Can Fire Emblem games with the Turnwheel still be challenging?

[Alastor15243]

17 minutes ago, Glennstavos said:

I thought about some other games, like Super Meat Boy, where the player respawns near instantly upon death and that each challenge averages out to maybe 15 seconds of incredible play that the player must master. It's one of the hardest games I've ever beaten but I know it's fun every step of the way because its generous checkpointing encourages the player to move forward and keep trying no matter how long it takes. Lots of indie games have a system like this regardless of difficulty. Doesn't the turnwheel do the same thing? The only difference is I decide when/if to use it. And unlike save states the game was built with it in mind. Maybe the number of charges is ultimately irrelevant. If I heard about somebody beating the hardest Fire Emblem by spamming turnwheel, it doesn't bother me, and it probably felt good for them if they went through with it.

I think the key difference is iteration time and genre. The individual obstacles that the turnwheel lets you redo are fundamentally simpler than anything in Meat Boy. Meat Boy's infinite lives works because the challenges it places between checkpoints are still satisfyingly difficult and require lightning-fast reflexes and execution.

In Fire Emblem, however, everything is planned ahead in advance. If a particular action caused you to lose a unit, it's not because you didn't execute that action with enough skill, it's because it was the wrong action, and you would have known it was the wrong action if you were paying attention to the plentiful information the game gave you. At least assuming the game is well designed and actually gave you the proper tools to solve the problems it throws at you.

That's the main issue; the way the games are currently designed, in terms of turn-to-turn progression of the map, it's actually very, very difficult to kill somebody who's aware of the potential consequences and knows what they're doing. Sure, you can not plan ahead properly and accidentally put yourself in a situation there's no reliable way to get out of, and you can fail to account for all of the possible actions an enemy might take in certain games where enemy behavior is more complicated, but in terms of things that you can do in a single turn, if that action causes somebody to die by the end of the turn, you should have every means to know that.

In short, advanced players already use a "turnwheel" of sorts all the time. They "rewind" whenever they consider an action and then think "no, wait, that's a bad idea, better think of something else." They have as much time as they need to check if something is a good idea, and if it isn't, they can do something else. It's only when they commit to an action where they have to see if they were right.

Which in essence means that adding in the Turnwheel completely takes the bite out of your decision making, because there's way less of a need to check if what you're doing is the right idea in the first place. You get to see the answer rather than figuring it out for yourself. Now, that makes it great for more casual players, but when I hear people talk about making the game hard to beat even with multiple rewinds, what I hear is people wanting to add in situations where it's impossible to know the right answer to a problem, or where the answer is "just be lucky".

The only other alternative I can think of would be to drastically improve the enemy AI and the general map design to force the player to think much further ahead and think about what sorts of enemy formations they might have to deal with multiple turns down the line. If that happened, then yes, I could imagine a situation where it would be way easier to screw myself without making it so that a sufficiently brilliant player couldn't solve the puzzle on their first try. But that's just about the only fair and reasonable game mechanic I can think of to make the turnwheel something I'd ever actually need to use in a game still recognizable as Fire Emblem.

Edited August 29, 2019 by Alastor15243

[Interdimensional Observer]

Just because you can rewind, doesn't mean people are going to whine about the game being easy. Or boast, wrongly, that they made it through the game without a single death. 

I had to load a save state two or three times to make it through THAT room in Thracia 776. It does not mean that room is easy, nor that I did the best job possible.

 

17 minutes ago, Glennstavos said:

I thought about some other games, like Super Meat Boy, where the player respawns near instantly upon death and that each challenge averages out to maybe 15 seconds of incredible play that the player must master. It's one of the hardest games I've ever beaten but I know it's fun every step of the way because its generous checkpointing encourages the player to move forward and keep trying no matter how long it takes. Lots of indie games have a system like this regardless of difficulty.

I kinda made this same point earlier. Platformers have long had checkpoints, and more modern ones sometimes do away with lives, and some incentivize skipping checkpoints if you're of a certain mindset. A lot of RPGs put save points in a dungeon right before a boss. Why not offer something similar and optional in strategy games?

 

I do see @Alastor15243's point of this allowing for greater "BS moves" though. Sure, these have looooongggggg existed pre-rewind features, but optimistically, you'd think developers would be wise enough to avoid making those nowadays.

 

Edited August 29, 2019 by Interdimensional Observer

[eclipse]

Paralogue spoiler.

Spoiler

It also means utter nonsense like Marianne's paralogue turns into a game of "what is where" instead of "where did THAT come from, and why is half my army dead?".  Fog and giant beasts with 1-2 range do not belong on the same map.

 

[Thinks Their Own Way]

I haven't played Three Houses (don't have the console), but I remember Echoes being quite easy of a game to the point of I didn't use Mila's Turnwheel all that much. I felt like Mila's Turnwheel was an excuse to for the developers to justify questionable game mechanics and shakey RNG.

[starburst]

I am against both Casual Mode and The Wheel because it dramatically changes my experience of the game. I like to feel the thrill of planning my moves and wait for the outcome, hoping that I will succeed. The uncertainty of it is what makes it more real.

For those who like sports, what were the odds of the Patriots's comeback against the Falcons in the Super Bowl after being losing 28-3 in the third quarter? And what about Liverpool beating Barcelona in the Champions League after losing 3-0 in the first leg? Or Federer's missing two consecutive match points against Djokovic in Wimbledon's final two months ago?
Who does not love witnessing miracles?

I could probably use The Wheel to redo certain key decisions that I made in my life... but I could not give a fuck about an almost-impossible loss in Fire Emblem. It is a game! I laugh when I lose, and try again.

[Parrhesia]

The Turnwheel doesn't turn that into a sure thing, it just means that if your plans fail, you lose less time retreading the plans that didn't fail.

I love sport; I have no idea what relevance it has to the topic.

[Alastor15243]

2 minutes ago, Parrhesia said:

The Turnwheel doesn't turn that into a sure thing, it just means that if your plans fail, you lose less time retreading the plans that didn't fail.

I love sport; I have no idea what relevance it has to the topic.

If, every time you died in super meat boy, you respawned on the last safe platform you landed on, would you consider that to have no impact on the difficulty, and just be saving time?

[Parrhesia]

It's a completely different genre; the difficulty there is execution, not planning. Retracing steps in SMB is difficult; retracing steps in FE is just redoing a puzzle you've already solved.

[Alastor15243]

5 minutes ago, Parrhesia said:

It's a completely different genre; the difficulty there is execution, not planning. Retracing steps in SMB is difficult; retracing steps in FE is just redoing a puzzle you've already solved.

Nope. In both instances, the game is sending you back to prove what you just did wasn't a fluke. To prove you're good enough at the challenge presented that you can do it all at once without screwing up. By not having to go back when you fail, you are proving nothing of the sort. You can take stupid risks and shrug off the consequences, play carelessly until it bites you in the ass, and just generally play in ways that someone without the turnwheel, much less someone playing ironman, would never be able to get away with, or dare try.

If repeating a challenge in Fire Emblem is so mindless and annoying, doesn't that say more about how the game is designed than the absence of the ability to skip it? I can't think of a single time I felt like that playing any of the best games in the series.

Edited September 1, 2019 by Alastor15243

[Parrhesia]

Honey, you don't have to quote me every time. I am actively monitoring the thread. I am the person Above your posts. I understand that you are addressing me.

If the Turnwheel lets someone who is bad at FE enjoy the game, that's an objectively good thing. Improves their Quality of Life, one might say. And, sweetie, you do have to go back when you fail. You... turn the wheel... back. To before you fucked up. And then you take another swing at it. The difference is that you don't have to turn back to the start of the chapter. The feature that loosens your failure condition from losing a unit into wiping is Casual Mode, which does make things easier, I don't dispute that. And is also a very good option that enhanced the series.

Bluntly, you sound elitist as hell, and that you see this as an opportunity to flex how much of a True Gamer you are for not using the... optional mechanic that means you don't have to retrace your steps.

[Alastor15243]

I'm quoting you so that if someone replies before I finish, I don't have to go back and quote you so people know who I'm talking about. Would this work better @Parrhesia?

Good. Now don't patronize me.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing if the turnwheel lets someone who's bad at the game complete it. I'm saying that it's proof that using the turnwheel makes the game easier, which is what you keep insisting it does not do.

4 minutes ago, Parrhesia said:

And, sweetie, you do have to go back when you fail. You... turn the wheel... back. To before you fucked up. And then you take another swing at it. The difference is that you don't have to turn back to the start of the chapter.

Yes. But if you got to that point through dumb luck because the RNG smiled on your bad idea, you have successfully gotten past, using terrible tactics, a challenge that other people had to get past by coming up with an idea less likely to fail.

[Integrity]

oddly enough people can luck their way through luck based things and the funny thing about probability is that it doesn't actually happen all that often and also it isn't a bad thing

 

EDIT: relevantly, i've had this happen to me myself in superb meat boy itself, when i got into The Zone and just fucking zenned a level and went holy shit how did i do that i will never be able to replicate that, and i was correct in this assumption

Edited September 1, 2019 by Integrity

[X-Naut]

The only problem I see with the Turnwheel is that it gives you too many uses per map. As other people have said before, rewind is a very convenient thing in a series known for having long levels between permanent saves and the potential to have RNG ruin a run. (This seems to have gotten more common since Fates with higher enemy crit chances.) Having two or three outs to dumb luck ruining a run sounds fair, just don't give the player so many that it becomes more of a rigging tool.

[Eltosian Kadath]

1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

If, every time you died in super meat boy, you respawned on the last safe platform you landed on, would you consider that to have no impact on the difficulty, and just be saving time?

If you are going to compare the time wheel mechanics to a platformer, you should compare it to the time mechanics of Prince of Persia, the Sands of Time. The ability to turn back time and fix mistakes was well received in that game, and generally seen as a good change difficulty wise, having some say it made the challenging instead of punishing.

 

1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

To prove you're good enough at the challenge presented that you can do it all at once without screwing up.

If that were really true, they would do it like old school platformers where you have to restart the whole game not just a single level. Time to make myself feel old by reminiscing over the change between Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Sonic the Hedgehog 3, the first in the series to save the game between levels. Its not like the challenges were easier, it was just far less obnoxious to get back to where you ultimately failed.

 

1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

If repeating a challenge in Fire Emblem is so mindless and annoying, doesn't that say more about how the game is designed than the absence of the ability to skip it? I can't think of a single time I felt like that playing any of the best games in the series.

Really? You never once had something happen late in a chapter of Conquest that forced you to repeat the chapter, going through identical motions, because you have sound strategies up to that point (and perhaps even sound strategies beyond that point, but sometime the highest probability of success still fails)?

[Alastor15243]

7 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

If you are going to compare the time wheel mechanics to a platformer, you should compare it to the time mechanics of Prince of Persia, the Sands of Time. The ability to turn back time and fix mistakes was well received in that game, and generally seen as a good change difficulty wise, having some say it made the challenging instead of punishing.

I haven't played that game so I have no idea how it works there, so I can't comment on that.

7 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

If that were really true, they would do it like old school platformers where you have to restart the whole game not just a single level. Time to make myself feel old by reminiscing over the change between Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Sonic the Hedgehog 3, the first in the series to save the game between levels. Its not like the challenges were easier, it was just far less obnoxious to get back to where you ultimately failed.

And if they proceeded to go a step further and to put checkpoints in levels after every single platforming obstacle, would that have still been an improvement and not a detriment to the difficulty? Removing bad difficulty is not the same as not removing any difficulty at all.

7 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

Really? You never once had something happen late in a chapter of Conquest that forced you to repeat the chapter, going through identical motions, because you have sound strategies up to that point (and perhaps even sound strategies beyond that point, but sometime the highest probability of success still fails)?

No. Not once. Mostly because Conquest is a fun and an extremely well-designed game that not only avoids killing you when it isn't your fault, but brutally punishes most strategies that are mindless and boring to repeat, so I don't use those strategies, and thus I don't get bored. I can certainly concede that I was feeling that mindless, tedious "I've done this already" frustration in the last few maps of Fire Emblem 1, but that's because I wasn't having fun with it because the gameplay wasn't engaging.

[Eltosian Kadath]

11 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

And if they proceeded to go a step further and to put checkpoints in levels after every single platforming obstacle, would that have still been an improvement and not a detriment to the difficulty? Removing bad difficulty is not the same as not removing any difficulty at all.

As long as the underlying experience was set to the right difficulty I don't think it would be a detriment. Unfortunately the sands of time Prince of Persia games really are the best example to use as comparison, as the rewinding time mechanic can be used as a checkpoint before every platforming obstacle during the platforming segments, but the platforming is well enough designed that it doesn't detract from the difficulty.

32 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

No. Not once. Mostly because Conquest is a fun and an extremely well-designed game that not only avoids killing you when it isn't your fault, but brutally punishes most strategies that are mindless and boring to repeat, so I don't use those strategies, and thus I don't get bored. I can certainly concede that I was feeling that mindless, tedious "I've done this already" frustration in the last few maps of Fire Emblem 1, but that's because I wasn't having fun with it because the gameplay wasn't engaging. 

I was going to call you out on some serious luck, but on second thought, the difficulty of some challenge runs I have done may have given me a bit of a different perspective on this game. In general the gameplay can be engaging when finding a solution, but once you have a reliable solution with your troops (the more reliable it is the worse in this regard, as less reliable solutions might require deviations to compensate for bad luck) repeating it to get back to a reset becomes tedious and rote (and made more so by knowing that this is keeping you from getting back to the engaging part of the game).

[Integrity]

i don't think i've made a real fucking effortpost in this topic but i'll pop one out in contrast to the occasional shitty takes in the last page or so

 

the turnwheel is an incredibly good mechanic and is ultimately extremely healthy for the series as a concept, but needs reined in.

 

while the turnwheel absolutely makes things easier or more accessible, whichever is your preferred terminology, saying it removes challenge or changes the identity of the series is completely ridiculous, as it covers the same niche as the save points from the ds games, except for being less arbitrary and more consistently applicable for the player. what's the point of save points/the turnwheel? i'm glad you askedn't, because alastor just strawmanned it tae fuck casually and then denied that the comparison was hot garbage so here we are. i'll try to divorce this as much as possible from my core belief that permadeath in fire emblem is an inherently flawed mechanic that doesn't accomplish its own goals, but i want to acknowledge up front that this bias is here and down to fuck at any time (dm me for his number).

 

fire emblem, you won't be surprised to learn, leans pretty heavily on the rng. there's a big a mostly decay-of-society moral outrage wringing of hands viewpoint that alastor very cleverly brought up but is absolutely not localized to OP that someone's Bad Tactics could be completely validated by good rng, and this is true - except for that the badder the tactics, the longer the rng streak of Good Job You Win has to go to make it work. for someone who isn't good at tactics at all, oh, yeah, they could put all the wrong guys forward and hypothetically win the game with a one in a billion RN streak. it's pure hypothetical. however, it's kept alive by anecdotes from the community, hey, this one time i dropped neimi into eight guys and she crit twice at 2% and didn't get three hit killed despite all eight guys having 50% hit rates! the most basic college 201 taught-to-liberal-arts-majors stats class will tell you pretty easily that these events are both inevitable (statistical outliers this is the reason the law of large numbers exists bitches) and improbable (basic statistical calculations bitches). now, what basical statistics type numerology, as well as just using one's brain, teaches us is that the longer the string of random things that have to go all right to luck through a thing, the less likely it is to happen. so op's conclusion is pretty obviously apparent; adding the turnwheel/save points increases the chance of lucking through any given segment of the game, by virtue of shortening the rn sequence necessary to brute force one's way through it. this is objectively, provably, a fact. adding options to the player and not increasing the capability of the enemy to compensate reduces difficulty.

 

so now that i've really transparently slammed my statistics background dick on the table, let's take a look at two questions: what's the point of save points/the turnwheel, and the original question of whether challenge is still possible

 

first up, the point of save points slash the turnwheel. despite being scary and new, they literally serve the same point as between-chapter saves. ironman is on a scale; prime ironman is one save, no reloading a previous state, no alt-f4ing the game (i am guilty of this.) to prevent an act you didn't like like someone dying, everything is permanent. the platonic opposite to this is unrealized, but is something like the strawman super meat boy of alastor or a game played by a guy hard abusing savestates (e.g. a TAS), where no action actually matters and everything is instantly reversible at the press of a button. literally all games occupy the space between these platonic ideals, and the separation is abstractable to how long you have to perform ideally between checkpoints.

 

let's look at my child, my fourth-fave, fe8, for context here. there are no in-map saves. there are no savestates unless you're a coward on VBA or No$GBA. there is no turnwheel. the contract is very clear: you must perform for a chapter at a time. you must not fuck up irrecoverably, from chapter begin to chapter end, and then you are safe again and your shit is secured.

so you know, what if chapters are big? not all chapters are created equal. fire emblem dual screen took that into account. save points were created. you must not fuck up irrevocably, not from chapter begin to chapter end, but from save point to save point. clearly, some of these were placed bizarrely, and some chapters had or hadn't them when they shouldn't or should've, but that's the risk you take when there's a static mechanic to solve a dynamic problem.

but that's the problem, the RNG is in full force, this isn't a static problem. someone can have or haven't a strong string of rng at any time, get fucked or not at any time. adding onto that, save points were physical things, letting you just store scrubs in the back to hit them up when you needed to stack them in a really cumbersome system. applying static solutions to dynamic problems doesn't tend to work; what about a dynamic solution?

so let's flip onto echoes. the turnwheel now, correctly, exists. the contract is now 'perform from whatever you denote as a safe space to whatever you denote as a safe space'. you can no longer fuck yourself over by saving over, since you can rewind indefinitely with any given charge. however; you need to have the knowledge to suss when your strategy fucking died and to rewind from there. this is the major thing the turnwheel contributes; with a dynamic starting point, the effectiveness of the rewind is completely dependent on player skill, and is no longer 'chapter begin' like many previous games, which puts the start point as static and independent of player input.

to undigress from that, the short of those lines is that map saves and turnwheel accomplish the same thing: they shorten the amount of time that the player has to not fuck up for, with the only difference that the turnwheel is flexible to player taste and the map saves are preset by how the devs think maps should flow. this makes the games easier from a luck perspective by shortening the RN strings that need to happen for players to win maps big quotation marks "with bad tactics".

 

thus we move to the second question, which is the one actually offered by the thread and not just me talking shit for ages. is challenge still possible with our best friend, our absolute stan, the turnwheel? yes. and this is insanely obvious. i'll approach this with theory and examples.

 

let's go hypothetical. let's abstract this out of fire emblem entirely. i ask you twenty-five multiple choice questions, but i give you five mulligans. are you going to nail all twenty-five questions? in classic fire emblem, failing to answer a question meant you'd have to reanswer all of the Xteen you knew the answers to, and then offering a new response to the question you failed. in turnwheel fire emblem, the only change is that you don't have to answer the previous Xteen questions. saying the turnwheel itself destroys difficulty is the same as claiming that who wants to be a millionaire isn't difficult because each contestant can phone a friend.

and you know, let's keep that angle going - imagine who wants to be a millionaire, but the contestant can call a friend for every question. doesn't sound very interesting, does it? now the victory is determined by whether the contestant has a friend on call for each given question. this is the ultimate form of unlimited turnwheel, which we've all dealt with in the form of resisting using savestates.

so let's look at examples let's look at fire emblem examples. let's take a really dumb one, a seth solo of fe8. you, noble gamer, know about rn abuse, drawing the arrow to burn an rn or two. you beat a map - except for the boss crits seth and kills him, ending your run. classic fire emblem: you retread all of the exact same moves, all of the exact same things happen because of how the rng works, you burn an rn and seth doesn't get crit. is this better than the experience of turnwheeling and just attacking again? this is a rhetorical question, the answer is no.

so let's look at something less dumb: the archetypal fire emblem experience. you're in the middle of hector chapter 13, six turns in, and the bitch of it is you did the bad math and eliwood killed a dude with his rapier and then guy attacked him and he crit, robbing you of guy. for many, many fire emblem fans, the move is "rewind, do literally everything the same, recalculate this turn" so we'll run with that. so what goes on is you do all the same moves, then you equip eliwood with an iron sword instead, and you don't kill guy. on the other hand, with the bourgie turnwheel, the difference is that you don't do all the same moves, then you equip eliwood with an iron sword instead, and you don't kill guy. the former is a better experience because

let's look at the other one! alastor made a "point" about players lucking their way through maps with bad tactics. here i am, with my good tactics, i have done literally everything right. my formation is fucking immaculate. things have done the 50th percentile, most hits that should happen have and most that shouldn't didn't. it's the awkward zombie THE ODDS WERE IN YOUR FAVOR, but unironically. anyway, you didn't note that vaike has less luck than usual, and he's facing a 1% crit, and the crit of course happens, and he's destroyed. one might say AH THIS IS FIRE EMBLEM YOU PUSH ON but i've made my feelings towards that sentiment clear; you reset. if bad tactics are at risk to be rewarded with success then, equally, good tactics are at risk to be rewarded with failure, and here you are, soaking the memetic 1% crit. in classic fire emblem, you reset to chapter start; in save point fe, you reset to the last time you felt secure that shit was good; in turnwheel fe, you reset to back when ....you felt secure that shit was good, except for that you didn't have to anticipate it. the former is a better experience because

 

so let's combine that shit and get some conclusions, and let's bring up another thing very directly. fire emblem 4, genealogy of the holy war, indisputably one of the greatest games of this entire franchise, literally let you save every single turn. there were five save slots, the RNG was fixed to the slot; on load, so hey, the crit wen't your way or the mobs scattered how you didn't like? oh, the maximum penalty was you went back a few turns. did this mechanic destroy the difficulty of fe4? of course it didn't, unless you're some kind of loser Tactical Genius who thinks fe4 is dummy easy and doesn't understand why it has a reputation otherwise

let's look at another game. master of magic has infinite save slots, you can literally undo any action if you save after it. does this destroy its killer 1994 difficulty? no. master of magic remains a difficult game, but through concealing whether your save is in a good or a bad timeline, being able to infinitely retake doesn't actually help. literally in the same vein, the turnwheel doesn't itself destroy difficulty, except if you decide that the shortened necessary RN string being shorter makes it easier to luck into. the thing that makes this discussion happen is that, if one never uses the turnwheel, FETH is still significantly easier than what we expect from a fire emblem; FE:echoes is generally easier except for shitty map design that we tout as omg shitty map design that is being enabled by the turnwheel but that existed before the turnwheel's existence, which, of course, leads to people justifying shit as 'oh yeah this is bad map design enabled by the turnwheel' when the same map mechanics are mappable to previous fire emblems, because we're in a generation of gamers outraged about things they've always lived with but angry because the wrong people did it, or someone told them to be angry about it.

so the tl;dr of the whole post is is it possible for the turnwheel to give difficult gameplay? literally yes, ironman didn't exist for decades and games were still hard. the only thing the turnwheel does is shorten the spaces between perfect performance, which is something that fire emblem has done in at least two different massive contexts in the past and neither has been called out at all as undermining the difficulty of the series. the move is good. good night and good luck.

[Alastor15243]

11 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

As long as the underlying experience was set to the right difficulty I don't think it would be a detriment. Unfortunately the sands of time Prince of Persia games really are the best example to use as comparison, as the rewinding time mechanic can be used as a checkpoint before every platforming obstacle during the platforming segments, but the platforming is well enough designed that it doesn't detract from the difficulty.

And would you say that a single turn of decision making in Three Houses or Echoes is a big enough challenge to be worthy of a checkpoint?

 

11 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

I was going to call you out on some serious luck, but on second thought, the difficulty of some challenge runs I have done may have given me a bit of a different perspective on this game. In general the gameplay can be engaging when finding a solution, but once you have a reliable solution with your troops (the more reliable it is the worse in this regard, as less reliable solutions might require deviations to compensate for bad luck) repeating it to get back to a reset becomes tedious and rote (and made more so by knowing that this is keeping you from getting back to the engaging part of the game).

What sorts of challenge runs have you been doing? Just to get some perspective on this. Generally in Conquest if a strategy is going to get you killed, you have every means to know, so I'm having trouble visualizing a situation where you've come up with reliable strategies you've repeated enough to get bored, only to keep dying. Are you talking about a speedrun where you had to rely on RNG at the end and it didn't matter that that decision would obviously kill you if it didn't work out, because it was the fastest way and you had to do it?

[Integrity]

i love how in the context of my huge effort post everything you just said looks variously dumb as hell

[Eltosian Kadath]

19 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

What sorts of challenge runs have you been doing? Just to get some perspective on this. Generally in Conquest if a strategy is going to get you killed, you have every means to know, so I'm having trouble visualizing a situation where you've come up with reliable strategies you've repeated enough to get bored, only to keep dying. Are you talking about a speedrun where you had to rely on RNG at the end and it didn't matter that that decision would obviously kill you if it didn't work out, because it was the fastest way and you had to do it?

I was thinking back on the 10 unit, no prepromoted royal, never allowing a unit that was paired up be in a position to be targeted (so no preventing enemy attack stances or blocking attacks with the guard gauge), no skill buy, no forging, no items from the reward boxes, no random castle items, on Lunatic Conquest. The big one was forcing me to go through the incredibly boring and rote process of beating the fairly trivial chapter 27 to get back to get back to working on endgame, although there were a couple other places this came up (and Takumi could always get some odd RNG to ruin everything at the end).

I have also been somewhat casually doing a Lunatic Conquest 10 man no prepromoted royals run (I do let guard stance see some use this time) using Shadow Mir's terrible trifecta (Arthur, Nyx, and Charlotte in base classes), and finding a way to do Nina's paralogue before the game makes any armor effective weapons available, with one of my 10 slots taken up by a relatively under-trained Niles (his planned partner was the Cow who was restricted,so their relationship grinding was done in castle battles), fast enough to secure all the loot had similar levels of repetitions (and no it wasn't due to needing crits, I have nothing that can one round those wary fighter armors, some with armored blow and 1-2 range, and even one attack stance miss on those guys is enough to keep me from going fast enough to get the loot).

19 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

And would you say that a single turn of decision making in Three Houses or Echoes is a big enough challenge to be worthy of a checkpoint?

Some turns yes, other turns no. Sorry for such a vague answer, but not all turns are created equal, and which ones will be isn't easily determinable before you do them.

[starburst]

6 hours ago, Integrity said:

now, what basical statistics type numerology, as well as just using one's brain, teaches us is that the longer the string of random things that have to go all right to luck through a thing, the less likely it is to happen. so op's conclusion is pretty obviously apparent; adding the turnwheel/save points increases the chance of lucking through any given segment of the game, by virtue of shortening the rn sequence necessary to brute force one's way through it. this is objectively, provably, a fact. adding options to the player and not increasing the capability of the enemy to compensate reduces difficulty.

 

10 hours ago, Parrhesia said:

The Turnwheel doesn't turn that into a sure thing, it just means that if your plans fail, you lose less time retreading the plans that didn't fail.

Parrhesia, I quoted a section from Integrity right above you to better illustrate my point.

The Turn Wheel does turn every previous interaction as a sure thing. Unless you told me that every previous attack had a 100 % chance of success, that every previous critical hit had a 100 % chance of landing, that every previous dodge corresponded to a 0 % hit rate, et cetera.
Only if you used the Turn Wheel to rewind a stupid move (which is certain) does your claim holds. Almost every other action could have gone differently; you just want to take all those probabilities for granted and go on.

Do you also use the Turn Wheel when an unexpected (to you) enemy misses an 81 % mortal hit? According to your "plan", that hit should have killed your unit. The fact that it did not is pure luck. And it seems to me that you do not want to rely on luck.
You did not? So, you let the game go on when a 19 % dodge favours you but rewind if a 19 % hit kills your unit? That is a very broken mechanic and an very broken way to play. There is no interpretation.

[Alastor15243]

6 hours ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

I was thinking back on the 10 unit, no prepromoted royal, never allowing a unit that was paired up be in a position to be targeted (so no preventing enemy attack stances or blocking attacks with the guard gauge), no skill buy, no forging, no items from the reward boxes, no random castle items, on Lunatic Conquest. The big one was forcing me to go through the incredibly boring and rote process of beating the fairly trivial chapter 27 to get back to get back to working on endgame, although there were a couple other places this came up (and Takumi could always get some odd RNG to ruin everything at the end).

Given that guard stance is a fundamental and, crucially, well-balanced aspect to the game's strategy, is it really fair to hold it against a game if (and this is if, I haven't done it for myself) beating the game without it is a tedious and luck-based slog?

But anyway, here's my big personal anecdote that I think will highlight exactly why the game takes less skill to beat when you have rewinds:

When I first played Three Houses, I did it ironman. This has become a tradition of mine ever since Fates, and I do it for two reasons. One, because I find it lets me more deeply appreciate a game's strengths, and magnifies the game's flaws, when the consequences of all of my and the game designers' actions become magnified. And two, because I play better under that kind of pressure. Whenever I play ironman I play way, way better than I ever play normally, because the pressure is on and I have to make sure i make the right decisions.

I scanned every map for potential dangers before going ahead with it. I kept careful track of enemy ranges and made sure none of my units were ever relying on attacks missing or crits not proccing in order to survive a turn. I never gave the okay to any action that I didn't know for sure wouldn't kill me (which made the vagueness of various crest skills and combat arts infuriating, because at times I had to assume they were instant kills when they probably weren't), and if I couldn't guarantee that, the option wasn't acceptable and I had to find another way. If I was surrounded by enemies and I had to rely on player-phase attacks to clear breathing room for my more fragile units, I carefully examined all of the combinations of options I had until I found the one with the best chances of routing them all. And I was in this kind of zone, this kind of careful planning, make-no-mistakes zone, for the entire game.

And I resolved that if it turned out they found a way to make the game compelling for a player like me, a player who does all of this, even with the divine pulse, I would abandon this and play it normally.

This didn't happen, because the game's as difficult as, or slightly easier than, Path of Radiance, even if you ignore the rewind system, and there was no real depth to strategy that was added to make this game genuinely harder to ironman than Conquest was. The only times I ever came close to dying were when the game threw things at me it was impossible to counter without trial and error knowledge or dumb luck, such as Foreign Land And Sky, AKA the worst map in Fire Emblem history. But due to a combination of dumb luck and the moderate amount of skill it took to recognize what little luck I had and act on it, I managed to get out of all of those situations without a scratch and somehow beat the whole game without a single person on my team ever dying. But that was a challenge I mostly completed out of spite to see if I could actually manage it, because the moment I triggered that borderline kaizo trap in Foreign Land and Sky, I no longer believed I could complete this run without a ridiculous amount of luck.

But this isn't a critique of Three Houses' game design. I only say this to explain that once I beat the Black Eagles route on ironman, I had no desire to do that ever again, so when I decided to try out Golden Deer because I heard the story was better than Black Eagles, I resolved to play it on reset classic to spare me the un-fun stress of trying to do this untrustworthy game ironman with all of its fake difficulty that could crush all of my careful planning to pieces without ever giving me a chance to fight back.

My skill level with the game almost instantly plummeted. I didn't think nearly as much about the layout of a map before giving it the okay, I stopped planning out my player phase gambits in advance, and I often stopped even bothering to check how much damage enemies would do to my units before positioning them. I was just playing the game on borderline auto-pilot because 1: I no longer found taking the game seriously fun, and 2: I reasoned that taking the time to think out my strategies in a game that could kill me with death traps at any moment would actually cost me more time than playing sloppily. And, here's the crucial bit, I've been getting away with it a hell of a lot without even having to restart, because the game isn't all that hard. But the key point is that playing like this consistently would have dire consequences on ironman that it wouldn't have on reset classic. And the same applies if you go even further and add the divine pulse.

If I have four rewinds, what incentive do I have to think about any move I make until I'm down to 1 of them? Surely it would be faster to just do whatever and wait until that isn't good enough before I actually have to start thinking about my actions? What about if I had eight? Ten? Twelve? Then that moment where I actually have to start taking the game seriously will get later and later and later into the level, and I wind up coasting through a larger and larger percentage of it without any thinking but the barest of hunches and instincts about what seems like a good matchup.

What reason do I have, if I'm willing to use a turnwheel, to check how much damage enemies will do on enemy phase to the unit I've sent out to fight them? I'll just eyeball it and rewind if I fail. Why do I need to think about risks and rewards of a 50% hit rate attack I could do that would be a serious blow to my enemy but would leave a unit open to extreme danger if it failed? I have like twelve rewinds, why don't I just try it, see if it works, and if it doesn't, try something less risky?

In this way, the turnwheel takes the bite out of every single harsh risk assessment and planning decision you ever make in the game as long as you have uses left. It no longer matters that failure results in death, because it'll be several reset-worthy mistakes throughout the entire map before you have to suffer the consequences. In this way, the turnwheel lets you get away with worse and worse strategies the more rewinds you have, and thus makes the game easier and easier. It's not just a quality of life shortcut. It actively undermines the entire concept of risk assessment and double-checking that what you're doing is a good idea.

Edited September 1, 2019 by Alastor15243

[Integrity]

29 minutes ago, starburst said:

Parrhesia, I quoted a section from Integrity right above you to better illustrate my point.

The Turn Wheel does turn every previous interaction as a sure thing. Unless you told me that every previous attack had a 100 % chance of success, that every previous critical hit had a 100 % chance of landing, that every previous dodge corresponded to a 0 % hit rate, et cetera.
Only if you used the Turn Wheel to rewind a stupid move (which is certain) does your claim holds. Almost every other action could have gone differently; you just want to take all those probabilities for granted and go on.

Do you also use the Turn Wheel when an unexpected (to you) enemy misses an 81 % mortal hit? According to your "plan", that hit should have killed your unit. The fact that it did not is pure luck. And it seems to me that you do not want to rely on luck.
You did not? So, you let the game go on when a 19 % dodge favours you but rewind if a 19 % hit kills your unit? That is a very broken mechanic and an very broken way to play. There is no interpretation.

thanks for quoting a single section of my massive drunkpost which is entirely about how thinking that the turnwheel is a broken mechanic and destroys challenge is a ridiculous point to prove your point that the turnwheel is a broken mechanic and destroys challenge!

 

the turnwheel allows you to treat every previous interaction as a sure thing, flexibly as far back as you need, this is correct. the funny thing is that for most of fire emblem's history resetting the chapter also allowed you to do literally the same thing, as the rng was pre-seeded so taking the same actions in the same order always resulted in the same outcome - this is the entire core of fire emblem speedrunning, and it's also relatedly why fire emblem speedrunning pre-3ds is really boring to watch.

 

your point about using the turnwheel when you get lucky is a complete non-point. taking the in-map save feature out, which should quotation marks destroy all the challenge of fe4 the same way the turnwheel does later games, there's very little practical difference between fe5 having shorter maps than fe4 and that clearly is a broken mechanic compared to the previous entry - what if the rng hadn't gone in your favor in chapter 6 and leif hadn't dodged that 71%? you wouldn't even be here on chapter 7 to risk things! that was only twelve turns ago, that's not even half of an fe4 map! it's a completely arbitrary delineation of play. the turnwheel's only impact is that it lets you choose slightly more flexibly than a traditional save system where the delineation goes. too many turnwheel charges lets you place too many rewind points, and that can destroy the challenge; having it in a smaller dose allows you to do precisely what parrhesia says without being any more broken than map saving. the interpretation is very simple.

 

what's often cornfused by people is the fact that feth is itself a relatively easy fire emblem game. this isn't because of the turnwheel - the game with zero turnwheel uses is just measurably easier than your game frame of reference. the turnwheel piles onto that slightly, letting the occasional mistake get swept under the rug, but if you trained yourself for days to not squeeze your left index finger in a heated gaming moment, chances are pretty good feth's challenge would still underwhelm you, and the turnwheel would no longer seem like a convenient excuse for it.

[starburst]

7 hours ago, Integrity said:

if bad tactics are at risk to be rewarded with success then, equally, good tactics are at risk to be rewarded with failure, and here you are, soaking the memetic 1% crit. in classic fire emblem, you reset to chapter start; in save point fe, you reset to the last time you felt secure that shit was good; in turnwheel fe, you reset to back when ....you felt secure that shit was good, except for that you didn't have to anticipate it.

Here lies my main criticism to your argument, mate. You see, I am all in favour for Fixed Save Points, but not of the Turn Wheel nor Infinite Save-Wherever-You-Want Save Points. (Suspension Save Points are not being discussed here. They are a quality-of-life improvement.)
In large maps, there could be one or two Fixed Save Points, in the same way that one can save mid-chapter or right before the boss in other games. And these Fixed Save Points could even increase objective diversity by being inside chests or in places a bit off-the-road.

Both Infinite Omnipresent Save Points and the Turn Wheel contradict the notion of uncertainty that is at the core of Fire Emblem. Without uncertainty, this game would play in a radically different way. Since the odds of every encounter would either be 1 or 0, you units would never die unless you explicitly wanted to, and you would inevitably face impossible situations that would force you to grind for levels or better equipment (until the odds of winning are 1.)

I do not know, mate, I love that feeling in action-adventure films where every character sticks to a highly improbable plan to save the universe in the last minute. Or when the protagonist of a suspense film, against all odds, flees a mortal chase. You know that the good guys will win, yet if the menace does not feel real, the film loses all of its impact. Uncertainty is necessary to create the atmosphere, and the film is only effective when it transmits the notions of hope and despair, thrill and success; probably at the same time.

[starburst]

1 hour ago, Integrity said:

thanks for quoting a single section of my massive drunkpost which is entirely about how thinking that the turnwheel is a broken mechanic and destroys challenge is a ridiculous point to prove your point that the turnwheel is a broken mechanic and destroys challenge!

Do you not love the irony? I certainly did. He, he.

 

1 hour ago, Integrity said:

the turnwheel's only impact is that it lets you choose slightly more flexibly than a traditional save system where the delineation goes. too many turnwheel charges lets you place too many rewind points, and that can destroy the challenge; having it in a smaller dose allows you to do precisely what parrhesia says without being any more broken than map saving. the interpretation is very simple.

If the interpretation were indeed simple, you would not be writing dozens of paragraphs to prove your point. You do it precisely because you want to convince us (or yourself) about your argument.

You know what would be fairer? If the Turn Wheel, because of some quantum magical effect karma shit, changed all the rolls and favoured the enemy. Thus, if the player wants to go back one turn, their units now have, say, -5 % Hit, -7 % Avoid and -2 % Dodge.
-- "Wait! But that is not what the player wanted to do!" -- "And what is it exactly?" -- "Well, they wanted to... win... more easily." -- "I see."

 

1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

Given that guard stance is a fundamental and, crucially, well-balanced aspect to the game's strategy, is it really fair to hold it against a game if (and this is if, I haven't done it for myself) beating the game without it is a tedious and luck-based slog?

It clearly is not. That is why almost everyone glues a low-level Berserker Charlotte to Xander. The whole "backpack" concept derives from an easy exploitation of a Guard Stance mechanic (unrestricted bonuses.) It was the main reason why I decided to try 10-Units campaigns in Conquest. And it was fun that Eltosian Kadath decided to give it a try and chronicle his run.

Edited September 1, 2019 by starburst