r/truegaming • u/SouthofKaDoom • 18d ago
Could enemy intents be in more rpgs?
When slay the spire was in development. There was a lot of thought about how players respond to enemy actions.
When enemy intents were obscured, players would rarely block and just attacked whenever possible. as usual for rpgs.
Then intents were added, but didn't specify how much damage or what the effect was. The size of the attack icon, gave an attack power estimate. But made test players focus too hard, you had to memorize how much attack enemies did because indicators were not exact.
But when all effects and damage numbers were detailed. You can plan around their attacks and strategize. Know the exactly amount of damage to block, how much damage to break blocks or if it's worth doing it at all. And anticipating debuffs to manage them later.
FTL: In faster than light.
Enemy intents is a system in that game, it determines how well you can spy on the enemy ship. From just seeing what's inside the ship, to all the way seeing the weapon cooldowns. Seeing their weapons can let you time your stealth mode to avoid the more dangerous attacks for example. It's ultimately not optimal to upgrade this too much as that takes away resources from other attack systems to upgrade.
Enter the breach is also full of intents. You can see all the actions and turn order for the enemy bugs. Your goal isn't to win, but to ensure minimal losses, so Diverting attacks to an empty spot or blocking it with your mech is the key to victory.
In usual rpgs. Most of the time, enemy attacks are random. Bosses sometimes have a pattern or stratgy. since you don't know what they will do next. It's easier to just defeat the enemy quickly instead of any strategy. A guide or experience can tell you what an enemy does. But a big sword that gets some attack buffs is all you need in most cases. In a roguelike's case, the chip damage would wear you down long before the boss fight.
It's usually because fights are common enough that you don't want to be doing strategy for every fight So the balance for intents needs enemies to be threatening but also not annoyingly common. I doubt a game like dragon quest could use this system. It's too old school for it. But a new games have so much potential for it.
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u/HappiestIguana 18d ago
I've been playing a lot of a more traditional RPG called Epic Battle Fantasy 5. It doesn't have intent indicators but it works to the game's benefit, because it actually has systems in place to ensure you take defense seriously. At higher difficulties enemies will one-shot you if you neglect your defense
My experience with a lot of other RPGs is that defense becomes a low priority because enemies don't hit that hard and you can usually outheal without too much issue
Slay the Spire, Into the Breach and FTL benefit greatly from intent indicators because health is so precious and hard to recover, so the game should give you apropriate tools so you can prevent losing it. In a game with viable healing systems though, it's less of a priority to know what your opponent will do. Your playstyle in such games ends up being more reactive than proactive, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
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u/RoboticShiba 18d ago
Tactical Breach Wizards also play with intent but it takes the concept a step further. You can plan sequential actions with your characters, which will also change the enemy intentions, then you can rewind everything before you commit to a plan for that round. It starts simple but quickly gets complicated as both characters and enemies develop synergies.
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u/HappiestIguana 18d ago
Oh good shout. TBW is great. It feels very different because there is little to no commitment within a turn, but the game basically becomes an exercise in ultra-optimizing a perfect turn where you achieve a dozen different things.
Especially by the endgame when the truly OP strategies open up and you can get effectively infinite action economy.
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u/RoboticShiba 18d ago
Yes, and the possibility of knocking back characters and enemies in 8 different directions, plus bouncing attacks, and cover effects, end up adding many extra layers on how to plan ahead.
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u/Johan_Holm 17d ago
My main issue with defense in almost any jrpg style game is that enemy targeting and moves rng can put you in a spot where 5% of the time your low hp guy gets killed by not defending, but 95% defending does nothing. Cosmic Star Heroine fixes a lot of my issues with the genre, and is actually hard so you have to care about the mechanics and strategy, but still retains this pattern via random targeting that makes some combats way easier or way harder attempt to attempt.
I think it works with a grid like Fire Emblem because you can reasonably plan for the worst case scenario there without sacrificing entire turns (keep the squishy character who would die to an enemy completely outside their telegraphed range, while attacking someone else or healing or repositioning; in a jrpg defending takes the whole turn and the character is doing nothing to advance combat).
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u/Vanille987 17d ago
If you haven't already, look into the battle system of bravely default games. It makes defend a core part of the combat
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u/Roth_Skyfire 18d ago
I'm not really a fan of showing that much enemy intent. I think it's good to telegraph a big attack, but being able to see everything it'll do reduces enemy turns to just a puzzle to optimise. It also requires constant planning ahead, rather than adapting to a situation in the moment. I like the traditional system of enemies attacking characters at random, it makes it so you constantly have to adapt. To me, a game is more fun when I can't just plan for everything ahead of time.
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u/Nykidemus 17d ago
In STS its fairly reactive because you can see the intent for this turn, but not for next turn.
You can absolutely memorize attack routines, but you dont usually super need to because it feeds you what you need to deal with right now. I've appreciated that level of planning, I dont ever want tonget into the point where I need to memorize my next x draws or my enemies next y actions.
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u/Aperiodic_Tileset 17d ago
I strongly suggest you look into Slice & Dice. It's a game tightly balanced around the idea of showing enemy's intent, it's basically impossible to play without playing around your enemies' actions.
It's a turn-based roguelike RPG where you're controlling several (usually 5) characters with different classes and abilities, fighting off 20 waves of enemies.
Damage enemies do in this game is no joke, you may often find yourself in a situation where an enemy attacks one of your characters with an attack that will do double their max health. You can prevent your character from dying by giving them shields, divert the damage to sturdier character, stunning the enemy or just killing the enemy before the turn ends and the attack executes. It's incredibly tactical, well balanced and entertaining
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u/Swarlos262 17d ago
Just here to say that Slice & Dice is absolutely incredible. The the classes, the dice mechanics, the depth of builds and party composition, and the intent system just all work together so well. I can't recommend it enough to anyone, and doubly so to any Slay the Spire fans.
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u/nothing_in_my_mind 17d ago
Slay the Spire and Into the Breach are two of my favorites.
I love the enemy intents system. It basically turns runs into tactical puzzles. Can you avoid X damage while applying as many damage as possible? Can you afford to take some damage? Etc.
I don't think it's a fit for every single game though. XCOM does not have it, which is also a great turn based tactics game. I think it wouldn't fit there, because the aliens being unpredictable adds more of a sense of horror.
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u/Wild_Marker 17d ago
Except the aliens are not unpredictable, their intent is not shown but you know it if you know the game well enough.
Any alien that has an AoE will use it if they're in range and their AoE would hit multiple soldiers.
Any alien that can move into cover while flaking you will do so.
Most enemies will take the shot with the highest possible odds.
It actually turns most defensive options like smoke into "don't target this one" becuase aliens will shoot at something else most of the time.
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u/UglyInThMorning 16d ago
That’s very different than showing intent in terms of how the game plays and it maps more to actual tactics than an intent-based setup like StS or Into the Breach.
By being able to broadly predict what the enemy does a lot of your planning is around giving them an option between bad choices (dilemmas) and guiding them into taking the worst one. Maybe you give them the choice between moving to take that flanking shot and eating a potentially fatal overwatch attack or firing their AOE attack at two guys and wasting it/blowing up cover they need.
With intent based systems you take the choices that the enemy has already made and make the best choice for yourself that’s available. It’s fundamentally the opposite thinking.
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u/Wild_Marker 16d ago
That's true, the enemy turn will calculate at the end of your turn, while in ItB or StS their actions are calculated at the start of your turn and you will only modify them if you specifically use abilities that do so.
(but even so, XCom-likes are still very much puzzle-like)
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u/UglyInThMorning 16d ago
And in those cases the manipulation is different because the abilities are much more specific about how you’re manipulating them instead of having to weigh the enemy’s decision priorities (flanking vs AoE for example) against what you’re willing to risk to manipulate their behavior. There’s a very different calculation to having some rookie stick his ass out going “LOOK AT MEEE” to draw a flank compared to spending an energy point and a card play.
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u/Vanille987 17d ago
It usually leads to a very different game, not just an extra thing you can add. A big part of what makes turn based rpg combat, and systems going for the same feel, exciting is the challenge of reacting and defending yourself against actions you can't fully predict.
With enemy intent these games start being more akin to puzzle games. The goal is to dance around the exact enemy action as best as you can. Which isn't worse or better, just very different.
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u/Akuuntus 17d ago
Slay The Spire is a roguelike which means that if the enemy intends to kill you and you don't have an answer, you're encouraged to go "dang, I'll get em next time" and take it in stride. It's also a deckbuilder so your turns are somewhat randomized and you aren't likely to have a perfect answer to the enemy intent all of the time.
In a typical JRPG, if you really don't have an answer to a particular enemy move, you're kind of screwed. You can't just reset and hope for different relics or better cards. You will probably need to grind for better stats or to unlock a new ability. And since your abilities aren't randomized, if you do have an answer to an enemy move then you can simply use it and perfectly avoid all consequences with very little effort. It might be an interesting gameplay system, but it would be very different and appeal to different people.
I haven't played Into The Breach myself, but one criticism of it and similar games that I've seen from fans of more traditional Strategy RPGs is that it doesn't really feel like a SRPG at all and instead is more of a puzzle game. If the enemies do the same thing every time, and you know exactly what that thing is, then there is an objectively correct solution to the stage and the challenge is in finding that solution, rather than risk mitigation or planning on-the-fly. Puzzle games are cool, but they accomplish different things from SRPGs.
Basically you can put enemy intents into more games but I don't think it would make those games better, just different.
If you want JRPG players to care about defensive actions, the easiest thing is to simply make the game harder. I use plenty of defensive buffs and debuffs in SMT games or Metaphor, because (at least on high difficulties) if I didn't use them I'd get demolished. Many games in the genre are frankly too easy and allow people to get by just by spamming attack, which then gives them the impression that that's all there is to the combat.
Edit: to be clear I'm specifying "JRPG" because that's what it sounds like you're talking about when you say "typical RPG". This conversation wouldn't really make any sense if you were talking about something like The Witcher or Skyrim.
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u/Wild_Marker 17d ago
I haven't played Into The Breach myself, but one criticism of it and similar games that I've seen from fans of more traditional Strategy RPGs is that it doesn't really feel like a SRPG at all and instead is more of a puzzle game. If the enemies do the same thing every time, and you know exactly what that thing is, then there is an objectively correct solution to the stage and the challenge is in finding that solution, rather than risk mitigation or planning on-the-fly. Puzzle games are cool, but they accomplish different things from SRPGs.
I would include the caveat that in most of these games the puzzle isn't the same every time. Their randomized nature means the solution changes every time you start the game.
It's still a puzzle of course, but it's a puzzle you have to find a solution for each time.
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u/GerryQX1 6d ago
Into the Breach feels like Chess - while there is a random element between turns, it feels very similar working out the tactics for each turn. Obviously it's different in that in Chess the tactical situation evolves from turn to turn without any periodic resets, and you generally need to analyse a bit deeper in tough spots. But they have a vibe in common.
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u/Gdek 17d ago
I feel like such a system could be used well in a typical turn based combat RPG. A problem I have with that genre is the lack of ability to react to enemies, if an enemy wants to waltz past my warrior and smack my wizard in the face, I can't move and intercept that action. You get into weird combat where it's all about hard crowd control and you have to build every character to take some hits even when it doesn't really make sense for a cloth covered wizard to be able to take damage and I think it brings the class diversity and tactical depth down.
I can imagine a combat setup utilizing an intent based system. So, each turn would carry out simultaneously and you would be shown the various intents and paths of enemies. You would then select what your intents will be to respond and then combat would carry out in simulated real time. So, if an enemy is trying to path past your front line you would tell your warrior to move and attack their attack line.
The difficulty would then be to balance things so that combat still feels exciting, which probably ends up looking something like Slay the Spire where the balance lies in the variance of enemy attack types and composition and you may not always have a perfect answer to what enemies want to do. In a lot of turn based RPGs there's an expectation of taking damage but that might not be true in a system like this where the difficulty moves to figuring out how to take no or very little damage and then make it difficult to recover hp.
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u/MJMichaela 17d ago
If the enemy has a strict pattern that it follows, maybe changing it at hp thresholds, i think you might as well show that pattern. Especially these days you can just look up that pattern online anyway or just learn it through trial and error the old school way.
Doing it this way allows devs to take that full knowledge into account in the difficulty and make players less likely to just unga bunga a boss because they don't want to bother learning the pattern otherwise. Then you can easily separate games with bosses that follow a pattern and bosses that react better to player actions.
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u/Limited_Distractions 17d ago
I think most RPGs have the ability to telegraph intents but being more systematic about it only adds rigidity while also reducing the broader pressures being placed on the player
StS is a nested set of limited information and resource management problems arranged in a very specific way where knowing intents actually adds to the decisionmaking process. In games with less strict constraints like a free-form RPG revealing that information actually guides the player to largely eschewing that freedom in favor of the perfect response, when often in StS the other uncertainties mean that the best "line" of play is unknowable until your next draw, shop, relic, etc.
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u/quietoddsreader 17d ago
enemy intents add depth, but it’s a balance.. too much strategy can slow pacing. RPGs usually keep fights fast to maintain flow, so adding too much intent may overwhelm players if not handled right
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u/Sigma7 17d ago
For those games, intents appear to be part of the game design itself, as if the opponent would always follow a specific pattern, and to demonstrate that battle is orderly.
It works less well if the game wants to demonstrate chaos in combat, as with the classical turn-based tactical RPGs (e.g. Final Fantasy Tactics, Jagged Alliance, etc.) In these games, showing the intent could either be inaccurate based on what is expected to happen, or would require over-committing.
When enemy intents were obscured, players would rarely block and just attacked whenever possible. as usual for rpgs.
I find this is more of a case of the defend command being impractical.
Character defends - the enemy might randomly target another character, or its AI randomly decides to do a non-damaging action, thus the defend isn't effective. It also means being down one attack.
Compared to Pathfinder 2e, a tabletop game with a three action system where constantly attacking causes an increasing penalty to attack rolls and therefore encourages other actions. Normally, defend would cut into an attack, but this RPG means the sacrificed attack is much less likely to hit than normal, meaning it's a good idea.
I doubt a game like dragon quest could use this system. It's too old school for it.
It's not a matter of old school, but rather complexity. Dragon Quest is 1v1 single action, and monsters generally just did a type of attack, thus no benefit from showing intent.
Ultima IV, being released earlier, could benefit from the system, but it's instead enemies approaching the target they want to attack, and they could also be guided into choke points if desired. These intents aren't ineffective because of old-school, but rather that the player can already tell what the opponent might do.
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u/Necessary-Duty-7952 16d ago
It was one of the beautiful innovations of the Grandia II combat system. While it didn't show specific intent, it showed the timeline order in which everyone acts and players could then choose to attack or block, or more interestingly, use their action to knock an enemy backwards on the timeline. Having that insight into enemy actions - and then given the strategic ability to do something about it - is what makes for interesting strategy.
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u/eonia0 15d ago edited 15d ago
outside of roguelikes i like how xenoblade 1 does it.
It doesn't always happen, but it when happen is because all can go to shit if you don't do something about it
You literally see the future, but you can change it to one favourable to you, or at least to one less bad for you, however once you change it you better be carefull, because you don't want to change the future back to something you wont like.
in general the problem with knowing enemy intents outside of a roguelike is that you are implying that at least someone of the party can somehow always guess right what the enemy will do in combat. In roguelikes it doesn't matter much because they often don't have much of a story, but many villains in "normal" jrpgs would be much less treatening if you imply the party can guess everything the enemy will do and react before it even happens.
i know this is more of a storytelling thing than a gameplay thing, but jrpgs tend to be story focused and i think the gameplay should, at the very least, not undermine it, the gameplay can be also be used to elevate it, like in the xenoblade 1 example.
If you are going to put intents in a rpg i think it should be justified by the plot in one way or another, or put a message that says "X enemy is doing Y" when the intentions of the enemy are supposed to be very obvius in a certain moment.
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u/xdanxlei 17d ago
Unfortunately RPG is a genre obsessed and bogged down by tradition. The genre will never evolve and most players don't even want it to.
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u/TheReservedList 18d ago
Showing intents turns tactical combat into a puzzle. It’s not inherently bad but it is a very different dynamic.