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TalkBack / Re: REVIEWS: Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon

« on: August 18, 2008, 03:43:26 PM »

Obviously you disagree, and your perspective is valued here, but I hope you will reconsider and retract your suggestion that we should retract this review.

Turnabout is fair play, I see!  Well, I respectfully request that you retract your respectful requect that I retract my respectful request to retract the review.  Not for any actual reason, but because it was fun to type.

More seriously, see the next quote from a previous post.

As far as how much of your review is coming to grips with roguellike properties, 50% of the listed "cons" are standard roguelike features.  However.. If this is the sort of review that you feel will appeal to your target market, you presumably know your business.  I don't feel it's a good review of a roguelike, but it seems that you're saying that isn't what your readers are likely to want.  More power to you, then - you are not here to appeal to my ideal of a perfect review.

Please note the last couple sentences.  I've already implied it there, but I will formally say it here: I apologize for requesting the review be altered.  It serves its target market well, even if it's not me.

I cannot ask others to eat crow unless I'm willing to pick up a fork.

I have nothing to say about this game's failure to generate sufficiently interesting randomness other than insightful comments like "yeah, it sucks."  I could reword it and pontificate a bit if you like, as in "This demonstrates exactly why strong randomness is so important to roguelike design."  But.. same thing.

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TalkBack / Re: REVIEWS: Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon

« on: August 17, 2008, 04:22:19 PM »

Unfortunately, in my opinion, what death teaches you is grind, grind, grind, and again in my opinion, grinding is a failure of game design.

...

What that also did for me, discounting the grinding, was actually made the game boring because it was never actually challenging. Once I learned grinding was the key, I would grind until I could just slaughter my enemies.

This response made very little sense from what I understood, so I went back to looking at the game.  My wife has been the primary player of this game so far; I've spent a fair bit of time watching her, and a few things have slowly dawned on me.  Such as a revelation that explains why people keep talking about grinding and getting blank looks from me.  A confession is in order - while I have plenty of experience with the roguelike subgenre, my knowledge specifically of this particular series is nil.  So I was surprised to learn that, well..

You don't lose all of your levels when you die?!

I might not have to spell out what consequences this has, but I'll give it a shot anyway.  In most games in the subgenre, all character development is utterly ephemeral.  At any moment the classic "It breathes.  You die." event may make all of your leveling and equipment collection and effort instantly irrelevant.  This alters all sorts of strategic issues; if there's a very long leveling game, one hopes that death becomes increasingly unlikely towards the end of it, because at that point the stakes are very high.  There are several roguelikes with gameplay like this, including Angband and Nethack.  Dying near the end of these is not uncommon, but you do in fact generally have warning that it's going to happen and lots of ways to avoid it.  If you didn't, they'd be awful games.

This game essentially removes the "permanent death" aspect of roguelikes, and n my opinion it suffers very much for this decision..  Why?  Because it means that you can just power through dungeons by going elsewhere and gaining ten levels.  The developers have no control over what overall and job level you bring to the dungeon, so content can be obviated by overwhelming power.  In other words.. it makes grinding possible, and since it's possible it becomes mandatory in short order.  It shouldn't even be meaningful to grind in a short roguelike.. but here we are.  Ugh.

And yes, that means I feel that a major problem with the game is that the death consequence is not harsh enough; it breaks the fundamental gameplay.

Especially in a roguelike, death is not only a lesson but a damn hard lesson at that.

In this particular case, where the only thing death has to say to you is "grind more," there's not much positive to be said about it.  Let's pick a more useful example.. say, IVAN.  It comes up frequently enough in discussions of roguelikes that despite it being very obscure compared to mainstream games I feel comfortable saying it's relatively well-known.  IVAN's full name is Iter Vehemens ad Necem, and the webpage for it helpfully reminds me that that translates to A Violent Road to Death.. which is a fair description.  Among other nasty features, IVAN makes becoming more powerful a major risk; your enemies will without fail become more powerful to match.

I have never won a game of IVAN.  I've come very close, close enough that I'm fairly sure I know how it's done, but I must nonetheless admit defeat.  The duration of my longest game has been perhaps three hours.. and that is really the core of my point.  Most of my deaths have taken up less than twenty minutes of gameplay.  The ones that have lasted longer have been desperate, odds-defying exercises of wit, strategy, and sheer luck.  For all that they were the product of a simple turn-based game, they were exciting and difficult and.. yes, in the end, frustrating.  But I got all the way to the Enner Beast that time!  And after a while, something becomes apparent: when you find a strange, unknown room, item, creature, what-have-you, it is imperative that you try it out.  Even, or perhaps especially, if it kills you instantly.. because if it doesn't, it may lead to learning something that will keep your next character alive a little bit longer.

It is also very important to note that each character is a wildly different experience in IVAN; it is very important that you become familiar with all the things the game can possibly throw at you, because you will only see a small subset of them in each game.. and it is imperative that you exploit whatever oddities the game grants you this time around to have a chance of survival.  There are all sorts of things you can do to hugely increase the power of your character.. if only you are lucky enough to have access to them.

This game does not dream of recreating that experience.  To reiterate, I agree.  The grinding it teaches you represents a serious failure.

Just for fun, what would you consider a game that follows all other conventions of a roguelike and doesn't contain random dungeons?

It depends on just how much randomness you're subtracting.

If you go for a completely static world.. IVAN would not be the same at all if I knew, every single time, that I could get shrines of gods X, Y, and Z at certain points in the game and that I should therefore hang onto certain sets of items to sacrifice to them so that I could instantly gain their favor, pray to them, and get various huge advantages.   

I think the mechanics of sudden, permanent death and randomness are fairly strongly tied together.  If the world is the same or even very similar each time you trek through it, we are reduced to the scenario occurring in multitudes of games consisting of a save point that's too far from a difficult boss.  Your eighth trip through the first couple levels is no longer interesting because this time the game gave you a wand of lightning and some major problems were obviated; instead, it's a humdrum trip through "open secret door Y, pick up wand of lightning, fry monster Z, blah".

Maybe some truly inspired designer could decouple those two mechanics.  I would be very interested in seeing the game that would make it fun.

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TalkBack / Re: REVIEWS: Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon

« on: August 15, 2008, 09:40:02 PM »

Silks

Svlad, can you think of a Roguelike game that couldn't be criticized in the same way that Nick is criticizing Mystery Dungeon?  From what I can imagine, this sequence of events...

No, I can't.  It's a problem a new player will have with the genre, and they won't enjoy it one bit.  Full stop, no arguing.

I'm not sure that it's entirely fair to toss the pejorative "primitive" at them, though.  Platformers originated very early in the history of gaming, and we're not saying that any game involving timed jumps is primitive.

Whether it's good game design is an interesting question, though.  Here's what's in the bag of counterarguments. 

One, what's good game design?  You yourself (very fair-mindedly, I might add) have supplied a figure arguing that there are people who enjoy games like this.  I am not lunatic enough to suggest that popularity and quality are at all equivalent, but that does argue strongly that the design isn't truly awful.

Two, what you see when you describe that scenario is someone getting punished for what seems like no reason, because their character has been moved back to the start as the result of seemingly innocuous actions.  What I expect of a roguelike is, more or less, to die until I learn how not to die.  The play experience of a roguelike is not focused on character development as much as it is player development - character development is an ephemeral thing that can be lost at any moment.  It is the lessons one learns as a player, such as "do not descend to depth X of the Pits of Angband until you are able to resist these forms of attack" that are the actual development process.  Arbitrary death is not the destruction of your hard-won effort, it is a step in the staircase.

Three, as established, I absolutely agree that most people cannot reasonably be expected to be pleased when confronted by this subgenre.  For crying out loud, we are talking about games most of whose representatives use ASCII for graphics.  Why do you think my wife bought a game with no information on the simple premise that, hey, console roguelike!  Not only is it hugely underrepresented in the mainstream, it is by nature something that those used to RPGs will find almost painful to play initially.

Mr. Jack

There's a certain inarguable validity to "it looked like a strategy-RPG to me, so that's what it'll look like to whoever comes along, so I'm calling it that so they'll know what to expect."  On those terms, you're right.  I suspect that it's possible to draw bright shining genre lines in absolute terms and finally show you that roguelike and strategy-rpg are entirely different bubbles in the great Venn Diagram, and on that level I'm fairly certain I'm right.. but pragmatically, what your readers think matters more.

Having to grind often is a problem specifically with the game, and I wouldn't begin to defend it.  I still haven't seen enough of it to have an opinion on whether the grinding is excessive, but I will say that it won't be the first roguelike I've burned out on for that exact reason.  That is a design concern, but it's not one that necessarily mandates the removal of randomness.  It does mandate that someone tweak and examine the results of their algorithm, and failing to do that, well, sucks.

As far as how much of your review is coming to grips with roguellike properties, 50% of the listed "cons" are standard roguelike features.  However.. If this is the sort of review that you feel will appeal to your target market, you presumably know your business.  I don't feel it's a good review of a roguelike, but it seems that you're saying that isn't what your readers are likely to want.  More power to you, then - you are not here to appeal to my ideal of a perfect review.

You're dead on as far as my interests being very, very specialized, by the way.  And I say that with no rancor.  I had to accept quite a while ago that the mainstream generally does not care about me and learn to be satisfied with the occasional Disgaea or Etrian Odyssey thrown my way and otherwise enjoy the efforts of individuals working in their basements.  Thank you, Tarn Adams.  I'm not entirely alone, though.. those games do sell.  I landed here by sheer chance, as you know from previous posts, and you are absolutely right to not consider me part of your target market.

As a wanderer from outside, though, I must say that I am very pleasantly surprised by the discussion that's evolved here.  I'll have to lurk around and see if this happens again, even if your reviews aren't aimed at me.

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TalkBack / Re: REVIEWS: Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon

« on: August 15, 2008, 07:58:46 PM »

This is going to be a long post.

Chapter 1: Yoshidious

I think Svlad's request for the review to be retracted is quite ludicrous. The implication is that anyone without a certain threshold level of experience with a given series or genre should be disqualified from providing a review

I trust you knew I wouldn't be able to resist rising to this. 

To go way over the top, imagine if someone whose total exposure to games was a half-hour of Windows Solitaire was asked to review X-COM.  Obviously that's far beyond the situation at hand, but it's the basis on which I asked that the review be, well, reviewed.

My contention here is that the majority of the review is the things a player who is new to roguelikes would be shocked by.  That's valuable for most of the reading public, just as that Solitaire player's review of X-COM is valuable to people like him or her.  People who know what a rogue-like is, however, are going to find the review, well.. laughable.  I'm sorry, I know that's not a wonderfully nice thing to say, but based on my reaction and those of several people I forwarded the review to, it's accurate.

Maybe I'm drawing a false distinction here, but I believe that a review is supposed to try to be somewhat objective.  If it were the reaction of some random individual to a film, game, what-have-you, it would be a blog post.  Reviews, in my expectations - have I established that this may be subjective yet? - are supposed to be the work of someone who knows a lot about the subject matter and who can judge it relative to other works in its field.  A review of a roguelike that spends a lot of its word count just coming to terms with the fact that it's a roguelike doesn't do that justice.  As I mentioned in passing, I would not purport to give an authoritative review of a racing.. or sports.. game.

So that's why I feel a change should be made, great.  What do I want that change to be?  On reflection, I don't think the review should be deleted.  It's a fair appraisal of the game from the perspective of an 'average' gamer; I concede that point, people absolutely do need that sort of information.  I do think someone else on your staff who has more experience with the genre should take a look at the game and add some opinions from a more jaded perspective and make it more of a true review.

Chapter 2: The Quickening

Mr. Jack, or Nick, or Mr. DiMola, as you like.  I again apologize for the fact that this interaction started out fairly badly. 

You took exception to two of the points I raised.  I'll deal with the strategy-RPG versus roguelike question first, and I'll open by saying that classifying things into genres is a useful tool for describing things but that when one gets into individual cases one invariably runs into problems of subjective opinion, semantics, and just all-around fuzziness.  I'm going to take a stab at defining things, but I'm not going to pretend that I expect this to be the Final Ultimate Supreme Papal-Infallible Word on the subject.

A strategy-rpg is FFT, or Disgaea, or half of X-COM, or Battle of Wesnoth.  You control multiple characters, strategy revolves around using them effectively as a large team and deciding which of them to develop in what way.

A roguelike is POWDER, or IVAN, or Angband, or Nethack, or.. THIS place!  One night in Bangkok and a strong man.. er. 

Roguelikes feature control of one character, or one character and their pet.  Strategy revolves around coping with randomness and permanent death and that one character is developed to a very great degree only to be heartlessly reset to level 1. 

I could keep naming features distinctive to each, but my essential point is that I feel the two are distinct.  Space Rangers 2 is an RPG, and it involves strategy, but it is neither a strategy-RPG nor a roguelike.  Disgaea has some random elements, but focus is not on one character and coping with those random elements is not really the main problem of the game - it's a strategy-RPG.  This game has strategic elements, but they are those exactly typical of a roguelike.

If you want to say that any RPG involving strategic elements is a strategy-RPG, I can't really disagree with you - genre definitions are subjective and fuzzy, as I noted above.  But that's not how I see the term generally used.

Chapter 3

Randomness versus hand-made content.  Round 1.  FIGHT!

I'll lead off by backing down on one item.  Your point that the dungeons are ugly and incoherent is accurate, and it's a problem the game should not have.  X-COM (this is where I thought of using this as an example, all other uses have resulted from, hey, it's easy) managed to randomly generate battle maps that were up to the visual standards of the day.  It's not a hard problem to solve, and it is a failure of the game.. ljust ooking over my shoulder as my wife plays it.

Of course, no REAL roguelike player cares about graphics!  We all think Dwarf Fortress looks great and have lots of hair on our chests and.. yeah, no.  Presentation matters.  You have a point.

Meanwhile, on to the core battle I announced at the start.  I am by no means saying that all games should use procedural content, or that it is good every time it appears, or that hand-made content is bad, or any other such silly things.  I am saying that random content is an outright superior choice for some games and that it does have value in its own right.

Essentially the remainder of this argument is going to be an extended version of the reasoning I already gave, but let's play it out.  If someone designs a level in a game, it is going to have cues indicating which direction the player should go, it is going to have items that are actually useful, and it is going to have opposition that is carefully tailored to what the player can handle.

And if you're nodding your head and saying yes, that's great, I will start linking you to mods that removed level scaling from Oblivion because there were a fair number of people out there who hated that feature, who did not want to always run into appropriate challenges, who wanted adversity and the unexpected.

The unexpected is what randomness offers, and it is to be valued.  In the face of the utterly unknown with, strategic decisions are changed.  You cannot count on there being a reasonable number of monsters on the next level.  You must therefore do whatever you can to prepare for an unreasonable number.  You cannot assume that you will start at any given distance from the exit.  You cannot assume this, that, or the other.  Surely I do not have to explain the pleasure of truly not knowing what is down that next corridor?  Even the most sadistic and clever designer must make choices, and I'm sure you're all fairly experienced with the jrpg phenomenon of figuring out which direction leads to the next plot point and either avoiding or seeking it.

Randomness offers other pleasures, too.  As my wife conveniently just exclaimed, "yay for small levels."  In a designed scenario, if there is a small level it is because a designer has decided that it shall be so.  In a random one, that small level or treasure chest with a useful item or whatever is a gift from the RNG.. and in the face of permadeath, one to be prized.  A hand-made world is a pretty Skinner box.  You know where the sugar button is.   A random world makes finding sugar cubes an event

As far as more compelling experiences being available.. that's especially subjective, so I have license to be subjective back.  I have found that managing randomness is, as experiences go, unique.  There are other things that are entertaining, it is not the Ultimate Gaming Experience, but it is fun and distinct and something I would not want to abandon.  I don't think it's for everyone, but I really do think it's unfair to say that it should be left in the dust.

I don't think I've said everything I possibly could say here, but this is supposed to be a dialogue, not a monologue.. and I've said quite a bit.

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TalkBack / Re: REVIEWS: Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon

« on: August 15, 2008, 05:05:46 PM »

I would have a discourse with you on this, but you are too closed-minded to discuss this or even consider an alternate view point.

I'd be happy to have a real discussion of this.  I gave up on substantial discussion when you led off by accusing me of nit-picking and stated that something I held up as a core value is "ridiculous" and "archaic" without giving it any real consideration, and your accusation of being closed-minded on basically no grounds is another step down the path of meaningless flamewars.

How about we declare a truce?  I'll drop the unnecessarily elaborate style and the comments about you failing to understand things, you'll be a touch more polite and consider that there really may be something to this randomness idea, and I'll write up a nice thoughtful post when I get home from the gym?

By the way, as fun background, the reason I ran across this review was that my wife IMed me informing me that she'd randomly picked up a game I'd never heard of before.  I've now seen about two minutes of gameplay.  As far as the game's own merits, I have no fixed ideas at the moment.  I just recognize your complaints as ones common to new roguelike players.

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TalkBack / Re: REVIEWS: Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon

« on: August 15, 2008, 04:30:57 PM »

You may feel that this distinction is subtle and meaningless, but it is one of the core gameplay values of the subgenre.

Finally, managing the randomness is a ridiculous idea; anything that is achieved through randomness can be trumped by well-designed dungeons.

I can see the future.

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TalkBack / Re: REVIEWS: Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon

« on: August 15, 2008, 03:54:12 PM »

I happened across your review a few minutes ago.  I do not intend to be disrespectful, but your opinion of the game clearly reflects a fairly major failure to understand the very basics of the genre to which it belongs.  Given this, I have to question your fitness to be reviewing this game, for much the same reasons that would make me loath to claim to have a strong opinion about, say, a racing game.

I'm not sure what the local conventions are with regard to mixing quotations and reply, but the format is suited to establishing the problem at hand.  I apologize if anyone finds this irritating.

During gameplay it becomes obvious that, at its core, Chocobo’s Dungeon is a strategy-RPG.

Actually, it's not a strategy-RPG.  It is a roguelike.  I invite you to examine the Wikipedia article on the subgenre here.

The concept of randomly-generated dungeons is simply added to avoid creating unique levels for each and every dungeon.

The concept of randomly-generated dungeons is a core idea of the roguelike subgenre.  Your feeling that  this is laziness on the part on the developers is one of the major reasons I do not feel that you should be offering your opinion on this game as meaningful.

Unfortunately, the great strategy-RPG aspects of the game are ruined by this randomizing; like the dungeons themselves, players must face randomly-generated enemies while at the same time dealing with what becomes randomly-generated leveling-up and character development

Coping with randomness is not a flaw in this type of game, it is very nearly the entire point  It offers a type of strategic problem that static content can only rarely match; in a game with hand-picked content, if you find some ammunition for your rocket launcher, you may rest assured that enemies vulnerable to rocket attacks will be appearing in the reasonably near future.  In a roguelike, if you find a sword of bat-slaying and opt to hang onto it, you run the risk that you may never encounter any bats.  You may feel that this distinction is subtle and meaningless, but it is one of the core gameplay values of the subgenre.

That's because it makes more sense to reset the game, since death results in the loss of all of your unequipped items and any money you possess.   

...

Cons: ... - The ramifications of death are too great.

Again, please see the Wikipedia article on the subgenre.  This is something anyone who enjoys roguelikes is going to consider to be fairly standard.  It is totally understandable that this is somewhat surprising when first encountered - many newcomers to roguelikes are stunned by this idea.  It is nonetheless another of the major pillars of the genre, with the idea being that not only do you have to make strategic choices in adverse and random circumstances, but you must do so with the knowledge that if you choose incorrectly you will suffer drastic consequences.  This awareness of risk, contrary to your experience of it, means that every decision is interesting and exciting.  I don't claim that it's something everyone will enjoy or that you have failed in not enjoying it yourself, merely that it is on the same order as having downs in a football game, an expected standard feature.

There were other instances when I would be so underpowered in a dungeon that I would get annihilated after dealing with just two enemies. This was a direct result of skipping whole floors, since you’ll sometimes get spawned right next to exit stairs.  Since your goal is to escape each dungeon, it makes no sense to fight your way through it when you can simply exit immediately.

Not to indulge in hyperbole excessively, but what would you say to a person who played a FPS, ran carefully around all of the ammunition, and complained that they were unable to kill enemies with their bare hands?  And then protested that it made no sense to wander around picking up ammunition?  Skipping a floor is intended to be a strategic choice available to you; if the results get your character killed, you are meant to learn to play more conservatively and to refine your analysis of when you are ready for the next level.

Its gameplay is quite solid and forces the player to use tact and thought to complete all of the dungeons in the game; however, the randomly-generated dungeons really detract from its otherwise engaging gameplay. If the dungeons were designed rather than generated players could seamlessly keep pace with the increasing skills of their enemies; as it stands, players must grind dungeons to truly keep pace with the game.

At the risk of repeating myself, you are complaining about a core feature of the subgenre.  To pick another comparison, this is like saying that you didn't enjoy a turn-based strategy game because the pace of the game was too slow.

Doesn't have to be (a love it or hate it thing) if they would evolve it a bit, but I think I went on about that enough in my review.

Roguelikes in general are very polarizing games, ones that one either loves or hates, for exactly the reasons that appear in your review.  Many people find them frustrating and perplexing and cannot imagine why anyone would play such a game.   Just as with, say, Japanese food, the fact that one person does not like it does not mean that it needs to evolve away from what it is.

I respectfully ask that you retract this review and hand it off to somebody who has more experience with similar games, or at the very least do some additional research into the subgenre and try to understand what someone interested in this game might be looking for before revising it to be more relevant.