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This was an idea I had after reading that debate in the 'Most powerful character' thread. It would take some imaginative hacking...and it might be a little past its time...but what else are forums for except stuff like this?

Since clearly you guys have strategized this game a hell of a lot more than I have (I'm still reeling from that Genji Glove/Offering thing) I thought it would be interesting if there was a game that allowed players to develop parties of characters and then go head to head with each other. Maybe in a Tactics-style world (which I haven't even played) or in the more old-skool world with four guys lined up on either side and those little speed bars ticking away.

I'm not really sure how the dynamic would work for head to head stuff - there might be a lot of point allocation. But if, in the 'old-skool' version you were continually finding out the hard way what your opponent had his characters equipped with - Ice, Fire gear, etc. - then the strategy of it all would really come into play.

The simple way to do this would be just with a sort of head-to-head Tactics universe. It's those wicked FF6 graphics that always get me, though - so over the top.

Just a thought.

P.S. That genji glove/offering combination? Eight hits. I'm not kidding. Now somebody explain all this hooplah about Gau to me.

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ONCE I LIVED IN UPPERCASE
MY LIFE INTENSELY PHALLIC
now i live in lowercase
with the occasional italic

interesting...I'm not sure if this is the right forum to post in, but hey - don't listen to me. I have no authority (or self-esteem for that matter) whatsoever. at any rate, what 'hooplah' do you want to know about?

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"Fire and steel
follow me through the lands
you will burn hordes of hell
in the deadly raging flames of revenge"

Rhapsody - Flames of Revenge

I'm not terribly sure what this topic is about. Mind clarifying so I know whether I have to move it or not?

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

from what I can make out, it is an idea for a rom hack or such like. at least that's what it says to me.

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"Fire and steel
follow me through the lands
you will burn hordes of hell
in the deadly raging flames of revenge"

Rhapsody - Flames of Revenge

This isn't the first (or the second) time somebody has mentioned how awesome it would be to have party VS party battles. There are two angles to it.

Is it possible? Yes. Yes, you can have a party controlled by the CPU which attacks you. Just think Kefka fighting you a few times, but then some. To do a proper job, there'd be some things that need to be fixed/modified, but it'd be possible. Now for human VS human battles, that'd be a lot tougher. Where I could imagine the first happening just for kicks, the latter would become an entire project all by itself.

Is it a good idea? Possibly. But there would be a lot of restrictions. There are a ton of attacks that you can perform that would kill an entire party easily. A decently-leveled Cyan using Quadra Slice would inflict 9999 on all four targets. We should ban Ultima, Meteor, Quasar, GrandTrain, Valiantknife/Dragon Horn, Offering/Fixed Dice, etcetera. There are so much attacks which are barrier-piercing and unblockable that it would be outruling almost 50 % of what you can do.

Thing is, FFT is built for team VS team battles and has abilities which assume it (although I've heard there's plenty cheapness if you know what to use). FF VI....simply assumes that you're fighting monsters with over 50000 HP, and not another party.



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The Collapse of Heaven and Earth

It's about taking the beloved FF6 combat system and giving it a monster tweak...which is something of a paradox...

And therein lies the rub, I suppose. As half-baked as this idea seems, it was always baked in the FF6 oven. Alphasmart's right - it would be a rom hack, the mother of all hacks. Hacking its way into a new game, really.

I don't know. Djibriel brings up a good point as well - the essence of those fights is only partially captured in your four little wee guys' strategy. It's equally important to have them face off against gigantic, sickeningly powerful, and single-minded enemies. Come to think of it...it's a motif of the games. Never would have thought of that.

Learn something new every day. Thanks.

And now I've got this feeling that I'm about to learn where to put posts like this...right?

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ONCE I LIVED IN UPPERCASE
MY LIFE INTENSELY PHALLIC
now i live in lowercase
with the occasional italic

"Beloved" battle system? Have a look at the FAQ the good folks at Mnrogar put up on the bugs lining FF3e/6j and you'll probably understand why I'm reading that sentence with a grain of salt. ;P

The main problem here is that the game is biased in favor of characters, stats-wise, and not enemies. Meaning characters get all the offense, and enemies, frankly, do pathetic damage in comparaison. Try whacking one of your characters with nothing but, say, the Illumina equipped using a decently-powerful character. Chances are the damage it would cause would be, frankly, staggering. Let an enemy hit you. No biggie, right? That there's the problem with this. Character damage is weighted towards being more appropriate to preveail against enemies with tens of thousands of HP, whereas no enemy is expected to have to take down something with more than a few thousand HP. Fighting against Shadow in the colloseum is a testimony to how quickly PC vs. PC battles can be over.

This would, in fact, be a very easy hack. It's done with a lot of characters: Kefka, Gau (sorta), Shadow, etc.. I'm not familiar how FF3e would handle multiple sprite-based characters on the enemy side, but even then it's likely there'd be very little to do to manage more than one sprite-based enemy. The problem would involve tweaking the game's battle engine to give PC vs. PC battles a fairer ground to stand on (ie, reducing damage done, dummying out some cheap relics and abilities, etc..) Mind you, the latter is easy enough but the former involves rewriting part of the battle engine, and deciding just how to tweak things to make it reasonably fun is harder than it looks.

Far from impossible. The question is just wether it's worth risking effort on something that would involve 3-second battles.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

But you can see where I'm going with this - theoretically, at least. The idea is more or less completely divorced from the realities of the engine. I do english literature, not computers. The difficulties involved in something like this are not lost me. I just like ideas.

Keep the crazy graphics - even that old mode 7 stuff for added effect. Reduce the damage, of course. And yes, I know it would be ridiculous to have some incredible graphic yield a piddly little bit of damage. Everything in moderation.

So you could do a point system - say, having 50,000 hitpoints to distribute amongst your team of four, chosen from a master list of the FF6 (7? 8? 1?) characters. You could use your points to shop for relics, espers, weapons, etc, or just pour them into the stats.

Then the characters face off, four-on-four. Or six on six, or five on two, or any permutation you want - it would actually be possible to just put all your points into a single character, and actually feel the pain of being Ultros.

If you used an FF7 style of combat engine, the camera could spin around after each attack and show the opposing party.

Am I talking completely out of my colon, or does this seem possible to anyone?

This post has been edited by Dr. Salt on 5th January 2005 05:16

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ONCE I LIVED IN UPPERCASE
MY LIFE INTENSELY PHALLIC
now i live in lowercase
with the occasional italic

While I don't have anywhere near the skills to possibly do it, it still at least SEEMS possible. As for the whole thing about doing way too much damage, there are relics and equipment and espers and such that change stats, how difficult would it be to just hack the strength and magic stats down a lot? Hack the hp and defense stats up? It sorta seems possible. It also seems like a good idea. Although I would much rather have PvP Tactics battles.

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Mercy?! I am the sixth phase of your world's destruction! would you like some evil pie?

My name is Fox, I am infinitely great, and I am the author of this comic strip..

You don't quite seem to understand the limitations of ROM hacking.

While the idea itself is FAR from being ANY difficult to implement (as Djibriel and I have posted, it's already being done through the regular course of the game with, mainly, Kefka), ROM hacking forces you to work with the limitations of the hardware (no 3D) and to some extent, the overall flow of the game itself.

One could write a (slow as hell) 3D engine in 65816 assembly, this would involve dumping all of the current graphics in favor of 3D models and backgrounds (unless you billboarded the sprites, but even so the point stands), effectively getting rid of a lot of the original graphic-related data. You could also write a complete "new" game out of it where the battle engine has been rehashed completely in favor of character vs. character battles only, where you can setup and massively customize teams, and where multiplayer battles would be possible, but at this point you might as well hack Tetris to make it into Super Mario 1.

Or, y'know, just write a Win32 game that doesn't have to work with the FF3e engine's limitations. Developement time would be cut by quite a bit and quality could be considerably higher. Have a look at the link in my sig. The screenshot there was produced after a single night of work (and quite a bit of coffee ). Why spend months on a ROM hack when you can just spend weeks on a Win32 game?

This post has been edited by Silverlance on 5th January 2005 13:15

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Quote (Silverlance @ 4th January 2005 22:54)

The question is just wether it's worth risking effort on something that would involve 3-second battles.

The honest answer is no. Otherwise, I would have finished my own half-assed hack by now (never got around the 2nd player targeting issues, had I done so, we'd have a hack by now).

Edit

FYI, the hack in question is a couple years old. Just ask mnrogar, who I got excited multiple times with my preemptive annoucements. I really should finish the thing just as an apology for getting everyone's hopes up and never delivering, but now I don't even know if my current 2P VS. ROM is the actual hack or not as I can't find the test battle on it. It'll suck if I have to start over....

And yes, I can third Rune and Dji's opinions that the Kefka, etc. battles are PVP battles. I was using those very events as a basis, since it turns out you can make a character an enemy in those events and yet leave him player-controlled. Like I said though, the targeting does not follow suit, so an ASM hack will be required to make that work.

This post has been edited by Master ZED on 5th January 2005 14:55

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The Unoriginal White Sheet

-Master ZED