Encourage Fun
I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XII, and it’s magnificent. So I was a little startled by one of their systems: “chaining”. You get a bonus for killing a bunch of the same type of creature in a row, and your chain is broken if you kill any other sort of critter.
While there’s a small amount of fun gameplay here (Run away! That’s not a dire rat!), for the most part it’s just encouraging you to perform a task you’ve already mastered, again and again and again. If you choose to ignore it, as I do, you still get a discouraging message flashing up on the screen every time you break a chain. “You just killed a brand new, big, bad-ass monster! … How could you? You had 7 dire rats going!”
There are plenty of examples of games encouraging un-fun behavior (Everquest’s camping; Castlevania’s leveling up). While it’s impossible to plan for everyone’s different ideas of fun, some game systems have explicit penalties for something that’s clearly a behavior the minority of gamers will enjoy.
In contrast, look at a game like Grand Theft Auto: minimal penalties, with tons of activities I can participate in if I choose. When you feel like it’d be fun to drive a cab, you can drive a cab: and the game rewards you for it. When you want to go off some cool jumps, go off some cool jumps: more rewards. The game doesn’t penalize my mood at the moment, but instead encourages me to have fun.
May 14th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
Ugh, super repetitive tasks for minimal rewards - if I wasn’t such a completionist, I’d start a revolt!
Actually, I think GTA’s model really is the way to go. I don’t see anything wrong with having some rewards for super-repetitive tasks, but I’d like to see those be side missions or additional advancement instead of part of the required path. Better yet if said diversions are actually FUN in and of themselves (such as, blowing up criminals as a criminal in a police car). Unfortunately, just about every RPG (MMO or not) feels that at some point, you need to put time in to crawl over some immense hurdle, just because that is what one does in rpgs.
I will say the later FF games have been pretty good about this - you can usually get enough xp/levels/spheres/ just by advancing the main story. If you choose to grind out some particular side event, that’s up to you, and it may reward you significantly (super-mega-ownage spell/materia/whatever), but it isn’t required to keep going.
There is definitely a different feeling with MMOs - they basically set a exponential curve that says “You must have invested X hours to be this level”. After that, most put in a 2nd gear curve that again largely rewards time invested over anything else (say, personal skill or group coordination - which laregly help in lowering the time investment per unit of advancement, instead of providing their own advancement).
Alright, i’m wandering here and there… a few thoughts to wrap things up.
* I appreciate games that allow me to play through at my pace for content, and then if I had enough fun to go back and tickle my completionist bug. That means, no slogging required for the main story arc; as well as any side quests/collections/etc can be completed on the same game where I’ve already won. Completely replayable levels/boss encounters/dungeons/etc are great.
* Nothing pisses me off more to put 10-20+ hours into beating a game that I liked well enough to “complete” just to find that because I already beat boss 2, I can never go back and get that missing fragment that allows me to continue working on the item of pwnage. Unless the game is really good, that’s usually a shelf moment for me.
* I prefer additional rewards that require skill instead of slogging; but if slogging is required, try to make it fun. The kind of fun where you look at the clock at 3 am and think to yourself “I’ve been doing this for 4 hours? really?”
-geoff
May 16th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
It is kind of funny that FF has gotten better and better about this. The gambit system is great for making battles fun again, and removing those horrible slogs through challenge-free random battles when trying to get from point A to point B.
I was about to say it was funny that eastern RPGs were fixing this up while western RPGs were heading towards the MMO treadmill, but that’s not really the case . We had FFXI, and of course Baldur’s Gate fixed up combat tedium well before Final Fantasy got tolerable.