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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...
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..."
The difference between random encounters and non-random or static encounters is the ability of the player to level up the characters as they please before attacking the next boss/challenge.
With random encounters, if you want to put the time in, you can overpower the boss or at least make things easier on yourself by simply wandering around to find more random monsters. Without it, you're stuck hoping you found every monster in an area to get to the highest level possible before getting there.
Both have their appeal, as different people play RPGs in different ways. What more games probably need is something like the chocobo that lets you go from one place to another while avoiding random encounters (the airship did this as well in the first FF game).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
"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."
That is why these games come with adjustable difficulty settings.
Besides: the game should have been scaled properly, with enough static? encounters programmed in to put the character on the propper level.
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.
You raise a very good point here that many people just do not want to accept. Final Fantasy games (and other jRPGs) rely on the "Random Phantom Encounter" concept. It's a big part of how the games/series actually work.
I think a lot of people like the graphics, story, and (some of the...) other Game Mechanics in the FF Games, and are hoping that the random battles will be dropped.
Well this simply isn't going to happen any time soon. They're a part of the staples in the series. They'd no sooner ditch the random encounters than lose the Chocobos and stop having a character (usually technical) named Cid.
Squaresoft (OK, now Square Enix) do have other battle styles. But these are in different series.
The Seiken/Mana series for action-based. Chrono for one type of on-screen baddies, the SaGa games for anotehr. Plus Kingdom Hearts for the "Random, but in same screen so you can try to avoid them" style.
But bitching about the FF Series, saying they'd be great except for one of the staples of the series is just plain dumb, IMO.
TiggsTiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"