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 @segfaultvicta and
See that whole mentality is alien to me; it seems like somebody protesting too much to position sandboxes as better. Plenty of games use areas you can't go in the background as mood/scenery-setting and this is wholly valid.
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Yes The promise has to be broken at some point because it isn't actually possible to make an entire living universe inside the game and probably never will be The question is how gracefully this is done, based on the preferences of the players
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
But a big part of the surprise and delight of unwrapping a new genre of game or new level of technological sophistication is letting you visit those mountains The shock and wonder people experienced when 3D games actually let you walk through the world as a real place
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
Which is tied to the shock and wonder of, you know, playing a game at all Plenty of people feel immersion and investment just reading a book or watching a movie, but if everyone were completely satisfied with that there'd be no games
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