Less scripted fights more online engagement

[PyurBlue]

I think people don't really understand how insanely complex the design of a battle system in any game is. The dev have a vision of the kind of games they want, and conceive a system tailor specifically for it. So unless they wanted to create a system that can do more than one style of battle and invest twice or thrice the resource to develop it from the beginning, that won't be a change you see 10 years into development.

In a way FF14 can serve as an example of a more dynamic game, at least early FF14 can. The lower levels had some recurring enemy types that players were expected to learn through repeated encounters. That would inform them on those enemies general capabilities and give hints on how to deal with new versions of those enemies. Things like cyclops and morbols. I wouldn't consider these to be exactly what I want in terms of less scripted combat, but there are some interesting ideas there on how to build a more dynamic combat system.

FF14 also has PvP which is unscripted by nature.

I find that people that people that ask for "less scripted fights" don't understand what it means.

Many fights and mechanics in FF14 can be memorized and a lot of the difficulty comes from being unable to know what will happen exactly until you see it. That's the core of my complaint, and I think the same goes for many who are asking for less scripted combat.

You can write an AI script that chooses a response from a list based on the current situation and I guess you could call that scripted, but I wouldn't. That's dynamic. It's also something that FF14 doesn't do. In FF14 a mechanic happens at X time or Y % HP. Sometimes there is a choice of mechanic from a small list at X time or Y% HP, which is very slightly better but not a huge improvement. I think what people want is the illusion that they are fighting someone, an observing and thinking entity, and not fighting something, a mechanic dispenser.

[Lak14]

Less scripted fights more online engagement

Playing through trails and fights more than once is a wasted time and boring

What about stopping scripted fights at least 50% just let us have online moments that can be unique each fight

what are you talking about ? mfs pls you can't even kill phoinix.

[Raven2014]

I feel like this was something they were experimenting a little with variants. I would love to see fights with more mechanics that were randomized a bit.

Instead of fights that were just:

A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> F -> G (repeat)

I'd love it if the mechs swapped places a bit or branched off into other mechs. So A could move onto B, but maybe could also move onto F. When F fires, it could be D or G. This allows for fights to be mostly scripted in regards to the mechanics themselves, but when they pop up changes the fight almost entirely.

We kinda already have that since 3 expansion ago where they mix up the order of the phase coming, most fight have it now. Even the current EX has it, for example in WorQor La Dor after the first common phase, you can get either ice phase or thunder phase first. But that's about as far as you can go without mixing up to much.

A choreographed is not just about what the boss do, but also the design take into player's resource into account as well. It's an optimization for both defensive and offensive resource. We already actually had one example of this during Asphodelos - the first phase of the 4th boss. One branch line up with the burst window while the others make you lose up time. In the first week or even second, for 95% of the group getting the latter pattern is an automatic wipe because you can't meet the enrage check. Now if you have a bunch of branch and just let them go willy nilly, what if 2 hard hitting phases come in row and your defensive cool down didn't have time to recover? What if your burst window keep landing on a movement/down time phase? Whether you like it or not, the entire combat system in FF14 designed around the party's Cool Down, meaning the fights have to pace to match those available resources. Otherwise players's success and failure will be just just down to random chance, no one gonna like that, even the people who asking for it right now. The only way to avoid that in a random system is to tune the fights to be beatable under the worst case scenario, but that would make them to easy most of the time. I remember progging A4 and even if thing was going smoothly, the moment we see we get the bad pattern everyone just hit the wall, it was a very shitty way to prog a fight.


This is why I said FF14 is a very tightly structured system, you won't change something without it effecting a lot of other thing.