>linear stat progression system hidden behind pretty gui to create the illusion of choice
why do people defend this so much? you could take away this system entirely and just give a certain amount of stats per level and unlock certain spells/abilities upon reaching the appropriate level and accomplish the exact same thing
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Don't choose the fricking newbie sphere grid.
What said. Add to that, even the newbiegrid opens up and makes you choose paths/specific skills later down the line.
are you talking about the international version? that was not an option when I first played in NA, but when I replayed X a few years ago I used the international sphere grid and chose to develop the characters as their intended archetypes and nothing changed
>ffx remastered
>chooses to pick the standard PS2 sphere grid
OP you're a fricking moron, you had a choice and you fricked up, that's on you
>nooooo don't play it the way it released you're playing it wrong!
why are squaredrones like this?
even the Standard Sphere grid gives you a lot of options especially once you get far enough to teleport characters around or learn abilities from a friend. Even when it's not a choice between 2 things it makes it more interesting having to get the right spheres to unlock stuff. Then you have Kimahri and then you have Expert.
It's a good system and what you are describing is actually FFXIII
None of it matters because everyone just over-grinds and brute forces jar pigs anyway
You can't brute force the monster arena and dark aeons rofl
You can savescum with yojimbo though (at least for dark axons, I haven't tried the beast stuff myself)
the game can be beaten without ever advancing anyone on the sphere grid
kino
That's something i dislike about jar pigs. i can 100% them while entirely skipping some of their mechanics, often by accident
How many people did that the first time they played the game
I wouldn't call reloading your save thousands of times until rng pulls you through every boss fight "beating" something.
that only happens on chocobo eater (if you want the spheres), seymour flux, and yunalesca.
doing a no-sphere grid run relies on how tightly scripted most enemies are. it plays more like a puzzle, and rng plays very little role most of the time.
Even assuming your premise, the worst you can say is that the game makes it easy to do a level 1 challenge out of the box
I wonder if a sphere grid randomizer would work well.
i'd expect it to be played mostly with a boring first order optimal strategy
God I hate these kinds of pretentious progress systems. Games should either have progression by class (OD&D) or by random chance (fire emblem).
>Games should either have progression by class (OD&D)
Leveling is outdated game design, keep D&D shit to tabletop games
Outdated in which sense? What has now taken its place? Anything that has attempted to surpass and replaced It ends up as bloated and uninteresting systems that either make you waste more time on menus than playing or replicate the level system with added fluff.
Well I just think that technology and game design have improved a lot well, not exactly current years since industry is a cesspool rn to a point where RPGs have become the most not fun allowed video game genre ever. It worked for the 80s and 90s where D&D was still relevant and longer stories couldn't be done any other way, but these days? Its just padding to get more game hours
Sorry, Im fsiling to grasp how whatever you just said made of leveling systems outdated.
Do you just not enjoy RPGs?
>Do you just not enjoy RPGs?
I do enjoy RPGs, played some D&D back in the day, still play some JRPGs, but I personally think that these days progression of character strength shouldn't be locked over grind and levels. Yet, every franchise these days has some sort of leveling system that wasn't a thing in previous entries and sure as hell don't add anything to the newer ones
Look, I can clearly ser the point you make when you say that there are games that add leveling systems in ways that dont add anything effectively to the games.
What I cant see however is How that makes of the leveling system outdated instead of poorly implemented.
Levels are a good simple and clear way to measurement progress. It is such a effective way that its hard to come up with something else to replace It really. Let alone something completely original that doesnt mimmick in any way or another certain concepts and principles of leveling systems.
>How that makes of the leveling system outdated instead of poorly implemented.
You made a good point actually, and I think that sums up my feeling towards it. Cheers anon
The guy you are talking to is a zoomer, as evidenced by him saying "rn". He couldn't play a crpg, jrpg, arpg, etc. Only fortnite and dmc for him.
Sorry Super Mario 64 filtered you anon, no enough menus for you?
SM64 filtered me because it is a gay baby game. Shooters (first and third), horror, stealth, and rpgs are my favorites.
As someone said something is only outdated if something functionally replaces it. Record players are not outdated because we invented movies which are cooler they are outdated because audio cassettes and later CDs could do the same thing but cheaper, smaller, and with more space.
The function of allowing grinding is two fold
a) diegetic difficulty adjustment. A difficulty selection meter is not diagetic.
b) In a game that is heavily stat based (ie you cannot avoid a ton of damage with reaction time because the game is turn based or light on how much reaction time can help like diablo) if the classes/builds are varied enough it's simply impossible to balance everything. There are too many factors so you can create a challenge that has powerfully statted enemies and the weaker builds/party comps will just have to grind more.
This, open leveling in RPGs where you can grind to beat challenge is outdated. Levels should only be rewarded at milestones, and each level up should give distinct choices on progression rather than a certain amount of stats.
At the very least, there should be some sort of limiter on your capacity to level up your characters such as having story events progress based on how much grinding you do. If someone is going to grind or cheese the game for an easy ride, they should be punished for it over working through fights with limited resources.
The point of levels in an RPG is to act as a sort of reactive difficulty. A player who is struggling will retreat or die more and end up fighting more enemies and get overleveled, making the game easier for them. A skilled player who beats every challenge on the first try gets less experience and becomes underleveled, making the game more challenging for them.
The skilled player is still rewarded for their skill by finishing the game quicker. But if they want to grind and make the game even easier even though they don't need to, why not let them? Why put some artificial barrier or time limit in their way to punish them for having fun the "wrong way"?
I've played RPGs with hard level gates and they have been consistently miserable. Either I earned level ups but wasn't allowed to have them because I hadn't jumped through some hoop yet, or I ended up stuck against an enemy five times my level who kills my entire party from full health with one spell that I don't have the faintest hope of defeating. No matter how much I love the game I end up dropping it feeling completely disgusted. It's a terrible system.
Bro FFII came out in 1988
But what about games that dont have set stories? How do you imagine a Dungeon crawler going without levels to measurement real effective progress?
The cool thing about levels is that they are up to the player. Grind If you want less difficulty, there is where the magic is at.
First, a dungeon crawler is quite a bit different from a narrative based JRPG. Dungeon crawlers lean heavily on the mechanics over their story, although the need to regulate the player's power is still there.
Second, it's easy to tie character levels to the exploration, such as gaining a level upon slaying the boss of a floor or a set of floors. It's required to do so to progress, so you will get your increase in power, but you have to overcome the challenge with what you have.
And third and biggest, those level ups you get shouldn't provide you with small, incremental bonuses to all of your stats, they should provide discrete and mutually exclusive bonuses as you level. For example, leveling up as a fighter gives a choice between a skill that deals high damage to wounded targets, deflects melee attacks for 3 turns, or gives you +30 strength making your physical attacks hit harder. You have to pick one to take and what to give up, and what you pick is going to influence how the rest of your game plays. If you give everyone everything, every playthrough becomes identical and stale.
>shouldn't provide you with small [...]
Why shouldnt they exactly?
Besides, do you really really believe that It is a great Idea for players to be stuck at a level until they complete the required milestone to hit effective progress?Wouldnt that make of the game always completely linear? How do you balance difficulty? You can only make the game too easy, as there is only one way forward.
About your example, you generally can mix and many parties and classes and items in games with leveling systems you know. Furthermore, your proposed system doesnt make of any game more or less standardized, especially because metas always arise. If fact, having no classes generally makes of games more standardized, as the fear of sunken costs makes players afraid to try out different things that they might not enjoy.
>do you really really believe that It is a great Idea for players to be stuck at a level until they complete the required milestone to hit effective progress?
Yes. You should be forced to clear challenges in order to move on. Modern gaming's idea that difficulty should be dynamic has been a disaster for gaming as a whole, it's created a generation of gamers who flail at their problems until the game lets them pass instead of forcing them to wise up and think through their problems.
That's one thing I absolutely will not budge on, achievement in a game should be tied to difficulty. You can play an easier mode more befitting of your skill, but you shouldn't expect to be able to see as much as someone who's cleared the most difficult challenges and have fully exhausted everything the game can throw at them. This is as much for your own benefit as it is a mantra, by forcing a player to improve to see a game in its entirety, you're improving them as a person, forcing them to exercise skills that are underdeveloped. You're also providing a game made as a long term hobby rather than a cheap morsel to be consumed for temporary satisfaction.
Ask me how I know you have zero real-world accomplishments.
Someone who strives to do their best in a game, and actually succeeds at it, is fairly likely to have the drive to do well in life, too. Willingness to step up to a challenge and push back when you fall down rather than simply get mad that the system is rigged or whatever is a positive aspect.
If we're going to project what people want out of games to how they do in life, one only has to wonder how someone who wants games to be easy and hand them every accomplishment must face any sort of hardship in their day to day life.
>Someone who strives to do their best in a game, and actually succeeds at it, is fairly likely to have the drive to do well in life, too
lol
lmao even
So, what exactly are you doing on a board dedicated to not just video games, but retro games at that if you don't think they're important?
Not him, but hobbies don't need to be important or useful in any way. Almost none of my hobbies are important in any way other than that I enjoy doing them.
We're on the classic games board and you're complaining about classic games not being hard enough, maybe you are the one lost?
Counter take:
People who put all of their energy into thriving in life have no need to thrive in games, and actively see games as a waste of time. They're too busy living in reality to give a frick about what is and isn't difficult in an imaginary world.
I first noticed this when I realized that all of my most successful friends, the ones bringing in huge salaries, did not play games for the most part, and the ones who did only played casually and would give up at the first sign of frustration.
It's called knowing what is and isn't important.
I've talked to homosexuals that believe that they are learning important lessons about life by watching hours upon hours of crossdressers restarting games over and over until they get a lucky break
And then there is you pretending that someone who's locked in their room 24 hours a day playing video games is someone who's going to be a successful, well adjusted, hard worker the moment they turn it off.
Speedrunner mentality is a disease, stop fooling yourself.
I never said a thing about speedrunning, which is indeed a huge waste of time.
What an odd resistance to the idea that someone who wants to tackle challenges naturally would thus be more motivated to bring themselves further in other areas of their life.
Everyone I know that gives in in games easily and whines or gives up upon having to try something more than once is a deadbeat failure who can't hold onto even the simplest jobs.
I do know someone whose priorities are ass backwards and spends all of his time on video games while being a parasite to his family, but he's never sought after challenge and instead plays hours upon hours of various easier games that won't test him.
Fricking based as hell. Vicious, authentic and true.
i have competed in and won tournaments but none of my self-worth is tied up in anything related to playing games so i don't get anything out of beating a very difficult game for the sake of it. making a straight hallway with 100 pixel perfect frame perfect jumps must be peak game design in your mind, so weird man
>Levels should only be rewarded at milestones
No longer an RPG.
A milestone can be quest completion, which is in line with being a RPG.
the different tracks on the sphere grid ARE classes, tho
As I said, a system that tries to replace the level system and ends up replicating with extra uninteresting fluff
If you like playing the exact same game over and over again with a new number slapped on the end, more power to you, I wont begrudge you for it.
I enjoy the challenge of learning and mastering a new system. And I very much prefer to have my characters be strong because of the skill I have as a player than because they happened to have a strong class or randomly got good level ups.
There's something to be said for the experience of rolling with the punches and watching unexpected characters shine because they were gifted by unbalanced design or lucky RNG, but when that is coupled with the misery of having your favorite character be totally fricking useless with no recourse to be able to fix them, it is absolutely not worth it.
I also disagree with what you said here
and I think if you played the game you'd understand why.
Characters in FFX start out in a defined class but branch out from there in dozens of directions. No two players have the same team by the end of the game; every playthrough is unique. It isn't a rehash of the traditional class system, and it isn't something that can be replicated by one either.
Imagine if when you were playing D&D, each time you beat a strong enemy, you got an item that let you take a pencil and write a new ability in the level up table in one of the classes in the Player's Handbook. And not only do you get that ability, but every other player who has that level of that class gets that ability too.
Imagine stapling another player's character sheet to yours.
Imagine leveling up backwards from 20 to 1.
Imagine leveling another character down so you can get a bigger level up for yourself.
Now imagine seven people at a table, all doing this to each other at the same time.
That's what Final Fantasy X is like.
>Imagine if when you were playing D&D, each time you beat a strong enemy, you got an item that let you take a pencil and write a new ability in the level up table in one of the classes in the Player's Handbook. And not only do you get that ability, but every other player who has that level of that class gets that ability too.
That's something you only do incredibly late in the post game, and it gives you selection of stat bonuses, not actual new abilities. At the actual end point of the normal game everyone's characters will generally be a the end of their grid, mostly exactly the same, and can only then really start to explore what happens when you unlock key spheres unless you really pushed for specific unlocks early.
FFX is legitimately the game that only gets properly good after 30 hours of straight gameplay, and you're right about to face the final boss sequence, and I'm not joking in saying this in any way.
>FFX is legitimately the game that only gets properly good after 30 hours of straight gameplay, and you're right about to face the final boss sequence, and I'm not joking in saying this in any way.
You people are terminally boring and have no imagination. It says more about you than the game if you think it's only fun once it devolves into a spreadsheet simulator.
>devolves into a spreadsheet simulator.
We are not the one claiming to enjoy staring at a skill tree screen for hours. These look a lot like spreadsheets you know.
You're the one with no imagination if you didn't find the game interesting to explore once it actually gives you freedom and things to do, or made this boring for yourself by following a guide. It's at that point you really get to breath and the game lets you choose what you want to do in ways that were not at all similar to what it was like before.
You are the kind of homosexual who ruins RPGs for people that always liked them because you failed at math in school.
I dont know, Id say Im fairly good in math.
I just like simplicity in games, I find It more fun when I play something instead of staring at a boring skill tree that, most of the time, adds virtually nothing that couldnt be made simpler and better with a level system.
One of the more fun things about RPGs is seeing different methods of character progression when it comes to gaining stats, skill acquisition, and items.
Agreed, not what Im talking about. These games have systems of progression in items, weapons or, heck, even skills, they just dont waste your time on skill tree screens.
>why do people defend this so much?
Why do you ask moronic loaded questions about imaginary ghosts haunting you?
>poopy game hidden behind pretty box art to create the illusion of quality
Literally my entire childhood collection
>What is a teleport sphere?
a mental construct representing the character's indeterminate potential growth
if I remember correctly, an item which allows you to move to another section of the grid to continue linear progression
>game has a vast and sprawling skill tree full of meaningful choices
>lol just kidding just grind to max level and get everything
Even though it wasn't a hassle, I'll never forgive FFX for making me grind Yuna for the Jecht boss fight
>game only has the illusion of multiple possible builds because it uses obfuscation to hide how bad most of the options actually are
>this kills the jarpig
how many levels do I have to grind to get all of those?
Can't. You have to choose.
>choose
cringepilled
No point in having this stuff if there is no choice. Might as well be like Phantasy Star 1 where the level up inform you have received the stat boost and new abilities that the devs chose for you.
>Might as well be like Phantasy Star 1
This is moronic shit.
Infact people who play PoE will tell you "don't worry about that! you'll just look up the best direction to go in online!"
which is to say "yea it's too fricking complicated so just look up what path to take"
which is to say "yea it's shit"
I recommend that you stick to simple, linear progression systems.
I'm pretty sure it's not 100% linear. there were ways to go into other character grids, and also you could branch for extras or not branch
Sure if you're a gay playing FFX for the first time in 2024 then yea this system is in other games a million times over, but
>imagine not having played FF fricking X in peak PS2 era
couldn't be me
People who call the sphere grid linear never did the monster arena and endgame content.
Yes, the grid IS linear, up until that point, which is when the game basically actually begins, as a game.
>bro the games progression system isn't linear just play 99% of the game and it becomes nonlinear
FFX trannies had nothing to say here I guess
People always claim that you can grind to victory in RPGs, but every well designed RPG blocks player progression with huge exp gaps. For instance there will be a point where you've reached the "max" level wanted by the game in a given area, and attempting to go past it would take HOURS and HOURS of grinding, to the point only an FAQ writing autist would go that far (never trust their level recommendations), and most players will not do that. Then, you reach the next area and the exp gain is greatly increased, suddenly after a few fights you level up, and so on.
That's without mentionning systems which on top of that reduce the exp gain of enemies when the player level ups (same enemy, fewer exp once the player is past a certain level).
Every RPG does this to some extent and only badly ones let the player become over-lvld easily; or worse, allow the player to accidentally become over-lvl'd after just a couple fights because he walked into the "wrong" direction (Metal Saga comes to mind; I liked a lot of things in that game but the leveling system is ass)
Would you guys have liked the sphere grid better if rather than locking branches behind key spheres, which you cant get until certain points in the game and kind of limits experimentation, if key spheres worked liked regular spheres but needed a certain number of levels to unlock? i.e. for a level 1 key sphere early in tidus' grid, you can spend 10 sphere levels to open a gate and move him onto wakka / lulus / rikkus grid or whatever
>Would you guys have liked the sphere grid better if rather than locking branches behind key spheres
No, locking things behind keyspheres is interesting and makes you want to go out and get them. The problem, as you're said, is that there's no way of doing this until too late in the game and the game should have given you more means of doing this earlier, along with more possible branches to/between paths to unlock.