Meaningless Battles...

All of you must pay for your pizza crimes WITH BLOOD.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBYcM60WwAIF3dc.jpg:large

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Originally Posted by Tsumdere

Corn is actually good on pizza though.

Anti-corn pizza propaganda is made by pineapple pizza fans.

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No.
No to both.
(๑-﹏-๑)

I'm one of those people that think pizza is perfect cause you can put just about anything on it and make it work...

However if anyone ordered a mayo and corn pizza...I'm arriving with a molotov and not a pizza.

THE SICKNESS MUST BE PURGED!

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

I'm tempted to say "that's right" just to see how the other account reacts.

Deny nothing. Or deny everything. Doesn't matter, people will always believe what they really want to believe. Or what others trick them into believing.

joins you in sipping tea

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Good plan.

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Originally Posted by kaynide

Japan has very weird sense when it comes to pizza. Well, to my American brain…anyway.

Unless you really really like lots of mayonnaise with lukewarm corn.

http://www.mikesblender.com/pizza%20nightmare.jpg

On topic: I do wonder what the point of the Golbez situation actually is. If this is his one battle, and he lives, will he be redeemed in the end? Or will it be a solo duty thing? Or is Zeromus gonna eat him?

And (spoilers), what effect is this going to have on the first? If I understood Y’shtola correctly..she’s..going to…weaponize.. the empty?

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There's one made with corn and mayo too? Oh gods...

Back on topic!

I have no idea what's up with Golbez. I'm hoping he gets eaten by Zeromus.

Yeah, I wonder what's going to happen when the Empty meets the Void. What's going to happen to all three worlds? Y'shtola's plan can be seen as brilliant or insanely reckless.

I guess it all depends on if the writers are going to be consistent with what we know occurs when something big happens in a reflection or if it's going to layered with so much plot armor that we all collectively throw our hands up in the air.

note: I did not read all 10 pages.

Unwinnable fights are very difficult to do well.

- wasting resources
- have to hit a dps check only to lose AFTER you meet the dps check, but if you don't meet the dps check, you really lose and have to restart (looking at you FFXVI, a trick they picked up from FFXIV and other games)
- main character cutscene fumbling and suddenly can't swing their sword without falling down (FFXVI again!)
- fight seems easy until the inevitable one shot

They're just very difficult to do well without it feeling cheap, or that you were tricked. Souls games are pretty good about it, they give you an honest challenge, and if you pass it, you get a reward (souls, or an item, something), but you still "lose". Games that actually let you straight up beat the final boss early like Renalt mention are awesome, but again, they can harm a game experience if someone beat the game way earlier than expected (Prey early ending is an example of a ending ruining the proper gameplay experience).

off topic: Korea also has weird pizza. Check out this white sauce based pizza with sweet potato/cheese crust on the edge. It's so ridiculously good

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/i...3h01s&usqp=CAU

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Originally Posted by Tsumdere

Corn is actually good on pizza though.

Anti-corn pizza propaganda is made by pineapple pizza fans.

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I'm not anti-corn. In fact, I like on a tex-mex style pizza. (Don't knock it. If you love enchiladas, tacos or tamales, you'll like a "mexican" pizza.)

It's the mayonnaise which throws me off. The thought eating it hot just doesn't appeal to me and I'm one of those individuals who will try any culinary dish at least once.

I like pineapple on pizza but it has to be paired with the right toppings, such as barbecued chicken. My spouse, however, hates it.

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Originally Posted by Boblawblah

note: I did not read all 10 pages.

Unwinnable fights are very difficult to do well.

- wasting resources
- have to hit a dps check only to lose AFTER you meet the dps check, but if you don't meet the dps check, you really lose and have to restart (looking at you FFXVI, a trick they picked up from FFXIV and other games)
- main character cutscene fumbling and suddenly can't swing their sword without falling down (FFXVI again!)
- fight seems easy until the inevitable one shot

They're just very difficult to do well without it feeling cheap, or that you were tricked. Souls games are pretty good about it, they give you an honest challenge, and if you pass it, you get a reward (souls, or an item, something), but you still "lose". Games that actually let you straight up beat the final boss early like Renalt mention are awesome, but again, they can harm a game experience if someone beat the game way earlier than expected (Prey early ending is an example of a ending ruining the proper gameplay experience).

off topic: Korea also has weird pizza. Check out this white sauce based pizza with sweet potato/cheese crust on the edge. It's so ridiculously good

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/i...3h01s&usqp=CAU

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You know, I love Korean cooking. I'd try that pizza. Got the recipe at hand?

Back on topic:

I don't think the issues are with unwinnable fights. In fact, I think it's good to remind the players that there is always someone better.

The issue is how it is presented. It is tremendously unfair to the player to have a cut scene take away a victory when the player has been winning the entire fight.

What we do should always matter and it's not difficult to have an ending where the player wins, and another where the player loses, and have the two forks in the road join together a short while later.

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

Boss fights you're supposed to lose have been in RPGs for the past 30+ years and SE aren't the only ones to do it. Elden Ring even begins with one. It's just a narrative tool and I don't really see a problem with it unless it's an RPG with items and I end up wasting them, not knowing I was supposed to lose.

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I think something like that is fine when you are starting out with your adventure or if the enemy has some unknown fighting mechanic that takes us by surprise. Fordola is someone like that with her echo.

I really dont like it, if its simply for plot. For example Zenos...he beats us quite easily (we are already seasoned warriors at that time) and somehow a few levels later we not only beat him but Shinryu. Our character may have gained exp while going through the story but that is a gameplay mechanic. We had not gone through real months of training. We did not research something that will help us beat him. We just did, because it was time to do it.

At least if we are meant to lose make it so that it makes sense. Poison us with something unknown, let us take a hit that was meant for one of our friends, that we otherwise would have not taken. Anything like that.

And I fully agree with the OP about our character just not doing much afterwards or the fight not meaning much. Cutscene WoL is honestly the worst. There are too many scenes where stuff happens because our WoL turns into a level 1 warrior again, with the reaction time of a slug. Like a deer caught in the car lights.

Another problem is that the opponent we're losing to has to actually feel like a credible threat. If we're effortlessly stomping mudholes in them until the plot kicks in, it's unsatisfying at best.

As an example, Kai Leng in Mass Effect 3. The game talks him up like a super badass assassin, a sort of anti-Shepard who should be a deadly adversary. In his appearances in the novels, he even lives up to it (perhaps barring Deception, which.....let's just say even BioWare disowns that one). But then he gets on screen, and:

-Barely escapes a one-on-one fight with Thane, who is in the terminal phase of Kepral's Syndrome (short version: his lungs are dying, he can barely breath without considerable pain, never mind fight). Even after fatally wounding the already half-dead Thane, he flees as soon as Shepard's squad comes to join the fight, failing his mission to kill the salarian Councilor. Thane even mocks him for it on his deathbed.

-On Thessia, Leng is a pathetic excuse for a fight; it's quite easily possible to take no damage at all from him until he calls in gunship support. Leng himself is never a real threat in this fight. And it eventually ends on a cut scene. Oh, and the petty little prick sends a taunting email afterwards.

-Finally, on Kronos Station, Leng calls in teams of flunkies to help....and they're far more dangerous than he is. He's a slightly-buffed Phantom, but without the instant-kill melee attack. (For extra irony, some of the mooks he calls in are actual Phantoms.) At least this time you actually get to kill him.

Overall, there are a lot of reasons why Leng's considered one of the worst characters in the franchise, and his underwhelming boss fights are a big part of it.

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Originally Posted by TheMightyMollusk

Another problem is that the opponent we're losing to has to actually feel like a credible threat. If we're effortlessly stomping mudholes in them until the plot kicks in, it's unsatisfying at best.

As an example, Kai Leng in Mass Effect 3. The game talks him up like a super badass assassin, a sort of anti-Shepard who should be a deadly adversary. In his appearances in the novels, he even lives up to it (perhaps barring Deception, which.....let's just say even BioWare disowns that one). But then he gets on screen, and:

-Barely escapes a one-on-one fight with Thane, who is in the terminal phase of Kepral's Syndrome (short version: his lungs are dying, he can barely breath without considerable pain, never mind fight). Even after fatally wounding the already half-dead Thane, he flees as soon as Shepard's squad comes to join the fight, failing his mission to kill the salarian Councilor. Thane even mocks him for it on his deathbed.

-On Thessia, Leng is a pathetic excuse for a fight; it's quite easily possible to take no damage at all from him until he calls in gunship support. Leng himself is never a real threat in this fight. And it eventually ends on a cut scene. Oh, and the petty little prick sends a taunting email afterwards.

-Finally, on Kronos Station, Leng calls in teams of flunkies to help....and they're far more dangerous than he is. He's a slightly-buffed Phantom, but without the instant-kill melee attack. (For extra irony, some of the mooks he calls in are actual Phantoms.) At least this time you actually get to kill him.

Overall, there are a lot of reasons why Leng's considered one of the worst characters in the franchise, and his underwhelming boss fights are a big part of it.

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That email from Leng felt like the devs were just memeing at that point. "lul, you opened the message, it is I KAI LENG! You're a poopy head!".

We don't talk about Kai Leng here...or anywhere.

About the whole unwinnable fights deal, I feel that they are almost never done correctly, and even if they try to do such fights in the best possible ways, they're still underwhelming. It's why most games nowadays don't do it anymore and I don't really remember any case right now - I've read FFXVI has an example but I haven't played it, but also Dragon Quest XI does and it's "probably" one of the few unwinnable fights where it's also an integral part of the story...which I can't tell because it's major spoilers.

Either way, I feel that they're really not fun to do, and don't tell you much at all about it, other than "woops, you can't win, screw you". I'm honestly happy most games have quit doing this because it doesn't do anything other than prolong a fight. If you wanted us to show we were unable to win just give us a cutscene instead, at least we'd lose with style!

This reminds me of a game that I absolutely hated for this annoying gimmick, which was the Trails of Cold Steel games: they constantly throw you unwinnable fights with enemies that are considered Godly beasts, and it did work...the first time you meet them that is. But after the quintillion unwinnable encounter, you just go "urgh, fine, let's lose quick". Heck those games even tell you "lower X hp to 50% to win the battle" and even if you're in NG+ with level 200 characters and final weapons, and being able to use your S-craft with quartz that double your attack on first turn, doing literally hundreds of thousands of damage, and yet you can't win against this boss anyway! So why even bother?!

TL;DR if you want to show us unwinnable fights, make it a cutscene instead. At least it's an enjoyable defeat rather than a meaningless win.

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Originally Posted by Voltyblast

TL;DR if you want to show us unwinnable fights, make it a cutscene instead. At least it's an enjoyable defeat rather than a meaningless win.

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Different preferences I guess.

I personally dislike whenever my character is just suddenly shown "doing stuff" in non-interactive cutscenes — for me, it feels immersively-jarring to flip-flop arbitrarily between fully controlling my character's actions and decisions, to suddenly just sitting back and passively letting a cutscene make my decisions for me.

It's why I kind of tense up every time FFXIV decides to try to show the WOL "doing stuff", because usually that stuff doesn't feel like what "I" would do in the same situation, and it's... frustrating.

Given that, I really don't mind "guaranteed loss" battles, if the other option is a "get beat up" cutscene, because at least with "guaranteed loss", I get to experience a combat flow and make my own "decisions" about how the scene plays out (up to the scripted conclusion point).

The worst possible combination, however, is going through a scripted loss battle which then leads to a completely-separate scripted loss cutscene battle, making the mechanical battle itself feel completely like a pointless gameplay formality.

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Originally Posted by Eorzean_username

It's why I kind of tense up every time FFXIV decides to try to show the WOL "doing stuff", because usually that stuff doesn't feel like what "I" would do in the same situation, and it's... frustrating.

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My WOL certainly wouldn't stand there like a dunce while the villain of the week monologues, but that's unfortunately 90% of the, not even just scripted loss, cutscenes lol.

Could be FFX and the "almost unwinnable" battle is your first Blitzball match. Win or lose changes nothing in the overall story. You're supposed to get your ass kicked.

I handed the controller over to a friend who wanted to see if it was possible to win that fight (and he was good at Blitzball.) The answer is YES! a good BB player can win as long as they manually control the players (the computer is bad.) Your prize is a slightly different cutscene and some of the opposing team's BB players going free agent later in the game. That's it.

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Originally Posted by Catwho

Could be FFX and the "almost unwinnable" battle is your first Blitzball match. Win or lose changes nothing in the overall story. You're supposed to get your ass kicked.

I handed the controller over to a friend who wanted to see if it was possible to win that fight (and he was good at Blitzball.) The answer is YES! a good BB player can win as long as they manually control the players (the computer is bad.) Your prize is a slightly different cutscene and some of the opposing team's BB players going free agent later in the game. That's it.

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The Jecht shot makes it much more possible. You get a goal or two and then just play keep away for the rest of the match. But yea, requires some knowledge of the game for sure.

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Originally Posted by Themarvin

they should introduce AI to the boss mechanics... would be interesting to never be able to cactbot or write any guides to anything, especially for savage and ultimates, it would be nice when we get to be it that it is the player having to do things and not by some dork with a mic video.

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I raided every expansion until part of ShB. I sort of got tired of the scripted battles. Don't get me wrong, they are challenging, but mostly just based on memorization. The name of the game was always being proactive, not reactive. They should really mix up these mechanics more than they do. Instead of just being:

Mechanic 1 followed by Mechanic 2 followed by Mechanic 3 or 4 followed by Mechanic 5 followed by unused mechanic 3 or 4 etc etc

It should be more like...

5 > 1 > 3 > 5 > 6 > 2 > 3 > 4 etc

You get to a point in these savage raids where you are doing your rotation and looking for a certain "tell" every 30 seconds and going where you need to go. Don't get me wrong - when raids first came out, especially as the expansions went onwards, they came up with very unique mechanics. However, things are too scripted. Randomize it.

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Originally Posted by dspguy

You get to a point in these savage raids where you are doing your rotation and looking for a certain "tell" every 30 seconds and going where you need to go. [...] However, things are too scripted. Randomize it.

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Tough call. Part of what makes FFXIV stand out as somewhat-unique in terms of its raiding is how incredibly, precisely-scripted almost every mechanic and timeline tends to be.

This makes encounters become stale or "rote" faster, but it hypothetically also allows for more precise rotational execution, and more complex rotational design.

That said, if XIV continues to move in the direction of simplifying rotational execution and refinement, then maybe it would make sense to introduce a lot more reactivity and variation into the encounter designs.

Considerations regarding this include:

• How would it interact with XIV rotational design and the buff-alignment meta-playstyle?

• Would the "high end" XIV playerbase object to losing the ability to (in many cases) precisely-script their rotation, down to the GCD?

• Can the XIV engine / server responsiveness / etc, actually handle truly spontaneous, randomised, or unpredictable mechanics? (ie — How much of the current system "works" because players can kind of "compensate" for it by exactly anticipating many elements ahead of time, or otherwise compensating for erratic responsiveness with predictability?)

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

Boss fights you're supposed to lose have been in RPGs for the past 30+ years and SE aren't the only ones to do it. Elden Ring even begins with one. It's just a narrative tool and I don't really see a problem with it unless it's an RPG with items and I end up wasting them, not knowing I was supposed to lose.

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The worst to me are fights you're supposed to lose, but you have to win. If you get KO'd early, you lose the fight/get a game over/etc.

Contrast: Kingdom Hearts 1 fight with Squall. If you lose, he knocks Sora out and the story continues. If you win, Sora demands answers but them passes out from the exertion, Yuffie makes fun of Squall for getting soft/weak, and you get a low level accessory reward for beating the fight. Winning doesn't feel like losing as you get some reward and stuff, and it's somewhat reasonable for (just starting out) Sora to pass out after that much effort against a seasoned fighter, but if you lose, instead of a game over, the story continues since Sora is supposed to be unconscious and taken to the hotel by Squall and Yuffie for the story either way.

However, in other "you lose in the cutscene" fights done wrong, you have stuff like all the Zenos fights in Stormblood where he DOES beat you in the cutscene, but if you lose the fight, you have to redo it over and over until you win. Instead, they could just do the KH1 thing. If you lose, well, you're SUPPOSED to lose, so the story goes on. If you win, you get some token reward and a slightly different cutscene, but are still beaten in it. "Well, it seems I underestimated you. Now I will not. /unleash big attack to knock you to your knees anyway" sort of a thing.

I don't mind "must lose" battles. I hate "must lose" battles where, if you lose, you have to keep doing it anyway and you have to WIN it...just to lose it in the cutscene. Those annoy me more than almost anything.

The very first unwinnable fight I have ever experienced was Breath of Fire 3.

You and your friends end up being Robin Hood of the town and ended up getting cocky and the rich hired these mercenary horse men (Humanoids with a horse head) and they destroy your hide out, they mock you for being just dumb kids and you shouldn't be doing things like this stating that things like this will get you killed at a young age.

Your friends get angry about that and they start combat, you can't beat them, the white horse man has a powerful AoE that can surely cause a total party wipe in two hits and you also have the brown horse man that attacks to finishes a single party member off with his high single target basic attack. You the protag survive and you believe your friends are still alive and out there somewhere and that is when you start your actual journey. When I got to that point in the game I was young and it actually did hit me that I need to get stronger to beat these bastards for killing my friends.

The horsemen end up being reoccurring enemies during this point in the game and I think it is a good way to show that the enemy is definitely stronger than you so you have to get stronger for your fallen friends and live on, maybe bring down revenge when you reach that point.

All my homies hate Balio and Sunder.

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Originally Posted by BaconBits

All my homies hate Balio and Sunder.

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Oh my god, I legit forgot their names and you just jogged my memory, thanks for that!

Breath of Fire 2's first two battles are unwinnable. Although that's because in those, Ryu is a five-year-old kid with no weapon or training.

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Originally Posted by TheMightyMollusk

Breath of Fire 2's first two battles are unwinnable. Although that's because in those, Ryu is a five-year-old kid with no weapon or training.

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Oh man that's one of the first RPGs I've ever beaten.

FFII starts you literally with an unwinnable fight. Don't know if anyone mentioned that already

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Originally Posted by Renalt

Oh man that's one of the first RPGs I've ever beaten.

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It was one of my first turn-based RPGs, and my first experience with a game with multiple endings. Which also means it was probably my first experience with searching online for guides.

Sorry for necroing a drama thread but I found this and I think it shows how lame most scripted losing fights are played out.

https://youtu.be/X6e7ayhYW60

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Originally Posted by Renalt

Sorry for necroing a drama thread but I found this and I think it shows how lame most scripted losing fights are played out.

https://youtu.be/X6e7ayhYW60

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That also reminds me of some of the trolls around here.

Just to put my two cents, the 6.4 main story major battle could have been SO much better, if instead of afflicting our character with "cutscene disability" they bothered to expand the cutscene after the trial with the following development:

Golbez suddenly summons a huge horde of voidesnt (as far as we know, he should have plenty at his disposal) and WoL is left with a choice to either pursue their main target or help their comrades. Obviously, the latter is chosen, because we treasure our friends. The fight erupts, but our party helds thanks to the WoL sheer strength.

But it buys enough time for Golbez to retreat and finish his plot, summoning Zeromus. Cutscene then proceeds as normal (may instert us defeating the huge horde just for some power fantasy, you know, WoL is awesome, yadda-yadda) and our party retreats to the Source. The end.

There, I fixed it in 15 minutes. Definetly not the best explanation, but still better than seeing our character standing completely still (bonus points if their job is ranged DPS) and stare how Golbez T-pose and fly away to create a plot device to move the story to next patch.