Encounters, Encounters, What to do?

[Vyk]

AARRRGH ridiculously high encounter rates is what makes it so maddening for me to play anything pre-FFVI. Maybe I was behind, but they tended to be rather difficult too. The others were nice, you ran into plenty of monsters, but not enough to make you pull your hair out trying to get from point A to point B. I liked how there was no transition to another map in FFXII. If you got swarmed by a lot of enemies it was like "o" because if you had to run away you could potentially take the whole map with you xD

Both versions of Skies of Arcadia are especially notorious for this. Even after they were -both- edited to -reduce- the encounter rate. The Japanese have an insane amount of patience and stamina for encounters. Its crazy. I remember on the Saturn there was a game called Albert Odyssey (originally an SNES game so partially excusable) Working Designs brought it over and edited the encounter rate down and it still had you get into fights ever 2 or 3 steps sometimes. So I can't imagine what the Japanese deal with sometimes

[Slothy]

When I was playing FF12 all I could think about how it sucked that all the paths were huge wide open areas. It was especially noticeable when doing anything inside. I don't think there was a single combat enabled area in the game with a 'width' of less than 20 feet. The whole time I was in the Draklore laboratory I was just thinking how weird it was that they apparently designed the whole thing to be so wide open as to accommodate huge battles going on in their halls.

Previous entries had always featured very tight and intricate dungeon design, by contrast everything in FF12 was forced to be laid wide open. It almost felt like FF13 to me, just with a different constraining design paradigm.

I disagree with every area feeling wide open as I remember some felt quite tight and closed in, particularly some caves, mines, forests, etc. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that each area in the game was wide open. I still don't think that somehow proves that an RPG with on screen battles needs to be wide open. Particularly when positioning isn't that important to the combat system. The trouble is that there are so few JRPG's that use an on map battle system that it's hard to think of any that aren't fairly open a lot of the time, but I think this shows more a lack of imagination on our part (and a strange love of random encounters from the Japanese) than some inherent flaw in the concept of on map battles.

I also think that part of the problem could be that with 3D itself things tend to have to be done big to feel like they're the right size. Taking FPS games as an example, doors and ceilings usually have to be about 9-10 feet high in game to not feel too small and cramped to the player. So where I didn't feel that every area in FFXII was big and sprawling, I could certainly concede that they may have felt that way to someone else, though to be honest, I don't see physical scale as a detriment to dungeon design. I actually felt FFXII had the best dungeon design since probably FFIX or earlier in terms of variety of locales and the character of the areas.

[Wolf Kanno]

I've been meaning to touch on this topic.

I really don't have a preference for one over the other. I've seen both systems done well and both done terribly.

I feel random encounters are trickier to work with cause everything needed to get rid of their annoying aspects also wipes out their positives. If I would suggest one series that comes close to perfecting random encounters, its Wild Arms, specifically Wild Arms 2nd Ignition as it allows you to choose whether you want to fight or not as long as your levels are high which makes the most annoying aspect of random encounters a thing of the past, by which I mean, backtracking through a low level area to be constantly stopped by pathetically weak creatures whose spoils are utterly worthless to you later.

As for on map enemies, CT probably did it best in terms of seamless ness though I do appreciate XII's attempt. Yet, I don't feel any RPG series has really done on map encounters as well as BoFV. For the majority of you who probably gave this game a pass or gave up in frustration of the games eccentricities, BoFV had enemies on the map you engaged in similar to Chrono Trigger. You made contact and the battle menu popped up and battles commenced. What set BoFV apart was that you could affect battles before even engaging them or there were clever means of avoiding combat (which was necessary cause BoFV wasn't afraid of tossing in high level monsters in areas that were way above your parties level at the time) through the use of items that affected monsters. You could toss bombs or leave land mines that would reduce the enemies health before battle commenced, you could afflict them with status effects by feeding them corrupted food, or you could simply avoid them by drawing their attention with food and items in one direction wile running towards the other. The system was brilliant and I will never understand why no one copied it except if you want to count Xenosaga but its system was much more situational since you couldn't carry around the items needed to affect enemies. BoFV also gave you bonuses for fighting larger groups of enemies so food had multiple practical uses.

I still feel its the best on map battle encounter system in the RPG genre just because it added a new level of gameplay and interaction to the world. Really, if FF wants to be rid of random encounters entirely, then they need to start investing in letting the player interact with the environment so encounters feel more organic as opposed to "I need to go this way and hulking behemoth is in my way and I can't avoid him, which makes this a staged encounter..."

[Roto13]

Random encounters are terrible and they need to go away forever and ever and ever. It's amazing that there are two schools of thought on this, really. They're the biggest reason why old RPGs are so hard to get into.

[VeloZer0]

If I would suggest one series that comes close to perfecting random encounters, its Wild Arms, specifically Wild Arms 2nd Ignition as it allows you to choose whether you want to fight or not as long as your levels are high which makes the most annoying aspect of random encounters a thing of the past, by which I mean,

This makes me think of Earthbound. In that game the enemies appear on the over world map, and touching them causes you to enter a battle screen. If you are strong enough all touching them does is cause you to gain experience and items from killing them, just a dialog box that pops up on the bottom. You don't even have to close the dialog box, just keep running through the area.

[Del Murder]

Yeah, that was a pretty cool system. Ahead of its time.