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wallofregularities · 2 years

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FF14: Gameplay Streamlining and the Design Space Crisis

Shadowbringers brought some big changes to the gameplay of FF14. Setting the changes of individual jobs aside, the expansion fundamentally changed how the game is played by effectively removing the management of enmity, TP, and MP. At the time of announcement, I believe these changes were seen as welcome by the larger community. I confess that I, too, saw these as positive changes at first. But after having played through Shadowbringers and Endwalker, and reflected on it, I have come to the realization that our first impressions were wrong. The reality is that enmity, TP, and MP management weren’t just contrived annoyances: they were crucial parts of the game that provided different dimensions of gameplay interactivity. They were gameplay elements that allowed for interplay to exist between the players of a party beyond taking and dealing damage. By removing them, you also remove the possibility of true utility and support abilities existing, which is exactly what we are currently seeing in FF14.

The only gameplay dimension remaining is the most simplistic one: the dimension of dealing and taking damage. This has led to a rather large problem: you can only design abilities that directly interact with taking or dealing damage. Ask yourself, what is “utility and support” in Endwalker? Bard is a support job, and the support it provides are DPS buffs to the party. Dancer is a support job, and the support it provides are DPS buffs to the party. Astrologian is a support job, and the support it provides are DPS buffs to the party. It has become impossible to design a job around anything but dealing or taking damage, as that is the game’s only remaining dimension of interactivity. We can deal damage, we can reduce damage, and we can heal damage. That’s it. That’s all we can do. Consequently, the notion of there being “pure DPS jobs” and “support DPS jobs” can no longer exist. The reasoning for Black Mage and Samurai being the highest DPS jobs has historically been because they provide no support or utility beyond their damage. How can that reasoning hold water if the “support and utility” provided by other jobs are now just more damage? What merit is there to buffing the damage of the party if the party would do more damage overall if you played a class without those buffs?

In Stormblood, support abilities would interact directly with the gameplay dimensions of threat, TP, and MP, and through those dimensions could interact indirectly with the dimension of taking and dealing damage. If you used a support ability that made it easier for the tank to maintain enmity it would translate to the tank spending less time in tank stance, which then translates to more damage for the party overall. If your healer is running low on mana, it doesn’t only mean that they won’t be able to heal as much, they also won’t be able to attack as much. Being able to help the healer out through Mana Shift or Refresh helps the party in both surviving and dealing more damage. This same argument can be applied to TP. These interactions make it easy to justify that jobs with support abilities should deal less damage, as they not only make fights easier for the rest of the party, but also have the potential to indirectly provide more damage.

In the current iteration of the game, helping and supporting your party is almost a completely foreign concept. Streamlining support and utility from the game results in a gameplay experience where there is very little interaction between the players who are supposed to be working together. It is rather as if every party member is playing within their own little bubble, and we only so happen to be attacking the same target. Some jobs will be throwing out party wide DPS buffs, yes, but they are buffs you would be using for your own benefit regardless of whether you’re in a party.

My argument is that the streamlining of the game has gone too far, and that it has significantly diminished the amount of design space the developers can operate within. The consequence of this is something YoshiP has already admitted to: they are not sure how to further evolve jobs in future expansions. They have streamlined themselves into a corner. Every new ability they make must interact with damage, and because a job can only have so many buttons, every new damage ability comes at the expense of old damage abilities. In practice, this means that in every new expansion, they must remove some of our old damage abilities, only to replace them with some new damage abilities. This is an approach where the fun of playing a job at max level will stay about the same, but playing at lower levels will become increasingly unsatisfying with each new addition. This is already noticeable within the game: playing at level 60 used to be fun, now it’s miserable, playing at level 70 used to be fun, now it’s miserable, and playing at level 80 used to be fun, now it’s miserable.

The only alternative to this is to significantly alter the way a job is played with each new expansion. The changes to Samurai and the removal of Kaiten, along with the talk about significantly changing Dragoon in 6.2, may seem to suggest that this is something the developers are looking to try. This is much riskier, as it can easily rob players of what they enjoyed about the jobs without offering an alternative.

The only clear solution to the problem, that I can see, is to bring back enmity management for tanks, make mana management more involved than pressing Lucid Dreaming every minute, and possibly even bringing back TP. And please note that this does NOT mean reverting literally every change made by Shadowbringers and Endwalker. I simply believe it would be much easier for the developers to design differentiated and balanced jobs if these mechanics had been improved and polished, rather than functionally removed.

#final fantasy xiv #games #final fantasy 14 #ffxiv

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wallofregularities · 8 years

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Fire Emblem XIII: Awakening

With the release of Fire Emblem Fates (in America at least... fuckers) I figure it's a good time to take a look at what made Fates possible: Fire Emblem Awakening. Awakening was initially intended as Fire Emblem's swan song, as the series at that point was niche at best. However, Awakening's surprising popularity breathed new life into the series. It is now one of Nintendo's more mainstream game franchises! And all it took was to remove everything that made the series good and replace them with waifus for neckbeards to drool over.

Like every game in the series, Awakening's premise is to build an army of anime characters and send them to war in the name of our glorious motherland.

The battles are fought on grid based battlefields where you control your units during the Player Phase, and just kinda wait around during the Enemy Phase. Past Fire Emblem incarnations had a firm focus on gameplay, resource management, choosing the right unit for the right situation (yes, units had weaknesses back then) and of course the strategies of the stages themselves. Awakening said, "screw that!" and instead virtually every single stage is just a big blank square with you on one side and the enemy on the other. Since all your units are big lumps of stats, you only need move your invincible forces towards the enemy, paying no attention to their formations or equipment, and have the enemies commit mass suicide on them during the Enemy Phase. Between stages you can buy items and weaponry from vendors with the seemingly endless amount of gold the game throws at you. And, if you're amazingly terrible, you can also grind between stages - just to assure that anyone can brute force this strategy game without having to strain their brain cells. And yes, there are different difficulties to choose from, but none of them actually provide any real challenge due to how fundamentally flawed the game is. Since your characters have far too high growths, (the percent chance of an individual stat increasing upon a level up), the inclusion of a new game mechanic I will talk about later, and there not being a level cap, you can easily trivialize even Lunatic mode by only leveling up a single unit to the point where no enemies can even hope to touch them. Ironically, this means that the hardest levels of the game are the 5 first ones, since at that point you haven't accumelated enough experience to create a god unit.

Here's proof that I beat the entire game on Hard using this strategy in 1 hour and 45 minutes, and I'm not even particularly good at it.

Battles in Fire Emblem are pretty much just basic math with fancy visuals. As such, a core part of the balancing are the different formulas used to decide for example your Attack Speed, how much damage you'll deal with a specific weapon, and of course how different weapons interact with one another. Enter the weapon triangle! Swords beat axes, axes beat lances, lances beat swords. Simple, innit? These are the melee weapon types in the game, and have been traditionally balanced by having swords deal the least damage, but being the most accurate and lightest weapon type - axes dealing the most damage, but being the least accurate and heaviest weapon type, while lances are in the middle of the two. However, Awakening decided it would be a great idea to get rid of weapon weight entirely, meaning swords are awful while axes are completely bat shit broken. This is further cemented by the fact that all your units are ludicrously overpowered compared to the enemies in the game, so your accuracy will never be a problem - axes or no. Magic is similiarly turned into a trainwreck with the removal of weapon weight - as Thunder magic is strictly better than Fire and Wind, and since magic users have access to all 3 types anyway there is not a single reason to use anything but Thunder. That is not to say weapon weight was handled perfectly in past Fire Emblems. The Game Boy Advance games used a weight formula that inherently made female characters worse than males for example. But... do you hear that?

Down from the heavens cometh the chosen Fire Emblem game, wherein weapon weight wasn't an awful mess! In Path of Radiance, your Attack Speed was the Speed stat - (Weapon Weight - the Strength stat) So let's say you have 8 Strength, 10 Speed and using a weapon of 12 weight. Your Attack Speed would be 10 - (12-8) = 6. If your Strength stat surpass a weapon's weight it counts as 0. This means that units can use increasingly stronger weapons without penalty as they naturally level up! But of course, this would create some semblence of balance and make the players think from time to time, the exact opposite of Awakening's design philosophy. But I could talk for hours about weapon weight, so let's end it here with Awakening's system being god awful and that they only had to copy what they did in Path of Radiance... now that I think about it, they should've just copied everything from Path of Radiance and made a remake instead of this Awakening nonsense. The final thing I want to bring up about the gameplay is the new game mechanic Awakening introduced: Pair Up. This mechanic means that you can pair up 2 units to create 1 super unit. First of all, this mechanic is fundamentally flawed because in any turn based strategy game it is always better to have a few powerful units than many weak ones. It doesn't matter that the enemy outnumber you if they can't hurt your ultra souped up soldiers. Secondly, the buff Pair Up gives is so insanely huge that it, ALONE, completely breaks the game in half. To put things in perspective, pairing up a romanced couple can easily give an average bonus of + 4.7 in every stat. This means, exluding the possibility of getting perfect level ups, the Pair Up system gives you 6+ LEVELS FOR FREE. And that's in the game where your power level compared to the opponent is already off the charts. The Pair Up mechanic is so poorly thought out that they had to split its benefits into 2 different "stances" in Fates. Think about that. It was so broken they had to halve its effect for it to even resemble something balanced. WOW!

Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Yes, this seems reasonable.

The saddest part about the units' absurd growth rates and stat inflation through Pair Up is that it effectively kills any identity the classes were meant to have on the battlefield. All your units can brute force any given task by virtue of having higher stats than the opponent. Send my fliers against enemy Archers? Sure, they can't hit my units anyway! Pfft, I don't need Armorslayers to kill these Knights, my Myrmidons' got this! What's that? I should position my Archers carefully because they can't attack in melee? *laughs as the enemy's weapon bounces off Virion's skin*

The gameplay is so bad, so lacking in depth, so flawed on every imaginable level that there is no doubt in my mind that Intelligent Systems paid no attention to it at all. So what did they pay attention to? Supposedly, the gripping story and characters. Oh boy, we're in for a doozy... The story begins with the male lead, Chrom, finding Mary Sue in a grassy field. Despite Chrom's bodyguard being hesitant - Chrom and Mary Sue immediately become best friends because of course they do. Chrom then reveals he's the prince of Ylisse and leader of a gang freedom-fighters called "The Shepards" - a group that lose all relevancy after the first 6 levels of the game. But all is not well! After taking Mary Sue to their secret hideout, we find out that one of the members have been kidnapped by Gangrel, the king of the neighbouring nation, Plegia. We dash to the Plegian border in pursuit, but alas, too late. Gangrel lets out an triumphant laugh, pushes the kidnappee onto Plegian soil and declares war on Ylisse for sending a spy to his country. Yes. That's what happens. Despite being the king of a country so comically evil their favorite past time is child blood sacrifices he feels the need to justify a war declaration and does so in the most amazingly stupid way imaginable. This might've made sense if there was some international senate or something that he tried to convince Ylisse was the aggressor, but this game isn't written well enough to have that. Everyone present knew he was full of shit so this dumb-ass ploy accomplished fuck all. Chrom goes to mope about it to his elder sister whose name I've forgotten. She says some hippie shit about how awful war is and that she'll go talk Gangrel out of it. NEWS FLASH: A BAD FUCKING IDEA. So no shit she gets killed, which is supposed to be emotional but we've seen her in like 3 scenes or something before that so the players have no attachment to her loosely defined character of vaguely being nice. Chrom is like "NOOOOOO!" while sad music plays and then literally nothing important happens for the next levels until we go kill Gangrel. Fade-in a couple years later. Chrom has married Mary Sue and become Ylisse's king after his sister's death - luckily that involves zero responsiblities and has no bearing on his character. 2 unimportant people come stumbling into the throne room and tell Chrom that an evil king from a far away nation is trying to conquer the world because he's called "The Conqueror" and it would've been really awkward if he didn't give it a shot. This is when shit starts getting weird. So Mary Sue and Chrom's daughter from the future, Lucina, enters and is like "YO DAWG, I'M FROM THE FUTURE AND I KNOW YOU WILL DIE IN THIS WAR! THERE'S ALSO THIS HUGE DRAGON-GOD THAT WILL DESTROY THE WORLD!" Chrom's like "Naaaaaaah," and this convinces her that it'll be okay. Then, once again, literally nothing of note happens for the rest of the act while we go kill The Conqueror, because 80 % of this game is filler. The 3rd and final act of the game begins with yet another evil king declaring war. Turns out after Gangrel's death a new, even evil...er person named Validar became king of Plegia. Then he appears in front of Mary Sue and reveals her dark past she had long forgotten. Mary Sue is... Validar's daughter!!!!! And she was bred through the dark powers of incest (no joke, this is Fire Emblem tradition) to host the evil dragon-god, Grima, and destroy the world! Time travel is always a fucking mess but let me try to explain this to the best of my capabilities. In the timeline Lucina came from, Validar successfully summoned Grima through Mary Sue and destroyed the world. Lucina used a time portal to escape Grima and to stop the same thing from happening in this timeline - problem being Grima followed her through it. However, when Grima travelled through the portal he lost most of his powers, reverting him to his human form... for some reason? Everyone else who travels through time suffer no consequence and are completely fine, but this all powerful god, the one most likely to be able to do that kind of stuff, cannot. In lieu of his decreased power, Grima heads off to find this timeline's Mary Sue so they can fuse and regain his strength, but this also fails for no particular reason, weakening Grima even further and giving Mary Sue amnesia. Then Grima proceeds to simply wait around until act 3, where he finally decides that he didn't actually need this timeline's Mary Sue anyway and resurrects his dragon form by himself, seemingly something he could've done at any point in time. I'm fucking serious. Straight from the Fire Emblem Wiki: "Grima tries to persuade the Avatar into accepting the Fell Dragon's influence, but they refuse. Undeterred, Grima decides to harness the power himself through the future Avatar's body and powers up his real dragon body." Grima is literally sitting with his thumb up his ass for 2/3 of the game. Oh, and as you probably noticed, act 1 and act 2 have nothing to do with the actual plot. They could've been replaced with anything else and have act 3 make as much sense as it does now because they are completely irrelevant to the story the game is trying to tell. It's like if Lyn's Mode in Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword was twice as long and unskippable.

For the final level of the game we teleport onto Grima's back. Instead of Grima's human form turning into his dragon form or simply disappearing, we see that he, too, is apparently on top of the dragon's back. Whaa?? Are they seperate entities? Does Grima's human form mentally control his dragon form? Why would Grima do this when the only thing it accomplishes is creating the mother of all weak points for us to attack? This makes no sense!! As I'm sure you could guess, Mary Sue is the only one who can truly kill Grima because of the connection they share. But in doing so... she would also sacrifice her own life... Except fuck that! She's fine! There can be no consequences! Remember Chrom's sister who died? She's alive! Remember Gangrel? He's alive and wasn't evil! Remember the Conqueror? He's alive and wasn't evil! Remember these 100 side-characters we killed but weren't important enough for me to mention? They're also alive! Someone please kill me!

TL;DR: A bunch of random and irrelevant shit happens, then a dragon comes out of nowhere and we kill it. The End.

And now, finally, it is time to talk about Awakening's bland, awful, boring, worthless cast. Obviously I'm not gonna throw out a deep analysis for every character because that would be a colossal waste of time on your end and would make me fall even deeper into the depression this game has given me. Keeping things brief, the entire cast is weighed down by the fact that they're all romanceable, and as such, have to be "attractive" to the player. Diversity is gone - replaced with carbon copies of white hot people in their early 20s. Where are my child soldiers? Where are all the old people to throw on the bench the moment they're introduced? LAAAAME! There is no Vaida in this game. There is no Gonzales. Any and all imperfections have gone through the waifu-o-tron and emerged as generic, lifeless, wastes of pixels. The incredibly bland characters and sheer quantity of supports each character is given doomed them to be awful, watered out snoozefests. Almost every single support just has them spouting their 1 character trait over and over until they somehow end up married. Supports are meant to explore and develop the facets of a character. You're supposed to actually learn something new about them in each conversation. But in Awakening every character is single, so there aren't any relationships to explore. None of them have any interesting backstories to share, and none of them have any insight in regards to the overarching plot. Donnel, for example, is a farmer. Every single one of his supports has him mention the fact that he is a farmer, and maybe have him do something farming related to the amazement of the other participant. Cordelia is in love with Chrom, so every single one of her supports have her allude to being in love with Chrom and then at S rank just marry some other dude. It is so formulaic that once you've seen 1 of a character's supports you've seen all of them. Amusingly enough, the only support in the entire game I actually remember in detail (because it is so bad) is Tharja and Kellam's and it goes: Rank C Tharja: What are you doing? Kellam: I'm writing a letter to my parents. Tharja: K. Rank B Kellam: Tharja, I think you, too, should write a letter to your parents. Tharja: Nah. Rank A Kellam: What are you doing? Tharja: I'm writing a letter to my parents. Kellam: K. Rank S Tharja: Kellam, my one character trait is being in love with Mary Sue, but after writing that letter to my parents I realized you'll do. Kellam: Great! Being a silver medal is what I do best! Their fiery hot passion for one another is enough to... sigh in disappointment.

Then there's this whole controversy about Fire Emblem's female character design post-Awakening that I can't just ignore. Fire Emblem pre-Awakening used to have pretty respectable designs, but that has now changed. Now we have boob armor, we have battle thongs, we have whatever the hell is going on with Camilla's design. I'm typically not a person to call stuff like this out, but the discrepancy between the old and new games is so fucking huge that I have to wonder what the hell happened for them to completely change their policy on this. The best explanation I can think of is Awakening's target audience. Intelligent System's staff sat down in a conference meeting one day with a billboard saying, "More skin = More waifu." Maybe I'm being cynical, but how else would you explain this?

Both Wyvern Riders, both from Fire Emblem. If this doesn't make you cry in your cornflakes, I don't know what will.

It's one thing to dress characters in revealing, fanservice'y outfits, but at least make it look good! Even ignoring the blatant sexism, Camilla's design is so visually appaling it makes me want to poke out my eyes with a rusty spoon. And yeah yeah, "she's from Fates!" but Awakening and Fates have the exact same art direction and lead artist so that's hardly a point in Awakening's favor. Seriously, Knights in Awakening look more like they belong in a Gundam anime from the 80s than any medieval setting. Cavaliers are running around with toilets on their heads. Hell, Sorcerors are running around in NOTHING! There is not a single thing in Awakening that doesn't look like ass in comparison to... say... Fire Emblem Path of Radiance. *swoon*

Don't forget to flush!

Earlier in this... review? rant? whatever you wanna call it, I mentioned how Awakening has the most overpowered units in the franchise compared to the enemies we fight. Now, after all is said and done, let's see Mary Sue and the final boss of the game side by side.

Mary Sue has an average of 44.5 in every stat, while Grima's average stat is a mere 42.87. Remember, this is on the same Hard file I cleared in 1 hour and 45 minutes. This is without any grinding or the DLC skills that make your units a million times stronger. Hell, I didn't even create the Avatar optimally: see Swordfaire without having access to swords. Anyone trying to play Awakening as intended would have units many times stronger than Mary Sue, who can already solo the game!

When I look at Awakening, and Fates looming on the horizon, I am reminded of the saying: "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." The Fire Emblem I fell in love with all those years ago died with Heroes of Light and Shadow. What we have today is nothing but a desecrated corpse tied with string and puppeteered to appeal to the mainstream weeaboo audience willing to throw enough money at their waifus to keep it afloat.

Awakening was a mistake.

Anime was a mistake.

#Fire Emblem #Fire Emblem Awakening #Video games #games #review #angry weebs incoming #just go play Fire Emblem 4 #or hell #literally any other game in the series #except Shadow Dragon #we don't talk about that one

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