LINEAR MAPS :@

[Raistlin]

I liked FFXII's dungeons, too, for the most part. Dungeon crawling is old school fun. I guess it would depend on how much you liked the gameplay and fighting, though.

[the AJman]

I understand that some people like the more linear dundeons and such, and that fine. I just personally like the old school dungeon crawling when it comes to the dungeons.

[Wolf Kanno]

The only problem I have with linear dungeons mostly comes from them being terribly uninspiring (Mi'hen Highroad anyone?) and they bank on the storyline being so good you won't mind rushing through the dungeon, which is a very dicey gameplan if you ask me cause story is subjective. I'm not asking for 3 hour dungeon crawls but I like it when my dungeons are more than a straight line to the next cutscene.

I only feel that RPG developers need to find a middle road cause they either do it old school and thus you spend more time plowing through it that by the time you reach the next plot point you have completely forgotten what was going on or its so streamlined and straight forward you wonder why they bothered making a game and not just make it a cgi movie.

Mostly I would like to hear more about creative dungeons, not linear or open ended.

[arcanedude34]

I definitely prefer a happy medium to linear and so convoluted that I get lost three steps in/so open that my OCD compels me to explore every last inch for hours. Final fantasy VI-IX had good dungeons. Explorable, but not time guzzlers.

FFXII's were fun to extent, but after a while, they certainly began to drain my energy, and the relative difficulty of that game didn't help that at all

[Skyblade]

The problem with the dungeon crawling in XII was threefold.

First, I didn't like the combat, and the mindless trial and error of the dungeons did nothing to shorten the amount of it I had to experience.

Second, the dungeon design was no good. I love good dungeon exploration. Games like Golden Sun and Legend of Zelda, with their puzzle and exploration based dungeons, are among my top games ever, and I would love to see some of that sort of stuff in an FF game. But this game didn't have it. The dungeons were rarely anything more than "find door, look for switch to door, press switch to open door, rinse and repeat". But it gets worse. Take the Great Crystal (which is by far the worst offender in the point I've reached in the game so far). No map, and not even any distinguishing features from one room to the next. If you didn't do trial and error for hours drawing your own map (or steal one off the internet, or, as the developers hoped, buy a strategy guide), you had pretty much no way through that place. That is not good dungeon design (and hasn't been since the dungeon-crawler genre died so long ago).

Third, and perhaps the worst of all, there was no point to the dungeon exploration. Say what you like about the boring linearity of a place like the Mi'ihen Highroad, I still feel it was better than 90% of the areas in FFXII, because it was interesting. There were a ton of NPCs along it to talk to who would break up the simple jog down the path. There were several plot-heavy points that gave you background information. Maechen, Belgimine, Rin, Shelinda, Cally, Captain Lucille, Elma, Clasko, Gatta, Luzzu, Dona, Barthello, and, of course, the dozens of crusaders rushing around handing you supplies and building up the mood for Operation Mi'ihen. You knew why you were going down the path, and you still felt a connection to the rest of Spira as you did it.

In FFXII, you were so disconnected from the plot and characters that you never really knew why you were going through a dungeon, what your objective was, or why you cared. The plot and the dungeon crawling was so divorced it was like two entirely different games. You went from a couple minutes of cutscenes and city exploration to a couple hours exploring dull, repetitive, and uninspired dungeons.

I would take the interesting linearity of X versus the boring non-linearity of XII any day.

[Rad Bromance]

There are towns. Go to the official Japanese site and you can even look at some of them. There just aren't very many from what I've read, and there are several dungeons.

Personally, I'll just have to wait and see how the game pulls it off, because I remember how upset I was when I heard X had no world map and no ship you could fly, and XII had done away with the traditional battle mechanics, and yet, I ended up loving both games.

[Wolf Kanno]

The problem with the dungeon crawling in XII was threefold.

First, I didn't like the combat, and the mindless trial and error of the dungeons did nothing to shorten the amount of it I had to experience.

Quite surprised you hated combat in this game but that's a subjective opinion and personally I enjoyed combat especially since it allowed me to micromanage but that is a topic for the XII forums and not here. Personally, I hated X's combat cause it was easy and tedious and I asked myself very often why bother, but once again, that is a topic for another day.

Second, the dungeon design was no good. I love good dungeon exploration. Games like Golden Sun and Legend of Zelda, with their puzzle and exploration based dungeons, are among my top games ever, and I would love to see some of that sort of stuff in an FF game. But this game didn't have it. The dungeons were rarely anything more than "find door, look for switch to door, press switch to open door, rinse and repeat". But it gets worse. Take the Great Crystal (which is by far the worst offender in the point I've reached in the game so far). No map, and not even any distinguishing features from one room to the next. If you didn't do trial and error for hours drawing your own map (or steal one off the internet, or, as the developers hoped, buy a strategy guide), you had pretty much no way through that place. That is not good dungeon design (and hasn't been since the dungeon-crawler genre died so long ago).

While I would never say that XII was the epitome of clever open ended dungeon design still had quite a bit more than X's single road... I also simply appreciated the scale and the fact I could get lost. Puzzles would have been great especially since XII rids itself of the problem I had with complicated puzzles in games like Golden Sun and Wild ARMs by reducing the issue of random encounter, nothing more annoying than trying to solve a puzzle that requires moving through several rooms when you are getting attacked every two steps and dealing with the loading of a battle screen and what not...

I personally never had problems with the Crystal though. I actually managed to get through it without actually consorting to a guide especially since the complicated part is getting to the secret bosses hidden in there (which is not that difficult if you have played FFT since it follows the Zodiac Stone) so once again I cannot in good conscience completely agree with you especially since being lost in a dungeon was refreshing after having my hand held by the game like 90% of all the RPGs released at the time.

Third, and perhaps the worst of all, there was no point to the dungeon exploration. Say what you like about the boring linearity of a place like the Mi'ihen Highroad, I still feel it was better than 90% of the areas in FFXII, because it was interesting. There were a ton of NPCs along it to talk to who would break up the simple jog down the path. There were several plot-heavy points that gave you background information. Maechen, Belgimine, Rin, Shelinda, Cally, Captain Lucille, Elma, Clasko, Gatta, Luzzu, Dona, Barthello, and, of course, the dozens of crusaders rushing around handing you supplies and building up the mood for Operation Mi'ihen. You knew why you were going down the path, and you still felt a connection to the rest of Spira as you did it.

Except you forget the game stops you literally every 20 seconds to go into its story banter, and the fact that most of the dialogue consists of the three simple statements of:

1. The Crusaders are planning to stop Sin with the Al Bhed
2. Only a summoner can defeat Sin
3. Please Yuna, sacrifice yourself so I can go on with my meaningless life.

The majority of the dialogue ends up making a predictable plot scene even more predictable and ultimately destroys any sympathy I may have had for all parties involved, the plot practically sabotages itself by foreshadowing crap so heavily it basically tells you in advance how everything is going to turn out.

Not to mention this dialogue is repeated over and over again every 20 to 60 seconds while your walking down a straight line cause the game can't seem to let the player have a few moments of peace to think for themselves. The game bores you with what I consider to be pointless details on a repetitive level, its not story telling or immersion, its simply bad writing accompanied with terrible game design. X should have been a movie as it required no real interaction from the players part whether mechanical interface or even just thinking about the plot and cast.

In FFXII, you were so disconnected from the plot and characters that you never really knew why you were going through a dungeon, what your objective was, or why you cared. The plot and the dungeon crawling was so divorced it was like two entirely different games. You went from a couple minutes of cutscenes and city exploration to a couple hours exploring dull, repetitive, and uninspired dungeons.

I found the sheer scale of things to bring life to all the locations of XII and I hardly felt plot and gameplay was divorced from each other as each place has its own history and significance to Ivalice as a whole. If Raithwall's tomb was simply five rooms with puzzles, I don't think you would have grasped the scale of his importance by wandering through a Tomb the size of a palace. The Pilgrimage of Mt. Bur-Omisace is far more real as you struggle to climb through a maze like mountain path filled with relentless monsters and snowstorms that turn you around. Giruvegan leaves you asking more questions than actually answering and for once I feel its a better choice than simply revealing the "magician's tricks". I don't really feel having your party stop every five minutes to explain the ADHD player why they are there is necessarily a good thing or a wonderful example of the marriage between story telling and game design.

Past FFs games had locations that never had real back stories in them yet people feel they need to complain about XII's? It is ridiculous in my opinion. You drive down the street to go to the store but its not like you need to learn the significance of the history of the roads you go to get to your destination. A good chunk of things in RPGs are never explained and most have such tedious reasons for existing that I feels its even more tedious to explain it to the player, we have to go through here to get to there. I see no real reason to have the game explain this to me as it seems quite obvious.

I would take the interesting linearity of X versus the boring non-linearity of XII any day.

X was linear to the point of making me wonder why I should bother. I could get as much out of X simply by watching the cutscenes on Youtube whereas I would lose a bit of XII as a story by doing the same. The gamplay is important cause you actually earned a lot of it and while you take a look at the cinematic cutscenes of locations you the player understand what you had to go through to get there. If we want good linear dungeon design, we should look at Xenosaga or BoFV: Dragon Quarter as they handle it much better imho. Puzzles, claustrophobic mazes, and combat systems that are actually good throughout the game instead of just the end.

So please, when we discuss good linear gameplay let's actually stick to good games, that did it well.

[Rostum]

To me linearity isn't such a bad thing. I prefer the overall experience, and it doesn't matter if the game is linear or non-linear; as long as I have a good experience that is all that matters to me.

Of course I can't say anything about FFXIII, but I liked both FFX and FFXII in terms of dungeons.

[VeloZer0]

I haven’t included quotes with this because it is a response to everything I have read in this thread.
*I make several statements as fact which can obviously only be my opinions, but its far easier to phrase them this way*

Re: Great Crystal Dungeon

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My only problem with this zone was that the lack of map made it a significantly longer trek to get through. Had the game been enjoyable to me I probably would have appreciated it more, but as it was I was just trying to rush through to get some closure on the game.

Re: Combat System

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I concur that this is the wrong place to discus combat systems, but I would like to note that if you are not enjoying yourself as you play through the dungeon, it will probably color your impressions of the dungeon in general. When I think of dungeon designs objectively I would say overall that XII was superior to X, but seeing as I was enjoying myself in X ans slogging through in XII I liked the dungeons in X far better. And it has nothing to do with dungeon design. Re: Puzzles Once again, in XII the puzzles just seemed to me like things they threw in to increase that games play time, not anything that involved me. As mentioned earlier, had I been enjoying myself I would probably feel differently. (I'm all for more complicated puzzles. Though I have mixed feelings about the phasing out of random encounters, this is certainly one good thing I can see coming of it.)

Re: Random Encounters & Dungeon Design

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I found one LARGE and crippling design constraint is that all dungeons in FFXII and other non-random encounter type RPGs is that all locations must be made open and suitable for encounters on the dungeon map. Though I don't despise large wide open areas on principle, it feels like all the areas are the same re-skinned version of each other. It makes virtually every RPG game I play nowadays feel very uninspired. Just think of how many areas of your favorite pre-PS2 RPGs would be impossible to recreate in the new paradigm.

Re: Camera Angle & UI

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I've ranted about this before, but this is another place to vent about my single biggest issue with the 'modern generation' of RPGs. This shift from overhead cam to third person camera is, imho, THE biggest shift in RPG dungeon design for me. This is significant because:
a) you always get the narrow tunnel vision perspective of looking towards your objective. I'm not looking around with this camera angle, I am looking where I want to go. With my vision focused on the path ahead (when I am looking at the path, see next rant) I am missing the work that only comes into enough detail I can see it when it is very close to my character.
b) maps lessen the focus of looking at the dungeon. Because of the constant camera angle change third person perspective makes it much harder to keep yourself oriented in a dungeon. This has made map essential and ubiquitous. However, this results in more attention being drawn to maps than to the environments themselves. I can't count how many dungeons I have blown through barely even taking note of the surroundings. If I was the person whose job was designing the dungeon textures it would make me want to cry.
c) there is a proliferation of crap on the field screen. I can't stress enough how much
better an environment looks with the removal of ALL UI elements. When I used to play WoW, which isn't known for it's cutting edge graphics, I was constantly amazed how much better the game looked if I were to turn of ALL of my UI elements. This occurred to me again when playing Tales of Legendia. The game isn't especially well developed graphically, but the game features rendered backgrounds done in the same style of old pre-rendered games. And despite the relative primitiveness of the textures all I was taking in was how good all the areas looked. (Not to mention I could navigate and not get lost w/o a map)

Re: Path Like Design

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Though there is much hate for the path like design of FFX, I can’t say the layouts of FFXII felt appreciably different. To me they were just big paths, with very wide shoulders on the side. They still felt like something I had to get through to get where I am going, not something I was exploring. I blame this on the camera angles, as if you think about it most pre-rendered layouts are essentially just long winding paths, the fixed camera just made you not notice it.

Re: Motivation

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Dungeons usually fall into one of two categories 1) It’s in my way, 2) I need to get something from it. In case number one the dungeon requires little or no explanation, it is just there. In fact, no explanation is usually better, as the more they try to explain the more it is apparent they have left out. In case number two, there has to be explanation to go with it. It has to be plausible why this object is in a monster filled pit, and why you know it is there in the first place. This becomes harder to explain the more civilized the world becomes. In games where the cities seem somewhat isolated from each other, and much of the world remains untamed it is much easier to accept all of these monster filled areas that you are the first ones to brave. The Pilgrimage of Mt. Bur-Omisace was one of the most disillusioning parts of FFXII for me, here I was feeling like I was exploring lands not claimed by civilization, blazing a new path into the unknown, and I get to a dam temple that everyone and their dog seems to be able to get to.

Re: Treasure Chests

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Do you remember how excited you were in FFIV to go the wrong way in a dungeon and hit a dead end? Why, because you were excited for the loot that was invariably waiting in a chest to reward your exploration. And these items were significant upgrades. Fast-forward to FFXII and it’s treasure chests. They were so useless that I stopped collecting them after the first half of the game. (And don’t get me started on the fact that you only have a random chance of getting a good item even if you loot a unique item chest). Having the extra exploration of a dungeon yield significant upgrades is one of the biggest ways to make exploring a dungeon more interesting. Once I realized exploring the areas of a dungeon get me nothing, it just becomes a big obstacle between me and where I am going.

[Skyblade]

I'm not going to argue with most of your post, because you are correct, most of the issues are subjective.

FFXII's battle system was so painfully broken and annoying to me that it detracted from the rest of the game, especially the exploration. While FFX's battles actually enhanced the experience of the game. ...For me. So I, personally, don't mind a more linear design that gets away from the troubles of XII.

Although, if they fixed the battle system, I would find XII's system more appealing than X's, but as long as the battle system is so broken, I'd rather take the approach that gets me through as few as possible. Dungeon exploration is fun as long as the combat is fun, so any puzzles on top of that would just be icing on the cake.

But you are wrong on one point.

While I would never say that XII was the epitome of clever open ended dungeon design still had quite a bit more than X's single road... I also simply appreciated the scale and the fact I could get lost. Puzzles would have been great especially since XII rids itself of the problem I had with complicated puzzles in games like Golden Sun and Wild ARMs by reducing the issue of random encounter, nothing more annoying than trying to solve a puzzle that requires moving through several rooms when you are getting attacked every two steps and dealing with the loading of a battle screen and what not...

In Golden Sun and its sequel, 95% of the puzzle rooms had random encounters disabled. They were in fact, decent places to rest and recuperate as you could walk around regenning PP without encountering enemies (though this took a while).

Re: Random Encounters & Dungeon Design

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I found one LARGE and crippling design constraint is that all dungeons in FFXII and other non-random encounter type RPGs is that all locations must be made open and suitable for encounters on the dungeon map. Though I don't despise large wide open areas on principle, it feels like all the areas are the same re-skinned version of each other. It makes virtually every RPG game I play nowadays feel very uninspired. Just think of how many areas of your favorite pre-PS2 RPGs would be impossible to recreate in the new paradigm.

This is an excellent point. Up until XII, the layout of areas was far more flexible. Since combat did not take place on the exploration field, the dungeons did not have to be designed with combat in mind, and it did allow them to be far more interesting. Kudos for picking up on that. I'd noticed the result, but not conciously identified the cause.

A lot of your post was great, but that one and the Treasure Chest one were among my favorite points. I hope like heck they fix Treasure Chests.

[Vyk]

A lot of my favorite action/adventure games were -completely- linear. Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone for the PS2 was -all- about the story and the gameplay. This just beefs up the story -extra- long. And adds RPG components. A lot. So I really can't judge the game badly based solely on this aspect. As an RPG sure, it may lose some marks. But it could still be awesome just as a game *Shrug*

[Wolf Kanno]

Treasure chests were damn annoying in XII though for me personally, collecting treasures has not been significant in an FF game since IX.

Forgot there is no random encounters in Golden Sun but I've only played a little, been having a hard time getting into the game.

Linear in the sense of X's design and what XIII looks to be (though the jury is still out on that one) is that I find the dungeons to be tedious cause there is nothing to them they are literally a means to get from cutscene A to cutscene B at which point I feel why one would bother telling a story from a gaming medium if you are not going to put actual effort into the layout design and often I feel that designers screw themselves by not fleshing out a location and making it feel more alive. Though VeloZero is correct that some of the "expansiveness" of dungeons amounts to very little in XII, I personally feel that the size of many of the locations made it feel more real to me. I always felt like Spira was a beautiful place but it was a shame I was stuck on the Summoner tour cause often I felt there was more interesting places to see and go to in the unreachable background than on the actual path that was laid before me.

The ultimate issue with XIII for me will be wither the combat is as good as it looks and whether the story will actually hold my interest but regretfully it already looks a tad predictable to me once you get a few facts. Time will tell of course.

[Rantz]

Re: Random Encounters & Dungeon Design

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I found one LARGE and crippling design constraint is that all dungeons in FFXII and other non-random encounter type RPGs is that all locations must be made open and suitable for encounters on the dungeon map. Though I don't despise large wide open areas on principle, it feels like all the areas are the same re-skinned version of each other. It makes virtually every RPG game I play nowadays feel very uninspired. Just think of how many areas of your favorite pre-PS2 RPGs would be impossible to recreate in the new paradigm.

This is an interesting point, I never thought of it that way before. There is definitely a much larger amount of variety in dungeon design in games where random encounters are used.

[Del Murder]

I like the Zelda style where there are puzzles to solve and the dungeon takes you various places, but it isn't some elaborate maze with tons of dead ends. Though I do like side paths that lead to rare treasures. Do we know if the treasures are going to be like FFXII where they respawn and the contents are somewhat random?

[Skyblade]

Treasure chests were damn annoying in XII though for me personally, collecting treasures has not been significant in an FF game since IX.

Forgot there is no random encounters in Golden Sun but I've only played a little, been having a hard time getting into the game.

Linear in the sense of X's design and what XIII looks to be (though the jury is still out on that one) is that I find the dungeons to be tedious cause there is nothing to them they are literally a means to get from cutscene A to cutscene B at which point I feel why one would bother telling a story from a gaming medium if you are not going to put actual effort into the layout design and often I feel that designers screw themselves by not fleshing out a location and making it feel more alive. Though VeloZero is correct that some of the "expansiveness" of dungeons amounts to very little in XII, I personally feel that the size of many of the locations made it feel more real to me. I always felt like Spira was a beautiful place but it was a shame I was stuck on the Summoner tour cause often I felt there was more interesting places to see and go to in the unreachable background than on the actual path that was laid before me.

The ultimate issue with XIII for me will be wither the combat is as good as it looks and whether the story will actually hold my interest but regretfully it already looks a tad predictable to me once you get a few facts. Time will tell of course.

Actually, out of X and XII, I'd give best dungeon design to X easily. The Cloister of Trials for the various temples were vastly better designed than any dungeon in XII.

And stick with Golden Sun. It's worth it.