physical defense should always be defending against the respective attacks. Saber (who is a she) always defends magic for her Master Shirou, just like Berserker always defends physical attack for his Master, Shirou's archrival, Ilya (who, at melee range, can probably be overpowered by a normal human being because she's incredibly frail). Ilya and Berserker would be like when you fight Seymour and he has the two guards that always block for him, and it makes perfect sense. Now if the characters are separated, that's fine. In fact that should be incorporated into the battle.

I would call this a spread-damage AoE spell, where the focus is on one character, but lesser damage spreads to other. This is in a lot of MMOs, and a few single RPGs, but not used in the latter very often. I agree that it should be used more often.

Well I'm thinking more of something like, say an attack does 4000 damage. But if you spread it out over enough distance to hit 2 people, each person takes say 1500 damage. If you spread it out enough to hit 4 people, maybe they each take 500 damage. Mathematically, it should be total damage / (amount of area needed to cover) = damage done per person. Also, it should be impossible to focus your attack on anyone in the backrow, because otherwise in such a system the best thing to do woudl be always to focus all attack power on the weakest person, and if that attack gets covered, so be it. Tactic's 'charge time' concept would help here. There should be huge penalty for ignoring people closest to you to charge up to attack someone from behind. Also there should be least penalty to attack someone closest to you (since once you've charged up you can unleash the attack right away). To borrow from Fate again, Gilgamesh, the game's ending boss, has an attack that's considered anti-planetary and genericly DBZ-ish powerful. However, during the charge time he is very vulnerable, which is why he has weaker moves that occupy the enemy to give him time to charge up. There are two ways to defeat him. Either you can pull some generic RPG miracle and defeat his ultimate move with Saber's Far Away Utopia move (path 1), or you can never give him a chance to have the time he needs (path 2). Both I think should be valid options. And ideally, both options should be roughly equal challenging. Actually, Deus in Xenogears is like this. You can either take out his 4 supporting Seraphs, or you can go after him directly. Neither paths are necessary that much better than each other since Gears do not recover lost fuel/health easily, so it's a tradeoff.

I disagree with one-hit kills. Nothing should kill the entire party in one-hit, unless the player is just stupid and forgot to put on his armor, etc.

I abhor party death spells (chance of killing the whole party). Spells like that should be based on a random percentage of damage. For example, instead of a 65% chance of killing you, why not a 50-65% damage (of your max HP) spell that has a 85% chance of hitting. In this case, you can die, yes, but it's because your HP was low enough to get you killed, and not on a pure luck basis.

Well status effect spells are just a bad idea in general I think. Powerful characters, good or evil, should have significant resistances to everything. Ilya in Fate is pretty much imprevious to all status/elemental magic. You'll see stuff like Saber's holy-based Promised Victory or Sakura the Anti-Guardian's darkness spells just bounce off her and I think that's what you'd expect from powerful characters. I don't see why certain attacks can't instant kill some members of your party. That's % to hit and cover is for. Heck, whenever you fight Ilya it is always understood that it only takes one physical hit to actually kill her, but good luck trying to hit her through her sorcery barriers and her summon.

The early FF games had this on a very basic level, where a hero-type would be on the front row to do more damage (and take more damage), with the back row for the mage/range types. This can be refined better, and Suikoden actually did a decent job with the S/M/L system. But, since we could be talking about a game with movement involved, the distance between the attacker and defender could be a part of the character, or an adjustable trait (outside of battles, like the front/back rows). For example, some attackers like to get right on top of the enemy before striking, which would yield a better chance to hit (and maybe tie into damage, too), but it would also give the enemy the same thing when he might attack back. Others would like to stay their distance, just within sword range to hit them. Range weapon folk would stay as far as possible (while still having a decent to-hit rate).

Yeah, the front/back row is kind of artificial, but it does get the idea I want. The positioning of character should matter a lot. Characters should have preferred combat style (melee/range/magic is simple but a reasonable breakdown) and not fighting in the character's preferred mode should impose significant penalties. The problem with that is that current RPG systems do not have any way to impede overcoming this. There is no real way in a RPG system to stop an enemy melee from beating up your caster/range attackers, so basically it becomes just hoping the weak versus melee guys won't get hit due to enemy stupidity.

However, it's almost like your saying that Auron should be able to deflect just about every enemy with ease. This totally fucks up the difficulty in these cases. Sure, it's semi-realistic, but I don't see people complaining about realistic need to eat and drink put into the game. It's a kin to Nash (when you first meet him) in Lunar:SSS or Mr. Ten Seconds in Star Ocean 2.

Why not? Why shouldn't the legendary Guardian clean house with mundane junk that's in your way? They are supposed to be powerful characters, are they not? As for this making the game boring, first, games usually take care of this already by having the said characters mysteriously leaving. Second, you can tune an encounter that is actually appropriate for the said characters. For example even as powerful as Auron was you shouldn't expect him to take on Spectral Keeper (Yunaelseca's guard) easily. You can make a battle like say Auron is roughly 75% of your party's attack and defense, but the rest of your party still has to come up with the 25% that is needed, and this also allows you to make a battle that's utterly unwinnable if Auron wasn't present. Also this allows you to have actual character growth. I mean consider most RPG have the generic 'legend' guy and the generic 'newbie hero' guy, shouldn't the legends start at the top but stay static while the newbie eventually catch up and surpass them? But rather in RPG you get walking legends like Auron or Citan, the High Guardian of Solaris who starts out at level 5 even though it makes no sense whatsoever. Take your Dias example, no reason Dias should be babysitting Rena and Claude all this time, so for the time you do join up with him, either stuff is ridiculously easy (because he's much more powerful than what you're fighting), or stuff is hard AND it requires his presence to be defeatable. In Fate, virtually every one of the fight you get Rin on your side would not be remotely winnable if she was not present, which is why you get to fight things that you're not supposed to be winning against. And anyway, I think RPG writers are creative enough to come up with ways not to let your overpowering characters trivialize everything. For example in Fate's first story, at the very end you fight the Magi Kirei with his ultra powerful summon, Gilgamesh. In Fate battles are usually Magi vs Magi and Summon vs Summon, so the logical choice would be to have Rin take care of Kirei in about 30 seconds even if Gilgamesh is far too strong for your summon to fight directly. But Rin was heavily wounded by Kirei earlier from an ambush since she never knew Kirei was an enemy, so she can't fight for that day so instead you get her dagger (which is also one of the more ridicously overpowered weapons in the game) which is what you need to defeat Kirei (who is obviously stronger than the main character). And hey, a little overkill isn't always a bad thing. People do get Knights of the Round and stuff that utterly trivalize the game, do they not? Compare to that, I'd rather have in game legendary characters trivializing the encounter. As horrible as Fate's final story is relative to the other two brilliant arc, getting Rin AND Ilya for the final battle is pretty sweet when you watch the two most powerful characters in the game demolish the force of Darkness. Basically it turned out that Ilya and Rin are the ones who are supposed to be watching the Holy Grail, which is your generic artifact of incredible power that promises stuff like eternal life, godhood, etc... from falling in the wrong hands. Ilya and Rin disagrees on what's the right way to use it that's why they fight each other throughout the game, and at the 3rd story they both actually agreed on what to do. So you have Sakura, the Anti-Guardian who sold her soul to the darkness and trying to resurrect the dark god Angra Mainyu and Rin challenges her single-handed, because at last Ilya agreed not to hold back Rin's powers (Rin's ultimate weapon is sealed within Ilya's memories). You have Rin's infinite mana pool toying around with the clueless Sakura who thought with her power from the darkness she shouldn't lose in a straight magic vs magic duel, not that Rin couldn't kill Sakura outright if she wanted to, but Ilya's condition to help Rin was that she will have to bring Sakura back to the light safely. And then Ilya actually raised Shirou from the dead just because she can (and a real resurrection, not like the RPG-ish raise), and it was abundantly obvious that she was at least as powerful as Rin (her mana is likewise infinite). Of course Rin already killed whatever hell's legion that were trying to come through the portal Sakura was creating, so Ilya didn't have anything else to do. Yeah, this is kind of cheesy too, but I'd rather have something like this over KOTR doing 9999 X 13 and killing the last boss instantly any day.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Currently there is almost no such thing as a dificult RPG battle. All you have is longer battles, or battles that require more leveling up.

Aye. It's an idea that's tossed around in some RPGs, but not others. I think the biggest problem is the amount of turn-wasting it does in certain SRPG-style implementations.

Grandia and Lunar's system both work. Or even Skies of Arcadia, where there is apparent movement but not really (since there's no really area of efect or line of sight atacks). The battle against Spectral Keeper in FFX can be considered *movement*. You have to place your people in a way so that you avoid Spectral Keeper's counterattack (which hits 3 out of the 6 places you can be). It's having stuff like this that makes battle more interesting, and allow for the possibilty of challenging.

That's not always true. There were actually only a rare few skills/spells that hit 100% of the time, and usually it was just a higher level skill that they gave you the 100% hit rate as a reward for going that far. (Hey, if you're going to waste that much MP on Holy, it better damn well hit.) Hit rate was a big factor on whether you actually did something or not. But, like FFT, you should have a number or at least some generalistic indicator to show what your hit rate is, since that is a factor in your choices.

The MP you pay for Holy is the fact that it does a lot more damage than your generic spells, especially for a white mage that is not supposed to specialize on attack. There's a character called Lancer in Fate whose attack NEVER misses. And in all 3 of the game's arc it is necessary for him to get ambushed and die early, because 100% to hit attack are simply too powerful. If he didn't die so early, there would be no convincing way to believe why you can't defeat the boss in question when Lancer can just come and pierce the enemy's heart with 100% accuracy. Note that Lancer is actually not the strongest hero, even though he can beat anyone except Archer 1vs1. It is even said on the character profiles. Lancer's attack is called Piercing Spear of Death Thorn. This is a move that never misses and pierces the target's heart with 100% certainty. It uses a low amount of mana and there is no reason not to use this move over and over. That's why Lancer's personality ends up like being a Ryu kind of guy, i.e. someone who loves to fight just for the sake of fighting, because otherwise he'd have killed everyone else right away, so he basically just messes around in combat and never uses his ultimate moves even if he is going to die, unless he finds someone he considers worthy. This is why Lancer, despite his low combat stats, is feared by all other heroes. That's the problem you get with 100% to hit attacks. Unless the attack is horribly weak there is no reason to not always use this attack. In Tactics why would you ever do anything besides Holy Sword Tech or cast Holy (especially swordtechs that don't even have a charge delay)? The answer is you do not. This makes the game too easy to figure out, and too predictable.

I would also put a cover rate on this, too. In your example, Saber could cover for others, but maybe only 50-75% of the time. After all, he can't always guess what kind of attack the enemy will pull next. Factor that in with movement, as well. (How are you going to cover somebody that is a hundred feet away?) So, with a maximum cover distance, you could probably tone the cover rate up a bit to something like 75-85% (or simply base it on the distance between the "coverer" and "coveree").

There should be a rate as a function of distance, speed, and possibly other character abilities. I don't see why you can't have 100% cover rate though. It makes perfect sense characters with strong magical/physical defense should always be defending against the respective attacks. Saber (who is a she) always defends magic for her Master Shirou, just like Berserker always defends physical attack for his Master, Shirou's archrival, Ilya (who, at melee range, can probably be overpowered by a normal human being because she's incredibly frail). Ilya and Berserker would be like when you fight Seymour and he has the two guards that always block for him, and it makes perfect sense. Now if the characters are separated, yeah the ability to cover should suffer or maybe not at all. That's fine, and in fact that should be incorporated into the battle. Seeing RPGs have always tried to at least pretend positioning matters somewhat, you can even script this... like at some point your character gets separated, so now you don't have your characters to cover your weak people and must fight differently. Though I think an obvious tradeoff for cover is that, at laest for versus physical attacks, someone who's good at versus physical is probably a melee, and if he's back covering casters, then he's not doing damage to the enemy either.

I would call this a spread-damage AoE spell, where the focus is on one character, but lesser damage spreads to other. This is in a lot of MMOs, and a few single RPGs, but not used in the latter very often. I agree that it should be used more often.

Well I'm thinking more of something like, say an attack does 4000 damage. But if you spread it out over enough distance to hit 2 people, each person takes say 1500 damage. If you spread it out enough to hit 4 people, maybe they each take 500 damage. Mathematically, it should be total damage / (amount of area needed to cover) = damage done per person. Also, it should be impossible to focus your attack on anyone in the backrow, because otherwise in such a system the best thing to do woudl be always to focus all attack power on the weakest person, and if that attack gets covered, so be it. Tactic's 'charge time' concept would help here. There should be huge penalty for ignoring people closest to you to charge up to attack someone from behind. Also there should be least penalty to attack someone closest to you (since once you've charged up you can unleash the attack right away). To borrow from Fate again, Gilgamesh, the game's ending boss, has an attack that's considered anti-planetary and genericly DBZ-ish powerful. However, during the charge time he is very vulnerable, which is why he has weaker moves that occupy the enemy to give him time to charge up. There are two ways to defeat him. Either you can pull some generic RPG miracle and defeat his ultimate move with Saber's Far Away Utopia move (path 1), or you can never give him a chance to have the time he needs (path 2). Both I think should be valid options.

Ideally, both options should be roughly equal challenging. Actually, Deus in Xenogears is like this. You can either take out his 4 supporting Seraphs, or you can go after him directly. Neither paths are necessary that much better than each other since Gears do not recover lost fuel/health easily, so it's a reasonable tradeoff.

I disagree with one-hit kills. Nothing should kill the entire party in one-hit, unless the player is just stupid and forgot to put on his armor, etc.

I abhor party death spells (chance of killing the whole party). Spells like that should be based on a random percentage of damage. For example, instead of a 65% chance of killing you, why not a 50-65% damage (of your max HP) spell that has a 85% chance of hitting. In this case, you can die, yes, but it's because your HP was low enough to get you killed, and not on a pure luck basis.

Well status effect spells are just a bad idea in general I think. Powerful characters, good or evil, should have significant resistances to everything. Ilya in Fate is pretty much imprevious to all status/elemental magic. You'll see stuff like Saber's holy-based Promised Victory or Sakura the Anti-Guardian's darkness spells just bounce off her and I think that's what you'd expect from powerful characters. I don't see why certain attacks can't instant kill some members of your party (Lavos can instant kill people with low physical/magical defense with Grandstone/Dreamless for example). That's % to hit and cover is for. Heck, whenever you fight Ilya it is always understood that it only takes one physical hit to actually kill her, but good luck trying to hit her through her sorcery barriers and her summon. RPG system should award good placement of characters/strategy/whatever, as opposed to just hoping the enemy fails to attack your character that has low defense (physical or magical) even when it's obvious.

The early FF games had this on a very basic level, where a hero-type would be on the front row to do more damage (and take more damage), with the back row for the mage/range types. This can be refined better, and Suikoden actually did a decent job with the S/M/L system. But, since we could be talking about a game with movement involved, the distance between the attacker and defender could be a part of the character, or an adjustable trait (outside of battles, like the front/back rows). For example, some attackers like to get right on top of the enemy before striking, which would yield a better chance to hit (and maybe tie into damage, too), but it would also give the enemy the same thing when he might attack back. Others would like to stay their distance, just within sword range to hit them. Range weapon folk would stay as far as possible (while still having a decent to-hit rate).

Yeah, the front/back row is kind of artificial, but it does get the idea I want. The positioning of character should matter a lot. Characters should have preferred combat style (melee/range/magic is simple but a reasonable breakdown) and not fighting in the character's preferred mode should impose significant penalties. The problem with that is that current RPG systems do not have any way to impede overcoming this. There is no real way in a RPG system to stop an enemy melee from beating up your caster/range attackers, so basically it becomes just hoping the weak versus melee guys won't get hit due to enemy stupidity.

However, it's almost like your saying that Auron should be able to deflect just about every enemy with ease. This totally fucks up the difficulty in these cases. Sure, it's semi-realistic, but I don't see people complaining about realistic need to eat and drink put into the game. It's a kin to Nash (when you first meet him) in Lunar:SSS or Mr. Ten Seconds in Star Ocean 2.

Why not? Why shouldn't the legendary Guardian clean house with mundane junk that's in your way? They are supposed to be powerful characters, are they not? As for this making the game boring, first, games usually take care of this already by having the said characters mysteriously leaving. Second, you can tune an encounter that is actually appropriate for the said characters. For example even as powerful as Auron was you shouldn't expect him to take on Spectral Keeper (Yunaelseca's guard) easily. You can make a battle like say Auron is roughly 75% of your party's attack and defense, but the rest of your party still has to come up with the 25% that is needed, and this also allows you to make a battle that's utterly unwinnable if Auron wasn't present. Also this allows you to have actual character growth. I mean consider most RPG have the generic 'legend' guy and the generic 'newbie hero' guy, shouldn't the legends start at the top but stay static while the newbie eventually catch up and surpass them? But rather in RPG you get walking legends like Auron or Citan, the High Guardian of Solaris who starts out at level 5 even though it makes no sense whatsoever. Take your Dias example, no reason Dias should be babysitting Rena and Claude all this time, so for the time you do join up with him, either stuff is ridiculously easy (because he's much more powerful than what you're fighting), or stuff is hard AND it requires his presence to be defeatable. In Fate, virtually every one of the fight you get Rin on your side would not be remotely winnable if she was not present, which is why you get to fight things that you're not supposed to be winning against.

And anyway, I think RPG writers are creative enough to come up with ways not to let your overpowering characters trivialize everything. For example in Fate's first story, at the very end you fight the Magi Kirei with his ultra powerful summon, Gilgamesh. In Fate battles are usually Magi vs Magi and Summon vs Summon, so the logical choice would be to have Rin take care of Kirei in about 30 seconds even if Gilgamesh is far too strong for your summon to fight directly. But Rin was heavily wounded by Kirei earlier from an ambush since she never knew Kirei was an enemy, so she can't fight for that day so instead you get her dagger (which is also one of the more ridicously overpowered weapons in the game) which is what you need to defeat Kirei (who is obviously stronger than the main character).

Besides, a little overkill isn't always a bad thing. People do get Knights of the Round and stuff that utterly trivalize the game, do they not? Compare to that, I'd rather have in game legendary characters trivializing the encounter. As horrible as Fate's final story is relative to the other two brilliant arc, getting Rin AND Ilya for the final battle is pretty sweet when you watch the two most powerful characters in the game demolish the force of Darkness. Rin versus Sakura the Anti-Guardian was in many ways far more overpowering then doing 9999 X 13 or whatever the game over move of RPG might be, seeing that she toyed with the dark priestess who supposed to have obtained incredible power at the cost of her soul effortlessly. If Ilya didn't force Rin to bring back Sakura alive (that was the only reason Ilya helped you, because she sees shadow of herself on Sakura, a girl whose happiness was forsaken by the Light), the final battle would've ended roughly 3 seconds after it began. By the time Ilya arrived there isn't even anything left to kill since Rin already killed everything else, so Ilya resurrected Shirou (who really died, i.e. like Aeris dead) just because she likes happy endings! Yeah overpowered alright, but I think that is at least more enjoyable than having some mysterious attack that somehow kills the last boss in one hit. At least put some story into such game over mechanisms.</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>On Skies of Arcadia, the enemies use a lot of area of effect and line of sight attacks, normally this is reserved for end bosses (Many end bosses and mini-bosses use explosives which effect characters in a certain area), and also several attacks such as Aeka's first limit break effects enemies only in a certain line.

A lot of ancient PC RPG's used tactical type battle systems, like Lord of the Rings, where you could move each character around and then attack. I think Dragon Warrior was the first RPG not to use a tactical system, and people enjoyed it because of its more simplistic and easy to learn nature. I am a fan of more simplistic RPG battle systems, personally, but a little complexity on the level of Skies of Arcadia is certainly fine. The thing I dislike the most in RPG battle systems are load times before/after battles and attack times (like the summons in certain PSX RPG's).

On powerful characters, I don't quite remember, but I do believe that Xenogears used a similar system when Fei unlocks the God Gear. Then of course there are games like Ogre Battle 64 where, depending on the path you take, you can get extremely powerful characters, rather than extremely powerful summon spells, attacks, or weapons.

I agree with your FF10 example though, why should a kid and a blitzball player be more powerful than a Legendary Warrior? Wakka is by quite a distance my most powerful character in the game.

I was going to post a lot more, but I am in a bit of a rush since I am gone for the weekend. So I just posted a few thoughts before this post gets buried (since this is a popular forum again, and I am quite pleased with it since this site is and should be mainly about gaming).</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>The US gaming Industry seems to be focussed primarilly on Sports, First person shooters, and RTS style games.

Canada is largely focussed on similar style games to the Japanese, and in some cases our games turn out to be superior (Splinter Cell, Prince of Persia, and Baldur's gate for example).</div>

[the Gray]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>You never know Don, but some companies NEED ideas like this. And some hire too, send an application to Bioware, BlackIsle or Silicon Knights. You never know....</div>

[Eric]

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>That's a well kept secret.</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Since beginning development of games on the current generation, they have received critical acclaim which is on the level of what Rare received during the mid 1990's with titles like Donkey Kong Country, Banjo Kazooie, and Goldeneye 007. So far every game released by them on this current generation of consoles has ranked up among the highest selling games of the generation, even beating out the sales of games like Final Fantasy 10, Metal Gear Solid 2, Zelda: The Wind Waker, and Halo.

I'm not entirely sure if any RPG development projects are in the works but, I haven't heard anything yet at least, but Bioware just a few hours away is the largest RPG development company outside of Japan, and the sales of their games rival the sales of games by Square.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Citan was MUCH stronger than anyone else (even though still not as strong as he should be), and Xenogears or even System Id was much stronger than any other Gear. But the game's really not balanced around such characters since for some twisted reason you could decide to use worthless characters like Maria without a gear or Emeralda in a gear (Crescens is pretty but absolutely worthless as a Gear).</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Not going to get a job at Canada, I'm afraid, unless they hire people to do work remotely, which I doubt.</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>The only major development studio in the US is in North Carolina, and admittedly they are quite small in comparisson, and only aid the Montreal house in smaller projects. All the best stuff is in Montreal, but California and North Carolina are good stepping stones to get up there.

As for Bioware, I do not know a lot about them, but, they are a highly acclaimed development studio themselves, between them and Ubisoft (and perhaps Rockstar over in the UK) they have most of the top games outside of Japan. Bioware of late has been outdoing the Japanese RPG developers, not only in sales, but in critical acclaim as well, it's not Final Fantasy, or Dragon Warrior, Phantasy Star, or any games like that anymore that are getting the top RPG awards, it's Knights of the Old Republic, Baldur's Gate, and Neverwinter Nights; not only that, but they are also being touted as the best games of the year by a number of top sources in the industry. However, I do not think that they have any offices in the US aside from sales rep and inventory

Videogame companies all over the place are constantly looking for 3D graphics artists, but on the program and design level, most of those positions are all relatively filled, but it is possible to work up into those positions.

As for Silicon Knights, they are a relatively small development company, and only come out with one to two games with every generation of consoles, but their games are normally very good, this generation it was Eternal Darkness, last was Blood Omen: Legacy of Kane.

Essentially though, if you are looking to join one of the top development teams in the world, there are essentially three places in the world where you're going to find them: Canada, the UK, and Japan. Even Electronic Arts has their major development studios up here. Also, there are many college programs in Canada which are dedicated to console videogaming development, and they count as experience. Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto are all considered by many sources (which include, the UN, top Universities, and other objectively based statistical organizations) to be among the top cities in the world, Vancouver usually ranked at #1 or tied for #1 with Geneva, Zurich, or Vienna. Vancouver is also a place where you can work for Japanese companies, such as Square Enix, Konami, Nintendo, Namco, and others.

But if you are looking for development jobs in your area, I think the best luck you will have is looking into companies who are into RTS and FPS style games.</div>

[Zeus]

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Only because you guys down there don't look too hard beyond your borders unless it's to Japan when it comes to gaming</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Million seller critically acclaimed RPG's like Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, Knights of the Old Republic, and Neverwinter Nights are well kept secrets?</div>

[Eric]

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Where there developed? Yes.</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>I'm sure people who play RPG's have the ability to read, and therefore have the ability to read the back of the box or the credits.</div>

[Ganath]

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Since you're so literate I suppose you could tell me off the top of your head the ingredients to Twinkies, right? I mean, they're right on the package, and you DO have the ability to read, yes? Or did you just not bother, like many people who don't read game credits line for line (or at all)?</div>

[Tessian]

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>Ganath's right, gimme a fucking break.</div>

[Eric]

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Dude, unless it's a game like Warcraft where I actually talk to the people who worked on the game, I couldn't give a damn about what's on the box or who's in the game's ending credits.</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>I mean, your analogy to twinkies is we could say, "interesting", but this isn't a board which revolves around what some human trash who lives in a single room apartment or a trailer might eat, so I do not see any value to your post whatsoever in the present situation.</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>It's not really that hard to miss, and I was just using that as the most obvious example (like Square on the Final Fantasy box and in the credits at the beginning), it's also fairly common knowledge among everyone who plays RPG's. Certainly no secret.</div>

[Eric]

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Those companies don't mention their location next to the logo....</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>*Jump kicks Eric and then Dragon punches him into a dumpster for not knowing that Bioware was Canadian!* Come on, where did you think they were from? =P</div>

[Eric]

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Japan. lol.</div>

[Ganath]

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Feh, I was rather close to giving a scathing response. But instead, I'll just claim vengance for Eric. HADOUKEN!!!</div>

[Eric]

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Pfft Just because I came here looking for help in Wild ARMs doesn't mean I have a PHD in video game history and developers!</div>

[Eric]

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Screw that, let's just E-mail Utopia and say he's running multi provinces. :P</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Aren't all of those produced by Bioware/Black Isle?</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>The problem is that it makes the game completely trivial with the difficulty, or makes it that you HAVE to be playing this boring ass hero character for the duration of the game. I hated playing with Crono on just about everything, because he just got boring after a while. Remember when you got TG Cid in FFT? Wasn't the game just really easy after that? The hero in Suikoden could pretty much destroy most of the fights with his Soul Eater rune. (Yeah...100% chance of death on any non-boss character, oh that's balanced...)

There's just a level of balance that needs to be carried out with RPG characters. Fuck realism. We already suspend our disbelief with the differences between the story and battle engine anyway. Why bitch about death in an RPG, when you can just use a Phoenix Down? Why are people running around and afraid of the enemy when their spells are all powerful and able to just blow everything up anyway? Why did Sephiroth just blow up the solar system and these three dolts are still standing here (in space?!)? Why did he blow up the solar system twice?</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Citan was a joke. The sheer amount of speed alone chewed up enemies.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>His speed isn't that much faster. He is awesome because he can cast haste, highest HP, and highest attack</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Granted you'll need a bit more complexity than the current RPG system to have a meaningful encounter, but you can always hope.

Crono really wasn't all that strong. Realistically Magus is stronger until you get the Rainbow/PrismSpecs combo and even then, Dark Matter still does more damage than Luminare early on (because Crono's magic stat sucks) and Confuse is capped at ~3000 on one target.

Suspension of belief is not when you get your legendary whatever figure he has identical (or minimally better) stats as any other joe average part time hero part time basketball player on your team. Take Lunar series. Lucia starts at level 99 stats (or at least assume that's level 99). In Lunar 1 when Ghaleon joins you he's level 99, and so is Laike (Dyne in disguise). They don't have to be instant killing machine of doom but there should be a reason to see 'oh so this is why this guy is supposed to be so cool'.

As for the problem of the said powerful characters demolishing everything in sight like they currently do, like I said, having a more complicated system should help a long way, as well as designing encounters with the said characters in mind. Obviously Tactics encounters are designed that the player, in their infinite wisdom, would not use TGCid so you've Cid killing most things in one hit. Another good way to take care of it is convenient plot twists. It is already overused anyway (characters leave your party all the time) so why not take advantage of it? Two really easy way to incorpoate powerful characters I can think of just off top of my head:

1. Powerful character A goes off to fight powerful boss while rest of party fends off the boss's minions (lots of RPG supposedly operates under a sense of urgency, it'd also be more believable if you actually just have to charge instead of leisurely killing everything that moves in a dungeon, run back to an inn and rest, and then save 2 steps outside the boss's room)

2. Powerful character A and party fights a powerful boss. Instead of powering up like any respectable boss after defeated, powerful character A is heavily wounded and unable to participate the next fight. The boss is weaker, but it is still a harder fight since you no longer have a powerful character on your side.

Shirou Emiya in Fate never fought anyone important on his own. You always wait for either Rin or Saber to get there to help you before fighting any of the major enemies (Ilya, Gilgamesh, or Black Saber). There's nothing wrong with that, especially with the rampant 'unlikely hero' theme in RPG, i.e. characters that you have no reason to believe they'd be good at fighting at all let alone saving the world. Why shouldn't someone like Tidus be relegated to newbie duty in FFX while the real Guardians do the work (and speaking of which, neither Wakka nor Rikku seem like a convincingly powerful character)? Sure he can still be the one to kill Sin, just have him awaken or something after a key event (say near Zanarkand, or even while fighting Jecht). If your main hero is an Ashley Riot, then sure he can start out powerful throughout. But if it's another wannabe like Tidus, why not have him weak through most of the game? It's not like such heroes become a better character if they can do 999999 damage per hit. Just make the hero powered up in a few scripted special circumstances (I mean they're the one saving the world, so at some point they got to be pretty powerful).</div>

[Ganath]

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Muwhahahahahahahaha....</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>You have your father, who joins you during Ashura's Fortress, and with his power you can defeat Ashura. There's also the Samurai, Lynn, Ki, and other characters.

Isis is a Goddess who joins you at the end of the game, she has maximum stats plus her weapons are re-usable Flare (most spells in the game are based on books, once they're used, they're gone. But there are spells that can be re-used in the game, such as Isis's Flare.) and the Masamune, which is the most powerful sword in the game. She's essnentially by far the most valuable player heading down to the center of the Celestial Realm at the end (the game has many different worlds linked up by the Yggdrasil tree, which comes from norse mythology), you fight powerful monsters along the way which include Fenrir (Fenris Wolf, a Norse monster with godlike powers who fought on the side of Loki and evil in the battle of Ragnarok). At the end you have two bosses to face, Isis leaves the party to fight one, and your party fights the other. This game, though very simple in graphics, was perhaps my favourite RPG for quite a while, maybe even up until Final Fantasy III on SNES (which is I'll note will be a ten year old game May 12th). Anyways, the way these characters are used in Final Fantasy Legend 2 works out quite well, the difficulty is higher than most RPG's, but it does have the feeling of being very well balanced unless you sit and level up for hours (or power stats up). It works in a way that even though the other characters may be much more powerful than your own, that without the support of your main characters, the legendary characters would otherwise be demolished, and without the legendary characters, your own characters would suffer a similar fate.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>It's unfortunate games with interesting combat systems are usually the ones you never heard about, since all the big sellers are the ones that stick with the tried-and-true mediocrity. I guess I don't blame them when you can spit out another variant of FF system and sell 3 million, but still...</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>You don't have to do that to make money. The FFT team is a good example. They are good at designing and implementing on-the-fly and coming up with complex systems that earn them high marks among players and reviewers alike.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>That's because it had the FF name. Good reviews only get you so far, at some point you've to be able to sell the games.</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Or Square in general. It worked for Monolith.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Err xenogears/saga had a ton of budget/advertising backing it. I mean people who knew nothing about RPG have heard of Xenosaga</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>And even so, its sales still are no where near that of Final Fantasy titled games, even though (in my opinion) it is generally more fun. I know Xenosaga/gears isn't for everyone, there are some people who don't like them at all.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Gears/Saga had nothing innovative so far as gameplay goes... maybe aside from the fact that healing your gear is extremely difficult. Suikoden is the only game I can think of that has limited success despite having a relatively different combat system (the limited magic makes a huge difference)</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>It had COMBOS, man! Combos! Also, the magic regulation system (where you could only hold a limited number of spells) did add a bit. (Hey, if we're going to credit Suikoden for the limited magic system....)</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Combos were just an alternative to a textual menu system.</div>