RPGs with experimental mechanics

[rusty_shackleford]

I assume most of these are going to be from ~1995-2003 era, but what are some RPGs with experimental mechanics that didn't catch on or you thought were neat?

[Oyster Sauce]

Oblivion's Radiant AI

[asf]

darklands character creation system is still unique

[NotAI]

Good theme for a thread. A list would be interesting.

1. One of the Final Fantasy titles had a pretty interesting AI where you can select the tactics strategy to take for companions but forgot which one it was...it was never repeated. (I think it was a Final Fantasy.)

2. Not only in RPGs but asymmetry is usually pretty lacking.

Some guy rewrote pong so that one paddle is like this ___________________ and the other paddle is like this __. (MIT Press said wow amazing and published a book about it.)

So what ever happened to games where class X is easier to play and learn to play and overall just better and stronger than class Y? But then X lacks some of the really fun or cool things that can be done by Y and only by Y? Even though playing as Y is plain harder and not optimal. Merely cool.

Any RPGs with really asymmetric lack of balance in character creation that still worked?

Gothic 2 to some extent but it's balanced by the fact that mages become more powerful near the end. What about completely and obviously unbalanced?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I wound up writing down a lot about neat mechanics I saw in games, and then tried shaving the fluff but it might still be too wordy. Oops.

► Show Spoiler

Romancing Saga 2 (1993, December 10)
+ Permadeath is worked into the gameplay loop. You play as a dynasty of emperors and his loyal retainers. If your party wipes, rather than get a gameover, the game instead timeskips to the next generation (except until you reach the final emperor's generation. If you wipe at that point then it's a gameover and you have to reload). Your descendants can quickly level their skills back up to where you left off, so it's not all for nothing, but starting fresh at each generation incentivizes you to try out new builds. Also, there are timed events, ie a volcano erupts at a certain date and destroys the land in the vicinity, so if you want to beat all of the content you don't want to wipe too much or you won't be able to complete certain questlines in time.
+ Your characters can spontaneously learn new abilities/spells/techniques during battle, which is a little exciting.


Sakura Wars (1996, September 27)
+ Timed dialogue choices. The player has a short window of opportunity to choose a dialogue option. If the timer runs out, the player character remains silent, and the person they are conversing with will react as such. Sometimes, if you remain silent for long enough, they will think you're giving them the silent treatment and get mad at you. Sometimes remaining silent is the right answer. Depends on the character you are talking to and the situation.
+ These dialogue options can be spontaneous and affect gameplay a little bit. One timed dialogue that pops up during a battle forces you to recall the color a ribbon a girl party member was wearing earlier in the morning; success improves her morale and stats for that battle while failure makes her demoralized and lowers her stats.
+ In later SW games, the player can angle the analog stick to determine the intensity of their dialogue option. When combined with the timed dialogue boxes, this can become challenging, which again makes the VN parts more engaging. For instance, the player can angle their response to be loud enough to be overheard outside the room, or only heard by the character they are speaking to. Characters might get mad if you start yelling in their face, or if you are speaking too low; depends on the situation and character you are talking to.

Final Fantasy IX (2000, July 7)
+ Friendly monsters: To spruce up the gameplay, there is a small chance that you might get a random battle... but then the battle music doesn't play. Instead, comedic music plays, and a cute little monster asks you to give it some ore. You give it some ore... and then it says thanks, and the "battle" ends, and you get a crap ton of EXP. Spruces up the experience.
+ Tidus starts out having just picked up a sword for the first time in his life, and his animations reflect that. As the game goes on and Tidus becomes more experienced, his animations show him becoming more adept with wielding his sword. IIRC the only other game I know of that does something like this is Fire Emblem 8.

Final Fantasy X (2001, July 19)
+ Monster design encouraged you to use every character. Flying enemies are out of reach for the melee characters (there is a hit chance), so they can only be hit by magic or by Wakka's blitzball. Agile enemies like wolves and lizards will dodge the attacks of slower moving characters (again, not always but a high miss chance), so you need to use a fast character like Tidus. Tidus is also really fast, so he gets more turns, and is useful if you need to use a lot of turns to set up the party or prempt the enemy. Tidus' sword will bounce off armored enemies, but Auron can shatter the armor, allowing everyone else to attack. Etc.

Zwei: The Arges Adventure (2001, December 30)
+ You play as a pair of protagonists who you can swap between at will. In the towns, there are many objects that can be interacted with, such as tables, beds, strings of laundry, barrels, plates of food on a table, statues, etc. When you interact with an object, your current character will give their view on the object, and both characters have different thoughts about every object in the game. For example, when interacting with laundry, Pokkle remembers that he needs to fold the laundry, while Pipiro comments on how she likes the clothes. In another instance, when interacting with sacred idols in a shrine, Piprio simply states what it is, expressing her reverence, while Pokkle cracks a joke about each idol.
+ Similarly, when mousing over items in your inventory, the game doesn't give you a single, objective description of the item. Instead, your current character gives you their view on the item.

Final Fantasy XI
+ Weaponskill chains. The martial abilities players use have an element attached to them, and a party of players using their weaponskills in a certain order can trigger an elemental combo that deals bonus elemental damage. So rather than players just paying attention to their own resources and abilities, players are keeping on eye on each other waiting until everyone is ready to use a weaponskill and start or participate in the chain. Granblue Fantasy would later refine this with the chain burst mechanic.


World of Warcraft (2004, November 23)
+ A common issue with MMO raid boss fights is that when you have a lot of people all attacking a boss with a humongous HP pool, each player feels like they are hitting like a wet noodle and their contribution is small or insignificant. The best WoW boss fights break up the raid into smaller groups where individual players can really feel their power, and feel like they did something important. Ie, on Siegecrafter Blackfuse, a team of players has to detach from the rest to hop onto a conveyor belt to quickly destroy inventions that will harm the whole raid, such as a magnet that pulls/repels everyone into fire. On Blackhand, some people need to leap up into the rafters to kill snipers who are shooting at the rest of the raid down below. On Larodar, some people need to be extinguishing fires or else the whole room will be ablaze and there won't be anywhere left to stand and fight. Etc.

Sakura Wars V (2005, July 7)
+ Every once in a while, you (as the main character, Shinjiro) will be asked to take a picture for another character. You have to get the camera zoomed in and adjust the focus just right, but while this is happening the characters are waiting for you, and if you take too long they will start becoming impatient, so you have to be quick. It's a timed minigame that doesn't feel like an arbitrary minigame, and feels quite natural.
+ If you go on a date with Gemini, you will stop by her house for breakfast. While you're sitting at the table waiting for breakfast to be served, you notice her diary. You are given the choice to read it. What makes this choice interesting is that it is a timed choice, but the timer is super long, like one minute long. If you don't immediately choose to read the diary, you're just sitting there seeing the timer bar fill and hearing the timer beep, for a full minute, and the option is right there. The gameplay mechanics are encouraging you to give into the temptation and read the diary, even though you know it'd be intrusive to Gemini's privacy. Great gameplay and story integration.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005, November 14)
+ Emphasizes the size/strength differences of the characters. Edmund can crawl up pipes, lamp posts, and trees. Peter and Susan can roll big snowballs. The lake level where Peter, Ed, and Susan are too heavy to walk on the thin ice (if they do the ice cracks and they fall and drown), so you have to use Lucy to map out a safe path.

Final Fantasy XII (2006, March 16)
+ The weather changes the very geography of certain maps. When you first visit the Giza Plains, they are dry and you can easily traverse the map. When you return there later on, the plains have experienced heavy flooding and the place becomes a maze as you traverse from one hill-turned-island to the next, and the low level mobs like rabbits are replaced by high level mobs like alligators. It makes an old area new again.


Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection (2008, September 25)
+ Super Sayian fantasy. In this game, you level up and restore your health by eating food. Thus, rather than the leveling process feeling like a passive byproduct of regular combat gameplay, leveling up is an active choice made by you during combat. If you are taking damage and need healing, pressing the "eat food" button means you are immediately becoming more powerful on the spot. You know how boss battles usually have the boss become more and more powerful as the fight goes on? This system kinda makes you feel like you're doing that. There is a feeling of "alright, you've pushed me to my limit, time to eat ALL of my food. UNLIMITED POWWWWWEEEERRR!"

The Last Remnant (2008, November 20)
+ Dynamic final boss difficulty. In many JRPGs, the final boss is never the hardest boss in the game, because he has to be beatable by everyone who wants to see the story. So the optional superbosses are the hardest. If you're a hardcore player, then it can be anticlimatic to work so hard to kill the optional superbossess... and then when completing the game, the final boss is a pushover. Well in TLR, the final boss becomes more powerful the more of the game you have completed. If you rush through the game and only do the story, then you can pretty easily beat him. But if you do every quest (and there are A LOT of quests and you can easily miss some, so if you completed them all you're probably a hardcore completionist), and you beat the optional superbosses, then the final boss will be far and away the hardest boss fight in the game.

Lego Universe (2010, October 26)
+ In the player housing, players can program decorations to do things, such as bricks moving up and down to create elevators. Players could do elaborate stuff with this and create minigames on their properties.

Guild Wars 2 (2012, August 28)
+ Downed mechanic: in most games, when your HP reaches 0, you die and have to respawn or reload. Nothing breaks the immersion of your epic experience of being a hero faster than dying and reviving over and over again until you finally beat the boss. In GW2, when your HP reaches 0, you enter into a "downed" state, where a second HP bar pops up and starts slowly dwindling. You can throw dirt at the enemy while bleeding out, and if an enemy is focused on other players long enough, you can heal to full and stand back up. Other players can also come to you and help you get up out of your downed state. For a casual game like GW2, this mechanic is really helpful in that it helps preserve the epic experience while still functionally being a death mechanic (you have died and cannot use your normal abilities to participate in the fight until you are rezzed by someone else, or the fight has ended so you heal yourself to full rather than respawning and running back). It also encourages more player cooperation as players help each other to heal up (sorta like rezzing, but healers aren't the only ones who can rez, but everyone can).
+ Leveling: rather than getting skill points when you level up to spend on a abilities/traits, you must instead head out into the world and complete particular challenges to obtain skill points and mastery points. Ie, platforming to a hard to reach skill point, or solving a puzzle, etc.

Pokemon XY (2013, October 12)
+ If you ride a taxi without enough money to pay the fare, you battle the driver!

The Banner Saga (2014, January 14)
+ Your character's physical strength stat and HP are the same stat, called strength. The more damage your character takes, the less strength they have to move their body, swing their weapon, and deal damage. Avoids the usual RPG problem of combat devolving into "attack, heal, attack, heal" ad infinitum. Strength cannot be healed in TBS, and there is only one single character who can restore armor during combat.

1. One of the Final Fantasy titles had a pretty interesting AI where you can select the tactics strategy to take for companions but forgot which one it was...it was never repeated. (I think it was a Final Fantasy.)

There are two FF games that do this.

FF12 lets you program each character what exactly you want them to do ie. Ie, use a heal spell on anyone below 50% HP. If no one needs to be healed, then cast a fire spell at monsters that are doused in oil. If there are no monsters doused in oil, then douse a monster in oil. Etc. Crystal Chronicles allows you to pick broad, pre-set strategies for characters. Ie, "go nuts with magic" if you want them casting spells.

[wndrbr]

Final Fantasy IX (2000, July 7)
+ Tidus starts out having just picked up a sword for the first time in his life, and his animations reflect that. As the game goes on and Tidus becomes more experienced, his animations show him becoming more adept with wielding his sword. IIRC the only other game I know of that does something like this is Fire Emblem 8.

Gothic series does this as well, your character's combat animations change depending on your skill level.

[aweigh]

Wizardry

- the game saves the game state with every step you take and during every combat round, and you can't manually save the game. It creates a sense of permanence which makes exploration feel more meaningful.

- combat is phase-based; you give every character orders all at once, without foreknowledge of what the enemy will do, and then the characters execute their action. this creates a layer of depth where the player has to pay attention to what's happening and make guesses or gambles instead of simply reacting to what happened.

- a lot of the game's mechanics are black-boxed by design. An example being exactly what helps or hinders a resurrection chance. The player can make educated guesses and will usually be correct (character class, race, age, manner of death), but it's still black-boxed. Most of the inner workings are like that and it creates mystery.

- death is not the end of gameplay. if your party dies "you" return to town and are free to create a new party. you can even rescue your old party member's corpses and take them to get revived, though this is not guaranteed.

It presents an interesting question as to who "you", the player, actually are within the context of the game...

Well, not really, no one cares about that because we all know it's just a game. But I wanted to write that sentence and feel like an asshole for typing it XD

[rusty_shackleford]

Final Fantasy IX (2000, July 7)
+ Tidus starts out having just picked up a sword for the first time in his life, and his animations reflect that. As the game goes on and Tidus becomes more experienced, his animations show him becoming more adept with wielding his sword. IIRC the only other game I know of that does something like this is Fire Emblem 8.

Gothic series does this as well, your character's combat animations change depending on your skill level.

This actually has a gameplay effect too

[Nooneatall]

Good theme for a thread. A list would be interesting.

1. One of the Final Fantasy titles had a pretty interesting AI where you can select the tactics strategy to take for companions but forgot which one it was...it was never repeated. (I think it was a Final Fantasy.)

2. Not only in RPGs but asymmetry is usually pretty lacking.

Some guy rewrote pong so that one paddle is like this ___________________ and the other paddle is like this __. (MIT Press said wow amazing and published a book about it.)

So what ever happened to games where class X is easier to play and learn to play and overall just better and stronger than class Y? But then X lacks some of the really fun or cool things that can be done by Y and only by Y? Even though playing as Y is plain harder and not optimal. Merely cool.

Any RPGs with really asymmetric lack of balance in character creation that still worked?

Gothic 2 to some extent but it's balanced by the fact that mages become more powerful near the end. What about completely and obviously unbalanced?

The destroyed it because it was too fun. Everything is about "balance" now so you can't have an easy class for beginners and a hard class for experienced classes. Now you get a set of weak boring classes that all do the same stuff, but the enemies are also weak so you still get through the game (movie)

[gerey]

Does Alpha Protocol's dialogue wheel count, or does the credit go to BioWare, with Obsidian's sole accomplishment being them finding out how to make the idea worse?

[rusty_shackleford]

Imagine if we didn't have playtesters and focus groups, we'd have all kinds of cool mechanics.
Reminds me of Anthem, the failed bioware game. The only mechanic worth mentioning was the flight, and the only reason they kept it in was to not piss off an EA executive. The EA exec came to their office to test the game right before they were about to remove the feature, and he commented how much he loved the flying, so they felt obligated to keep it in.

[gerey]

Imagine if we didn't have playtesters and focus groups, we'd have all kinds of cool mechanics.

I blame less the playtesters, and more developres for listening to the input of mouthbreathers.

Did Valve really need to change that antlion cave section just because one retard kept running in circles?

Did Arkane really need to modify parts of Dishonored just because some playtesters were too stupid to figure out a guard not telling them to go somewhere is not an order to be followed (in a stealth game where you are a fugitive)?

Catering to the dumbest fuckwits in the audience is a choice.

Reminds me of Titanfall, the failed bioware game

You mean Anthem?

The game was doomed from the start, BioWare certainly did not have the experience or infrastructure to make and maintain an always-online looter shooter.

[rusty_shackleford]

You mean Anthem?

Woops, yep.

The game was doomed from the start, BioWare certainly did not have the experience or infrastructure to make and maintain an always-online looter shooter.

They did, it was just at their other studio that was already running an MMORPG. Bioware had no business making another GaaS.

Very reminiscent of Bethesda doing the exact same thing with FO76 when their sister developer Zenimax Online was already operating Elder Scrolls Online.

[1998]

When I first played NWN I really liked the radial menu, I thought that would become the new norm. Now I just hate it...

[rusty_shackleford]

When I first played NWN I really liked the radial menu, I thought that would become the new norm. Now I just hate it...

Radial menus are perfection!

[1998]

When I first played NWN I really liked the radial menu, I thought that would become the new norm. Now I just hate it...

Radial menus are perfection!

That one works better for sure, at least its spelling out things. NWN all you get is icons you need to memorize.

[rusty_shackleford]

When I first played NWN I really liked the radial menu, I thought that would become the new norm. Now I just hate it...

Radial menus are perfection!

Ah man, forgot SWG

[rusty_shackleford]

@Kalarion we need to play SWG sometime, all three versions.

[Nooneatall]

@Kalarion we need to play SWG sometime, all three versions.

Let me know when you guys are going to play that's one of my favorite games.

[asf]

i might play swg, if it is the original version

[J1M]

There's an RPG where you lose levels as you gain XP. Can't remember the name.

So essentially the game discourages combat and the difficulty increases over time which can be mitigated by understanding the systems.

As you can imagine this will not ever be a mainstream feature.

[rusty_shackleford]

There's an RPG where you lose levels as you gain XP. Can't remember the name.

[Irenaeus]

Reminds me of getting old.