Elminage Gothic - A Unique Gem

Frayed Knights' drama star system did an excellent job of handling risk/reward without adding artificial difficulty via save restrictions. Great job, Jay.

I'm not sure if you are entirely correct about Wiz 1, Roq. Wiz 1 was released at a time when almost no games let you save anywhere. It was more a function of limited PC capabilities rather than deliberate design, IMO.

Originally Posted by gozioso
Frayed Knights' drama star system did an excellent job of handling risk/reward without adding artificial difficulty via save restrictions. Great job, Jay.

I'm not sure if you are entirely correct about Wiz 1, Roq. Wiz 1 was released at a time when almost no games let you save anywhere. It was more a function of limited PC capabilities rather than deliberate design, IMO.

"Artificial Difficulty" ?? Last time I looked you can't save and reload your life (if only!) - you have to live with the decisions you made. Tension and excitement arise from taking risks, but that dissipates when you can simply do something over and over until you get the result you want.

If you look *closely* at Wiz's design you will realise just why it is centralised around a single "town" area. And you can see that design element too in Darkest Dungeons, which is also designed as a team management game and in XCOM, where you have one base to develop the XCOM team. But IMOP XCOM EU makes iron man mode a too hard take it or leave it option, pretty much forcing all but the most die hard players into save scumming modes.

I haven't played Frayed Knights, but I had heard that Jay had come up with an innovative way of making it challenging. There are many approaches, of course, such as staged saves - developers need to come up with just the right formula so that there is a sting, but you don't lose so much that you have to back track for hours.

In my opinion, just allowing unbridled save scumming is very lazy game design. It makes development much easier, because they don't have to balance the game properly (that is the most time consuming thing in game development…). And it is really the main reason why I play MMOs - the death penalty being one of the defining functions of enjoyable gameplay in MMOs, I reckon - something that I really miss in the current crop of single player RPGs, where the world so obviously revolves around the player.

I think one save slot in Elminage Gothic would be a bit *too* hardcore. I understand that the game is meant to have multiple parties, but consider this example from Episode 29 of my Let's Play of the game.

I am in the wind cave Hastrana, which is the most confusing dungeon I've been in yet. It seems to stretch on forever, going down deeper and deeper with no end in sight. I have been saving on the same slot for the past 30 minutes now. Meanwhile, my party is battered and bruised. I'm running out of everything, most importantly, spells. With no end to the cave in sight, I decide I have to get the heck out of there and live to fight another day.

Unfortunately, I went down to the fifth level. Not knowing that this level was *insane mode*, where all the enemies were much stronger, I was forced to try and find a way back up on this level, all the while dodging as many of the encounters as I could. Well, long story short, it turned out to be impossible. I even did some off-camera searching around the place, trying to run from every encounter just so I could explore, but my party would get killed before I got very far.

So, I ended up having to load a previous save that was some 23 minutes back. Reasonable. This is what I signed up for, and would be a great argument for limited saving. I can live with having to backtrack 23 minutes.

Too hardcore? Well, if I would have to use Roq's method of one save slot, either that party that I spent close to 40 hours with thus far would be lost forever, or I'd have to send in a secondary party to retrieve them. Problem is, the secondary characters I had weren't even leveled up yet, so they would never survive or make it that far. So, I would end up having to spend another 40 hours (!) to level them up, just to allow them to bring supplies to my original party. Unreasonable.

My idea would be simply timed save limits, such as Bard's Tale IV is going to use. Or, perhaps, limited use Save Stones. They could be in a special bag so they don't take up inventory space and you could carry one stack of 20 of them per dungeon. So, you'd have to limit your saves accordingly. Or, which is probably the saner answer, just limit saves to 15-20-30 minutes apart. Therefore you still have the risk of losing some game time if you aren't careful, but you don't run the risk of completely failing the game and losing your party forever.

@Fluent - Yes I agree, EG is very hard with only one save slot, probably unreasonably so. The problem is modern games that pay lip service to iron man gaming mechanisms in an attmept to be "hard core" fall between two stools - because they implement the iron man mechanism and then balance the game for save scumming.

There is a way to play to EG in the old style though. You need to maintain several parties. The idea then is to use your *weakest* party to explore unknown territory, so that you always have a strong team as backup (and close behind) to extract characters when things go awry and you can swap characters between parties to get them the hell out. That is just how hard core players used to tackle early Wiz in fact. I only experimented with this a bit, so can't say if it works throughout the whole game. And the whole thing is a little bit cumbersome for a modern game - something I don't put up with so much these days.

Hand held gaming had this problem solved a decade ago. Both Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Fire Emblem had limited saving that prevented save scumming. If you tried the quick save during battle, then you were returned to the title screen. When you loaded the quick save, you are returned to the battle but the quick save is erased. IMO this is the perfect balance between save anywhere and save in town only.

Don't know why more CRPG designers don't implement this save system.

Main problem with this game is the general underwhelming experience you get at first : blend look, clunky interface(remember this was a PSP game after all) and lack of direction as what to do and how it work. but if you give it time and you like hard unforgiving dungeon crawler, I thing it is a definite must play. It will grow on you and will become a highly addictive game if you give it time. I've played it for more then 100 hours so it will keep you busy for a while.

Originally Posted by Nephologist
Hand held gaming had this problem solved a decade ago. Both Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Fire Emblem had limited saving that prevented save scumming. If you tried the quick save during battle, then you were returned to the title screen. When you loaded the quick save, you are returned to the battle but the quick save is erased. IMO this is the perfect balance between save anywhere and save in town only.

Don't know why more CRPG designers don't implement this save system.

Interesting. I would have to play with that system myself to get a feel for it and really understand it better.

Originally Posted by lunnar
Main problem with this game is the general underwhelming experience you get at first : blend look, clunky interface(remember this was a PSP game after all) and lack of direction as what to do and how it work. but if you give it time and you like hard unforgiving dungeon crawler, I thing it is a definite must play. It will grow on you and will become a highly addictive game if you give it time. I've played it for more then 100 hours so it will keep you busy for a while.

Yep! It does have a clueless start where you don't know how things work and it never really fully explains things, but stick with it and it becomes an addictive, must-play title. It really challenges you, even with the save anywhere system.

Originally Posted by Roq
@Fluent - Yes I agree, EG is very hard with only one save slot, probably unreasonably so. The problem is modern games that pay lip service to iron man gaming mechanisms in an attmept to be "hard core" fall between two stools - because they implement the iron man mechanism and then balance the game for save scumming.

There is a way to play to EG in the old style though. You need to maintain several parties. The idea then is to use your *weakest* party to explore unknown territory, so that you always have a strong team as backup (and close behind) to extract characters when things go awry and you can swap characters between parties to get them the hell out. That is just how hard core players used to tackle early Wiz in fact. I only experimented with this a bit, so can't say if it works throughout the whole game. And the whole thing is a little bit cumbersome for a modern game - something I don't put up with so much these days.

In theory it sounds alright, but it also requires a lot of excess grinding it seems. I don't mind creating secondary parties, and considered it when I got stuck in Hastrana, but I'm not sure if I'm up for the grinding of levels to get them to a respectable level to survive the more difficult dungeons. I like that the option is there, I'm just not sure if I'll ever use it.

Originally Posted by Roq
"Artificial Difficulty" ?? Last time I looked you can't save and reload your life (if only!) - you have to live with the decisions you made. Tension and excitement arise from taking risks, but that dissipates when you can simply do something over and over until you get the result you want
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In my opinion, just allowing unbridled save scumming is very lazy game design. It makes development much easier, because they don't have to balance the game properly (that is the most time consuming thing in game development…). And it is really the main reason why I play MMOs - the death penalty being one of the defining functions of enjoyable gameplay in MMOs, I reckon - something that I really miss in the current crop of single player RPGs, where the world so obviously revolves around the player.

People play games for different reasons. I have never cared much about games emulating real life. I play games for fun. What you might consider to be "tense and exciting", I might consider to be utterly tedious. There is a very slippery slope between realism and fun. Very few games get it right. The best games have adjustable settings that can satisfy both of us.

Another thing to consider is age. When I was younger, I had far greater tolerance for tedious gameplay. Now that I am in my 40's, I am focused on pure enjoyment.

Originally Posted by gozioso
I am focused on pure enjoyment.

I don't think there is any such thing. All temporal art forms: music, films, novels, computer games are journeys that are based on tension and it's resolution, which happens over time. Without the tension you don't get to experience the catharsis of the resolution. I am sure, for instance, that just being served a steady stream of vignettes from films where the two lovers are finally reconciled would be enough to make anyone sick… Enjoyment *is* overcoming adversity, whether on your own part or that of the surrogates you watch on a film or play in a computer game. Without adversity there is no enjoyment.

That is a point of view that suit players who long for a feeling of achievement and that is favourable to game designers.

It is a limited view on gaming though and the best part of it, it advocates the cause of a behaviour that was previously condemned.

Gaming is not about overcoming an adversity, gaming is about gaming. And that includes providing enjoyment whether a gamer succeeds or fails.

When advocating for enjoyment by overcoming the adversity, it means that, by design, a gameplay must be attached to the overcoming phase.
It sort of cuts in half the work of a game design who must bother only on that side.

It follows that players who save and reload have understood the design and behave properly: every time they fall on the wrong side, the side when they do not overcome the adversity, they put themselves back on the track of enjoyment.
They cut down on the non enjoyable experiment and seek the enjoyable part of the game.