Mechanics that you want

[Celice]

Has anyone here played Shining Force, or any other SRPG with no permadeath? They suck.

Yes, many SRPGs, and none of them really sucked, and several I liked more than Fire Emblem. Maybe you've only played... shitty ones?

[RNG Princess]

What if they give Jeigans/Oifayes 0 skill so they can only do so much in early chapters?

[grandjackal]

I will not tolerate this mocking of Shining Force. 1, 2 and RotDD are perfectly fine, and though I haven't been able to play 3 (since it was essentially incomplete), they are perfectly fine games. I'll even go as far as to say I have 0 issue with them, and that I find more things wrong about Fire Emblem than it.

But I suppose that's besides the point...Still, someone's gotta defend Shining Force.

[Kngt_Of_Titania]

I will not tolerate this mocking of Shining Force. 1, 2 and RotDD are perfectly fine, and though I haven't been able to play 3 (since it was essentially incomplete), they are perfectly fine games. I'll even go as far as to say I have 0 issue with them, and that I find more things wrong about Fire Emblem than it.

But I suppose that's besides the point...Still, someone's gotta defend Shining Force.

My biggest issues with Shining Force were:

1) I swear the plots were written by a 5-year old, but it's an old game, and old games had terrible stories, so I'll let it pass.

2) The AI was terrible. Like I started to intentionally place near-death units so that they were in range, but not closest to the enemy. I swear the enemies just attacked the nearest player units without thought. Unless this changed towards the end of the game (I stopped like halfway through out of disgust), it made it way to easy to game the enemy AI. This was not so easy to let pass.

I heard it used growth bracketing, which I certainly didn't mind.

Edited January 10, 2012 by Kngt_Of_Titania

[Snowy_One]

I'm not sure why you feel the need to enforce your playing style on everyone else, Snowy.

Huh. Wait a minute here. I made the suggestion that they find a way to alter perma-deaths so that they hold meaning beyond the restarting of a chapter, the people who want it kept in said it was just fine and started to reference videos where people intentionally abused the system and stated that they felt that a change wasn't needed because they would lose incentive to protect softer units; and I AM THE ONE FORCING HIS PLAYSTYLE ON OTHER PEOPLE?

What the...

So if I suggest a movie to a friend because I think he will like/benefit from it and he shoots it down because he prefers watching Family Guy and refuses to budge on it, I'm forcing my movie choice onto him?

[arvilino]

Huh. Wait a minute here. I made the suggestion that they find a way to alter perma-deaths so that they hold meaning beyond the restarting of a chapter, the people who want it kept in said it was just fine and started to reference videos where people intentionally abused the system and stated that they felt that a change wasn't needed because they would lose incentive to protect softer units; and I AM THE ONE FORCING HIS PLAYSTYLE ON OTHER PEOPLE?

What the...

So if I suggest a movie to a friend because I think he will like/benefit from it and he shoots it down because he prefers watching Family Guy and refuses to budge on it, I'm forcing my movie choice onto him?

The change wouldn't be that minor and you should know it. It would path the way for extremely reckless strategy both being better and having little to no consequences compared to better ones and fully remove incentive to protect any unit except a lord.

If you want something that changes how player death is handled while objectively stearing away from abuse it would be a high cost or limited revival, which FE1,FE3,FE4,FE11,FE12 all already have in the form of the Aum and Valkyrie staves. Also In FE11 the generic replacement units and in FE12 a seperate game mode, casual.

An alternative can be as simple as an exponential revival cost

1st time 2000 gold

2nd 4000 gold

3rd 8000 gold

4th 16000 gold

and so on to the point that the first deaths are softer on the player, but it can't be abused for very long as the cost becomes significantly higher each time.

Though honestly you haven't really said what you want changing. You've just said Permadeath is annoying to you and requires you to reset, then said you want more relevant permadeath which could only mean that if you let a certain character die and continue on without them you'll be screwed on a later chapter that you might want them for.

[Othin]

Or you could just have a Survival style ranking.

For a game without permanent death, that just sounds weird. I'm all in favor of ranks, but I think in this case, separate modes work better than dealing with ranks, especially since the permanent deaths can add another factor to consider for those who might continue despite them.

[Anouleth]

Though honestly you haven't really said what you want changing. You've just said Permadeath is annoying to you and requires you to reset, then said you want more relevant permadeath which could only mean that if you let a certain character die and continue on without them you'll be screwed on a later chapter that you might want them for.

Exactly. People almost always reset after a useful unit, or a unit that they're training dies. That's a pretty big warning sign that it's not a good mechanic, that the players hate it so much that they will restart the entire chapter to get around it. And the "solution" is not to somehow force them to go through with it. If ally death has "no meaning", that's because players don't allow it to have any meaning.

[Kngt_Of_Titania]

Exactly. People almost always reset after a useful unit, or a unit that they're training dies. That's a pretty big warning sign that it's not a good mechanic, that the players hate it so much that they will restart the entire chapter to get around it. And the "solution" is not to somehow force them to go through with it. If ally death has "no meaning", that's because players don't allow it to have any meaning.

So I think there needs to be either two modes like in FE12 (Casual v. Traditional), or we need to penalize in some meaningful way (probably other than money, imo).

There could possibly be a variation of the fatigue mechanic, so that if you lose a unit in battle, they cannot be fielded in the next 2 or 3 battles while they are recovering from their wounds. That way, you still don't want to sacrifice people to trivialize maps, but at least it's not PERMA-death.

Edited January 10, 2012 by Kngt_Of_Titania

[CrashGordon94]

Even then people might still reset because they're so freakin' desperate to field them in the next few maps.

[Celice]

Exactly. People almost always reset after a useful unit, or a unit that they're training dies. That's a pretty big warning sign that it's not a good mechanic, that the players hate it so much that they will restart the entire chapter to get around it. And the "solution" is not to somehow force them to go through with it. If ally death has "no meaning", that's because players don't allow it to have any meaning.

I don't think it's a warning sign at all. I think it's a perfectly normal reaction. And the mechanic itself is well-enough designed. If you're not the one taking care of yourself during a map, and someone dies, it's all on you, and you get to react to your mistake. Don't pin on the game what some players decide to do in response to the game :/ In the NS mod of Stalker, I just had Strelok destroy my absolutely best artifacts with a nice little message expecting me at the Bar. I of course reset and stashed my prized artifacts so they weren't destroyed--but that doesn't mean the mechanic was a bad idea. I think it was an awesome idea. Just as for Fire Emblem, it's not that we restart because we can't stand the feature. We restart because we can't stand losing something we found important to our experience in some way.

[Wooster]

*munches on popcorn*

Ya know, I was wondering how the meetings between Nintendo and Intelligent Systems could've possibly been so heated at the idea of adding casual mode. This is a marvelous reenactment.

If I may put my two cents in. I think the problem is one of precedent. It becomes quite hard to close the pandora's box once everything's escaped. Now that we've had a casual mode, the argument against having it return are much weaker now then if it never appeared in the first place. Now you've got two groups arguing seniority against each other.

Personally, I argue against casual mode. Fire Emblem is one of the very few games where you have dozens of party members, and all have families, back stories, aspirations, homes, and bonds. It makes them as real as fictional characters can get. The one thing that 'real' people have, that most fictional characters don't are mortality and consequence; that gives Fire Emblem a unique characteristic in the gaming world.

Contrast Advance Wars, where your army is both faceless, and death is a part of how you play. Otherwise similar games are defined quite literally by how one treats life and death.

[Rehab]

What if a unit's death literally made your army stronger?

One thing that I think has been a bit lacking in recent Fire Emblems is the character development that things like supports offer, which has been one of my favorite things about the series. I can go to many different game series for turn-based strategy, but Fire Emblem shines for me because everybody under my control is presented as an individual, a very mortal character with their own perspectives and needs. That's part of what makes me want to take care of my units, and what makes the threat of their permanent death so interesting. But strangely, once a unit dies, that's usually it- there's rarely any special recognition, the other characters usually keep talking to each other the same way as if everybody were still alive, and things might as well have gone on the same as they ever did.

What if a unit's death gave their support partners, or whoever was close to them going by the story, permanent bonuses? Maybe a level-up with special stat-ups, similar to promotion bonuses. Maybe once a fight for X many turns, or once in X many fights, the dead's support partner could use a unique command to remember the dead, and gain A-level support bonuses for the rest of the fight ("It's like s/he's right here with me!"). Maybe certain units could only support if a certain unit died, or could only support after one of them had previously supported with a now-dead unit. A unit's characterization could change depending on what part of the game a friend fell in battle- if their friend fell earlier, maybe by the end of the game said unit would become more jaded than if said friend had died later, or otherwise change their character in a way that wouldn't have happened without that friend's death. The possibilities for how (paired) character endings could be affected by unit death are endless, too.

It could be something akin to having Sylvia killed off in FE4 in order to get Sharlowe, albeit in a less particular and cruel way.

I like permanent unit death as a part of Fire Emblem, I think it makes the attachment to my units feel that much more real. It feels like, hey, this is war, I have to be careful because mistakes have consequences. However, I do sort of agree with Anouleth in that death loses its importance eventually because players just don't let it happen- there's nothing to be gained from it, obviously. What if there were a way to make characters falling in battle still have the same impact as death, but that wasn't such a bum deal overall for the player that they would go to any length to avoid dealing with it?

I thought FE11's replacement approach was an interesting shot at doing something to make one pause before resetting at player death, but I think we can do better than simply throwing some placeholders at the player who fucked up and didn't want to restart. Unit death could be made into something interesting, rather than a net annoyance.

Then there's the Tactics Ogre (Let us Cling Together for PSP, at least) approach, which has a rather unique consequence for units falling. When a unit falls, if you send a unit to their side immediately, you can revive them with no repercussions. Every time their turn comes before you've revived them, though, 1 of their 3 hearts drains away. This is permanent- lose 1 of those, it doesn't come back after the fight. If your unit eventually runs out of hearts, then they finally die. I think that's pretty interesting, it allows your units to have a "history" of sorts- "in X battle, I took a grievous wound and would've kicked it if not for my friends, and now I'll have a reminder of it for the rest of my life."

Has anyone here played Shining Force, or any other SRPG with no permadeath? They suck.

Shing Force is awesome >: Again, not a fan of the weird turn order, but otherwise I enjoy them.

edit: totally agreed, Wooster.

Edited January 10, 2012 by Rehab

[Snowy_One]

The problem with that is that you will have some players sticking a weak unit in just to build supports so they can suicide them and power up a stronger unit even more.

[Rehab]

And that would be awesome.

[General Banzai]

No, that's wrong. That would be fucking stupid.

[eclipse]

The last "you get something for killing your allies" game was Shadow Dragon. That mechanic never carried over, thank goodness.

[Lord Raven]

Huh. Wait a minute here. I made the suggestion that they find a way to alter perma-deaths so that they hold meaning beyond the restarting of a chapter, the people who want it kept in said it was just fine and started to reference videos where people intentionally abused the system and stated that they felt that a change wasn't needed because they would lose incentive to protect softer units; and I AM THE ONE FORCING HIS PLAYSTYLE ON OTHER PEOPLE?

What gravity

So if I suggest a movie to a friend because I think he will like/benefit from it and he shoots it down because he prefers watching Family Guy and refuses to budge on it, I'm forcing my movie choice onto him?

Your play style enforces the idea that a unit should not die, but many people use unit death either as apart of their strategy (as dondon keeps saying, BEAMCRASH'S FE6 RUN) or they can't be bothered to restart because that unit isn't important enough. A good enough cost to death is restating if you wish it; there shouldn't be any punishment because having one less unit to bitch around is already punishment enough if you don't restart.

And *this* is what I mean by enforcing your play style. Not everyone's play style will give them room to keep everyone alive nor give them the patience to restart for someone who's dead. If this point doesn't make sense to you at all then I'm not sure why people even dignify our retarded musings with a response. Opinions are opinions until they fuck around with flexibility and rights.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Sirius

[Rehab]

No, that's wrong. That would be fucking stupid.

Go on. I'm not saying you should be full-on rewarded for having a unit die (you lose the unit, obviously), and none of those ideas would be final drafts, but as it is, unit death plays a very subdued part in the characterization of a series about war which is supposed to be plot-focused, where I'd assume death would be all around us. Doesn't that seem odd?

The last "you get something for killing your allies" game was Shadow Dragon. That mechanic never carried over, thank goodness.

But wasn't the complaint that in most cases that wasn't a substantial reward or sufficiently viable alternative, that you mostly just got some no-names who could fill out your roster? And what's so bad about the starting concept, anyway? If your army is low on dudes, it's probably in your interest to get more dudes.

Edited January 10, 2012 by Rehab

[Anouleth]

Go on. I'm not saying you should be full-on rewarded for having a unit die (you lose the unit, obviously), and none of those ideas would be final drafts, but as it is, unit death plays a very subdued part in the characterization of a series about war which is supposed to be plot-focused, where I'd assume death would be all around us. Doesn't that seem odd?

So basically, even though players hate units dying, units dying should be a central focus?

But wasn't the complaint that in most cases that wasn't a substantial reward or sufficiently viable alternative, that you mostly just got some no-names who could fill out your roster? And what's so bad about the starting concept, anyway? If your army is low on dudes, it's probably in your interest to get more dudes.

No, the complaint was that in order to get to the content in those chapters, the player had to do something they hate. The starting concept was flawed because it treated permadeath as "just another game mechanic", when really, it's the game mechanic that most players seem to avoid like the fucking plague. The solution, when someone refuses to eat your shit sandwich is not to rub their face in it and shove it down their throat, or to try and bribe them to eat it.

Edited January 10, 2012 by Anouleth

[Snowy_One]

Snowy you are truly a fucking moron. Your play style enforces the idea that a unit should not die, but many people use unit death either as apart of their strategy (as dondon keeps saying, BEAMCRASH'S FE6 RUN) or they can't be bothered to restart because that unit isn't important enough.

So then perma-death only happens when it is part of a specific strategy or when the person doesn't really care about the unit anyways? Sounds pretty unmeaningful to me.

A good enough cost to death is restating if you wish it; there shouldn't be any punishment because having one less unit to bitch around is already punishment enough if you don't restart.

Did... you even understand what I was saying? I'm saying the perma-death mechanic can be completely avoided and negated simply via a reset making the mechanic lack any lasting value. The only reason you will complete a game without all your units intact as-is is if you willingly choose to continue on after a unit dies. Say you play Skyrim, in which one of the game mechanics is that, as you level up your skills, you increase your level. The idea is pretty simple. As you spend time playing the game, trying out new things, and focusing on what you are good at, you get more powerful. Now imagine there was a way to completely bypass all that via reading a simple book that could max out all your skills easily. That would ruin the whole idea of the leveling-system they put in as, instead of exploring and working hard to level yourself up to 81 (max level), you would, instead, just quickly shoot up and be the best at all your skills. Your character is suddenly the best at everything (yes, yes, I know about perks and such). No longer are you the mage who works hard at destruction but can't make a good illusion for his life, you've got access to the best of everything! The system has lost a lot of its meaning. It is still 'there'. Even with 100 lockpicking there is a clear difference between someone who invested perks and who didn't and someone with experience and someone without, but those choices are the players choices, self-imposed, and lack the in-game meaning they once had.

Look at perma-death. It's the same story. The mechanic has little meaning and needs to be made relevant again. That does NOT mean it should be removed. That does NOT mean it is lacking in value, it means that the entire system can effectively be bypassed by a reset and, if you don't care about the unit in any way, it's a measure that has no value at all.

And *this* is what I mean by enforcing your play style. Not everyone's play style will give them room to keep everyone alive nor give them the patience to restart for someone who's dead.

I have a funny feeling that the only times a character will actually suffer a perma-death is if they are not particularly useful and/or the player doesn't really like the unit.

If this point doesn't make sense to you at all then I'm not sure why people even dignify our retarded musings with a response. Opinions are opinions until they fuck around with flexibility and rights.

What? I say that perma-death has lost meaning (only time units die for good is when the player doesn't care or is using a specific strategy) and should be changed so that it has meaning again and I'm suddenly demanding the game be made inflexible and should be the gespado? Isn't that a complete non-sequester? Heck, I even gave a possible suggestion when I made this of 'hardcore mode' where the player only gets one auto-save at the base when they complete the chapter and loading the file up means it gets erased (so you can't reset and have to bear any losses, no matter how good or bad they are).

[Rehab]

So basically, even though players hate units dying, units dying should be a central focus?

No, the complaint was that in order to get to the content in those chapters, the player had to do something they hate. The starting concept was flawed because it treated permadeath as "just another game mechanic", when really, it's the game mechanic that most players seem to avoid like the fucking plague. The solution, when someone refuses to eat your shit sandwich is not to rub their face in it and shove it down their throat, or to try and bribe them to eat it.

I wouldn't want sacrificing units to be so overpowered that one would be far better off getting their own units killed, if that's what you mean by central focus. But as it is, people are more likely to metagame their way around units dying than to ever let it happen, and regard it as an annoyance, correct? It can be more than that. It's in the creator's power to make death something that players don't have to hate so much they do anything to avoid it, to turn it from simply losing an asset of the player's into something that helps shape the game world created by the player's actions. Par of the reason I, at least, avoid letting my characters die is that the game makes it such a total loss, and never even acknowledges that it happens, that I have no reason to accept it when I can easily metagame around it. What I'd like to do is make it something I won't automatically want to metagame around.

There are possibilities available to Fire Emblem, as a series that focuses on characterizing the individuals that make up your army, that are simply not being tapped into. Keeping units alive should be recognized too, of course, and I'd prefer to have cool things written about the characters who are alive as a first priority, but it shouldn't be impossible to do both.

Think about the FE4 pairing schtick. If you don't actually pair anybody 1st generation, you won't get the "best possible" outcome later, but you won't necessarily be screwed and want to start over, because you're still totally within your ability to play through the game. Just as importantly, going without pairings changes the story significantly, but things can still proceed towards the same end, and some players may even prefer the way it happens- Celice leads the descendants of his father's army in carrying on their bloodlines and the legacy of the holy warriors, versus Celice assembles a ragtag bunch of relative nobodies and overthrows the biggest military power in the world through mostly sheer willpower. And if I want the story to go in that direction, I have that choice. It's not all about which is better for the minutiae of the gameplay, but how the player can be immersed and made to feel like they're making meaningful choices.

I'm thinking all this with the assumption that permadeath isn't going anywhere, and I don't think it should. The idea of some buffers between falling in battle one time and true permadeath doesn't sound bad to me, though.

Edited January 10, 2012 by Rehab

[Othin]

Let's say you're playing Yoshi's Island. Yoshi falls into a pit and dies, so you have to restart the stage, or go back to the last checkpoint.

In Fire Emblem, the way it's usually played, you're playing as all of the characters. If one of them dies, you restart the map or go back to the last checkpoint. It's the same deal. When you play Yoshi's Island, you need to complete the stage, but you also need to keep Yoshi alive while doing so. When you play Fire Emblem, you need to complete the stage, but you need to keep all your characters alive when doing so. This greatly impacts how you play FE.

Now, FE doesn't force that upon us. It could, by making it so that losing any character would be an instant Game Over. But who wants that? Instead, we have it be treated as a Game Over if we want it to be, or we can continue and move on with the loss, impacting the gameplay in a rather special way.

That is the effect of permadeath in FE. Its impact is a substantial and meaningful one, even though it is more often the threat of permadeath that affects how we play. Where's the problem?

[arvilino]

Did... you even understand what I was saying? I'm saying the perma-death mechanic can be completely avoided and negated simply via a reset making the mechanic lack any lasting value. The only reason you will complete a game without all your units intact as-is is if you willingly choose to continue on after a unit dies. Say you play Skyrim, in which one of the game mechanics is that, as you level up your skills, you increase your level. The idea is pretty simple. As you spend time playing the game, trying out new things, and focusing on what you are good at, you get more powerful. Now imagine there was a way to completely bypass all that via reading a simple book that could max out all your skills easily. That would ruin the whole idea of the leveling-system they put in as, instead of exploring and working hard to level yourself up to 81 (max level), you would, instead, just quickly shoot up and be the best at all your skills. Your character is suddenly the best at everything (yes, yes, I know about perks and such). No longer are you the mage who works hard at destruction but can't make a good illusion for his life, you've got access to the best of everything! The system has lost a lot of its meaning. It is still 'there'. Even with 100 lockpicking there is a clear difference between someone who invested perks and who didn't and someone with experience and someone without, but those choices are the players choices, self-imposed, and lack the in-game meaning they once had.

Look at perma-death. It's the same story. The mechanic has little meaning and needs to be made relevant again. That does NOT mean it should be removed. That does NOT mean it is lacking in value, it means that the entire system can effectively be bypassed by a reset and, if you don't care about the unit in any way, it's a measure that has no value at all.

No it can't, your analogy doesn't even work because by gaining all the skills a Skyrim player doesn't have to re-do everything do they(you don't bypass a Fire Emblem chapter when you reset)? Permadeath is the thing that makes a player reset when a unit dies, so by you simply pressing reset button when a unit dies it's done it's job. Continuing on with one less unit but not having to re-do the chapter, Permadeath has still done it's job.

You can't really say Permadeath has no meaning when it's the sole influence behind you resetting a Fire Emblem game when you lose a unit can you?

Edited January 10, 2012 by arvilino

[Rehab]

Let's say you're playing Yoshi's Island. Yoshi falls into a pit and dies, so you have to restart the stage, or go back to the last checkpoint.

In Fire Emblem, the way it's usually played, you're playing as all of the characters. If one of them dies, you restart the map or go back to the last checkpoint. It's the same deal. When you play Yoshi's Island, you need to complete the stage, but you also need to keep Yoshi alive while doing so. When you play Fire Emblem, you need to complete the stage, but you need to keep all your characters alive when doing so. This greatly impacts how you play FE.

Now, FE doesn't force that upon us. It could, by making it so that losing any character would be an instant Game Over. But who wants that? Instead, we have it be treated as a Game Over if we want it to be, or we can continue and move on with the loss, impacting the gameplay in a rather special way.

That is the effect of permadeath in FE. Its impact is a substantial and meaningful one, even though it is more often the threat of permadeath that affects how we play. Where's the problem?

Speaking for myself, my main problem isn't losing the characters, but that the game basically doesn't care when one of them is lost. For all the time we spend getting to know the characters, if they fall in battle they might as well not have existed. They have a death quote, and then they're either dead or out of action and it's never mentioned again. Obviously, unless we're taking our own role-playing a lot further into our own hands than the game allows for, no player has much reason to accept that beyond not caring. Sometimes we can't recruit a certain character later on if the person who's supposed to recruit them is dead, but as it is the fact that the given character is actually dead is rarely gone into much detail by the writing. The fact that character death is rarely accepted by the player when the option to restart is available makes me think that maybe it should be changed, that it might be more interesting if it weren't something the player was so dedicated to avoiding that they never let it happen. As it is, I think the writing and gameplay and be made better than they are, in that respect, by changing some of the things about how permadeath has traditionally worked.

It's not uncommon for FE characters to have close bonds with each other, so the idea that their friends wouldn't be affected by each other's death not only doesn't make sense (which I can grudgingly accept, for the purpose of the game), but it also misses out on a chance to develop the characters further (which seems like it would be in Fire Emblem's interest as a story-based game).

It's possible to acknowledge a character's death both by changing subplots along with dialogue and how the characters generally interact with each other, and by having it directly affect gameplay. Post-death support changes and route changes are potential examples that I would think wouldn't be too hard to make, or too overpowering.

Edited January 10, 2012 by Rehab