Brendan Coleiro s3200713

Exercise 3a

Random Encounters in RPG Games.

First of all I would like to mention that it is one of the most frustrating and annoying game design flaws in my opinion.

The first game I would like to mention is not actually a game but a series, the Final Fantasy series. Now I know that in their most recent games they have a similar system but it’s a lot less random and just an encounter that you can see on your screen. But in the earlier games you would be travelling across a field to get from city to city and in that field you would get jumped by about 50 different random encounters of monsters that are trying to kill you. Sometimes your character would not even complete their run cycle before you were in a battle again... and that is where it starts getting annoying. In the first couple of hours of game play this may seem fun but then after a 10-15 hrs game play I get so fed up with these random battles. On top of that in the later game you will most likely need to go back to your starting area where you continuously get jumped by level 3 monsters when you are at level 78. And then ON TOP OF THAT its takes about 10 seconds to get into a battle and then another 10 to leave the batter and maybe 10 seconds to kill the encounter. So that is roughly 30 seconds an encounter TIMES BY about 30 encounters... that works out to 15 minutes of the players time wasted and at which point you can’t stand the game and never play it again.

NOT TO METION TURN BASED COMBAT J

The second game is also not a game but a series again and that is the Pokemon games on the Gameboy/DS. Pretty much the same thing as the Final Fantasy games but this time there is specific ‘grass’ areas that have pokemon in them, so they improved on the fact that FF had an entire map that you could walk through and anywhere on the map you could get a random encounter. So it was easier to navigate and avoid unwanted pokemon but then the game revolved around pokemon and you needed to capture your very own pokemon. AND OF COURSE YOU COULD NEVER FIND THE POKEMON YOU WANTED! It was always a damn crap pokemon that you didn’t want, like geodude. While the game had items that could repel encounters in the grass areas they never lasted long enough. And then of course there were the caves...

So yeah Random Encounters in games = BADDDDDDDD

That being said these games are great games but if I had a choice over Random event RPG or WoW (live combat) I’d go Wow. On the ground that WoW is a of the rpg element and has live combat.

If my third year game had to include random encounter enemies it would probably destroy the game as we know it. Firstly the game we have is not suited for random encounter enemies that will cut you to a combat screen that will totally ruin the game play and most importantly the flow of the game that we have established so well. I suppose that if we had to incorporate it into the game it would still work but it would not be fun AT ALL!