The anti-mash Options

[ZarroTsu]

Remove the 'attack' command completely.

Instead, characters start with, and learn, a much larger number of skills than normal.

MP regeneration is optional.


EDIT: This might need to be moved to "Design Critique". Although I fail to see the difference between these two forums.

This post has been edited by ZarroTsu: Nov 4 2012, 07:18 AM

[Ratty524]

... Okay? What solution do you propose for the fact that the player will be lacking of a costless skill that can be used in effort to save up your mana-costing skills?

For me, the problem isn't the attack button itself. If I find that all I need to do is mash attack to defeat an enemy, it means that the enemy itself isn't posing enough of a threat to warrent the use of skills. So the solution, as I propose, is to make enemies smarter. Why not, from the beginning of the game, create enemies that are so high in defense that spamming attack would be an impractical method to kill them? In turn, you might want to create skills that have a low mana cost so that it will encourage the player to switch between making basic attacks and skilling a lot more.

[LockeZ]

... Okay? What solution do you propose for the fact that the player will be lacking of a costless skill that can be used in effort to save up your mana-costing skills?

No one suggested making every skill cost an unreplenishable resource. That's POSSIBLE, of course, but it would probably require you to severely limit the length of your dungeons, or even design the entire game around the idea of fighting until you run out of breath. But there are like a billion ways to do this without encountering this problem, with or without using mana:
- Give the player a variety of free skills that aren't Attack
- Give each character an MP recovery skill
- Create some skills which increase MP while other ones cost MP
- Recover MP gradually each round, or each battle
- Allow the player to recover MP at specific points in dungeons, possibly making each point usable one time only
- Use some other resource instead of MP in your game, such as energy, rage, limit, etc., which recovers on its own by a different method
- Include lots of recovery items, or even attack items, forcing the player to use them if he wants to keep fighting beyond his MP limit
- Fully heal the player after every battle

For me, the problem isn't the attack button itself. If I find that all I need to do is mash attack to defeat an enemy, it means that the enemy itself isn't posing enough of a threat to warrent the use of skills. So the solution, as I propose, is to make enemies smarter. Why not, from the beginning of the game, create enemies that are so high in defense that spamming attack would be an impractical method to kill them? In turn, you might want to create skills that have a low mana cost so that it will encourage the player to switch between making basic attacks and skilling a lot more.

Making enemies take a billion hits isn't a good solution. That doesn't accomplish anything. Making them smarter can help with this, and is always a good idea to do in any case regardless... but if you have a game that allows the player to infinitely grind exp, then at some point he's going to become strong enough that the battles aren't interesting any more. But yeah - if the player can win without thinking, then the player shouldn't be fighting that enemy. If he is fighting it, then either you're giving him enemies that are too easy, or he's stronger than he's supposed to be.

Let's be clear, though: "Attack" is just another physical skill. The only thing that makes it different from any other physical skill is the fact that it has its own spot in the battle command menu. It also happens to be kind of boring. But if a lot of your other skills are equally boring, then getting rid of it isn't inherently helpful. It can still make a slightly more interesting dynamic if you create a resource-conservation game, though.

This post has been edited by LockeZ: Nov 5 2012, 08:44 AM