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Googleshng - May 4 '04- 4:00 Eastern Standard Time
I became aware of this
today. I cannot put into words how wrong that is.
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Time keeps tickin'...
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Hey Goog,
This is a pet peeve of mine, tell me if you hate it as much as I do. Don't
you hate it when you're playing an RPG, and you have to go somewhere, but
are nowhere near a place to save and have come to far to start over from the
last save, so you leave the system on, go do what you have to, then come
back and your game time has just gone up four hours? I hate that SO MUCH
just because it means I don't have an accurate tally of how much of my life
I've spent playing whatever game I have in front of me. Does this nag at
you as much as it does me?
Robust Stu
Gold Reviewer/Swell Guy
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Googleshng:
Yes. Yes it does. Thus, I try to avoid such situations whenever possible, and when I can't, I just make
a mental note to chop however much time off the final total so I can accurately tell people how long it
took.
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Reruns
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where did chocobos originate from?
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Googleshng:
Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind. Like I said yesterday when someone asked this.
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Difficulty curves.
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Google,
Andrew asked this question over the weekend, but I forgot to respond and so
am giving the answer to you for now. He asked about most-hated aspects of
RPGs.
My most-hated aspect of today's RPGs are the poor difficulty curves. The
games are easy as hell the whole way through and you cruise on by. But then
all of a sudden at the final dungeon (and sometimes not until the last boss
himself) the difficulty skyrockets. I dread making it to the boss because I
know it's going to be way too hard. Just from memory, this has happened to
me in FF4, FF6, FF7, FF8, Xenogears, and Golden Sun. I was pleasantly
surprised when I recently completed Xenosaga in only one final fight
attempt.
For the record, I'm a fairly thorough player, but I don't look at strategy
guides if I can help it. That means my characters are probably stronger
than the game expects, as I get into more fights while exploring. I don't
go overboard though - I never bothered with Knights of the Round for
example.
People usually rank the games I mentioned as "easy", but I always have
trouble at the end. It isn't good game design when you can make it to the
final dungeon easily at level 25, but will have great difficulty finishing
unless you're level 50. I was weaned on the teat of the original DW and FF,
so I know difficulty - it's the curving these days that I have a problem
with.
-JuntMonkey
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Googleshng:
Yes, it's always annoying to have a cake walk end with a ridiculously hard boss. Almost as annoying of
course is when you have a nice challenging game, and then a cake walk at the end. Now, you could make
the arguement that it's really hard to set up a difficulty curve for an RPG, because the player's party
gets steadily better over time and you have no way of controlling that. And if you make this argument,
you have no business trying to work on game design. It's simple enough to set the stats up on your monsters
to get a nice staircase looking difficulty curve, which when overlayed with the steady downward drop caused
by experience levels going up, and end up with a nice little jagged line which heads upwards overall at
a rate somewhat dependant on how much the player character builds. It's honestly a whole lot easier to
get right than the curve for, say, an action game, where you have to juggle building familiarity with
the controls with new ways to challenge it.
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