Are random encounters a relic of the past or do they have their uses in certain situations?
I like then
>>726272718Mostly a relic. It's just not all that fun
Skyrim uses random encounters and they work great.
>>726272718always hated them, even back thenall games with these kinds of encounters need like 20 different battle themes for different enemy types1 is not enough and you'll end up hating the song by the end of the game
never, they're great. maybe not the walk and instant combat kind, but randomly generating encounters I don't think will ever go out.
>>726272718They suck. It's crazy games like Earthbound already solved them, yet a lot RPGs still lagged behind.
don't all arpgs basically randomly generate encounters still?
>>726273210People don't complain about this enough.
having enemies appear out of thin air looks like shit and is annoying
having enemies appear out of thin air is fun and makes the world feel perilous
Random encounters make hostile areas more perilous. You can't manipulate pathfinding and spawns to get around them, every step is a ticking timer towards your next battle. The only way to avoid them is with repel items and spells but those still have limits.
>>726272718The problem is that they force you into doing something different from what you were currently focusing on. A lot of games that lack random encounters have much higher encounter rates, but you probably don't notice it much even if you can't avoid them. You now know exactly when it will happen, so it's far less annoying. But random encounters still have merit for the same reason they're annoying. They raise tensions, and bolster the importance of resource management because they're almost totally unavoidable. Basically I don't think they're inherently good or bad. It's just a mechanic that can be utilized for a particular effect. But it also happens to be one that a casual player is almost certainly going to hate.
>>726272718nothing inherently wrong with it, mostly gets a bad reputation because people hate getting attrited for trying to explore or having to mash through easy enemies to get back to playing the game
It's good because it gives exploring an area tension. With random encounters you have to gamble on how far you can press into a dungeon because you have to fight enemies on the way back to safety and you don't know how many or how strong. When you can see the enemies they typically disappear and don't attack you again on the way back.
>>726272718Just make them visible
If you don't like them, just go read a VN or play an action adventure instead?Combat needs to be unavoidable, resources need to be limited and managed. All the alternatives that ditch this to make things easier for people are not worth the tradeoffs, the game suffers overall.>>726273932someone gets it.
i like how they work in fallout 1
>>726274780Etrian Odyssey does this with a color changing circle. That really alleviates the problem while not getting rid of the system altogether.
>>726273456earthbound, mother3 and chrono trigger have the best enemy encounter and rpg battle systems
>>726272718Only time they suck is when the encounter rate is too damn high. Like, in Pokemon, the only time people complained about the random encounters is in the caves where you're essentially forced to walk in the grass every step.
>>726272718>my friends are horny, surrender your body to themHow do you respond without sounding mad?
>>726272718having smaller battles with multiple enemies is a completely different challenge than a boss fight, and overall they're an important part of the game's pacing. Strictly being random isn't what's important about them, but they shouldn't be completely avoidable either.
more like random UNCounters
>>726272718Pointless in games where you have easy access to to HP/MP recovery, otherwise it works as a way to make going from point A to B a battle of attrition.
>>726275104That would disallow the use of fun things like spiked tiles.
>>726272718The problem is mostly that modern games are so stupidly easy random encounters just turn into pointless wastes of time instead of actually dangerous or resource-consuming threats.
>>726272718Truly random is only tolerable if the run option is 100% effective.The many variants with the encounters being visible beforehand in some way is fine.
>>726278149they just have enemies pop out when you interact with certain objects for the same effect
>>726278420That's not the same.
>>726272718What’s the advantage of a four fighters in a row start?
>>726278736sword strong therefore 4 sword stronger
>>726278736Nevermind, just noticed the red mage at the bottom.Still, why three fighters?
>>726278769Okay.
>>726278792excalibur, masamune, uhhhh, sun sword?
>>726272718If the game has quick transition screens and you can run quickly I don't mind it. I've had more moments raging in Paper Mario bumping into fodder and waiting like 15 seconds before I can even use the RUN command which also takes several seconds to execute compared to FF1 on GBA or FF7 on PS1 taking a handful of seconds or >10 seconds.
>>726278736>>726278853The real answer is people play FF1 in tons of different silly ways. Whether it's good or not is largely irrelevant.
>>726278736Fighter is the best class by far, doubling up on them at least is smart (but kinda boring).
>>726273210>>726273617Outside of the main bosses the best your going to get is one song for the first half of the game, one song for the second half, one random miniboss getting its own song, and is your lucky a comedic fight theme.
>>726272718They're pretty nice to me and work as an abstraction of running into enemies in the world as you travel. For 3D games I think they feel a little weird unless they make an actual proper attempt to chase you down and thus aren't really random. But for 2D stuff like FF, or DQ, or Wizardry they're great (Granted I know Wizardry tends to put most of its encounters behind opening doors but still). >>726273210I do agree that multiple battle themes always kicks ass and wish more games did it. Older games only having a few due to limitations is understandable but even newish portable stuff like Etrian Odyssey has at least a few different battle themes depending on what stratum you're on, so when games don't do that now I think it's a little lazy. >>726278934This is the biggest thing when it comes to any RPG imo. Don't make animations take forever, make stuff quick and snappy.
>>726272718They work is a core aspect of the gameplay is long term resource management, like the kind of games where the boss is less the primary issue in the dungeon and more something to put you out of your misery if you limped along through the area unprepared.
>>726272718>relic of the pastthey will always be present in (good) jrps
>>726272718oh boy more shitty rpg threads. just flood the catalogue with as many as possible. definitely not intentional
>>726279401>discussing a genre of video games on the video game board is a grand conspiracy
>>726278986It's not like taking another class is going to increase the depth of your choices. You're mostly either spamming Attack or equipment.
>>726272718All what the turn based JRPG genre needs is speed up buttons that would take all that tedium away. These games always should have had this.
>>726280068The new octopath has that
>>726279842>It's not like taking another class is going to increase the depth of your choices. You're mostly either spamming Attack or equipment.True
>>726278736>What’s the advantage of a four fighters in a row start?BALSTOTHEWALL
Good to keep you prepared. But they are annoying.Also battle music is a bad thing. Planet Alcatraz had beautiful music that was ruined and returned to start by battle music.Could keep prepared by random depletion of health, instead of the time wasting battle.As well as health cost to move, look at distance by looking out or at map and guess how much health/energy/fuel you need to get there in excess.Play Sunless Sea.
>>726278736BALSTOTHEWALLHas its perks since warrriors>knights have the most consistent single target DPS in the game.The way the game's math work is that your attack values are include both your core stats and the stats of the weapon you're using on top of other variations like innate crit rates and attack number.Technically Black Belt>Master has the best DPS due to the much higher crit rates and attack numbers, but this doesn't really happen until late in the game because Black Belt doesn't want to have weapons equipped to beat shit, that means you're working with one less multiplier and at low levels it means you're less powerful than Warrior, which is why 4 Black Belt does struggle in the Marsh Cave but 4 Warrior doesn't, because the latter can use their weapon value multipliers to breach through the defense of gels and piscodemons while black belts are cucked into doing no damage until they reach level 9-11 which is a really painful grind.Warrior simply has the best physical attack average and the best defense breach which makes four warrior exceedingly efficient throughout the entire game despite not having gear to properly minmax all of them (Only one excalibur and masamune and all that), technically 4 black belt is the more hardcore BALS TO THE WALL since you don't even have white magic from your advanced class, but you don't really see the power spike until very late in the game and the run is grindier and slightly more inconsistent than 4 Warrior.Single Target raw damage is king in FF1 because most enemies have very low HP but due to how magic works AoE is not super powerful outside of instakills like Quake, raw damage is just more reliable at all points and especially against bosses, which is something spellcasters have issues with, FF1 in general is much more martial friendly in all its versions.
>>726281479>due to how magic works AoE is not super powerful outside of instakills like QuakeCould you elaborate on that? I'm curious.
>>726272718they are important, fun, and addictive. Grinding against mooks is part of the appeal of jrpgs. They add a sense of tension when exploring dungeons and they let you try out your abilities and strategies on lesser enemies. They make games better.
>>726281765Simply put, magic in FF1 originally did not scale with intelligence due to a bug, so the damage was quite low, you were mostly running off the spells' internal multipliers, which are not enough to actually kill most mobs on a cast even if you factor in elemental or racial weaknesses, Dia, Fire 2 and the likes are mildly strong AoE when you get them but scale horribly and become useless very quickly due to the aforementioned issue.Casters have issues dealing raw damage in general which is partly why 4 White Mage is mostly you hammering shit rather than casting spells and 4 Black Mage is all about abusing buffing spells like Saber or instakills like Quake rather than trying to pull off raw damage through spells, of which only Flare is notable but also limited by its spell slots and availability throughout the run.Coupled with the fact that you do have magic items for buffing and healing like the Silver Glove or the various Healing Helms this ends up in martials being the best classes in the game since they have the best firepower AND they can also buff themselves with Haste or heal with Healing Helmet regardless of classes, casters do have those spells by design but their physical attack is low by design so without any mean to have unconditional high raw damage they're forced to rely on gimmicks like again, Quake's instakill to deal with high level mobs and even there you have to hope they're not flying mobs and/or they do not resist death, it's a pretty bad situation.
>>726282217Interesting. Do you know offhand how much of that was fixed in the GBA version? That's the one I played a few years ago and it seemed fine to me. I went with basic Fighter/Thief/WM/BM party rather than get cute with it for a first playthrough.
>>726280068All of the pixel remasters have ways to speed up the battles
>>726282217I'm almost certain I've seen some rebalanced versions of FF1 floating out there; with that in mind are there any romhacks you know of that make casters more powerful? Do they tone down the martial classes a bit? What about later versions of the game like the PSP version? I know on GBA they moved from spell slots to MP which seems a lot easier. >>726282306nta but from what I recall from playing the GBA port myself, mages were only putting out upwards of 500 damage on AOE spells end game so idk if they fixed anything.
>>726282217Everyone assumes magic not scaling is a bug but I really doubt it given FF's inspirations and roots.
>>726282217I never knew it was that bugged damn, I always hated that enemy groups were either 5 fishes weak against Thunder but die from, 1 physcial attack or so mixed that it was pointless to use Thundaga when it was super effective against 2 out of 5 enemies so I just hoarded MP and used basic attacks because regular enemies were so weak anyways. Different case for bosses of course. I think FF2 had damage scaling issues when targeting all enemies with a target all spell, or when fighting 1 enemy and still using the target all variant for extra or lesser damage.
>>726282306GBA works through entirely different mechanics so that's another can of worms I don't really consider since it's not really the original vision for FF1.Spell charges no longer exist and you have MP, the overall balance has been changed considerably with enormously buffed stats player side and enemies being bloated to hell and back to counter it, it's a different game altogether and I don't really like how it works, I'm a bit of a purist you see.In that case mages sort of work as intended but still run into the problem of single target DPS being relegated to Flare and Holy, which is still an issue, the same is true for the PSP version where Chaos can heal himself indefinitely to make you lose the damage race if you can't burst him down fast enough with raw damage, something 4 WM/BM still struggle to achieve.>>726282376I don't play romhacks, so I can't say.>>726282420The D&D roots of the game are there but INT was bugged and that behaviour was not intended, which is why it was eventually fixed in all the versions past WSC/Origins.>>726282468FF2 spells do indeed halve the damage should you use them as AoE, in a way this is still better than FF1 though because FF2 spells scale with both your intelligence and the spell rank, the problem is that the scaling is way too slow to work in their original versions so again, you have a game that favors martials over spellcasters.Ironically, you also still had the same issue of buffs being overpowered even at low spell ranks so full mage parties are still largely about buffing yourself with Blink/Haste/Berserk and wacking shit until the later game versions where spell ranking is much faster, and Ultima is not bugged by design.
>>726282217That isn't a bug, exactly. INT in FF1 simply isn't programmed to do anything, and the game is designed around it not doing anything. It's reasonable to assume it was intended to have an effect at some point in development, but that may or may not have involved increasing damage.>>726282420Yeah, it wouldn't be surprising if it was originally intended to increase spell charges, since that was the main benefit of high INT/WIS in AD&D.
>>726278736>What’s the advantage of a four fighters in a row start?Replayability options.
>>726272718I like the idea that RPGs could do both at once based on where you are in the game, so dungeons and caves might be random encounters, but the overworld has the monsters running around.The only real issue with random encounters is that it never feels balanced, it's often too many spawns, which just makes the game drag. Something I thought was interesting is that NeoQuest on Neopets included a toggle to hunt for more enemies or to sneak and avoid them, which is something I really don't think I've seen in any other RPG.The reason I don't like enemies just running around for you to run into is that a lot of the time it just kinda shits things up, like running past enemies because they're annoying only to end up being underleveled, or having that mechanic where enemies chase you on the overworld and you have to stop and turn around or you'll get ambushed.
>>726273210I like dynamic tracks. Like in FTL, you have an "overworld/exploration" theme that adds additional instruments and changes the tempo during combat. It's the same track but a clever way to make it seem like more are in the game.
>>726286357It might be cool in an RPG with a large roster and your active party is a subset of that roster to assign each character a specific instrument for their musical motif and then construct the soundtrack from the instruments of the characters currently in your party.
>>726272718Random encounters work when you have few consumables so they can make you go back to town to rest and get more.If you can buy 99 HP potions the only reason to go to town is MP.If you can buy 99 HP potions and MP potions it's padding. Like every alternative to random encounters you can remember.
