combat engines

[kuroi]

I've been thinking a lot about the benefits and drawbacks of having a combat engine within a VN which has a decent number of fight scenes and I thought I'd put the question to everyone here~

What do you think of visual novels with combat engines (specifically final fantasy tactics style combat engines)? Do they enrich the game by adding more interactivity or would you rather just read about how the fight goes?

[squark]

I'm fine with whatever, just so long as it suits the game style.
For example, FFT/Shining Force style suits those games as they're Unit-Driven.
Phantasy Star (and countless other TBP battle games) suit those are they're Party-Driven.
Real-Time (New breed games, FFXII, Fable, MagnaCarta etc etc) suit those as Real-Time gives an element of free battle. More commonly used in Adventure games, ie Dark Cloud/Chronicle, Legend of Zelda and so on.

So for me, it must suit the game it's written for. But it would save some people a lot of trouble (granted, at the expense the people creating Ren'Py) if it contained a customisable template for people wanting to try their hand at making a VNRPG.

[Jake]

What do you think of visual novels with combat engines (specifically final fantasy tactics style combat engines)? Do they enrich the game by adding more interactivity or would you rather just read about how the fight goes?

I think it depends heavily on how well it's all done.



If the story is shoddy, no number of gimmicks will save it; don't try, it'll quite possibly just make your story look worse.

If the story is really engaging, then pointless battles just because you want to insert a gimmick will just annoy people and get in the way. Make sure you're only using combat when it actually fits into and furthers the plot.

If the story is engaging, then battles with no real consequence can break the suspension of disbelief. If two of your three heroes get seriously wounded in the battle segment and you just scrape through and then the story segment directly after the battle has them all laughing and doing energetic stuff, the battle doesn't gel with the story. If there's no story difference between winning a battle with your entire regiment standing and scraping through with just two guys, then one wonders why the battle was there in the first place. This is something that's relevant for VN-making without gimmicks as well: if you give the player interactivity and decision-making, make sure that the decisions carry relevance, otherwise it'll all feel rather shallow to the player.



(Of course, I'm working on an engine that supports just that kind of thing within Ren'Py, so I'm obviously a fan of the tactics style of gameplay, and if you spend 95% of your game time fighting then it's really a battle game with story bits rather than a story game with battles, and a lot of these concerns aren't so relevant any more. The answers above presume that you're talking about something which is still predominantly an RPG.)

[DaFool]

I happen to be making a VN-SRPG hybrid an SRPG.

I would just go all-out with the combat engine, and use VN style for the cut scenes. Because if you're entertaining the question of whether combat will enhance a VN story, then next thing you know you'll be entertaining the decision to make combat skippable or not. And if you happened to slave away countless hours on the battle mechanics (as well as probably shell out lots of $$$ for the animated art that is required), you probably want it to be the highlight of your game, and thus unskippable.

Of course, I'm squarely in the camp that says a superior battle mechanic makes a good RPG, despite a crap story (Grandia series, Resonance of Fate).

[Jake]

Of course, I'm squarely in the camp that says a superior battle mechanic makes a good RPG, despite a crap story (Grandia series, Resonance of Fate).

I tend to believe that most people probably agree with you, but they still think that they're playing the game for the story.

Compare and contrast:
http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7516

(For what it's worth, I see absolutely nothing wrong with a battle-heavy, story-light game - I'd play it - but really, once you're throwing story to the wind you don't really care about the question that opened this thread, you care about making your battle mechanics fun.)

[kuroi]

If the battle were a larger part of the game then this question would be pretty easy but as it stands, it looks like there are 6 or 7 fight scenes within a 150 page script so they're not too large a part of the game. Thus it's not like there'd be a lot of leveling up or anything like that but I do want to combat to be as engaging as possible and I've seen fight scenes that are just described in the usual VN style to very often kinda fall flat as far as their impact on the player...