Why do so many turn-based RPGs have so many trash encounters? Whether it's a JRPG or WRPG, whether they're "random" or there are monsters on the map this is a constant problem, just trash mobs that exist to waste your time with a boring fight.
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They're suppose to be eating into your on hand resources via attrition.
Going from: Town where you can resupply -> dungeon -> boss at the end of the dungeon is suppose to be putting a strain on your sustainability.
However, due to poor balancing, in most modern RPGs, you can be so prepared that this effect doesn't happen.
Instead the standard encounters just exist so you have a way to power up if a boss gives you trouble
You can have resources taken up by having fewer fights though. Instead of 20 30 40 munchkin enemies wasting your resources you can have 3 or 4 big fights that do that
And besides 99% of the time that shit doesn't matter, in most of these games you can
>save whenever you want
>grind gold
>end up with 99 potions
Adding onto this I propose that there should be ZERO trash mobs. Only important, story-relevant, or interesting fights. If your goal is to enter and explore a cave it should have a couple big fights, not a bunch of respawning bats that get in your way every damn time.
If you want to grind because the bosses or fights are too hard, that should be a completely separate option in a completely separate area. You need to go to Grindtopia, and Grindtopia is only available on Easy difficulty
>Adding onto this I propose that there should be ZERO trash mobs.
That a good idea on paper, but it not so good in practice. Players are gonna be so damn winded if every battle is gonna take like 5 mins, it gonna ruin immersion, they'll get out of the battle like "Where was I going again?"
Now I am not trying to say every battle should just be a trivial attack button spam, but random encounters should be short and sweet. That way when they DO pose a challenge they are more memorable. Look at those god damn marlboros in final fantasy for example, I am sure many players had a memorable experience when they first encountered them, dealing with their status effect spam.
Those 'trash mobs' you hate so much are opportunity for the player. Opportunity for resources, as well as a way for them to experiment with their party's abilities. If you have nothing but boss fights then the player is not gonna get a chance to have fun with their characters to a full extent.
>Instead of 20 30 40 munchkin enemies wasting your resources you can have 3 or 4 big fights that do that
The problem with this is that players treat boss fights differently from random encounters. People are gonna fully heal their party's HP and MP before a boss (inn), but most likely not between every random encounter.
The ultimate solution to all this is to include a well designed battle system in your RPG, one that can appeal to players. Now people will point to games maybe like SaGa or SMT for their depth, but even more 'shallow' RPGs can still have appeal to players, two examples FF7 and Chrono Trigger.
FF7 you have the materia combinations and the grandiose animations which were impressive for the time.
Chrono Trigger had those teamup attacks that a lot of players had fun using all sorts of different attacks, along with awesome spritework and sound design.
That way even "trash encounters" still have merit to them. You're missing the bigger picture, OP.
>That a good idea on paper, but it not so good in practice. Players are gonna be so damn winded if every battle is gonna take like 5 mins, it gonna ruin immersion, they'll get out of the battle like "Where was I going again?"
Which is why you only have a few of them, whether it's 3 5 minute fights, or 90 10 second fights, what's the functional difference other than the 5 minute fights are more memorable and actually challenging? If anything the latter makes it far easier to forget what's going on, if it's only a few fights, and they're all important for some reason then that's far more memorable than random bat #5000
>Immersion
It's far more immersion breaking to constantly be in combat all the time
You go into a cave, and you realize there's billions of respawning bat enemies everywhere, all crammed into this tiny damn cave. How the frick do all of these monsters eat?
You go into a forest, and there are waves and waves of wolves that want to murder you, for basically no reason
Instead you can have
>go into cave
>there are some monsters patrolling near the entrance of the cave but they're mostly scouts/workers
>there's more monsters near the center, guarding their queen, or whatever
>there's a boss
And that's it, that makes far more logical sense and feels more like an adventure
It makes more sense but there are tradeoffs. CRPGs like Baldur's Gate (especially BG2) are designed this way. Every single battle is a unique encounter.
The big thing you are forgetting is that not everyone cares whether every single fight is memorable. Sometimes players want to feel like they can just go trigger some low-stress combat where they can try out abilities, explore the mechanics, test out strategies, and so on. Hand crafting every encounter is great but it also means the game can actually wind up feeling like just as much of a slog. Kind of like relentlessly hiking uphill with no relief.
Again I'm not saying all-handcrafted design is bad by any means but there's more to consider than you assume.
And if they want to do that then like I said, there should just be an easy mode where you can access Grindtopia. If they want to test out combat, there can be a practice area where you don't grind and there is no penalty for losing
Instead in the current system everyone is practically forced to engage with these trash encounters. Even in games where monsters are on the map and you can avoid them you will almost always inevitably run into them sooner or later, and they will influence how you explore the map and area. If there is a certain "quota" of monsters to have in a given area why not just fulfill that quota and get rid of the roaming monsters?
>And if they want to do that then like I said, there should just be an easy mode where you can access Grindtopia
Or you can just tune a moderate-to-low number of encounters by default, let the player walk in circles if they want to trigger more or flee if they want less, a dynamic which has existed since the 80s.
>If they want to test out combat, there can be a practice area where you don't grind and there is no penalty for losing
Nah that's fricking gay.
You fail to understand the draw of this kind of JRPG. Players want to be able to chill out and explore, have a feeling of adventure and playing through easy combat, managing resources and seeing their characters progress while they enjoy experimenting with mechanics. Stuffing this it into some special training area would kill the vibe entirely.
>Even in games where monsters are on the map and you can avoid them you will almost always inevitably run into them sooner or late
Well, what is your threshold, exactly? In one post you're complaining about a billion trash fights but right here you seem like you can't handle even a couple. Assuming you're the same guy that's a dishonest argument.
>they will influence how you explore the map and area
Well yeah that is a big part of why they are there, to influence how you explore and give some meaning to your decisions. Some degree of randomness is often desirable here to make the game feel less predictable and more organic. Hence, wandering enemies.
The alternative here is that you can just accept that games can be designed one way or the other. The specific balance might be tuned too far on the grindy side for your tastes. In the end, a lot factors in to how annoying trash encounters are, like transition delays, length of animations, and general bloat in the combat (eg damage sponge enemies).
A fight doesn't have to last 5 minutes to be dangerous. Enemies in Shiren the Wanderer, for example, typically go down in 2-4 hits, a fights are frequenly over in <30s, but even so, most of what you encounter needs to be taken seriously.
Helen's Mysterious Castle is another good example of a TB RPG where fights are brisk but dangerous.
>The ultimate solution to all this is to include a well designed battle system in your RPG, one that can appeal to players.
The ultimate solution is for this homosexual to play another genre.
The worst part of both FF7 and Chrono Trigger is their combat systems.
funny enough chrono trigger usually allow you to avoid enemies so that you can beeline toward where you want to go although there are some forced encounters
Chrono Trigger's ratio of mandatory battles vs skippable ones is probably something like 80/20.
Divinity Original Sin is the closest to that. It doesn't have respawning enemies so most battles are designed to be interesting and are worthwhile because there is also a limit to the amount of XP you can earn.
And DOS1/2 are shit games and only got a audience because twitch and reddit humor.
I never played such boring RPGs.
If you want to see this logic applied to a jrpg, try Final Fantasy IV free enterprise. The story is removed but it's a fantastic game/hack. You can get a feel for the pros and cons of the gameplay. The biggest issue with removing random encounters from dungeons is that there's no cost or risk at all associated with exploration.
>The biggest issue with removing random encounters from dungeons is that there's no cost or risk at all associated with exploration.
You can also bypass this with a carefully thought out encounter. You enter a cave, you can go north, east, or west. Is there going to be a fight if you go west? You don't know but it's possible. That's a risk
Even if you're worried someone will look things up in a guide (which is always an issue for any game, especially a story-focused one) you can still have "randomness". Like if you go west, there's a random chance you get in a fight. The difference is again, the quantity and quality of the fights, instead of randomly getting involved in 100 junk fights you may get randomly involved in 2-5 carefully thought out fights
The only difference is the quantity and quality of the fights themselves
Sounds boring as frick and would be incredibly hard to balance. You should be a rom hacker.
What do you mean it would be difficult to balance? It would be easy as shit. Because you don't have 10000000 fights you'd have a very clear, obvious idea of what level the player is going to be. The only problem would be on Easy, which would let you grind, but that's fine, the whole point of Easy is that it's supposed to be easy and the game is supposed to let you grind to get past obstacles
You know what's boring as shit? 1000000000 fights that have no functional purpose, other than to waste your time.
>You know what's boring as shit? 1000000000 fights that have no functional purpose, other than to waste your time.
Have you never actually played a JRPG? Battles are there to give you the needed resources to progress through the game. An rpg without random battles and just bosses would barely be an rpg. Go play Furi if that's what you want.
>Battles are there to give you the needed resources to progress through the game.
And about 95% of the time the games would be better off increasing EXP and gold drops while reducing the random encounter rate to drastically less than the default.
So you want less content and less stuff to do, just a boss rush? Go play a different genre if that's what you want. Going on an adventure, battling monsters, slowly gaining levels and abilities are part of JRPG's. Stop trying to change shit into something it's not. Those crappy Cthulhu Saves the World games basically do what you are asking and guess what, they're fricking boring to play.
I want to repeat the exact same content fewer times, yes. It is the same amount of stuff to do, with less repetition. ~5 random encounters between boss fights is a perfectly good number and hardly enough to turn the game into a boss rush, though that also would be fine.
You can just tweak the number of resources you get, or have the player actually explore to get them
>get 100 gold for killing 10000 monsters
>get 100 gold for killing 5 monsters
>Sounds boring as frick and would be incredibly hard to balance. You should be a rom hacker.
Never played Romancing SaGa 2 eh?
Yeah you've never played a SaGa game. I recommend Frontier.
modern games even give you heal (and a save point right if you can't save everywhere) before the boss lmao
>However, due to poor balancing, in most modern RPGs, you can be so prepared that this effect doesn't happen.
Unless the game has finite resources for player to use, this will always happen, just with varying levels if tediousness. And then the problem is that the player can ruin his playthrough with subpar resource managment and be forced to restart from scratch.
Better to cut down the number of encounters drastically and make every one of them challenging in it's own right.
Trash encounters create a loop where they encourage grinding for resources and at the same time gove you the perfect way to grind them to grind (through trash encounters).
How and why do you get 5000, 4000 and 5000 max HP exactly
>how
autism
>why
autism
Because they are easy to make, a single boss can have special skills that require specific code and be more detailed than mobs (art-animation-wise) therefore taking longer to make.
Trash mobs are good padding because the industry and many gamers have decided that a RPG needs to be certain length to be good so trash mobs are the best design-once-repeat-a-lot content.
Because they don't know what else to fill your time with while running from A to B.
It's partially a question of pacing and avoiding too long dead time.
You just suffer through the game long enough to get the no random encounters special item. Then you can bask in the satisfaction of having the choice.
Practice.
And the assumption that the mechanics are fun and players want to play.
To make (you) and only (you) in particular seethe about it.
Wild Arms 3's early game is really bad about this for a few reasons
>Early game dungeons have only one or two types of enemies so every encounter is the same
>There's a mechanic to skip random encounters by spending points
>Amount of points increases as the game goes on so you can skip more encounters late-game, but not the early game trash fights
gomme that frickin exp
I love random battles, SMT is the worst offender btw... FF has like 1/20 step-to-battle rate. SMT is like 1/5 and on a roll 3/5 of the time it's higher
I think it's largely a genre convention at this point. I do like the on-map encounters as a compromise where you can evade the random battles with skillful movement or resource expenditure (item/skill).
Literally the only people complaining about random encounters are speed consumers trying to clear a game ASAP guide in hand only to never touch it again, this is why the "muh waste of time" argument comes up again and again.
Those homosexuals shouldn't be listened to.
Underrail did it right. First time walking through a new area gives you usually very tough battles that require you to use all of your abilities and use them well.
Then when backtracking, some weaker enemies respawn so you could still farm for specific loot and the world feels alive.
In bad RPGs, most of these encounters don't require you to do anything but auto-attacking. Trying to use buffs/debuffs/status effects is not only a waste of time but will just drain your HP/MP for no gain.
Most of UR battles are trash encounters, even more so on DOMINATING where you got even more enemies, in fact all veterans drop the game before the last dungeon on replays because going through infinitely respawning mooks that do nothing but waste your time (on top of those atrocious puzzles) is just too much at that point.
>when backtracking, some weaker enemies respawn
No, that's not how it works at all.
Unless it's:
>Humanoids
>Non mutated dogs (that includes pitbulls/dobermans)
>Mechs
>Locust hives
>Specific encounters/bosses/dungeons
EVERYTHING eventually respawns.
E.g. you cleared the mines in camp Hathor? After a couple of hours they will have the same exact enemies back.
You cleared the lunatic mall? Nothing is there when you go back because it was just a dungeon full of human enemies.
Depot A? Everything that isn't a mutie, a normal dog or a mech respawns.
The Blacked Sea? All those serpents including the rust bastards respawn eventually.
>most battles are designed to be interesting
D:OS battles are laughably shallow, not as bad as D:OS2 since at least the first game has actually more than three unique bosses, but it's still pretty terrible.
And the xp limit is such a dumb point, every game has a growth cap, making the exp limited encourages grinding out all the optional trash even more.
Excellent, tasteful party choices.
A lot of RPG development is literally just cargo cult design. "Popular old games did it, so we should do it too if we want to be popular." They don't have the passion to question whether those designs are worthwhile or even what purpose those designs are meant to serve in the first place.
Unfortunately the same goes for most fans and they'll cry and scream whenever they find a game that's lacking those useless design elements, because they've convinced themselves that it's not a real RPG if it doesn't have the moronic shit they associate with the "classics."
Because there is no content, almost no game without this fights.
Power fantasy of slaying wild monsters + tradition + pads game length + sometimes you just want to hear a kick-ass battle theme
I do think in general RPGs need to slightly decrease the frequency at which encounters happen but also increase the threat that enemies pose. you don't quite need to totally get rid of random enemies and make every encounter a mini-boss fight, but encounters should be just barely hard enough that players can't just spam attack all the way through all these fights like; this would also pave the way for making typically overlooked things like status effects more useful
of course, doing this would be kind of hard to balance without making a game extremely linear or using a lot of level scaling
Besides indie games, how many new rpg games feature random encounters? Even the old school Dragon Quest series has switched to visible enemies on the overworld and added a difficulty option. Yeah some chase after you but 90% of encounters can be avoided.
Bravely Default let's you adjust encounter rate and difficulty on the fly.
Final Fantasy is pretty much an action rpg series now.
Complaining about old school 80s to mid 00s rpgs at this stage is pointless. I think most of the complaints come from people that grew up with the newer style rpgs and want to try out older ones.
Don't force yourself to play them if you don't enjoy them. No one cares if you have beaten them or not. Games should be for enjoyment, not completing a checklist of games beaten.
It's the same with XIVs story. Thats why I bought story skips to skip all the trash.