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Q: Is a No Battle/Encounter Hack possible? - byrjun - 01-28-2015
Hello FF6Hacking,
I just signed up and have tried to search my way around the forums, but I don't think this has been discussed - if it has, my apologies.
So, for a while now I've been having an idea of creating almost an art project in which "I"(not me, as I lack the skills) hack JRPGs that I love to remove the battle part out of the game. Essentially creating "Walking Simulators" out of the games, charter trips to the worlds, where you enter a story, somewhat more passively than otherwise, still able to walk and travel around the worlds.
The reason for this endeavor is manyfold:
One of them that I do not have the time anymore to play my way through the 40-80 hours it will take to make my way through some of my favourites, and the thought of having a tourist trip through a game could be a good comprimise. - How long would this game take without them?
A second reason is more "altruistic": Showing non-gamers/non-jrpg'ers the beautiful worlds, stories and characters without scaring them away with battle encounters.
A third is just a fun, open question: How does the experience change when playing an JRPG without battle?
Anyway, first and foremost is the question whether this is at all possible. I realise that there are a lot of scripted battles in the game, and these I have no problem in keeping - it is interesting for me to think of how a more seldom use of battles might even make each encounter feel more special.
So, would something like this be possible? And if so, what would it take to do, and approximately how long?
Thanks, byrjun.
(I don't know exactly why, but I fear asking this question here might have the potential of angering devout fans. Please understand that I love these games, and only have the best intentions in mind.)
RE: Q: Is a No Battle/Encounter Hack possible? - Tenkarider - 01-28-2015
No battles? Definitively not interested.
By the way it should be easy applying Moogle Charm effect to an equip, assigned to all characters as soon as recruited. (with Hex it should be possible the same setting of Biggs and Wedge and so deny the chance of remove this equip)
The same for area encounters, which you can set as no encounter areas.
To remove event battles you might do 2 things: remove invoke battle commands from events, or directly editing invoke battle event commands in order to obtain as result making those commands useless... for example setting as first byte 60(which makes return the function) and so solving the whole thing in 3 bytes...
quite drastic anyway...On a side note i believe that the most amazing stage for special effects and cutscenes is actually the battlefield: you can place enemies and whatever you want, without making happen an actual fight(like battles in the esper gate bridge)
You can set all spells to having 0 power or, even more perky, setting it as always miss and then changing "miss" or 0 damage word from some program like YY-char and then cancelling "miss" or "0" text into literally nothing... now you have your marvelous fake spell, just for animations, in the perfect style of fake spells used in FF9 when Tantarus fight against Steiner
The rest would be a matter of Variables and AI scripting.
On a side note i'm forced to point that out:
"where you enter a story, somewhat more passively than otherwise"
It's totally misleading believe that battles can spoil or making somehow less enjoyable the story of the game!
RE: Q: Is a No Battle/Encounter Hack possible? - abyssonym - 01-28-2015
Removing random encounters is easy. The overworld encounter rates are stored at 0xC29F-0xC2BE and dungeon encounter rates are stored at 0xC2BF - 0xC2DE. If you change all of these values to zero, there will be no random encounters.
There are problems with this approach though... first, your party will be underleveled, which means scripted battles will be more difficult. Second, there's no way to encounter Gau on the veldt, because you must meet him in a random encounter. If you want to play through the whole game like this, you'll need to find a way to deal with these issues.
As for how long the game takes without random encounters, it's not that long. People who speedrun the game and run from almost every encounter can finish the game and do every sidequest in about 7-8 hours without glitches or hacks.
RE: Q: Is a No Battle/Encounter Hack possible? - Catone - 01-28-2015
I have to agree with Tenkarider, the whole idea would be very, very, boring. Why? Beyond the obvious reasons, most of the dungeon crawling or long walks to the next town would put you to sleep. If you wanted to speed up the process, without making it completely mind numbing, just decreasing random encounters would be a better idea than removing them. Just as Tenkarider said except with the charm bangle effect.
But, if you really wanted to just to view the game (although you really wouldn't be seeing much but thats personal opinion) and you wanted to do it with minimal hacking skill:
Find an IPS patch for general bug fixes,
Open up FF3usME, raise all characters begining levels, stats, magic, etc to max (Basically just cheat your ... off)
Again, in FF3usME, set the No rand. en. effect to pretty much every item. Add super uber items to all character's starting equip etc. (again, cheat your ... off)
At this point, there would be no random battles, only scripted story stuff and you'd so unkillable they'd just feel like any other event.
The only issue that would come up at this point is, as Abyssonym said, recruiting Gau to progress the story, then in the WoR recruiting Gau and Gogo. (Gau random encounter on Veldt and Gogo requires random encounter getting swallowed). With some minor hacking that would be fixed to. Gogo, just find his normal place in the cave and drop him in a town with the same script/dialog for recruiting. Gau, still pretty simple but some work, do the same thing and make a recruit script.
Moral of the story? Most of what your asking for can already very simply be done with standard cheats. I don't really see anybody spending time on actually doing it as a hack. Just my two cents though for what its worth.
RE: Q: Is a No Battle/Encounter Hack possible? - Gi Nattak - 01-28-2015
Hello there and welcome! Maybe stash a Moogle Charm in a treasure in Arvis's House there, or w/e, so the player has the choice to engage in those annoying random battles or not. I'm not a huge fan of random battles as much as the next guy, but with FF games it is pretty much quinn-essential to the character's stat development, in order to face off against bosses.
RE: Q: Is a No Battle/Encounter Hack possible? - Lockirby2 - 01-28-2015
(01-28-2015, 07:08 PM)catone Wrote: I have to agree with Tenkarider, the whole idea would be very, very, boring.
I don't agree with you in full here. While this would be boring for me or for you, I know people that pretty much just play these games for the exploration and the dialogue. This hack would be pretty much perfect for them. From their perspective, the main problems that I see with it would be that; a) You can explore, but in dungeons it is pretty worthless as you won't be using anything you find, as nothing helps you progress or explore anything else further; and b) Without as much in between cutscenes you wouldn't feel as though the game is very large from the perspective of metonymy. So even if we're not going to play it, that doesn't mean that it's not worth having, if the OP is going to do the legwork.
And this is definitely possible to do, provided you're willing to do a lot of it yourself. Cheat codes/FF3usME to get the Moogle Charm and OP characters would definitely work for a quick fix for the OP's personal use, but the laundry list of instructions on what to do with them (like turning off the cheat code for random encounters at the part where you're supposed to get Gau) would probably intimidate non-gamers as well, I suspect. It wouldn't seem like much for us, but I can see somebody already reluctant to play one of those "newfangled video game things" getting scared off by a one to two page ReadMe of instructions.
To eliminate some battles, you could just remove them with the LE (like for Atma Weapon and Inferno), and for others you could always edit their HP down to one in FF3usME, in general (although Vargas should have more than that), and probably lower their level to one so that they can't do any damage before dying either. Perhaps consider allowing either form of Chadarnook to die as well. For Gogo just use FF3LE to create an entrance to his cave on the overworld (there's a pretty good spot on the mountain to do that). Gau should probably be in the corresponding world's Cave on the Veldt, where he should probably initiate a short event that simply initiates battle with a formation consisting of only himself. That would be the hardest thing, probably, as it would require some event editing (there's a tutorial on the site). Hopefully that covers all of the bases here. I suspect all of that should be within the reach of somebody who hasn't done any hacking before, with the event editing being the possible exception, but that's a relatively easy event to create, and if you get that far, you'll definitely get more help at that point. Removing things from the game is always easier than adding them.
RE: Q: Is a No Battle/Encounter Hack possible? - Catone - 01-28-2015
Very valid points, as usual. I didn't even think of editing non-skip battles to 1hp, that would fix the lack of leveling up without going superhulk on everything.
When I say "boring" I was refering to, as you said, there would be no reason to explore because you need nothing from those dungeons. I admit, I've played plenty of times on pretty much every FF game where random battles were nothing but a time wasting hassle, but turning them off always made me lean toward no looking at the story part much either. Why listen to what that boss guy, or train is gonna say if he's gonna die as soon as you highlight an attack?
An off topic example, I was playing the game Dead Rising 2 awhile back (PC version, the only way to go) and the time limit on the game just seemed to ruin it. You were always on a deadline, it was actually impossible to do every side quest in one playthrough because of it. So, break out the hacks, slow the game from... oh I think it was about a 60/1 speed on time, something like that, anyway I set it to 1/1, real time. And while kinda fun, it broke something.
You see, with the time limit, the world map seemed endless, the quest infinite. You could actually play the entire game successfully and never see a single boundry. Without it, granted you could spend hours hitting zombies in the head with golfballs, but game got old, quick.
The point, just as you've said in a much more direct and eloquent manner, while it sometimes seems like a practical idea to remove something annoying, without any limits (not necessarily "challenges" even) the world gets small... quicker than you might realize.
Not to mention, yes I liked the story in FF, but without the bonds you build through those many battles, it becomes kinda hard to care if any of them are gonna die.
And the reason I say:
Quote:I don't really see anybody spending time on actually doing it as a hack.Is in referance to:
Quote:in which "I"(not me, as I lack the skills) hack
It would actually be a good project for the OP to learn those skills, but again I don't see someone else doing all the work. That being said, if this project was going to be done, it WOULD leave a LOT(dumping of the monsters/magic/weapons/etc.) of space for some really really hardcore custom events and it would make up for the lack of battles...
RE: Q: Is a No Battle/Encounter Hack possible? - Lockirby2 - 01-29-2015
My best thought to make the exploration more meaningful is to make the treasures into some sort of scoring system. For example, edit the text (also doable with the OP's skill level) to list a score, or assign a Gil Value to every treasure that represents how rare/valuable it is. For example, the Force Shield could be worth 20 000 Gil when sold, and a Genji Glove could be worth 10 000. It would be a lot less like Final Fantasy and more like Great Cave Offensive from Kirby Super Star, but it might spice it up a little if the player could get something at least, even if it's just bragging rights.
RE: Q: Is a No Battle/Encounter Hack possible? - Tenkarider - 01-29-2015
I can see pretty much well as chest prizes consumable firework spells(the one used in FF9 against Steiner... like Firada... Medeor and... well, it's up to your immagination
RE: Q: Is a No Battle/Encounter Hack possible? - byrjun - 02-07-2015
Dear everyone!
Wow, thank you all for your eloquent answers! I thought I was 'subscribing' to this if new posts came, and as I hadn't recieved any emails I thought nothing had happened. Again, thank you, it's amazing to get this response.
I am going through your ideas now, and it has put a lot of good questions into my head.
A cool thing is that this project almost seems like a perfect ROM-hacking "tutorial", which is admittedly another reason of doing a project like this.
I'm definitely contemplating having some, if nerfed, encounters, but not nearly as many as normally. I think, for example, places the Ghost Train the Cultists Tower get a lot of their tension from the fact that everything is creepy and you might die.
And of course, the Gau and Gogo situation needs to be fixed - right now I'm thinking maybe these areas should just remain intact - at least in tandem with whichever battle tweaks/rules I end up using: What I mean is that maybe the Veldt and the Cave can be sort of like Battle Arenas - sort of "if you would like to in fact fight and explore that part of the games mechanics, go to these places". I think this has to be tried out.
I also clearly get the thing cantone said about Dead Rising 2 - the sensation of overpoweredness might just make people not care.
Is the story in FF games an "excuse" for doing a lot of battle encounters, or is it the other way around? Is it even possible to suggest this binary? Do the battles and the story serve as two halves of a whole?
I am very interested in death in videogames - again, as cantone points out, are we connected to the characters because we fear for their lives in combat?
I think it is this tension I want to explore, even if the answer is obvious from the get-go. I mean, what am I toying around with here - the most central game mechanic, right? At least that seems to be the immediate assumption, but it is an issue I find fun to challenge, not only intellectually but also actually practically - putting actions to words, so to speak.
As for making incentive to walk around in the dungeon, while I agree with a necessity of a solution, though a scoring system might be too.. gamey, I guess? This problem is also one that has to be experimented through play. You know how Miyamoto has said that walking in caves and woods as a child inspired Zelda? For us, who have played the game WITH battles on, something might seem lacking without the battles, but for someone with no pre-requisite, how will the cave look? Will more focus be given to the sense of exploration, the music and the area? Will they die out of boredom?
Is the fact of indeed walking/travelling from place to place - the journey - itself enough to be interesting?
So, step 1 for me will be to play through FFVI with cheats on - eliminating random encounters and nerfing scripted battles - and seeing how it feels. By the way, please help me remember - which scripted battles is it that have to be lost?And are there any other things besides what cantone has addressed that I such think about starting the run?
Again, my thanks, byrjun