The First Quest - Should it be easy?

[Alexander Amnell]

I agree with wavelength and ksjp17, challenge is fine but artificial challenges like enemy mobs weakening you to the point that you cannot proceed with the game after beating them is just rediculous. I'd rather see the party healed after every single battle personally, using weak mobs to force resource hoarding through dungeons is just a crutch to begin with; and where I the fun in fighting something that cannot be a threat to you just so you have to worry about being killed by cumulative paper cuts? Wouldn't it be better if you want a challenge to set the game up so that each battle can threaten you but be overcome rather than a field of lemming-like enemies with one hunny badger hiding at the end waiting to single-handed lay Frick you up?

 

[Wavelength]

Just in case I wasn't clear, like we discussed in your other topic, I think that attrition throughout a dungeon (as opposed to easy healing but troops that can 100-to-0 your party) can be a totally fine system.

It's just that players won't be expecting this at first, nor will average players have the time to develop good battle strategies before the end of your first dungeon.  This is why I suggest erring far toward the "generosity" side in your first dungeon (making it so that poor play is apparent, but won't lead to a Game Over or any other significant punishment), and even going lightly on the second dungeon as well.

I feel like Chantellise and Recettear are great examples of mostly attrition-based Action RPGs that do a poor and good job, respectively, of easing the player into the challenge, which is funny because they're made by the same company and share a lot of the same mechanics.  I think EasyGameStation learned a lot from Chantellise, which (after an unloseable tutorial) threw you into a relatively difficult first dungeon (Terran Ruins) with monsters you haven't seen before that can deal boatloads of damage to you until you grind money and buy good equipment (as well as difficult-to-pick-up controls).  It was very frustrating for me, especially since there wasn't really anything else to do in the game.  The difficulty stays pretty consistent throughout the game.

So their next game, Recettear, gave you a full "training" dungeon with extremely easy layouts and only easy-to-kill green slimes as enemies (allowing you to get used to the battle mechanics), and then introduced several new enemy types in the second dungeon (Jade Way), but kept the enemies' levels and damage low enough that most players would have an easy time getting through it without dying.  It also helped that the fixed 3/4 perspective made controlling your characters far easier, and that even if you were awful at the combat there were other things to do (run your shop, build relationships with people) while you built up better equipment.  The difficulty actually ramps up to very hard levels later in the game, but by the time it does so, the player has had long enough to understand how everything works and get comfortable with the game, so when you do "die" in a dungeon, it feels far more like "I messed up" or "I'm not ready for this yet" instead of "why does the game hate me".

 

[jonthefox]

Re: Alexander:  I settled on a system of using attrition for non-boss enemies because I really couldn't think of how to make every battle challenging and interesting.  I also felt that if every individual battle had the capability of leading to game-over, that would be even more frustrating for the player.

Thanks Wavelength...I think some of your suggestions are really good and I'm going to take them.  I'm just torn about how far to go though, because I just can't help but personally feel that a dungeon where death is near-impossible, even if it's the 1st dungeon, is just not fun...if all players need to do is engage in every visible encounter and spam their attack/skills, I don't see the point.   I do understand that A) players new to the genre might need an adjustment curve...honestly though, this simply might not be the right game for such players going too far in the other direction is also not fun...so I do think further playtests/tweaks are in order.

Also, I took a look at Recettear...It honestly completely lost my interest in the first 20 minutes, didn't find it fun or enjoyable at all.  Not sure if it's just not my type of game, but that kind of hand-holding and slow immersion just made me want to stop playing. 

 

[Kinerex]

I agree with most of these posts. I find it generally rewarding when the game might start a little more difficult, but with common sense is easily overcome. For my game, each character has specialties that require a focus on STATS that boost them. For example, one of my characters is an offensive/magic offensive tank. So it would make sense to channel points into ATK/M.ATK (my game uses stat points per level up), rather than say, DEF and LCK. 

The first boss can only kill you if you literally somehow manage to make it all the way through without any battles whatsoever. If you are level 2-3 (which are easy to obtain in the start), then you should have no problem killing the boss (granted you distributed points logically). I think that balance is the key. I've watched many people play my game, and try the same strategy on later bosses they used before and die repeatedly. But once you figure out a good strategy, you can win with much less stress. It takes time to perfect it. I played through the game many times to test everything. Literally every enemy and boss. 

A good game is the developer's responsibility, but the player must be patient. I know people who love the easiest games in the world, and then others who love challenges (I was a victim of Dark Souls). I think you just have to make a balance for everyone, all ready accepting that not everyone will like the difficulty of the game. Best of luck and I'd like to try your game if you have a link!

- Zack

 

[hian]

Naturally, it depends on who you're making the game for.


It also depends on what you mean by "the first mission". Are you talking about the tutorial, or the first mission


after the tutorial?


Personally, I am of the old-school "read the god damn manual"-crowd who've always had a strong loathing for people who walk


into a game not knowing how to play it, then fail, and then complain that the game didn't teach them how to play it.


To me, that's the equivalent of an illiterate picking up a novel, and getting angry at the novel, because it doesn't teach them


how to read.


Why should it have to? Especially when most games today are made on tried and tested conventions


established by more than 3 decades of games, and now pretty much have their own logic.


The more actual game-time is wasted on teaching a player what they might already know, or grasp quite quickly,


is game-time lost which could have been spent on the more interesting parts of your game


that are more likely to captivate an audience.


So with that being said - are you aiming for the casual, new generation of angry-bird fans, or for long-standing RPG (more


specifically, probably those who already know about RPGmaker) fans?


My guess is the latter, and that makes most tutorials redundant in either case - and the same for first (hand-holding) dungeons.


At worst, they should be skip-able - at best, they shouldn't be necessary, because your game-play will logically


demand certain stragegies and game-play elements in the beginning, which will be the basis for later game-play,


and therefore serve as a sub-text tutorial (like the first level in Megaman X, which, bear in mind, is still


a level you can die on, in which most players completely new to something like Megaman also will die).


RPGs have traditionally had very little in ways of teaching players how to play - they teach you the buttons,


and migh have some tutorials of passive functions (like how to make the materia system work, or how to level up skills)


leaving battle strategies (which is the brunt of the active game-play in an RPG) largely uncovered


in order to allow the player to figure this out on his or her own, using a trial and error approach.


Personally I prefer this. I don't mind meeting the game-over screen, as long as game-over isn't code for "you've now lost a


huge amount of progress and will have to redo the last 2-3 hours you just did before dying".


Last Ranker for PSP, among others, was kind enough to give you a continue screen if you lost a battle offering not only


to take you to the main menu, but to retry the battle as it originally occured, or even to first visit your in-game menu


and then fighting again (allowing you to use itens, change equipement, and skill set-ups before the retry).


Excellent game-design. It allows for high difficulty, where players can be punished for their own ignorance


or lack of foresight, while still allowing players the ability to correct that on the spot, and therefore


not make them feel like they've lost time, or been unfairly treated by the game for not having picked the right


battle set-up from the start.


I want my games to be challenging, and I because I've gamed for 3 decades I usually dislike toturials and "first missions"


that insult my intelligence by treating me like a person who didn't actually just read the manual before starting up the game,


or as a person who hasn't played enough games to intuitively get the game-system right out of the box,


when both are usually the case. That being said, most people are not me, and you have a large new generation of gamers out


there (and you have the accursed and entitled millennials as well *shudders*), so if you want to reach them, even


something as excellent as the Megaman X approach might not be your best choice in terms of making your game accessible.


However, if making your game accessible means padding it out with cushions, removing harder obstacles, etc.


then you'll end up turning away people like me - so you're going to have to make a choice at some point anyway.


I'll put it simply -


I don't mind difficult bosses, enemies and dungeons that require specific strategies that can only be uncovered through trial and


error - as long as you give me plenty of chances to save/load, and retry without having to endure long loading times,


back-/re-tracking, unskippable cut-scenes/dialogue and so forth.