Random combat is the number one thing that makes me drop a game.
Its annoying, it happens too often, it always interrupts me when I want to do something else, and it is too repetitive.
This is why I stopped playing a lot of JRPGs. The other thing I drop them for is when combat only has a single song and always starts with the exact same intro, like what happened with Dragon Quest 11 or whatever it was that I played.
I hate grinding. Its repetitive and boring. Its not fun. If a games story missions are not paced properly with level such that I can do only the story missions and never be underleveled, then I will drop that game immediately.
I also hate grinding but sometimes I get addicted to it. Like my lizard brain likes watching the numbers go up. I recently loaded an old save in final fantasy and saw my level at 99, health at 999/999 and gold at 999999 and was like “I don’t remember grinding any of this”. It happens in a trance.
I don’t really like random battles for the most part, but they are not normally the thing that makes or breaks a game for me, either.
Some of the first jrpgs that I remember handling battles better then the typical final fantasy was Chrono Trigger and Pokemon. In Chrono Trigger, you can typically see the enemies before you have to fight them, though they would often surprise you with enemies that you couldn’t see jumping out. I think that worked much better than just the normal system where if you walk around long enough you get a battle. Then Pokemon has 2 different things that it did. First, for trainer battles, you can see the trainers on screen so you can make sure you are prepared before you go into a fight. Then for the normal battles around the world, it does use random encounters, but they take place ONLY within certain spots, like in tall grass or in a cave. So you still have a lot of freedom to roam around in areas without triggering battles, and when you do go through those spots, you know that a battle could pop up, so you can be ready for it. There are also items you can use to avoid encounters.
For dealing with the annoyance of low level enemies, I think Earthbound had a pretty good system. In Earthbound, it shows you enemies on screen rather than doing random encounters, and once you get to a significantly higher level than the enemies, they will run away from you instead of coming at you, so you are free to just ignore them.
I agree these games made big improvements but I still see them as bandages to the inevitable problems that came with random encounters. There’s no undoing the interruption of flow you know.
I think it’s a tradeoff though like I said. Because I don’t know how you can have a combat system as cool and creative as say Undertale (blending turn based and realtime bullet hell) or battle network (blending turn based, real time and card game) without it being completely separate from the overworld.
Random encounters tend to be trash mobs, and I hate trash mobs. I know even in the late 90s, there were some prehistoric internet memes about FF7, and having just played it recently, I remember why. There were so many of them. You’d easily forget where you were going and what you were doing because you’d be interrupted by random encounter trash mobs every couple of seconds. They weren’t too hard, so you didn’t have to think very much to get through them, which made them uninteresting, and they also, like you said, just kind of screwed with the flow of the game. So generally, I don’t like them.
That’s a good point. Trivial encounters feel like a grindy and annoying waste of time. I guess it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way though.
I also think Final Fantasy falls too much on the old turn based choose from a menu, watch a cut scene system, when there was room for something more interesting. That’s just taste though I guess. I haven’t even played any other than Final Fantasy I and Tactics Advance maybe they changed.
The annoying thing is, the problem with this from a design perspective was well known and there were already some efforts to improve upon matters as early as the SNES era. Both Chrono Trigger and Earthbound leap to mind. It’s just that following this, most developers forgot to learn a lesson from these for another decade or two.
In Earthbound, all non-story, non-boss encounters are visible on the overworld and you can either:
Avoid them entirely with some foresight and skill
Get a backstab advantage if you manage to maneuver yourself behind the enemy, or
Instantly win the battle if your level significantly exceeds that of the enemy
Battles can be auto-fought with the computer controlling your party if you are e.g. trying to eat a sandwich at the same time or something
In Chrono Trigger, most trivial encounters can be avoided, with some scripted exceptions that always initiate when you cross a certain area presumably to prevent players from completely avoiding all combat entirely and subsequently getting their asses stomped by the bosses. Chrono Trigger’s overworld map also features no random encounters whatsoever. You can wander the world freely and will only encounter monsters if you actually enter a location.
I harp on this a lot, but only because it’s true. Despite its faults, some of which it definitely has, Chrono Trigger had some incredible design innovations and was easily the high water mark for JRPG design not only for its time, but even compared to subsequent games for a long time – maybe even still to this day.
Many trash mob encounters can simply be avoided if you can’t be bothered or are low on resources
Those that can’t can usually be wiped in a single move if the enemy is far beneath you via double/triple techs
Encounters happen on the screen you’re already on, so you don’t get disoriented after the battle ends
Positioning on the battlefield matters for techs, making fights more interesting than the usual you line up on one side/they line up on the other side method…
…However, positioning on the battlefield absolutely does not matter for single magic spells or melee attacks, meaning you never get completely screwed by how the chessboard is laid out
You can walk diagonally (seriously, the inability in even much later games to do this bugs me to no end – Pokémon, I’m lookin’ at you)
If a non-story-critical NPC is yammering at you and you can’t be bothered, you can just walk away even when the text box is still open
Not only can you rearrange your party however you want including not putting the protagonist at the head of the conga line (and even being able to remove him fully, after a certain plot event), but which combination of party members you have actually matters for techs and not just a perpetual case of, “I need one tank, one caster, and one healer” like prior/later games
The entire concept of the New Game+ is called what it is and works how it does because of how Chrono Trigger did it
You can fight the final boss pretty much any time as soon as you learn about him, and if you get your ass whooped trying that’s on you
Etc.
Apparently the Chrono Trigger devs originally planned to give the player even more freedom but several additional concepts such as being able to freely position your fighters on the field were cut due to time constraints and not being able to figure out a sufficiently elegant way to do it on the SNES hardware and controller.
It’s worth noting too that trash mobs aren’t limited to random encounters. Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 are littered with trash mobs, and none of them are random except for maybe traversing between towns.
Take a look at the Sniper Elite series. It’s third-person and plays a lot slower than a COD game, but it is full co-op and takes place in WW2. The newer entries also look pretty nice.
Thanks, we tried this earlier but me and my buddies can’t seem to do stealth no matter how much we try. Now if it can be a viable strategy to go guns blazing then that’d be a different story.
If what's supposed to be the core gameplay feels like an unwanted interruption, I don't think the random enounters themselves are the problem. I think the reason random encounters get a bad rap is because some games don't make basic fights feel engaging enough. But when done right, they should be the fun part!
The lenovo legion series gaming laptops have been good in my experience. They also have fully AMD ones nowadays too i think. (If you are on linux that is a plus)
The whole shipping, returns, and reliability experience for Lenovo was rather bad for me (Lenovo Canada). My Legion shipped with a faulty motherboard and faulty power supply. Bought in Canada, but I work in China. International warranty didn’t cover China so I paid for replacement power supply out of pocket. Then multiple usb keys were fried before I figured out it was my laptop. Back in Canada they fixed it, but jerked me around on the turnaround time. Overall bad customer service, shipped a lemon. It was cheap for the specs though.
Oof that sounds rough. Maybe the EU custumer service is run different. I never had any major issues with all the lenovos i used or set up for other people. Thinkpads and legions alike. But when i did have a family member break something, it was repaired (not replaced) in a matter of a few weeks without any warranty hassle.
But generally the quality of all things lenovo has definitely gone done in recent years for sure. I would recommend framework but those are not cheap and not really for gaming.
Agreed that it likely depends on the region it was bought in. For most businesses and government services I have found the quality of customer service has dropped through the floor in North America as compared to 20 years ago. I worked in customer service for years and it’s always been a horrible job. But it can be made better or worse by how the department is managed.
Lenovo Canada’s customer service, shipping, and possibly quality control teams appear to be overworked because the result is slipshod work, ignoring the customer, and general incompetence. Again, I worked in the field and don’t blame the individuals.
They are trading on their good name, and eroding it at the same time. Glad to hear it’s better in Europe.
Does it have to specifically be semi-realistic, have old guns, be military themed and in first person? Cuz I know some fine twin-stick sci-fi co-op shooters that can fill the same “shoot everything that moves with minimal effort” itch but they aren’t realistic, military themed or first person.
Like Synthetic 1 and 2 or The Ascent. I know of a couple WW2 games also similar but they completely lack co-op (or any kind of multiplayer for that matter) except for Jagged Alliance. And those games are old (except for the F2P thing that might not even be around anymore).
I got the impression they won’t like either of those based on the post. Which is a shame because they’re great. You can spend a night with a couple friends going through pretty much any of the Halo games, and with the Master Chief Collection you can turn on skulls and such and have access to all the great Halos in one.
Yeah, not what we’re looking for right now but we’ve played through halo games and it was a blast. GOW didn’t sit right with us, perhaps due to the third person view, but we are going to give it an another try in the future. Just now, we got the COD itch. We’ve completed world at war campaigns so many times that now we just blaze through it on full autopilot now…
I was initially saddened to hear it was going to follow in the steps of 15 and be an action based rpg, and I thought 15 was brain dead “warp strike simulator” with horrible story pacing and poor characters (until last 5% of the game).
This game though has simple but effective action combat with enough variety to be fun and the characters and pacing are a joy.
I still wish we could get some FF games like 7 or 9 where there is depth to equipment, magic and turn based combat, but jrpgs have been iterating away from complex battle systems and sell well so can’t see them going back.
I still think FF7 was the pinnacle as material mixing and matching with equipment was really simple and super fun.
I genuinely hate it lol, as do all of my friends IRL.
We’re all huge into 14, which was produced by the same team. I mention it because there’s a ton of overlap with 14. The cinematography in the cutscenes and even the emotes the characters use feel lifted straight from the older game. The structure of the combat segments is also uncannily similar, they feel a lot like 14 dungeons. So, my group generally felt like the game got stale really quickly, which colored our impression as a whole.
The moment-to-moment gameplay also feels like a hyper simplified version of the “rotation” system in 14. You have a basic filler combo, and larger more powerful moves that can only be used again after a long cooldown timer. I found it to be under-stimulating, even after unlocking a few more things.
The story was awesome in the segments covered by the free trial, but then everything after that just kind of slipped off my brain. More than anything, I remember side quests in particular were really boring to the point where it felt like a joke.
We were really hyped and really really wanted to like the game when we first heard about it, and we were super hyped after playing the demo, but in the end it just felt like a really unpleasant slog to actually play.
At the same time however I can totally see why people do really enjoy the game. I think it’s a divisive release, and often the people who love/hate it will cite the exact same things but paint them in a different light. I ultimately wouldn’t not recommend the game, I think $50 is a really fair price for it too for what you’re getting
FF14 has sort of an unwritten rule, that you should ignore all side quests that are represented with the plain gold circle. They’re not even worth the time for XP and rarely have anything interesting happen in them. It’d be interesting if the same rule applies for FF16.
A 3070FE with no CPU bottleneck should not chug this game at 40fps on low settings with “ultra performance” DLSS at 3440x1440. Do better, devs.
Besides that, your complaints are 100% on point. As someone who had 2700 hours in FF14 before quitting, it’s clear they overclocked the engine to its limits and simply patched together whatever they could.
I called it as soon as they gave the FF16 project to Yoshi-P. He did the best he could with the tools he was given, and the only tool he knows is FF14.
We expect this man to produce a stellar mainline FF game while actively being the producer of the best MMO on the market while trying to finish multiple industry-leading expansions?
Square Enix is yet another example of corporate suicide by deliberate mismanagement. Let Yoko Taro loose, you cowards. Give him FF17 so we can go down in a blaze of glory.
It’s wild how CBU3 dumped FF14 design straight into FF16 and decided it was good enough. MMO gameplay makes a lot of design compromises to accommodate for the multiplayer shared-state world, network latency, etc. None of which make sense for a single player offline experience.
What do you do in FFXIV? Like I can’t look at a stand alone and expect the same. I even liked SOME of Strangers of Paradise just because of the job skill tree. It was what they embarked on back in ARR and it never happened.
But the demo for XVI and the crossover event was decent. I loved the Ifrit fight and the cave flight part. I am not sure about it though. If I could have done PC as the demo I would have bought it. But waiting 6 months is ass.
I was just asking what your main activity is in XIV. I’m a raider. So the story is cool, but not my driving factor in enjoying the game. The gameplay and mechanics are usually what makes me enjoy it.
Honestly I’ve done just about everything over the years except ultimates (I play with IRL friends and I’m happy if we can clear a savage tier lol)
If I had to pick a “main” activity I think it would be parsing tbh, I really enjoy chasing the numbers. I level up all jobs and also try to perfect at least the basic rotation for all of them. I’ll hang out on party finder and jump into extreme farms on off jobs to practice.
But there’s also been months where I’ve done nothing but like, ocean fishing, diadem, pvp (I love crystal conflict, best part about endwalker to me) and so on. That’s been one of my favorite things about the game; you can get totally wrapped up in a huge project. Almost like you can play the game to take a break from playing the game. Just recently we’ve gotten into treasure maps, super chill
Hmm. I wonder if we have partied together! I do the ultimates. I’m actually a Penta legend. But I don’t parse more than what I naturally do while clearing. I may chase an orange with BiS but I usually get bored after the first few weeks after BiS and go elsewhere.
I was just wondering if your main jam was housing or glam or just the story. If it’s raiding I probably wouldn’t dig 16 either.
I gave up on it for now when the questline involving the NPC learning to write broke, and then I started crashing to desktop (without any logs anywhere, either in the Buffout directory or even in Windows’ Event Viewer) every time I left the Swan or fast traveled directly to it, even though traveling to another point literally fifty feet south worked just fine. And since there’s no logs describing the crash, I have no idea how to fix it.
I could probably fix it by uninstalling and re-downloading it again, but I have a goddamn data cap that my roommate already blows through every month with the fucking massive updates Fallout 76 has taken to pushing out, I have zero desire to download 60 GB of data (30 GB base game + 30 GB FOLON) every fucking time I sneeze wrong and make the game start crashing again. =|
regarding the large download, there is a girl which is very fit and likes compression a lot which reduced the total download size to 38 gb, if that helps. also, you can reinstall from that as often as you like without redownloading.
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Aktywne