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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?
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."
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.
... 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. --
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.
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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.]
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?"
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.