Thozmp
Gets my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
I'll be honest, any game I've played that has it, I usually set it to "wait" instead of the other option. I've never really had a problem with it.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
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Gradually becoming weaker is actually cool and based on a game (or if you want to be a boring, boring person , make scenarios variated but escalating so you're effectively weaker, ie difficulty is increasing and tactical tedium doesn't increase).
FF8 problem is that you don't get weaker (if you want lol) in a interesting way, just in the same framework as the whole ATB system and when they switch to the flip stravaganza in later games, the arena keep away game, and frankly speaking this is endemic to all square games where even their attempts to "heighten excitment" depend on mechanics introduced in the very start of the game (obscurely) and puzzle bosses, NOT anything scenario based (if you don't count puzzle 1-4 bosses). To the point that a gamer weaned on only this kind of game may think that "this is how you design a game". Even FFT disdains mid battle objective changes (I don't remember all of it, but bosses aside, even enemy reinforcements iirc), the most basic tool of a strategy\tactics game to challenge a gamer.
Of course you can design fine entertaining games this way, but for a company that prides itself on trying things, I feel random battles is something they should have replaced by all setpiece battles at least once. Other, competitor, large games like growlanser IV or radiant historia or legend of heroes managed.
What I'm saying is that square innovates; learnable combos in xenogears, parasite eve various combat systems, heck Bushido Blade crazy ass honor, 1-2 hits kills system, but their games lack that "wow" factor of a satisfying whole game combat experience. What you see at the beginning is what you get, +\- some bells and whistles, and the difficulty curve stays gentle (screwups like no-enc + level fixed dragon encounters aside). And boy are you going to see those bells and whistles a lot, if they don't happen to only become available 3 hours before the end.
And no puzzle bosses with a gazillion HP are not the kind of satisfying combat experience I'm talking about.
FF8 problem is that you don't get weaker (if you want lol) in a interesting way, just in the same framework as the whole ATB system and when they switch to the flip stravaganza in later games, the arena keep away game, and frankly speaking this is endemic to all square games where even their attempts to "heighten excitment" depend on mechanics introduced in the very start of the game (obscurely) and puzzle bosses, NOT anything scenario based (if you don't count puzzle 1-4 bosses). To the point that a gamer weaned on only this kind of game may think that "this is how you design a game". Even FFT disdains mid battle objective changes (I don't remember all of it, but bosses aside, even enemy reinforcements iirc), the most basic tool of a strategy\tactics game to challenge a gamer.
Of course you can design fine entertaining games this way, but for a company that prides itself on trying things, I feel random battles is something they should have replaced by all setpiece battles at least once. Other, competitor, large games like growlanser IV or radiant historia or legend of heroes managed.
What I'm saying is that square innovates; learnable combos in xenogears, parasite eve various combat systems, heck Bushido Blade crazy ass honor, 1-2 hits kills system, but their games lack that "wow" factor of a satisfying whole game combat experience. What you see at the beginning is what you get, +\- some bells and whistles, and the difficulty curve stays gentle (screwups like no-enc + level fixed dragon encounters aside). And boy are you going to see those bells and whistles a lot, if they don't happen to only become available 3 hours before the end.
And no puzzle bosses with a gazillion HP are not the kind of satisfying combat experience I'm talking about.
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The real sin of the ATB is that it forces a layer of obfuscation to the mechanics for no benefit. If you play it 'perfectly' then it's just fucking turn based! But bad turn based.
Because some FF's have enemies randomly decide to not act, or sometimes give them free actions in response to your own, or other such bullshit, you have no clue what the enemies are actually doing.
You don't see their ATB, and you have no context on when you input your actions who is actually going to act, and you can't plan around your enemies actions because maybe your ATB fills up in 8 seconds and theirs in 7, so you think it's rotating turns until suddenly they get two actions in a row.
If you want to add in some action or timing to the game system, you can do this without being fucking stupid. FF8 even has three and a half examples! And games like Shadow Hearts series builds their entire combat system around adding a timing minigame to every action.
But ATB is just fucking useless. It adds nothing but jank to existing systems, and both wastes your time and gives you options to fuck up, and not even in an interesting difficult way.
Fuck it and every game that uses it when they're just making a turn-based game.
Because some FF's have enemies randomly decide to not act, or sometimes give them free actions in response to your own, or other such bullshit, you have no clue what the enemies are actually doing.
You don't see their ATB, and you have no context on when you input your actions who is actually going to act, and you can't plan around your enemies actions because maybe your ATB fills up in 8 seconds and theirs in 7, so you think it's rotating turns until suddenly they get two actions in a row.
If you want to add in some action or timing to the game system, you can do this without being fucking stupid. FF8 even has three and a half examples! And games like Shadow Hearts series builds their entire combat system around adding a timing minigame to every action.
But ATB is just fucking useless. It adds nothing but jank to existing systems, and both wastes your time and gives you options to fuck up, and not even in an interesting difficult way.
Fuck it and every game that uses it when they're just making a turn-based game.
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And like, if you insist on having a visual element for how your speed is affecting a character's turns, you don't even need ATB, just use turn based but have a visual initiative queue somewhere on screen. When the fast character is visibly getting three actions per action from that big slow monster over the next X actions, you can see at a glance how fast each entity is and better plan ahead at the same time.
I've said it before, but more than anything else ATB feels like the game developers are ashamed of turn based gameplay and are desperate to distance themselves from it.
I've said it before, but more than anything else ATB feels like the game developers are ashamed of turn based gameplay and are desperate to distance themselves from it.
It's interesting with how much Final Fantasy has changed things up each game, ATB has stayed so consistent since 4.
Octopath Traveler rerolls turn order every round that goes by, meaning that a high-speed character will float to the top of the turn order more often on average. Heck, sometimes this encourages unique play patterns - Ophilia, who has high stats except for a glaring weakness in speed, makes an interesting damage dealer depending on her build because you know your buffs and debuffs will land before she gets a turn. And because her base class is Cleric, you know that her going later allows her to heal off damage that is likely to have accumulated from enemy actions. And there are skills that interact with turn order, such as the simple Defend command that pulls a character to the start of the next round's turn order.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
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- Italy
Yeah, paired with giving most enemies fixed levels (I'd keep the scaling level for optional GF like Diablos, Cerberus and Bahamut, but modified so that they're specifically scaled to the highest level on the team, so they're always a challenge), doubling the power of most magic (and probably removing the damage cap from Ultima), combined with a slight increase in stats (let's say that level 100 characters have stats around 70-80, rather than the 30-40 they have in the game as it exists) would help a lot in making using magic useful in a "ok, I need big damage NOW" sense. Especially if paired with an ability like the "+20 stock" I mentioned earlier.
And, of course, having visible turns instead of the ATB would also help; if nothing else, the whole "skip turn to reload the chance of Limit Break" is an issue that would not exist (or at least carry some cost, if players had a "delay turn" equivalent option) in a pure turn based system.
Radiant Historia also does fun stuff with dynamic turns. Your characters get to trade their turns with both their allies and their enemies and there are lots of neat tricks that can be done whenever your party gets consecutive turns.
So the actual gameplay experience consists of constantly questioning whether you can afford to grant initiative to your opponent to set up a sick combo later.
So the actual gameplay experience consists of constantly questioning whether you can afford to grant initiative to your opponent to set up a sick combo later.
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So basically what you're saying is that the turn based system of FFX is actually the best in the entire series, as I've always suspected. Good to know.
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The one potential advantage of ATB I can think of is the ability to delay a specific character's turn to go immediately after another character, just for that turn. For example, say Quistis is slower than Squall, so Squall's ATB fills up faster, but we want to use Quistis to cast Aura on Squall first. So Squall delays until Quistis casts Aura, then he can immediately go Limit Break.
Unfortunately, this is undermined by a few factors: this method really doesn't need the ATB system, and can be done just as well on a timeline or volley turn-based system. It's just not common to see there because... I don't know, balance or coding or something. It's a very common tactic in tabletop RPGs, to delay action until some conditional, and the human DM usually knows what that means, while game code might need special case coding.
Secondly, the vast majority of fights in the Final Fantasy series just... don't need to do that? As commented earlier, there are almost no battles where delaying your turn is beneficial compared to just going, apart from gimmick fights. One could try going for the Crew-Served Yda option against Warmech, but at that point might as well let Yda punch on her turn (or Defend, if there is a counterattack mechanic), have the others buff her on theirs, then Yda can super-punch on her next turn.
Unfortunately, this is undermined by a few factors: this method really doesn't need the ATB system, and can be done just as well on a timeline or volley turn-based system. It's just not common to see there because... I don't know, balance or coding or something. It's a very common tactic in tabletop RPGs, to delay action until some conditional, and the human DM usually knows what that means, while game code might need special case coding.
Secondly, the vast majority of fights in the Final Fantasy series just... don't need to do that? As commented earlier, there are almost no battles where delaying your turn is beneficial compared to just going, apart from gimmick fights. One could try going for the Crew-Served Yda option against Warmech, but at that point might as well let Yda punch on her turn (or Defend, if there is a counterattack mechanic), have the others buff her on theirs, then Yda can super-punch on her next turn.
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I mean, there is the fairly common use case of "character A got KOed, gotta have character B rez and then character C heal before they can be killed again", which a lot of turn based games don't allow for any certainty of pulling off.
No argument from me, certainly. FFX even has the ablative-armor summons like FF8, except the summons do more than act as an additional HP bar until you use the big blast!
Wiadi
Uncompromising Radical Leftist
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I'm finding all this ATB discussion mildly baffling because, like...it's speed chess. It's just speed chess. The standout feature of ATB in specific isn't that it makes the speed stat matter or allows delayed actions or whatever, it's that it forces quick decision-making. You don't have to like that feature but it feels very weird to be treating it like some unfortunate side effect rather than, y'know, The Point.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
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- Italy
I'm sure everybody understand that this is the point of ATB. Most people just think that's a bad system to select as the base mechanic when building an RPG.
I, of course, dislike it in chess as well. Losing a game due to timeout when you were dominating the game because you took the time to think your moves through while your opponent is operating from memory or just playing delaying action doesn't feel like a earned loss to me.
I, of course, dislike it in chess as well. Losing a game due to timeout when you were dominating the game because you took the time to think your moves through while your opponent is operating from memory or just playing delaying action doesn't feel like a earned loss to me.
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The implementation of ATB (as Final Fantasy does it, at least) kind of undermines that, though.
There's always (as far as I know in the games, no idea if they change it in later games) an "Active" option and a "Wait" option. If you use the "Wait" option, everything pauses when you go into a menu, which means the "quick decision-making" part is negated. You can open the Item menu on reflex (or just select Attack and leave the targeting cursor on the enemy), and then spend as much time as you want to ponder your actual next action.
So the "Active" option is supposedly the "proper" option for speed chess. But due to the nature of Final Fantasy's UI, it's not exactly speed chess. It's speed chess where you can only control a robot arm using a basic joystick to pick up the pieces. The "Wait" option is necessary because Final Fantasy's UI involves a lot of paging through menus, and the speed chess clock is ticking all the while. This becomes very obvious in cases like FFXI, where there is no "Wait" option (due to being a MMORPG), and yet everything is still menu-based, while there is technically an ATB-like system hidden in the background. From what I've seen through streamers, FFXI veterans who play on PC (and thus keyboard and mouse) don't bother much with the menus, and instead just type in commands like "/ac Hagakure".
It's speed chess via an awkward interface. Mitigating for that awkward interface (the "Wait" option) makes it no longer speed chess, while still having the miscellaneous drawbacks of ATB.
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If the 'speed chess' thing was true, then whey does 6, 7, 8, and 9 all have 'wait' menu option that freezes ATB while you're in a menu? That's 2/3rds of all ATB final fantasies, and every one of the most modern ones. It proves that it's not about forcing players to act quickly, and still maintains all the downsides that using this system inflicts.
There's no rest of the players like in a multiplayer game or some limited time resource you're using up, and the 'hurry up and be fast!' is just obscuring the, often tedious and boring, gameplay that's in the majority of the combat fights. Considering how long spell or monster attack animations get, it can turn into a real-time-with-pause start and stop situation.
And if you wanted players to act faster, and feel tension about missing out and play the game under time pressure? We already had that system, it's called a timed mission, and FF8 was not shy about putting them the game regularly with extremely hard bosses.
There's no rest of the players like in a multiplayer game or some limited time resource you're using up, and the 'hurry up and be fast!' is just obscuring the, often tedious and boring, gameplay that's in the majority of the combat fights. Considering how long spell or monster attack animations get, it can turn into a real-time-with-pause start and stop situation.
And if you wanted players to act faster, and feel tension about missing out and play the game under time pressure? We already had that system, it's called a timed mission, and FF8 was not shy about putting them the game regularly with extremely hard bosses.
A better example of RPG Speed Chess is Bravely Default with its buffs that last for seconds rather than turns.
Wiadi
Uncompromising Radical Leftist
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I mean, it's a matter of playing the game you're playing, IMO? It's not like you don't know there's a clock, so good play that loses to time isn't actually good play.
This I think is broadly fair, but without getting too speculative, it seems at least plausible to me that this is an issue of a concept being hamstrung by technical details and then being compromised to mitigate them. Though I suppose at that point it might be a pretty minor nitpick to distinguish "ATB has no uniquely valuable features" and "Final Fantasy has never made use of ATB's uniquely valuable features" in this particular thread. Assuming "wait" mode is always offered, at least.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
I'm aware, which is why I stopped playing timed chess; I still know what it felt like to play it when I did, though. We're discussing how the ATB in Final Fantasy feels annoying to use, you compared it to another game that uses a similar system, and I commented that, in my personal experience, that's just as annoying.
I know well that my tastes run in the direction of having the time to plan things out, I'm the one who has been doing their best to present the many ways in which I believe it is possible to find fun in FFVIII's gameplay, which, as was pointed out, is made for spreadsheet-minded people. The ATB being in the game is one of the annoyances the game provides that I aren't able to find a workaround for in the mechanics as presented (instead of the mechanics as I'd have preferred them to be); I was expanding on this opinion of mine.
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It absolutely is, yes. I look forward to Omi getting to X and being able to compare it mechanically to the previous games in the series, I think it'll be a breath of fresh air there.
And when it comes to the speed chess argument, I think part of the issue is I just. Don't go to Final Fantasy to play speed chess? In my mind, FF has always been historically a series with turn based combat, even XI and XII with their ATB in the background sort of system feel close enough to turn based. It's just that it's always been turn based with some weird mechanical fluff on top of it. So ATB feels like the games want me to be playing a different combat system, but with how they're structured I'm still playing turn based, just with some weird mechanical quirks.
XV and XVI finally make cleaner mechanical breaks from their turn based roots, and while I don't like their gameplay they're at least less of a compromise between the gameplay the devs want to build and the turn based roots of thr series.
Personally, my favorite part of speed chess back in the days when I played it was where whenever I took more than 2 seconds to make my decision, my opponent would instantly reach across the table, slap me in the face, then move again even though I hadn't taken my turn yet. The ATB system is very immersive, that way.
Spectral Waltz
Scatterbrained Writer
- Location
- Walking the Endless Corridors
I find it kinda baffling too, though I find speed chess deeply stressful, I like ATB because it frees you from the 'each round everyone goes in order' nonsense. You can have characters be just straight-up faster than others. Someone mentioned an enemy having a 7 second ATB while you have 8 normally? I love that shit, it makes fights more interesting. I love it when a Haste spell actively fills your ATB bar twice as fast. I wish Final fantasy had done more to link ATB and characters' agility or speed stats, making PC actions move at more varied paces.
I do personally prefer wait, where the game hangs while you have menus open rather than forcing you to navigate them while time is still ongoing, but that feels like just a common sense way of implementing it to me. A well-made ATB game should probably also hang on cutscenes like summons and limit breaks to avoid having them disrupt other actions.
But like... Just generally speaking I think ATB is... It's not objectively better or anything? But I think if properly implemented (and I know that phrase is doing a lot of work here) ATB makes RPG combat just straight up more interesting and nuanced. Until I read this thread, it never even occurred to me that anyone could think otherwise, much less that it would receive actual hate.
I mean in part that's because I haven't thought about ATB vs. Non-ATB in years, but still.
It's genuinely confusing to me.
I do personally prefer wait, where the game hangs while you have menus open rather than forcing you to navigate them while time is still ongoing, but that feels like just a common sense way of implementing it to me. A well-made ATB game should probably also hang on cutscenes like summons and limit breaks to avoid having them disrupt other actions.
But like... Just generally speaking I think ATB is... It's not objectively better or anything? But I think if properly implemented (and I know that phrase is doing a lot of work here) ATB makes RPG combat just straight up more interesting and nuanced. Until I read this thread, it never even occurred to me that anyone could think otherwise, much less that it would receive actual hate.
I mean in part that's because I haven't thought about ATB vs. Non-ATB in years, but still.
It's genuinely confusing to me.
RogueIce
Noctis Æternæ
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You know, thinking back, the end of Disc 1 is about where I stopped playing, back in the day. I think I still went a little further, but not much. So this very, very much sums up my experience with FF8.
Always! As I said before, your efforts have allowed me to appreciate better what FF8 had to offer, even if I'll never play it again myself.
Quick question: now that it's all over and you've had a little time, which game do you think was most disserviced by its mechanics: FF2 or FF8?
As was pointed out, you can have all this in a proper turn-based system just by having a queue that fills out based on character speed, so some characters have two turns to enemy's one and the like, and then you can farther add mechanics manipulating your placement in a queue (haste, slow abilities that push your next turn way back, delayed action so you would go right after another character, etc.).
There is just no need for pseudo real time of the FF-style ATB system. The only thing it actually enables is gimmick bosses whose defensive/super-counter stance is divorced from their actions proper, so you can hover over them waiting for the switch and ready to attack, but even that can be done through the queue, just slightly more awkwardly.
So ATB doesn't really add depth compared to other methods, but does add several downsides. The biggest one is that it slows everything down, paradoxically. You have to wait for the gauges to fill in real time, so it's not as responsive as an actual real time system since you spend a lot of time just sitting there waiting for your turn, and it's even slower than normal turn based system since in those ones there is no pause between turns.
It's just frantic enough to be stressful but not dynamic enough to be engaging in a way action games are.
It's the worst of both worlds.
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That's accurate, yes. As mentioned upthread, Chrono Trigger does interesting and useful things with the ATB system. There may be other, further uses for ATB that make it a good choice for the combat system.
Final Fantasy, as we've seen up until now, just doesn't do any of it.
Other games do a sort of pseudo-ATB, but honestly they're just disguised timeline systems. It's essentially auto-Wait mode, where once a character gets to act, the game pauses until the player inputs a command. Examples are Blue Reflection and Child Of Light. I assume they use a fancy gauge because it looks more dynamic than just a timeline of turns, even though it works the same.