Wizardry 7 [1992] vs. Elder Scrolls IV: Olivion [2006]: Battle of the First-Person RPGs
Setting graphics aside, since that's blatantly obvious, let's see how games have changed in the span of 14 years.
Wizardry 7:
-Turn-based, party-based gameplay
-Automap function exists as an easily missed item which requires a high level of mapping skill to use
-No autosave function
-Large world with no fast travel function
-Most chests are booby-trapped
-Heavy reliance on skills
-Frequent encounters with bands of party-slaughtering monsters only a few spaces from the starting location
-Frequently encounter items that you can't identify without a spell or a skill
-Some locations are very maze-like
-NPC interaction is limited
-It's up to the player to remember quests and destinations
Elder Scrolls IV:
-Realtime combat with only one character
-Automap function is available from the start
-Autosave function saves frequently
-Large world with fast-travel to locations you've been to before
-No trapped chests, only locked ones with minimal penalty for failure
-Skills are mostly combat-oriented
-Monsters scale with your level for the most part
-All items are automatically identified
-Virtually impossible to get lost, even in dungeons and even without looking at the automap
-NPCs are present in greater numbers and interaction is much deeper
-Game provides a journal to keep track of quests
In playing Wizardry 7, it's very clear that I've been quiet spoiled when it comes to RPGs.
There's a definite contrast in the difficultly level of the games of yesterday and today. Take Mario games, for example. The Mario games on the NES were quite brutal in terms of deaths. Not only could you die in two hits, a majority of the levels were rigged with traps that made those two hits hard to avoid. The new Mario games, however, are much different. In games like Galaxy, you have a hp meter that you can constantly restore with coins. The fact that you have a variety of abilities also gives you a better chance of avoiding attacks.
Quote:Take Mario games, for example. The Mario games on the NES were quite brutal in terms of deaths. Not only could you die in two hits, a majority of the levels were rigged with traps that made those two hits hard to avoid.
I've found that this is at least half an illusion. When I played Super Mario Bros. as a six and seven year-old, it was difficult and beating it was an accomplishment. Today I can breeze through the game in less than a half-hour without losing a life.
Alternatively, games like
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link are still stupid hard.
Quote:I've found that this is at least half an illusion. When I played Super Mario Bros. as a six and seven year-old, it was difficult and beating it was an accomplishment. Today I can breeze through the game in less than a half-hour without losing a life.
Practice makes perfect, Ryan.
I really love RPGs... alas I was a Nintendoboy, and I never had much of a selection on the N64. However, I can hold one thing over ALL OF YOUR heads: I OWN AND HAVE BEAT QUEST 64!
Well, I think there's a difference between being a difficult and actively punishing the player for playing the game. Wizardry 7, and many other PC games from the late 80's and early 90's, definitely indulged a bit in the latter.
It's not just that the combat in the game is hard, which it is, but the game doesn't really go out of its way to throw you a bone. You have to go out, locate a grave, and dig the grave up with your bare hands to get that bone. I'm not necessarily saying one way it clearly better than the other or whatever, but that's just the way it is. Today's game are more intuitive, more action oriented, and easier to play.
It's up to the individual to decide whether they like the new direction or not.
Darunia Wrote:I really love RPGs... alas I was a Nintendoboy, and I never had much of a selection on the N64. However, I can hold one thing over ALL OF YOUR heads: I OWN AND HAVE BEAT QUEST 64!
^I've heard that
Quest 64 makes you its bitch.
Darunia Wrote:I really love RPGs... alas I was a Nintendoboy, and I never had much of a selection on the N64. However, I can hold one thing over ALL OF YOUR heads: I OWN AND HAVE BEAT QUEST 64!
As I recall, us PSXers liked to hold that over
your head. ;D
Our relationship is complex, Unread. Sometimes I'd play other RPGs, and when Quest would find out we wouldn't talk for weeks on end... but we still love one another. Am I its bitch? We do role play sometimes in the bedroom, but when we finish cuddling, the simulations stop.
Darunia Wrote:However, I can hold one thing over ALL OF YOUR heads: I OWN AND HAVE BEAT QUEST 64!
Can't hold it above MY head!
Darunia Wrote:Our relationship is complex, Unread. Sometimes I'd play other RPGs, and when Quest would find out we wouldn't talk for weeks on end... but we still love one another. Am I its bitch? We do role play sometimes in the bedroom, but when we finish cuddling, the simulations stop.
When I said "makes you its bitch," I was referring to the game's difficulty. Of course, in your case, that does explain a lot.
I honestly didn't find it very difficult. What parts did you find difficult?
Quest 64 difficult? It's like My First RPG, for goodness sake!
^I remember hearing something about its difficulty level. I guess the person who posted it was being an ass.
If anything, it's easy; it has a simplistic interface... OVERLY simplistic. All you have to do is keep playing... keep leveling, and you'll win. It was fun and colorful, with lots of spells and lots of bad things to kill, but... just too simplistic. Did I mention the simplicity involved?
Haha, Quest 64 brings back memories of the old flamewar. It was a pretty lameass RPG, in all honesty. My first RPG was Super Mario RPG, which I still love (as you may've guessed given my username). I got into Pokémon sometime after that, and eventually I began playing Final Fantasy, which remains my favorite RPG series to this day.
And Wiz VII is simpler, less evil, and more modern than VI, which is the same compared to the older ones... yes, old RPGs could be EVIL, there's no question about that. There were some that weren't as cruel as others (Eye of the Beholder is no Wizardry, that's for sure, for instance!), though. By the early '90s I'd say that Wizardry games were hardcore for their time, while the TES series has never been like that at all, so I don't think it's necessarily a representative example of either era, maybe. Both are popular games for their times though so perhaps it's valid.
Anyway though, yes, Wizardry is cruel and heartless, while Oblivion is nice and easy. However, you can mod Oblivion to make it a bit harder, like the mods that remove the scaled difficulty and replace it with set difficulties and such. But nothing can be done about some of those things, for sure. The game just isn't about the kind of challenge you found in classic dungeon crawlers.
Oh, as for N64 RPGs, Aidyn Chronicles is the hardcore N64 RPG. Beat THAT one and it'd be pretty impressive... it's like 100 hours long, challenging, slow paced, and buggy. I like it anyway, but most people hate the game...
Wizardry 7 might have been less evil, but it was still pretty evil. Same goes for Wizardry 8. It came out in 2001 and did have a map and journal and, by nature of it's more advanced 3D, wasn't as maze like, but it was a still a brutally hard game. There were times where you could get completely swarmed by 15-20 enemies that would just flat out kill you.
To go along with the OP, I played some Elder Scrolls I: Arena. It's pretty clear that it's the basis for the Elder Scrolls game to come, but it's a pretty good foundation and feels closer to its newer brethren than other RPGs from a similar time period feel compared to other modern-day RPGs.
Having said that, it's still somewhat archaic. For one thing, the game world is absolutely massive. Something 80 million square kilometers to roam through. The problem? Most of it's pretty barren and same-y. If you're looking for variety and cool little secret places that look different from the rest of the world, you're not going to find that here. If you got bored in Oblivion of seeing the same dungeon for the 10th time, we'll just wait until you see the same dungeons for the 1,000,000th time. That's basically Arean in a nutshell. There's also the "move the mouse across the screen to attack", which seems kind of cool at first but becomes annoying after a while. Modern TES games handle this so much better.
NPC conversation is pretty limited too. Most have exactly one line and that's about it. There's also a ton of repetition, even more than the newer games, because the game is so much more vast.
Anyway, I'm straying from my point, I think. Arena is pretty fun for what it is and I think I'd have more fun playing this than a lot of other RPGs from the same time period judged by the perspective of the passage of 15+ years. Between this and Wizardry 7, there's really not much else unfortunately. Perhaps some Ultima 7 or 8.
Well, I take back some of what I said about Arena. All in all, it's pretty barren. I ran for several minutes across a series of roads, trees, and buildings and couldn't figure out how any of it was relevant. There weren't even any monsters out in the open world, which was pretty lame. I suppose you're supposed to locate dungeons and such.
I also played some Daggerfall too. It's more advanced and features a cool 3D map, it's got a travel feature as well so no more slogging through miles of barren landscape to get back to somewhere you've been before. The problem? It's HARD. I've been utterly slaughter about THIRTY times in the noob dungeon. I open a door, some monster comes out, it kills me. Roll game over movie clip. Thirty times at least. Your character gets absolutely raped by every monster in the dungeon, including rats. It's just insane how difficult it is.
The upside is that the game features mouse look [!!!!!!!] but the controls are still kind of clunks and it still has the annoying "swipe the mouse to attack" feature. I might like it more if it was easier, but it isn't.
As it stands, Morrowind and Oblivion eat these two games for lunch.
Actually Arena doesn't model the entire continent. You cannot actually walk from one city to another in the game; you can just explore each city (randomly designed) and its randomly generated surroundings. To get from place to place you have to use the fast-travel map.
Also I remember the fact that the insides of buildings are identical continent-wide really annoying me... why are all the people inside the buildings in the High Elves' island normal white humans, just like they are everywhere else? I think it was like that at least...
And yes, NPC "interaction" is basically limited to asking for always-the-same sidequests, hints towards the location of the next story or quest dungeon, or asking where things are in town (an important function).
I do like "move the mouse across the screen to attack", though. Daggerfall does it the same way, and it's more interesting than the consolized attack system of Morrowind and Oblivion.
As for it vs. Wizardry 7 though... I'm going to go with Wizardry, even though it's much more annoying and frustrating to play, because of the much greater depth. That means that it's likely going to be less repetitive and samey as Arena (and all TES games really) gets.
Of course I've never really liked TES games, so that's probably not too surprising...
As for Daggerfall, I've only played a few hours of it, and even that was only the demo, but I still think that conceptwise and featurewise, it's easily the best game in the series by far. Gameplay-wise I don't know, I kind of dislike all of the TES games... they just don't hold my interest. Too big, too open, with too little actually interesting things to do and far too simplistic a combat system. Arena is actually the one I've played the most of the four, and I do have Morrowind and Oblivion. Arena's simple, but fun for a while... Morrowind has no fast travel which ruins it really, and Oblivion... eh. Haven't played much of it. Both of those are quite disappointing in their very small worlds though; sure, Arena and Daggerfall are all randomized, but the scale is so much more realistic and impressive that I don't think of them as worse for it. More realistic scale and random or all designed and small... I'm not sure which I like more, but I think I give the edge to the larger randomized world. Morrowind's world was tiny! I know that it had to be small because they were designing it all and with no fast travel getting places is a pain even with its "small" size, but still... towns being like a minute's walk apart is lame. Fantasy-game staple, sure, but lame, and quite unlike Arena or Daggerfall.
Oh, Daggerfall also has some decent graphics for the time. Arena's pretty archaic, with only flat rooves, those identical interiors, etc, but Daggerfall still looks somewhat nice... the fairly close fog is annoying, but still, it looks better.
Seriously though, overall I'd far rather play a Wizardry or Wizards & Warriors than anything in the TES series. Those are much better games in my opinion, or at least games much more like the kind of thing I like more.
... I still love Wizards & Warriors, it's lesser-known than Wizardry 8 (which came out just slightly after it), but the game really is just about as good... fantastic, fantastic game, and really one of the least well known great games I've played on the PC.
Quote:I do like "move the mouse across the screen to attack", though. Daggerfall does it the same way, and it's more interesting than the consolized attack system of Morrowind and Oblivion.
It's cool if you like it, but that doesn't make it any less stupid. Especially in a game like Daggerfall where you really need the mouse to look around with. It would have been nothing but a headache in Oblivion and Morrowind since it really doesn't work at all with mouse look.
And the various attacks are still there in Morrowind and Oblivion, they're just tied to the movement of your character instead of the movement of the mouse, which is a much better alternative.
Quote:Arena and Daggerfall are all randomized, but the scale is so much more realistic and impressive that I don't think of them as worse for it.
Big, with realistic scale, and BARREN. There's nothing more unfun than wandering through square after square of the same-looking landscape, the same-looking buildings, and the talking to the same-looking characters. I'll take Morrowind and Oblivion's smaller but more unique worlds, thank you very much. They at least have something to look at and something to distinguish one location from the other.
I added a whole bunch of stuff to my last post in edits I think, did you see it all?
Quote:It's cool if you like it, but that doesn't make it any less stupid. Especially in a game like Daggerfall where you really need the mouse to look around with. It would have been nothing but a headache in Oblivion and Morrowind since it really doesn't work at all with mouse look.
And the various attacks are still there in Morrowind and Oblivion, they're just tied to the movement of your character instead of the movement of the mouse, which is a much better alternative.
That's opinion, not fact... it's simplified in the later ones. Sure in the first two it doesn't make that huge a difference, but still, it's an interesting unique feature, and I think that that made it something a little difference...
Quote:Big, with realistic scale, and BARREN. There's nothing more unfun than wandering through square after square of the same-looking landscape, the same-looking buildings, and the talking to the same-looking characters. I'll take Morrowind and Oblivion's smaller but more unique worlds, thank you very much. They at least have something to look at and something to distinguish one location from the other.
There are a lot of fantasy games with fully designed worlds though, but very, very few with worlds that are anywhere even remotely close to the scale of an actual world... really, Arena and Daggerfall are two of the only ones ever. The tiny worlds of normal fantasy games are annoying, really, why does it take me ten minutes to go around the entire world? Daggerfall's not like that, and that's awesome.
Sure it's all the same and very repetitive, but still. As I said it's not like I love Morrowind and Oblivion either. Arena is the one I've played the most of the four, and even there I only got to like the second dungeon. (the second major story dungeon that is, not counting the intro dungeon thing or the small ones in the overworld but only the major ones you have to find for the main quest).
Quote:I added a whole bunch of stuff to my last post in edits I think, did you see it all?
Yes.
Quote:That's opinion, not fact... it's simplified in the later ones. Sure in the first two it doesn't make that huge a difference, but still, it's an interesting unique feature, and I think that that made it something a little difference...
It worked fine in the first game because the 3D is some basic that you very, very rarely will look up or down at anything. In Daggerfall, looking around with the keyboard and trying to look up and down at things is very counter-intuitive, it's much easier to go with mouse look. Now, when you add in swipe the mouse to attack with mouse look, it's a problem. Because you attacking what you're looking at, but "look" left or right to attack, which makes it harder to focus on what you're attack.
Quote:but very, very few with worlds that are anywhere even remotely close to the scale of an actual world... really, Arena and Daggerfall are two of the only ones ever.
It's miles and miles of NOTHING. If they could somehow make a really huge world filled with unique locations, towns, and people, then, hey, that would be pretty cool. But it's a trade off. It probably always will be. You can either have a huge, barren, boring world to wander through for hours or you can have a tightly crafted, smaller, world with unique places to go and unique people to talk to.
So, it's Huge and Barren or Smaller and Interesting. It's not hard at all for me to pick which one I'd rather have.
On another note, I played some Wizards & Warriors since I had a copy lying around. My first reaction was to laugh a bit at the fact that it's real-time, party-based, first-person combat. Good stuff that. Yes, I'm using sarcasm. The mechanics of it aren't too great, I'd rather it be like in Wizardry 8 with everything turn-based. It's not impossible to work with, but I don't like the idea of me being attacked while I'm trying to pick a spell. The controls are bit a wonky too, I constantly found myself running into enemies when I'm trying to attack, since the mouse button for attack is also the mouse button that makes you more forward. Really don't like the controls at all. Anyway, I haven't really played enough to judge it just yet.
Wizards & Warriors has turn-based combat, not real-time... when you're within range of enemies it's all turn-based. It is true that you can kind of "break" it by backing off, because from range it's all realtime, but when you're next to the enemies your characters take turns. Unless that's an option you missed, perhaps? Really though, if there was a realtime/turnbased option I'm forgetting, definitely play on turn-based. It's much better that way.
The game does have issues, a lot of them. It's buggy and incomplete, and the patch only fixes some of the bugs and none of the incomplete nature of the game. Some sidequests never go anywhere though you'd expect them to, like the Vampirism one for example. The game was just released unfinished, unfortunately. The controls are a hassle because there are no hotkey shortcuts for any button on the interface. The interface for how you get quests and go through the guilds is a massive headache, as you have to back in and out of the guild menus with every character, listen to the whole spiel of information for your current guild quest every time you switch characters, etc, etc. Also never alt-tab while running the game, you won't get back in. The minimap only shows the current floor of the dungeon you are in, and the dungeons all have multiple floors. The story's generic at best. Skills and spells are not defined in that game -- keep that manual handy if you want to know what spells do or what your skills and abilities mean! And more.
(Oh, one thing...mouse button for forward? Why would you do that? Use the arrow keys! So much easier!)
What it does right though, it does so, so right... First, the music is fantastic, perfect looping atmospheric-ish stuff that I absolutely love. It's only 20-something minutes long, but I don't mind listening to it for hours. The story may be generic, but the writing is good, as you'd expect from a D.W. Bradley game (he did Wizardry V-VII...). The conversations are entirely voice acted too, or at least the people you are talking to are entirely voice acted, which is a pretty cool touch. The voice acting is solid. The graphics are also pretty good for a game from 2000, particularly in style. While overworlds are just okay, the game really shines in the dungeons. The dungeons really are the star of the game, and the main reason why it's such a fantastic game. They really are some of the best dungeons, in style, design, puzzles, gameplay, what have you, from any RPG I have ever played... outstanding, outstanding stuff! Wandering around those dungeons is really what made me love the game, above anything else.
The combat's fun too. Sure it's not super deep and complex, but it's got enough depth to keep me interested, and there's a good deal of customization as well with a bunch of different classes and races for your initial choices and several higher-level classes to upgrade to later in the game. There are also quite a few sidequests to do along the way, that mostly involve finding out-of-the-way places in the overworld or fighting some enemy in the overworld or something like that.
The premiere Wizards & Warriors resource forum, with lots of very helpful information:
http://www.ironworksforum.com/forum/foru...y.php?f=14
Quote:(Oh, one thing...mouse button for forward? Why would you do that? Use the arrow keys! So much easier!)
Then I'm stuck using the arrow keys to move and the mouse to look around. There was a time when I did that sort of thing, but it's not something I'd like to go back to.
Edit: Also, the game just glitched so bad that I can't play it anymore. Every time I start it up, the graphics go crazy and the screen flashes and parts of it turn black. In other words, it's busted. I'll probably have to reinstall it to get it to work again, not that it was all that stable to begin with.
... If you don't want to use the arrow keys to move, why, exactly, are you playing older games? Lots of older games require arrow key movement... and I can't imagine what the problem could possibly be with it, either... they're there for a reason!
What do you want, I mean? WASD movement? The only reason games use that is to use the other keys around it for other functions, and because this game doesn't support that, the arrow keys are exactly the same as WASD would be. So I have no idea what your complaint is, besides perhaps that it should have keyboard hotkeys for the interface buttons (if you are complaining about that, I'm not sure). Keyboard for movement and mouse for aiming is the perfect first-person game control setup, after all.
I honestly can't imagine how anyone could actually prefer "hold the mouse button down to go forward" to the usual "press forward"... can you explain?
You have to use the mouse to look around and use the interface because there are no hotkeys for the buttons, and for interacting with the environment (picking up arrows manually, for instance, if you don't want to just walk over them), but at least you can move around with the keyboard, which is very good. If you had to use the mouse for movement it'd be just awful...
As for the graphical glitches you're talking about, I have no idea. The only time I've noticed anything is when I try to alt-tab out and back; that turns the whole screen black and you can't fix the problem without quitting. I'm sure that there's something at the forum I linked which can help you though... oh, and are you using the patch or not?
Well, I'm partially wrong about W&W. Some of the controls are configurable, and some of the buttons do have hotkeys. Here's a list:
Options - Graphics
Only ever use the Software graphics driver. Direct3D graphics do not work properly anymore due to changes in DirectX.
All other options should be set to High/On, etc. (apart from brightness and such, which should be set to your liking)
Options - Gameplay
I use the defaults here... though note that there is an option for on-screen movement arrow buttons, if you want them (for move forward/back, turn left/right, strafe left/right, and look up/down). I do not, myself.
I'm not sure what turning on or off the Mouse Move/Look setting does... either way it seems to work the same, for me... hold down the left button to look around, hold down the right button to move forward. Both work the same with that setting on or off.
Options - Keyboard
Configurable Commands
Movement (forward/backward, turn left/right)
Jump/Climb/Swim (all on one button)
Strafing left/right
Run
Pass Turn (in combat) / Switch Character (otherwise) (switches to next character, ending that character's turn if you are in battle)
Realtime/Turnbased Toggle button (for combat -- better off!)
Zoom in/out
View Resolution
Safe mode toggle
Y Axis Toggle
Pause
Text Window Resize (shrink/expand the text window at the bottom of the screen)
Run and Jump are important gameplay commands, and do not have interface buttons for them. You need to use the keyboard buttons for those. Note that each character has different run and jump characteristics -- so for instance to get through a very small passage you may need to have a small character like a Dwarf in your party. Crawling Dwarves are smaller than larger people so they fit through smaller passages. Similarly characters with higher jumping-related skills will jump better. That much makes sense. How the rest of the party somehow follows those people through/over those places, though... that I don't quite get. :D Oh well... it works. Just a little silly. :)
Unconfigurable Commands - these are preset
Hold Right Mouse to look around
Hold Left Mouse to walk forwards
F1-F6 replicate the functions of six of the eight interface buttons on the center left side. Oddly enough the Dragon Breath/Vampire Bite button does not have a hotkey, and neither does the Talk button.
F1 - Switch to Weapon / Open Inventory Screen
F2 - Open Cast Spell Window
F3 - switch to Steal cursor
F4 - Switch to Use/Give cursor
F5 - Switch to Carry cursor
F6 - Switch to Minimap / Automap Screen (press once to switch the lower left display to the area map, and again to open the fullscreen automap)
A list of some good points about the game...
- Good graphics
- Exceptional music
- Exceptional dungeon designs
- Good combat
- Good writing and quests
- Great voice acting
The game is far too good for the various issues I mentioned earlier to get me to mark it down much. Sure there are some little frustrations, but it's such a good game that I don't care much.
Quote:... If you don't want to use the arrow keys to move, why, exactly, are you playing older games? Lots of older games require arrow key movement... and I can't imagine what the problem could possibly be with it, either... they're there for a reason!
Most of those older games don't have mouse look. And the default function for the left and right arrow keys it to MOVE left and right, rather than TURN left and right.
Quote:As for the graphical glitches you're talking about, I have no idea. The only time I've noticed anything is when I try to alt-tab out and back; that turns the whole screen black and you can't fix the problem without quitting. I'm sure that there's something at the forum I linked which can help you though... oh, and are you using the patch or not?
It's not just the screen turning black, which I can be "wiped away" by clicking on something that changes the screen, but the graphics going insane and causing the game to be unplayable. As in, everything's so slow that I can't move and the graphics so messed up that I can't see anything. The former happened the first time I booted it up, the latter happened the next two times.
Quote:Most of those older games don't have mouse look. And the default function for the left and right arrow keys it to MOVE left and right, rather than TURN left and right.
But the movement controls are fully reconfigurable, so what the defaults are is irrelevant.
As for mouse look, it is true that you have to hold down the right button to mouselook, but seriously... this is an RPG, not an FPS. It's not like you need to look up and down that often.
Quote:It's not just the screen turning black, which I can be "wiped away" by clicking on something that changes the screen, but the graphics going insane and causing the game to be unplayable. As in, everything's so slow that I can't move and the graphics so messed up that I can't see anything. The former happened the first time I booted it up, the latter happened the next two times.
Yeah, I've never seen that. (You ARE in software mode, right?)
I know I've said this before, but one of the things I don't like about older RPGs is how your characters always miss or do zero damage. In my opinion, it makes battles last way longer than they should. It's a bit deal early on in Daggerfall, there were times where I would swing at a monster thirty times and miss every single time and this is the newb dungeon we're talking about.
Yes, I understand the reasoning behind it. No, I don't want to discuss it.
That's not something about older RPGs really, that's just about things following D&D's lead. And I still like D&D a lot.
(What game(s) are you talking about in particular, though? Anything that got you to say that? Daggerfall?)
Daggerfall, Fallout 1 and 2, Wizardry 7, Baldur's Gate, I could probably name more, but you get the idea.
In Fallout 3, each shot isn't a sure thing, there is a change of missing, but missing isn't something that happens all the time and actually hitting what your aiming at isn't the exception to the rule. This is mainly a problem early on where both you and the monsters will miss about 80% of the time and does get less of an issue as your progress. So, when you're at level 50 it's really a non-issues, but it makes the first 10-15 levels that much more frustrating.
I still like the D&D armor system. Sorry. :)
I know it's a little strange (armor doesn't actually reduce damage, but just the likelihood that you get hit), but for a pen & paper game that's easier to deal with than reducing all damage by some percentage I think, and the overall effect is pretty much identical, in terms of how much actual damage you do. So you're missing a lot and hitting for full damage sometimes instead of hitting all the time for low damage... the end result is the same.