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Why Random Encounters In RPGs Aren't That Bad
Thanks to GameSpot for their guest editorial discussing why randomized enemy encounters in videogame RPGs aren't as bad as they're made out to be. The author argues: "The most common charge is that random battles are 'unrealistic.' To this I counter that the RPG experience is inherently unrealistic." He goes on to comment: "A more valid argument is that random battles 'pad' gameplay. I'm not going to argue with this, but I am going to say that RPGs need that padding... With battles cut out, there isn't really anything to fill the gameplay void." He ends by floating compromise solutions for when "it's simply annoying to be assaulted by all manner of enemies when you simply want to make it to the next town", suggesting: "Adjustable [encounter] rates or ways to abbreviate battles, especially with radically weaker adversaries, would be one way to speed things up."
Random encounters are not bad because they are Unrealistic. They are bad because they are just that: Random time fillers. They are there so the game will last longer, but most of the times you as a player just want to get on with the story. I'd much rather have a more intelligent game design where I can see the monsters moving around the "map" or the "town", and if you touch one, the battle starts (like some RPGs).
That way, its not only an added fun gameplay element, but the battles can be better integrated to the story, which is really what counts in a console RPG...
Plus, Earthbound was completely awesome. It had the funkiest music of any RPG, ever.
WHERE'S MY EARTHBOUND 64?
They should do it like Star Wars: KotOR, where you can see the enemies IN the environment and decide wether to fight them or not. The Final Fantasy way of suddenly being swept into a fight at random is very annoying.
The problem with randomised encounters is that they never stop.
When you are an uber-high level character, and gnats keep attacking you (long after you have practically scorched the entire planet clean of monsters) making your progress tediously slow.
Dungeon Siege was cool in this way... after you clear out an area, that area remains clean (unless a creature moves there from another area)
This is a lot of work for the designers, but if you insist on being lazy and add random events... they should at least have an event-count per area, and have it stop when it reaches a certain level.
(Diablo did this well, (deterministically statistic random events) whereas neverwinter nights is just the status quo (pure random mixed with pre-set)
PS: Re-spawning monsters are also evil. It takes away a sense of progress and continuity.
The (only) place where this may be somewhat applicable is in massively multiplayer (on-line) games... and even then it's better to have many pure once-off unique non-repeating events.
Many's the time in an FF-Game when I've just wanted to save the game and power down the system. Maybe I was about to go out. Maybe I was tired and wanted to sleep. Occasionally it's 'cos i'm using the main TV downstairs and my parents want to watch whatever lame Soap is about to come on.
But so often I've tried to either reach a known save point, or explore and tried to find one of the damn things. Just so I can actually finish playing for a bit.
There have been a few times when I've just powered it off, and decided to try again later.
A similar point is when you hit what I call "Story Mode".
Or course you're gonna get long story segments in a story-driven game. But so often you finally off a huge Boss character, and then it takes you into story-mode for about 5 or 10 minutes until you're given the option to save.
Tiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
"it's simply annoying to be assaulted by all manner of enemies when you simply want to make it to the next town"
As much as I loved FF3, that statement right there is what held me back from going through it again. The encounters themselves wasn't so bad, it was the rigid structure of the game you had to go through. First, let's zip zip zip down to the battle. Second, let's have the screen fade in and the characters leap onto the screen, cue music. Third, let's go through the "a button a button a button, yes yes, fire magic at him. Okay, let's way for them to go through their series of hit hit jab jab magic magic. Okay, turn 2..", Fourth there's the victory. Yay you won! Deeeee dedededeee! Okay, let's all dance as the game announces quite patiently what all experience you've one. Fifth, let's do a nice little fade out, and fade in back to the screen. And start up again. Sixth, let's move two spaces, rinse, and repeat!
Though technically not an RPG, I was quite relieved that Zelda/Wind Waker didn't force you through as much of that. Not only could you dodge monsters, but the game was made so that scouring the map was MUCH much easier to do. It's an adventure game, it's an entirely different animal from an RPG, but that's not to say something couldn't have been learned from it.
I hope Final Fantasy 3 is ported to the GameBoy Advance. They can call it Final Fantasy 3 AD. (Attention Deficit.) I'm bored writing this now so you can figure out what I meant by that.
"Derp de derp."
They don't ruin a game, but they make some games worse for sure.
I'm currently playing through Lunar 2:Eternal Blue Complete for the PSX, and it's much better than the original. Mostly because I can avoid battles with annoying enemies and focus on the really rewarding ones.
Maybe it's just me, but I didn't see any point in him saying that "Chrono Trigger sucks". At no point does he say anything to give him a reason to say that (other than to start a flame war and get more people to read his article out of anger instead of out of interest). He even said that Chrono Cross, the sequel, was a good game.
If the game allows you to "turn it off", either by an item, like in FF's "Enc-none", or an option.. best of both worlds, I would think..
I'm not the devil.. just his advocate.
Gah, I remember playing Bard's Tale 2 (I think that was the one), and there would be a random encounter every 4-5 steps in the dungeons. It became just too much: step step battle step step step battle. I always felt like I wasn't making any progress at all.
... know a few things about why random encounters with RPG's are a bad thing ...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Maybe all of you people complaining about random encounters really just do not like RPGs. If you hate the way they are maybe you should look into playing a different style of game instead of ragging on random encounters.
There's nothing i hate more than trying to retreat to the nearest town to save my sorry mage ass.
The wife used to play an RPG, cant remember which at this time, which would allow you to become invulnerable to those 'invisble wandering' monsters until the item/spell wore out. Maybe have this as an spell/item in more RPG's as a way to deal with this rather annoying issue. But hey...these _are_ after all RPGs.
I always thought that was one of the clever things about Wild Arms 3 (and 2 I think), that it allowed you to avoid random encounters. WA3 has a gauge that tracks how many random encounters you have skipped. Skip an encounter, gauge goes down, fight a battle, gauge goes up allowing you to skip more battles. Fight as little as you want, up to a point.
Neat game, clever idea.
"...At the end of the day"..."when everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself." RIP Layne Staley
If you haven't realized it yet, there's an obvious answers. RPGS that have random encounters arne't video games. They are interactive movies. The difference is that some games let you choose your own adventure (Chrono Trigger). And some are dead linear.
It's like if you went to see a movie in the theatre and they said "ok, in order to see the next scene you have to push the correct buttons on this controller we're giving you." It's not a game, it's a trial. A test to determine if you are allowed to progress. And RPGs with random encounters test you every 5 seconds.
I mean I love the RPGs, but for the plot. I can't play most of them anymore because I just don't have time for the tedious parts which take up 90% of the game time. Golden sun is an exception because the tests are puzzles, so I think of it primarily as a fun puzzle game. You can't lose combat in Golden sun, and it takes two seconds. And you can use a simple magic to eliminate random encounters easily.
Take a look at games like Mario + Luigi Superstar Saga. It's super amazing. Why? Because it gives you the plot and the fun elements of the rpg, but eliminates the stupid combat parts. It replaces those with a platform game true to the old school mario flavor.
So, people play the RPG for the amazing amazing plot. The randome encounter/combat "game" they throw in there so it isn't just a movie is crap. Throw in something else instead and we can make great games worth playing. Try throwing in a turn based strategy, an fps, a real time strategy, a puzzle game, a simulation. Any real game will do just fine.
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Random Phantom Encounter: Your character is walking on a pre-drawn background when all-of-a-sudden the screen goes black and you're fighting a goblin. This is a random fight for the sake of having something to do. This is the FF series. These fights are why I stopped playing FF-style games.
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Random Encounter: Top-down Ultima 6 style game where you randomly encounter packs of wolves in the mountains or forest. They aren't scripted and if you kill them, walk far enough away, and return they will probably re-appear.
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True Random: Everquest-style game where monsters are spawned randomly into the world at random (limited) locations and exist until they expire by one method or another.
There are probably more styles, but the author is trying to justify #1. He actually goes far enough to say that: If that's all he's there for, why not ask for a FF-StreetFighter game and be done with it? Then we can get back to using skills and intelligence in RPGs.What's so unrealistic about random battles? I don't get it!
For me, the main problem with random battles is the damn start-up and time. I don't know if it's gotten any better since I stopped playing console RPGs, but when I was walking around and had to sit through a screen fade, battle start music, then a single-hit victory, then victory music, then stats update screen---well, that sucked. It really wouldn't be that bad if when
gnats attacked you, the battle happened without interruption, maybe at the bottom of the screen, maybe automatically. Compare with, say, the Castlevania platform/RPG series (Symphony of the Night, etc.): You still get attacked by bats and zombies when you go back to the beginning of the castle, but everyone is one hit, and you can just run and dash your way through. Speed!
AC used to do monsters well.
The only problem was they changed hte mold and just about ever monster spawn on the map yielded random results. When you wanted to hunt a specific monster, you had to wade through all the crap in between.
Granted, the game had WAY to many encounters, but they left good save previsions.
If you were running around in a dungeon, that was it. You had to accomplish your task or get to the next major milestone to save. Fortunately you could heal between battles. As long as you didn't move you could heal. You could heal via magic, or set items. If you were both out of magic points and healing items, or just wanted to do a small increment heal you could eat the fish you gathered while traveling between locations in your airship. Thats a dungeon and you were expected to make it one your own.
Outside of dungeons however was a different story. You could do the normal save in any town, or you could save at anypoint while you were in your ship (minus a couple of dungeon like ship encounters) As long as you can save at any point random encounters weren't that big of a deal on the airship.
Towards the middle part of the game you could make your ship fly higher and lower than you could at the begining. When you were able to do that, random encounters virtually stopped, so your 50th level character didn't have to battle level 1 enemies all the time. On the occasions you did encounter them they could be wiped out in a single move. This was sometimes worthwhile, lower level battles could still earn moonberries, usually you had a better chance getting one from a lower level than a higher level character. If you still needed training points that wasn't such a bad approach.
They had the getting around safe, dungeons on your own formula down quite well.
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Games that feature overland movement through 'enemy' territories -should-, for story consistancy, include possible encounters with enemies.
Games that feature only scripted encounters, for a tighter, more limited story experience - should not even have random character wandering, let alone random encounters.
it's as simple as that.
If there's only one way a player can go, only one path from A to B, and it's filled with random enemies, all it's going to do is cause someone to go the wrong way, have 3x more fights than the designers figure he 'should have had' and get pissed. It ends up making the 'real' fights more difficult for the people who are already frustrated by having gone the wrong way, or bothered to explore and are angry that their 'options' are only illusory. and that's bad design.
And if you're going to have random enemy encounters, you're going to wind up with 'pest' fights. that is, fights where your party is in absolutely no danger, and the fight itself is not fun, not tense, not important.
This is where functionality akin to Lord of the Realms II's 'mop up' button comes in. Sure, the mop-up ai won't be as effective as you are, and it may cause you to get hit once or twice. but the fight is over at the click of the button. the inevitable outcome occurs without wasting the player's time. Better still, for people who love random fights and micromanaging, it's all optional.
Again, the only time random fights, or even character wandering itself makes sense, is when there is a branching storyline that allows multiple routes from A to B.
The random fights though, should always be tied to the gamestate. If i destroy the main kobold nest outside 'whateversville' - when i travel through those woods i shouldn't have to fight more kobolds, unless in the story they're regrouping or making their last ditch offensive or some such.
But it all depends on the game. I couldn't imagine something as open-ended as Baldur's Gate without random fights. yet I wonder why in the heck the Final Fantasy series even bothers letting me steer my guy from A to B half the time.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
...I made in alt.games.final-fantasy:
...but until we have true AI, necessary.
On Mon, 24 Nov 2003 18:38:38 -0500, Van Halen - Black And Blue.mp3 wrote:
> http://www.gamespot.com/features/6084158/p-8.html
>
> FUCK THAT SHIT.
>
> Yes I am actually defending Crono Trigur. Anyway.
>
> Other things.
Random encounters are most definitely gay. Chrono Trigger is the best SNES RPG (although it takes a lot of suspension of disbelief to get past the timetravel illogic.)
"To this I counter that the RPG experience is inherently unrealistic. I'm not just talking about the swords-and-sorcery or science fiction settings
either. When was the last time you put on your clothes with a menu system or used a floating hand to pick your target?"
Putting clothes on with a menu system is necessary. Any "realistic" method is either pornographic or looks extremely stupid.
Picking targets with a floating hands is a bad idea. Action RPGs > turn based.
"The truth of the matter is, controlling multiple characters is unrealistic"
"Finally, to all of the advocates for "realism" in RPGs, note this: In Xenosaga, a single gnosis attacks me in the field. In the battle screen,
there could be anywhere between one and five enemies on the screen. Where did the other four come from?"
General consensus is that Xenosaga sucks, so this is hardly a good argument.
"A more valid argument is that random battles "pad" gameplay. I'm not going to argue with this, but I am going to say that RPGs need that padding."
All the best games are short. Ico didn't have any padding.
"Plot is unquestionably the meat of these games, and my favorite part of any game. However, story development is inherently noninteractive."
I guess somebody never plays PC RPGs.
"While I hate excessive leveling-up as much as the next guy, I'd rather do that than spend $60 on a 10-hour game"
Game value is calculated by the amount of enjoyment you get for your money, not the amount of time wasted. I am quite capable of wasting time for free.
"Xenosaga and Chrono Cross are great games, but so are Final Fantasy and Xenogears."
There goes the last remains of his credibility.
Xenosaga had no purely random battles, and if you had the skills, you could dodge most of the normal battles (there was a training thing on this early in the game) and the result?
It became known as "the movie you sometimes play". (I thought it was a good game, hopefully xenosaga 2 will get a US release, the trailers I've seen give me goosebumps in a good way)
Whats needed isn't so much "no random battles" as maybe options for 1) automatic battles with AIs that don't suck and kill your characters 2) an option to turn off all special effects to speed up fighting (not just short versions of whatever animations, but pick an option and the numbers just pop up immediately, next turn) and 3) the idea that monsters that are far too low a level to even bother the characters would be afraid enough to not even approach and bother them.
The problem with the idea of "clearing out" an area and leaving it empty is that there will always be power-levellers who would get pissy when their monsters run out.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I have been reading these posts, and this to me, seems to be what happens when RPG developers try to reach out to the FPS type audience. As it is, I think RPG's have been 'dumbed down' quite a bit from their earlier roots.
:). It really would not take a lot of effort if the designers just gave you a heads up saying 'hey, were about to do a 30 minute show here, do you want to save?'
And really, alot of these arguments are just not valid because there are in game elements that allow you to avoid random encounters. FF for example: chocobos have been around since FF3 on the snes, and the airship since FF1! I thought it was almost ridiculous that there was a save point every 5 steps in FFX, that also fully recovers you! You guys ever play a nes RPG? Try getting through the FF1 marsh or one of the fiend caves in one piece, beating the boss, and then getting back out, and then getting all the way back to the nearest town! Today's RPG's are an absolute walk in the park comparitively. No more hours of repetitive leveling (which if youre going to play an RPG, you should enjoy).
I just dont understand. The random encounters are what RPG's are all about. I will admit, it is kind of annoying and ridiculous when you are in an area where you are omnipotently stronger than the enemies and they are still bothering you. Im not going to start claiming that RPG's should be based in anything resembling reality or logic, but come on now, cant we write into the world that far weaker creatures will be scared of you and not try to attack you?
I will also admit 'story mode' is annoying. You get through an area, and then out of nowhere, you have like 20 minutes of scenes to watch. Try explaining to your girlfriend that you were late coming over because you were playing a video game and a part with movies came on... just one of the many reasons she left me
Point being, I think random encounters are a staple of RPG games. I also believe that RPG games have made humongous strides since the days of Dragon Warrior and FF1. The beauty, depth of the stories, the complexity of the battle systems, and all around fun is just immeasurable compared to the old school games.
Btw... what I often do during those annoying scenes is just hit the pause button, and leave the PS2 on. Not the best solution, but if youre only leaving because the chinee foo hea or you have to run to the store or something, it works out alright.
The random fights though, should always be tied to the gamestate.
I think this is the main reason why I, personally, find many random encounters "unrealistic". Ok, even if you consider a RPG unrealistic - which it can be - it doesn't help if I remove all enemies from a closed area but still they pop up just because it is random encounter time again. That IS unrealistic and it is tied to the logic of the game, not the realism of the game.
Overland travels are a completely different story, as you have mentioned. Here, enemies can emerge from various "spawn points". Maybe I can destroy all the nests all over the world - then, random battles become unrealistic again.
To make the long matter short: Dear game designers, no more random encounters in closed areas please, thank you.
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
Interesting enough topic, and I don't actually disagree with the guy's main point, but...this guy is a moron. In trying to defend the fact that rpgs are inherently unrealistic, he brings up the fact that final fantasy games use blue boxes to represent dialog? That was the best example you could come up with? He doesn't mention things like the fact that random encounters are what allow you to build up your characters in most games. A game can have as fancy a class/ability system as it wants, but if there's no fodder for your characters to practice against, then the system is going to be pretty limited. Several games have used static encounters, and the result is usually that if you didn't build your characters properly the first time through, you'll have no chance against the final boss. Finally, the guy takes a pot shot against what's generally considered to be one of the best rpgs ever with absolutely no justification whatsoever. If you don't like CT, fine, but I think if you're gonna say it sucks in a gamespot editorial, you need to back it up a little.
I like these 'food for thought' style articles that the games section has been posting lately, but I think we could use a somewhat higher standard for the quality of the articles.
hot foreign sheep.
It's a matter of preference. Random battles, or Other.
I personally prefer RPGs without random battles. Random battles discourage you from really exploring the game, because every 5 steps you take, you will have to deal with another battle.
I think games like Chrono Cross/Trigger, and the Grandia series do it RIGHT. You should be able to see the enimies, so that you can avoid the battles, or target the battles if you so wish. But thats just my preference.
The Final Fantasy series will never change the way it does battles. It wouldn't be Final Fantasy if it didn't have random battles.
Also, the person who wrote this article doesnt really say anything new. It's just a random battle fan boy saying how those of us who prefer RPGs w/o random battles are just plain wrong. Again, I think it's just a preference. If you do like random battles, it's not like there is anything to complain about. MOST of the RPGs out there do have random battle systems.
Even though I do not prefer random battle systems, I like that I can just choose to play the few RPGs without them. I don't have to have one or the other forced down my throat.
"I just dont understand. The random encounters are what RPG's are all about."
No, that's what a particular type of console RPG is about. If you play and RPG for, say PC, you'll find that many of them have some different form of dealing with the battles. Besides, what does RPG stand for? Role-Playing Game, not Random (Some word begining with P that I can't think up) Game.
What's happened is that a few games had success, such as Final Fantasy and the Dragon Quest/Warrior series. They had random encounters due to what were likely technical limitations of the platform they were built on. Other game developers have looked at that and decided that they want a piece of that market, so they release a game and they're careful not to tamper with the characteristics too much. (Case in point: Final Fantasy VII. Think of how huge it was, now think of how many half-assed RPGs came out immediately after it that seemed to be little more than a thinly veiled rip-off. It's a more modern example, but it's still an example.)
I personally always point to the Fallout series as a an excellent way of how to make RPGs that aren't dependent on the leveling treadmill, while at the same time not becoming a movie that you sometimes play. I'll give a brief description in case you haven't played it before:
- For starters, it's possible to make it through the first one without ever getting in a fight. (Not sure on the second one, I've heard it is, but never to the same degree as I did with number 1) You could gain experience by solving problems in ways other than slaughtering everything that opposed you, and it was possible (although quite difficult) to sneak past enemies rather than fight them. Which brings me to point number 2.
- Battles. All battles took place in the normal view, no fancy battle system, meaning that you saw the enemies before they attacked you. If you were travelling on the world map and hit an enemy you'd move into a screen with the enemies present, but, and this is something that I find is missing from current console RPGs, it was always easy to escape if you didn't feel like fighting.
- Finally, point 3, the plot, which was both branching and non-linear. The only sure thing you had in the game was the final goal, you had to do X for the game to end, of course, X might change slightly over time, but you still had a final goal. Now, what you did while trying to complete X and how you did it was all up to you. Sure, the game would try and push you along a certain path, but that doesn't mean you had to do that.
I'll agree that RPGs have made great strides, I can barely play the original Final Fantasy as I just can't get interested in it. (Contrast this with II, where there's more of a story, and which I don't mind playing at all.) But I still think the entire "take a couple of steps, fight an enemy" bit is a thing that needs to be more carefully examined to see if there's a decent replacement rather than just saying "Oh, it's tradition, we can't remove it."
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
"Gosh I'm so tired of playing this game that now the battles bore and annoy me. Please turn off the challenge features so I can just finish this game without actually exerting any concious effort! I'm too lazy to get up off the couch and switch to a different game. And I have no life therefore I can't just turn off the damn video game console for a day or two. I HAVE to keep playing otherwise reality will catch up..."
Maybe it's the nature of an editorial, but some of these things are just poorly written. I know that editorials are opinionated by definition, but seeing "Chrono Trigger Sucks" in the title made me wary of the content. Unfortunately, he never qualifies it at any point in the article (just repeats it again at the end). So, for the mindless attention-grab that it obviously is, I'm labelling him a putz. If it was a post here, I'd mod him "Flamebait" without a second thought.
Other things: as far as random encounters are concerned in specific games, I think a game worth mentioning (since everyone else here is) is Wild ARMs 3. it has random encounters, however:
- An exclamation point appears over your head, and you can choose to avoid the battle by hitting a button.
- Avoiding a battle drains your Encounter gauge depending on the monster's relative strength in comparison to your party (sort of).
- You can't avoid battles if your gauge runs out.
- Resting at an "inn" will replenish the gauge, and fighting monsters will slowly raise it in the field.
- You can avoid battles with trivial monsters for free. It makes zipping through earlier portions of the game a snap.
- Exploring and finding hidden rooms with a particular kind of item makes the cost of avoiding battles cheaper. Brilliant.
Also, in regards to saving, you can save anywhere that's not a battle on a cutscene. You just need to spend a Gimel coin, which you can find dungeon crawling or from monster drops (the point being that you use it for emergencies, since saving in town is free). I think random combat is one of the things that WA3 did right.
As far as random combat in general, it doesn't bother me in the least, if it's fun. I like bumping into new types of monsters and working on ways to defeat them in different or creative ways. I never found the combat in FFX tedious, for example, because I always tried new ways to wipe the floor with mobbies, and lots of them did interesting things that I had to adapt for.
My gut reaction: if you are so impatient to get monster battles over with, you're probably playing the wrong (type of) game. I have a simliar issue with things like racing games ("is this thing over yet?"), so I don't even bother unless there's an interesting twist to it.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
No one on here seems to have accually played Chrono Trigger...
Chrono Trigger for SNES does not have random battles. That is why the article author hates it. He is a random battle fan boy.
Chrono Trigger lets you see the eneimes on the map, so that you can avoid them, or target them. Chrono Cross for PSX is the same way.
Both games are some of the best RPGs out there IMO. Think final fantasy, with a more in depth story line, multiple endings, and a 'better' battle system.
If the only justification for random enemy encounters the reviewer can come up with is that they are necessary to make a game longer, then the reviewer needs to re-examine why they have persisted for so long. What has kept them around for years?
I would argue that RPG fighting, when done well, is a strategy encounter. Final Fantasy is full of examples of this type of gameplay. Wall in your characters to reflect healing spells onto the undead. Falcon units off of the screen, then cast earthquake to damage everyone left. Lunar featured movement squares which played a strategic role in every battle. Grandia had a real-time fighting system that forced the player to decide between waiting for combined attacks or doing faster individual ones. Aside from the initial encounters, there are also long-term effects from fighting that must be balanced. All fighting has an associated cost in life, mana, and items, but pays off in gold and experience. Do you dart the glass sword now to top off the boss or do you rely upon your Phoenix Downs and save it for the next one? Do you level up your mighty axe which has +12 to goblins or the spear of light which gives a +3 to the undead? Use your fragile armor of perfect protection now or use up your spare cash on the mighty armor of swiss cheese? Done right, RPG's are resource management sims.
It's ironic the reviewer would mention Xenogears. Xenogears was a revolutionary game (and still is), whose dungeons alternated between having A: no enemies, B: very few random enemies, and C: frequent once-only battles at fixed locations. The jumping aspect made exploration actually fun, and the detail everywhere was just dripping.
That, and having the two different modes of fighting made Xenogears one of the most enjoyable games ever (right up to the point where they ran out of money).
Any game can take a fun genre and turn it into boring drivel if the developers don't focus on the right things. The winning strategy in Star Ocean 2, for example, consisted of buying forgery papers, spending hours clicking on "make fake money," and finally spending hours clicking on "photograph fake money." Eventually, you would have all of the resources you would need, but the mechanic to get there was no fun.
One of the ways to change the system would be to expand the concept of "attack." When swordfighting in the real world, you have head shots, body shots, leg attacks, limb attacks, etc. If you hammer away at one portion of the body, the enemy will expect that and block accordingly. Likewise, the player should set their guard after an attack, in any of the 8 control pad directions. Swordfighting should be as intricate as spellcasting.
Likewise, enemy encounters should be fewer and stronger. I'm not advocating the return of the infinite boss syndrome (2+ hours for Final Fantasy 8... What were they thinking?), But a battle with faceless drones should take longer than the loading screen... that way they wouldn't be faceless drones. Think of them as mini-mini bosses, with one or two per explorable area.
RPG's in recent years have plummeted in difficulty, which makes encounters more of an annoyance than a challenge. Sure, this opens things up to more players, but that also makes the game busywork. What was wrong with selectable difficulty levels? To balance this out, the designers should reduce the significance of death. Return the player to the last checkpoint with all of their items intact, and expect this to happen several times.
Another of the ways to change the system would be to have a target level associated with every area. If a player were to go to the second level with too few exp, for example, they would be given more to help them catch up. However, if they were dominating in an area, they receive fewer. That way players are discouraged from camping, and can explore what they are interested in without unbalancing the game.
Finally, players should be encouraged to consume resources, not horde them. Items should b
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
I completely disagree with the author that random encounters are necessary. While I can't think of any RPGs that lack the element completely, I can think of at least two in which the element is almost non-existant. In the Fallout series, you might have 10 random encounters all game, which is obviously laughable. The other good example is Final Fantasy Tactics. Again, unless you try, you'll get about 10 during the entire game. Both these games recognize one critical game play element: we don't need that damn fluff. What random battles are there for in both games is to get extra money and experience than you otherwise would by going through the storyline. Next plot battle too hard? Go build up by fighting random battles by walking back and forth between towns.
The only thing large ammounts of random battles represent is tedium. Eliminating or severely reducing these provides games with a higher percentage composition of both plot and challenging gameplay. If tedium was eliminated from RPGs, wouldn't this improve the genre?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
BTW, I happen to accept the random battles: how else are you going to inflate your levels? One of the things I found annoying about NWN was that the OC wouldnt let you get to the level cap; to do that, you needed to replay the game (or at least the last chapter).
I would rather have trudged thru an area with random encounters than numbly gone thru a part of the game where I already know what is going to happen.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I don't believe the problem of RPGs come with Random Battles, it comes from the fact that there is no challenge. Face it, when was the last time you actually had to think about how to beat a non-boss battle (unless it was against a really hard opponent you really didn't stand much of a chance at winning anyways)? Even some boss battles get pathetically easy. Especially combined with the lack of options in a fight. In nearly every single RPG out there it all battles end up as either straight weapon combat, or weapon combat with a few of your highest level spells thrown in. I've never found an RPG where items retain their usefullness once you get a character who can cast more than a few heal spells without losing all their mana. Plus throughout an RPG magic is either ridiculously overpowered, or on a fairly similar level with basic weapon combat, making it easier to just attack with a weapon. Someone mentioned it before, but there has to be limits. No more 9999 hp characters, with stat ratings that would leave divine beings reeling. RPGs should be more like the traditional pen & paper games, where you hps rarely go beyond a 100, and even a group of the weakest monsters can pose a problem to a high level character, but at the same time a similar high level monster is a managable problem. I thought Neverwinter Nights might have finally solved this problem, but even then weaker monsters are nothing but a speed bump in the grand scheme of things.
No, that's what a particular type of console RPG is about. If you play and RPG for, say PC, you'll find that many of them have some different form of dealing with the battles. Besides, what does RPG stand for? Role-Playing Game, not Random (Some word begining with P that I can't think up) Game.
If you play an RPG for, say, the PC, you'll be playing something on the Baldur's Gate engine, or you'll be playing something old. PC RPGs have generally been a completely different game than console RPGs.
What's happened is that a few games had success, such as Final Fantasy and the Dragon Quest/Warrior series. They had random encounters due to what were likely technical limitations of the platform they were built on.
It certainly wasn't a technical limitation unless they would've had to shrink the map sizes to display the monsters at the same time. Other games on the NES (the system both series started on) had the monsters on-screen. I don't remember for certain which system the Ultima 3 port used, but for some reason I'm fairly sure they were on-screen.
Other game developers have looked at that and decided that they want a piece of that market, so they release a game and they're careful not to tamper with the characteristics too much. (Case in point: Final Fantasy VII. Think of how huge it was, now think of how many half-assed RPGs came out immediately after it that seemed to be little more than a thinly veiled rip-off. It's a more modern example, but it's still an example.)
I don't remember it that way, though, as the only thing FF7 really seemed to do is encourage more Japanese developers to port RPGs for the US market. Maybe I just managed to ignore or avoid the rip-offs.
I personally always point to the Fallout series as a an excellent way of how to make RPGs that aren't dependent on the leveling treadmill, while at the same time not becoming a movie that you sometimes play. I'll give a brief description in case you haven't played it before:
And again, this is a PC RPG. I love the Fallout series, but really it's a different type of game. I just wish they'd make another Fallout RPG instead of using the name to push different types of games while the core of the series gets left behind.
- For starters, it's possible to make it through the first one without ever getting in a fight. (Not sure on the second one, I've heard it is, but never to the same degree as I did with number 1) You could gain experience by solving problems in ways other than slaughtering everything that opposed you, and it was possible (although quite difficult) to sneak past enemies rather than fight them. Which brings me to point number 2.
That's nice, but I've never known anyone that actually did that unless they had already played the game and decided to replay it in this manner. It's more than just a bit difficult to avoid getting attacked, especially early in either game.
- Battles. All battles took place in the normal view, no fancy battle system, meaning that you saw the enemies before they attacked you. If you were travelling on the world map and hit an enemy you'd move into a screen with the enemies present, but, and this is something that I find is missing from current console RPGs, it was always easy to escape if you didn't feel like fighting.
Ah, but you're missing the same thing everyone else that brings up Fallout is missing: most of the encounters were random in Fallout, you're just on a negotiable battle screen that allows you to escape and/or avoid enemies. The battle system was so completely different, and took up so much of the gameplay in Fallout, that people make the mistake of thinking that's the way the game actually played. Click on grid, end turn, click on enemy to attack, maybe choose to use some skill and try for a headshot, end turn. Click, click, click, click. You're not avoiding an encounter by running away, you're just cutting the encounter short.
- Finally, point 3, the plot,
-PainKilleR-[CE]
If you have played Earthbound, if you randomly encounter a monster that is significantly weaker than you, the monster is instant killed without the game moving to the fight scene. I always enjoyed this over having to attack each of the weakest monsters once just to kill them for nil experience in other RPG's.
I remember the item you could get in the original Dragon Warrior (and maybe some of the others, I forget): Fairy Water. When you used it, you avoided all random encounters. I don't really mind random encounters that much myself, they can be annoying at times, but are usually needed for leveling.
-Magiluke
Earl Grey, Hot.
I'm not asking them to remove them from the Final Fantasy series, as a) I understand the point of tradition in a series, and b) I don't play that series anymore for other reasons.
My point was that, contrasting what the previous poster had said, an RPG does not mean it has to have random battles. Yes, the PC RPGs are signficantly different in nature than console ones, but that doesn't mean you can't take bits from them and try it on the console. I like the story elements to RPGs, I like the idea of having a world I can explore at my own pace, but I hate the inability to take more than a few steps without running into a random battle. There's plenty of newer games that come out without the tradition of previous games to tie them down, would it hurt them to try something different?
Now, moving on to Fallout. Yes, there were random encounters, yes the escaping was part of the battle system, but I'd argue your point that most of the battles were random. The only random battles were the ones on the world map, the majority of the ones I fought were in caves, sewers, mines, buildings, etc., where there was a set number of enemies, who were already visible, and once you killed them you could waltz through the area without anymore fights.
Yes, the 'no fights at all' option was incredibly hard to do, but it was an option. Imagine my surprise when, the very first time I reached the "boss" in Fallout, I managed to convince him to end his scheme without drawing a weapon.
(As for the non-linearity argument, I realise that was a different train of thought altogether, I just felt it needed to be listed in the description of the game.)
BTW, what system was Ultima 3 released for? I've never played any of the early ones.
Finally, as for FFVII, the rip-offs aren't that easy to find, as they never did well, but there's two types. There's the ones that rip-off the game visually (think Legend of Legaia, where the characters looked like less polished versions of FFVII ones), and there's ones that rip-off the game thematically (IMHO Legend of Dragoon was the most successful of these, granted I didn't play the entire thing, but what I did reminded me of FFVII something terrible. YMMV, etc etc.)
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
how about adding some logic to the random generator? like modeling the real world: let the player know that lots of monsters have been seen around here, looking for item-x. then add twenty random encounters. after that random encoutners stop until some other event (which doesn't have to be that brilliant) occurs generating more random encounters. real monsters just don't pop out of thin air without a reason.
Come on didn't you pick up the "no encounters" to add to your armor? You'll regret it if you don't fight at all, but it does speed the point A to point B travel alot.
I haven't seen this mentioned in the article or the thread, and it's obvious. Random encounters, when incorporated into plot and gameplay, are very effective and entertaining. There are several key elements to randomness "done right":
1) The selection of monsters that pop up require you to be a certain level to pass. Often, a key location cannot be reached at first because the monsters between you and it kill you with one hit.
2) You may need a certain item to defeat a particular group of monsters, like a water pendant to defeat fire creatures. So if you haven't got it, they'll tear you down no matter what level you are until you use the proper item.
3) Random monsters may leave key components behind, like a mosquito wing, green humour, or gobs of money. These items are later used in item construction or passkeys.
4) Likewise, some of the optional but really rare items may only be obtained thru random combat.
5) The random encounters can be bypassed once passed. Usually, this is done with a town teleporter or other teleporting conveyence. Then, if the creatures have served their purpose, they can be skipped. If they haven't served their purpose, you may wander aimlessly to meet them again.
6) Gallery, collection, or similar things require you to seek out different monsters. Obviously, Pokemon comes to mind. You get an entry if you meet them, a different one if you catch them. Also, some spells in RPGs allow you to summon a creature only after you've previously fought or beaten it.
7) Weapons practice. How else do you find out how new weapons are used unless you beat a "sure thing?"
In summary, random encounters can mask the true purpose of non-random elements in the game. If the game uses randomized codes or recipes, you may have to search for different monsters each time you play. So, it can be more than a level-building annoyance.
[I've never understood why non-humanoid monsters would carry all that money, though. I guess it's a shortcut to going to town and selling the pelts/meat.]
"With battles cut out, there isn't really anything to fill the gameplay void."
Funny, I wasn't aware that Planescape: Torment needed random encounters. Apparently I went blissfully unaware of how much I was missing out on, how bored I was.
Sarcasm aside, Torment had what too many RPGs lack: story and choice. It had like a billion times more in the way of story as most RPGs out there (which, when you get down to it, are more tactical excerizes than RPGs). It let you play any type of character you wanted, from a paragon of virtue to a downright bastard. You weren't shoehorned into being the good guy.
Soylens viridis homines es
My point was that, contrasting what the previous poster had said, an RPG does not mean it has to have random battles. Yes, the PC RPGs are signficantly different in nature than console ones, but that doesn't mean you can't take bits from them and try it on the console.
This is why, I believe, we've seen quite a few PC RPG developers doing console titles lately. Traditionally, PC RPGs have been done by American developers, while console RPGs have been done by Japanese developers. This is also a part of why there's so much difference between console and PC RPGs. Now that PC/console ports have become more common, you see things like BG: Dark Alliance (which could actually be argued as more of an Action RPG) and KOTOR, developed by PC developers for consoles (though KOTOR was of course released on the XBox first). There are a handful of Japanese developers that use different systems, and many of the RPGs never even get to the US, so it's sometimes impossible to see what they've been doing without importing. It's simply a matter of what's most popular that drives them not only to release the same types of games, but to only release certain types of games to the US. Perhaps with the popularity of KOTOR we'll see games with more of the PC RPG elements coming from Japan, but I think that really depends on a PC RPG breaking through in Japan.
I like the story elements to RPGs, I like the idea of having a world I can explore at my own pace, but I hate the inability to take more than a few steps without running into a random battle. There's plenty of newer games that come out without the tradition of previous games to tie them down, would it hurt them to try something different?
I'm sure if you look through a few game descriptions or FAQs you can probably find some used console RPGs that don't use the system. They don't come out with as much fanfare because they're not FF or DW games, but there are a lot of them out there, and some of them are good games. Even Square takes a lot of risks in their other game series, and I've even had a theory going that they use the SaGa series (for an example) to try out risky ideas before moving the best of those ideas to the FF games. SaGa Frontier 2 didn't have random encounters, iirc, though it's been a while since I played it, so I could be wrong.
Now, moving on to Fallout. Yes, there were random encounters, yes the escaping was part of the battle system, but I'd argue your point that most of the battles were random. The only random battles were the ones on the world map, the majority of the ones I fought were in caves, sewers, mines, buildings, etc., where there was a set number of enemies, who were already visible, and once you killed them you could waltz through the area without anymore fights.
All of those areas, though, rarely let you out of the battle system, so it almost lies in an in-between area, because every battle is laid out the same way (randomly generated iirc), the game uses a distinctive battle system though it removes the turn-based system when you're out of immediate danger, and uses the battle system for almost everything but the overview map used for long distance travel. On the overview map, though, there are definitely random encounters, even though they aren't very frequent (and the overview map allows for much greater distances of travel as the smallest possible increment).
Yes, the 'no fights at all' option was incredibly hard to do, but it was an option. Imagine my surprise when, the very first time I reached the "boss" in Fallout, I managed to convince him to end his scheme without drawing a weapon.
I think this tends to point to something missing in most of the FF (and many other console RPGs) series: any real conversational system with multiple correct options and significant effects on the game. I think this is probably a result of the somewhat severe linearity of many of these games. Before you can convince a boss not to fight, you have to be able to choose a path through a
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Not all RPGs are JRPGs.
Get over your japanese fanboy elitism and try KotoR. If there were any random battles they weren't random in the sense that JRPGs are, but in the good sense as random number of enemies rather than random encounters.
Just because some developer did it once, doesn't mean it has to be that way forever.
To the japanese, try some new things. Let the player have choices in how the game turns out. Get rid of random battles, let me see the enemies coming and decide how I want to deal with it. How can I roleplay a non-violent character if I am always getting in fights?
I agree that it should be more realistic, and one should be able to see the enemies walking around the city. But isn't this the wrong place to be targetting realism? In every Final Fantasy game I've played, and most RPGs for that matter, the thing that struck me was how these sexy little anime guys and gals had room to carry several hundred items with them on their quest. I didn't see any porters following them... As for random time fillers, that may be true, but at least with FFX, the game was entirely turn-based and one had the option of setting the cursor to "memory", meaning that if an enemy was ludicrously weak, you'd mash X for about 5 seconds and it'd be over. If an enemy was ludicrously strong, you could use the "Flee" command, something learned very early in the game. The problem with "flee" is, my brother tried that, because he was getting annoyed with the random battles. As a result, he didn't level up, and when he got to a battle he couldn't avoid or flee from (a boss battle), he was hopeless. Fortunately, it was his game, and he threatened me with never letting me play again if I didn't give him my savegame. I don't see how having battles be avoidable makes it any better. If you were really skilled, you could avoid all battles, but it would essentially be the same as "flee". In order to make that work, we need a better leveling system -- I should never have to run around a save point looking for random encounters in order to get to a level where I can beat a particular boss. Tony Hawk's Underground (THUG) actually has the right idea about leveling. Things that you do well, you get better at. Because of that, you neither follow a linear path of evolution nor have to make difficult choices (some people I know still don't get the Sphere Grid from FFX). For example, if you can grind for a certain amount of time, your balance improves. I'm all for eliminating random time fillers, but you have to fill it with something. Besides, if it was all about the plot, why not just watch a movie? There's got to be some gameplay involved. Personally, I prefer games in which new skills or abilities earned are completely unrelated to menial tasks such as random battles. For example, most FPS games involve weapons and such that are either hidden, hard to get to, or both -- but how powerful your weapon is has nothing to do with how many monsters you kill. As proof, try playing through a game on Godmode -- there are only a few bosses that you actually have to kill, and you could otherwise be a complete pacifist and have about the same arsenal at the end -- more, even, having not wasted it all killing random monsters.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Anything you might ever need to say about anything has already been said better by Penny Arcade.
When "in" the game world (i.e. not travelling on the "overworld" map), all enemies are visible and never random.
When travelling on the overworld map, there are occasional random encounters (although we're talking maybe 1 or 2 in the time it takes to get from one town to another - nothing remotely like a Final Fantasy game).
Plus, your character had a stat attribute that affected these encounters. If your stat attribute was high, you would "see" the enemy before the encounter, in the form of a dialog box popping up, informing you of the pending encounter. If you wanted to avoid it, you clicked a button to do so. Now, this would be annoying if there were the number of encounters on the scale of a FF game, but Fallout simply did not need such a design crutch.
Unfortunately, most Japanese RPGs still prop themselves up with the crutch. Even though some notable ones in the past have partially side-stepped the problem (like Chrono Trigger, which at least greatly reduced it, although the "ambush" encounters were still a bit too frequent), most ignore all other options and happily fall back on the regressive design.
Meanwhile, BioWare games, like Baldur's Gate and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, learned from Fallout and have perfected the approach.
Over the years I've played a ton of RPGs, and although I have no problem with random encounters, I can understand why some people would so readily hate them.
One game series that stood out in terms of handling random encounters was the Fallout series created by Black Isle. Your player had a skill called "Outdoorsman" which determined your traveling and scouting capabilities. A higher outdoorsman rating would help you avoid random encounters, but you had to be willing to commit skill points toward it (at the cost of other skills). Further, items like the car (which you acquired later in the game) made random encounters less likely.
On the completely opposite end of the spectrum, we had the Shining Force series created by Sonic Team. All "encounters" were scripted, significant battles that pitted the player in strategic combat with enemy forces (basically, the battle layout was Final Fantasy Tactics without 3D terrain, 10 years earlier). The complete lack of random encounters was refreshing, and the impressive storylines mananaged to keep you involved and interested from beginning to end.
Basically, the point is that games do not have to have "dumb" random encounter engines, nor do they have to have random encounters at all. What I am trying to say is this: if you have a modern RPG, and the random encounters are handled poorly, then this suggests that the rest of the game is also designed poorly. There are too many good examples out there for RPG makers to have any excuses anymore.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
exactly, if you're going to have random encounters, it shouldn't be a big deal for you to simply take note of the gamestate. pad all you want, but if i kill the goblin king and all his best guards, how about we remove the random goblin spawns in the castle for when i want to wander about and look for treasure?
and for the love of baby jebus on rubber crutches:
if there were only goblins in the woods when i was level 2, don't just suddenly make them ogres when i'm level 6.
(unless of course the game-state and story support it. If it turns out a treaty between goblins and ogres was staving off the impending ogre invasion, fine.)
but don't just upgrade the monsters because you want a 'challenge'. if goblins aren't a challenge, take em out of the game. no creature exists in a world because it's too dumb to know when to fight or run away.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Ive got to again mention the SNES game earthbound.
When you encounter an enemy, the screen spirals in indicating a battle, when you over power them by so much, the enemys begin to run away from you, but if you are attacked the spiral turns green, spirals back out giving you an instant victory. You still get all the points and experince from winning, just without having to go through the hassel of actually fighting.
The chocobo was first introduced in final fantasy II for the NES. (NOT FF4/FF2 american.)
Ultima III on the NES handled that pretty well, I thought. I don't know about the original PC version. In the overworld map, you could see little icons for the groups of enemies, with the exact appearance indicating their strength. If you needed experience, you could go hunt them down. If not, you could usually avoid most of them.
Sometimes it wasn't possible, and sometimes they'd appear right next to you and attack, but generally you got to choose when and what to fight. I've always been really surprised that more games haven't used a method like that (MMORPGs and action RPGs not withstanding).
I thought about the same issue a couple of days ago.
My conclusion was that what really sucks with random encounters isn't random encounters, but the "aww, not now"-moment.
And that is because battles need a long time to load/camera flight/swinging weapons/getting a thousand experience and lvl up screens. I sometimes wish for an option to skip these.
I had no motivation problems with bashing the monsters in Secret Of Mana. Because it was quick and fun.
He loves Xenogears and Xenosaga and thinks Chrono Trigger "sucks." His opinion is objectively wrong. End of discussion.
"Strike that, reverse it."
The BoF series was developed by Capcom. Square just did the English port of the first game.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
It's not exactly an RPG, though it has RPG-ish element (i.e. you get experience for killing badguys which you can spend on upgrading your skills). I guess the closest equivalent is FF Tactics.
I haven't beaten the game yet, but it looks like it's possible to play the whole game without ever going through a single random encounter.
The way it works is you have a map that shows all the locations of interest, and there's an icon representing your location. You click where you want to go, and your icon pretty much travels in a straight line to where ever you clicked.
Every now and then, red dots appear randomly around the map. If you come into contact with one, then a random battle starts.
However, these dots, while not rare in the temporal sense, are pretty sparse in space. What I mean by that is that there'll always be one or two dots, but the dots are so small compared to the size of the map that if you don't want to get into random battles, it's trivial to walk around them and onto the "plot battles".
The benefit of them being common, temporal wise, is that if you get stuck on a mission, you can get into random battles pretty much at will, and level up your characters. Or maybe just play them for fun (since Silent Storm is very combat oriented, being a FF Tactics type game.)
So far I've voluntarily went through one random battle, and have never gotten into a random battle involuntarily. A friend of mine says he's beaten the game without ever having gotten into a random battle.
I think this is really the "optimal" solution: Let the players who want to have random battles play their random battles, and let players who don't like random battles not go through random battles.
Any potential RPG designers might want to give Silent Storm a try and see if they can adapt it to their designs.
I would rather have trudged thru an area with random encounters than numbly gone thru a part of the game where I already know what is going to happen.
How about you neither "trudge" or "go numbly around" in an RPG, and actually have FUN exploring and progressing the story??
I'm surprised that so few people mentioned the two main reasons why random battles really suck:
1) They're boring and easy. Classic Final Fantasy-style gameplay offers you nothing but using the same attacks over and over to defeat enemies that can be easily slaughted by nothing more than the Attack/Fight option. Because they have no depth or challenge, they're just a momentary distraction from the boss fights that you're looking forward to. Contrast this with Final Fantasy Tactics. Hardly anyone complains about the random battles in that game, even though you can rack up quite a few of them on your first playthrough to get past Dorter Trade City, Queklain, or Velius. This is because they actually offer some depth. Different terrain, different heights, different groupings and pairings of soldiers (most of which are very different from one another, because they share the same enormous Job System that you do) and monsters. There's enough depth there to make you think about skipping the random battle, but then think, "Holy shit, Ninja Army!" or "I wonder what Phantom Time Mages do..." If the combat in traditional console RPGs like Final Fantasy or Suikoden games had this kind of depth, no one would want to skip the random battles.
2) The other, minor problem: Time delay. Each random battle has a startup animation, a victory animation, an experience screen, and then another animation to transition you back to the world. Combine this with the fact that there are usually ten to twenty random battles (at least?) per dungeon and that's a lot of delay. If the monsters just jumped out and then the game switched to battle mode right there in real time, no one would mind. When most players play RPGs, you'll hear a whole lot more groaning and bitching from them during the long startup and ending animations than during the random battle itself.
I guess the real problem is that random battles don't HAVE to suck, especially because of the added muscle that the PS2, GameCube, and Xbox have to handle magic and summoning animations alongside the normal game world instead of in the plain box that your characters fight in in Final Fantasy VII or other PS1 RPGs... but for some reason, they still do.
While DMing a couple paper and dice rpgs, the silliness of having random encounters in certain situations occured to me as well. Moving around through the wilderness is one thing, and here random encounters can spice things up a bit as long as we keep in mind certain aspects of realism. Walk around in the woods at the right time of year for long enough and you will encounter a bear or a moose, and in a fantasy world where the local region is being terrorized by goblins, it only makes sense that you shouldcome across the occaisional goblin war party, but when storming a castle, encounters tend to be very focussed. When Mr. Evil King knows where you are, a winning stretegy for him is to move the maximum amount of his most powerful soldiers to that same position. Of course, he still might want to have a few guards for himself and his treasure horde just in case a few of the layers slip by, or it's some kind of ruse.
I find that a good strategy, and one that is eminently emulateable by video games, is to place guards at key positions, and then have a select number of guards who are "on patrol." When one of these on patrol guards runs across the players, chances are the guards standing at the ley position down the hall are going to help them out.
Of course when a 1st level guard encounters a 12th level player character, and sees themwading through their allies and brandishing weapons so magical that they glow, their first instinct tends to be to run. This is something else that video games should have no trouble emulating; intelligent creatures should be able to size up their opponents. Only the most foolhardy raw recruit is going to try to stop the super powerful opponent (unless there are about a hundred raw recruits, which makes it a more interesting and difficult encounter), and so will either run or surrender.
Of course the bear that you randomly encounter in the woods might not be so smart.
I recently finished FF8 (ya, im way behind the times), and I had at least 60 hours into it. I really wasnt rushing, I just played the game, enjoyed myself, played the card game and did all the side quests, powered up my characters, etc.
On a game like FF8, in case you are familiar with it, you can actually finish the game rather quickly, and there isnt even a need to level up your characters much (there are even FAQs written on how to finish with hardly any level gain).
I guess my point is that by doing so you miss much of the charm of the game, most of the interesting things, and shorten your leisure time experience. I just played it in my free time, and was happy to do so. In fact, I was kind of sad when it was over, because it was a fun game.
If you feel that you are 'wasting your time' on a game, perhaps the game is doing something wrong. IMO, the current MMOGs are worse and less interesting time sinks than CRPG random encounters. Having it take 15 minutes just to fight a monster? Unbelievable. Thats why single player games are still way better than MMOGs.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Pretty much, the one thing that I find to be quite annoying with console RPGs is not the random battles, its the contextual environment within which the random battle is placed and the resultant opponent you're facing.
I think Final Fantasy 7 had some particularly bad form in this regard, with battles that took too long to load and had enemies that were just there to look cool. Even in a world that, by the very name of the title, is supposed to be a Fantasy, there should be some semantic rules in place to keep the story believable.
Two examples of bad form in this old RPG are the random encounters in the ghetto town's playground, and in the Shinra office towers. In the town, one could get attacked by a robotic house, which sported arms and legs. If done as a boss battle, maybe one could accept that this was some freak of an inventor gone mad... however, you keep encountering the damn things... who's building these things? In the Shinra offices, one could get attacked by giant, floating, robotic fish. Even in the world of Final Fantasy, I fail to see how an office building (which was all painted up and designed as a "normal" place in the midst of the Fantasy) would have a security system which relied on giant, floating, robotic fish.
A recent nitpick I have with some console RPGs is found in my latest aquisition, a year-old RPG for the GameBoyAdvance called Lunar Legends. An excellent RPG for the GBA, but what's with the experience-points system? A semi-challenging boss fight in the SubVane level provides less experience points than offing two 1hp Ice Dogs (immune to physical attacks, a Skill has to be used to elminate them.. and their defense is not very high). I have seen similar events in GoldenSun 2, with opponents who are very hard to beat giving out little XP, but a firebird which goes down in an instant gets you 20000XP...