Making Pairing More Important (Game Design Discussion?)

[monkymeet]

So, I've been playing and thinking a lot of Fire Emblem, especially Awakening. And game design, of which I am still rather amateurish but really enjoying, but hey, what else should I do with my free time?

I've always enjoyed the replayability of Fire Emblem. The RNG and random growths are one of the best points about the game, one that separates it a lot from other SRPGs. It allows for heavily replayability, as the player is forced to adapt to how the RNG has decided to act. It's one of the ways that Fire Emblem has allowed for motivation to replay the game to begin with. Previous iterations, with its support systems had a way of motivating us to play so many times just to unlock all those fancy little blurbs that so many of us enjoy. This, I have found, to be a much better game design choice than the artificial choice that is granted in many modern games such as Mass Effect, where choice actually means little other than to see a brief difference in interaction. Choice should truly matter if we want the audience to really care about them.

Of course, Awakening removes that need. We can grind forever and unlock a good number of supports on a single playthrough.

There's also the issue of the children, which is my biggest gripe. There's a much lower incentive to really care too much about pairings compared to, well, Fire Emblem 4.

There's the issues of balancing the skills, and as is, Galeforce is both a wonderful, yet terribly designed skill. It's great, but there's little incentive to really pass down any other skills since its a female skill and we want the male children to have it because otherwise they'll never get it. Similarly, Agressor/Axe-faire are arguably male-skills that are good, yet need to be passed down to the female children, but less so.

Other than skills though, pairing seems much less important other than choosing our favorites and shoving them together. For some that love FE for its characters, I see no issues with this. But from a specific gameplay perspective they mean much less. This is compared to FE4, where pairing has a huge impact on half the game! Of course, with our current narrative (another large problem, but that's a discussion for another time), but the fact remains there's a much lower impact on our pairings for the core of the game. Of course, this can be argued that endgame is just as a large part, but I'm just talking about the campaign portion of the game.

So, how can we effect a stronger importance in the pairing? (Of course, people might say the children are completely superfluous, but I want to talk about making them an integral part of the game). There could be a limiting class options to fewer, but I don't think anyone really wants that to happen. Re-classing is likely here to stay, and having three class options isn't completely unreasonable (though, maybe having overlap of promoted classes, like class options fighter/mercenary).

Herein lies my idea. I think that lowering class growths and having a greater impact by personal growths would make certain gameplay more interesting.

You look at the children's growth rates. Lucina's strength growth, for example, will always vary between 51% to 61% for a Lord. I feel having a stronger influence of pairing would make for a larger impact of who you pair and why. Let's take Lissa. If we wanted Owain to be a magic-based unit, we would want to pair Lissa with a magic dad. However, if class growths were incredibly low (or even nonexistent), then making Owain a Myrmidon would a terrible idea, in this circumstance. Let's say, maybe having Libra!Owain, grants a terrible 20% strength growth would be impractical for campaign purposes as a physical based unit. This would motivate us to be more careful about pairing and getting what we want or plan. Of course, with enough perseverance and grinding, we could ultimately get about this, but that would provide more reason to choose our fathers more carefully. As is, even Libra grants Owain a 50% strength growth as a myrmidon. Perhaps also passing down weapon ranks would also be a good option. Henry!Noire should have more than E-rank Tomes as both parents should have higher at most points, which would also raise the instant usability of certain pairing combinations. Second Sealing Noire to Sorcerer would be a great idea then since that was our intention? Making a magical baby that has instant use as a magician? Maybe average all the weapon ranks of the parents...

Of course, this is actually a rather small part of the game, and the children 1) aren't even needed and 2) need those higher growths to make them usable at the time we can finally recruit them. But I think I want to start thinking about choices about during the designing process of Awakening that could make it a more interesting and better game and having some discussions about it. After a rather large obsession during my first month with it, I feel I can start stepping back and looking at more of its flaws (really, I feel the plot is the biggest problem, but that's a writing issue than game design) such as the poor design of Lunatic+, lack of map variance, and balancing pair-up, which I know have been discussed quite often on the forums.

I dunno since I know my arguments aren't exactly 100% solid or even coherent -___-, but I do enjoy discussing such aspects. If this goes wells, I would be down to start more of these topics!

[Rehab]

Personally, I hated beating the games multiple times to get all the supports. As much as possible, I just saved at a certain point and got two pairs of supports per character at a time by finishing up one support, restarting whatever chapter I was on and finishing the other, then going back to the base file and doing it over. I much prefer Awakening's way of handling that in particular.

Neither of the games completely let you in on what impact pairing characters as a mechanic will really have from the beginning, I'd guess at least partially in the service of keeping quiet on the plot, but FE4 barely gives you any feedback at all that it's even a thing until BAM it already happened. Some poor schmuck who's without a manual (as most non-Japanese players were and are, aside from player-made walkthroughs, I imagine) could hypothetically both never put pairable units side by side long enough to get the required love points, given that nothing out of the ordinary happens for a long time when you do that, and simultaneously fail to ever see or understand the Talk tab in the unit screen (as it doesn't exactly thoroughly explain itself), thus missing the conversations that help out by boosting love points. So said poor schmuck could get to Seliph's story and be missing out on one of the most important parts of the game, since the hints the game gives you about it are mostly implicit at best, with the exception of Sigurd getting married (automatically, though the player doesn't necessarily know that bit) and Quan/Ethlin being already married to start with.

Awakening's feedback on the characters falling further in love, along with the overworld allowing you to choose when/where to grind supports and when to do the child-recruitment chapters, both help make it a preferable example to me of how to handle having children units, if it's assumed the game is going by FE's traditional "stick units side by side for a set amount of time to make them fall in love" setup.

If I had my druthers regarding the next FE game looking to integrate children units, I'd just have them flat-out tell the player, preferably through the story as well as the gameplay;

"Hey, for whatever reason the soldiers of the army you're directing are encouraged to fraternize in a controlled fashion, as their children (might?) be expected to become soldiers or might otherwise unavoidably end up fighting, themselves (or insert whatever kind of plot justification is necessary to make it clear that our units might have children that we might also end up controlling, depending on how we direct the units already under our control). Here are the ways in which you can direct that, and some blueprints for how the children for each available pair will turn out (with regards to their gameplay, at least)."

Admittedly, I'll probably be less certain about how to balance the stats and skills etc. given to the child units until I have experience with the actual setup, I think.

Also, choices can mean plenty to players in Mass Effect if they're interpreting the dialogue and actions wrought by their choices to form the character they're controlling in their mind, or at least they certainly did matter to me in that way. I think what effects those choices end up having on gameplay is a separate matter.

Edited April 30, 2013 by Rehab