Thread for Potential Mechanic/Gameplay concepts

Design
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Just a thread overall to discuss potential mechanics or concepts. I’ll try to keep these within the potential realm of FE GBA hacking, but if you have ideas that use concepts from newer games or just entirely unique concepts, feel free to stick them here as long as they’re generally based in SRPG territory. I’ll start with a few of my own.

Raid-style bosses. In this case, a giant Golem surrounded by many spirits. The Golem has huge HP and Defense stats, 3 movement, attacks at 1-3 range, and uses the skill Barricade to limit the damage it takes from being doubled. It’s surrounded by many Spirit enemies. The Spirits don’t have any offensive abilities, and instead act as supports for the Golem. They all have Kishuna’s anti-magic field effect, but to a much more limited extent (3 tile radius), and have AoE healing skills that keep the Golem alive if they aren’t taken down. There are effectively multiple ways to fight this kind of boss, either by hunting down the spirits and then bursting the boss with Magic or by just ignoring them and brute forcing into the boss. This kind of boss can exist as a stand-alone challenge early on, while later encounters can force players to deal with waves of melee enemies alongside this, have enemy summoners summon more Spirits to protect the boss, and give the Golems different kinds of weapons with various effects.

A game with a weapon that defines the lord. Instead of a single character claiming the status, a weapon usable by all characters and classes gives them the ability to seize. To counteract the potential for snowballing, that weapon acts as a curse, inflicting stat debuffs on whoever carries it and leaving them incredibly vulnerable, possibly not even being able to attack at all. Writing for this could humanize the weapon I guess? Or just focus on telling a plot driven story over the characters, maybe something about a group sharing a heavy burden.

A Lord Weapon that has unlimited use in combat but has a limited amount of uses as a savestate. I’m not sure which slot it would technically take, whether it be the ferro-electric one or one of the three default ones, but either way savestates exist so whatever. Or it could just spend a use and pull up a prompt telling the player to savestate? But that doesn’t seem very classy.

If a Unit dies while they have an A-rank support with another character, that character gains the ability to Summon them from the beyond as a spirit. This Spirit can’t attack, be attacked, or move, but it retains the support rank it had with that ally. It can also act as a Light Rune with support bonuses, as enemies can’t stand on the tile they occupy. Ideally they could be only used once per map and vanish after a few turns.

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First of all: Those are some cool and interesting ideas imo. I would like to add my thoughts on two of them especially:

The Golem:
Maybe you could give the spirits some different skills too, not only Kishuna’s “mages hate this trick” barrier. So it’s not always defeat spirits, so your mages can actually do something as well, then kill the golem.
Instead you could give them some debuff or so maybe. Together with the different golem weapons that could give some different ways of playing against them or at least a bit more freedom in how to fight them.

Lord defined by the one ring weapon:
I like that idea. It could make for some interesting tactics in how to clear a seize map quickly. And the idea of binding it into the story is interesting too. But I’m not sure if the debuffs should be so big that you create something worse than Lyndis.

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Just to add my say on the matter.

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I’m a huge fan of radiant design, so I’d love to see a roguelike FE game where units are randomised with certain attributes or skills on recruitment,
but playing through fixed maps, much like Into the Breach. I’d give each unit a randomised backstory and require the player to capture, then recruit them via dialogue choices. The player would have to learn more about the lore of the land in order to know what the correct dialogue choices would be, so recruiting allies would become easier and easier the more familiar you are with the game. Each randomised unit would have some flavour text that would vary depending on their backstory. Your attachment to the unit will change depending on how that unit functions within your army… then you get to start over with a new cast, every time!

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I don’t get why people say Bow range needs to be higher considering most games where Bow units are good have 2 range 90% of the time.

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Mount Expansion

Berwick Saga lets you customize mounted units by putting them on different horses. I think we can take that a step further. Sometime or other I want to try out an FE where every unit is dismounted and has an item in their inventory that summons their mount. And it wouldn’t just be horses, pegasi and wyverns, you could add lots of cool creatures as mounts. They could even level up and have gambits like battalions. But they’d also have endurance too, so if they get KO’d, your unit’s going to be on their feet again.

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I think it’s because of 1-2 weapons and magic, they can counter bows from afar and attack when adjacent to a unit, so if a bow was 2-3 e.g. it can be uncounterable, at the expense of being unable to hit when adjacent to a unit.

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Enemies usually don’t have 1-2 however, and in those games I mentioned 1-2 isn’t very useful all the time because it either is heavy and has low hit or it has low mt. Magic users usually just tend to get balanced out by having low bases although I think if more enemies packed resistance that would go long enough to make bows be a viable alternative.

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I’m surprised MMOs aren’t pilfered more for gimmicks to introduce into ROM hacks, it almost works with a small controlled player army against either a big singular enemy or a larger amount of smaller enemies.

The leading idea in the OP made me think of the second boss from Syrcus Tower in FFXIV, though it’s slightly different in that there are small bit spawns that have small circles you need to stand in to make them vulnerable, then killing them will stop them healing the boss. Overall though it’s still the same concept of big mon with minor support mons.

One thing I’d love to see more of is map interaction. Outside of terrain bonuses and movement for fliers it feels like we’re just playing on textured playmats, especially in 3H where it seemed maps were reused often and I never really grew to associate a map with a place aside from the monastery. A defend throne map where you can lock certain doors, a castle city siege where you can lower and raise bridges between areas. I had one idea for a sewer(ugh) level where you had to lower and raise water levels to get through the level, inspired from FFXII’s waterways.

I’m also a big fan of indirect choice making, or gameplay focused choice making. Thinking of a boss in Nier Automata where after you beat it you can either confirm the kill or walk away but there’s no pauses, no cuts to a dialogue box with a yes or no. In Human Strings I had a chapter early on that was scrapped where you’d be against two separate armies from different factions and a boss each, where depending on the boss you kill you’d essentially side with the other army.

The talk feature is also severely underrated and I wish it’d be used more, the games need more diplomacy that’s player managed and not just player witnessed.

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This is something that I feel leaves room for tons of experimentation on the developer side and I’ve felt that for years (see my comment in Skitty’s LP thread of Dream of Five). Interactivity that is player-driven within a chapter that changes things on the map, be it opening new pathways, destroying obstacles, changing the landscapes, etc. can create new experiences beyond standard “move forward, defeat every enemy” or “lolwarpskip” chapter designs that are overly common both in the series and replicated in the community.

Now, of course, you might say, “But LG, we already have that with breakable walls and snags!” and you’d technically be correct, but I’m moreso referring to things on a macro scale than something as simple as punching a hole in a wall. I’m thinking things like destroying the top stone of a hallway to cause a cave in that blocks the path or something like Staff of Ages where the boat crashes into the dock, but set up as a mid-map event where you have the choice of docking normally and being near your allies or ramming the dock/bridge/whatever, destroying it, and cutting off reinforcements from reaching the main front, but it leaves the terrain mangled and the reinforcements on the boat are strewn about near the wreck instead of being able to aid the fight.

The downside to having room to do this is that the story and developer(s) need to accommodate those options and be planned for, and, obviously, it would be very tricky to include something like this in every map (at least in a GBA environment), and it might get stale even if you did structure something like that, but there’s definitely avenues to explore.

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This is straight up just a good pitch for a game. I think if you combined this with the burden-lord weapon thing, you could create a pretty unique rogue like. What kind of overarching plot do you think could lead to this?

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Big reply to as many of these ideas.

Personally I don’t think this really works when it comes to every class that uses bows, but for Archers/classes locked to Bows, I find it hard to see 2-3 range as unbalanced. Classes that can use 1-2 range weapons and bows just completely outclass them.

Honestly, I think that both of these being unrealistic as hell works solely to the game’s benefit. Being able to ferry allies quicker is just a net positive to almost everything, and making more rules around the already complex rescue system is hard to justify outside of Kaga’s active lust for player torture in Thracia.

Personally, I’d just like it if we went back to passive items that take up inventory slots. This way, boosted stats can have a bit of a tangible cost. That and as a dev, I like the idea of being able to see where all a unit’s stats came from, which players will surprisingly forget.

I’m genuinely curious on how this could work, but as far as I can tell, there are a bunch of problems in the way. I don’t know how Berwick Saga handles mount death, but I can see real problems in the form of resetting for your mounts fearing the consequences or just slapping them onto as many people as possible if they aren’t heavily restricted as there’s generally very little downside to having one.

I think this is specifically not done more in the current scene because tile changes are very difficult and annoying to manage, and honestly I don’t know how difficult or even possible it is to go back and forth with tile changes, ie being able to open, close, and continuously repeat that. But those are just engine limitations, in terms of design I’d love to see these, even if it’s just a one time change you can make to the terrain.

On a main scenario level, these are very difficult to do well, and require tons of work plotting out alternate routes. On a moment to moment gameplay level, lots of these moments already exist in the form of simple things like saving villages or recruiting enemies. And due to the cascading consequences actions face in these games, people will almost always either not care about the extra story content if it has no consequence towards the game or players will just aim to pick the choice that gives them the biggest gameplay advantage or reward.

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Big empire is in the process of conquering continent, down to final kingdom who takes a stand to liberate the other countries, who have been conscripted/forced to fight in the war, which is why their allegiances are swayed so easily. The overarching story isn’t that important - I’m more interested in telling the stories of the cast.

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