The dynamics of battle, and the overall quality and detail of a battle engine, are what make or break a game for me. Two of my favorite games, Final Fantasy Tactics and Grandia II, both had rather limited depth and plot (at least compared to many other RPGs), but their original and enjoyable battle engines more than made up for that fact. On the other hand, I can hardly stand playing games that have a slow or repetitive battle engine no matter how impressive the plot and graphics (i.e. the Breath of Fire series).

From experience we also see that battle engines stick with games much longer than almost anything else. There has been no significant change in the Final Fantasy battle system since IV (I haven't played X yet, but it looks to be the same), and it's the same for many others.

As you can tell, I'm leading up to questions about FoI's battle system. Based on what I've read of the story so far, it seems that it's slated to be traditional (party of PCs fighting party of NPCs). Please forgive me if I'm wrong on this, I haven't been able to read everything yet. Has any part of the system been finalized yet?

One of the things that we were exploring with Ecclesia RPG was character emotions. I could write much about this topic, but basically we were toying with the possibility of allowing both PCs and NPCs to act a little bit more on their own.

I'm not talking about effects such as berserk here, I'm talking about characteristic behavior. Final Fantasy IV had quite a few examples of this (which sadly newer games in the series have lost) including Edward's tendency to hide whenever he's low on HP and Cecil's heroic efforts to guard party members low on health. These type of unscripted events greatly enhanced the bond between the gamer and the characters and showed things that no amount of plot development could have done. To this day I've never seen an FMV that can top the dramatic effect created when Rydia saves your party in the land of monsters...it gives me the chills just thinking about it again!

Anyway, I was hoping to take this concept even further. To do so would most probably require a more complex battle system. There are many ways of approaching it, and I have many ideas already, but I'd like to hear your feedback on it before going further.

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That should help for starters. :) There was an even older thread - the original - but it's no longer available for perusal. Too bad. That's where all my related posts were. ;) Lol.

Thanks for the links, it seems I have a lot of reading yet to do.

Surprisingly Fate of Io has chosen many of the same things as Ecclesia (alright, I'm going to stop comparing things to Ecclesia very shortly). We also did not like the idea of random battles. Play a good pen-and-paper RPG or read a good fantasy book and there aren't really that many (random) battles.

I like the idea of controlling one player at a time and being able to issue commands to others. I think that the AI can be taken even further without necessarily creating more complexity by again looking at emotions. Each character could have a certain courage and trust level that influences their ability/willingness to take orders from other members of the party. Also there would be a variation in how characters acted underlying the commands that they're given.

It would take me a bit too long to get into specifics any more here. This leads me to another question which I'll post in another thread regarding the organization of data on this thing ;).