Big agree. Its a problem I have with many modern hacks, I just don’t bother considering the skills because they’re too complicated, too many of them, and not impactful enough for me to care about. Even in the hack I’m currently working on that does use the skill patch, we tried to aim for units to have fewer but more impactful skills because of this.
1 Like
Skills are a tool and tools can be used poorly. They usually are added as a band-aid to spice the game up, which means they are not given the thought that any other part of the game should be given.
Skills are not a free get-out-of-stale-game card, they add complexity to the game, and it is up to the designer of the game to make it worth putting up with learning new mechanics. This can only be done by making the game entertaining yet accessible enough to hold the interest of the player.
And well, among the things that include making a game enjoyable is balance, and when skills are given out without thought, the balance gets obliterated and the game gets more complicated, so skills can be a detriment to the enjoyment of the game by making it a broken and/or complex mess
So yeah, I think Ghast is on point here.
11 Likes
I’m gonna agree with Ghast, spamming skills isn’t really good design. Still, if done right it can have marvelous results.
1 Like
I imagine it’s a problem exacerbated by Heroes being the way it is. It’s a game designed around skills which were a relative rarity in the main FE games, or at least were used in moderation. And I think that’s key; use skills in moderation. The 3DS games on higher difficulties turned me off to skills because I didn’t want to calculate my unit’s skills, enemy unit skills, buffs, and debuffs on top of the usual things you’ve gotta take into consideration before starting combat.
I think the main reason I like to use the skills system, QoL aside, is because I can translate existing mechanics and class abilities that isn’t displayed normally in vanilla into a skill with a description and visual identifier. This is great for things like Canto. I also use it to indicate weapon locks and crit boosts. For example my Myrmidon/Mercenary equivalent has the class skill Sword-Ace. This is really just a display only Skill that tells the player they get access to an exclusive range of Swords like the Wo Dao. On promotion this is upgraded to Sword-Ace+, which grants access to Swords like the Wo Dao but also grants an innate crit bonus. Again, display only but I appreciate the extra amount of information you can convey with Skills.
9 Likes
Skillsystems is about versatility. Options. Breath.
I seriously agree that the design flaws with Skillsystems are quite numerous, however I also will stand in defense of them that the allow more versatility between units and classes. I know I am guilty of using a lot of skills in my project, but I agree that using too many complicated skills at once can be very distracting, and I try to keep it at a small amount starting out, with only 2-3 simple skills starting out, and growing very slowly with the course of the game until high levels with the super epic complicated powerful skill.
I don’t know what other hacks are doing, but I certainly agree that projects that give you 6 skills at once with effects you’ve never seen before can be highly problematic. There is a great deal of power that comes with skillsystems, and we as a community can sometimes forget the implicit responsibilities. Doubtless we will have a large number of noob projects that will succumb to this issue since they don’t understand how to create a proper difficulty curve with skills. Skills are a tool that the developer gives the player and their opposition to create unique scenarios they would not otherwise be able to, yet a lot of people don’t understand this and simply add skills because “oogabooga skills good”.
That’s why, nowadays, the most clever and interesting hacks are those that don’t use skills at all, because they are able to show they don’t need to rely on skills as a crutch for uniqueness and a mask for fun.
Now, of course, if we were to have a universal skillsystem of the same set of skills that everyone could get used to, it wouldn’t be so distracting, but people that flood their games with custom skills understandably create problems, especially when they forget that those playing their hack don’t know everything about the gameplay right out of the box.
Also, is this rant coming off of playing the Make a Fun Chapter Submissions? lol.
6 Likes
i agree with @Arch’s case study idea. i feel like someone had to have made a similar topic about hack design just in general on what made some mechanic good before the skill system took place. I feel like if you did want to get that topic off the ground. A game-by-game study could be a good start. We could look to vanilla games and why we like these unique skill systems to begin with and take notes from those.
I always had these feelings on the “modern day hacking” scene when skill first came out and then when i came back to the community a few months ago and started playing recommended hacks and stuff.
I always wanted to post a thread about this but never was inspired enough to give it a go (i tried twice before).
to the fellas asking if MAFC triggered this. It did, but I haven’t played all the submissions and the ones that DO have skills actually didn’t go overkill. Additionally, it feels like in some submissions, i was placed in the middle of an existing project, so i don’t have the context of playing it up until what feels like mid-late game for some submissions. So I would say, on the heels of playing like, 12 fe8 hacks in a row, it gave me the motivation to post.
6 Likes
As Leonarth said, though, that’s a problem with the designer rather than a problem with the skill system. I mean, I’ve seen hacks that think it’s a good idea to pit you up against mercenaries who have seal speed as a class skill at chapter 3. While I personally just don’t like seal skills as a concept, I’m not going to complain nearly as hard if they appear towards the end of a hack when I’m use to more skills existing.
2 Likes
people seem to be reciprocating fine. better than i expected actually.
1 Like
The skill system is ultimately an extremely verbose tool that makes it easier for a creator to make modifications to the games calculations and gameplay. How that tool is used should not be blamed on the system itself, but rather its implementation, and I think the title of this topic is a bit disingenuous as a result. Additionally, I think the complaints brought up against the system in this topic are overly broad and can be applied to things that go beyond the skill system itself.
For example, the first critique, something that amounts to there being too many skills and that they are hard to keep track of, isn’t something unique to the skill system itself. Instead of skills, a hacker could make a map filled with totally new items/classes with brand new icons and achieve a similar result.
Of course, much of what I have said or could say has already been said by others in this thread and we don’t need paragraph long post after paragraph long post all essentially repeating the same exact thing.
In an attempt to be more productive, in my opinion, the way I see it, it can be argued that there are four paradigms of skill usage in FE games.
Paradigm one I would argue is used by FE9, FE10, and Birthright. In these games, skills are largely tools for the player to make use of, and only very rare enemies, such as bosses, will have skills themselves. Generic enemies rarely have skills. This is the easiest version to implement as if enemies rarely, if ever, have skills, then there is less for the player to worry about and more for the player to take advantage of.
Paradigm two I would argue is what you see in revelations, FE4, FE5, Awakening, and three houses. In this case, generic enemies almost always only have class specific skills, with the occasional unique skill sprinkled here and there. You will almost always see bosses with unique skills as well. It differs from paradigm one in that you are almost always guaranteed to see enemies with the same skills as opposed to sporadic implementation of more random skills. This is a more advanced implementation of paradigm one and requires more thought to take care of, but can still be easy for a hacker and player to manage.
Paradigm three is what you see in conquest and missions in FEH. In this case, you will constantly face off against enemies with skills that are more specific to the situation you are in. Such design can border more towards being puzzle like than what you would typically see in an FE game. This is extremely difficult to pull off, and isn’t something that should be attempted unless you have a large team to work with.
Paradigm four is what you see in more randomized FEH battles like the tower or in PVP. This is just unpredictable skill usage where there is no good indication of what to expect other than knowing that you’ll see skills for the sake of skills and that things will be harder to deal with in some way, shape, or form as a result.
Because of how difficult it is to implement paradigm three, it sounds to me like people are either trying and failing to get there, ending up in paradigm four, or as a result of their skill spam, are getting into paradigm four regardless.
I think most hacks should aim to be in paradigm one or two, and be smart about the skills that they use to accomplish that. No one is going to complain if you give shove to all your foot units, but giving luna to enemy units is where things can get dicey. At the same time, you shouldn’t being giving vantage, wrath, and resolve to all your player units, however giving hawkeye to bosses can help keep players alert and make a threatening enemy stay consistently intimidating.
Talking about what hacks do and don’t do something well is difficult. You risk hurting the feelings of someone who spent a lot of time on something they think is an enjoyable product, but true constructive criticism is important. For hacks that aren’t using the skill system well, we should be nice and constructive in how we help our fellow peers improve their hacks. That isn’t to say people here aren’t doing just that, but I feel it’s important to keep that in mind, and to the hack creators out there, have an open mind as to how best to improve our work products.
20 Likes
I fully agree with this, if only because I’ve had a vehement grudge with badly designed memehacks with the skill system thrown on at the last second to achieve nothing but frustration.
Also cause I just, kinda hate the system. It’s like, if you’re even remotely considering using it and you’re on FEBuilder, it’s either
-
- give up
-
- move to buildfiles
-
- your hack sucks
with that said there are many amazing hacks that use skills well: four kings, hiraeth, etc.
1 Like
not sure if it’s related but
Talking about skills…
2 Likes
To be honest, if 3H maddening wasn’t the stat inflated shitfest that it was, I think their skill balance would have been fine.
You say that like it’s a bad thing to have bad game design you can ridicule and mock.
1 Like
I think the point is that when someone makes a bad map that isn’t fun to play, people aren’t saying “Tiled is bad.” I get what you mean though, the issue w/ skill system is the default settings that are time consuming to change if you’re using it in builder. That doesn’t excuse poor design choices, but it certainly makes it easier to make design choices that lead to frustrating player experiences.
This is the single largest issue - the default skill layout and default numbers all need to be adjusted to achieve some semblance of balance in the context of FE8/GBA style numbers/gameplay. It’s tricky because I presume the majority of users making hacks and using it are doing so in an uninteded way (Builder), making it harder to edit exactly how you want, versus in a buildfile where it is more straightforward and simple to customize.
If the source implementation for builder was tweaked so that the 1) numbers were lower (+50 breaker skills to like +15, stance skills from +4 to +2, etc.) and 2) that the skills weren’t assigned to classes by default, or at least slightly reduced, it’d probably make a huge impact in how new hackers approach using it.
I get that that’s counter to the purpose of the skillsystem and anyone involved will tell you it isn’t meant to be used the way it comes out of the box. Thankfully, 7743 is a saint and has made patches to make it easy for FEBuilder users to also adjust the values as well, but I think the defaults don’t work unless a bunch of other stats are inflated to better reflect 3DSFE or 3H.
I’d argue Legends of Avenir is probably one of the better implementations of a more ‘skills oriented’ hack. Snakey and Noguchi adjusted a lot of the numbers and shuffled around skills a bit to better attain balance, and tweaked (mostly reduce) numbers to make them more in line with GBA defaults. It’s been a while since I’ve played LoA though.
Faith and Blood is more my speed (emphasis on movement skills vs. proc and stat adjusting skills), and is a good example of what a more ‘pared down’ system would look like IMO.
Aletheia also has a simpler implementation where the skills add a bit of personal flare to the units you’re using (personal + shove/canto) that helps make units more distinct without making enemies annoying to deal with or triviliazing the gameplay.
4 Likes
I mean, is it not? If something has bad game design and I enjoyed it less as a result, why wouldn’t I laugh at its expense?
There’s some other hacks I’ve yet to play but I know about them balancing skills well, like, say, Faith and Blood or Avenir. I also wasn’t saying “if you use skills your hack will always be bad”,
Going to ignore the thread title because it’s already been brought up, but I feel like this needs to be stated:
I think we should be careful not to conflate a simple skill with a good skill. Vantage is gross. On red units it’s a prime example of a ‘ha ha you didn’t check skills, gotcha’, and on blue units it just encourages dumb EP cheese strats. I can tell you I never felt like vantage added anything positive to the game when I was playing 3H, it was either ‘gotcha’ or me abusing Dimitri.
Pass is another example of a skill which is very simple and easy to understand but is also undesirable. Being able to prevent enemies from reaching your squishy units by making defensive formations is a legitmate tactic, and it is incredibly jarring when a red unit just runs through your units to kill your priest.
Distant Counter is another example. Really easy to understand (‘always counter despite range’), and terrible. If you can get it it on blue units it just encourages juggernauting and EP gameplay, and on bosses it kind of misses the point of good boss design. If you can trivialize a boss just from attacking outside of its range, then the answer isn’t to throw distant counter on it.
Not a fan of overly specific and conditional things like HP thresholds, but I’ve done things like ‘when initiating at 1 range’ to encourage the sword/anima class to risk counters instead of just use 2 range magic before.
Overall yeah if you’re using the skill system you should be using it sparingly and carefully. Personally I’m even reconsidering the policy of ‘give every unit a personal skill’, because there just aren’t enough skills I like to even fill out the list of personals, and ‘throw random crap in just to fill out a skill slot’ is probably a worse idea than ‘only certain units have personals’.
3 Likes
Personally my main problem with the skill system is not so much the design implications or the default skills, but rather that it’s a big example (and perhaps even the primary factor) of FE hacks becoming incredibly insular and incestuous. It’s so widely used that anyone who writes buildfiles for public use has to go twelve extra steps in order to support skill system compatibility, which I think is an unreasonable degree of extra work for a system that really isn’t particularly good in the first place.
Incestuous is certainly a particular choice of words.
9 Likes
It is indeed quite a selection that involved options.