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Gameplay Hopes and Expectations


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Based on the one trailer thus far, we've already been able to notice some big and small changes made to gameplay from previous titles, especially Three Houses.

We can already see that the weapon triangle is back and combat arts/battalions from TH seem to have been done away with.

As the topic title says, what are your hopes and expectations of the game play in Engage?

Personally for me, with how the game seems very inspired by Heroes, I'm hoping we get more class diversity in the game. It seems that units only use one weapon type each (bar staff users) and we've seen classes using non-traditional weapons (like Vander using an axe as a paladin, which has happened but is not common, as well an as enemy pegasus knight using a sword while Chloé uses a lance). It would be cool to get some of the classes pulled from Heroes I think.

Durability seems to be gone also, which could be interesting and suggest we'll be getting Fates esque weapons with restrictions and stat buffs/debuffs.

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This seems like it's taking a very approachable back-to-basics GBA-era formula, but with a FE Heroes approach to Skills and no durability. Which is not a bad thing at all. Heroes has some rather elegant mechanics undermined only by intentionally bad balance.

 

It seems like it's aimed at getting new or casual players in, which is good for the franchise. And I think they can pair that with good map design and mechanics for existing players.

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They seem to have kept hand to hand fighting from Three Houses, complete with the brave effect, and I did notice it was a woman doing the punching so the brawling classline may be unisex (watch it be gender locked in the opposite direction lol). But they aren't gauntlets this time around. Either it's move scrolls, or the scrolls represent an entirely different fighting discipline. The latter is tantalizing because of the gameplay implications. Maybe you could have enemy phase hand to hand fighters that cannot strike first (won't be able to attack on player phase), but they get the brave effect and other bonuses when being attacked on enemy phase. A scroll with no brave effect but you get to move yourself one space in any direction after attacking and can retaliate against 2 range javelins.

My hope for gauntlets was to see them fit in to a system of Non-Lethal attacking types where you could take prisoners or otherwise keep enemies alive for loot, side objectives, or doing a No Kills challenge run. That's not happening in this game, But seeing them back at all is the best takeaway from the trailer for me. Unfortunately, gauntlets may once again end up as an afterthought in this game's ecosystem. Among the Smash Bros personas you can equip to your roster, only one will have the potential for hand to hand combat, and it's byleth. Byleth's mural art depicts him with the Sword of the Creator, so I'm not especially hopeful that the brawler classline will be as fleshed out as classic FE classes. And it may be even less varied with the apparent removal of Combat Arts. 

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8 minutes ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Either it's move scrolls, or the scrolls represent an entirely different fighting discipline. The latter is tantalizing because of the gameplay implications. Maybe you could have enemy phase hand to hand fighters that cannot strike first (won't be able to attack on player phase), but they get the brave effect and other bonuses when being attacked on enemy phase. A scroll with no brave effect but you get to move yourself one space in any direction after attacking and can retaliate against 2 range javelins.

i hope and guessing its the latter too based on the naming of item used by Framme in trailer. gauntlet kinda boring. i want it to be like mixed martial art style where punch and kick used evenly rather than boxing style. that way it could suit both sex more naturally and also show off the 3D model animation. 

a loli doing air kick to the face of an enemy knight seems more sensible compared to a loli punching enemy knight on their chestplate

57 minutes ago, Azz said:

As the topic title says, what are your hopes and expectations of the game play in Engage?

back to gba mechanics triangle, complete with tomes triangle. w

Edited by joevar
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I hadn't noticed that the durability had disappeared. I kinda liked it and didn't particularly enjoy Fates weapon system (or much else, tbh).

Checking the trailer again, it's not 100% clear that weapon durability's gone.

As for mechanics I'd like to see, I'd love a 3-tier class system, where infantry is not stuck to 2nd tier, like it (partially) is in 3H. I want my max-tier spear infantry god (or goddess... Oh, Nephenie, how I've missed you... 😁)

I've also always loved dual classes with magic and a weapon, even though one of them's usually pretty useless (especially in 3H, with the possible exception of the Mortal savant and Enlightened one), so I was happy to see the monk-style fists + staves combo. Framme, you're on Team A!

On a different note, can't wait to see Lyn's design and her engage modes. She's one of my favourite lords.

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5 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

They seem to have kept hand to hand fighting from Three Houses, complete with the brave effect, and I did notice it was a woman doing the punching so the brawling classline may be unisex (watch it be gender locked in the opposite direction lol). But they aren't gauntlets this time around. Either it's move scrolls, or the scrolls represent an entirely different fighting discipline.

Frammé is also the healer? This is an interesting concept and I wonder how it will tie in with her character story/development and class/combat/unit development.

Also that Alear will have a class that allows him to transform into a dragon and use breath attacks or some type of transformation, I do hope that his being a Divine Dragon is important to the story... unlike some other god dragon lords I know.

Edited by DivineDragon_Goddess
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Weapon durability seems to be a disappearing mechanic from games these days. I think it's fine if they put in a bunch of unique weapon effects and downsides so that the choice is more tactical than simply "choose best sword". 

 

Frankly with how the forging works in three houses let's you repair weapons I basically never payed attention to the durability there. 

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I want the Engage mechanic to be varied and interesting throughout but not trivialize the game. That'd be #1. And considering how stats backpacks have worked in the past, I'm not sure they can pull it off. If anything, from what we're seeing having a ring equipped will make a character substantially better. The bond level might also discourage switching things around too much.
And that's not even taking the actual fusion into account, which I'm not sure can realistically be open to everyone, that's way too many designs to alter.

Otherwise, the usual stuff. Good map design, okay character balance at worst, solid unit identity. Wind mages, classes from Birthright reappearing. Etc. Fliers and cavalry not being busted also (at least cavalry only seems to have +1 mov over infantry this time)

Edited by Cysx
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My biggest hope is that if Supports are a thing that we can do them with the Emblems. Furthermore if we can do Supports with Emblems I'd like to see more than 12 Emblems in the game. I also would like it if they brought back Phoenix Mode as I personally prefer it to Mila's Turnwheel/Divine Pulse.

As for expectations. I'm expecting a back to basics story ala Fates which I'm fine with. If they really are bringining back the weapons and/or magic triangle and weapon durability I also expect that they may bring back the way classes were handled in older games.

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14 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Unfortunately, gauntlets may once again end up as an afterthought in this game's ecosystem. Among the Smash Bros personas you can equip to your roster, only one will have the potential for hand to hand combat, and it's byleth. Byleth's mural art depicts him with the Sword of the Creator, so I'm not especially hopeful that the brawler classline will be as fleshed out as classic FE classes. 

Actually this may have more issues than one neglected weapon class. Even If the Heroes can accommodate multiple weapons types, if all but one of them can work with sword users, that may give an unfair advantage to those classes, yeah? Or is it the other way around. Are our units adopting the weapons and animations of the Heroes?

Edited by Zapp Branniglenn
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I’m pretty curious about what the stats caps are gonna be in this one. Are you gonna be like Houses/Echoes where without a terrible amount of manipulation you will never see the caps, like PoR where your units would see their best stat or 2 cap or like RD where you units would have most of not all of their stats capped.

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15 hours ago, Cysx said:

And that's not even taking the actual fusion into account, which I'm not sure can realistically be open to everyone, that's way too many designs to alter.

This is another reason I suspect the returning roster will be restricted. Alear and Alfred's Engaged designs look generic enough (if anything I'd expect Alear to be able to fuse with any of the 12) but Celine's Engaged outfit is clearly based on Celica's. We saw in the trailer that Emblems can be mixed and matched, but I imagine only certain combinations of characters will get those extra perks.

At a stretch I guess each "real" character could have an Engaged form that's meant to be used with a specific Emblem but can still be used with any of them (e.g. Celine will always look like Celica regardless of who she's actually with).

Gameplay-wise, and this just occurred to me now, with even Pokemon of all franchises making the jump to non-linear gameplay, it'd be interesting if we could go to each of the four neighbouring kingdoms in any order too. Maybe each region has a specific problem (or pair of regions, to keep things simple) that needs resolving before you get certain rings and you need them all (not even that to be honest) to face the final boss?

In that case you'd definitely need enough Paralogues for the extended cast to feel like they actually exist in the party, but... I don't know. Maybe something like Age of Calamity then, where the story is linear but you can choose to clear certain acts in different orders?

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2 minutes ago, DefyingFates said:

This is another reason I suspect the returning roster will be restricted. Alear and Alfred's Engaged designs look generic enough (if anything I'd expect Alear to be able to fuse with any of the 12) but Celine's Engaged outfit is clearly based on Celica's. We saw in the trailer that Emblems can be mixed and matched, but I imagine only certain combinations of characters will get those extra perks.

At a stretch I guess each "real" character could have an Engaged form that's meant to be used with a specific Emblem but can still be used with any of them (e.g. Celine will always look like Celica regardless of who she's actually with).

Gameplay-wise, and this just occurred to me now, with even Pokemon of all franchises making the jump to non-linear gameplay, it'd be interesting if we could go to each of the four neighbouring kingdoms in any order too. Maybe each region has a specific problem (or pair of regions, to keep things simple) that needs resolving before you get certain rings and you need them all (not even that to be honest) to face the final boss?

In that case you'd definitely need enough Paralogues for the extended cast to feel like they actually exist in the party, but... I don't know. Maybe something like Age of Calamity then, where the story is linear but you can choose to clear certain acts in different orders?

I agree, I can definitely see everyone's 'Engaged form' being generic. At most, maybe have some colour differences (tho I do believe we saw Framme's twin (?) engaged with Micaiah and he looked quite green which is not a colour I would associate with Miccy at all so probably generic). But I do think we'll definitely have 'canon' characters for each Emblem.

As for breaking linearity, that would be really interesting but part of me can't see it lol. Would probably require a bit much balancing and fiddling with units and join times and such which may be more effort than worth, but you never know.

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Just now, Azz said:

As for breaking linearity, that would be really interesting but part of me can't see it lol. Would probably require a bit much balancing and fiddling with units and join times and such which may be more effort than worth, but you never know.

Actually that part doesn't seem too complicated conceptually: the game could simply keep track of how many maps or sub-plots you've cleared and up the level respectively. Each map is a specific "instance" after all, so it probably wouldn't be that difficult too increase all of their enemies' levels every so often or add an extra enemy here and there - like the difficulty options in FEH, even.

Granted I know balancing all of that would be much more difficult than in FEH, but I hope the principle is still the same, at least.

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One minor thing I just thought of, I really hope we can rename weapons in the forge again. It was actually one of my most missed features from TH. I also want to call one of Alear's weapons a toothbrush

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Gimmick map like FE conquest! But no bullshit like Keaton forest or the hexing rod madness.

More dancer!

More trap, also FoW (to be like AW : DoR)

Yellow enemies like in TH, which is nice to see enemies beat up each others.

more character to use and deploy.

Capture or/and stealing weapon/item.

Fixed Mode!

from the trailer with the paladin guy, we can see he can't dismount? (maybe now mounting/dismounting is an action which you can't move?)

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Honestly, I'll bring it up time and time again but -- I really hope they ditch gender-locked classes again as it was in Fates.

One of the characters in the trailer seemed to be a female unit using Brawling, which is a good sign, but I seriously hope male units can become Pegasus Knights as well.

Judging by the way the characters were shown in the trailer, I'm not sure how reclassing would go for this game or if reclassing will be present at all as it was in past games. If there is reclassing, I feel like it'll be like Awakening where each unit is given a set of 3 or so classes and that's all they can have for the game. I'm not expecting it to be like 3H's completely open reclassing system at all, though lol.

I wasn't too much of a fan of allowing all classes to use all weapons (though it was cool to some degree, like bow-Pegasi), and I want to say that classes will return to being weapon-locked, but axe and sword wielding Pegasus Knights were present in the trailer.

Spoiler

Image

Clearly pegasi with the axe icon. They don't look like Wyverns.

I highly doubt there'll be separate Pegasus classes for each weapon type, but I'm thinking these may or may not be enemy-exclusive classes or there'll just be a "Great Knight" equivalent for Pegasi lol (unlikely). However, only Pegasi and Cavaliers(?) were shown to have multiple weapons (axe and lance Paladins were present). My stance on this is--I'd rather the series go back to weapon-locks so each class retains their weapon niche.

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10 hours ago, DefyingFates said:

Gameplay-wise, and this just occurred to me now, with even Pokemon of all franchises making the jump to non-linear gameplay, it'd be interesting if we could go to each of the four neighbouring kingdoms in any order too. Maybe each region has a specific problem (or pair of regions, to keep things simple) that needs resolving before you get certain rings and you need them all (not even that to be honest) to face the final boss?

I had had that thought as well. The world map is weirdly symmetrical, and it didn't feel like the sort of design that would happen by accident unless there's a reason for that symmetry. Being able to go through the kingdoms in any order would make sense to me as one possible reason.

I think it could work really well, too. One of the (many) divisive aspects of Three Houses was the front-loaded recruitment. On the one hand, this was good, because you could always have your favourite unit from pretty early on (unless your favourite was Gilbert). But on the other hand, it was bad because no late game recruits meant your team became static and you didn't get replacements for anyone who died. Giving the player choice as to which order to tackle different maps could be the best of both worlds. You're guaranteed to get your favourite character early (if you want to), but you also get a steady stream of new recruits throughout the game.

I don't think that it would be so much work as to make it completely implausible. At the most basic level, it could just allow the 4 kingdoms to be handled in any order (with a few introductory levels before and a few finale levels after), which would only require 4 different versions of each map, most of which would just be scaling of level and stats on enemy units. Not trivial, but definitely possible.

I don't think I'm expecting this, or even necessarily hoping for it, but I do think it's possible.

On 9/15/2022 at 5:16 AM, Maimishou said:

I also would like it if they brought back Phoenix Mode as I personally prefer it to Mila's Turnwheel/Divine Pulse

Are you thinking instead of Turnwheel/Pulse or as well as? They seem like very different features to me, with different use cases, designed to appeal to different types of player.

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A complete overhaul of the blacksmithing mechanics. Make it complicated, but also hypothetically possible to produce an uberpowered weapon through forging alone. Customized results if you know what you're doing, in terms of how the weapon is balanced.

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28 minutes ago, lenticular said:

Are you thinking instead of Turnwheel/Pulse or as well as? They seem like very different features to me, with different use cases, designed to appeal to different types of playe

Instead of. Fates introduced Phoenix Mode and the very next game got rid of it in favor of Mila's Turneheel and TH followed that up with Divine Pulse which serves a similar role to the turnwheel. They're obviously not the same mechanically, but the fact that Phoenix Mod doesn't exist in either game that allows you to rewind battles tells me IS is treating them as serving the same purpose. Personally I prefer units returning on the following turn to rewinding battles so if we can only have one I would prefer Phoenix Mode over any sort of rewind feature.

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1 hour ago, Maimishou said:

Instead of. Fates introduced Phoenix Mode and the very next game got rid of it in favor of Mila's Turneheel and TH followed that up with Divine Pulse which serves a similar role to the turnwheel. They're obviously not the same mechanically, but the fact that Phoenix Mod doesn't exist in either game that allows you to rewind battles tells me IS is treating them as serving the same purpose. Personally I prefer units returning on the following turn to rewinding battles so if we can only have one I would prefer Phoenix Mode over any sort of rewind feature.

Hmmm. Fair enough, if that's how you see things. I don't really look at it that way, though. I don't really see Time Rewind as a replacement for Phoenix Mode, so much as two features that explore vaguely similar design space. To me, saying that Turnwheel replaced Phoenix Mode would be sort of like saying that Brawling replaced Shuriken. Yeah, they're both weapon types, but I don't see them as in direct competition to each other. Both Phoenix Mode and Shuriken were things that they tried for one game, never became mainstays of the series, and then didn't bring back. I can't see why Phoenix Mode inherently couldn't exist alongside time rewind any more than Shuriken inherently couldn't exist alongside Brawling.

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Others have said it, but I'll say it too: No gender-locked classes. Please. Let men be pegasus knights and women smash things. Seeing Frammé using Brawling in the trailer gave me hope. I also hope for decent reclass options. I do think classes should go back to niches, but I'd like some customization akin to 3H, Awakening, and Fates. Maybe have starting classes be locked to certain weapons and give later tier classes the ability to use whatever (Master Classes, anyone?).

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On the "Pegasus Knights using different weapons", I'm secretly hoping they're doing the same thing as I'm doing in my system; having mounts as equipables. Equiped during combat preparations, you could equip your soldier class unit with a Pegasus to have them be a Pegasus Knight wielding a lance, or your Myrmidon for a Pegasus Knight wielding a sword. Etc.

Riders might even be able to build a support level with their mounts to improve their teamwork. The amount of wyvern knights would be limited by the amount of wyverns you have (and then through DLC give more wyverns for people who want to go oops all wyverns).

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I'm also a dire enemy of all things gender-locked, so I want all classes to be open gender (Hilda missed out so much in TH because she was locked out of the warmaster class, it was an absolute shame).

I'm thinking along the line of what other people called in the forum, that weapons for enemies are going to be unrelated to class but rather chosen for the sake of diversity on a map for map basis. And for playable characters, I think it will be based on each character (like Alear is sword regardless of class, Chloé is spear, Anna is axe, Etie is bow, etc.) with a possible addition of a second weapon when they promote and / or a poney, a peggy or a wyvy, depending on what class they promote into.

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