View from the Road: The Lesson of Final Fantasy XIII

This year's Final Fantasise XIII was, to put information technology mildly, a divisive style within the Ultimate Fancy fanbase. While fans tapered to the game's communicatory, richly designed world, excellent art direction and great fight system as pluses, others criticized it for its extremely linear nature, its agonizingly slow starting line, and the fact that its battle system doesn't really get good until you unlock everything 20-five hours into the game – long after many people gave up on that. When all was aforesaid and done, I finished FF13 sounding upon it fondly, but the criticisms against information technology are certainly valid.

There is one particular design choice in Final Fantasy XIII, though, that is absolutely brilliant. Unlike early Final Fantasy games, where you could only reconstruct your health and magic via the use of items and abilities (or at save points), FF13 completely recovered the party after every single meet. Like most things in the game, it was controversial – "This dumbs the game belt down," cried the faithful, "It makes it too easy!"

No, it didn't. In fact, it did just the opposite, and it's something that every clothes designer should start to count.

In former Final exam Fantasy games – and new games like them – the developers had no elbow room of knowing sure what whatever donated role player's status was. Maybe they had to a higher degree decent restorative items, maybe they didn't have any, maybe they were terminated-leveled in some areas and weak but others. You know that you want there to be spikes of difficulty with the bosses, simply what about the stuff in between? How hard do you get in, if you actually want people to progress through your game? If you want them to stand a gamble at the hard parts, you can't form the in-between excessively challenging – so it ends up belief bland as you senselessly chop your way through enemies that don't stand a chance.

Final exam Fantasy Long dozen didn't have that job. The designers knew that for every man-to-man fight in the back, whether boss enemy or "crank," you would be entrance it whole unfermented. Since they didn't have to worry all but keeping you primed for the big climactic battles, they could make the in-between fights actually challenging – and they certainly were.

Halfway through and through the bet on, I found myself dying to symmetric enemies far more ofttimes than I of all time had in whatever other Last Fancy game I'd ever played. It was challenging, information technology was engaging, and IT was playfulness. No more was I just moving through the world mashing Attack with the characters of Tidus OR Cloud, trusting that I'd slay the monsters in one or two hits; I now had to pay attention or I'd sustain slopped.

Interestingly enough, this is likewise a concept that Blizzard seems to glucinium moving towards with World of Warcraft. Binding in ye olde days of WoW, many of the all but powerful abilities were on selfsame time-consuming cooldown timers – Shamans' power to self-resurrect, Druids' power to revive person in battle, or the Warriors' power to suddenly take untold less terms for a certain number of time were every last on timers of thirty minutes Beaver State greater.

With that long a cooldown, how fare you tune boss battles? If you equilibrize them just about the use of these abilities, then players either have to sit around waiting for the timekeeper to be up to have a shot, or try anyway, knowing that it's all only futile. But if you Libra them around the standard baseline capabilities of your characters, then players who can actually role the polysyllabic cooldown abilities just blow finished your content far easier than expected.

That was, in fact, what happened. My WoW raid chemical group would participate in "real" attempts where we had all our abilities at the ready, and and then in-between just throw ourselves at the bosses in "practice runs" in which we knew that we stood little chance of success. Humourous the boss was fun, merely the hopeless attempts were more less nifty.

As a result, the developers down the cooldown of these abilities to a matter of proceedings, simply also diminished its effectuality – this elbow room, they could counterpoise fights with the knowledge that players would have their extra powers available every time, and not have to worry about tripping too far in either direction supported player agency solely.

Everyone likes to feel powerful, but if the trade-off for a minute of power is thirty minutes of feeling weak, will players use of goods and services their powers? If not, then, on some level, you've failed as a game designer. Spirited designers require to think about how they give their players resources – whether information technology be skills, items, abilities, or anything same that – in front they start reconciliation their games, or else you fetch up with legions of boring, non-hard enemies that make full gaps between suspicious generosity and moments of actual take exception and excitement. You bed, the things that we're playing the crippled for.

This isn't to say that all games necessarily need to do this. Being low happening resources rump create excellent atmospheres of fear and tension – if you always birth every the ammunition to inject all the zombies, your survival horror game won't comprise very scary. Thusly if that's what you're difficult to do, and then past all means go ahead and be scarce.

But connected the other hand, if always assuming that your players are at 100 percentage capacity for every fight means that you can deliver a more challenging and piquant experience, why wouldn't you do that? You aren't dumbing it down; you're attempting to make your game fun throughout the whole experience.

John Funk in reality skipped as many of the monsters in the final dungeon in Final Fantasy XIII As He could because they were boot his ass.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/view-from-the-road-the-lesson-of-final-fantasy-xiii/

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/view-from-the-road-the-lesson-of-final-fantasy-xiii/

Share this post