ProtoByte
Weeb Underling
I'm excited for FF16, but I've been asking myself why I'm not ecstatic for it.The main thing that I could identify was that the gameplay is not blowing me away. Let me explain why, because there's a larger conversation to be had from this.
FF16's combat looks good in the basic sense: Clive's attacks and defensive/evasive maneuvers look appealing, varied, and visceral. The pace of combat is fast and engaging, but not stupidly incomprehensible.
But combat is more than just that. I will say that enemy design is not something easy to showcase in a game like this, so I'll give some grace there. But in that, level design, environmental interactivity, traversal, and the interaction of all of these in encounters, FF16 looks rather simple to me.
The combat designer here comes from DMC - and I'll use DMC as an example of what I'm talking about.
Bosses aside, enemies are not all to capable to actually respond to what the player is doing, certainly by the time they get into their Ultra Instinct combos. Enemy behavior is also extremely static.
The layout of the levels, unvaried as they are, don't matter to any given encounter. Verticality is null since the topography of the most combat arenas is effectively flat, and the openness or tightness of a given environment doesn't change the options awarded to the player, due to the lack of contextual actions and animations in place.
Traversal or lack thereof plays a role here. When your movement tops out at running and double jumping, you can only have environments so large and varied before it becomes tedious and redundant respectively.
Spacing is a rudimentary concern since the supermajority of attacks are close-mid range - which has to be given some grace considering the games are entirely focused around melee combat. That does not, however, excuse the lack of positioning: The player characters ground on the field relative to enemy placement is mostly irrelevant. Unfortunately, this is where DMC's player character combat options kind of fail. Attacks are rarely segmented between single target and AOE in any meaningful way. V in DMC5, anyone? Not just that, but surfaces like walls and ledges offer zero combat utility or threat to the player.
The way these types of games are designed does not lend itself to variety or dynamic encounters. FF16 doesn't look exactly like a DMC, but you can see traces of it, and while it does still look like a fun enough game, it doesn't entice me the way others do. Watching Clive engage in the same flashy animation can only be interesting so many times when it looks the same brings the exact same external results every time.
There's a lot if discussion about next gen graphics, but most people can't or don't define next gen gameplay. Those things that I mentioned are what I'm looking for in games going forward. There's been enough technological and design advancement to facilitate it. Frankly, there have been a lot of games that have done it to varying degrees already.
I will continue to bring up the gameplay genius of The Last of Us Part II. I think that's the closest to "next gen gameplay" we've gotten. Each encounter plays, looks and sounds, so engaging, to the poin that each one feels like a setpiece.
Stealth, CQC, and firefighting flows together effortlessly. Enemies are smart and capable enough and fights take place in large enough areas that being on the move in any of these states is a viable and even necessary avenue for the player to engage in. While the game is not destruction heavy, just the inclusion of windows panes adds so much. I still remember the scene where Abby goes against the Wolves with Lev on the island, and you literally swim as shallow as it can get to avoid enemy sight lines and pop out to rush them.
TLOU2 has the advantage of including stealth and ranged combat at all, but I'll refer to FF15 pre Tabata as a more direct comparison.
Inb4 "scripted, fake". Yes, I get it. But this was Nomura's target, and you can't say it doesn't look enticing. Noctis' Warp ability and general locomotion allows for massive battlefields that don't feel tedious to get around. On top of that, there's environmental destruction that is the result of player or enemy choices. The scripted set piece has Noctis fighting in different spaces and warping between moving airships as Altissia crumbles in a tidal wave. I've seen nothing of FF16 that looks anywhere close to this scale.
No, not even the Kaiju stuff. Part of this is the setting. Massive encounters just look more impressive in modern environments than what XVI is going for. That, and the Kaiju battles seem pretty gimmicky. Give me a next gen Transformers game set on earth, and then we can talk.
To be clear, I do believe that Final Fantasy XVI will be a damn good game. Probably the fastest selling yet, cleanest success FF game in 20 years. I even think the understated hype is healthy. But I do think this is why the hype is understated.
We can talk about more of this through the thread. It is worth mentioning that I haven't ingested all of the footage. I have looked for interviews for enemy design stuff, but I've not seen anything about the function of enemies so much as the visual design.
FF16's combat looks good in the basic sense: Clive's attacks and defensive/evasive maneuvers look appealing, varied, and visceral. The pace of combat is fast and engaging, but not stupidly incomprehensible.
But combat is more than just that. I will say that enemy design is not something easy to showcase in a game like this, so I'll give some grace there. But in that, level design, environmental interactivity, traversal, and the interaction of all of these in encounters, FF16 looks rather simple to me.
The combat designer here comes from DMC - and I'll use DMC as an example of what I'm talking about.
Bosses aside, enemies are not all to capable to actually respond to what the player is doing, certainly by the time they get into their Ultra Instinct combos. Enemy behavior is also extremely static.
The layout of the levels, unvaried as they are, don't matter to any given encounter. Verticality is null since the topography of the most combat arenas is effectively flat, and the openness or tightness of a given environment doesn't change the options awarded to the player, due to the lack of contextual actions and animations in place.
Traversal or lack thereof plays a role here. When your movement tops out at running and double jumping, you can only have environments so large and varied before it becomes tedious and redundant respectively.
Spacing is a rudimentary concern since the supermajority of attacks are close-mid range - which has to be given some grace considering the games are entirely focused around melee combat. That does not, however, excuse the lack of positioning: The player characters ground on the field relative to enemy placement is mostly irrelevant. Unfortunately, this is where DMC's player character combat options kind of fail. Attacks are rarely segmented between single target and AOE in any meaningful way. V in DMC5, anyone? Not just that, but surfaces like walls and ledges offer zero combat utility or threat to the player.
The way these types of games are designed does not lend itself to variety or dynamic encounters. FF16 doesn't look exactly like a DMC, but you can see traces of it, and while it does still look like a fun enough game, it doesn't entice me the way others do. Watching Clive engage in the same flashy animation can only be interesting so many times when it looks the same brings the exact same external results every time.
There's a lot if discussion about next gen graphics, but most people can't or don't define next gen gameplay. Those things that I mentioned are what I'm looking for in games going forward. There's been enough technological and design advancement to facilitate it. Frankly, there have been a lot of games that have done it to varying degrees already.
I will continue to bring up the gameplay genius of The Last of Us Part II. I think that's the closest to "next gen gameplay" we've gotten. Each encounter plays, looks and sounds, so engaging, to the poin that each one feels like a setpiece.
Stealth, CQC, and firefighting flows together effortlessly. Enemies are smart and capable enough and fights take place in large enough areas that being on the move in any of these states is a viable and even necessary avenue for the player to engage in. While the game is not destruction heavy, just the inclusion of windows panes adds so much. I still remember the scene where Abby goes against the Wolves with Lev on the island, and you literally swim as shallow as it can get to avoid enemy sight lines and pop out to rush them.
TLOU2 has the advantage of including stealth and ranged combat at all, but I'll refer to FF15 pre Tabata as a more direct comparison.
Inb4 "scripted, fake". Yes, I get it. But this was Nomura's target, and you can't say it doesn't look enticing. Noctis' Warp ability and general locomotion allows for massive battlefields that don't feel tedious to get around. On top of that, there's environmental destruction that is the result of player or enemy choices. The scripted set piece has Noctis fighting in different spaces and warping between moving airships as Altissia crumbles in a tidal wave. I've seen nothing of FF16 that looks anywhere close to this scale.
No, not even the Kaiju stuff. Part of this is the setting. Massive encounters just look more impressive in modern environments than what XVI is going for. That, and the Kaiju battles seem pretty gimmicky. Give me a next gen Transformers game set on earth, and then we can talk.
To be clear, I do believe that Final Fantasy XVI will be a damn good game. Probably the fastest selling yet, cleanest success FF game in 20 years. I even think the understated hype is healthy. But I do think this is why the hype is understated.
We can talk about more of this through the thread. It is worth mentioning that I haven't ingested all of the footage. I have looked for interviews for enemy design stuff, but I've not seen anything about the function of enemies so much as the visual design.
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