and the concept of the Swirly Battle Transition does a lot of work in terms of how stylised and abstract your combat minigame /feels/, how different "what you can do in combat" feels from "what you can do all the rest of the time"
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Replying to @segfaultvicta @loudpenitent and
Chrono Trigger was considered groundbreaking on the JRPG side because they did away with the Swirly Battle Transition I mean it's mechanically the same thing - including having two identical copies of the monster leap out from the original's body - but staying on the same screen
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Replying to @arthur_affect @segfaultvicta and
Which does matter a lot for immersion, at least to me It's hard to keep on teleporting to "battle space" and not totally break the mimesis and feel like you're watching a movie and then playing an unrelated board game in between scenes
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Replying to @arthur_affect @segfaultvicta and
Interestingly and ironically the more integrated combat is with the rest of the game the less it feels like an RPG - unfortunately, the whole "RPG" concept is bound to ideas like "XP/HP/MP", "combat rounds", etc in our heads - and the more it feels like an "action" game
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Replying to @arthur_affect @segfaultvicta and
The Elder Scrolls games try to be as integrated as possible and therefore in a lot of people's eyes start to leave the RPG world behind
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Replying to @arthur_affect @segfaultvicta and
And somehow end up the worst of both worlds! No RPG mechanics, but no cinematic framing or terribly believable NPC interactions! Everybody is just a turret with HP, firing attacks at each other and sidestepping in 3D space.
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Replying to @loudpenitent @segfaultvicta and
"Cinematic framing" is, of course, something that a lot of people actively don't want "If it's absolutely impossible for me to anticlimactically stab the big boss in the back when he isn't looking, or poison his food, or whatever, why is this even a game"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
The themepark vs sandbox tradeoff is a real tradeoff and even Yahtzee, who hates sandbox games because they rarely live up to their promise, admits that giving up on sandbox mechanics completely is giving up on the promise a game makes by being a game
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
"When you put a mountain in a game and you give me controls to move around in the game you are making a promise I can climb that mountain If you put an invisible wall in front of that mountain so I can't, you've broken a promise Enough broken promises and I stop playing"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
And this is a very old, old conflict The hint book for Zork I - a game on an Apple IIc on a floppy disk, for Christ's sake - has a question anticipating responses from angry gamers mad at the invisible walls in the overworld
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"We would love to allow you to hike across the entire continent and get on a boat and travel to London to visit the British Museum but sadly we ran into memory limitations"
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