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Paper Mario comes to mind where status effects aren't usually worth the trouble compared to just attacking, but every boss has ONE status effect they're actually vulnerable to. Though still likely not worth the effort. Again, it's more the presentation and ambiguity, and enemy types not sticking around long enough to make figuring out weaknesses worth it. I think Pokemon is the big exception here because everything works by the same rules, your opponents use/are the same monsters and moves that you do.
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Jul 4, 2021 21:06
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Status effects are just not as cool as hitting a guy with a big sword.
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Jul 4, 2021 21:10
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In all the classic JPRGs I know (the SNES ones), if you play halfway competently you kill enemies in one or two hits anyway. That's obviously not helping the case for status effects. hey lemme spend an extra round here for no earthly reason
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Jul 4, 2021 21:25
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Crowetron posted:Status effects are just not as cool as hitting a guy with a big sword. What about hitting a guy with a big sword....that causes a status effect
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Jul 4, 2021 21:27
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Pokemon status effects are great in PVP battles but basically pointless in the game where you can one-shot glass-cannon your way through nearly every match as long as you have a basic knowledge of type weaknesses. Starting up AC: Origins for the first time this weekend and it's great. Absolutely loving being able to pick up loot while on horseback or running past. A loot hoover would be even better, but I'll take it after months of hammering my head against the Skyrim UI. Loving the variety of weapons too, but because I got a DLC bundle I feel like I'm overstocked with random Legendary weapons I will never get chance to properly use or upgrade. God I love that 'Hide in Inventory' option though!
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Jul 4, 2021 21:30
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The Stick of Truth was weird in that it had exactly one boss that actually required you to use status effects. Other than that they were pretty pointless.
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Jul 4, 2021 23:16
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Maxwell Lord posted:Yeah in the short term it always seems to make more sense to just do damage because that ends the fight fastest, so it's another thing where games could stand to signpost that "this is actually quite useful if applied properly" followed by "this is probably an enemy this will be good against." Pokemon is slanted way too hard towards one hit kills with regular attacks, but at least status effects are great when you’re trying to catch something. muscles like this! posted:The Stick of Truth was weird in that it had exactly one boss that actually required you to use status effects. Other than that they were pretty pointless. The bouncy ball with the “applies three stacks of bleed” mod was an I win button. One use and all the enemies had tons of stacks of DOT on them.
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Jul 4, 2021 23:21
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The real fun in Pokemon is screwing around with status effects on purpose, like the competitive builds that use the poisoning item to activate damage boosting abilities.
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Jul 4, 2021 23:23
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Captain Hygiene posted:What about hitting a guy with a big sword....that causes a status effect Whoa
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Jul 4, 2021 23:30
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If they want status effects to feel like they're worth using then they gotta stop making enemies and bosses arbitrarily immune to a bunch of them. It's never going to feel good to invest into applying poison when I have no idea whether poison is even going to do anything in the upcoming fights. Plus, if the designers know that status effects are always available, then they can start layering interesting mechanics on top of them, like "special attack that does double damage to sleeping enemies" or "defensive buff that makes a character take 30% less damage from poisoned enemies". Those kinds of things would be way too niche in a system where most status effects don't work in the hardest fights.
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Jul 4, 2021 23:50
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AC Odyssey was really good about status effects. You could make entire builds around them and they were incredibly effective.
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Jul 4, 2021 23:51
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Triarii posted:If they want status effects to feel like they're worth using then they gotta stop making enemies and bosses arbitrarily immune to a bunch of them. It's never going to feel good to invest into applying poison when I have no idea whether poison is even going to do anything in the upcoming fights. Plus, if the designers know that status effects are always available, then they can start layering interesting mechanics on top of them, like "special attack that does double damage to sleeping enemies" or "defensive buff that makes a character take 30% less damage from poisoned enemies". Those kinds of things would be way too niche in a system where most status effects don't work in the hardest fights. They have, including having those kinds of abilities and having accurate information in-game as to if something can work or not.
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Jul 5, 2021 00:00
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Sometimes I read a series of posts like these and realize that Final Fantasy has done more damage to the Genre than any other source
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Jul 5, 2021 00:02
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Death is the strongest status effect.
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Jul 5, 2021 00:10
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Also the enemy info in bravely default 2 will show any weaknesses you've discovered by hitting enemies OR by using the scan skill previously which is nice. Not nice: it does not show elemental or status immunities, absorption, or counterattacks. And a ton of the bosses are immune to a lot of stuff.
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Jul 5, 2021 00:13
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ImpAtom posted:They have, including having those kinds of abilities and having accurate information in-game as to if something can work or not. Even if I can look at an enemy and get a clear list of what status effects work, what's the intended flow there? I get into a boss fight, cast my scan spell to see what they're vulnerable to, quit out, load my last save game, change my loadout around to apply that effect, then go back into the fight? And even that stops being an option if I have to spend skill points or XP or whatever to spec into status effect application, unless I want to grind for a while.
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Jul 5, 2021 00:15
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Triarii posted:Even if I can look at an enemy and get a clear list of what status effects work, what's the intended flow there? I get into a boss fight, cast my scan spell to see what they're vulnerable to, quit out, load my last save game, change my loadout around to apply that effect, then go back into the fight? And even that stops being an option if I have to spend skill points or XP or whatever to spec into status effect application, unless I want to grind for a while. Or just have your mage cast poison on it instead of repeatedly casting "fire" (or "Lightning" if its a mechanical enemy).
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Jul 5, 2021 00:21
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Gaius Marius posted:Sometimes I read a series of posts like these and realize that Final Fantasy has done more damage to the Genre than any other source Yeah maybe this is mostly a Final Fantasy problem (the last JRPG-like I played was FF7R) but it's a dumb design notion that makes its way into a lot of RPG-adjacent games. Like the "fun" idea of making Dark Souls enemies/bosses hugely resistant to magic or whatever because, I guess, gently caress you for building your character that way?
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Jul 5, 2021 00:23
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Triarii posted:Even if I can look at an enemy and get a clear list of what status effects work, what's the intended flow there? I get into a boss fight, cast my scan spell to see what they're vulnerable to, quit out, load my last save game, change my loadout around to apply that effect, then go back into the fight? And even that stops being an option if I have to spend skill points or XP or whatever to spec into status effect application, unless I want to grind for a while. It depends on the game but in the case of these games there are a lot of design decisions specifically made to not require that. Some have party members with different specialties you can swap in and out such as FFX. Some allow you to keep a stable of different abilities you can swap to at will like Persona. Some do encourage you to start a fight over with a better setup if you're having trouble but that isn't exclusive to status effects. FF7R for example has several bosses where if you went in with a bad materia setup you're going to do better just leaving the fight and rebuilding instead of trying to plink away. (Hell House being both an example of this AND an example of a difficult boss vulnerable to status effects.) Some just make status effects always worth having both for regular and larger battles, by doing things like having standard enemies who have huge defense but are vulnerable to poison or enemies with powerful attacks who can be paralyzed or put to sleep, which makes even standard-rear end fights go by quicker. Some have characters with pre-defined movesets where the ability to inflict status effects is a basic part of how the game plays. A good example of this is Wakka from FFX whose basic skill lineup includes a lot of status-effect causing attacks which go a huge way towards making boss fights easier. Some also have mechanics that make it easier to inflict status effects, such as FFXIII's 'stagger' system where staggering a foe makes them vulnerable to status effects they'd previously be immune to. Regardless none of this is exclusive to status effects If you go into a boss fight against the Ice Dragon with the Ice Sword equipped you'd probably end up reloading and changing to the Fire Sword or if there's a rough enemy with a powerful lightning attack you'd probably want the Franklin Badge onhand.
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Jul 5, 2021 00:28
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Triarii posted:Yeah maybe this is mostly a Final Fantasy problem (the last JRPG-like I played was FF7R) but it's a dumb design notion that makes its way into a lot of RPG-adjacent games. Like the "fun" idea of making Dark Souls enemies/bosses hugely resistant to magic or whatever because, I guess, gently caress you for building your character that way? Yeah, like Salt and Sanctuary (2D indie Dark Souls) has 8 or so covenants that you can base your playstyle around and one of them is all about poison damage. Sounds pretty fun except woops like 1/3 of the enemies and 2/3s of the bosses in the game are virtually immune to it. I don't give a poo poo about verisimilitude, let me poison skeletons. Maybe its gotten better in actual jrpgs but lovely status effects are alive and well in hybrid rpgs.
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Jul 5, 2021 01:23
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Triarii posted:Yeah maybe this is mostly a Final Fantasy problem (the last JRPG-like I played was FF7R) but it's a dumb design notion that makes its way into a lot of RPG-adjacent games. Like the "fun" idea of making Dark Souls enemies/bosses hugely resistant to magic or whatever because, I guess, gently caress you for building your character that way? In Souls itself that started in DS2's DLCs, there's a boss that has something like 95% resistance to lightning. That one's a dick move, but it's late in the game, in a DLC and also not really feasible to have an entirely lightning-based combat style, so it could be worse. The ones in DS3 that are highly magic-resistant are straight garbage, though. One is mandatory for progression and the other is required for the alternate ending, and it actually is possible (and quite easy and overall effective) to make an all-magic-damage build.
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Jul 5, 2021 01:47
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darkwasthenight posted:
It got hell of overshadowed by Odyssey, but Origins is legit a really good game.
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Jul 5, 2021 06:02
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In Cooking Simulator there are windows that you can throw things out of if you want. There’s no way to retrieve things that are thrown out this way. One throwable item is your phone, which is necessary in order to take orders and order new supplies, making it essential to playing the game. The developers could have solved this problem by making it so the phone doesn’t go out the window. Instead, a second or two after you throw it out the window, it gets thrown back in.
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Jul 5, 2021 06:24
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In many RPGs, my personal issue with status effects is one of conveyance. Does "miss" mean that the enemy is immune, or does the Sleep spell simply have bad accuracy? Does no message mean immunity or success? Especially in older games, you maybe had an indicator for Confuse (sprite turned around), but none for sleep and/or silence. Nowadays often enemy color changes, but if their Protect-yellow takes precedence over silence-green, then tough luck. Lists of immunities and icons for each effect under their health bar are a little sterile but go a long way towards me actually wanting to experiment.
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Jul 5, 2021 08:03
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Tbh, another big problem with status effects is that they often act as a form of delayed gratification and for a subset of players that will just never feel as good as hitting attack and immediately landing 999 damage, even if "wasting" a turn to power up first would've resulted in a hit worth 9999. Basically a lot of the reluctance to use them comes from turn based combat just being like that sometimes. In Pokemon spamming those bread and butter Tail Wag et al. type moves is secretly pretty good but it never feels as good as using Razor Leaf and getting a critical hit and just decimating an opponent in one attack, especially when you only get to take one action per turn. If status effects at least gave you a weaker, pity effect if the larger binary one failed or were riders attached to something else (like elemental attacks) that would probably help too. John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 08:33 on Jul 5, 2021 |
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Jul 5, 2021 08:26
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Philippe posted:It got hell of overshadowed by Odyssey, but Origins is legit a really good game. Odyssey is queued up next, mostly because of this thread. I bounced off Black Flag at the time but might go back as I'm enjoying this.
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Jul 5, 2021 08:51
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I wouldn't say Dark Souls is the greatest example of status effects mattering but I like how applying a status effect deterministically builds up a bar that procs the effect when it fills. You get to see how close you are to making it happen, and you don't get the "oh it missed that was a waste of an action"
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Jul 5, 2021 08:51
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Qwertycoatl posted:I wouldn't say Dark Souls is the greatest example of status effects mattering but I like how applying a status effect deterministically builds up a bar that procs the effect when it fills. You get to see how close you are to making it happen, and you don't get the "oh it missed that was a waste of an action" HZD does this as well, it makes filling the bar and proccing the really strong effects super satisfying.
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Jul 5, 2021 09:25
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John Murdoch posted:If status effects at least gave you a weaker, pity effect if the larger binary one failed or were riders attached to something else (like elemental attacks) that would probably help too. Another thing Etrian Odyssey does pretty well— a lot of debuffer classes have their status effects tied to attacks, so if the effect doesn’t land at least you’re doing some damage too.
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Jul 5, 2021 09:30
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ImpAtom posted:And it's also as mentioned a very 90s Final Fantasy centric viewpoint. You can't really apply that as readily to something like Shin Megami Tensei which has absurdly powerful status effects and instant-kill spells. Dragon Quest has varied somewhat but frequently has Sap, Poison and Sleep be varying degrees of very powerful. Legend of Heroes has some absurdly strong status effects and tons of ways to apply them. (Indeed abilities that can apply multiple status effects at once are often terribly OP). Phantasy Star has spectacular status effect spells which often define a character, etc, etc. Even modern Final Fantasy games are all-in on status effects and usually have a Libra or similar spell that will show exactly who is vulnerable to what. FFXIII and its spinoffs even have dedicated debuffing classes. Not to mention Monster Trainer games like Pokemon where saying status effects are worthless is hilariously untrue. Oh, wait, buffs and debuffs count as status effects too? Because in that case I pretty much exclusively use those! I thought this conversation was all about like, freezing, poisoning, burning, etc. I'll absolutely buff everyone's attack and lower the enemies defense in games. It's just that a lot of the ones that I play that doesn't happen very much. I played DQ11 basically using 'lower enemy defense, buff party defense and attack' as my strategy for basically the entire game. The FF7 Remake's UI was just a bit too small so sometimes I didn't catch when some bosses did or didn't have resistances to some status effects. Etrian Odyssey 3's the most I've messed with them though, because some monsters only drop items if they get killed by a specific element or petrified or poisoned or etc. Behind that would have to be XCOM 2 of all things because of the special ammo you can load that applies status effects on hit. That was fun. I wish it had more support on PS4 after it released because those load times are enthusiasm killers. Phy posted:I don't remember if FF6's status effects were worth a drat (outside of abusing vanish/doom) but 7's weren't, and considering that it introduced a lot of people to the jrpg form factor, I think that might have contributed to cultural osmosis even if you never touched it yourself I only got to borrow it from a friend in like, middle school but I remember just opting to use a spell that does damage- which was super easy, even Strago would show up with spells that could do an easy 3k damage when you first got him- and grind with magicite equipped to boost people's stats through the roof. With the only active time thing I had on the GBA being Megaman Battle Network games and Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga, having to input a command to get an attack for Sabin was interesting and had me hooked so I was punching people for 6000 damage most of the game.
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Jul 5, 2021 09:32
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Space Base Halcyon Six did something fun with status effects, where you could “exploit” them with specific attacks, removing the effect but doing massive damage. It made for a lot of fun planning ahead since you would try to set up your effects so that a ship that could exploit it would be ready to fire on the turn before it expired.
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Jul 5, 2021 09:34
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Bussamove posted:Another thing Etrian Odyssey does pretty well— a lot of debuffer classes have their status effects tied to attacks, so if the effect doesn’t land at least you’re doing some damage too.
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Jul 5, 2021 09:36
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darkwasthenight posted:Odyssey is queued up next, mostly because of this thread. I bounced off Black Flag at the time but might go back as I'm enjoying this. Odyssey might be the best game
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Jul 5, 2021 09:39
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My Lovely Horse posted:Pen & paper, but D&D 4E does it like that too. Even buffs are often tied to attacks ("x damage, and allies gain an attack bonus against this enemy", along those lines). With particularly strong abilities you're even guaranteed the effect sticks, the hit check only determines for how long. 4E was so, so good and 5E is the epitome of “it’s fine, I guess”. The LaCroix of TTRPGs.
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Jul 5, 2021 09:43
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I always use status effects more when it affects enemy behaviour, not just their hp bar. Much more fun to see them madly running around, staggering from poison or making them blind and confused. In unrelated news I started playing Monster Hunter World recently.
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Jul 5, 2021 10:08
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Which is another thing 4E does! It's got the usual effects like "hit chance up or down" and "damage every round" but also ones like "can only move 2 squares" (usually 6) or "only gets one action a turn" (usually 3, broadly) that force a creature into completely different behaviour. And often the stats effects are baked into those rather than standalone.
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Jul 5, 2021 10:22
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Space Base Halcyon Six did something fun with status effects, where you could “exploit” them with specific attacks, removing the effect but doing massive damage. It made for a lot of fun planning ahead since you would try to set up your effects so that a ship that could exploit it would be ready to fire on the turn before it expired. These elemental statuses are also random procs off normal elemental attacks which you might do anyway, but you can build your Personas to have the status proc more often. It's p good
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Jul 5, 2021 10:26
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Simply Simon posted:Persona 5 does this. Frozen/burned/paralyzed etc. enemies can be hit with specific attacks which gives you a damage bonus and an extra turn, but it gets rid of the status. This can be good as well, because there's also a mechanic where e.g. paralysis can get transferred from enemy to party member if you hit them physically, making it a trade-off. This is actually something that even first-generation Pokemon tried to do, albeit... not well, because it's first-gen Pokemon. The idea for the Freeze status effect is that it gets removed by using Fire-type moves that can inflict burn, so theoretically you could use the combo of having an Ice-type inflict Freeze and then tag in a Fire-type to thaw them but inflict Burn. But then 'being first-gen Pokemon' kicked in, and it turned out that hitting a frozen Pokemon with a Fire move was the ONLY way one would thaw. So... why would you do that, when you could instead just let them be a free kill by other means?
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Jul 5, 2021 10:49
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John Murdoch posted:Tbh, another big problem with status effects is that they often act as a form of delayed gratification and for a subset of players that will just never feel as good as hitting attack and immediately landing 999 damage, even if "wasting" a turn to power up first would've resulted in a hit worth 9999. Pillars of Eternity does this really well, imo, where winning fights are basically all about stacking status effects to decrease enemy defenses so you start being able to land monstrous hits. Making it so that status effects that "miss" typically just have a shorter duration helps with that. It is possible to miss outright with them too of course, but as long as you aren't trying to attack a monster's strongest defense you'll probably be able to land some kind of status (which usually makes another status easier to land later).
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Jul 5, 2021 16:13
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My Lovely Horse posted:Which is another thing 4E does! It's got the usual effects like "hit chance up or down" and "damage every round" but also ones like "can only move 2 squares" (usually 6) or "only gets one action a turn" (usually 3, broadly) that force a creature into completely different behaviour. And often the stats effects are baked into those rather than standalone. The fact that we never got a 4e video game is such a huge bummer.
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Jul 5, 2021 16:19
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