There are games that already have no random encounters even without cheating.
Like,
Riven
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i have myst and riven both but have yet to play them both because i am a sinner / i have not felt up to puzzle solving
are all the screens in riven pre-rendered? what i’m really enjoying abt my skies of arcadia playthrough is that i can position myself where i want and look where i want to take these screenshots! it’s like going out and taking photos but i don’t have to leave my room
Yes. It’s honestly not the same thing at all and I’m a jerk.
Uru and Myst 5 are both good and fully 3d though. But they’re not Riven good.
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What if they made RealRiven: Masterpiece Edition™
That would be pretty cool. Also, totally doable with Current Technology
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Ehhhhh. I’ve said this elsewhere, but the slideshow/hypercard type games are built around their slideshowiness. Taking the same worlds and allowing you to go through them in full 3d can dilute the puzzles, or make some near impossible to solve. The full 3d Myst games accommodate this difference by making puzzles that require you to get the “shape” of a place, rather than looking down a particular perspective to see how elements form a specific picture.
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riven is a true all-timer. I first played it when it came out when my uncle was nice enough to get an idiot 13 or 14 year old a great video game for his birthday. unfortunately, I was an idiot 13 or 14 year old so I couldn’t figure the game out very well and I gave up. I didn’t play the game all the way though until 5 or 6 years ago, and the intervening years had robbed it of exactly none of its vibrancy.
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Right, I forgot about the shape puzzle clues in Riven.
I guess they could modify the environment a bit to accomodate for the freedom of movement?
Every realtime RPG/adventure game should have a first person mode and let you look around. I loved it in Dragon Quest 8, and I was really bummed the feature wasn’t there for FF15. If there was a game that could benefit from it, it would be that.
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I’m glad someone else has the LAMBDA BURST voice sample stuck in their head, I haven’t touched the game in 16 years and it’s the first thing that comes to mind
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I seriously love movename callouts, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a resurgence of those yet
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Those particular puzzles are very explicit examples, but it extends much further down than that.
A slideshow-style game is made of a comprehensible number of discrete elements. Every screen can be scoured and might contain vital information. As it happens there are of course transitional screens that don’t specifically have any puzzle or even background/narrative information, and you learn to recognize them in time; but in Myst/Riven, anytime you have any kind of “puzzle room” where you have a handful of screens that all combine into one thing you interact with, each of those slides is framed in a particular way to emphasize (or strategically de-emphasize) important information.
A fully 3d game has a practically infinite number of “screens”. You can’t just hide information in any random corner (I call this the “hidden package problem,” referring to GTA3). The environments as a whole have to have a realtime flow that guides the smoothly-moving player to important features. It’s a whole different thing.
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Shoutouts to the preposterously named Lavtiz for being one of the only spear dudes in jrpgs
Rutee’s moves are forever burnt in my mind when it comes to attack calls
Karyl’s aren’t so much callouts, he just bards hilariously hard
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That whole portion of the game where the crew gets separated, and Vyse has his little desert island moment, and then they keep crossing paths over and over – that’s one of my favorite segments in any videogame I’ve ever played.
I only got there once because, yeah, the encounter rate. I’m not too bullish about the random encounter thing in general. I mean, I adore Phantasy Star II. But the encounter rate here does make PSII seem like Animal Crossing by comparison.
That’s the only thing I’ll say against the game, though.
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i owned this on gamecube and i think i only ever played about 30 minutes of it!
anyway, we talkin riven in here?
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i’ve wanted to replay this for awhile, but i don’t think i’d be able to play out all the encounters again. i got frustrated trying to think of a workaround that would cut down on this a bit while still preserving the feel of the game. i don’t want to turn off the battles entirely or end up overpowered, i want to play like 2 hours of random encounters instead of 20.
i ended up flipping through a pdf guide and a wiki site. maybe i should make a thread about this kinda larger jrpg problem
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Yeah that’s the primary deterrent vs replaying a lot of jrpgs. There are some I’d rather not blaze through again with tools or workarounds but unfortunately in Skies’ case, that plodding battle frequency might eclipse the adventure I’d be coming back to. Speeding definitely justified.
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i have a couple emulator workarounds i was thinking of posting about in one place or another, what ones did you have in mind?
i remade this one as a direct reply but it’s saying it’s too similar to something i already posted
You could probably edit the No Random Battles code to lower the encounter rate rather than turn it off entirely, or use that as a reference to make an actual lower encounter rate code.
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