LogFAQs > #977647222

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Maybe if these scripted losses were happening early in act 1.

Not at all. "Oh no I'm weak at the beginning" is kind of a given. "I've gotten so powerful but it's still not enough" comes as a surprise, an opportunity for the character to grow in a different direction, or a reveal about the true power of the antagonist. That's used to kick off a new story arc; a scripted loss at the beginning just kicks off the story as a whole.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

A game is testing the player, if the player never fails, the player should never be punished.

You're not being punished. From a gameplay perspective, the reward for playing well enough in an RPG is advancing the story. In this case, "well enough" is a very low bar because you don't actually need to win the fight to get that reward, but either way you're being rewarded with story progress. That the story takes a negative turn doesn't turn that reward into a "punishment." You're not "punished" for turning the page if a character dies in a book you're reading.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Then who is that option for?

People who want to overpower the core game content. That can be a bit of an issue when the side content rewards you with interesting story content as well as gameplay rewards that mess with the balance of the game (this is one of Xenobalde 3's biggest flaws, for example, since its sidequests are amazing story-wise but overlevel you such that developing classes becomes hard), since then you have to choose whether you value side stories or proper balance more, but it's still a pretty universally accepted truth that if you do all of the side content, you're going to have an easier time than intended with core content.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

doing everything leads to dissonance with the story

Realistically, this is always going to be the case regardless of how well-balanced the rewards are (or if there's a system like Xenoblade DE's expert mode where you can store exp from sidequests to level/delevel at will). Unless there's no urgency whatsoever in the main story, deviating from it to do side quests is inescapably going to come with some dissonance. "The world is in grave peril and will be destroyed any minute!" "Hang on, this lady wants some eggs." You can sometimes mitigate that by doing sidequests during a lull in story tension, and some games manage to tie sidequests into the broader story in a way that helps further, but inherent in the very idea of side quests is the choice to spend your time doing something low-stakes and optional instead of the higher-stakes main quest. By choosing to do side quests in the first place, you've already made a conscious decision to play the game in a manner that's dissonant from the main story, so what's a little dissonance in power level going to hurt?