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[Bohandas]

Yeah, JRPG combat sucks donkey balls

[KingofstarrySkies]

Hokay, now I know GTA V recently made this a thing, but can we have more FPS-Open World games that aren't set in a fantasy situation please?

[Kadzar]

Meaningful choices in character creation and an open world aren't all that incompatible with the kind of turn-based combat in a JRPG. I guess it depends on how you define JRPG and CRPG.

I just don't understand why people would prefer JRPG combat. JRPGs are typically only better than CRPGs in terms of character development and sometimes worldbuilding creativity (seriously, TES lore may be "deep" but it's basically launching fantasy cliches at a wall and seeing what sticks) so I don't understand why you would deliberately put JRPG combat slog into a serviceable otherwise-CRPG.

The Skyrim thing was just to give an example of what I meant by open world, and I wouldn't necessarily say I'd prefer JRPG combat, but I'm interested in a party-based game where you can choose who you like for your party, and real-time combat generally sucks when you have a party of NPCs. Also, I'm not to fond of grid/position-based tactical games. And, seeing a Let's play of Final Fantasy II, it seems like the combat slog problem isn't necessarily inherent to the genre, but just something that arose out of time.

But, frankly, the thing I'm more interested in is having interesting and developed characters to recruit for your team.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

go play kotor then. Frankly i'm really tired of the party system. It's very constricting the its been implemented over the years.

[Bohandas]

I'd like to see a remake of Baldur's Gate that actually used the rules for Dungeons and Dragons. I'm not totally familiar with every edition of the rules but I'm pretty fucking sure that all of them are turn-based.

It being turn base isn that much of a corner stone for the combat found in dnd. Its done as a matter of practicality. You have free movement and hits and stuff while using the rules just fine.

You can never hope to make a 1:1 recreation of dnd rules into a video game. Its an entirely different medium, with entirely different restraints.

Temple of Elemental Evil came pretty damn close. So did Dark Queen of Krynn

[itisnotlogical]

JRPG combat is difficult to do right. In just about every JRPG I've played, there's a point where I've thought "Ugh, more random battles, I just want to get to the boss and the next story point". I think the best you can do with old school turn-based, random battle JRPG combat is to add a way to circumvent it, like shortcuts and Repel Spray in Pokemon.

The Skyrim thing was just to give an example of what I meant by open world, and I wouldn't necessarily say I'd prefer JRPG combat, but I'm interested in a party-based game where you can choose who you like for your party, and real-time combat generally sucks when you have a party of NPCs. Also, I'm not to fond of grid/position-based tactical games. And, seeing a Let's play of Final Fantasy II, it seems like the combat slog problem isn't necessarily inherent to the genre, but just something that arose out of time.

But, frankly, the thing I'm more interested in is having interesting and developed characters to recruit for your team.

Yeah, Knights of the Old Republic is the best you can do on these fronts. The combat's bearable, although it gets very punishing near the end in both games. I don't especially enjoy the characters in the first game, but there's plenty to love about the writing of both games. Play KOTOR 1 if you want a game that feels like the original movies, play KOTOR 2 if you want an interesting deconstruction of the Star Wars universe (in exchange for some pretty lame gameplay, including an inexcusably long intro dungeon/area).

[Kadzar]

So you can choose your party members in KOTOR, or is your party just made up of people the game chooses for you? Because that's the thing from Skyrim I most wanted: the ability to just recruit random-ass people you find in the world and add them to your party.

[Sirus]

Have you played Mass Effect or Dragon Age, to name just examples? KOTOR is a bit like that, where only certain characters can join your party but you get to choose which ones to take with you.

[Mech#4]

So you can choose your party members in KOTOR, or is your party just made up of people the game chooses for you? Because that's the thing from Skyrim I most wanted: the ability to just recruit random-ass people you find in the world and add them to your party.

There is about 6 to 8 potential party members of which you can choose 2 to accompany you on planetside exploration (The rest remaining inside your ship). You don't make any of them but I think one or two of them you can choose whether to accept them into your group or not.

[SealyStar]

Hokay, now I know GTA V recently made this a thing, but can we have more FPS-Open World games that aren't set in a fantasy situation please?

Not really sure what you mean, since the only fantasy first-person open-world series that comes to mind is TES, by my definitions of "fantasy" and to a lesser extent "open world".

If by "fantasy" you mean "anything unrealistic/not present in modern day", I think you're basically limited to Far Cry from 2 onwards, which isn't exactly a bad set of options save for the fact that it means supporting Ubishit.

If, unlike too many snobbish normies (reeee), you differentiate "fantasy" and "science fiction" then you have Fallout 3/NV and possibly Borderlands if you can settle for a somewhat less-open open world.

As for my problems with JRPG combat, I really don't think the random battles are it. I mean, they are annoying as fuck but an increasing number of JRPG devs have been realizing that and the once-ubiquitous feature is slowly dying in favor of "bump into enemy to fight" or other systems.

It's also not because it's almost always turn-based, because a fuckton of older CRPGs did that right. Rather, I think it's that JRPG combat is usually boring and barely interactive. Generally, the battles have no strategy involved and are just wars of attrition and praying to RNGsus while cool but repetitive animations play. In contrast, even the most primitive of turn-based CRPGs generally require and allow more varied tactics and allow movement around the battlefield.

[Kadzar]

I guess I don't mind tactics games that much, but I don't really find battlefield movement to be a particularly exciting feature of combat, unless there's some tactically important terrain features, and even then it's not always that great. Plus, there's a lot of time just spent moving your units into position, instead of being able to attack the enemy.

And I remembered the thing that made me interested in the idea to begin with: I was basically just interested in the idea of a sprite-based open world game, instead of the graphics-intensive 3d versions that are popular lately.

[Rose]

So more similar to legend of Zelda?

[Gatleos]

As for my problems with JRPG combat, I really don't think the random battles are it. I mean, they are annoying as fuck but an increasing number of JRPG devs have been realizing that and the once-ubiquitous feature is slowly dying in favor of "bump into enemy to fight" or other systems.

It's also not because it's almost always turn-based, because a fuckton of older CRPGs did that right. Rather, I think it's that JRPG combat is usually boring and barely interactive. Generally, the battles have no strategy involved and are just wars of attrition and praying to RNGsus while cool but repetitive animations play. In contrast, even the most primitive of turn-based CRPGs generally require and allow more varied tactics and allow movement around the battlefield.

This is why Twitch Plays Pokemon worked. JRPG mechanics are (usually) pure garbage, battles coming down to

Code: [Select]

while(enemies.alive()) {
if(party.healthy()) {
attack();
}
else {
castSpell(HEALING_SPELL);
}
}
They have always been a complete failure of game design, based around grinding and repetition to pad their length. I guess it could be interesting to see Glorious Nippon try to make something TES-like. Imagine an open-world RPG with character building, fully interactive environments and non-linear exploration-based gameplay, but applied to something like the Tales series.

[itisnotlogical]

I do think TES could do with an experiment into more character-driven storytelling. Even in Skyrim, the characters are very generic. Imagine if Legate Rikke or General Tullius was a reluctant soldier that only wanted to restore order as quickly as possible, detesting the bloodshed? As long as the player character remained a blank slate, I'd be down with that.

[itisnotlogical]

A multiplayer crafty-survival game that does NOT inherit from Minecraft, DayZ or Rust in any way, shape or form. If that's even possible, but it's really hard to play a survival crafting game when almost all of them are clones of Minecraft or DayZ or Rust.