How To Make RPG Combat More Interesting

i consider myself a fan of rpgs i've played all the big ones from final fantasy to fallout and from advanced dungeons and dragons to xenoblade chronicles and even a few underappreciated gems that no one's ever heard of like pokemon i love rpgs because they've got epic stories fantastically realized worlds and really nuanced systems and mechanics to get my teeth stuck into and i suspect i'm not alone here why is it then that despite my love of rpgs i've only actually finished maybe 20 of the ones i've played and that's been pretty generous i only just finished final fantasy vii and that was after about four years of on and off playing it what's more i like most of the rpgs i've dropped i've just not had the energy to go back to them leaving countless battles on one and countless stories unfinished why is this well i think it has to do with how rpgs handle combat basically every rpg whether eastern or western turn-based or real-time when you get right down to it it's oriented around combat leveling up stats more often than not only improves your combat ability going on grand quests rewards you with items that make you better in a scrap and even important narrative milestones in rpgs are more often than not marked with big boss fights rpgs have been this way since wizardry and ultima kick-started things back in 81 and even before that with dungeons and dragons which was itself a mod for the incredibly dull war game chainmail if you ask me it's exactly this focus on fighting that makes designing a fun combat system for an rpg much harder than for almost any other kind of game because role-playing games typically need much longer play times to let their complex stories and systems flourish their combat has got to keep the player engaged for that much longer often resulting in there not being enough strategic depth or interesting mechanics to go around not only that owing to the fact that rpgs are so structured around fighting when their combat system starts to lose players interest and trust it's much harder to get them back think about all the classic examples of rpgs having frustrating combat whether it's the obligatory zubat genocide whenever you have to enter a cave in pokemon boring slugfests against bandits in skyrim or the necessity of grinding boring fights in final fantasy just to get high enough level to see the next bit of story each of these games starts out with very enjoyable combat mechanics the problem is that they can't sustain themselves over long periods of time so at the risk of biting off more than i can chew what's the antidote to rpgs running out of steam how can we make rpg combat systems that remain interesting after tens of hours and after hundreds of battles well i think a good place to start is to break down your average rpg fight into its three fundamental components and analyze how we can streamline and tune up each one why don't i tell you what they are tool sets which is to say the actions you can take in a fight encounters or how you interact with the baddies you'll be duking out with and layers which is the systems that affect your play beyond a single battle see it it spells out tell i spent like an hour trying to make it spell rpg and briefly ass but i gave it up so have this infinitely less funny version instead let's start with that first one toolsets your suite of abilities and options in an rpg is crucial to get right because they inform the scope of your actions when dealing with enemies if your means of fighting aren't interesting then players will get bored of them long before the end of the game like i did in these spam-tacular borderlands but equally if combat is too complex then most players will get scared off before they've really understood how it works something that happened to me as i tried and failed to get my head around disgaea's insane stacking fusing using cats as guns in a battle system you might not expect it but both of the mario rpg franchises that being paper mario when mario and luigi manage to find a great balance between accessibility for new players and depth that satisfies rpg veterans let's look at your two basic attack options in both games the jump and the hammer jumping attacks hit twice meaning that you can really make the most of attack boosts and can also strike flying enemies whilst hammer attacks deal their damage in a single strike making them much more effective at punching through armor and dealing with spiny foes many rpgs have a single generic attack ability as your d4 move but more often than not when players are given a free reliable source of damage it quickly becomes all they use if they can get away with it the fact that mario doesn't have a universally applicable default attack option means that you have to think about how to most efficiently win every engagement taking into account stuff like piders changing their altitude and being able to knock normally defensive koopa troopers into a vulnerable state using a head bounce the mario rpg's action commands and stylish moves also help to keep battles engaging pressing buttons at the right time allows you to gain bonus effects mitigate damage and in the mario and luigi games even counter attack rewarding players looking to play efficiently with an extra challenge to keep them occupied action commands do still need to be paired with a strong toolkit as otherwise they can just add needless padding in yik the post-modern rpg you do stuff like spin records or take photos to do damage but it's unclear how much this actually helps and it takes ages as well bogging down already lengthy fights without really adding much by making even the basic components of a toolset more interesting rpgs can avoid situations where spamming a single move over and over is all that's needed to win i think a game that fixes this problem brilliantly is divinity original sin and its sequel nearly all of your moves interact in some way with the spectrum of elemental effects that dominate the battlefield and they all feed into each other organically firing a sticky boulder makes oil on the floor which can then be ignited by a fire attack which can be extinguished with water creating vision obscuring steam by learning to manipulate these elemental effects to your advantage you can output way more damage than you ever could through weapons alone and you'll need to master them to beat quests like this one where you've got to protect a guy who seems intent on setting the whole god damn level on fire then walking into the blaze like an idiot action rpgs can apply many of the same principles to their tour sets as well shunks backslash and slit engines xenoblade chronicles require you to hit enemies for particular directions and powerful mekon enemies can only be heard via the use of limited monado arts or by knocking them over through the tactical use of status effects turning combat into a fast-paced dance of positioning and skill cooldowns right from the outset of course your abilities don't mean anything if you're using them against boring enemies many rpgs are legendary for having dungeons filled to the brim with easy fights that take ages and that you barely need to think about in order to plow through not only are these fights boring but they leave players critically underprepared for when their skills actually need to be tested one of the most important things that great devs keep in mind when designing regular battles is to remember that they aren't just roblox or pinatas full of experience points normal enemies exist to set the pacing and tone of an area and offer small more contained challenges than the more dramatic rules changes you'd find in boss fights chrono trigger is a master class in doing just that instead of chrono triggers areas being packed with a bunch of filler random encounters they instead feature just a handful of tailor-made fights calibrated to the terrain and rising tension of a quest rather than trying to grind players down through attrition chrono trigger can instead use its smaller number of handmade encounters to create specific challenges like this sentry turret that shoots lasers at rats inadvertently hitting your party members or the shield enemies that play against your impatience to escape the prison by only being vulnerable at certain times this helps to give each area its own distinct feel and keeps the momentum of the story going where it would normally slow to a crawl in addition any one of chrono triggers fights is usually over in less than a minute there's no transition into a separate battle screen enemies go down in a couple of hits and their animations are usually quick and punchy giving dungeon crawls a great sense of momentum that it [Music] there isn't constantly interrupting that isn't constantly interrupted by random battles making quick fights could be great for ensuring players don't lose interest in the short term but if they're too easy then the root of the problem still hasn't been fixed a small number of appropriately challenging enemies can keep players on their toes without exhausting them too much star renegades a rogue-like rpg leverages the traditional difficulty of a roguelike into making its battles fun enough that you won't mind repeating them in star renegades even basic enemies are more than capable of taking off half your hit points or inflicting some sort of horrible status condition this means making difficult choices between which attacks you're okay taking in the face and which enemies need to be prioritized and killed before they can drain all your shields or set you on fire resulting in skirmishes that play out like life or death puzzles just as much as they do fights indivisible works much the same way a good attack from an enemy has the potential to instantly ko a more fragile party member and foes will easily win a straight up damage race against most compositions this pushes players into fighting a little bit smarter and engaging with the most interesting parts of the game that being using actions to build up resources like dahar's earth and fury before unleashing mega combo attacks using all four party members the stun lock baddies and prevent them from attacking however indivisible runs into a classic trap here its enemies might be hard but they all have weaknesses to particular moves meaning you just use whatever kind of attack breaks their guard then spend the rest of your actions going to combo town every single time giving bani specific weaknesses and resistances could be a great way to encourage a diversity of strategies but because players are just as lazy as they are clever this can often lead to encounters with only a single obvious solution in the outer worlds there's pretty much no reason to use anything but shock damage against robots and the same goes for plasma against wild animals because enemy types rarely mix it means when you're going to do a quest that involves fighting robots shock damage is pretty much all you'll ever need rendering the rest of your kit obsolete the solution to this is to mix things up and design encounters around enemies that can't all be answered with the same strategy for example in final fantasy xv powerful imperial robots are weak to lightning damage just like they are in outer worlds however they're often supported by weaker troopers which actually resist lightning damage so not only do you have to weigh up going after the big chunky robots or their ranged damage dealer helpers but you've also got to switch up your weapons and tactics to deal with each kind of enemy effectively the thing is though with only small scale fights to work with there's only so much complexity developers can add before players are spending more time navigating menus than they are actually playing which is never a good thing that's why sometimes the best way to add depth and replayability to an rpg is to instead zoom out from individual battles and expand what players get up to outside of them in other words to add additional layers to the game fire emblem is probably the earliest innovator in this department adding a tactical layer to traditional rpg mechanics the beauty of fire emblem is that its combat mechanics are dead simple but because you're commanding 12 or so characters at a time each with different movement ranges strengths and weaknesses battles can take on a much more strategic element as you're forced to contend with winning lengthy missions rather than individual battles in addition permadeath encourages investing into a few powerful characters leading to interesting choices as to which ones will end up being force-fed experience points and which characters will sit on the bench forever for the king does the same sort of thing except it simulates an entire game world that each character has to run around in between getting into scraps in for the king not only do you have to concentrate on gearing up and fighting monsters like in any other rpg but you also have to manage moving between fights efficiently and keeping tabs on the rising forces of chaos springing up around the map testing both your logistical skills as well as your tactical ones wasting time on the board means that enemies will get tougher but powering ahead into dungeons while your teammates are off killing bunk skellies is more often than not going to result in losing one of your precious lives adding long-term strategic consequences and decisions to bowels can help tie them together and make them feel like a single contiguous narrative rather than isolated episodes whilst leveling up characters can do this to some extent it's pretty hard to relate to numbers alone this is why pokemon encourages you to catch them all why path of exile makes you fill out that big scary skill tree and why games like darkest dungeon instead love giving characters randomly generated traumas in double d characters begin as blank slates but slowly develop a personality through the quirks they acquire chomps that accidentally get trapped in an iron maiden might become claustrophobic others might be compulsive thieves and all of these little statuses are accompanied with their own small dialogue snippets and in-battle consequences really helping the otherwise anonymous characters establish a memorable identity that you can get attached to as you play making their inevitable deaths that much more gut-wrenching branching narrative paths morality and reputation systems pioneered by western crpgs around the same time japan was getting really into strategy have the same effect of tying gameplay and narrative together because for many people the main draw of an rpg is the story they might not want to focus too much on the fighting but when bashing goblins has knock-on narrative consequences and when your choices in the story determine how powerful your characters are players can suddenly become invested in both regardless of their initial preference many games of the fallout or planescape tournament persuasion can even determine which characters get added to your party through your narrative actions changing not just which enemies you fight but how you fight them boon the sniper in fallout new vegas hates caesar's legion and once you've proven that you do too he gives you a special perk that highlights enemies when you zoom in this is incredibly useful for sneaking up on camps full of legion guys with long range weapons because they typically fight in melee and have good armor that needs a sniper to punch through it neatly tying together different layers of gameplay evocative enemy design and simple but nuanced abilities by combining all three of these ideas developers can make combat systems compelling enough to last through 100 hour campaigns even if their nuts and bolts suck like in fallout new vegas by focusing on making combat more satisfying more interesting and with greater scope the rpg is continuing to evolve the final fantasy 7 remake takes the epic masterpiece that is the original and gives the combat a much needed overhaul to make it less for slog without losing the cinematic feel random encounters which originated as a result of hardware limitations are slowly but surely slipping into the dumpster of history where they belong and terrible old-school morality systems ripped straight from d d are being phased out and replaced with much more nuanced player choice and narrative consequences so why is it then that i've played about 60 hours of divinity originals in 2 about 40 of final fantasy xv and apparently over 300 of fallout new vegas and i've still not completed any of them why it's clear from how much i genuinely like the combat in all of these games yes even you follow new vegas rpgs have more ways to evolve than just modernizing the ways they handle fighting rpg shouldn't feel constrained by the need to have 40 hour stories or having combat at all barkley shut up and jab gaiden the shadowrun rpgs and south park the stick of truth all clock in under 10 hours meaning that all of their great writing is nicely condensed into an easily digestible package and the pretty straightforward fighting never outstays its welcome similarly great games like persona 5 or near automata are free to really let their narrative breathe and tell their story slowly because they know their combat is good enough to carry it some newer rpgs don't have any combat and they're stronger for it disco elysium my favorite game of last year does exactly this cutting out combat to zero in on the internal struggle of its main character by using a fresh perspective on leveling up and growing stronger to represent your character forming an identity and ideological framework for himself disco elysium tells a completely different kind of story within a tradition that's been around for decades and this is only possible without the distraction of worrying about dps mana or whether to spec kim into healing or whether to use his sas abilities to turn him into an emotional damage dealer combat in role-playing games can be the focus of an experience designed around rich and satisfying tactics but that doesn't mean you also have to include a story about teenagers killing god an rpg with a globetrotting tale of adventure at its core doesn't always need a legion of gobbos to kill all the way and of course it's perfectly fine to balance the two into a package that rewards thinking deeply about combat and narrative so long as you ensure that one never drags the other down the classic style of rpg isn't going anywhere but i think it could stand to be modernized and innovated upon too maybe then i could actually finish one but i think we can all agree that the one rpg trope that should stick around forever is the grand tradition of that one weirdly hyper sexualized character whether it's miranda remorrigan queens of the dany and mummy issues respectively from the bioware golden age camilla from fire emblem fates who constantly goes on about how she wants to bang her sibling madame flurry from the thousand-year door who's some sort of sexy clown lady and of course sexy lady cloud from final fantasy vii and if i'm being honest sexy boy cloud as well uh sorry what was i talking about i just i got a bit distracted hello and welcome back i took a bit of a break after the frog fractions video to recharge because i knew this was going to be a long one and it turns out i was right i also lost a bunch of my footage so that's why most of the stuff you can see from these games is from near the start but i'm gonna say that's me trying to avoid spoilers if you'd like to check out someone who isn't me and is also one of the cleverest minds in the talking about video games on youtube space then please check out noah caldwell gervais all of his videos are just wall-to-wall awesome analysis delivered in a way that's simultaneously rambling as hell yet also super engaging i highly recommend his stuff on doom and kentucky root zero in particular but if you'd like to support more of me then please do chuck me some money on patreon if you give me even one dollar for one month you have my perpetual permission to use adblock on the channel because you'll be worth more money to me that way and who likes ads nobody except like advertising executives i think if you give me 10 a month however you'll get to join the illustrious club of my top tier mysterious benefactors who are alex delaunch andrew lebrano assaran ausa kav baxter heel big chess bodhi bran lab briana toriani chill constantine punkt daniel metchez david sester dirk jan karen beld eugene bulkin evie philip magnus gaskell george sears greta harrison items to astound on dm's guild jacob dylan riddle joey bruno jordan gear joshua binswanger janos vaquete kai gillespie lee berman lucas slack lunar eagle 1996 mace window 54 max philippov nwdd patrick romberg filled with the movie regal rejects ray's dad samuel vanderplatz sheldon hearn simon jacobson steve reilly strategier and ultima hueritos and chao thank you all for watching uh i need to find some way of shortening down that list because it takes [ __ ] forever uh i will see you around in the next video bye

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 431,371

Rating: 4.8724656 out of 5

Keywords: Games, Video Games, Gaming, PC Gaming, Adam, Adam Millard, Architect, AoG, Architect of Games, Review, Analysis, Game Design, RPG, Role Playing Games, Best RPG, Dungeons and Dragons, D&D, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy 7, Paper Mario, Paper Mario The Thousand year Door, Fallout, Fallout New Vegas, Chrono Trigger, Xenoblade Chronicles, For The King, Fire Emblem, Fire Emblem 3 Houses, RPGs Boring?, Good RPG, Fun RPG

Id: ZwlT0fMIiXo

Length: 19min 38sec (1178 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/otsukarerice]

This strikes at the core of why 95% of indie RPGs fail. Good shit.