Dear Christopher Park

[BobTheJanitor]

Very odd on the forums capitalizing your username all of a sudden.  Not sure what the deal is with that.

Fairly certain you used to be x4000 and not X4000. Some gubbins in the new theme doing it maybe?

[Coppermantis]

Very odd on the forums capitalizing your username all of a sudden.  Not sure what the deal is with that.

Fairly certain you used to be x4000 and not X4000. Some gubbins in the new theme doing it maybe?

I still see x4000, but I'm still using the old theme.

[x4000]

Okay, fixed.  Just so that I remember, if ever something happens to cause this again:

I changed the following:

Code: [Select]

.poster h4, .poster h4 a
{
color: #D5BC61;
text-transform: capitalize;
}
to:

Code: [Select]

.poster h4, .poster h4 a
{
color: #D5BC61;
}
in index.css in the css folder of the new theme.

[eRe4s3r]

much appreciated, stupid default settings eh ;p

Now that that's fixed, about making DK3....  (I really do NOT like the smilies in the new theme ,p)

[keith.lamothe]

DK3 is badly needed, Dungeons didn't do it.  But it'd need to be pretty different thematically, I don't really do "gratuitously encourage player evil" things   Though perhaps the AI would disagree with that claim.

[eRe4s3r]

Mhh, but a new Dungeon Keeper would need to be dark and grim and evil + evil humor

If Dungeon Keeper 3 would be done proper, maybe it could be a 2 factions in 2 worlds kind of game, the overworld trying to build nice beautiful settlements and spreading good, and the dungeon heart spreading evil and chicken.

That way, the overworld player could send heroes into the dungeon to gain prestige or goodness, or chickens. And the evil player would need to do the opposite (dig into the cellars of homes and infesting them with chickens, and evil)

Ah, mhh... well its not *easy* to make DK3 thats for sure, it would have to be rated M for Mature too, Dungeons mainly fails because everything is so bright, colorful and stupidly non-serious - and its rated TEEN (TEEN ! a game about DUNGEONS and torture and fighting, is rated TEEN, BLEH). While DK is mainly a very grim and dark theme...

I was anyway massively dissatisfied with Dungeons (lengthy discussion on Bluesnews about this game too) they just removed everything good about DK and replaced it with not fun things. Starting with the Dungeon Avatar (which is like a total fail, in Dungeon Keeper the Dungeon itself is your avatar, you are the over-evil after all, not 1 guy on a throne, you are the entire realm of evil) - and then the gameplay which is a sort of tower defense time management game, urgh ;/

[relmz32]

A) Some kind of turn based primarily social/religious(or some other aspect other than warfare) 4x game would be really really cool.

B) I think you guys could make a great 4x game regardless of setting! Some different primary mechanical way to win a 4x (other than warfare) would potentially be very refreshing.

and C) FFT for the iPhone is out?!? Awesome! I have SoM, and the only disappointing thing is no multiplayer as far as i know.

[Wingflier]

Major fan of the Final Fantasy: Tactics games here.

Me, too.  Keith likes Brigandine and others more, but I'm quite pleased FFT just came out for iPhone.  FFTA was also great, FFTA2 was less so to me.

OMG Chris I love you <3

Please make the spiritual successor the Final Fantasy Tactics game on PC.  God I loved FFT so much as a kid.  I used to make my parents rent it for me so much from Blockbuster that they just went ahead and bought it for me because they were wasting so much money lol.  I played that game for such a long time, there are so many good memories from it.

To this day, I don't feel like anybody has made a true sequel to the game.  Even FFTA was a disappointment compared to the original game (what, with this clunky rule system, different races, and abilities based on weaponry???).  I would never have imagined that 15 years later not a single company would have stepped up to the plate, but all I've seen is disappointment after disappointment in this genre.

I know you guys could make the best spiritual successor to date and I would love you for it.

I've thought about this a lot, how to modernize the FFT idea while still keeping true to its roots and all the aspects that made it wonderful.  This list I came up with was:

1.  Keep the amazing and hugely diverse class system that had so many trees and branches for making a unique and individual team of "heroes".  Specifically, the ability to have a secondary job was just awesome, and really added to the complexity of the game.

2.  Keep the directional-based combat mechanic.  So higher chance to hit from the back, lower from the sides, and lowest from the front.  To this day, I have not seen a single game replicate this.

3.  Add cooperative play to the game.  The one thing I missed the most when I was a kid was he ability to enjoy the experience with other people.  To be able to play a FFT-esque game, or run through the campaign with a friend or two by my side would bring me tears of joy. 

3b. Simultaneous team turns option.  Unfortunately these games can take quite a while with many people playing, but if a team has good coordination I don't see why they can't take all their turns at once.  Especially in modern-day gaming where people are often in Ventrilo or some other voice-chat type program, it's not unreasonable at all to think that small-scale coordination like this would be possible (and much easier than real-time tactics games like MOBAs are today).  Obviously this could be optional for the people who like the more massive turn-by-turn based game (which can take hours or even days), but some people like to finish a game in one sitting.

4.  Powerful AI.  And this is why you guys would be the conqueror of the genre.  Making a deep, powerful, and challenging AI-opponent that can utilize a variety of tactics and strategy would increase the enjoyment and longevity of the game by an unbelievable amount, and after what I've seen from AI War, I know you guys could do it.  How fun would it be to get together your best group of friends and tackle a powerful AI opponent on one of the hardest difficulties over a several hour campaign where the final battle comes down to the wire?  How refreshing would it be to have an AI opponent that tricked you and surprised you (and your friends) with clever strategies and unexpected attacks?  It makes me giddy just thinking about it.

5.  Point-based balance system.  This is something that I believe is absolutely necessary for a game of this nature.  One of the problems with the original FFT is that there was no reason to stay with the lower-level classes (or "jobs") once you had access to the higher, better ones.  Unfortunately, this killed a lot of the potential diversity of the game, and made most classes simply a stepping stone to the "next best thing".  Something that could do wonders in a game like this is a "point-based balance system" where your team, based on their classes, items, and skills, would accumulate a "power rating".  The more powerful an individual character (and thus a team), the higher the power rating would be.  For each game (at least in multiplayer), you could set a power rating threshold, so that a team's power could not go above that.  In this way, you would force players to diversify their lineup instead of just sticking with the obvious best choice, which is the highest-tier stuff.  For example, one player might have 2 Ninja that are so powerful on their own that they reach the threshold, and another player has 5 Knights that are less powerful individually, so he gets a bigger team.  This would encourage you to use the lower-tier stuff, or mix and match the best possible combination of classes, while keeping things relatively balanced.

Anyway, I know a game like this is probably a long ways off, I just wanted to share my ideas and thoughts about the genre, and how it could be maintained and improved upon.  If nothing else, it's something to think about for the future.

I love you guys and I hope that one day it becomes a reality!

[x4000]

1.  Keep the amazing and hugely diverse class system that had so many trees and branches for making a unique and individual team of "heroes".  Specifically, the ability to have a secondary job was just awesome, and really added to the complexity of the game.

Yeah, these were things I loved in the original, too.  I wouldn't just want to make a spiritual successor, I'd want to really expand upon what they were doing, but this would definitely be an element.  In all honesty I felt like there were too few meaningful abilities in the FFT games, so that's one thing I'd want to address.  Another was that all the battlefields were a bit same-y in terms of size after a while.  Giant battlefields aren't appropriate for a game like this, but introducing more oddly shaped battlefields with bottlenecks and so on, and larger things (like trees or skyscrapers in size) that prevent players from shooting around or over or through certain tiles would make the battlefields seem larger without actually being so.  I really like the tiered terrain system, too.

2.  Keep the directional-based combat mechanic.  So higher chance to hit from the back, lower from the sides, and lowest from the front.  To this day, I have not seen a single game replicate this.

Yeah, FFTA and so on also did this, and it's something I also really love.

3.  Add cooperative play to the game.  The one thing I missed the most when I was a kid was he ability to enjoy the experience with other people.  To be able to play a FFT-esque game, or run through the campaign with a friend or two by my side would bring me tears of joy. 

3b. Simultaneous team turns option.  Unfortunately these games can take quite a while with many people playing, but if a team has good coordination I don't see why they can't take all their turns at once.  Especially in modern-day gaming where people are often in Ventrilo or some other voice-chat type program, it's not unreasonable at all to think that small-scale coordination like this would be possible (and much easier than real-time tactics games like MOBAs are today).  Obviously this could be optional for the people who like the more massive turn-by-turn based game (which can take hours or even days), but some people like to finish a game in one sitting.

You know how we love co-op here.   And yeah, having simultaneous team turns would be about the only way I'd be able to enjoy it.

4.  Powerful AI.  And this is why you guys would be the conqueror of the genre.  Making a deep, powerful, and challenging AI-opponent that can utilize a variety of tactics and strategy would increase the enjoyment and longevity of the game by an unbelievable amount, and after what I've seen from AI War, I know you guys could do it.  How fun would it be to get together your best group of friends and tackle a powerful AI opponent on one of the hardest difficulties over a several hour campaign where the final battle comes down to the wire?  How refreshing would it be to have an AI opponent that tricked you and surprised you (and your friends) with clever strategies and unexpected attacks?  It makes me giddy just thinking about it.

This is actually kind of a funny thing, but our existing AI War work wouldn't have much bearing here.  The reason is that the realtime games have incredibly high number of possible "board states," and thus incredibly huge numbers of possible outcomes.  Our AI is focused around realtime decision making in that sort of context.  By contrast, a turn-based game on a pretty small board is a lot more like doing Chess AI -- or the AI in Tidalis, although that even had some realtime components to it.

As with a Chess AI, this one of those sorts of situations where the AI can just calculate all the various possible moves it could make, all the moves you could then make, and then determine which has the best chance of success and the least chance of you being able to do something really bad to it in turn.  That's theoretically simple, but computationally intense -- which is why Chess AIs that play grandmasters take a mainframe supercomputer to run.  We'd thus have to come up with some sort of hybridized approach that is a bit more intuitive, making "leaps of faith" onto what it thinks will be the best move rather than literally seeing all 12 moves ahead or whatever -- which is closer to how a human thinks, anyhow.

So in a lot of respects this would be a whole new AI challenge, because all that stuff with emergent behavior and so on wouldn't apply at all here.  Some of the lessons would, but on the whole this would be a whole new (and pretty interesting) technical challenge to delve into.  One big advantage that we have over, say, FFT, is that we're running this on modern PCs and so we can tap into all that power.  This would even be a case where it makes PERFECT sense to have the AI scale to n number of cores, n being however many you have.  This is a textbook example of a sort of game where you can easily divide up the processing work into any reasonable number of batch jobs all to be processed in parallel.  The big limiter would probably be the heap size of 800mb in Unity, although we could work with that.

5.  Point-based balance system.  This is something that I believe is absolutely necessary for a game of this nature.  One of the problems with the original FFT is that there was no reason to stay with the lower-level classes (or "jobs") once you had access to the higher, better ones.  Unfortunately, this killed a lot of the potential diversity of the game, and made most classes simply a stepping stone to the "next best thing".  Something that could do wonders in a game like this is a "point-based balance system" where your team, based on their classes, items, and skills, would accumulate a "power rating".  The more powerful an individual character (and thus a team), the higher the power rating would be.  For each game (at least in multiplayer), you could set a power rating threshold, so that a team's power could not go above that.  In this way, you would force players to diversify their lineup instead of just sticking with the obvious best choice, which is the highest-tier stuff.  For example, one player might have 2 Ninja that are so powerful on their own that they reach the threshold, and another player has 5 Knights that are less powerful individually, so he gets a bigger team.  This would encourage you to use the lower-tier stuff, or mix and match the best possible combination of classes, while keeping things relatively balanced.

Clever!  I really like that, too.  Having all the classes be useful long-term is definitely a good thing.  Having more counters from class to class would also encourage that same sort of thing without including limiters.  So if you made a lineup of all offensive mages, and they are naturally weak to melee weapons, then a melee opposing team will chew threw them -- encouraging you more naturally not to specialize quite to that degree.  Anyway, there are a number of ways that could go, but I really agree it's important to make older classes not get obsolete.

Anyway, I know a game like this is probably a long ways off, I just wanted to share my ideas and thoughts about the genre, and how it could be maintained and improved upon.  If nothing else, it's something to think about for the future.

I love you guys and I hope that one day it becomes a reality!

Thanks!

[Wingflier]

I'm so glad we are on the same page about this.  I've wanted a new FFT-type game since I was a kid, and it's broken my heart to see that the few companies that have tried have failed in several fundamental ways.

This is actually kind of a funny thing, but our existing AI War work wouldn't have much bearing here.  The reason is that the realtime games have incredibly high number of possible "board states," and thus incredibly huge numbers of possible outcomes.  Our AI is focused around realtime decision making in that sort of context.  By contrast, a turn-based game on a pretty small board is a lot more like doing Chess AI -- or the AI in Tidalis, although that even had some realtime components to it.

As with a Chess AI, this one of those sorts of situations where the AI can just calculate all the various possible moves it could make, all the moves you could then make, and then determine which has the best chance of success and the least chance of you being able to do something really bad to it in turn.  That's theoretically simple, but computationally intense -- which is why Chess AIs that play grandmasters take a mainframe supercomputer to run.  We'd thus have to come up with some sort of hybridized approach that is a bit more intuitive, making "leaps of faith" onto what it thinks will be the best move rather than literally seeing all 12 moves ahead or whatever -- which is closer to how a human thinks, anyhow.

So in a lot of respects this would be a whole new AI challenge, because all that stuff with emergent behavior and so on wouldn't apply at all here.  Some of the lessons would, but on the whole this would be a whole new (and pretty interesting) technical challenge to delve into.  One big advantage that we have over, say, FFT, is that we're running this on modern PCs and so we can tap into all that power.  This would even be a case where it makes PERFECT sense to have the AI scale to n number of cores, n being however many you have.  This is a textbook example of a sort of game where you can easily divide up the processing work into any reasonable number of batch jobs all to be processed in parallel.  The big limiter would probably be the heap size of 800mb in Unity, although we could work with that.

I know creating an AI for a game like this would be completely different than AI War's real-time AI, I just meant to say that I think you could bring your success and innovation with it to a new genre.  I would actually love to see the creative solutions you guys came up with to solve the (as you mentioned) computational stress and the massive possible outcomes problem.  The developer for Battle for Wesnoth, a freeware game which has many things in common with FFT, made a blog post (http://wiki.wesnoth.org/WhyWritingAWesnothAIIsHard) which explained his reasoning for the game only having a subpar AI.  He almost makes the prospect of creating a complex AI (one that could match or almost match the skill of a human) for a game of that nature seem impossible; but I disagree with him.  All it would take is a couple of innovative designers thinking outside of the box to turn the entire equation on its head, and come up with something so simple and unique that designers would wonder why they didn't think of it in the first place.  The hilarious thing is that I know you guys too well:  You wouldn't just create an AI for the genre that was better than anybody could have previously imagined, you would also add different personalities, difficulty settings, and playstyles for them, adding a proverbial insult to injury to the naysayers.  I'm almost more excited to see how you do it than to play the game itself ;p

Clever!  I really like that, too.  Having all the classes be useful long-term is definitely a good thing.  Having more counters from class to class would also encourage that same sort of thing without including limiters.  So if you made a lineup of all offensive mages, and they are naturally weak to melee weapons, then a melee opposing team will chew threw them -- encouraging you more naturally not to specialize quite to that degree.  Anyway, there are a number of ways that could go, but I really agree it's important to make older classes not get obsolete.

It's definitely a multi-faceted problem to encounter, and could be approached from many different angles.  What I like about the "point-based" system is that it makes sense from a lore perspective (as a Captain, you only have a limited number of resources to spend on your army in terms of combat training, equipment, and expertise), while allowing the classes to scale in power without restriction.  One way to balance the game would be to make it so that every class was simply different, but not any more powerful than a previous class.  The problem with this is that the player loses the novelty of working towards those amazing high-tier jobs that they are so excited about seeing and watching all the cool things they can do.  I definitely think that in this type of game it's extremely important to have a sense of power-scaling for different characters.  A Samurai should be so powerful he can take on 3 Squires, it just makes it feel so much better than the Samurai and Squires being equal but with different abilities.  I'm sure you guys will come up with a creative solution though, so I'm not worried.

Anyway, I'm so excited that you guys are even considering this.  I'm super excited for the future at Arcen if games like these are the warpath ;p

[keith.lamothe]

I prefer tactics games with a little less "bog down" than FFT, so less of the height and really complex terrain and so on, and I prefer it with a strategic meta-layer.  That whole need for a "points system" really works better with that; Brigandine had a pretty nice (if flawed) system where each knight could control X points worth of subordinates, and you could only have 3 knights in each battle, but you generally had multiple fronts to fight on, etc.  There were still useless knights and less-desirable classes, but for instance there was a point in training up a Pixie (30 points, iirc) to a Fairy (55 points, iirc) even though it was purely for support casting and inferior in basically every way to something like an Angel who could be trained up into basically world-wrecking levels of units.  But one Seraph was 120 points to control, which is pretty steep.  Balance was still pretty out-of-whack (lots of things wrong with that game, though it is my favorite), but at least there was _some_ balance between the different soldier classes, rather than simply "this is objectively a better choice than that".

[x4000]

Very interesting link to the Wesnoth blog, thanks for that.  A lot of the complexities that he mentions for Wesnoth are the things that AI War has to contend with above and beyond even other RTSes.  Most RTS games probably have trillions of board states, I wouldn't be surprised, but AI War has trillions of trillions of trillions.  Probably.  It's orders of magnitude larger, at any rate.

The thing about AI that plays by the same rules as a human is that it has to be able to evaluate possible outcomes in some manner, and then choose the best move.  In a tactics game, I'd definitely only want one unit to be able to move at a time, and a specific unit that has to move at this point (ala FFT).  That incredibly decreases the computational complexity, because then it's a matter of what is the best move for this particular unit at this particular time, and the number of possible states are very low.

On the other hand, then you run into problems of one unit impacting another by not moving to an ideal location, etc.  So potentially you do need to figure out what the "desired state of things" is (mage is here, fighter is there, etc, etc) and then make sure that the fighter doesn't move into the way of the mage as it moves to its location, and vice-versa.  OR you shortcut that in the game design itself, and make it so that allied pieces can occupy the same space or similar, such that you don't run into problems like that.

Then you can teach the AI about common combinations of units, spells, or whatever -- do this then that, and that's a particularly good thing to do, etc.  That can also cut down on the computational complexity, as the AI can specifically try to set up those sorts of combos rather than arriving at that solution by checking every possible board state.  And the reverse is true: the AI can know that certain combinations are exceptionally bad (such as having the fighter standing in the blast radius of where a mage would want to attack, for instance), and thus the fighter avoids those spaces if it can at all be avoided.

And so on. And pretty soon you're into a big decision-tree AI, and that's nothing that special or unique in terms of broad design style.  Where the uniqueness and power can come in is by having the AI designer and the game designers be the same folks -- so the game design can be tailored to things that the AI will do well at.  There are often simple choices in game design that seem inconsequential when humans are playing, but which are really important when an AI is playing, that you can optimize for. FFT as a whole, for instance, is designed in such a way that it's extremely friendly to AIs.  Battle for Wesnoth... not at all.

I agree with Keith that the biggest problem with FFT is how boggy it can get, though -- it takes way too long to make most things happen.  That's another thing I'd want to address.  It's definitely way off at this point, but Keith and I do talk about it periodically and this is hopefully the next full game after AVWW (in a couple of years).

[Wingflier]

And so on. And pretty soon you're into a big decision-tree AI, and that's nothing that special or unique in terms of broad design style.  Where the uniqueness and power can come in is by having the AI designer and the game designers be the same folks -- so the game design can be tailored to things that the AI will do well at.  There are often simple choices in game design that seem inconsequential when humans are playing, but which are really important when an AI is playing, that you can optimize for. FFT as a whole, for instance, is designed in such a way that it's extremely friendly to AIs.  Battle for Wesnoth... not at all.

This is an extremely interesting point that I hadn't even thought of yet, but which is just one example of "thinking outside the box" that other developers may overlook.  The Wesnoth developer for example, creates this extremely AI-unfriendly game, then tries to make an AI for it; where you and Keith would design the AI as part of the game from the ground up.  A good example is how in AI War, you simplify the AI "building process" by having them reinforce in a "Risk" style fashion, which allows you to circumvent most of the complicated building processes that humans deal with, and focus on actual combat mechanics and situational strategy.  It's just a brilliant way of building the game for the AI, not building the AI for the game. 

I agree with Keith that the biggest problem with FFT is how boggy it can get, though -- it takes way too long to make most things happen.  That's another thing I'd want to address.  It's definitely way off at this point, but Keith and I do talk about it periodically and this is hopefully the next full game after AVWW (in a couple of years).

Hmm this is interesting, because I never really had a problem with the speed at which things happened in FFT, at least on the individual battle level.  If there was anything I had a problem with, it was the amount of grinding and pointless encounters the game forced you into just to add extra content.  The battles themselves though seemed fine to me.  The "charge" mechanic in particular I really liked because it added an element of timing (as well as prediction) to the game.  As soon as a powerful Mage or Archer unit started "charging", it gave the option of trying to take them out quickly (before the charge ended) or bracing yourself for the impact in a specific way.  One aspect of the "charge" system that could probably be improved upon would be a way to "interrupt" a charging unit, allowing greater flexibility in terms of reacting to that kind of situation, since "charged" abilities tended to really powerful.  When they took the charge ability out in FFTA it really disappointed me, because (in my opinion) it dumbed down the abilites and made them all "single-turn".  Well when all the abilities in the game happen in the same turn you use them, there's only so much power they can have, and therefore you become very limited in what you can do.  The point I'm getting to with all this is that the extended amount of time it took things to happen in the original FFT was partially a product of the "charge" system, which wouldn't have been viable if the game ended in only a few turns.  Obviously there has to be a balance between the pace of the game and the strategy involved in playing it, but I think it's a better decision in this genre to make the game too long than for it to be too short.  I have not seen the "charge" system used in the original Final Fantasy Tactics in any other game of the type, much to their detriment.

Anyway, this has been a great discussion and very insightful for me.  Two years can't come fast enough, assuming the world doesn't end in 2012 (okay, now I'm just being a troll ;p).

[x4000]

Thanks for the kind words, again.

In terms of the bogging-down nature of FFT, at least for myself that comes from having to sit through the same animations really repetitively.  For example, if I cast some big spell, or shoot an arrow even, I know roughly what the damage will be.  But instead I have to watch the animation, waiting and doing nothing, then see other potential animations as things die or counterattack or whatever else they do.  It's very annoying and makes it so that I'm sitting there staring at the screen unable to control anything over 50% of the time in a battle, which isn't how that sort of thing should work.

Contrast this with FF6, where you input commands at your liesure, and then your characters carry them out when they are ready.  Or FFX, where it happens immediately but you can start giving orders to the next guy if you don't care to watch the slashy-slashy animation during the current turn.  What I would have changed about FFT pacing would be to make it so that when you move a character, it shows a ghost at the target location instantly (rather than slowly walking the character there).  Then you carry on with the ghost, and set up your spell or attack or whatever.  Then when you give the execute command, your ghost disappears and your real character walks into place (more quickly!) and does their attack.  MEANWHILE, your control has changed to the next character in your queue, and you can start issuing orders and planning out things with the next one while the last one does the attack.

Or something along those lines.  Granted, that's wicked hard to do with a gamepad input and a smaller screen resolution.  It will be vastly easier with keyboard+mouse and more modern screen resolutions where you can see more.

[Wingflier]

In terms of the bogging-down nature of FFT, at least for myself that comes from having to sit through the same animations really repetitively.  For example, if I cast some big spell, or shoot an arrow even, I know roughly what the damage will be.  But instead I have to watch the animation, waiting and doing nothing, then see other potential animations as things die or counterattack or whatever else they do.  It's very annoying and makes it so that I'm sitting there staring at the screen unable to control anything over 50% of the time in a battle, which isn't how that sort of thing should work.

Ah I didn't realize this is what you meant.  I definitely see how waiting through the animations can get mind-numbingly boring over time.  It's certainly something that shouldn't bog down the game (like you said).  To further emphasize on your comment about the advantages of a mouse and keyboard, bringing the game to a PC in itself could be extremely revolutionizing for the game.  Since all the players aren't looking at the same screen as before, you have the option to add things like invisibility, character illusions, diversions, fog of war, and many other things that were not even possible before.  Someone who could truly take advantage of this genre could create a masterpiece.

Thanks for the kind words, again.

Haha, oh they're nice now, until one of your AIs becomes so intelligent that it gains sentience and takes over the world.  I might have a few different things to say about you after that ;p