On Wed, 31 May 2000, Pablo Vasques Bravo-Villalba wrote:
> Maybe the engine could
> support some characters *without* sprites as
> well. This way we could enable visible and
> invisible enemies in the same game. :)
That would be a more elegant solution. It should be simple to make, as a
special kind of animation routine.
> But sometimes
> a stronger character could want to fight some
> weak enemies to build up experience easily.
I usually prefer to take on a few hard enemies to gain XP to defeating many
easy enemies.
By the way: Dragon Slayer 6 has some nice "jokes" with strong and weak
enemies. For example the owls in the cave: at first, you can't possibly
beat them, but then you get the great weapons and they're easy, later you
lose those weapons and they're hard again.
At another point in the game, you fight enemies with a group of 4. Once
they become easy, one of the characters leaves the group and the same
monsters are suddenly hard again.
> In game design time, we could devise some
> magic item (or its counterpart, in case of
> some different setting) which allowed the
> player to avoid encounters with weak enemies
> (say, 10 levels below the player).
FF7 contains such items. But there are some problems with the
implementation:
- you only get them once you're already quite far in the game
- it doesn't influence the chances much, unless the items become a high
level (in FF7, the magic spheres called "materia" gain XP)
- the item that scares off enemies gains little XP... (because it only
gets XP in fights, how ironic)
> Yes, it looks like monsters appear by
> spontaneus generation. `:))) However,
> every Final Fantasy has some "devices"
> which use this as a gameplay feature;
> when you get a chocobo, for example.
FF7 chocobo avoids enemies on the map, just like the helicopter/spaceship.
But it doesn't work inside towns and other non-map areas.
> Four options:
> 1. No way; the characters must always fight! (not very good)
Agreed: it's boring.
> 2. Characters never fight with weaker enemies
It is sometimes nice to see enemies that were hard to beat before and
notice how much power you've gained since then. So I think this option is
not the best solution.
> 3. Characters don't fight with weaker if in possession of some item
Works well, but it may be hard to integrate such an item nicely with the
setting. It shouldn't immediately strike the player as a "fix to the
system". In a magical world, it's easy to explain (you don't really need to
explain). In SF, it would be harder. If you have an item that transmits EM
signals to scare off enemy robots, it would also disrupt the player's
gadgets. Or if it is harmful to organic tissue, the player character may be
affected (if he's organic, ofcourse...).
> 4. Stronger characters are less likely to encounter weaker enemies
I like this approach. Because chances are used, the player will be
surprised from time to time. But random encounters with weaker enemies
won't waste much time compared to option 1, because they are less frequent.
> In Ultima, for example, you can escape almostany enemy if you want to,
> unless it's much stronger than you.
In Ultima V (I never played the others extensively) that was true, but if
there were many enemies in a screen, it would still take a long time to
escape. Same in FF7: escaping is possible, but slow.
Speaking of Ultima V, it's a type of battle we didn't discuss yet. It does
have a separate battle screen, but it's not face-to-face with the enemy as
in SD/DS6/PA3. The battle screen is a map, just like the normal map, but
smaller scale. The battle happens turn-based. You can use range weapons
effectively (make sure you can hit the enemy, but the enemy can't hit you,
or at least has lost some HP before he reaches you). You can also place
your characters strategically, taking advantage of the map layout, having
strong characters protect the weaker etc.
In Ultima V, in game mode you see only one character, but in battle mode
you see every character in your group. In Ultima VI they changed this: they
integrated the battle mode with the map. You would always see all
characters in the group. This was a bad idea: you could walk into a battle
without noticing it, you could lose track of characters because they got
stuck behind some wall or tree group etc.
Bye,
Maarten
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