I just bought Blood Bowl: Chaos Edition on Steam. I have such fond memories of playing BB on Lucky's board back in university: Staying up all night fighting exhaustion with adrenalin, sticking little bits of paper with notes scribbled in tiny letters on the tops of the figurines, and screaming "YOU'RE OUTTA HERE!!!!" in concert with half a dozen other excited spectators when a player got ejected for fouling. It was a wonderful time full of camaraderie, flow, and intensity. I would love to recreate that but the community and environment is evaporated, never to be recreated I expect. We are too old and jobs, children, wives, geography, and gray hairs keep us in check.
The computer game is a faithful recreation of the old board game with a few modifications that I heartily approve of. The basic mechanics are the same - block or dodge away, run the ball or kill the enemies, make the desperate long pass or sit tight. There is still the glory of the unlikely touchdown and the agony of watching a favourite player get pushed into the stands and die to the zealous fury of the fans. It has a campaign mode that seems reasonable so far since it is pretty much just a framework on which to hang playing a bunch of games of BB and it is hard to fault that. The graphics are mediocre and the menus are not the best but the gameplay is so much fun that it is easy to forgive. It feels like going back to play Final Fantasy 1 or somesuch - it looks terrible but I love it so.
I got into a league right away with some old friends, fellow alumni, and some folks who I know from my M:TG days and it seems like it should be a lot of fun. Hopefully it can scratch an itch I have had ever since I stopped playing WOW; the ability to log onto ventrilo randomly and chat with really smart gamers about a game that excites me. The community that surrounds competitive play is something I have missed very much since I stopped being a serious contributor to Ret Paladin theory on the Elitist Jerks WOW forums and I have high hopes that this can give me that feeling again. It doesn't feel like there is the same degree of number crunching available and I probably won't be writing any huge simulators but some armchair theorycrafting certainly is in the offing.
Now I just have to find a way for my squishy ratmen to score a crapload of touchdowns while avoiding being killed too much!
Showing posts with label FF1. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FF1. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Mass Effect
I am playing through Mass Effect this week. It is a really fun game and I find that there is a pretty good balance between combat and story - it is also nice that you can skip past either of the two elements fairly quickly if you want to. One thing I noticed is that it is shockingly like a Final Fantasy or similar type RPG once you get past the spaceship and lasers overlay. There are lots of enemies to fight and they always give you XP and sometimes give you stuff! A hardcore twink like myself cannot resist the lure of more stuff so I do every side quest, find every storage locker (treasure chest), hunt down every last geth (monster) and refuse to spend money on anything because I want to save it all up for the endgame. Buying gear and then selling it back to the vendor at a loss is unacceptable - only buy things that will never, ever obsolete! In the same vein the classes read much like fantasy RPG classes. I am a fighter and my two friends in my party are a fighter (Ashley) and thief/cleric/mage (Kaidan). Thankfully 'multiclassing' in ME is actually quite good and I basically have two tanks who do all the killing and one guy following us around CCing the enemies, opening locks and healing (having lots of First Aid). I guess some general designs are just timeless and transcend genres.
One thing that really irritates me though is that much like Final Fantasy 1 the combat mechanics are entirely unexplained. How can I find out what my accuracy ratings on weapons do? What does increasing my accuracy regenerated per second by 1% even mean? Just like in FF1 you can experiment randomly with weapons to see what happens but the tooltips seem to give a lot of information that is quite useless for making decisions. I am used to WOW where I can get really detailed combat logs to allow me to make good decisions and in ME I can't see how you would figure this stuff out without just playing through the game a bazillion times. I am not advocating providing tons of explicit combat log data to everybody. Most people would find it irritating and useless because they just want to put a lot of points into shotguns and then shoot people with shotguns - as long as that works the numbers aren't helpful. I sure wish that the game had a good combat mechanics section in it though that told me exactly what my stats are and what they do; right now I look at weapons that have 150/1 damage/accuracy and compare them to 140/5 and there is nothing whatsoever that tells me whether or not the new item is an upgrade and it is exceedingly unlikely I could figure that out just by shooting the enemies.
I do like the Paragon/Renegade system. You can earn points towards either as both are essentially reputations - you can be known for being a badass or a hero or both. My first playthrough I am playing mostly to get Paragon points and doing the good guy thing but I plan on running through the game as a pure Renegade next time so I can select "Bite me" from the menu a lot of times and see what happens. I took max points in both Charm and Intimidate to give me lots of chat options on my first playthrough and that looks to have been a mistake since I only had a chance to use them 3 times so far in my 15 hours of play and they haven't been particularly useful even then. Next time through my biotic assassin isn't going to mess around with 'talky' skills - I am going to have two responses to situations - kill them or tell them to F off.
One thing that really irritates me though is that much like Final Fantasy 1 the combat mechanics are entirely unexplained. How can I find out what my accuracy ratings on weapons do? What does increasing my accuracy regenerated per second by 1% even mean? Just like in FF1 you can experiment randomly with weapons to see what happens but the tooltips seem to give a lot of information that is quite useless for making decisions. I am used to WOW where I can get really detailed combat logs to allow me to make good decisions and in ME I can't see how you would figure this stuff out without just playing through the game a bazillion times. I am not advocating providing tons of explicit combat log data to everybody. Most people would find it irritating and useless because they just want to put a lot of points into shotguns and then shoot people with shotguns - as long as that works the numbers aren't helpful. I sure wish that the game had a good combat mechanics section in it though that told me exactly what my stats are and what they do; right now I look at weapons that have 150/1 damage/accuracy and compare them to 140/5 and there is nothing whatsoever that tells me whether or not the new item is an upgrade and it is exceedingly unlikely I could figure that out just by shooting the enemies.
I do like the Paragon/Renegade system. You can earn points towards either as both are essentially reputations - you can be known for being a badass or a hero or both. My first playthrough I am playing mostly to get Paragon points and doing the good guy thing but I plan on running through the game as a pure Renegade next time so I can select "Bite me" from the menu a lot of times and see what happens. I took max points in both Charm and Intimidate to give me lots of chat options on my first playthrough and that looks to have been a mistake since I only had a chance to use them 3 times so far in my 15 hours of play and they haven't been particularly useful even then. Next time through my biotic assassin isn't going to mess around with 'talky' skills - I am going to have two responses to situations - kill them or tell them to F off.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
What is Balance and why do we bother?
I talked a lot about balancing games in my last few posts. In particular I talked about balancing Final Fantasy 1 recently but the idea of creating balanced games has been a pretty constantly popping up on my blog. This should be no great surprise because the idea of balance is ubiquitous in conversation about games though I think most people don't really understand what it means. I am going to try to define what I mean by balance in the general sense and why I think it matters.
A balanced game is one that has a large variety of ways to play well while retaining a much greater number of ways to play badly. In particular when choosing a strategy and game style there are many different choices that are optimal depending on which of the possible game states the strategy is being used for. Game balance is drastically more important when player's performance is being compared to one another and when choices that require large investments to change are substantially different in effectiveness.
One of the most talked about types of games in terms of balance is the MMORPG where players choose characteristics of their avatar and then go about trying to do things within the game world. Game balance is particularly critical here because players are often compared directly to one another and if a particular choice the player has made (most generally class) is undesirable or weak it is often infeasible for the player to change it and thus the player can easily end up simply unable to play or compete at all. If, for example, Rogues are simply terrible then the player who has made their character a Rogue has no alternative but to start again from the beginning and this is extremely demoralizing and unpleasant for the player. It is for this reason that many MMORPGs that first come out have huge problems because they start out with enormous power differences between classes and players correctly reason that their performance and measure among their peers is dependent less on their skill and more on an arbitrary, necessarily uninformed choice when first choosing the game. The power differential between classes does not need to be zero but it needs to be such that an above average player will beat a below average player no matter what their class choices were.
Balance is drastically less critical in single player games for obvious reasons. Even if a player makes a bad choice it is often not impactful enough to stop them from beating the game anyway. They may take longer to achieve the same goals as a player that makes a better choice but they can generally win because few single player games allow characters to make such tremendously stupid choices that the game is unwinnable. Of course the game designers rely on people to not do things that are *obviously* stupid and try to make all the choices where the answer is not obvious ones that can be worked around. When the benchmark that a player must achieve is fixed then playing optimally is unnecessary because usually practice or grinding can get them past the hurdle; this is not true for multiplayer games where other players make the choices and set the benchmarks. In FF1 there are some obvious choices to make a more powerful party but *any* starting party can win and in fact the game is beatable even with playing with only 1 character instead of 4. The main difference is that a bad party takes much more time to win.
The main reason I see game balance as being at all relevant in single player games is replayability. A big part of the fun in a game is figuring out exactly what the best technique is and how to most easily overcome obstacles. When that answer is obvious because there are very few or only one optimal choice sets then the game is quickly mastered. Certainly there is some replayability even in games where optimal choices are easily come by but it is much less than in games where it takes far more time, experience and analysis to determine the perfect strategy. For example, Diablo 2 was a tremendously fun game. However, if you were playing a Barbarian you had only one choice - be a Whirlwind Barbarian. (WWB) If you tried any other strategy it would be unbelievably painful and you would be easily defeated by many obstacles that a WWB would crush with ease. While the game was successful as it was it could have had even more replayability if there were a half dozen different combat skills that were at least competitive with WW. Players would be curious to find out exactly how the different skills worked and in what situations they shone if the answer weren't so bloody obvious - always play WW. The same could be said of Hammer, Multishot, Corpse Explosion and Static Field - once you see the best in action nothing else is even under consideration.
Essentially I see game balance as providing the player with a greater distance between being totally uninformed and being completely sure of the optimal choices. If you consider WOW raiding for a moment it is easy to see how balanced it is by this criteria since although it is easy for nearly any player to determine that a party of
Priest x 3
Warrior x 2
Rogue x 5
is absolutely atrocious for attempting t11 raids it is only a truly exceptional player that could tell you accurately whether a party containing precisely 1 of each class is better than a party containing 2 priests, 0 rogues and 1 of each other class instead. There is a lot to think about there and if you asked top tier raiders to list the best possible raid composition for the entire tier you would end up with thousands (at least) of different combinations that are all very competitive. FF1 or Diablo 2, by contrast, have a very limited number of optimal choices, probably only a handful. This doesn't make them bad by any means, but it does mean that have room to improve. An MMORPG balanced as poorly as FF1 would have a really hard time in the current market since its competition is so much better and balance matters so much more in that genre.
A balanced game is one that has a large variety of ways to play well while retaining a much greater number of ways to play badly. In particular when choosing a strategy and game style there are many different choices that are optimal depending on which of the possible game states the strategy is being used for. Game balance is drastically more important when player's performance is being compared to one another and when choices that require large investments to change are substantially different in effectiveness.
One of the most talked about types of games in terms of balance is the MMORPG where players choose characteristics of their avatar and then go about trying to do things within the game world. Game balance is particularly critical here because players are often compared directly to one another and if a particular choice the player has made (most generally class) is undesirable or weak it is often infeasible for the player to change it and thus the player can easily end up simply unable to play or compete at all. If, for example, Rogues are simply terrible then the player who has made their character a Rogue has no alternative but to start again from the beginning and this is extremely demoralizing and unpleasant for the player. It is for this reason that many MMORPGs that first come out have huge problems because they start out with enormous power differences between classes and players correctly reason that their performance and measure among their peers is dependent less on their skill and more on an arbitrary, necessarily uninformed choice when first choosing the game. The power differential between classes does not need to be zero but it needs to be such that an above average player will beat a below average player no matter what their class choices were.
Balance is drastically less critical in single player games for obvious reasons. Even if a player makes a bad choice it is often not impactful enough to stop them from beating the game anyway. They may take longer to achieve the same goals as a player that makes a better choice but they can generally win because few single player games allow characters to make such tremendously stupid choices that the game is unwinnable. Of course the game designers rely on people to not do things that are *obviously* stupid and try to make all the choices where the answer is not obvious ones that can be worked around. When the benchmark that a player must achieve is fixed then playing optimally is unnecessary because usually practice or grinding can get them past the hurdle; this is not true for multiplayer games where other players make the choices and set the benchmarks. In FF1 there are some obvious choices to make a more powerful party but *any* starting party can win and in fact the game is beatable even with playing with only 1 character instead of 4. The main difference is that a bad party takes much more time to win.
The main reason I see game balance as being at all relevant in single player games is replayability. A big part of the fun in a game is figuring out exactly what the best technique is and how to most easily overcome obstacles. When that answer is obvious because there are very few or only one optimal choice sets then the game is quickly mastered. Certainly there is some replayability even in games where optimal choices are easily come by but it is much less than in games where it takes far more time, experience and analysis to determine the perfect strategy. For example, Diablo 2 was a tremendously fun game. However, if you were playing a Barbarian you had only one choice - be a Whirlwind Barbarian. (WWB) If you tried any other strategy it would be unbelievably painful and you would be easily defeated by many obstacles that a WWB would crush with ease. While the game was successful as it was it could have had even more replayability if there were a half dozen different combat skills that were at least competitive with WW. Players would be curious to find out exactly how the different skills worked and in what situations they shone if the answer weren't so bloody obvious - always play WW. The same could be said of Hammer, Multishot, Corpse Explosion and Static Field - once you see the best in action nothing else is even under consideration.
Essentially I see game balance as providing the player with a greater distance between being totally uninformed and being completely sure of the optimal choices. If you consider WOW raiding for a moment it is easy to see how balanced it is by this criteria since although it is easy for nearly any player to determine that a party of
Priest x 3
Warrior x 2
Rogue x 5
is absolutely atrocious for attempting t11 raids it is only a truly exceptional player that could tell you accurately whether a party containing precisely 1 of each class is better than a party containing 2 priests, 0 rogues and 1 of each other class instead. There is a lot to think about there and if you asked top tier raiders to list the best possible raid composition for the entire tier you would end up with thousands (at least) of different combinations that are all very competitive. FF1 or Diablo 2, by contrast, have a very limited number of optimal choices, probably only a handful. This doesn't make them bad by any means, but it does mean that have room to improve. An MMORPG balanced as poorly as FF1 would have a really hard time in the current market since its competition is so much better and balance matters so much more in that genre.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
FF1 balance changes
I didn't actually get any submissions for my FF1 balance contest. This didn't hugely shock me as it isn't like everyone goes through a 'must play random old video game X' phase at the same time. That said there were some interesting discussions in the comments so I figured I would post what I came up with anyway.
Magic Changes:
1. Intelligence does something! Intelligence adds to your chance to hit with spells. This makes the Black Mage significantly better at casting attack spells than Red Mage / Ninja and that all that Int the Black Mage gets is useful. Base success rate of spells reduced from 148 to 128 for players so that overall spell damage does not inflate too much.
2. Many bad single target spells now hit all applicable targets. I would have included Rub in this list but since several mobs cast it on the party and it is already brutal when they do this I don't think changing Rub is a good idea. It means Rub is still bad for players to cast and devastating when used against them.
BMagic:
Fire, Lock, Lit
Ice, Tmpr
Hold
Slp2
-
Stun
Sabr, Blnd, Brak
XXXX
WMagic:
Fog
Lamp, Invs
-
Pure, AMut
-
Soft
-
-
3. Several bad spells doubled in efficacy. As part of this all buff/debuff spells no longer stack. Specifically the dodge spells need to not stack so that ridiculous situations like the whole party being invulnerable to physical attacks don't occur. I realize this makes the White Mage only party totally useless but I am okay with that.
Inv2
Fog2
Lok2
4. Changes in spell levels: Pure to L2, Soft to L4, Mute to L6.
The idea behind these changes accomplish 2 things. First, to make spells that were almost never worth casting actually decent, which is true for most of the changes. The other major shift is to make the low level BMagic damage spells decent. Low level BMages are total junk compared to melee because they get only a couple of decent actions before they are back to swinging uselessly with daggers. Now BMages will actually have a few totally awesome actions before having to resort to useless swinging instead! RMages might even learn and cast attack spells before Fir2 also. Obviously beyond about level 10 this stops being very relevant, which is fine, because at that point BMages have enough spells they can contribute pretty consistently.
Thief and Fighter changes.
Mostly people agree that all the classes have good and bad points and are reasonable inclusions in a party except for Fighter and Thief. Fighters are flat out the best to the point that it is probably almost as quick to win with 2 Fighters as it is with a 4 person party including 0 Fighters. Thieves are unbelievable junk. The primary reason for this is Fighters get the best attack progression, best weapons, best armor, best HP and best damage progression and Thieves get to be either average or terrible at pretty much all of these. Changes:
Fighter:
Base Attack%: 5 (was 10)
Attack%/level: 1 (was 3)
Thief:
Base Attack%: 10 (was 5)
Attack%/level: 6 (was 2)
With these changes Thieves hit about as hard as Fighters used to and Fighters hit about as hard as Thieves used to. Fighters will still be massively tough and fantastic for filling the front line but for hard hitting physical attacks you will want either a Thief or BB.
Difficulty changes.
These last changes are designed to make the parts of the game that were simply too easy significantly more challenging. I don't mind some parts being easier than others but in any fantasy setting the final boss is supposed to be a real challenge and the fight should take awhile. Many of the game's dungeon bosses are simply too weak and die too quickly - it is common for a fairly challenging dungeon to be ended by a boss fight that lasts only 1 or 2 combat rounds.
Vampire, Lich, Kary, Kraken, Tiamat, Chaos: Health increased by 100%.
Pirates: Health increased by 900% to 60.
Magic Changes:
1. Intelligence does something! Intelligence adds to your chance to hit with spells. This makes the Black Mage significantly better at casting attack spells than Red Mage / Ninja and that all that Int the Black Mage gets is useful. Base success rate of spells reduced from 148 to 128 for players so that overall spell damage does not inflate too much.
2. Many bad single target spells now hit all applicable targets. I would have included Rub in this list but since several mobs cast it on the party and it is already brutal when they do this I don't think changing Rub is a good idea. It means Rub is still bad for players to cast and devastating when used against them.
BMagic:
Fire, Lock, Lit
Ice, Tmpr
Hold
Slp2
-
Stun
Sabr, Blnd, Brak
XXXX
WMagic:
Fog
Lamp, Invs
-
Pure, AMut
-
Soft
-
-
3. Several bad spells doubled in efficacy. As part of this all buff/debuff spells no longer stack. Specifically the dodge spells need to not stack so that ridiculous situations like the whole party being invulnerable to physical attacks don't occur. I realize this makes the White Mage only party totally useless but I am okay with that.
Inv2
Fog2
Lok2
4. Changes in spell levels: Pure to L2, Soft to L4, Mute to L6.
The idea behind these changes accomplish 2 things. First, to make spells that were almost never worth casting actually decent, which is true for most of the changes. The other major shift is to make the low level BMagic damage spells decent. Low level BMages are total junk compared to melee because they get only a couple of decent actions before they are back to swinging uselessly with daggers. Now BMages will actually have a few totally awesome actions before having to resort to useless swinging instead! RMages might even learn and cast attack spells before Fir2 also. Obviously beyond about level 10 this stops being very relevant, which is fine, because at that point BMages have enough spells they can contribute pretty consistently.
Thief and Fighter changes.
Mostly people agree that all the classes have good and bad points and are reasonable inclusions in a party except for Fighter and Thief. Fighters are flat out the best to the point that it is probably almost as quick to win with 2 Fighters as it is with a 4 person party including 0 Fighters. Thieves are unbelievable junk. The primary reason for this is Fighters get the best attack progression, best weapons, best armor, best HP and best damage progression and Thieves get to be either average or terrible at pretty much all of these. Changes:
Fighter:
Base Attack%: 5 (was 10)
Attack%/level: 1 (was 3)
Thief:
Base Attack%: 10 (was 5)
Attack%/level: 6 (was 2)
With these changes Thieves hit about as hard as Fighters used to and Fighters hit about as hard as Thieves used to. Fighters will still be massively tough and fantastic for filling the front line but for hard hitting physical attacks you will want either a Thief or BB.
Difficulty changes.
These last changes are designed to make the parts of the game that were simply too easy significantly more challenging. I don't mind some parts being easier than others but in any fantasy setting the final boss is supposed to be a real challenge and the fight should take awhile. Many of the game's dungeon bosses are simply too weak and die too quickly - it is common for a fairly challenging dungeon to be ended by a boss fight that lasts only 1 or 2 combat rounds.
Vampire, Lich, Kary, Kraken, Tiamat, Chaos: Health increased by 100%.
Pirates: Health increased by 900% to 60.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
FF1 challenge
I talked a little bit about Final Fantasy 1 in my last post and I wanted to extend that discussion a bit here. In particular Sthenno replied that he thought that FF1 would not be a better game with the changes I had outlined for the Fighter and the Thief to bring them much closer together in power. It is entirely true that the game is beatable with any random party with sufficient grinding since no matter how bad your party is you can grind up to very high level and beat the game, even if that party is just 1 Thief I suspect. Certainly if your party is 4 Thieves you will find the game very long and much of it very boring but you certainly will win. My contention though is that even though the game is clearly beatable with any group, and in fact is not that hard with any reasonable group, the game would be better if there were more ways to build a powerful group. Clearly you can be foolish and make lots of terrible decisions and the game needs to have those bad choices as an option to make it interesting at all. However, I have an issue with decisions that are
1. Irreversible
2. Not easily testable or obvious from a numbers/game advantage point of view
3. Not matching the intuitive roleplaying (RP) sense that players have
being very impactful towards overall party power. For example, taking a party that has no healing magic is going to have some significant disadvantages but because that is easy to test at any point in the game, obvious and matches the RP intuition players have I don't have a problem with it. The same is not true of thieves since there is an assumption that thieves, being a character class, are probably good for something and that assumption fails. It is not easy to test this out because you need to play through most or all of the game to understand how good the class is going to be and it isn't obvious to the player because most of the mechanics that make thieves bad aren't listed anywhere.
What it boils down to is I consider a game poorly constructed if someone with no previous knowledge can sit down, look at descriptions of things and make decisions based on common knowledge and those decisions will often be extremely stupid. Note that it is okay if those decisions are stupid if the player can test them and change them relatively easily - in WOW if you want to test out a character spec or particular talent you can do so and then change your mind if it turns out to not be as good as you thought initially. In FF1 some decisions are like that in that you can buy a spell, discover it is terrible, and then buy another. You can try putting your White Mage in the front line and after watching them die you try a Fighter instead and notice that it works much better that way. Choosing class composition for your party is not something you can change or easily test so it needs to be much more balanced and robust so that making really stupid decisions is obvious without extensive testing. A veteran who has completed the game 50 times isn't much inconvenienced by game balance like the Fighter/Thief but a new player really would be. I like having lots of interesting choices as long as testing or changing those choices don't require sinking another 50 hours into the game.
I want to have a little contest. Specifically I want to see what other people would do to balance FF1. The main points:
1. Don't bother with bugs. Assume the bugs in the game are fixed (there are many) and work from there.
2. Try to be succinct. The smaller your list of changes (while still accomplishing the same end!) the better.
3. Try to increase choice without increasing power. For example, the Fog spell is terrible and I never cast it. Making Fog give enough of an absorb bonus that you regularly but not always use it in combat is a good change - it is still decreasing damage taken but won't hugely boost party power if done right. On the other hand, adding new healing spells to L2 White Magic would hugely increase party power pretty much no matter how good they were because that spell level has no healing right now.
4. Try to make the classes comparable to one another keeping in mind the current progression of equipment.
5. Think about class power in all game phases. BlackBelts are useless in early game and overpowered in extreme late game. You can use that as a balancing mechanism if you want but keep it in mind. I personally don't much like 'sucks early, OP late' or the reverse as a balancing mechanism but some people don't mind it.
6. Use exact game mechanics if you know them, if not just be as specific as you can.
7. Remember that balance does not mean everything is the same - it is just fine for some choices to be good in some circumstances but not others. Having lots of casters is good for huge packs of undead, having lots of melee is good for magic resistant monsters. What I want to avoid is choices that are always bad in all situations.
8. Send your document to me at orangecape@gmail.com or just include the changes in the text of the email.
9. http://www.gamefaqs.com/nes/522595-final-fantasy/faqs/57009 and http://www.ffnemesis.com/ff1/magic/ have useful information and formulas.
I will post the entries and my thoughts on them on tuesday next week. Have fun!
1. Irreversible
2. Not easily testable or obvious from a numbers/game advantage point of view
3. Not matching the intuitive roleplaying (RP) sense that players have
being very impactful towards overall party power. For example, taking a party that has no healing magic is going to have some significant disadvantages but because that is easy to test at any point in the game, obvious and matches the RP intuition players have I don't have a problem with it. The same is not true of thieves since there is an assumption that thieves, being a character class, are probably good for something and that assumption fails. It is not easy to test this out because you need to play through most or all of the game to understand how good the class is going to be and it isn't obvious to the player because most of the mechanics that make thieves bad aren't listed anywhere.
What it boils down to is I consider a game poorly constructed if someone with no previous knowledge can sit down, look at descriptions of things and make decisions based on common knowledge and those decisions will often be extremely stupid. Note that it is okay if those decisions are stupid if the player can test them and change them relatively easily - in WOW if you want to test out a character spec or particular talent you can do so and then change your mind if it turns out to not be as good as you thought initially. In FF1 some decisions are like that in that you can buy a spell, discover it is terrible, and then buy another. You can try putting your White Mage in the front line and after watching them die you try a Fighter instead and notice that it works much better that way. Choosing class composition for your party is not something you can change or easily test so it needs to be much more balanced and robust so that making really stupid decisions is obvious without extensive testing. A veteran who has completed the game 50 times isn't much inconvenienced by game balance like the Fighter/Thief but a new player really would be. I like having lots of interesting choices as long as testing or changing those choices don't require sinking another 50 hours into the game.
I want to have a little contest. Specifically I want to see what other people would do to balance FF1. The main points:
1. Don't bother with bugs. Assume the bugs in the game are fixed (there are many) and work from there.
2. Try to be succinct. The smaller your list of changes (while still accomplishing the same end!) the better.
3. Try to increase choice without increasing power. For example, the Fog spell is terrible and I never cast it. Making Fog give enough of an absorb bonus that you regularly but not always use it in combat is a good change - it is still decreasing damage taken but won't hugely boost party power if done right. On the other hand, adding new healing spells to L2 White Magic would hugely increase party power pretty much no matter how good they were because that spell level has no healing right now.
4. Try to make the classes comparable to one another keeping in mind the current progression of equipment.
5. Think about class power in all game phases. BlackBelts are useless in early game and overpowered in extreme late game. You can use that as a balancing mechanism if you want but keep it in mind. I personally don't much like 'sucks early, OP late' or the reverse as a balancing mechanism but some people don't mind it.
6. Use exact game mechanics if you know them, if not just be as specific as you can.
7. Remember that balance does not mean everything is the same - it is just fine for some choices to be good in some circumstances but not others. Having lots of casters is good for huge packs of undead, having lots of melee is good for magic resistant monsters. What I want to avoid is choices that are always bad in all situations.
8. Send your document to me at orangecape@gmail.com or just include the changes in the text of the email.
9. http://www.gamefaqs.com/nes/522595-final-fantasy/faqs/57009 and http://www.ffnemesis.com/ff1/magic/ have useful information and formulas.
I will post the entries and my thoughts on them on tuesday next week. Have fun!
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
When is it okay to be bad?
I have been inspired by Ziggyny's Final Fantasy experiment and downloaded a NES emulator and FF1 so that I can replay and relive Final Fantasy 1. This game holds a very dear place in my heart as the first and probably most beloved of all the RPG single player games I have ever tried. I remember the trouble this game got my brother and I into as we both wanted to play but the cartridge could hold only a single saved game - I accidentally saved over my brother's game once when he was halfway through and the crying and apologies that followed that little incident were legendary. Thankfully I don't have to play it on the original NES system though and can play on an emulator where I can speed up the action when things get tedious and save at any point instead of only in towns.Ziggyny is a lot more hardcore than me about going back to FF1. He is playing a party of a single thief, which is certainly a trying and painful endeavour. Thieves are by far the worst class in FF1 for a variety of reasons. First, their special ability is running away from fights which is both bugged such that it doesn't work properly and is very weak even if it does work. Being able to run away is fine and all but eventually you have to fight some really hard monsters and at that point you really need to be powerful rather than fleet of foot. Unsurprisingly the parties that are powerful and can beat the hard bosses are also powerful enough to just beat all the random encounters too. This leaves the thief as a good character when you have no plans to do anything of note and since adventurers in fantasy games have a tendency to do things that are important thieves have no value. A single thief is much, much more challenging than a single fighter because thieves are useless and fighters are seriously overpowered. In one particular encounter (Astos the dark elf) Ziggyny is looking at getting his thief up to level 26 to have a real shot at winning and might not be able to do it until level 28. I went in with my solo warrior at level 12 and smashed Astos easily on my first try. It is even more ridiculous when you learn that Ziggyny needs 270,000 XP to get to level 28 and I needed 20,000 to get to level 12, most of which I got just by playing the game up to that point. He, on the other hand, needs to kill monsters over and over for ~25 hours just to have a chance.
So thieves are terrible and warriors are overpowered. Question is, does this make the game bad? I think that in general having a particular choice be really bad (or really good) isn't a problem given a few conditions.
1. There must be a variety of reasonable choices.
2. These choices must not make player vs. player play extremely narrow
3. The choice must be something that can be unmade.
FF1 fails on 1 and 3 and since there is no PvP it can't fail on 2. I think 3. is the most powerful argument against having really drastic power differences between various characters. The game takes a long time to play and you can't change which characters are in your group after you first begin. If you started a group with several fighters you would almost certainly find the game not that rough whereas if you started with several thieves you would find it extremely brutal and it would necessitate a lot of boring grinding. An example of where having serious power differences is okay is a fighting game like Street Fighter. There are lots of reasonably balanced choices with different styles and you aren't bound to any one choice for any length of time so having a character or two that absolutely sucks is no problem. The player can try them, discard them, or continue to play them just for kicks but they never need feel like they made an uninformed choice that made the game overly hard or long, nor a choice that made the game trivial.
In any game where PvP is a large component it is necessary to have many comparable options. They need not be identical but they all have to be competitive. Rock/paper/scissors matchups are one way to achieve this but there are many others. In those situations it is fine to have a few bad options but it is terrible to have a few overpowered options since those will be the only ones anyone plays, reducing the real choice players have substantially. In a game without PvP having one particularly powerful choice still seems poor but it restricts player choice a lot less since many people will still choose a suboptimal route to experiment. As long as many routes can be taken that succeed in defeating the game things are never too bad. If there were only 3 classes in FF1 then having 1 bad, 1 good, 1 medium would be a disaster. The only variety would be in how easy the game is. If there were 15 classes then having 1 bad option would give the choice of a 'hard mode' while still leaving a huge variety of good choices. 6 classes, which is what FF1 has, seems like it is on the cusp between 'few' and 'many'. I think the game would have been a lot better if the fighter were substantially nerfed and the thief substantially buffed but it isn't a catastrophe. After all, the game *was* a hell of a lot of fun.
My proposals to level the playing field between classes:
Thief: 4% hit/level instead of 2. Base %hit=15 instead of 5.
Fighter: 2% hit/level instead of 3. Base %hit=7 instead of 10.
Fighter: Base Str = 10 (was 20), Luck = 10(was 5), Int = 5(was 1)
There are a million and one other game alterations I would make to smooth things out even more but these would at least make the Thief a very heavy hitter and make the Fighter much wimpier in terms of damage output. Doing this would actually have the Fighter fill the role of the tank who has a ton of HP and armour but doesn't hit very hard and would have the Thief fill the role of high damage dealer who is fairly weak on defense. You would still certainly want a Fighter in the ideal party as the front line damage soaker but you wouldn't also want tons of them in the back row because they hit harder than anyone else too. :)
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