17th September 2004, 5:45 PM
Yep, you nailed it, that's exactly what I implied. And yes, I agree, strategy games and RPGs do have something in common. On that note, I first got into turn based strategy because the first one I played tricked me into thinking it WAS an RPG (Final Fantasy Tactics). It wasn't a hard thing to "fake" though, because FFT is more of a strategy/RPG, but that's how I got sucked in there.
On my whole speil about clicking and the character autopathing, actually I was talking about like if you could see into a dungeon cell through the bars, thus making it "uncovered territory", and then clicking the move button behind those bars even though you had no idea there was this secret passageway hidden behind some tapestry hanging on a wall you could just walk through, and your character just runs STRAIGHT there and into the dungeon. If not for that, it might have been a hard puzzle to solve :D. But still, that's easy enough to fix. If the character's pathing AI tells it to go into uncharted territory, the game will refuse to let you just autowalk there, thus making it impossible for just such a situation to occur. That was just bad programming though, the actual point to move setup wasn't to blame. (Yes, I know that can be interpretted to mean something that makes me sound stupid like "What, the setup isn't to blame but the programming, which IS the setup, is? MORON!", but you KNOW what I meant.)
Ya know, in Fire Emblem, or in the first two Warcraft games, or Starcraft, or Advance Wars, yes, the overhead perspective is similar to what a tactician would see looking at a board and deciding on commands. However, what about Final Fantasy Tactics games, or Wacraft 3, where there is no "tactician" you could possibly be seeing this from? You are merely a disembodied entity there, and the strategies, as far as the story goes, just seem to be coming from the heroes... or something... which have no top-down perspective on things. You, the player, aren't an actual character in those games. Actually, come to think of it, Fire Emblem 7 (that's the number of the latest one, the one we have, right?) is the first to actually give the player an identity in the story.
On my whole speil about clicking and the character autopathing, actually I was talking about like if you could see into a dungeon cell through the bars, thus making it "uncovered territory", and then clicking the move button behind those bars even though you had no idea there was this secret passageway hidden behind some tapestry hanging on a wall you could just walk through, and your character just runs STRAIGHT there and into the dungeon. If not for that, it might have been a hard puzzle to solve :D. But still, that's easy enough to fix. If the character's pathing AI tells it to go into uncharted territory, the game will refuse to let you just autowalk there, thus making it impossible for just such a situation to occur. That was just bad programming though, the actual point to move setup wasn't to blame. (Yes, I know that can be interpretted to mean something that makes me sound stupid like "What, the setup isn't to blame but the programming, which IS the setup, is? MORON!", but you KNOW what I meant.)
Ya know, in Fire Emblem, or in the first two Warcraft games, or Starcraft, or Advance Wars, yes, the overhead perspective is similar to what a tactician would see looking at a board and deciding on commands. However, what about Final Fantasy Tactics games, or Wacraft 3, where there is no "tactician" you could possibly be seeing this from? You are merely a disembodied entity there, and the strategies, as far as the story goes, just seem to be coming from the heroes... or something... which have no top-down perspective on things. You, the player, aren't an actual character in those games. Actually, come to think of it, Fire Emblem 7 (that's the number of the latest one, the one we have, right?) is the first to actually give the player an identity in the story.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)