Big Number Syndrome (Rant) (J-RPGs)

Xylia

Terrarian
So earlier today, I watched some Top 10 lists having to do with Final Fantasy.

Now as some background, I've not played FF13, 13-2, Type-0, Dissidia, etc. I've played X, a little of X-2, XI, XIV and of course all of them prior to X except for FF3 and After Years.

Well, I was watching this video, and I noticed that several clips of later Final Fantasy games (some of the clips I assume were from 13 and 13-2) had these ridiculously huge numbers all over the screen. I'd watch someone run at some ridiculously giant monster and I'd see 99,999 popping out of it again and again and again and again, and I'm sitting here rolling my eyes.

No, seriously. Stahp.

Not everybody is a little kid that gets goosebumps about arbitrary numbers. Large numbers only mean something when they actually convey something. For example, I get just as excited about doing 2,000 damage in Final Fantasy 1 (the only way to hit for 2,000 damage is to use a Black Belt; the best weapons on a Knight can only do 400-ish, and Black Mages can't get anywhere near that high, not even with Flare/Nuke) as I do when I do 8,000+ in Final Fantasy 4 (the only way that's possible without exploiting weakness is to get the Crystal Sword which many people miss on their way through the final dungeon due to it being difficult to see the path that leads to it).

The whole point in damage numbers is to convey how much damage you're doing compared to something's health. If everybody does 99,999 with every attack then it quickly becomes "blah". Just like when you start a game of Final Fantasy 1 (NES) out and two of your guys are doing 15s with their rapiers and your mages are doing 4-5 with their daggers and wooden hammers, you get the idea that the fighters with their rapiers are far more effective fighters. This continues through the game at a slow and even curve of rising power.

Contrast that to Final Fantasy 6. If you take the time to increase peoples' stats by equipping them with Espers when they gain levels, you can make it so that Relm (one of the weakest physical fighters in the game) can do 9,500+ with her paintbrush... oh wait, Mog does the same thing with his spear. And then the powerful knight Cyan uses the most powerful knight sword and does 9800.... wow. Ok? A little girl with a paintbrush is doing the same thing a knight with a legendary sword? *sigh*

That's when Big Number Syndrome starts to hit. You start filling the screen with ridiculously huge numbers that get difficult to keep track of after awhile (okay this thing has 10 billion HP and I hit it for 99,999 about 8 times... uh.... I need a calculator to calculate this!) and it seems to me that the huge numbers are only for the little kids who like lots of pretty pretty flashy flashy stuff.

I remember when Final Fantasy games were more about the story and (somewhat) strategic combat rather than finding the most overpowered move (FFX's Quick Hit anyone?) and spamming it repeatedly until the thing goes uncle, or until the thing does a total party kill on you (the number of clips where your group members have 10,000 HP and are getting hit with 100,000 are ridiculous).

Surely they can do better combat than that.

I'm glad Terraria decided to do actual game balance and stayed away from the "Dodge this or die instantly" kinda stuff. The only thing I know of like that is the Death Ray in Expert Mode. And that's the last boss and it is blockable by walls.

That, and another thing Final Fantasy games need to start doing.... enemy defense. You wouldn't need such ridiculously huge numbers if you had an Attack vs Defense scaling system. Say for example you have 10 Attack Power and the enemy has 1 Defense, so you do 9 damage, right? Well, later on the game you run into an enemy that has 10 Defense and now you're doing 1s. You gotta raise your attack power. Maybe at the end of the game, you've got 800ATP and the enemy has 600 Defense and you're doing 200s. But you go back to the beginning of the game and you're obliterating them with 800 damage attacks.

That way you get the sense of power without the ridiculous 5-digit numbers being necessary.
 
I've heard that some of the very 1st FF games had character HP Max out at 999 and enemy + Boss HP go around 4-5 digit hp. With later games around FFVI & FFVII increasing character HP to 9999 and Enemy/Boss HP to 6-7 digits. And now some Super bosses like Yiazmat have 8 Digit HP going all the way up to 50 Million HP, while the characters can only inflict a max of 9999 damage per hit making this boss into a several hour grindfest.

Big numbers are being used to make the game more "flashy" it seems like. Because a player seeing their attack do 50,000 damage against an enemy with 5 million HP is much "cooler" than seeing an attack do 50 damage against an enemy with 1000 HP. It makes the battle against the enemy with 5 million HP seem much more relevant than battling the weaker enemy. While I personally enjoy large numbers, I agree that there has to be a relevance to them in order to be used. When a game doesn't use a defense statistic, it seems like that's where large numbers become necessary to build up the scale of power.

If your character starts out with 100 HP in the beginning and can only do around 20 damage to enemies that are dangerous to the character, but are regular soldiers. Watching your attacks and character overall get stronger really allows you to feel like your character has gotten much stronger when they have 5000 HP near the end of the game about to face the final boss who threatens the world the character is in and the player's attacks can do 1000 damage which is a huge step above the 20 they could do in the beginning. That's when the thrill of getting stronger works very well.

If a game started out with an ordinary character that had 10000 hp from the start and weak goblin enemies that had 50000 hp. That feels like crazy inflation because it seems like normal characters from a normal setting are treated as very powerful beings from the start. Which can only mean the character will have 1,000,000 HP when they are maxed out, and the final boss who seeks to control a city will have 50,000,000,000 HP. It just feels like the scale of power has gone from absurdly powerful for all characters to even more absurdly powerful for a game that's just taking place in a single country.

I think a game that only focuses on a City-Scale Conflict should have small numbers for player and enemies plus their weapons, seeing as the strongest weapons in such a game are likely to be Swords, dynamite, and machine guns. Allowing the character to start with 10 HP and be able to level up to having 100-500 HP by the end. With enemies being a little higher than that.

Whereas if a game takes place in a Galactic scale setting, it seems more appropriate to have Player and Enemy units do tons of damage, because the destructive capacity of such weapons are likely to include nuclear weapons, planet destroying weapons, Antimatter Weapons, and Hyperdrive abilities. This may include facing bosses that are God-like, and when facing such enemies if they are the only enemy in the game to have the highest 25,000,000 HP When your weapons can do around 40000 damage it makes you feel like you are taking on a God while you still feel strong yourself, but not quite as strong as a God character.

No matter what sort of scale a JRPG adopts, it is important for the scale to account for higher difficulty modes for multipliers that adjust enemy health, hp, and defense by x1.5 or x2. One special enemy that has 500,000 Hp in a game where the strongest enemies mainly have 5,000 HP is a very unbalanced scale considering the Player will have attacks that do around 500-1000 Damage Which would make this enemy practically impossible on a "Hard Mode" where the 500,000 HP became 1,000,000.

It does seem like the Defense skill isn't used to great effect in many JRPGs and some games from Atlus have even started to remove the defense statistic entirely which effectively makes SMT more of a case of "Nuke your opponent before they can Nuke you". Because if your attacks do 30 damage to an enemy when your attacks normally do 200 damage to most other enemies that is a very noticeable difference and makes it so this special enemy doesn't need to have as high of a HP value to be formidable. It would certainly help to reduce a game's scale getting too inflated

Ultimately it seems the reason that Big Numbers emerge in many modern JRPGs is just for the sake of looking flashy, even if the game does use defense to a degree, it may only be something like 50 defense points which means nothing when the standard at a point in the game is attacks doing 10000 damage. Which I would guess is happening to the more recent FF games because it seems rare for a JRPG to not have any form of Defense Statistic at all.

These are my thoughts overall on what is called the Big Number Syndrome seems to be.
 
I was born in an era prior to big numbers being a thing, and yet I don't mind it that much. It's a stylistic choice, as they call it.

One of my favorite RPGs of all times (partially because it's the only good game my main fandom ever got) used "big" numbers but they capped visually at 9999, and it had a strange effect: In the final boss battle, you could have a group of girls throwing 9999 damage attacks at the boss constantly for several turns, and the boss didn't seem to mind until you got her health to less than 9999 (although it was likely the boss would go from 9999 to 0 in a single attack.)
 
Big numbers on screen != to little kids being the target audience.

Disgaea, for example, gives you the ability to throw a single punch that can do potentially billions of damage to an enemy. This series is most certainly not for kids.
 
The only J-RPG I consistantly play is Fire Emblem awakening, so you mostly only do 30-200 damage with criticals.
 
Big numbers on screen != to little kids being the target audience.

Disgaea, for example, gives you the ability to throw a single punch that can do potentially billions of damage to an enemy. This series is most certainly not for kids.

Kids, young adults with mindsets similar to kids.... not much difference there to be honest. We're still talking about younger people who are newer to videogames who demand flashy flashy stuff and power trips because the games they had as kids while growing up were getting all of these newer flashier graphics and such. When I was growing up as a kid, I had Final Fantasy 1 as one of the few RPGs around and eventually FF2 (4) came out along with the other SNES titles when I was a late teenager.

By the way, when I'm talking about "kids" and RPGs... I'm talking about 14-22 year olds roughly. People younger than 14 are probably not the type of kids to enjoy story-rich J-RPGs (the older kind), though exceptions always exist. Younger people are generally more into action-oriented games (nothing wrong with that).

The <25y crowd wasn't around (or shall I say, weren't of the gaming age to really understand such games) when the older story-heavy RPGs were current, the games like Final Fantasy 4 (2 US), or especially Final Fantasy 1, or even some of the newer ones like Lufia and the Fortress of Doom, or 7th Saga, or even early Playstation games like Breath of Fire 3 (which was released in 1997, 18 years ago). No, a 24 year old nowadays had at the very least Playstation2-era RPGs and that's about when PC gaming started taking off so the stuff they're used to is more flashier and that's about when J-RPG companies started deciding that somehow "bigger numbers = better!"

At least the biggest offender (not a J-RPG though), WoW, has an excuse because of how its I-level system works and how expansions work, but even they decided that the numbers were just simply too big and they had to cut them back. But a lot of good it did them, because numbers are almost absurd again already (they didn't cut them enough and they had the growth too fast).
 
... PC gaming started "taking off" when the PS2 was around? Okay then.

So this is basically ageism, "BACK IN MY DAY!" garbage, and flawed data. You make me ashamed of being an old man.

JRPGs were always grind-heavy and with numbers larger than required, really. Lufia had this nice intro sequence where you did a :red:zillion damage to monsters, and in the last stages of the game, I'm pretty sure I remember four digits numbers. If you're using a game like that to defend your argument against big numbers, then that's going to be as effective as using 4chan to tell people why the internet is good.

Now, what's bad about modern day RPGs is that a lot of lazy :red:s (read: "independient developers") use a horribly standardized and limited RPG engine to make cookie cutter Final Fantasy games. Remove RPGMaker and you'll remove half of what's wrong with the RPG genre in this era. But yeah, let's focus on cosmetic features of a game to call them flawes, that'll make us very different from "kids" these days who, ageists say, focus only on... Cosmetic features when choosing their games.

Ow, right in the hypocrisy.
 
... PC gaming started "taking off" when the PS2 was around? Okay then.

Before PS2 days, PC Gaming was something that was mostly done by a small group of people, back when most Windows games were written for Win98. I remember WinXP running most of these, but some of them didn't run very well (I remember Baldur's Gate giving me a lot of trouble, for example). Sure, PC Gaming existed, but it was still somewhat on the difficult side to actually pull off reliably. You still had driver issues, you still had Windows/DOS issues, etc. It wasn't like it is today where nearly any game will work on any PC without any tweaking whatsoever. It still took a healthy amount of PC Know-How to actually game on a PC.

So this is basically ageism, "BACK IN MY DAY!" garbage, and flawed data. You make me ashamed of being an old man.

Flawed data? lol.

JRPGs were always grind-heavy

Some were, some weren't. That's not the point. The numbers (damage/health numbers) are.

and with numbers larger than required, really. Lufia had this nice intro sequence where you did a :red:zillion damage to monsters, and in the last stages of the game, I'm pretty sure I remember four digits numbers.

Lufia and the Fortress of Doom had a 3-digit cap. The best spell in the game did ~450 damage.

If you're using a game like that to defend your argument against big numbers, then that's going to be as effective as using 4chan to tell people why the internet is good.

To better clarify what I mean by "Big Numbers", I'm talking 5+ digits. 4-digit numbers are OK, especially for a longer game. Until, unless you run into the 9999 syndrome where everybody does 9999 with every attack (FF6).

Now, what's bad about modern day RPGs is that a lot of lazy :red:s (read: "independient developers") use a horribly standardized and limited RPG engine to make cookie cutter Final Fantasy games. Remove RPGMaker and you'll remove half of what's wrong with the RPG genre in this era.

Ever played Skyborn? If not, try it. It is an RPGM game that does something I've NEVER seen in a Singleplayer "Final Fantasy Cookie Cutter" game, and that's an in-game threat/aggro system where enemies get angry at people who do lots of damage and lots of healing and you need to actually have tanks, tanking. Whenever a non-tank gets hit, that is a serious flaw on the player's strategy and the game punishes you for it heavily. Just one example. There's quite a few RPGM games on Steam that try very hard to innovate within RPGM engine.

But yeah, let's focus on cosmetic features of a game to call them flawes, that'll make us very different from "kids" these days who, ageists say, focus only on... Cosmetic features when choosing their games.

Damage numbers are part of the actual game mechanics, and something you (should) be keeping track of. It gets kinda hard to keep track of, though, when you see "99,999" all over the screen in some 20-hit combo, and you need to do that some 50 times to kill a boss. Then it just gets to absurdity. Why not divide all of those numbers by 100 and have them be 999 damage hits? Is there really a difference, other than smaller numbers are easier for the human brain to comprehend/compute? 50,000 is easier to compute than 5,000,000 on the spur of the moment.

Ow, right in the hypocrisy.

Not really. Aesthetics rarely have any part in game mechanics and vice-versa. These big numbers, however, do. That's why they are different.
 
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You probably wouldn't like Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows then. It's not an RPG, rather a tower defence game, but you have to eventually deal with enemies that have 1e50 health and more (that threshold is when it starts getting plausible to impossible without hours of mana farming).

Also, Unreal Tournament 1999 and Quake 3 were pretty popular, regardless of how much fiddling you had to do to make them work on your computer. I remember being able to get games pretty quickly.

I also remember the time when 500 ping didn't matter that much. Nowadays, you're royally screwed if you have more than 100 ping. I'm not talking TTK (Time-to-kill) here, but general performance. As in, past that threshold you start to hitch, teleport and phase everywhere erratically. How 0.1 seconds is that damaging I haven't the faintest.

Is there really a difference

Precisely, there isn't. So, what you have is either small figures for a simplistic sense or large figures for an overwhelming sense. Both have very minor effects regardless, mainly because it depends on the effect of the figures rather than the magnitude. So, it comes down to a matter of preference. And because it doesn't matter that much whether it be the latter or former, I don't see a reason to be that annoyed about it.

If we're talking about caps to figure values, visually or practically, then that's a separate issue.

I remember when Final Fantasy games were more about the story and (somewhat) strategic combat rather than finding the most overpowered move

Being at the top of your game, through questionable balance or exploiting or even external means, has been with gaming ever since gaming was created. 'OP' stuff is real hard to avoid, as there's always that one weapon or move which is marginally the best, in effect or simplicity or a combination of both, but then receives what is known as a 'Knee-jerk nerf' because the community.
 
You probably wouldn't like Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows then. It's not an RPG, rather a tower defence game, but you have to eventually deal with enemies that have 1e50 health and more (that threshold is when it starts getting plausible to impossible without hours of mana farming).

1e50? oi. Is there any particular reason it needs to be that way?

Also, Unreal Tournament 1999 and Quake 3 were pretty popular, regardless of how much fiddling you had to do to make them work on your computer. I remember being able to get games pretty quickly.

Popular, yes...amongst PC gamers. But still, I would wager a guess that console gamers vastly out-numbered PC gamers at the time, because it took a good bit of fiddling, and a decent gaming computer was not cheap back then. I remember the days where you went from "barely being able to run anything" for $500 up to $1200 and you might get something that might run games that people were playing at the time.

Nowadays you can grab a $400 walmart PC and at least play Indie steam games.

I also remember the time when 500 ping didn't matter that much. Nowadays, you're royally screwed if you have more than 100 ping. I'm not talking TTK (Time-to-kill) here, but general performance. As in, past that threshold you start to hitch, teleport and phase everywhere erratically. How 0.1 seconds is that damaging I haven't the faintest.

Newer games and more precision shooting, probably. That 0.1 seconds matters a lot when the game is actually tracking the trajectory of the bullets. I remember in Quake, half of the weapons were hitscan. The ones that weren't, were grenade launchers, rocket launchers, and... I'm not sure if the nailguns were or not. They looked like they had travel time, but it was difficult to tell. Not that anybody thought about hitscan vs non-hitscan in general.

Nowadays if you use hitscan weapons in the development of an FPS you get called "lazy" because everybody loves being a sniper and you better have bullet drop and everything else if you want your game taken seriously.

So now you need 100+ updates per second and those updates better be on time or you're never going to have a realistic sniping experience.

Precisely, there isn't. So, what you have is either small figures for a simplistic sense or large figures for an overwhelming sense.

Incredibly large numbers are difficult to keep track of in your head. When you have a boss that has 20 billion health and you're doing just shy of 100k damage per hit, you quickly get lost in zeroes. Now, what you could do, is cut all of those numbers by 100 and suddenly they'd be a bit easier to remember.

Also, screen space can be an issue. The aforementioned videos of the newer Final Fantasy games, you'd see 9's all over the screen, and it actually got hard to see the animations, and whatever else was going on for all of the flashy 9s all over the screen, lol.

Both have very minor effects regardless, mainly because it depends on the effect of the figures rather than the magnitude. So, it comes down to a matter of preference. And because it doesn't matter that much whether it be the latter or former, I don't see a reason to be that annoyed about it.

I suppose I remember the older games well enough that smaller numbers are just easier to work with in your head, and took up less screen space and just seemed more sensible.

If we're talking about caps to figure values, visually or practically, then that's a separate issue.

Elaborate on this, please? Not sure what your thoughts are on this as you were a little vague.

Being at the top of your game, through questionable balance or exploiting or even external means, has been with gaming ever since gaming was created. 'OP' stuff is real hard to avoid, as there's always that one weapon or move which is marginally the best, in effect or simplicity or a combination of both, but then receives what is known as a 'Knee-jerk nerf' because the community.

But yet, a lot of games have things that are just simply unquestionably powerful, much moreso than the alternatives and they surely knew that people were going to spam like that like no tomorrow, especially when it comes to damage caps that are absurdly easy to reach. I like to rag on Final Fantasy 6 a lot, because quite simply, that game is the poster child for this.

In a game where anybody can do 90% of the damage cap with every single ability and attack in the game, what are you going to do? Spam multihits, of course! Guess what the game didn't do? Put limitations on them and/or give you enemies where you'd actually need to do that with, or give enemies any kind of damage resistance.

Well, ok, some enemies do have damage resis.....oh wait, there's an infamous weapon that ignores enemy damage resistance. We're back to Square One where spamming the Fight command will just annihilate everything in your path once you get to Lv70+ in the latter third of the game, as long as you got two specific items (which aren't hard to find) equipped on one character. The other characters are simply there in case something gets an insta-kill on your main one or some-such.

But then again, now we got FFX where you can do the exact same thing (albeit quite a bit more grinding and prep work), but now instead of 9999 with everything, now it's 99999 (if you use break limits which all of the ultimate weapons have) and it looks like FF13 and 13-2 aren't any different from all of the 99,999s all over the screen I saw in those videos. At least they had the courtesy to put a comma in there lol.
 
1e50? oi. Is there any particular reason it needs to be that way?

It's only at extreme levels, on endurance runs, which aren't intentionally meant to be beaten (but people beat it anyway). It's just the way the formulas work in the game; it is very exponential. However, you still go way beyond values of trillions on maps intended to be beaten. It's a very formula-intensive game, but you don't have to be a math-head to comprehend it.

Nowadays you can grab a $400 walmart PC and at least play Indie steam games.

...But I'm talking games of the scale of Unreal 1999 or Quake 3, not indie. That's like, the equivalent of getting some AAA games to work decently nowadays, which you can't do with a toaster of a PC. You didn't have to pay much way back to play simple games of that time either.

Newer games and more precision shooting, probably. That 0.1 seconds matters a lot when the game is actually tracking the trajectory of the bullets. I remember in Quake, half of the weapons were hitscan. The ones that weren't, were grenade launchers, rocket launchers, and... I'm not sure if the nailguns were or not. They looked like they had travel time, but it was difficult to tell. Not that anybody thought about hitscan vs non-hitscan in general

I don't find this to be accurate, because you still had to be precise with the same measures on Unreal 1999. Heck, you'd have to be more precise because there's certain weapons with super slow projectile speed comparatively such as the Flak Cannon or Bio Gun. It was arguably harder to kill an enemy in Unreal 1999 than, say, Halo 3.

Nowadays if you use hitscan weapons in the development of an FPS you get called "lazy" because everybody loves being a sniper and you better have bullet drop and everything else if you want your game taken seriously.

...This is entirely false. The one ultimate example that goes against this is Counter Strike: Global Offensive, arguably one of the most competitive games out there, all weapons hitscan. In the realm of consoles, Halo 3 was the same story. Most weapons, namely the most commonly used Battle Rifle, were still hitscan.

Incredibly large numbers are difficult to keep track of in your head. When you have a boss that has 20 billion health and you're doing just shy of 100k damage per hit, you quickly get lost in zeroes. Now, what you could do, is cut all of those numbers by 100 and suddenly they'd be a bit easier to remember.

Not necessarily. Then again, that's coming from someone that can work fractions and percentages pretty easily in their head.

People also often refer to the health bar to evaluate progress made, rather than the damage figures that are displayed.

Also, screen space can be an issue. The aforementioned videos of the newer Final Fantasy games, you'd see 9's all over the screen, and it actually got hard to see the animations, and whatever else was going on for all of the flashy 9s all over the screen, lol.

That can be rectified by shortening the numbers with 'kilos' for the thousands, example being 200k which is 200,000, and going to the millions or higher or eventually the 1eX's.

Elaborate on this, please? Not sure what your thoughts are on this as you were a little vague.

If damage is capped to 9999 or something practically, then it's pretty harmful to gameplay mechanics. It'd also especially favour faster-hitting builds and whatnot. Visually, it is just displayed as outright laziness in not bothering to make the game display higher visuals.

But yet, a lot of games have things that are just simply unquestionably powerful,

Well, I guess some developers just succumb to the more casual audience that do not want to think extensively to progress. For a game to be that poorly balanced, I'd avoid altogether.

Not saying that it's bad to cater towards casuals...just that that's the wrong, easy way to do so.
 
It's only at extreme levels, on endurance runs, which aren't intentionally meant to be beaten (but people beat it anyway). It's just the way the formulas work in the game; it is very exponential. However, you still go way beyond values of trillions on maps intended to be beaten. It's a very formula-intensive game, but you don't have to be a math-head to comprehend it.

Well I suppose if it is optional content, meh, whatever floats their boat I guess?

...But I'm talking games of the scale of Unreal 1999 or Quake 3, not indie. That's like, the equivalent of getting some AAA games to work decently nowadays, which you can't do with a toaster of a PC. You didn't have to pay much way back to play simple games of that time either.

I played lots of Quake3, though mostly with bots. I tried online games, but I found the aiming to be atrocious. Even hitscan weapons like the railgun would miss even though I know very well that I had him. Nope. He teleports away 10 feet just after I clicked. lol. And then I went from 90 health down to 10 and dead a second later from something stupid like the plasma ball gun. I know very well that thing doesn't do THAT much damage, not within 2-3 seconds.

I don't find this to be accurate, because you still had to be precise with the same measures on Unreal 1999. Heck, you'd have to be more precise because there's certain weapons with super slow projectile speed comparatively such as the Flak Cannon or Bio Gun. It was arguably harder to kill an enemy in Unreal 1999 than, say, Halo 3.

The fact we require 100ms pings nowadays tells me that updates are happening more frequently and the game is more picky about what is a hit and what is not. How about hitbox size? Also, I remember the older FPS games only having head/body difference, while newer games seem to do head/torso/legs/arms.

Maybe positional data? As I said, my experience with Quake3 online was kinda limited, I tried it but could never get matches to work very well. Quake1 worked just fine, but not Quake3...

...This is entirely false. The one ultimate example that goes against this is Counter Strike: Global Offensive, arguably one of the most competitive games out there, all weapons hitscan. In the realm of consoles, Halo 3 was the same story. Most weapons, namely the most commonly used Battle Rifle, were still hitscan.

You could argue that the main playerbase of CS:GO sounds like die-hard fans that have been playing it for years. Seems like a lot of the newer gamers out there are all into the BF4 thing and some of them in COD now.

Not necessarily. Then again, that's coming from someone that can work fractions and percentages pretty easily in their head.

I usually can, but when you start talking about millions vs billions I start getting lost in the zeroes.

People also often refer to the health bar to evaluate progress made, rather than the damage figures that are displayed.

Sometimes, but not always. A lot of J-RPGs don't even show the boss's health meter (sometimes they will show it for normal mobs but you get a big fat "?" on a boss's health meter).

That can be rectified by shortening the numbers with 'kilos' for the thousands, example being 200k which is 200,000, and going to the millions or higher or eventually the 1eX's.

WoW did that and it worked rather well. You'd target a boss (say, Garrosh pre-squish) and it'd tell you that he had 989M health. And as you whittle him down, you'd see he has 12M ... then 8M then 1M and then you'd see 990K and then after 100K it finally displayed a five-digit number.

The outgoing damage numbers didn't do this, though, and I remember people starting to complain about the screen getting filled with 6-digit numbers flying around everywhere, but yet players needed to see those and they couldn't turn them off, but no addons could change how such numbers were displayed IIRC.

In the end, Blizz said they had to do the squish because they were approaching the point where the engine they were using would have to exclude 32-bit computers because the next boss would have broken the limit on how large of an integer they can assign within the game's engine (this is why Garrosh Hellscream healed himself up to 100% four times during the battle, because his real health was supposed to be 4 BILLION but apparently they can't do 1bil+ on 32bit computers so they did 989M x4.

If damage is capped to 9999 or something practically, then it's pretty harmful to gameplay mechanics. It'd also especially favour faster-hitting builds and whatnot. Visually, it is just displayed as outright laziness in not bothering to make the game display higher visuals.

Not if characters consistently do less than 9999.

Consider Final Fantasy 4. There are only, AFAIK, 3-4 attacks in the entire game that can get close to reaching the damage cap of 9999, and only one of them can hit it consistently even with a Lv99 group.

The entire game feels rather well-balanced, the growth of power is rather steady (except for one lull mid-game where XP gain is a little too slow and mobs hit too hard for all the piddly XP they give). The 9999 damage/health cap never once poses any sort of problem and all of the game's optional bosses are reasonably challenging.

Well, I guess some developers just succumb to the more casual audience that do not want to think extensively to progress. For a game to be that poorly balanced, I'd avoid altogether.

It is usually just one stupid joke item or joke attack that ends up ripping up the game balance for the whole game. FFX had one of these, and it was called Quick Hit. It looks like a pathetically weak attack, but if you power your guys up enough, it does ridiculous damage. The thing is, though, is it gives you a speed bonus for your next turn (using it makes you get your next turn sooner than normal). So..... yeah. Spam spam spam the overpowered ability all day long and the boss will die before he hardly gets a chance to move.

Not saying that it's bad to cater towards casuals...just that that's the wrong, easy way to do so.

The best games are those that give a good range of options and choices for game challenge. Easy for the casuals, normal for normal gamers, and Hard for those who like Dark Souls.

Problem is, few game designers seem to realize that the best way to do things is to simply put a difficulty selector on the thing and let everybody enjoy the game. Or if they do, the said difficulty slider either locks portions of the game out ("You can't fight this boss if you don't play on Hard"), forces you to have a pallette swap of the character (Cave Story+), or doesn't make enough of an impact on challenge (easy is still too hard, or Hard is still too easy for the intended audience).

EDIT: A few clarifications.
 
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The fact we require 100ms pings nowadays tells me that updates are happening more frequently and the game is more picky about what is a hit and what is not. How about hitbox size? Also, I remember the older FPS games only having head/body difference, while newer games seem to do head/torso/legs/arms.

Maybe positional data? As I said, my experience with Quake3 online was kinda limited, I tried it but could never get matches to work very well. Quake1 worked just fine, but not Quake3...

To use a better example, my recent experience with CS:GO is what kind of annoyed me with how good of a ping you consistently require before things start screwing up.

Halo: Reach didn't give a toss if you had 250. You could still do well, and that game had far more depth than CS:GO did in my opinion. And better graphics, too.

You could argue that the main playerbase of CS:GO sounds like die-hard fans that have been playing it for years. Seems like a lot of the newer gamers out there are all into the BF4 thing and some of them in COD now.

Not really, just different audiences. A lot of people I know that play CS:GO haven't been into it for that long. It's mainly the strictly competitive vibe it has (not that aggressive crap about people wanting bragging rights), whereas games like BF4 I find provide a much more casual or immersive experience. CoD is obvious.

It's not like you need to be a dedicated CS player to have a chance, either. I've recently been playing it, for the sake of helping my brother out, and am already impressing Master Guardian Elites, for a newbie.
 
To use a better example, my recent experience with CS:GO is what kind of annoyed me with how good of a ping you consistently require before things start screwing up.

Halo: Reach didn't give a toss if you had 250. You could still do well, and that game had far more depth than CS:GO did in my opinion. And better graphics, too.



Not really, just different audiences. A lot of people I know that play CS:GO haven't been into it for that long. It's mainly the strictly competitive vibe it has (not that aggressive crap about people wanting bragging rights), whereas games like BF4 I find provide a much more casual or immersive experience. CoD is obvious.

It's not like you need to be a dedicated CS player to have a chance, either. I've recently been playing it, for the sake of helping my brother out, and am already impressing Master Guardian Elites, for a newbie.

Meh, I was never into FPS all that heavily to be honest. Some people are just naturally good at it?

Not even sure how we got into the discussion of FPS in the first place tho, lol.

Ah well.
 
Well, if you noticed, my profile says my age is 19. But...Unreal 1999...that was 16 years ago???

Yes, I've been playing First-person shooters since I was 4. Seems most gamers have their preferred genre, and FPS is mine. "I was playing it before it was cool".

Anyway, I won't continue this off-topic-ness.
 
I'd agree with this... up 'till a certain point.

If your character starts off really weak, only doing 10's of damage per hit at the maximum with a moderate hitrate, that's absolutely fine, as long as the enemy has a good amount of HP.
However, when RPGs already start off with 500's in the first hits, it gets kinda ridiculous. That's almost like introducing the player to an endgame, legendary weapon on first contact! And when you've got that to start with, having a low cap like '99999' or '32767 (hardcap)' can get really irritating when the enemy has much higher HP than you can ever deal in a single hit. Then, because of that, you'll have to increase the rate of damage... and then it just becomes a fountain of numerical digits which still mean nothing.

(Statistics can be high as well, but as long as that doesn't affect the rest of the game (getting in the way of more important things) it should be fine.)

tl;dr If a cap is reached too early, expand it by a digit. The cap should only be able to be hit in endgame, coupled with some XP farming.
 
Kids, young adults with mindsets similar to kids.... not much difference there to be honest. We're still talking about younger people who are newer to videogames who demand flashy flashy stuff and power trips because the games they had as kids while growing up were getting all of these newer flashier graphics and such. When I was growing up as a kid, I had Final Fantasy 1 as one of the few RPGs around and eventually FF2 (4) came out along with the other SNES titles when I was a late teenager.

By the way, when I'm talking about "kids" and RPGs... I'm talking about 14-22 year olds roughly. People younger than 14 are probably not the type of kids to enjoy story-rich J-RPGs (the older kind), though exceptions always exist. Younger people are generally more into action-oriented games (nothing wrong with that).

The <25y crowd wasn't around (or shall I say, weren't of the gaming age to really understand such games) when the older story-heavy RPGs were current, the games like Final Fantasy 4 (2 US), or especially Final Fantasy 1, or even some of the newer ones like Lufia and the Fortress of Doom, or 7th Saga, or even early Playstation games like Breath of Fire 3 (which was released in 1997, 18 years ago). No, a 24 year old nowadays had at the very least Playstation2-era RPGs and that's about when PC gaming started taking off so the stuff they're used to is more flashier and that's about when J-RPG companies started deciding that somehow "bigger numbers = better!"

At least the biggest offender (not a J-RPG though), WoW, has an excuse because of how its I-level system works and how expansions work, but even they decided that the numbers were just simply too big and they had to cut them back. But a lot of good it did them, because numbers are almost absurd again already (they didn't cut them enough and they had the growth too fast).

It's like you're trying to make some vague point but you just ramble off on a weird tangent.

Flashier games do not necessarily equate to kiddie-fodder, nor do people whom enjoy those flashier games with big numbers somehow a child. Again, there are plenty of games that have a coherent and engaging storyline whilst also throwing big numbers at you.
 
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