A few objects to your line of reasoning here.
First and foremost, they destroy any immersion the player might have had in the game. Random encounters are a sudden and unexpected interruption against what the player was previously doing, breaking the flow of the game and the train of thought that the player had. Although one might argue that it's irrelevant since the player can escape, in most games the escape option works a negligible amount of times and even when it does work properly, escaping doesn't undo the interruption that the encounter itself had on the flow of the game.
This is an extremely subjective argument. For instance, while it might ruin
your immersion in a game, it does not ruin
mine. This I suspect, has a lot to do with what you expect of a game to begin with. If you accept and expect random encounters to be a part of your rpg experience, you're not going to feel that they ruin your immersion.
Secondly, sudden and unexpected interruptions in games are not limited to random encounters, and is something that can just as easily be said for touch encounters as well.
Chrono Cross is a good example. The encounters in Chrono Cross are extremely annoying despite being touch encounters.
Personally, I find encounter rates and loading times to be much more relevant issues when it comes to what I feel break the flow of a game.
Secondly, they disincentivize exploration. When a player wants to explore, let them explore! If I'm really digging your map and find your world fun to discover, then let me do that! Don't pull me away from what I want to be doing to do something else! If the player is looking around the world when they aren't forced to, then they're expressing an implicit desire to explore the world. They're having fun! The worst thing you can do as a game designer is to tear the player away from something they're having fun doing.
But then again, maybe the player is like me, a person who doesn't care all that much about exploration to begin with.
Never confuse what
you want to be doing, with what
everyone else wants to be doing.
Personally, forexample, I thought FF12 was the worst in the series largely because of the large, and largely pointless dungeon/town exploration segments. I've always played FF games for the story, so to me exploration is what is detracting from the fun of the game(namely the story and the battles).
But aren't battles a defining characteristic of RPGs? Why would someone be playing the game if they didn't want to fight? Well, there's a time and a place for everything. By placing encounters visibly on the map, you allow the player to explore while alerting them of the presence of danger. This allows the player to recognize that the area they're in isn't safe to explore, which allows the player to leave if they don't want to fight battles now, or to take a gamble and try to evade the battles.
I'd say story and character development are the defining characteristics of RPGs, but I digress.
I do agree fully with this point though. However, if the game I'm playing has a good and fast paced battle system, then I wouldn't really care about these points at all.
Again, in Chrono Cross, touch battle function works best(still frustrating though), namely because the transition into battle is super slow, and the battles are slow as well. If I couldn't avoid the battles, they'd be more frustrating than they already are.
In FF7 on the other hand, transitions are fast, and battles end quickly. You are also frequently rewarded for your efforts(Levels, materia levels, limit breaks, items, and general progress) I.E I hardly noticed them at all.
In summary, I'd rather Chrono Cross had random encounters with fast transitions and fast pace, than it's current touch battle system.
Not only do they improve the experience for players who enjoy exploration, but they also make the game better for players who enjoy battles. When the encounters are visible on the screen, combat-seeking players know exactly where to go to engage in battle and to expect what kinds of challenges they'll be facing. This lets them pick and choose their fights, allowing them to maximize their own enjoyment of the game. It's obnoxious running around in circles, waiting for that one encounter you need to proc, only for a battle to start up and it not be the one you wanted to fight, forcing you to waste time running away and beginning the process all over again.
That depends. Respawn rates, for instance, largely impact(and cause trouble for) battle-focused players.
If I kill everything on the map, will new monsters spawn? Or will I have to leave and come back?
Both alternatives are a pain -
Endlessly respawning monsters have a nasty habit of breaking the gameplay mechanics that are supposed to allow you to evade the monsters to begin with.
Leaving and coming back is a waste of time that forces you to back track("run in circles"), and is therefore not really much different from running around waiting on random encounters.
As for not being able to pick and choose your fights - This can be a good thing. Maybe you want some drops, or foes, to be rare. This is easily solved with random encounters. The only real way of solving it in a touch battle system is having your mobs spawn randomly, which again detracts from the original idea of the mechanic, and renders it not much different from the random encounter dynamics to begin with.
As such, touch encounters benefit both players who prefer exploration and players who prefer to fight battles. Who does this leave? Why would you choose to use random encounters, even knowing that you can increase the enjoyment of both combat-types and exploration-types by eliminating them?
Because, as I illustrated above, the issue isn't that black and white.
Here are a few pros to random encounters on the top of my head -
- You are free to create your maps the way you please without having to take into account the mechanices of the touch system I.E you don't have to worry about enviroments being to narrow, or small for the player to avoid the enemies.
- You don't have to worry about how your mobs going to spawn, in what frequency etc, and how that is going to effect the experience of the players who're going to invest a lot of time in battles.
- You can use the random encounter system to increase the difficulty of acquiring certain items, or triggering certain events(FF7 - Yuffie, Breath of Fire 3 - skill system for example) with ease.
In any case, the touch-battle system is fine in its own right - but that doesn't mean that it's somehow always preferable to random encounters, or that people who stick to random encounters are somehow ruining the fun of all the players.
