On (Lack of?) RPG Difficulty

by Dayton Williams (LrdDimwit on IRC)

 

I would take issue with starry wishes kirby's recent assertion that RPGs are not supposed to be difficult.Ê Both as an RPG addict (my to-beat list has ~6 games on it and my to-buy list is about the same size), and as a game difficulty engineer (big fancy term meaning I balance RPGs), I just cannot accept this statement.Ê While it may not be possible to create an RPG that has challenge in the way starry wishes kirby is thinking of the term, that isn't the point.Ê The point is to create a product where the game portions are not mindnumbingly boring exercises in pushing buttons, but require actual thought.Ê I do not dispute that most recent RPGs do not require real skill to play.Ê I dispute that this is inherent to the genre.Ê An RPG that requires hours upon hours of leveling is unquestionably bad; this is the wrong kind of difficulty.Ê An RPG where the difficulty arises from the battle strategy you have selected and from the makeup of your party is the right kind of difficulty.Ê So far, I have only seen one or two games come close to this, the most prominent example being Final Fantasy Tactics (which was still too easy).

 

If RPGs are not supposed to be difficult, then why are they even interactive?Ê Why take the time to develop enemy attacks, animations, player character abilities, and a battle engine if the game is so easy that the battle segments quickly degenerate into boring button mashing?Ê If the game portions pose no challenge and reduce to an exercise in holding down the attack button, then the product would be better off eliminating the interaction altogether and simply presenting it in some other format.Ê Without challenge, a product--any product--isn't really a game; it is a book (or more appropriately, a movie) where you have to push buttons to get to the next chapter.Ê This is bad design--forcing a customer to put up with unchallenging, boring segments of the product is bad business, especially when the product does this over and over.Ê A game is a piece of software that requires the user's active participation and where the outcome is uncertain.

 

This is, in fact, my major complaint with Grandia.Ê Grandia isn't really a game; Grandia is a very well done anime with really neat characters and a nice atmosphere that happens to have an RPG engine grafted onto it.Ê (Somewhat badly.)Ê The fact that it is a game is really incidental to the fact that it is a story about these really funny and likeable characters that get into wily shenanigans.Ê (Not to give anyone the wrong idea; I love Grandia and will buy a Dreamcast just for Grandia II.)Ê Thousand Arms suffers the same problem.Ê The RPG elements in Thousand Arms are so...amateurish that it makes it obvious that the game is a dating simulator masquerading as an RPG.Ê The core elements in Thousand Arms are the female characters and the dating sequences, not the fights, which are so poorly designed that I don't have space to go into detail here.

 

RPGs have generally been getting easier with the progression of time.Ê Excessively so.Ê At this point, there aren't any good examples that I can point to as a good example of appropriate difficulty.Ê The only example that I can think of, Legend of Legaia, has other serious problems with its gameplay.Ê It is a very difficult game.Ê At least, in the beginning.Ê Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, that difficulty disappeared, and the game became tedious.Ê (After I got the accessory that reduces the encounter rate, I had it equipped the entire remainder of the game and I had no problems with being underleveled.Ê In fact, I had little use for the almighty point card; I could have beaten the game without it, and almost did--having forgotten about it.)Ê So, instead of cite examples of what is good, I will work from the other direction, citing things that don't work, and how they could have been improved upon.

 

A good place to start is with the ever-debated FF7, as everyone (and their mother) has most likely played it by now.Ê First things first.Ê There is no excuse for Knights of the Round.Ê None whatever.Ê It is too powerful and can be used at will with no lasting repercussions.Ê starry wishes kirby was correct when she said that the bonus Weapon monsters were not difficult.Ê They weren't, in large part due to Knights of the Round (and Omnislash, andÊ Highwind, and Mega All, and Quadra Magic, and all the other obscenely powerful stuff in the game).Ê But where s/he simply accepts this as proof that RPG's are not difficult, I see this as proof that FF7 is egregiously unbalanced.

 

And it could easily have been fixed.Ê One simple change to the battle system could have been taken which would have drastically improved the imbalanced mess that is FF7.Ê Eliminate MP, and instead use AP.Ê That is, using a materia will

cause that materia to lose AP (more powerful material of course using more AP per use).Ê AP still retain their function as experience points for materia, and the weapons affecting AP growth rate mechanism still applies.Ê There are also still no items that increase the AP on a weapon.Ê (This requires a slight change, so that mastered materia lose all their AP--otherwise people could clone materia left and right by mastering it, then using it once (so it isn't mastered anymore) and mastering it again.)Ê If your materia loses a level, you lose access to the spell it had developed.

 

This would change the materia system into a very strategic system, with definite tradeoffs for using magic, instead of the way FF7 turned out to be, where there are no penalties for using materia.Ê This would even tie into the story more, since you would be transferring the Lifestream (as AP) of defeated enemies into your Materia, and then using it as you used your materia.Ê The net effect would be to curtail the use of an ability.Ê You got some awesome spell on your Materia?Ê Great.Ê You can only use it while the materia has enough AP to manifest it--and since using it expends AP, you use it, you lose it.Ê This immediately adds a LOT of strategy, as the player has to balance multiple considerations:Ê The need to survive, the need to use heavy firepower against a boss, the need to store AP in your materia so as to make them more powerful, and the need to cause your materia to fission so multiple characters can get the benefits of using them.Ê As is, all these needs are met at once and so no thought is required; simply equipping a materia lets you use its powers and increase them at the same time.Ê Under the changed system, all of these needs are to an extent mutually exclusive, and you have to decide which ones are more important.

 

 

Moving on to the other game that will be addressed, Grandia (to keep this editorial from becoming a full-length novel).Ê Grandia's battle system is set up in a fairly unique way.Ê The seperate levels for weapon and magic types (and the tying of these levels to the special moves) is a long overdue innovation that I would like to see all games adopt.Ê Unfortunately, Grandia is so utterly lacking in challenge that towards the end of the game I came to regard the dungeons as busy work to get to the next town.Ê There are two aspects of the battle system that drag the game balance down.Ê

 

The first (and most obvious) flaw is the hideously munchkin save points.Ê For those (unfortunate) people who have not played Grandia, save points fully heal you.Ê Every save point.Ê This is not just HP, but extends to status, reviving dead characters, and restoring MP/SP.Ê That is, it is an inn.Ê For free.Ê In the middle of a dungeon.Ê Furthermore, there is a save point immediately before every boss except two (excluding the bonus dungeons).Ê This is only made worse by the fact that the enemies appear on the map, and don't regenerate if you leave the screen.Ê This means that the dungeons quickly degenerate into the equivalent of casting Meteo on everything, because you can wipe out all the enemies on a map, retreat to the save point, heal, and repeat until they're all gone, at which point you can explore at leisure.Ê And it also reduces every boss in the game into a punching bag for your fully healed party to blast into oblivion with the tactical nuclear weapons that call themselves spells.

 

This is easy enough to fix.Ê Create different kinds of save points.Ê Some fully heal, some don't.Ê Most save points before bosses would definitely not be of the full heal variety.Ê This would definitely make the game a lot more difficult, as you would no longer have unlimited spells.Ê (I never used the various MP-restoring items the game showered me with--until the last boss, where you have to fight four bosses in order, and you don't get to use one of the Almighty Save Points.)Ê And, since the game is very linear and you never reenter a dungeon, the number of uses of the full heal at the in-dungeon save points could be reduced from an infinite number to, say, three or so.

 

The second flaw is more subtle, and also more central.Ê In the game, when someone (either you or the enemy) takes a hit, their action is delayed, and sometimes even canceled entirely.Ê This is an unusual and innovative feature, but it is not well implemented.Ê The delay is much too large; when either you or the enemy are outnumbered by 2 to 1 or so (not impossible, but fairly rare), you will be able to hit them so much that, if done correctly, they will get to attack again before their opponents complete their action, whereupon this will immediately be repeated.Ê Against most boss characters (which have 1 or 2 parts to your 4 characters), if timed correctly, the enemy will only get to act once or twice; after taking 4 hits, they will have been pushed back so much that your guys get to go again.Ê And, since you have access to the Magic Save Points of Invulnerability, you can hit the boss, any boss, with a full barrage of all your most powerful attacks, ensuring that not only does the boss not get to do much, but that he will die quickly.Ê Again, this is fairly easily fixed; simply reduce the delays or eliminate them entirely.Ê This would eliminate the possibility that enemies could be prevented from ever firing a shot, but it would still add an element of strategy because the attacks would still have effects on the enemy actions, just not an overpoweringly unbalanced one.

 

 

I could cite more examples, but I think I made my point.Ê While RPG's may not be mindnumbingly difficult in the sense that many other genres are, they can--and most definitely should--possess another kind of difficulty.Ê They should require the player to develop an actual strategy when they fight.Ê Final Fantasy Tactics shines as an excellent example of how this can be accomplished.Ê Legacy of Kain (the original) does also.Ê Final Fantasy 8 does not.Ê Players should not have to play a piece of software that calls itself a game where all you have to do is hit this one button over and over.Ê A game should be interactive, and that is not interaction.Ê Players should be required to make conscious decisions when they get into fights, whether those decisions involve resource conservation, survival, or even concern for character growth (but in this case, the character growth has to actually matter), and these decisions must affect the outcome.Ê RPG's do not normally require good hand-eye coordination, they (at least should) require good decision making.Ê It is admittedly very hard to balance an RPG; two simple features, one of them completely unrelated to the battle engine at all, changed what would have been a nicely balanced game into a totally unbalanced exercise in slaughtering computer sprites.Ê But where other people simply accept this as a fact of life, or at least RPGaming, I see it as something to fix.Ê But then again, that's my job.