[Raydeus]

You are not the only one Neesan.

The things I do dislike are blinking and macro unresponsiveness (along with line limitations.) The blinking part can be fixed with the windower plugin, but the macro lag not so much unless you want to type your spells (ewwwww).

[Armando]

If you hate random battles then don't play Suikoden. The encounter rates on those games are so high it's impossible not to be overlevelled in those games .

That's a shame. I remember a friend of mine bought Suikoden III a long time ago and it caught my attention just from the character design (they know how to draw armor?! Gasp!) But the examples you brought up are kinda bad...I mean, those games feature real time combat in the same environments you explore. That's not necessarily the only way to handle a lack of random battles; again, just look at CT or SMRPG, and apparently FFXIII. I put up with random battles if the game is really good, but I still think it's asinine. I recently beat Xenogears and I just had to sigh at such an awesome story wasted on these stupid timesink dungeons.

I must be the only person who loves the gear swapping thing. I like that every piece of equipment I obtain at any given time is going to (typically, there are of course some exceptions) remain useful to me. I also prefer to optimize things. If there were no gearswaps at all in this game, just try to enfeeble Tiamat without ES. Try it.

I'm all for optimization, but there are much better ways to handle it than having the player replace more than half his current equipment for each action that needs to be optimized.

[Aksannyi]

I thought the same way about typing spells, but really with the way spellcast modified it (god only knows how, but love it) it takes very little time to type. All the capitalization and quotation marks of the game's original design make it cumbersome, but typing the way spellcast allows you to made it really quick. I was very fast, unless I misspelled, which only seems to happen on Silena. ("Sielna" is what I would type. Damn dyslexic fingers!)

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Originally Posted by Armando

I know. But I also have a very low opinion of most traditional RPG conventions.

Ugh random battles. Stupidest idea ever to persist. That shit should've died after Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG showed how much funner dungeons can be when you don't get interrupted against your will constantly.

And when you're allowed to see the enemies on the field, you either constantly fight them or constantly avoid them. Constantly engaging them isn't that different from the random encounters themselves with the exception of linking and avoiding them 50% of the time leads to underdeveloped characters and postpones the grind.

Random battles have persisted for this long because if you filled the fields with mobs prior to PS2-era games, it would result in massive slowdown. Yet to have swarms of enemies on-screen at one time, sacrifices have to be made to graphics.

I personally don't care if the battles are random or not, but I know for a fact that seeing them on the field does not make the game more fun unless it allows you to gain some kind of advantage or exploit a weakness. By the same token, high encounter rates are extremely annoying without some means to diminish them

FFXI is one of the few MMOs I've played where mobs detect you by other things besides sight, I'd like to see that expanded on in FFXIV dramatically.

I think there's a lot of things that SMT does as a series that are better than what Final Fantasy does.

Example: SMT has two types of ailments. One type will inflict ailments at random while the other inflicts them 100% of the time.

Example 2: Levelling up means very little if your attacks are resisted. The system forces you to change your strategies constantly for both normal encounters and boss encounters.

Example 3: A "Press Turn" system is better than Haste. Exploiting enemy weaknesses in SMT not only gains you a turn, but forces your enemy to lose a turn. This lessens the damage you take and increases the damage and critical hit rates you deal out. You are rewarded for remembering weaknesses rather than doing the same attacks over and over.

Example 4: Set Skills are better than subjobs. Within certain limits, let me pick skllls from the pool of the ones I've learned and allow me to customize my character that way. While FFXI's job system is very robust, even other FF games allow more freedom for character customization.

[Firewind]

<stpt> and <stal> don't always work. if you hit the macro at the moment they blink it still won't get them. It only gets them while they are still loading clientside.

[Aksannyi]

I never bothered with them. By the time SE got around to doing something about the blinking, I'd already started using spellcast to type names and eliminate the problem entirely.

[Armando]

And when you're allowed to see the enemies on the field, you either constantly fight them or constantly avoid them. Constantly engaging them isn't that different from the random encounters themselves with the exception of linking and avoiding them 50% of the time leads to underdeveloped characters and postpones the grind.

Random battles are just timesinks; fillers between boss battles and plot events. I do not want to be constantly engaging mobs that are dumb as bricks unless it's very lucrative for me to do so. There's a certain amount of battles I'll tolerate over a certain timeframe; beyond that it gets stupid and annoying. And the RPG doesn't necessarily have to be designed in such a way that you need to fight over 50% of the enemies to see in order to not be undepowered. Xenogears throws so many bosses at you (each related to the plot, mind you) at a constant rate, and each drops so much gold and EXP, that you don't really have to fight more than 1/5th of the mobs you encounter unless you actually want to. Levels aren't even that relevant in Super Mario RPG, or Xenogears, because your stats are far more influenced by equipment in the former and most important battles happen in Gears in the latter, whose stats are determined by their parts. I avoid unnecessary battles in Chrono Trigger and always do just fine there as well. Hell, I find the whole notion of grinding to meet a certain level requirement (and by extension, being able to overlevel) irritating.

There are various key differences that you can't ignore either:
A) I can pick WHICH mobs to fight. If a mob is disproportionately hard for what it drops or the EXP it gives, I will NOT fight it unless you make it mandatory like Chrono Trigger or SMRPG does at some points in the dungeon. If a mob annoys the fuck out of me I won't fight it. If a mob inflicts a status ailment for which I have limited cures, I will not fight it. If a mob is much harder to kill without a specific party member in my party, I will not fight it.
B) I don't have to waste my time with transitions to get in and out of combat and failed "run away" attempts if I don't want to fight. I'll just continue to go about my business exploring the dungeon.
C) Dungeon exploring and random battles are almost mutually exclusive. In one system I know when I'll be attacked and by what. In the other I rue every fork in the road I find. No matter which way I pick I'll have to backtrack; if it's a dead end with a treasure box then I still need to go back to the exit. If it's the exit then I still need to go back to check for treasure boxes. And while I'm backtracking I'll be constantly interrupted by even more random battles.
EDIT: D) There are a finite number of mobs per area. In a random battle game I'll get a number of encounters proportionate to the number of steps I take within the area. And once I kill a party of mobs, it stays dead at the very least until I leave the room; in a random battle game I'll just keep getting mobs over and over again.

Random battles have persisted for this long because if you filled the fields with mobs prior to PS2-era games, it would result in massive slowdown. Yet to have swarms of enemies on-screen at one time, sacrifices have to be made to graphics.

Then don't flood the screen with mobs. Chrono Trigger and SMRPG seemed to handle the issue just fine. EDIT: Secret of Mana seemed fine as well. It's not even all that different from, say, having 5 mobs on screen in A Link to the Past.

but I know for a fact that seeing them on the field does not make the game more fun unless it allows you to gain some kind of advantage or exploit a weakness.

Maybe they won't make the game more fun for you, but they sure make it less painful for me.

But I'm also of the opinion that dungeons should be less about finding your way through a maze and more about doing stuff out of combat. Look at SMRPG, it's a platformer out of combat. Paper Mario and the handheld Mario RPGs are also platformers out of combat. If a GBA game can do it, I would wager an SNES game can too, albeit somewhat less pretty. I'd like to have a bit more to do in my dungeons than simply walking and waiting for the next annoying random battle.

[Vyuru]

I'm all for optimization, but there are much better ways to handle it than having the player replace more than half his current equipment for each action that needs to be optimized.

Agreed.

And to a certain extent I want to customize my armor and stuff for the way I play. I may not want to play the way the rest of the community wants to, but I want that choice to be available to me and to be mine to make.

[Firewind]

Originally Posted by Icemage

So many things broken/annoying about this game:

- non-instanced HNMs. Whichever designer at Square-Enix thought it would be a good chuckle to have hundreds of people waiting around in one zone for hours on end to maaaaaybe challenge a monster that might - or might not - appear needs to be shot. And then shot some more. Then dunked in a barrel of tar and feathered. Then drawn and quartered. Death is too good for him. Seriously.

- Utsusemi being either 100% effective or 0% effective against any given attack. Good heaven above, this might not be the most broken mechanic in the game, but when nearly all tanking situations devolve down to "Can it be blinked? Yes? No?", there is a problem.

- Agree with Armando that gear swapping sucks horribly. Why bring only one piece of equipment when you can bring seven or eight for various occasions (Yes I mean YOU elemental staves). Square-Enix should have long since put a 1 minute timer on getting effects from gear, to keep people from cherry picking the best gear for any given instant and swapping it (meanwhile the mages are tearing their hair out trying to target these people who are madly blinking in and out of existence on their screen).

- Way too much level grinding. Way, way too much. Even with all the advancements like level sync and the much kinder/gentler XP curves, it takes an enormous investment in time to get any one job to maximum level (75)... and then there are 17 other jobs. Not to mention those jolly little detours for support jobs and limit breaks.

- Skillchains are broken and nearly useless except in specific instances. Not only are the skillchain combinations too picky (is it so very much to ask to be able to have skillchains available for any combination of weapons at any reasonable level?), but the benefits simply do not merit the effort any longer unless you're tackling things that are way higher level than you are (endgame). And don't even get me started on the absurdity of magic bursting now that hardly anyone does skillchains except at endgame. Almost all newcomers to endgame have to be given a crash course in how to do magic bursts because, instead of 75 levels of training on how to use them, they never ever see them in a standard XP party.

- The crafting economy is broken. The only parts of the economy that function even vaguely correctly are consumables (ammo, food, drinks, ninja tools) because there is a flow of demand that does not suffer diminishing returns. Armor and weapons never degrade/break, so after a while everyone has enough of what they want of a given item, and that item is almost never made again - and in the mean time crafters charge whatever the market will bear until that happens.

Does all of this mean the game is horrible? No - there are a great many awesome things about FFXI. The storylines, the vast amount of content, the encouragement for players to work together built into many of the game mechanics.

But it could do with a lot of changes still, and I can only hope Square-Enix has taken some of these lessons to heart when designing the gameplay for the upcoming FF14.


Icemage

I generally agree with all of the points listed here, especially in regards to utsusemi. I'm surprised I haven't been asked to sub Ninja in a party on WHM yet

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Xenogears, Super Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger are fine games, but I still recall Mario and Xeno having transition screens. Xenogears isn't far removed from the style of many Namco RPGs like Super Robot Taisen which can still have random battles. There are even action RPGs such as the Tales series or Devil Summoner that have random battles. Dragon Quest IX is the first in the series to not have random battles, it seems to be faring just fine, but I don't know if they'd carry that over to the Wii installment.

Regardless of how the battles are presented, the value of those encounters also heavily depends on how the skill system rewards you for seeking out those battles or even exploring.

Persona 3 and 4 have the SMRPG style of field enemies. Strike them to gain the initial turn and same applies if they get the drop on you. But there's still a transition into battles and they occur often. But at the same time, you're constantly rewarded with new skills, gear and Personas to summon for pursing combat and even moreso for taking a gamble with the potential spoils for something better.

If those skills and rewards come too slowly, then any system you can dream up becomes a pain in the ass.

Bioware seems to like to have enemies on the field that only live once. This makes backtractking areas easy, but incredibly dull timesink. It I'm gonna go back through an area to find something, least they could do for a barbarian or a Jedi is have some enemies ready to strike down along the way. I never mind some extra pocket change.

------------------------------------------------------

I agree with Icemage regarding the invincibility of weapons and armor. That design not only makes reselling gear difficult as the game moves forward, but it makes things too easy on the owner of the gear. Armor and weapons should degrade without maitainence. Yes, its annoying. Yes, its a moneysink. But it forces different habits on the player and prevents a weapon from becoming the "one and only" thing you carry into battle.

Could you imagine how much damage you could do to a Samurai's epeen if Haguns could degrade? They wouldn't be sneering down at other weapons then and most of them would not be carrying multiple Haguns.

Plus, it would bring everyone down to the level of RNGs, CORs and NINs. In FFXI, we're supposed to be charitable classes who throw away our money with no compensation whatsoever. That would change fast if everyone had to repair gear and your job tended to take less damage and consume fewer resources than the rest.

And the value of drops would probably see a reasonable increase for this, in addition to the other items made by crafters.

[Armando]

It's not that I'm against battle transitions. I have no problem with having a transition into a fight. The problem is, when I get random battles I don't intend on fighting every few steps, those transitions add up to plenty of lost time and aggravation, and interrupt the dungeon-exploring process even though I'm not doing any fighting. And yes, Xenogears had random battles, it's one of the few things I hold against it - the fact that I didn't have to grind to continue the plot, and the plot moved wonderfully quickly despite how long it was, was almost wasted by the fact that I'm still getting a random battle every few steps, wasting my time. It's an unavoidable, undesirable time sink - unless your plot is too short or your dungeons too uninteresting and you're too lazy to come up with a better way to stretch out my play time. Besides, encounters against even the most fierce enemies lose their luster when the same enemies pops up entirely randomly every 5 minutes at any point of the dungeon.

If Persona 3 and 4 don't have random battles that's all the more reason for me to look into them.


That aside I could totally get behind weapon and armors breaking down and needing repairs, for all the reasons already stated. It never really occurred to me, but it does seem like something that would work wonders for the economy and sort of equalize all jobs in the sense of having to expend money for combat.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Persona 3, 4 and Devil Survivor have no random encounters (though Devil Survivor might trick you into a battle by posing it as a scenario you want to trigger. Only at times though. All battles save for story-based ones are can be retreated from. If there's nothing to gain from the normal battles, youc an leave them. Or you can work for what you need in them and then leave.

Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga have this little pulsing icon in the corner of the screen that more or less lets you know an encounter is incoming. There are items and skills that can stall this for a time, but at least you know the encounters are coming. I noticed the Etrian Odyssey games have that function as well. It kinda conditions you to expect the encounter and makes it feel less annoying.

[Firewind]

Being a White Mage as well as a Corsair I could definitely get behind weapons and equipment degrading over time. Maybe pick up parties will make more effort to keep hate away from me if it means that my Noble's getting too damaged will make my cures weaker and my refresh vanish. On my Corsair 58 I have to pay either 14k per 99 attempts to hit a mob or 150k for 1188 attempts to hit a mob as well as the cost of my weapon and food it would be nice to see other jobs to have to pay an expense to keep their weapons in check considering that DD jobs need only have to pay the price of their weapon and food and that is it.

With random encounters and transitions I do like the system they have on Golden Sun and Pokemon where spells and items can be used to skip battles so backtracking through areas full of mobs that are so low level compared to you they should really just lay down and die as soon as you look at them funny.

Persona 3 had a very good system in this regard. Monsters would attack you if you were at a lower level than them but as soon as you get enough levels on them to overpower them they will actively try to flee you. Needless to say it made traversing lower floors of the Tartarus as well as farming chests for loot much easier. Persona 4's didn't have the fleeing but the size of the monster in the screen would vary in size depending it's level compared to the party's so they were fairly easy to just sidestep and would give up chasing you after a few seconds.

[Aksannyi]

Originally Posted by Firewind

Maybe pick up parties will make more effort to keep hate away from me if it means that my Noble's getting too damaged will make my cures weaker and my refresh vanish.

They won't care. They care only about themselves, and the gil they'll have to spend to fix their own shit.

Also, trust me, no one realizes how important some WHM gear actually is. In salvage I was begging for body piece one time, and when asked why, I told them that an extra 12% Cure potency is incredible for MP efficiency, which will allow us to slow down less. I also bugged for weapon and earrings (Templar, Roundel) for the same reason. They just don't get it. Same as they QQ to see a sucky WS go off, I QQ to see a Cure III for under 200.

[Firewind]

You're talking to someone who QQ's every time they are beaten to a cure by a RDM on someone so a Cure V only does 200