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Crisis Core and convenience
Nicholas
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm nearing the end of Crisis Core (about 85% done), and while I was originally going to write a review I instead decided to just make a quick commentary on all the things I think it did right.
Frankly all I wanted was an FFVII sequel, but Square instead decided to release a prequel, a spinoff action game, a cell phone game, and a CG movie (much to my dismay). And while I really wasn't a fan of this idea I'm not exactly voting with my dollars well as I own two copies of Advent Children (DVD, UMD), and of course bought Dirge of Cerberus and Crisis Core.
Anyways, what I ultimately see Crisis Core as is just some very smart progressions of the Final Fantasy formula. I think back to some simplistic fixes made from Kotor to Mass Effect. In Kotor after killing a group of enemies you had to walk up to all the dead corpses hit the a button, check what they had, and then take whatever they had on them, which could get kind of irritating, especially when you kill them in close proximity and you end up double checking bodies etc. Bioware had the sensibility to just take this entire process out of the game completely and just have stuff show up in your inventory. Keeping you moving through the action rather then stopping after every group of enemies.
Square Enix also gave me some optimism for what an FFVII remake (or sequel) could really be if they implemented similar fixes like the one's in Crisis Core
- Random Battles: Still probably one of the most annoying things, even going back and playing the originals, they did them a bit better in this as you don't really change screens now when "random" battles pop up, and they seem moreso like the battles are purposely placed at various intervals in a level, so they don't really seem random as much as they seem "triggered" by crossing a path or stepping into a certain area. Point being when your not thrown into a different screen for the fight, and they happen at sensible/expected intervals they aren't nearly as annoying.
-Leveling Up: Leveling up is quite often a fairly irritating, and necessary task in a Final Fantasy game, you almost just have to force yourself to enjoy fighting the same trivial enemies over and over again for hours on end so your character can gain strength. I definitely question why Final Fantasy games stopped giving you Exp for boss battles as if to try and force you to fight more annoying random enemies throughout the game. But the mission system in Final Fantasy VII makes leveling up not quite as painful, they are nice, quick, somewhat meaningful spurts of battles that your generally rewarded with an item or materia for doing and they occasionally advance some kind of side story as well. The other really nice thing about them is you no longer have to circle your character around on a world map purposely looking for a fight. You just access these at any save point, and your able to level your character up whenever you need to between chapters. It's just a great way of making one of the more painful parts of the series kind of enjoyable and purposeful.
-More interactive fighting: It seems the second the fighting becomes more interactive in an RPG it's automatically tagged "Action RPG", but to me an RPG is an RPG. The Final Fantasy series has made a fairly slow progression into this style of fighting, but I think it's for the better. I mean I even liked the fighting in FFXI better then the original turn based style of the SNES/PlayStation era of games. This just takes it a step further being a nice in between, of what is essentially turned based fighting that FEELS like real time fighting. But I can see some very interesting gameplay potential in an FFVII remake if all the different characters had different ways of fighting. So for example Cloud uses a sword so you engage in fairly straightforward sword combat, but for someone like Vincent or Barret it might be some kind of third person targeting interface where the more you keep the target focused the more damage it does etc. I mean that's maybe not the best example but you get the idea.
-Store Access: I really thought Final Fantasy VIII was on to something when one of the GF's powers let you access any store in the game from your in game menu, essentially letting you stock up on the fly not always having to go into a town and crawl your way into an item shop, not to mention sometimes when you get the airship and have the whole world at your fingertips it can be difficult to remember which specific store carried certain items. Final Fantasy X was kind of the start of this kind of convenience with the same Australian accented merchant following you around the world showing up in convenient places, but in my mind that was never really enough. Crisis Core just plays it off as "buying stuff online", and as far as I know lets you buy items from the store at any single point in the game. So if halfway through your trek up a mountain you realized you didn't stock enough potions for the whole trip you aren't forced to regress all the way back to town, you just buy them on the spot and keep moving.
You might argue that these things make it too convenient or just make the game too easy, but I don't think inconvenience should be built into your game design, let me get the challenge of it from the fighting, or some intelligent puzzle solving...not from trying to deal with all the thing developers arbitrarily threw in to seemingly annoy the player. Some quick examples of this being
-Doom 3: Every single time you pick up a PDA and your forced to go into that slow loading PDA screen scroll through the random names of people you don't remember, not even remembering which PDA you just picked up, clicking the person's name and playing their voice recording so you can hear the password to a locker. If those sequences weren't annoying already they got even more annoying just from that 30 second step. It would have made so much more sense to streamline it for the player. He found the PDA...ok...he did what you wanted him to do (he explored more), when you pick it up...it should just autoplay the recording giving you the extra tid bit about the backstory and then reveal the locker password.
-Return to Castle Wolfenstein: This is something that's kind of popped up in a few fps's over the years and I'm not even sure if it was done on purpose because it's just so stupid, but its when cooperative play doesn't count. In Wolfenstein if you play any levels in coop it does not unlock them for you to progress through again later with your friend, so I guess they just expect to you either beat the game before playing coop, or play the entire game coop in one sitting? Coop was a much more fun way to play that campaign, but unfortunately I never even bothered with it because it was decided that you weren't going to be rewarded for playing the game with a friend. This isn't the only game guilty of this, it's just the most prominent one I can remember.
Obviously these are just some minor examples, but I think they go along with the Kotor and Final Fantasy examples mentioned above to prove my point to some degree.
Final Point: I just believe any decision made in the design process where your purposely inconveniencing the player really needs a second look, I've played more then a few games where it really seems like the developers put certain things in just to make things more difficult when they really don't need to be as it doesn't add anything to the experience of the game. Are you really doing anything for the player's enjoyment of the game making him walk around to all the dead bodies taking their stuff? Does the act of walking up to them and pressing A just add that much more realism?
Frankly all I wanted was an FFVII sequel, but Square instead decided to release a prequel, a spinoff action game, a cell phone game, and a CG movie (much to my dismay). And while I really wasn't a fan of this idea I'm not exactly voting with my dollars well as I own two copies of Advent Children (DVD, UMD), and of course bought Dirge of Cerberus and Crisis Core.
Anyways, what I ultimately see Crisis Core as is just some very smart progressions of the Final Fantasy formula. I think back to some simplistic fixes made from Kotor to Mass Effect. In Kotor after killing a group of enemies you had to walk up to all the dead corpses hit the a button, check what they had, and then take whatever they had on them, which could get kind of irritating, especially when you kill them in close proximity and you end up double checking bodies etc. Bioware had the sensibility to just take this entire process out of the game completely and just have stuff show up in your inventory. Keeping you moving through the action rather then stopping after every group of enemies.
Square Enix also gave me some optimism for what an FFVII remake (or sequel) could really be if they implemented similar fixes like the one's in Crisis Core
- Random Battles: Still probably one of the most annoying things, even going back and playing the originals, they did them a bit better in this as you don't really change screens now when "random" battles pop up, and they seem moreso like the battles are purposely placed at various intervals in a level, so they don't really seem random as much as they seem "triggered" by crossing a path or stepping into a certain area. Point being when your not thrown into a different screen for the fight, and they happen at sensible/expected intervals they aren't nearly as annoying.
-Leveling Up: Leveling up is quite often a fairly irritating, and necessary task in a Final Fantasy game, you almost just have to force yourself to enjoy fighting the same trivial enemies over and over again for hours on end so your character can gain strength. I definitely question why Final Fantasy games stopped giving you Exp for boss battles as if to try and force you to fight more annoying random enemies throughout the game. But the mission system in Final Fantasy VII makes leveling up not quite as painful, they are nice, quick, somewhat meaningful spurts of battles that your generally rewarded with an item or materia for doing and they occasionally advance some kind of side story as well. The other really nice thing about them is you no longer have to circle your character around on a world map purposely looking for a fight. You just access these at any save point, and your able to level your character up whenever you need to between chapters. It's just a great way of making one of the more painful parts of the series kind of enjoyable and purposeful.
-More interactive fighting: It seems the second the fighting becomes more interactive in an RPG it's automatically tagged "Action RPG", but to me an RPG is an RPG. The Final Fantasy series has made a fairly slow progression into this style of fighting, but I think it's for the better. I mean I even liked the fighting in FFXI better then the original turn based style of the SNES/PlayStation era of games. This just takes it a step further being a nice in between, of what is essentially turned based fighting that FEELS like real time fighting. But I can see some very interesting gameplay potential in an FFVII remake if all the different characters had different ways of fighting. So for example Cloud uses a sword so you engage in fairly straightforward sword combat, but for someone like Vincent or Barret it might be some kind of third person targeting interface where the more you keep the target focused the more damage it does etc. I mean that's maybe not the best example but you get the idea.
-Store Access: I really thought Final Fantasy VIII was on to something when one of the GF's powers let you access any store in the game from your in game menu, essentially letting you stock up on the fly not always having to go into a town and crawl your way into an item shop, not to mention sometimes when you get the airship and have the whole world at your fingertips it can be difficult to remember which specific store carried certain items. Final Fantasy X was kind of the start of this kind of convenience with the same Australian accented merchant following you around the world showing up in convenient places, but in my mind that was never really enough. Crisis Core just plays it off as "buying stuff online", and as far as I know lets you buy items from the store at any single point in the game. So if halfway through your trek up a mountain you realized you didn't stock enough potions for the whole trip you aren't forced to regress all the way back to town, you just buy them on the spot and keep moving.
You might argue that these things make it too convenient or just make the game too easy, but I don't think inconvenience should be built into your game design, let me get the challenge of it from the fighting, or some intelligent puzzle solving...not from trying to deal with all the thing developers arbitrarily threw in to seemingly annoy the player. Some quick examples of this being
-Doom 3: Every single time you pick up a PDA and your forced to go into that slow loading PDA screen scroll through the random names of people you don't remember, not even remembering which PDA you just picked up, clicking the person's name and playing their voice recording so you can hear the password to a locker. If those sequences weren't annoying already they got even more annoying just from that 30 second step. It would have made so much more sense to streamline it for the player. He found the PDA...ok...he did what you wanted him to do (he explored more), when you pick it up...it should just autoplay the recording giving you the extra tid bit about the backstory and then reveal the locker password.
-Return to Castle Wolfenstein: This is something that's kind of popped up in a few fps's over the years and I'm not even sure if it was done on purpose because it's just so stupid, but its when cooperative play doesn't count. In Wolfenstein if you play any levels in coop it does not unlock them for you to progress through again later with your friend, so I guess they just expect to you either beat the game before playing coop, or play the entire game coop in one sitting? Coop was a much more fun way to play that campaign, but unfortunately I never even bothered with it because it was decided that you weren't going to be rewarded for playing the game with a friend. This isn't the only game guilty of this, it's just the most prominent one I can remember.
Obviously these are just some minor examples, but I think they go along with the Kotor and Final Fantasy examples mentioned above to prove my point to some degree.
Final Point: I just believe any decision made in the design process where your purposely inconveniencing the player really needs a second look, I've played more then a few games where it really seems like the developers put certain things in just to make things more difficult when they really don't need to be as it doesn't add anything to the experience of the game. Are you really doing anything for the player's enjoyment of the game making him walk around to all the dead bodies taking their stuff? Does the act of walking up to them and pressing A just add that much more realism?
Nicholas on
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Part of the strategy of RPG's is inventory management, whether it's stocking up enough antidote potions before you head out to "poison valley" (Final Fantasy, JRPG's, etc.) or throwing out the crap to keep the good (Diablo 2, Baldur's Gate, etc). Allowing you to buy items anywhere, while convenient, really did dumb down this aspect of the game. Now it's not so bad in the Final Fantasy series in the first place where potions and phoenix downs cost very little, but I have had times when I've cursed myself for not checking my inventory to see if I had enough of these puppies.. and now with this system I can't really have those "oh shit - should I go back, or try my luck and press on?" moments.
When I don't have to think of inventory management (in regards to healing items and accessories that might be useful for a certain area of the game), I feel like I'm playing a more action-oriented game. Whether that's good or bad is up to taste, I guess.
all random battles are entered by choice;
a levelling system whereby you don't actually need to level for most of the game, and can gain bonuses by reducing your level back down;
the most interactive fighting I've ever enountered in an RPG short of full control.
Sadly, I suspect that Crisis Core will vastly outsell it, and Squinx will go by the design of the latter more.