What are some games with interesting crit mechanics that I missed? And also what are some games I should check out for my next topic about Skill Trees? Let me know! Checkout Secrets of Shadows here store.steampowered.com/app/3111150/Secrets_of_Shadows
Peglin is a very strange one, Orbs have standard and Crit damage base value and hitting a crit-block/peg on the board triggers the crit value being used instad of the standard one for most Orbs that leads to a demage increase since now you do 4 demage per Peg hit on the board instead of 2 BUT some Items/Orbs and Status Effects raise your base Orb damage stats but not the crit one, so its not super uncommen to end up with a situation were hitting a crit-peg on the board slashes the demage of an attack in half or worse. I am not a huge fan of the system tbh since its allready quite hard to control what you hit on the board but it can also be fun to play around with.
I think one thing worth mentioning, even though you covered this "comeback" type of crit in your top-right quadrant, is the potential of random high-impact crits to counter-intuitively _reduce_ overall random swinginess of certain types of games, despite making individual "fights" more swingy. Over a whole "series" or "game" the existence of crits incentives the leading player to avoid aggressively ending the game (or they may unexpectedly lose to a bad crit); and this allows the currently losing player more time and space to make a comeback (Because they can threaten risky confrontations the leading player has less incentive to take, and so is likely to back down). This means a stronger player that has an unfortunate "early game" can still be favoured to win and vice-versa, rather than a few early decisions/events deciding the outcome of the whole round. This is why "combeack" crits can feel good and not just "random" all the time!
To contribute to comeback crits, let us look at it from a probability avoidance perspective! In Fire Emblem, while crits are random and probability derived, these can be manipulated via buildcraft, level design or itemization, which contributes indirectly to how valid a critical hit is and its purpose as a piece that is played, but also a piece that is not played. High crit enemies become threats to focus damage on or to avoid engaging in any way where the threat is suffered, which, while playing on the excitement and randomness factor, also plays on the tactics angle by forcing more game sense from the player and its conditions. Fire emblem is a bit of a wildcard in that sense-depending on entry they fit a lot of the other categories through additives or holistic iteration of it as part of a whole, such as Thracia 776's Followup Critical Modifier or crit skills from the gamecube or further, to supports and items on the gba titles
While it isn't an RPG, I think Team Fortress 2 would be a useful game to study, as it runs basically the entire spectrum of critical hit types. By default, almost every damage dealing weapon in the game has a random chance to crit, with a few select exceptions that will only crit upon hitting a certain condition (Sniper headshots and Spy backstabs being the big ones I can remember off the top of my head). One of the most impactful abilities in the game is the Medic's 'Kritzkrieg' which can guarantee an ally critical hits for a while after the Medic heals enough damage or by risking their own life to get enough hits with a certain melee weapon. I also love the addition of 'mini-crits' to several items as a smaller sub-reward to enable a wider range of playstyles and behaviors while still letting 'full" crits retain their big impact on the flow of a game. There's a fair amount of nuance that I'm glossing over and some that's even been lost to time. For example, at one point a melee weapon had a pseudo-crit that stunned enemies based on how far away they were when you hit with a ranged alt-fire (RIP OG Sandman, may have caused a few ragequits with it back in the day 😅)
If you expand the discussion to TTRPGs, which is where crits were originally borrowed from, I _really_ like Animon Story's critical gauge mechanic. Animon Story uses a d6 dice pool count successes system, and active defense, meaning that during combat players are rolling typically between 3d6 and 6d6 - at least at low levels - every time they're either doing an attack or defending. Every time they roll a 6 (including in initiative where they're rolling between ) they add one to the gauge. When it hits maximum, they can collectively spend it to do something that's either generally useful in combat (a huge collective attack against a single enemy) or something that's a bit more niche but can be vital in the right situation (recharging all player's metacurrency pool but either making the problem worse or introducing a new problem; automatically succeed at a non-combat related skill roll during combat; everyone evolving to highest available stage without needing to go through the usual hoops for that because the game is heavily based on Digimon so there's an evolution mechanic). This both feels a lot less 'swingy' than a lot of crit systems in games (D&D's 5% crit chance in particular) and allows players to have a resource to spend or save as they wish giving them an additional tactical dimension rather than merely better damage. It also scales to the group size - the size of the gauge double the player count including the GM, so if there are 3 players and a GM, the crit gauge is 8, while if there's 4 and the GM, it's 10. I'd also note that Pokemon's crit system is changed a ton between Gen I and Gen II. Moves that change the crit chance adjust it along a granular scale rather than directly messing with the odds making them a bit less impactful, and - more importantly - the probability in Gen 1 used to be tied to speed, which meant that a fast enough pokemon using a move with a high crit chance used to be guaranteed a crit if they hit at all. Also crits are all 1.5x damage now, in Gen 1 it scaled from around 1.5x (level 5) to around 1.95x (level 95) as your pokemon levelled up - Not a linear scaling, either level 20 had 1.8x damage from a crit. This is almost universally considered A Good Change - Speed used to be far more important than it currently is. (And then it changed a bit less between later on, with crits going down from 2x damage to 1.5x damage in more recent games)
I think there's another substantial reason for crits: to differentiate characters or playstyles. A character dealing heavy damage because of criticals and avoiding damage due to dodging feels fundamentally different from a unit relying on high attack and defense for both
@@secretsofshadowsgame right. You can have the same *average* damage given and average damage taken between 2 characters but the feel is very different when it's crit and dodge vs atk and def.
They don't just _feel_ different. They have _very_ different functions. And this is the reason I prefer units with high avoid in Fire Emblem. Combined with a high crit, you get similar damage output against enemies as normal tanks. However, they come with many more benefits. - They take less damage overall, leading to less healing items or need for dedicated healers. (Lower resource expenditure) - The high crit chance means that there's a high likelihood that if they _do_ suffer damage, they'll clear an escape route during the enemy turn. (Increased mobility) You can throw a dodge tank into a group of enemies and reasonably expect them to be able to heal themselves _if_ they get hit. And when they're at risk of defeat, they can flee more often than not. So _if_ you need to send a healer or rescue unit, the distance they need to cover and potential threats to their safety are drastically reduced.
Glad you noticed that, I'm still trying to improve on writing but I do put in effort to avoid putting out a 30+ minute video where im just rambling lol
One of the things you failed to mention about Pokemons crit system is that crits ignore buffs to the targets defence and debuffs to the attackers offence which means that they also function as a soft counter to someone buffing their defence to 3x debuffing your attack to 1/6 and then stalking the game out forever. Because even in that situation a crit can happen and blow through both effects
He skipped a lot of nuance for most of the games he talked about (i only played very little of wargroove so i cant really talk about that one) but for most of them, and especially in the place of pokemon that wouldnt really change their place on the chart or the goals that the crit achieves. In pokemons case it would just increase the impact that crits have, which doesnt really matter to make his point.
I think the Persona series has an interesting weakness/crit system. If you attack an enemy's weakness you will knock it down and if you knock down all enemies your whole party can do an all out attack which usually ends the battle. If you don't have the element that the enemy is weak to, you can hope for a physical attack to crit for the same effect. If you get the lucky crit, you are rewarded with victory, if your attack doesn't crit things can fall apart during your enemies turn to counter attack.
Persona has interesting and satisfying crits yea, if i recall correctly in P3R enemies dont always have the same weakness throughout the game(?) I remember playing it and thinking the game would be "solved" when you figure out each enemies weakness but that wasn't really the case.
But late but aside from specific bosses weaknesses in P3R are fixed. You can have the navigator analyse them completely and be able to reference them in any encounters with that enemy for the rest of the game. The confusion you were experiencing I think comes from enemy variants on higher floors of Tartarus which share visual design as their relative counterparts with slight differences and completely different stats and weak points
@@secretsofshadowsgame each normal enemy has the same weaknesses, but there are many different variants you can fight though each arcana/mask type that the enemy wears tend to share a common theme: Chariots (the lion masks with wheels or the lion with a mask on its ball and chain), for example, tend to resist physical and is either weak to magic or to status effects. It's the bosses (be it full moon bosses or gatekeepers) that *can* have different weaknesses or none at all.
Thanks! Im writing up a tabletop skirmish wargame (whole different area ik) and didnt know if I wanted to do anything with crits. Thanks for stopping me for a moment to think. I especially found the quick-fire rounds of how games have them implemented useful
Funny you mention that cus while doing research on this topic i actually drew a lot of inspiration from how table top RPGs implement crit (mostly DnD)! Best of luck
One of the systems I've come to like is found in Daggerfall - the Critical Strike skill can add extra modifiers to your accuracy, helping you land more hits. It doesn't directly multiply your damage (although it was intended to), but it helps increase your overall damage output in the long run. Pretty low impact, sure, but still invaluable for any melee character where your hit chance is determined by a dice roll.
Another game I would like to add is Darkest Dungeon, where even your heals can crit, which makes you heal double. Your debuff attacks can crit to ignore a portion of enemy's debuff resist. DoT from critical hits lasts longer. Landing crits lowers your stress and recieving them increases your stress. And after every crit a hero gets a unique buff for 1 turn. In this game critical hits are not just extra damage like in a Pokemon game, but interact with a lot of other combat mechanics
I’m late to the video, but- Shoutouts to crits that don’t deal extra damage, but instead apply other effects like debilitating statuses or lifesteal. This includes Pokemon’s Freeze chance(no way to apply it directly), Ashe’s slowing crits in League of Legends, and Astra/Luna/Sol/other proc based abilities in Fire Emblem.
Monster Hunter's crit system isn't particularly flashy. Your crit rate is determined by your weapon and your armor skills with a flat crit damage rate that can be influenced by your armor. It's main role seems to be allowing a wide variety of weapons to exist with meaningful differences among them. They do interestingly also include weapons with negative crit rate, that will randomly deal less damage than normal. With balancing you may have reason to choose the balanced weapon, the weaker high crit weapon or the stronger negative crit weapon. While also considering weapon elements and currently available materials the system supports a game that pushes you to fight a lot of monsters to create new equipment.
The negative crit system MH has is pretty unique and to add to your point i think the weapons that get negative crit tends to be from more "vicious" monsters if that makes any sense. Another system MH has that is kinda like critical hits is the actual weak spots on the monster, figuring out which spot is vulnerable to which type of damage was always pretty fun since they're not always the same and tend to reflect the ecological/visual designs of each monster
The modern XCOM games seem to sort of use a hybrid system, I would say. At a base level, they have random crits that are high-impact and unreliable, like Pokemon style. But there's also "flanking", or positioning yourself to shoot at an exposed enemy, which is deterministic and skill-based, and leads to all sorts of bonuses (including massively increased crit chance). So you have both reliable _and_ unreliable crits that have some overlap. And you can sort of decide as a player which type to pursue more with your soldier customization.
I'm not sure if calling the flanking system "crits" is really accurate. Flanking an enemy nullifies their protection from cover, but it doesn't increase your damage potential. Ironically, what it does do is elevate your crit rate, unless your enemy was already unable to take cover. It interacts with the crit system but isn't itself part of it. Personally XCom kinda grinds my gears. I don't like it when games make me want to be okay with losing characters I invest into, but then also make you need those characters to not fall behind on the progression treadmill. A lot of brutal tactics games kinda make the mistake(imo) where after a bad fight you're essentially worse off than you were at step 1, effectively making it optimal to just restart the game. Or savescum. Xenonauts does a much better job at it by not tying your troop progression to troop level so much. In my opinion, obviously.
@@dojelnotmyrealname4018that's what the original X-Com did too, but then firaxis got control of the copyright and now we have a game series with focus on supersoldiers fighting the alien invasion I think both approaches are fine, but as you say it really stings when you lose that special character and really want to just give up in contrary, a lot of people also like xcom and fire emblem for those exact reasons
@@pinguin4898 I especially like XCOM for that reason. It forces me to think through my turns thoroughly. Fire Emblem (now) offers an 'escape hatch' in the form of the turn wheel.
@@dojelnotmyrealname4018 It fits a type of critical as described in this video. It's a skill-based, reliable crit that just so happens to grant higher odds to another, more random type of crit as its main reward. Like I said, it's a weird mixed hybrid sort of system.
Even though you didn’t talk about it too much, I praise you for mentioning Patapon. It was a very formative game for me in my early teens and I feel it’s been mostly forgotten
Darkest Dungeon has the most thematic crits. The game is about making the best of a bad situation. Crits are random and high impact and, when the monsters get them, put you into a bad situation. Especially with permadeath and no reloading. It's wonderful.
Plus the darkest dungeon crits heal your stress, which is effectively a second health bar, so if you have enough crit chance on your own mercenaries you don’t have to worry about stress as much even if you don’t kill things quick
I think you could've gone a bit deeper in conditionals and how they allow a brand of builds and interactions on their own without dominating the system. The main example I use is Nocturne: Rebirth. Crits there are simply an extension of accuracy, going from miss, hit, mini crit, crit. The key point is that mini crits give you a 25% reduction to time for the next turn, and crits give you 50%. This immediately changes a lot of things: -DPS is now split between increasing crits for more speed, and increasing atk for more damage per MP -Cooldown based skills are more important because acting too fast can also leave you with nothing to pull out. -Evasion tank becomes more valuable since it can literally cut the opponent's dps in half -Since items can't crit, you can get away with making their base effect more powerful since they take longer to use.
This sounds super interesting for sure - I think accuracy in games tend to be too binary (once you hit 100% hit chance you dont care about that stat) so its cool that this game plays around with it beyond that
Pokemon/FE style crits are needed for the same reason that the games have accuracy; if everything was 100% accurate and had no crit chance, there's no variance and battles become "solved game" chess puzzles.
I do think pokemon goes too far in that respect, e.g. making certain mons rely on moves like focus blast or hurricane with 70% accuracy, or the whole para mechanic makes the competitive aspect feel very random and frustrating sometimes vs other players.
I think they both do very different things though. FE has an abundance of tools to deal with enemy crits and plan around them while Pokemon just doesn't. FE allows you to prevent something from going wrong if you plan properly beforehand while Pokemon sometimes just screws you. Of course, the Pokemon AI isn't often good enough to capitalize on your mistakes in the main line entries so the annoyance of rng mostly comes out in pvp. I think older FE does have some issues with crits feeling unavoidable or sometimes having to deal with a small chance of something going wrong (FE 6 swordmaster bosses come to mind), but as the series has gone on player control over the outcome has only increased.
@@twigz3214Zoldam is the worst offender in the GBA titles. There is no planning. Luna crit always kills. Crits in more modern FE games suffer from an ironic fate. Because they're so impactful, players often make them reliable (increase player crit to 90+, reduce enemy crit to 0, increase bulk to survive crits).
Momentum is exactly how Shin Megami Tensei games do it. A crit will reward you with an extra half turn, allowing for more actions in its turn based system. Missing or being drained will see you losing your turns. I can imagine this as being on a fast offense(getting crit) stumbling and losing your pace(being drained or missing your attack)
Nice and quick analysis of the topic, super cool. I like that you include perfect blocks in the topic, I am too pedantic to have ever thought of it that way, but it's very valid.
Just came across this video in my recommended and honestly, really interested in the game~~ Video format is solid and thought-provoking ^^ Good luck in your game and here is my extra insights on crits in games. There’s some moves in Pokémon and other games that are guaranteed crits giving a choice of higher damage floor since it will always crit but lower damage in comparison to moves that have a chance but winnout in damage ceiling going a consistent vs. high risk high reward playstyle. In Metaphor Re:Fantazio, the turn based mechanic only utilizes half a turn point giving way to an extra turn on crit or hitting a weakness. Crits are possible on spells but do not refund the turn to a half giving physical abilities an edge over magic.
There is a game called Ember Knights that I really like the crit systems for. First off, it has a Paper Mario-like "crit" for skills called perfect skills. Whenever you use a skill, if you hold the button & time releasing it, you get a bonus (increased damage/size/duration or add an effect, whatever is applicable). It isn't difficult to do or super powerful, but you do need to think about it & it is impactful enough to keep you engaged. It also has a normal low impact crit on your standard attacks. But the game is a roguelike & you can increase your chance to crit, increase your crit damage, or add effects to your crits. Additionally, if you choose the sword as your weapon, you can start with a 3-hit combo attack that always crit on the last attack. There are also some perks you can get that trigger after you get a certain number of perfect skills & some that occur after a certain number (or every) regular crits.
I think many gamers would say that High Impact and Random critical hits are bad design, but there are ways to implement them successfully. Darkest Dungeon is a game about mitigating risks as much as possible and when players begin to factor crits as potential risk and play around it like other risks, they will win more often. When I thought about doing a greedy play, I started assessing what the worst outcome is of it and when I factored in potential crits, I started to avoid much more Bad RNG.
I like how Genshin Impact lets you controls how much crit chance your characters have, and how much crits affect the damage dealt. So you get 2 crit styles, a balanced build that mathematically optimizes the ratio of crit chance for crit damage for the best average damage outcome, or you can go for a very low chance, extreme damage crits, and keep restarting the battle until you defeat the boss in one hit. There's also variation between each character, some have higher base chance or higher damage, there's one that has negative 100% chance for crits, which is funny, this affects what kind of build you want on them, going for more non-crit stats if they already have a high base stat, or in that one special case just ignoring crits, although some gigachads manage to get enough crit chance to overcome the -100% debuff.
Wizardry also has "critical hit" which is essentially instant death. Vorpal bunnies give veteran Wizardry players PTSD with how these cute but deadly bunnies have a good chance to sever necks. If you watched Monty Python, you know the dangerous rabbit.
Nicely done, this was a good presentation. After seeing it laid out like this, though... I think "reliable" crits are impostors. If it isn't random, it isn't really a critical hit at all. Using the name is just a veneer, trying to frame a different mechanical system in terms from an RPG. You can reveal this by coming up with a descriptive name for the system, and then trying to apply a random crit mechanic on top. If you're truly dealing with critical hits, that just becomes a recursive crit: a chance for your crit to do extra damage. On a tactics game, you might see "crit" used for positional damage. Attacking enemies from the rear or sides will be more effective. Trouble is, these are just flanking mechanics! It's a completely different system, just borrowing the name of critical hits. This backstab mechanic can also interact with stealth, where attacking an unaware enemy gives a damage bonus. Because all of these are independent, you could have a stealthy attack from the rear... which also happens to roll a critical hit! The three mechanics can coincide, because only one of them is a crit system. We see something similar when looking at action games. In an FPS Roguelike such as Bullets Per Minute, enemies can have a giant glowing weakpoint. The game does feature RPG elements, such as giving you a Precision attribute to increase your critical multiplier. But there's no stat for critical chance, because it's purely determined by where you shoot. This one isn't a critical hit system either, and it's easy to see if you apply it to a humanoid enemy. These are just headshots, or more generally location-based damage. And by realising it isn't a crit system, you have room to implement things like reduced damage for hitting the legs. Regardless of where on the body you hit, it would still make sense to roll for a random critical hit. Then you have oddities like Team Fortress 2. This includes true crits, like a rocket launcher firing a projectile that glows and does triple damage. This is rolled on a random chance system, though there can be additional factors. I believe with Jarate, you apply a status effect to a target that causes automatic crits against him. However, there's also a system where sniper rifles cause reliable "crits" on a headshot. And that's just unnecessary, because the game already included a headshot mechanic. I don't see a problem with a critical chance going over 100%. But if you aren't rolling for them at all, using the term "critical hit" is just confusing. Diablo 2 doesn't feature crits as part of the core gameplay: they come from a class-specific skill called Critical Strike. It suffers from severe diminishing returns, so getting a crit chance over 50% is often impractical. However, there exists a version called Deadly Strike, which can be granted by the items you're wearing. So the game does support random crits for those who want them, as well as allowing crit-based builds. They aren't a fundamental part of the combat system, just a layer on top.
This has been such a beautiful and well put together video. Critical hits are definitely a big staple for many games and I like the way you categorized them.
I think low-impact is a bad way to put it. The difference isn't in how effective they are, it's in the timing of the effectiveness. You either get one big chunk of effectiveness all at once, or several small ones that add up.
Excellent video! I think a specific aspect of crits that make them great for the power scaling aspect is that it's a natural feeling form of exponential power increase. In games with multiple damage stats (attack, crit rate, crit damage for example) its very satisfying to balance them in order to maximize potential dps.
I do actually enjoy Pokemon’s crit system because they bypass enemy stat increases and player stat drops, causing stalling tactics to always be a gamble. It feels really good when your opponent is setting up on you and you destroy them with a well timed crit. Crits also help to make the game less of a math game and more of an actual adventure where things out of your control can happen, good or bad, and it’s your job to make sure things go well regardless.
I feel this was both entertaining and useful, so many thanks for sharing!!! 😁 I play TTRPG and use the Fate System, where the crits usually tend to feel rather wierd, especially if not understood in the context of what they work for. But at the same time, being a generic system it encourages people to make changes considering the experience they desire to achieve. So I might end up taking advantage of this concepts in many oportunities from now on when considering the different experiences that the system could achieve!
Was playing Super Robot Wars earlier today and the game goes to some lengths to make each character feel strong in a different way, and that includes crits. Only 2 characters per playthrough have higher crit damage as a unique skill, and you can only land crits if one of your stats is higher than that of your target. However there are many other ways to make your characters strong other than crits, but certain pilots have an affinity. Great to differentiate your characters in this way.
this is really cool!!! im personally wrestling with crits while trying to build my own table top game, so this has been a really fresh perspective on a topic ive been stewing on for quite a while 😅 keep it up!!!!
A friend of mine recommended this video to me because I like making games myself. I'm glad they did! I like your presentation style a lot. I learned just as much about critical hits as I did about making a well edited video essay. Good luck on your RPG.
@@secretsofshadowsgame You bet! I also posted about it on BlueSky. I didn't see you there so I didn't tag you. If you're there, let's connect. I wanna follow your progress.
Ah cool, unfortunately i don't use BlueSky cus i already have my hands full with youtube at the moment but I do hear of good things on that platform. maybe in a few months i will look into that
Already seen a lot of comment on TF2's crit system so ill comment on another one that has a similar process but in a way more similar to RPGS. In Warframe you have a crit chance and crit damage stat, when the crit chance goes over 100% you will have a 100% chance for a normal crit and then whatever % is left over for a chance at an orange crit. If you go over 200% crit chance then youll always get an orange crit and whatever is leftover is then the odds for getting a red crit. Each of these crit levels changes the modifier for the crit from additional 1x, to 2x to 3x damage. There are entire weapons and abilities centred around having insanely low base damage but high crit, so youre doing very little base damage normally but then you do normal damage via the crit system. Its a very interesting way of doing crits ive not often seen and it was entirely because they accidentally scale creeped too hard. Originally you werent suppossed to go above 100% but they added so many ways to increase it that now its an entire system of its own.
A funny side effect of this is people drastically underestimating yellow/orange crits. I've seen tons of builds that would do more DPS if they had a better balance of CC and CD instead of tunnel-visioning on the 300% pretty red numbers.
One thing you forgot to mention about random, high impact crits is that they provide a different sort of play independant from the main gameplay. Pchal for example, often says, "Play around the crit," which esentially means come up with a strategy so sound that even if you get the worst possible luck you still cant lose. This is a type of mastery over mechanics in itself that can be fun to engage with, if you are the type to plan everything out with spreadsheets.
I should mention that some games with scaling crits actually will allow you to crit multiple times in a single hit, such as warframe, including super critical hits and so on, differentiating them with yellow, orange, and red numbers
A thing to mention on Fire Emblem is that while a majority of the time crits are on the unreliable and high impact scale, there are weapons and classes that can increase your crit rate, usually by several times. Weapons like killing edges or the legendary Wo Dao tend to have high crit rates, and Swordmasters have increased crit rates. Even supports can add crit chances. Then there's the wrath skill which in some games just lets you crit guaranteed under specific conditions. Additionally while in most games crits and effective damage (bows on fliers, horse killers on cavalry) are separate, in the 4th game you auto crit when dealing effective damage.
I was working on my rpg maker game and realized that by having status ailments boost the counter and crit chance it allows for highly dramatic near-death situations turning into amazing moments organically.
I'm gonna have to comment on 2 here. Random crits don't work as comeback methods, as on average they favor the winning player. A critical hit's usual effect is multiplying your damage, which favors the side doing higher relative damage to begin with. So I think the label is inaccurate. I think they're more accurately described as a game-swinging upset. If you want comeback crits to be a thing, you need to tie either their effect or their rate to how much a side is losing.
Relative damage is an interesting point yea I see what you mean on that. Game-swinging would be more accurate in that sense. You could say that if your only out for winning is through a crit then in that instance crits would be more impactful for the losing player though. Either way I wouldnt be mad for labelling these types of crits as game-swinging upset
@@secretsofshadowsgame I use "relative damage" to condense "damage relative to enemy health", but I should probably clarify that for anyone reading this. Raw health numbers are insufficient to assign meaning to an engagement. As an example, some RPGs have enemies that have extremely low HP pools relative to the rest of the game but are also extremely difficult to damage. 1 damage is 25% of such an enemy's health. So some amount of normalizing relative to the target is necessary to assign meaning. I will also admit bias. Personally I am not fond of waiting to get lucky. So I don't like the idea of systems that incentivise so-called crit fishing. So that might also influence my opion. And while you are right, a crit that swings a game back into the losing party's favor would be more memorable than one that cements a winner's victory, there is an awkward bit in that the *effect* of the crit doesn't change, only the context around it. So then you have to ask: What does impact mean?
@@dojelnotmyrealname4018 This is a thing about RNG in general, too, and subdivisions within it. Eg, there is a long-running debate in ttrpgs about the preferred action resolution die/dice. Some people prefer the swinginess of 1d20, whereas others prefer 3d6, or something else. D20 is swingy with a flat distribution whereas 3d6 has a chunky normal distribution. Emphasizing RNG and game mechanics also deemphasize player skill and vice-versa (unless and until there are player choices involved that enable the manipulation of RNG until that becomes part of the player skills), which can be desirable to level the field between high-skill and medium/low-skill players or casual games. And some games have enemies entirely immune to crits (eg undead in some editions of D&D). Whether and when to prioritize improved likelihood to-hit versus damage/impact of a hit versus likelihood and/or impact of crits is a major and long-running debate in D&D optimization and it is always somewhat context-dependent.
In Pokemon specifically crits ignore defensive setups (stat debuffs on the attacker, buffs on the defender), so they are a comeback mechanic, as a properly set up player has a huge advantage and often a crit is the only out the losing player has to break through that setup. Setups and stalling are much more relevant in competitive pokemon, so single-player is a different topic.
@@EsperSpirit Except that's still not a comeback mechanic since the crits still favor the person in the lead. What you're describing is a counter mechanic where crits counter turtle strats.
TF2 has a base crit system that will _triple_ an attack's base damage and remove its damage fall-off (i.e., most attacks from further away do as little as 50% damage). For example, a Rocket Launcher from far away can go from doing 48 damage to _270 damage_ off of a crit alone, a 5.6x damage boost. But the most interesting part of the crit system in TF2 is more so crit chance. A standard weapon has a 2% chance of dealing a crit per shot (15% chance for melee weapons), which is about what you'd expect from most crit systems that strong. But as you start doing more consistent damage, your crit chance actually rises as well. If you've done 800 damage in the last 20 seconds, your crit chance shoots up to 12% for standard weapons and a staggering 60% while using a melee weapon (making you _more likely_ to land a crit than not). This adds a sort of skill-based backing to the system, while still making it always random no matter what. And even on top of that, there are weapons that enable _guaranteed_ crits depending on certain conditions. There are the Sniper rifles (and a bow) that deal guaranteed crits on a headshot, but cannot make use of the randomized crit system at all. There is a variant of the Medigun (Medic's gun that heals allies with a beam instead of damaging enemies) that temporarily gives a teammate guaranteed crits after you've charged it up for a while instead of making them invulnerable (both are just as broken as you think). There are the Spy's knives which, while not being conventional crits, will insta-kill enemies if you stab them while they're facing away from you. And so on. All of these bring the crit system into more of a reliable, skill-based light, while still co-existing with the traditional randomized crits. An overall pretty interesting way to handle a crit system. It's to the point where some weapon variants are given the "no random crits" downside to stop them from overshadowing their default counterparts. Which, while often meme'd on due to how uncommon said random crits are, can sometimes make or break a weapon's balancing. For example, Demoman has a bunch of swords he can use over his default beer bottle (he's a drunkard, so don't question it), which have longer reach and a bunch of other additional perks, but usually _cannot_ deal random crits. The one exception is the Scotsman's Skullcutter, which, on top of being a big f*ck-off double-headed battle axe instead of a sword, retains the ability to deal random crits on top of having a flat +20% damage bonus - the drawback instead being a movement speed debuff while the weapon is currently out. Its extra damage, combined with it being a melee weapon, makes attaining and keeping the coveted 60% crit chance with a melee weapon fairly easy once you learn how to dip in and out of combat well enough, now having a better-than-a-coin-flip's chance of nailing enemies with a massive 234 damage flat on their heads (or rather, skulls in thos case). And unsurprisingly, it is a pretty common choice for Demoman players to pick (though the sword that absorbs your enemies' souls to boost your max hp and movement speed and the sword that restores half your health on every kill are also popular picks).
Thanks for writing that out! I knew TF2 has a lot of interesting crit mechanics but I've never played it so I didn't feel comfortable talking about it, so this was a great read
I don't think paper mario (and to that extent all mario rpgs) action commands count as a kind of critical hit, it's just using the full damage potential of your attack. Consider Mario & Luigi, where you can do the same hammer swing as paper mario, also pressing the button at the right time for maximum damage. But in that game, you can also get a "lucky" hit, for an extra increase in damage (which tbh is also kinda low impact for those games,) and as reliable as your Stache stat allows for.
While they didn't really specify, I don't think they were actually talking about the action commands (largely because I definitely wouldn't call those low-impact, the bare minimum for most of them is double damage, with many offering more), but rather the stylish inputs and blocking.
I desinged an ttrpg using a 3W6 dice system. If a player rolls a 6 on one of his dice during an attack roll, it's a crit and based on weapon, it applies bleed or crippled. Your vid made me think "Hm.. That's pretty random, I should give players more control over crit chance, impact and effects to reward smart character building" Thx bro!
another crit system that fits into the pokemon "high impact-unreliable" quadrant is the crit table. My favorite is from GURPS 4e and they are pretty common in TTRPGs. Basically instead of doing extra damage, a table is rolled on when a crit occurs, some times just doing extra damage or doing something incomparable directly to damage like severing or otherwise disabling a limb. There is also usually a fumble or "critical failure" table as well.
When I think about interesting crit mechanics, I think of Pequod 1st Mate Yi Sang from Limbus Company. In Limbus Company, Crit is controlled by Poise. It's a status effect on the character. For every point in poise Potency, you gain 5% chance to crit. When you crit, however, the poise Count goes down by 1, and you lose all potency if poise count reaches zero (you also lose 1 count per turn, so some characters aren't very good at maintaining their poise). Pequod Yi Sang isn't very strong, but he has a very powerful skill called Relentless Stabbing. Keeping details brief, every time the attack crits, it's reused, getting more powerful each time. There is a limit on how many times this re-use can go off, but it leads to very satisfying moments where he has enough potency to guarantee the crit, and enough count to get the full use out of the skill.
*Dragon Quest critical hits also have a series of their own* Base game DQ1, crits have 1/64 chance to occur and now modern games have stats like deftness or luck to influence crits. Martial Artists or Thieves tend to have a higher crit chance like Alena (DQ4) or Erik (DQ11) And there is the hail mary strikes like *Hatchet Man or Thunder Thrust: Low accuracy attack but guaranteed crit if success* Not only physical attacks, *even spells now have a chance to "go haywire" which is a fancy way of saying "spell crit"* . Spells do more damage/healing and debilitating spells are almost always hit.
That's interesting - hail mary crits and spells going haywire sound thematic and i love when games play into RPG elements like that. Also, from what I heard Dragon Quest was one of the first games to ever introduce a crit mechanic so it's cool that it kept evolving over the years
Darkest Dungeon has low crit chance (affected by class, gear, and abilities) to double your damage roll. Player crits grant a small 'stress' heal, which is the game's unique "second health bar" mechanic. :)
When speaking about comeback crits, you said to weigh whether a game would be better without them and then followed it by saying " players tend to linger on unlucky crits, but I find the unexpected moments to be just as memorable." and I just wanted to point out that (respectfully) you're wrong, or at least a vast minority. Crits in pokemon are a whole topic I could complain about, but the biggest thing I'd like to point out is the basic concept of loss aversion. Loss aversion states that on average, things like this have a net negative impact on the players. I think that the low control+high impact crits feel this the worst. You say that nothing is worse than just watching a game play out despite knowing the winner, but (competitive) pokemon is largely just a strategy and math game in singles, and a game about information and reading an opponent in doubles. I can agree that crits can make some interesting moments, but I would say that the feeling of winning off of a 6% chance is dull, and the feeling of losing off of a 6% chance is infuriating. I have yet to find a compelling argument for random high impact crits that actually acknowledges loss aversion.
Loss aversion plays into this for sure and I definitely would've mentioned that if I thought of it lol. I think when you get into really competitive or high level games then random high impact crits are generally pretty goofy. The point about determined games being boring holds true more from a casual or spectator perspective, and I would argue that from a game's longevity pov that making the viewing experiencing more exciting would be worth it. Good points overall though pretty interesting take and I can definitely see how pokemon RNG is a lil bit too frustrating.
A good example is Hearthstone vs a modern competitive card game (FAB, Altered, etc). HS has a lot of randomness as it is aimed at casual players, that is why the competitive scene died down. Those others if not balanced or designed well can feel samey and predictable instead
I think fire emblem is an interesting example in this respect. Each time you engage in combat you can clearly know ahead of time what your enemies crit chance is. Yes, unlucky crits still happen but they feel less random since by choosing your engagements wisely you can minimize or completly negate the chance of enemies crits. Whenever you do get an unlucky crit from an enemy it still feels bad but there is also a sense that you could have avoided this with better planning. I also think when talking loss aversion we need to distinguish between pvp and pve. In pvp I agree that random high impact crits can add too much varience and feel like you lack control over the competetive outcome. In pve however, this isn't always a problem. I allready mentioned fire emblem and how loss aversion isn't a problem there and I'd argue the same applies to pve pokemon. Pokemon's base game is very easy. Unless you incredibly unlucky an enemy crit won't cause you to lose with a semi-decent team. But, an enemy crit can still cause you to reevaluate your plands and drives up tension even if the battles outcome is unlikely to change. Nothing is more boring than playing out an already solved matchup so every bit of variance helps here and I'd argue crits make pve pokemon more interesting in a positive way.
@@Chris3sfrom what I know Hearthstones competitive scene didn't die because of randomness but mainly because of Blizzard and how poorly they organized it (and treated the competitors or partners), while among the reasons related to the game itself the main issue was the ridiculous power creep with each new expansion and introducing wholly uninteractive combos. I'm quite sure randomness didn't play even the smallest part in this, it was just a mechanic that you had to account for within your strategies.
@@daruyami sorry yea you are right, but randomness was a huge part in it, in regular gameplay or in combos, everyone who played against that just wasn't a fan of it. It was one part in many that lead to its downfall (as it is with most other games)
Hi, great video! Just wanted to share a thought on game design from a topic that I've not seen talked much about: how much a game is handcrafted and when to mix repeated stuff to save development resources.
@@secretsofshadowsgame I will check it out but was mostly talking about game design itself, since I think that is what separates games like Elden Ring (which feels almost entirely handcrafted with the exceptions of some enemies and bosses) from newer Assassin's Creed games, which feels almost a repeated pattern that you can discover in like a quarter of its total playtime. Some handcrafted examples may include non conventional interactions (talking cats that give you quests in Skyrim), secret places (underworlds mostly in Elden Ring but also in Tears of the Kingdom to a lesser extent), unique NPCs (the mentioned examples have a lot of them, but it is also a counter example of how Assassin's Creed mobs feel dead and pasted compare to those other games).
oh yea absolutely, newer AC and modern open world games are the biggest offenders when it comes to recycling content in a bad way. Monster Hunter I think does reuse content in a better way by adding in new attacks + rewarding with better armor, or put different enemies together in the same quest to spice things up. On the other hand when you add in handcrafted areas and make them hidden like in Elden Ring i think the awe of exploration is increased even further. Lots to think about and I think I will make a video on that in the near future (I already plan on making 1 about Quest design and I think this topic can fit in pretty well)
Pokemon crits also serve to break stalls and threaten passive play, since they ignore defensive boosts on the target If you're sitting there using Calm Mind over and over again, you're giving your opponent more chances to score a crit and knock you out despite all your setup
I'm definitely more fond of controlled, low-impact Crits when designed well. A good example is from PSO2 (classic) where chaining actions together with the right timing rewards you with higher damage and lower recovery, as well as charging your Photon Burst and Focus Gauge faster. The player isn't doing anything particularly different from usual, but it's rewarding and players who can't hit those timings aren't punished all that hard. Contrast with Dark Souls, where parries and backstabs are massively damaging and invincible, so you may as well just fish for them constantly. Obviously these games have different design goals but the point is that once you've built skill, the high impact crit becomes the objectively best option very quickly. High impact high control critical hits can be really satisfying in a tactical setting because the designer can build scenarios where it's challenging to make use of them. But for an action RPG I find they can be fairly centralizing.
I think "comeback crits" work better if there's a modifier (possibly secret) that increases friendly crit chance under certain conditions, such as low health or being in range of too many enemies. I've seen games where a key strategy for high-skill players is to keep one or more units under X% health in order to take advantage of a radically improved crit chance, allowing the game to shift towards the skill-based side for high-skill players. A similar analysis applies in games where dodging is an extremely rare event, similar to a defensive crit. I think this works even better, especially in games with permadeath, because it increases the chances that you extract a key unit after a harrowing situation, which is exciting.
I actually have a perfect comeback crit with my Engage maddening playthrough. I was fighting the boss, but was just a little bit short of the damage threshold needed to kill it, so I sent a unit in hoping to trigger one of the chain attacks from a nearby unit. None of the chance based chains triggered, but I landed a 3% crit on the boss and cleared a chapter I had no right to win.
In Gunfire Reborn there's two sorts of crits. "Critical Hits" are where you aim for an enemy's weakspot, multiplying your damage by whatever your gun's CritX stat is. But it also has what's called "Lucky Shot", which is a stat you spec into through upgrades, this gives a random chance of also multiplying your damage by your weapon's CritX. And it can stack too, so a Lucky Shot against an enemy's weakspot will do 2 times your weapon's CritX... And Lucky Shot in particular *_can exceed 100%_* ... This means that you can get a lucky shot chance of 150% or more.. Giving you a guaranteed Lucky Shot, but also a 50% chance of multiplying it again. This means that people who haven't specced into Lucky Shot can still make use of their weapon's CritX if they aim well enough, but meanwhile people could spec into Lucky Shot to reach really high numbers.
What’s interesting to me is how a lot of this is more a discussion of RNG than just crits. A classic strategy game I’m fond of is Battle For Wesnoth, which lacks crits, but has such an emphasis on RNG that it feels very similar. It has a terrain and hit chance system similar to Fire Emblem’s (in broad strokes), but the game is designed around manipulating those hit chances. There are units with a low chance to hit but which deal devastating damage each time they do land a hit (basically crits), and units who deal piddling damage fairly consistently. The game _feels_ like it’s built around adapting to random crits in your strategy.
Personally i deslike the high impact random crit. I'm fine if it's something you can build around and turn in a strategy, but even if it can give you a dopamin rush when that clutch crit happens, but it's comproved that humans weight negative thing more than the positive one, so that one unluck crit will frustrate you much more. Also, if you care about playing well, winning or losing because a random crit just feel bad overall.
An interesting take on "crits" is found in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (and some other traditional roguelikes). The game has no mechanic named "critical hits", but the damage of every attack and most spells is HIGHLY variable (ranging from +/-100% of the average damage, with a uniform distribution), so in effect the game has the same very irregular damage that a game with proper random crits has. This ends up having a "comeback" effect in the game *for the enemies*, as even an enemy much lower level than you can get a series of lucky hits, forcing the player to play cautious even against trash mobs. There is a saying in the DCSS community that goes something like "A player with a 99% chance of winning each of their fights has a 99% chance of losing the game".
I always do both critical damage and advantage damage, so if you would attack a Fire Enemy with a Water attack, it would deal more damage because water is effective, and it still can do a critical hit
Path of Exile's crits actually work completely differently depending on the side of the player/monster dichotomy. Players use critical hits as you mentioned: as a distinct source of linear damage increase. Monsters use it as a way to raise the ceiling on player invulnerability. It would not be impossible to stack your defenses to the point of out-regenerating enemy damage if not for random crits. If you want to nullify enemy crits, that's something you can plan around, too! Here's my design for your critical hits implementation. It's asymmetric across player/monsters. Monsters have a low (~10%) chance to crit for triple damage, but you can completely zero out that chance by playing into very common and cheap skills. For example, a cavalier might gain crit immunity until end of turn by triggering the "Charge" skill by moving its maximum movement, encouraging long diving attacks. A fortress knight might gain crit immunity by triggering "In the Fray" by being surrounded by two different enemies, or by triggering "Hunker Down" by not moving at all. Player crits have a similar implementation to Fire Emblem's, but with a much bigger focus on weapons with increased crit chance instead of weapons with more damage and less accuracy. You can't fiddle with things until a kill is guaranteed, you have to decide which of your expensive weapons is worth using in this scenario. Or, yknow, use better tactics so you can checkmate the enemy instead of relying on random chance. This allows players not engaging with tactics to blame bad luck while encouraging them to solve the tactical puzzle. This lowers the excitement of the battle screen in general, but I think that's fine; in Fire Emblem I tend to find a random crit to make me dejected, like "I spent all this time solving the encounter then I just crit their cornerstone character so it was actually much easier than I thought it was".
Just watched the last two minutes of the video. Extra effects didn't really come to mind when I think of "critical hit", having played so much pokemon growing up. I REALLY like the idea that a crit is a hit so good it helps the rest of your units in the battle. That's unique enough you could make it the centerpiece of your game's strategy. It's not something that I would prefer in my ideal playstyle, but I'm sure there are many people who would be delighted to be faced with a brick wall, take a stab at it, and be delighted at seeing an unexpected explosion that drives the stooges' health into one-hit-kill territory.
Thanks for taking the time to write that, exactly the type of discussion I was looking forward to. Some cool ideas here, I really like your idea of anti-crit conditions being something unique for each class of units. That's a great idea to negate some of the unlucky moments in FE where crits are so brutal
Interestingly Pokemon's crits do the same thing. Because crits in Pokemon ignore defense boosts they stop a Pokemon from just sitting on the field and spamming a move like iron defense to become untouchable. You can do it but if an opponent switches in a moderately strong attacker and just swings at you for a while they're likely to eventually crit.
This was a great game design video! It made me think about potential ways to make crit mechanics interesting for my own hobby dev project! Definitely subscribing for more :3
7:34 About lingering on unlucky crits vs clutch comebacks, players who are familiar with the game and can choose their fights will practically never enter a fight where power balance is not in our favor. Thus, for better players clutch wins rarely if ever happen, fights will either go as planned or we will get unlucky crit and be mad about it.
Interesting video, can't wait to see what you have to say about skill trees. Maybe edit out the transition between your slides ? Or is it a choice to keep them ?
Thanks! Vid on skill tree is getting bigger than I thought so it'll be out in 2 weeks. For the transitions, it was my first time trying this style so I was just testing that out but it does look a bit awkward - appreciate the feedback
Enjoyed the video essay. A design choice I agree with in modern games is the splitting of criticals into chance stats and damage increase stats: this inherently imposes a tradeoff between reliability and impact while respecting player agency.
As someone who has played a ton of Genshin Impact the last few years, I found myself approaching this video asking where it falls. And each time you introduced a new section, I thought "maybe it goes here? No, wait, maybe it goes *here*..." But the way you describe PoE is probably most comparable due to the players' control and the relation to power fantasy. GI characters start at 5% crit rate, +50% crit damage. One of the staples of gearing characters in Genshin is picking up crit stats, which would be a little long to describe fully here, but the short version is that it's possible to take some characters as far as ~100% rate, ~200% crit damage. One thing players agree on is the "2:1 rule" where you try to keep your CD at double your CR because of how stats are distributed on items. One other thing players agree on is that crit is usually the most fundamental way to raise a character's long-term damage, and not just their ceiling. Players begin to take them for granted, and get frustrated when they don't happen. Having a character get 100% or near 100% crit rate is valuable in terms of the consistency. By comparison, players who want to show off forego crit rate entirely in favor of crit damage and engage in iterative attempts known as "crit fishing," which isn't ideal gameplay but is what certain players shoot for when they want "damage per screenshot." Ultimately, every damage-dealing character in the game, when played "correctly," will have at least 40/80 in their crit stats, aiming for 60/120, or higher if the character allows. Since this is a live service game, over time, more ways to push that higher have become available, with newer equipment sets like Marechausee Hunter and Obsidian Codex providing 36 and 40% CR (with a fairly trivial condition.) By contrast, players rioted back when the devs released the character Kokomi because they decided to try something different and make her effectively unable to crit...never mind the fact that she was a healer. I could probably do a full analysis video on the importance of crits in the game, both literally as DPS and in the players' overinflated importance of them.
If you want something even funnier the character who "can't crit" actually just starts with -95% crit rate rather than 5% like any other character. This means she can actually crit and there have always been Critkomi meme builds that just stack up 150% or so crit rate through building and buffing. They're not good, but because there was a shortcut taken you can technically do this. Crit stats play a pretty different roll in Genshin to most games when you're not doing dumb things like critfishing though. They're literally just a multiplier. They're a very strong multiplier because unlike almost all the other multipliers they stack multiplicatively with other multipliers. With one other exception all the other multipliers in the game are additive with each other. So crit in Genshin is a spicy "x% damage boost" that stacks really well with the normal "x% damage boost".
I've been futzing with crits in a ttrpg system, and honestly, my goal with isn't to make them an expected and reliable mechanic. It's purely to sike out the players. There's five levels of success in the system. Major Success, Success, Failure, Major Failure, Catastrophic Failure. Despite there being more Failure outcomes than Successes, Failure isn't actually more likely. I just differentiate Failures with higher granularity. In addition, Ive tuned Catastrophic Failures with the desire that no one actually rolls it all too often. The entire purpose isn't to be rolled but to instill in the players head that it can be rolled. So even if it's not super likely the probability that it can happen regardless it's enough to cause a player to hesitate. To second guess "but what if it all goes wrong?" Thirdly, my system involves purposefully making your current roll worse to be able to make future rolls better. This happens after the dice are thrown, and so even if the roll is rubbish, it will most likely be a major Failure at most. With out Catastrophic failures, the player would be inclined to just sink their own ship and salvage what they can if something goes wrong. After all, it doesn't matter if you lose by 1 or 20, a there's discrete tiers of Success. But, with Catastrophic Failures looming over them, the player is disinsentivized to go balls to the wall in their salvaging. To leave some substance for the current roll because they know for how bad this is, it can easily become way worse.
Great video. Something interesting about scaling crits that is the relationship between crits, attack speed, and damage. Attack speed lowers variance, while pure damage raises it. This only really comes up in rougelites because almost every other genre expects you to get 100% crit pretty quickly. It matters a bit though because it makes early attack speed feel better for skilled players, assuming that you start off with a normal attack speed/damage ratio Also, just a personal opinion, but the title cards feel forced. I think you could do without them completely. They mess with the flow, and I think your writing is good enough to not need them. But if you disagree, keep rolling with them because it really is just a taste thing
I like your analysis. One thing that I think you might have wanted to touch on (at least in an aside) is the fine line between rewarding system mastery and punishing a lack of system mastery. I haven't played Paper Mario, but I have played Super Mario RPG which uses similar mechanics. In my experience, the latter game punishes a lack of system mastery. The timing for crits is very tight, meaning that I could rarely hit them (about 10% success rate). This is because I have poor rhythm and I accept that. Unfortunately, the game is pretty much balanced on the idea that players will make perfect hits and get perfect blocks most of the time. The result of this design choice was that I was being punished for a lack of system mastery and unsurprisingly never found the game enjoyable.
Rewarding and punishing are definitely 2 sides of the same coin. I think Mario RPG is unique in that it sort of bridges action and turn-based elements, and a huge appeal for turn-based games is that people that are not good at action/input dexterity elements can have a more chill time playing turn-based games. So I can 100% see how Mario RPG was not enjoyable for you
@secretsofshadowsgame yeah, this is where I had issues with Sekiro- I have decent rhythm but overall miserable reaction times, so I had to struggle like hell to just get the shura ending. The souls games, bloodborne and elden ring all have alternate paths to power involving planning and strategy, so I do way better with those 😅
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What are some games with interesting crit mechanics that I missed? And also what are some games I should check out for my next topic about Skill Trees? Let me know!
Checkout Secrets of Shadows here
store.steampowered.com/app/3111150/Secrets_of_Shadows
Peglin is a very strange one, Orbs have standard and Crit damage base value and hitting a crit-block/peg on the board triggers the crit value being used instad of the standard one for most Orbs that leads to a demage increase since now you do 4 demage per Peg hit on the board instead of 2 BUT some Items/Orbs and Status Effects raise your base Orb damage stats but not the crit one, so its not super uncommen to end up with a situation were hitting a crit-peg on the board slashes the demage of an attack in half or worse. I am not a huge fan of the system tbh since its allready quite hard to control what you hit on the board but it can also be fun to play around with.
I think one thing worth mentioning, even though you covered this "comeback" type of crit in your top-right quadrant, is the potential of random high-impact crits to counter-intuitively _reduce_ overall random swinginess of certain types of games, despite making individual "fights" more swingy.
Over a whole "series" or "game" the existence of crits incentives the leading player to avoid aggressively ending the game (or they may unexpectedly lose to a bad crit); and this allows the currently losing player more time and space to make a comeback (Because they can threaten risky confrontations the leading player has less incentive to take, and so is likely to back down). This means a stronger player that has an unfortunate "early game" can still be favoured to win and vice-versa, rather than a few early decisions/events deciding the outcome of the whole round.
This is why "combeack" crits can feel good and not just "random" all the time!
To contribute to comeback crits, let us look at it from a probability avoidance perspective! In Fire Emblem, while crits are random and probability derived, these can be manipulated via buildcraft, level design or itemization, which contributes indirectly to how valid a critical hit is and its purpose as a piece that is played, but also a piece that is not played.
High crit enemies become threats to focus damage on or to avoid engaging in any way where the threat is suffered, which, while playing on the excitement and randomness factor, also plays on the tactics angle by forcing more game sense from the player and its conditions.
Fire emblem is a bit of a wildcard in that sense-depending on entry they fit a lot of the other categories through additives or holistic iteration of it as part of a whole, such as Thracia 776's Followup Critical Modifier or crit skills from the gamecube or further, to supports and items on the gba titles
While it isn't an RPG, I think Team Fortress 2 would be a useful game to study, as it runs basically the entire spectrum of critical hit types.
By default, almost every damage dealing weapon in the game has a random chance to crit, with a few select exceptions that will only crit upon hitting a certain condition (Sniper headshots and Spy backstabs being the big ones I can remember off the top of my head). One of the most impactful abilities in the game is the Medic's 'Kritzkrieg' which can guarantee an ally critical hits for a while after the Medic heals enough damage or by risking their own life to get enough hits with a certain melee weapon.
I also love the addition of 'mini-crits' to several items as a smaller sub-reward to enable a wider range of playstyles and behaviors while still letting 'full" crits retain their big impact on the flow of a game.
There's a fair amount of nuance that I'm glossing over and some that's even been lost to time. For example, at one point a melee weapon had a pseudo-crit that stunned enemies based on how far away they were when you hit with a ranged alt-fire (RIP OG Sandman, may have caused a few ragequits with it back in the day 😅)
If you expand the discussion to TTRPGs, which is where crits were originally borrowed from, I _really_ like Animon Story's critical gauge mechanic. Animon Story uses a d6 dice pool count successes system, and active defense, meaning that during combat players are rolling typically between 3d6 and 6d6 - at least at low levels - every time they're either doing an attack or defending. Every time they roll a 6 (including in initiative where they're rolling between ) they add one to the gauge. When it hits maximum, they can collectively spend it to do something that's either generally useful in combat (a huge collective attack against a single enemy) or something that's a bit more niche but can be vital in the right situation (recharging all player's metacurrency pool but either making the problem worse or introducing a new problem; automatically succeed at a non-combat related skill roll during combat; everyone evolving to highest available stage without needing to go through the usual hoops for that because the game is heavily based on Digimon so there's an evolution mechanic). This both feels a lot less 'swingy' than a lot of crit systems in games (D&D's 5% crit chance in particular) and allows players to have a resource to spend or save as they wish giving them an additional tactical dimension rather than merely better damage. It also scales to the group size - the size of the gauge double the player count including the GM, so if there are 3 players and a GM, the crit gauge is 8, while if there's 4 and the GM, it's 10.
I'd also note that Pokemon's crit system is changed a ton between Gen I and Gen II. Moves that change the crit chance adjust it along a granular scale rather than directly messing with the odds making them a bit less impactful, and - more importantly - the probability in Gen 1 used to be tied to speed, which meant that a fast enough pokemon using a move with a high crit chance used to be guaranteed a crit if they hit at all. Also crits are all 1.5x damage now, in Gen 1 it scaled from around 1.5x (level 5) to around 1.95x (level 95) as your pokemon levelled up - Not a linear scaling, either level 20 had 1.8x damage from a crit. This is almost universally considered A Good Change - Speed used to be far more important than it currently is. (And then it changed a bit less between later on, with crits going down from 2x damage to 1.5x damage in more recent games)
I think there's another substantial reason for crits: to differentiate characters or playstyles. A character dealing heavy damage because of criticals and avoiding damage due to dodging feels fundamentally different from a unit relying on high attack and defense for both
That's true, crits can definitely be "dressed up" differently to add to the immersion for how characters feel.
@@secretsofshadowsgame right. You can have the same *average* damage given and average damage taken between 2 characters but the feel is very different when it's crit and dodge vs atk and def.
They don't just _feel_ different. They have _very_ different functions.
And this is the reason I prefer units with high avoid in Fire Emblem. Combined with a high crit, you get similar damage output against enemies as normal tanks.
However, they come with many more benefits.
- They take less damage overall, leading to less healing items or need for dedicated healers. (Lower resource expenditure)
- The high crit chance means that there's a high likelihood that if they _do_ suffer damage, they'll clear an escape route during the enemy turn. (Increased mobility)
You can throw a dodge tank into a group of enemies and reasonably expect them to be able to heal themselves _if_ they get hit. And when they're at risk of defeat, they can flee more often than not. So _if_ you need to send a healer or rescue unit, the distance they need to cover and potential threats to their safety are drastically reduced.
This is written like an actual essay for school; your structure is actually superb!
Glad you noticed that, I'm still trying to improve on writing but I do put in effort to avoid putting out a 30+ minute video where im just rambling lol
One of the things you failed to mention about Pokemons crit system is that crits ignore buffs to the targets defence and debuffs to the attackers offence which means that they also function as a soft counter to someone buffing their defence to 3x debuffing your attack to 1/6 and then stalking the game out forever. Because even in that situation a crit can happen and blow through both effects
Except practically the mon stacking defensive boosts is tanky enough to live a crit and has recovery
He skipped a lot of nuance for most of the games he talked about (i only played very little of wargroove so i cant really talk about that one) but for most of them, and especially in the place of pokemon that wouldnt really change their place on the chart or the goals that the crit achieves. In pokemons case it would just increase the impact that crits have, which doesnt really matter to make his point.
I think the Persona series has an interesting weakness/crit system. If you attack an enemy's weakness you will knock it down and if you knock down all enemies your whole party can do an all out attack which usually ends the battle. If you don't have the element that the enemy is weak to, you can hope for a physical attack to crit for the same effect.
If you get the lucky crit, you are rewarded with victory, if your attack doesn't crit things can fall apart during your enemies turn to counter attack.
Persona has interesting and satisfying crits yea, if i recall correctly in P3R enemies dont always have the same weakness throughout the game(?) I remember playing it and thinking the game would be "solved" when you figure out each enemies weakness but that wasn't really the case.
But late but aside from specific bosses weaknesses in P3R are fixed. You can have the navigator analyse them completely and be able to reference them in any encounters with that enemy for the rest of the game. The confusion you were experiencing I think comes from enemy variants on higher floors of Tartarus which share visual design as their relative counterparts with slight differences and completely different stats and weak points
@@secretsofshadowsgame each normal enemy has the same weaknesses, but there are many different variants you can fight though each arcana/mask type that the enemy wears tend to share a common theme: Chariots (the lion masks with wheels or the lion with a mask on its ball and chain), for example, tend to resist physical and is either weak to magic or to status effects.
It's the bosses (be it full moon bosses or gatekeepers) that *can* have different weaknesses or none at all.
Thanks! Im writing up a tabletop skirmish wargame (whole different area ik) and didnt know if I wanted to do anything with crits. Thanks for stopping me for a moment to think. I especially found the quick-fire rounds of how games have them implemented useful
Funny you mention that cus while doing research on this topic i actually drew a lot of inspiration from how table top RPGs implement crit (mostly DnD)! Best of luck
One of the systems I've come to like is found in Daggerfall - the Critical Strike skill can add extra modifiers to your accuracy, helping you land more hits. It doesn't directly multiply your damage (although it was intended to), but it helps increase your overall damage output in the long run. Pretty low impact, sure, but still invaluable for any melee character where your hit chance is determined by a dice roll.
Another game I would like to add is Darkest Dungeon, where even your heals can crit, which makes you heal double. Your debuff attacks can crit to ignore a portion of enemy's debuff resist. DoT from critical hits lasts longer. Landing crits lowers your stress and recieving them increases your stress. And after every crit a hero gets a unique buff for 1 turn. In this game critical hits are not just extra damage like in a Pokemon game, but interact with a lot of other combat mechanics
I’m late to the video, but-
Shoutouts to crits that don’t deal extra damage, but instead apply other effects like debilitating statuses or lifesteal. This includes Pokemon’s Freeze chance(no way to apply it directly), Ashe’s slowing crits in League of Legends, and Astra/Luna/Sol/other proc based abilities in Fire Emblem.
Monster Hunter's crit system isn't particularly flashy. Your crit rate is determined by your weapon and your armor skills with a flat crit damage rate that can be influenced by your armor. It's main role seems to be allowing a wide variety of weapons to exist with meaningful differences among them. They do interestingly also include weapons with negative crit rate, that will randomly deal less damage than normal. With balancing you may have reason to choose the balanced weapon, the weaker high crit weapon or the stronger negative crit weapon. While also considering weapon elements and currently available materials the system supports a game that pushes you to fight a lot of monsters to create new equipment.
The negative crit system MH has is pretty unique and to add to your point i think the weapons that get negative crit tends to be from more "vicious" monsters if that makes any sense. Another system MH has that is kinda like critical hits is the actual weak spots on the monster, figuring out which spot is vulnerable to which type of damage was always pretty fun since they're not always the same and tend to reflect the ecological/visual designs of each monster
It's also worth noting that a really well done build in Monster Hunter will guarantee or almost guarantee Critical Hits.
The modern XCOM games seem to sort of use a hybrid system, I would say. At a base level, they have random crits that are high-impact and unreliable, like Pokemon style. But there's also "flanking", or positioning yourself to shoot at an exposed enemy, which is deterministic and skill-based, and leads to all sorts of bonuses (including massively increased crit chance). So you have both reliable _and_ unreliable crits that have some overlap. And you can sort of decide as a player which type to pursue more with your soldier customization.
Man that sounds cool, the XCOM series is for sure on the top of my list of games to try out soon.
I'm not sure if calling the flanking system "crits" is really accurate. Flanking an enemy nullifies their protection from cover, but it doesn't increase your damage potential. Ironically, what it does do is elevate your crit rate, unless your enemy was already unable to take cover. It interacts with the crit system but isn't itself part of it.
Personally XCom kinda grinds my gears. I don't like it when games make me want to be okay with losing characters I invest into, but then also make you need those characters to not fall behind on the progression treadmill. A lot of brutal tactics games kinda make the mistake(imo) where after a bad fight you're essentially worse off than you were at step 1, effectively making it optimal to just restart the game. Or savescum. Xenonauts does a much better job at it by not tying your troop progression to troop level so much. In my opinion, obviously.
@@dojelnotmyrealname4018that's what the original X-Com did too, but then firaxis got control of the copyright and now we have a game series with focus on supersoldiers fighting the alien invasion
I think both approaches are fine, but as you say it really stings when you lose that special character and really want to just give up
in contrary, a lot of people also like xcom and fire emblem for those exact reasons
@@pinguin4898 I especially like XCOM for that reason. It forces me to think through my turns thoroughly.
Fire Emblem (now) offers an 'escape hatch' in the form of the turn wheel.
@@dojelnotmyrealname4018 It fits a type of critical as described in this video. It's a skill-based, reliable crit that just so happens to grant higher odds to another, more random type of crit as its main reward. Like I said, it's a weird mixed hybrid sort of system.
Even though you didn’t talk about it too much, I praise you for mentioning Patapon. It was a very formative game for me in my early teens and I feel it’s been mostly forgotten
Darkest Dungeon has the most thematic crits. The game is about making the best of a bad situation. Crits are random and high impact and, when the monsters get them, put you into a bad situation. Especially with permadeath and no reloading. It's wonderful.
Plus the darkest dungeon crits heal your stress, which is effectively a second health bar, so if you have enough crit chance on your own mercenaries you don’t have to worry about stress as much even if you don’t kill things quick
I think you could've gone a bit deeper in conditionals and how they allow a brand of builds and interactions on their own without dominating the system.
The main example I use is Nocturne: Rebirth. Crits there are simply an extension of accuracy, going from miss, hit, mini crit, crit. The key point is that mini crits give you a 25% reduction to time for the next turn, and crits give you 50%. This immediately changes a lot of things:
-DPS is now split between increasing crits for more speed, and increasing atk for more damage per MP
-Cooldown based skills are more important because acting too fast can also leave you with nothing to pull out.
-Evasion tank becomes more valuable since it can literally cut the opponent's dps in half
-Since items can't crit, you can get away with making their base effect more powerful since they take longer to use.
This sounds super interesting for sure - I think accuracy in games tend to be too binary (once you hit 100% hit chance you dont care about that stat) so its cool that this game plays around with it beyond that
@@secretsofshadowsgame correction, misses might also slow you down, it's been a long time I don't remember too well.
Pokemon/FE style crits are needed for the same reason that the games have accuracy; if everything was 100% accurate and had no crit chance, there's no variance and battles become "solved game" chess puzzles.
I do think pokemon goes too far in that respect, e.g. making certain mons rely on moves like focus blast or hurricane with 70% accuracy, or the whole para mechanic makes the competitive aspect feel very random and frustrating sometimes vs other players.
I think they both do very different things though. FE has an abundance of tools to deal with enemy crits and plan around them while Pokemon just doesn't. FE allows you to prevent something from going wrong if you plan properly beforehand while Pokemon sometimes just screws you. Of course, the Pokemon AI isn't often good enough to capitalize on your mistakes in the main line entries so the annoyance of rng mostly comes out in pvp. I think older FE does have some issues with crits feeling unavoidable or sometimes having to deal with a small chance of something going wrong (FE 6 swordmaster bosses come to mind), but as the series has gone on player control over the outcome has only increased.
@@twigz3214Zoldam is the worst offender in the GBA titles. There is no planning. Luna crit always kills.
Crits in more modern FE games suffer from an ironic fate. Because they're so impactful, players often make them reliable (increase player crit to 90+, reduce enemy crit to 0, increase bulk to survive crits).
Loved your perspective on crits! I've never thought about how complex this reward system is!
Great video! Really appreciated the section on reliable crits as I think it really builds into what makes risk/reward so important in game design.
Momentum is exactly how Shin Megami Tensei games do it. A crit will reward you with an extra half turn, allowing for more actions in its turn based system. Missing or being drained will see you losing your turns. I can imagine this as being on a fast offense(getting crit) stumbling and losing your pace(being drained or missing your attack)
As a game designer myself, I hate % chances and prefer systems without them. Thanks for sharing not only chance based crits.
Nice and quick analysis of the topic, super cool. I like that you include perfect blocks in the topic, I am too pedantic to have ever thought of it that way, but it's very valid.
Just came across this video in my recommended and honestly, really interested in the game~~ Video format is solid and thought-provoking ^^ Good luck in your game and here is my extra insights on crits in games.
There’s some moves in Pokémon and other games that are guaranteed crits giving a choice of higher damage floor since it will always crit but lower damage in comparison to moves that have a chance but winnout in damage ceiling going a consistent vs. high risk high reward playstyle.
In Metaphor Re:Fantazio, the turn based mechanic only utilizes half a turn point giving way to an extra turn on crit or hitting a weakness. Crits are possible on spells but do not refund the turn to a half giving physical abilities an edge over magic.
This was awesome!! I had never even thought about all the different kinds of crits. This is what I love about game design
As a professional game designer I’d say you did a great job presenting and breaking down this topic. Good work!
There is a game called Ember Knights that I really like the crit systems for. First off, it has a Paper Mario-like "crit" for skills called perfect skills. Whenever you use a skill, if you hold the button & time releasing it, you get a bonus (increased damage/size/duration or add an effect, whatever is applicable). It isn't difficult to do or super powerful, but you do need to think about it & it is impactful enough to keep you engaged.
It also has a normal low impact crit on your standard attacks. But the game is a roguelike & you can increase your chance to crit, increase your crit damage, or add effects to your crits. Additionally, if you choose the sword as your weapon, you can start with a 3-hit combo attack that always crit on the last attack.
There are also some perks you can get that trigger after you get a certain number of perfect skills & some that occur after a certain number (or every) regular crits.
I think many gamers would say that High Impact and Random critical hits are bad design, but there are ways to implement them successfully. Darkest Dungeon is a game about mitigating risks as much as possible and when players begin to factor crits as potential risk and play around it like other risks, they will win more often. When I thought about doing a greedy play, I started assessing what the worst outcome is of it and when I factored in potential crits, I started to avoid much more Bad RNG.
I like how Genshin Impact lets you controls how much crit chance your characters have, and how much crits affect the damage dealt. So you get 2 crit styles, a balanced build that mathematically optimizes the ratio of crit chance for crit damage for the best average damage outcome, or you can go for a very low chance, extreme damage crits, and keep restarting the battle until you defeat the boss in one hit. There's also variation between each character, some have higher base chance or higher damage, there's one that has negative 100% chance for crits, which is funny, this affects what kind of build you want on them, going for more non-crit stats if they already have a high base stat, or in that one special case just ignoring crits, although some gigachads manage to get enough crit chance to overcome the -100% debuff.
Wizardry also has "critical hit" which is essentially instant death. Vorpal bunnies give veteran Wizardry players PTSD with how these cute but deadly bunnies have a good chance to sever necks.
If you watched Monty Python, you know the dangerous rabbit.
Great Video! Really cool breakdown of different types of crits!
Great video and an interesting if not overlooked topic. Haven't seen people talk about the design and UX of a crit presentation.
My absolute favorite is when your assassin class in fire emblem gets one. That animation 🫦
GBA FE crit animations were something else man
What a great gem of a vid. I'll be looking forward to more and good luck on your game!
Good to hear, thanks for watching!
Was not expecting the Kerning City theme in a dev design video, but it's welcome.
Haha I'm glad some1 noticed. Been watching old school MS videos lately and felt hella nostalgic
Considering how impactful crits are to the point where you WANT them to be consistent, especially for thief jobs, this fits so well.
Nicely done, this was a good presentation. After seeing it laid out like this, though... I think "reliable" crits are impostors. If it isn't random, it isn't really a critical hit at all. Using the name is just a veneer, trying to frame a different mechanical system in terms from an RPG. You can reveal this by coming up with a descriptive name for the system, and then trying to apply a random crit mechanic on top. If you're truly dealing with critical hits, that just becomes a recursive crit: a chance for your crit to do extra damage.
On a tactics game, you might see "crit" used for positional damage. Attacking enemies from the rear or sides will be more effective. Trouble is, these are just flanking mechanics! It's a completely different system, just borrowing the name of critical hits. This backstab mechanic can also interact with stealth, where attacking an unaware enemy gives a damage bonus. Because all of these are independent, you could have a stealthy attack from the rear... which also happens to roll a critical hit! The three mechanics can coincide, because only one of them is a crit system.
We see something similar when looking at action games. In an FPS Roguelike such as Bullets Per Minute, enemies can have a giant glowing weakpoint. The game does feature RPG elements, such as giving you a Precision attribute to increase your critical multiplier. But there's no stat for critical chance, because it's purely determined by where you shoot. This one isn't a critical hit system either, and it's easy to see if you apply it to a humanoid enemy. These are just headshots, or more generally location-based damage. And by realising it isn't a crit system, you have room to implement things like reduced damage for hitting the legs. Regardless of where on the body you hit, it would still make sense to roll for a random critical hit.
Then you have oddities like Team Fortress 2. This includes true crits, like a rocket launcher firing a projectile that glows and does triple damage. This is rolled on a random chance system, though there can be additional factors. I believe with Jarate, you apply a status effect to a target that causes automatic crits against him. However, there's also a system where sniper rifles cause reliable "crits" on a headshot. And that's just unnecessary, because the game already included a headshot mechanic.
I don't see a problem with a critical chance going over 100%. But if you aren't rolling for them at all, using the term "critical hit" is just confusing. Diablo 2 doesn't feature crits as part of the core gameplay: they come from a class-specific skill called Critical Strike. It suffers from severe diminishing returns, so getting a crit chance over 50% is often impractical. However, there exists a version called Deadly Strike, which can be granted by the items you're wearing. So the game does support random crits for those who want them, as well as allowing crit-based builds. They aren't a fundamental part of the combat system, just a layer on top.
Ima fighting game dev but my dream is to make my dream rpg. I’ll be checking out your entire rpg dev journey 🤞🏿
This has been such a beautiful and well put together video. Critical hits are definitely a big staple for many games and I like the way you categorized them.
Nice video, i never really stopped and think about crits in different games, this is very informative.
I think low-impact is a bad way to put it. The difference isn't in how effective they are, it's in the timing of the effectiveness. You either get one big chunk of effectiveness all at once, or several small ones that add up.
Excellent video! I think a specific aspect of crits that make them great for the power scaling aspect is that it's a natural feeling form of exponential power increase. In games with multiple damage stats (attack, crit rate, crit damage for example) its very satisfying to balance them in order to maximize potential dps.
I do actually enjoy Pokemon’s crit system because they bypass enemy stat increases and player stat drops, causing stalling tactics to always be a gamble. It feels really good when your opponent is setting up on you and you destroy them with a well timed crit. Crits also help to make the game less of a math game and more of an actual adventure where things out of your control can happen, good or bad, and it’s your job to make sure things go well regardless.
Fallout 1 and 2 had a Crit Table. Having a table ranging from 1.5 damage to instakill can be an interesting path.
Cool video! I appreciate going over the advantages and disadvantages of each quadrant of the crit matrix
Thanks, I had fun making that part, glad you liked it
I feel this was both entertaining and useful, so many thanks for sharing!!! 😁
I play TTRPG and use the Fate System, where the crits usually tend to feel rather wierd, especially if not understood in the context of what they work for. But at the same time, being a generic system it encourages people to make changes considering the experience they desire to achieve. So I might end up taking advantage of this concepts in many oportunities from now on when considering the different experiences that the system could achieve!
I’m working only own ttrpg. This was an excellent breakdown, looking forward to more deep dives from you!
Was playing Super Robot Wars earlier today and the game goes to some lengths to make each character feel strong in a different way, and that includes crits. Only 2 characters per playthrough have higher crit damage as a unique skill, and you can only land crits if one of your stats is higher than that of your target. However there are many other ways to make your characters strong other than crits, but certain pilots have an affinity. Great to differentiate your characters in this way.
That sounds pretty cool. I always have a soft spot for games that double down on individual class/character identity
this is really cool!!!
im personally wrestling with crits while trying to build my own table top game, so this has been a really fresh perspective on a topic ive been stewing on for quite a while 😅
keep it up!!!!
Nice, I love hearing from table top gamers. Good luck from one game designer to another 🤙
A friend of mine recommended this video to me because I like making games myself. I'm glad they did! I like your presentation style a lot. I learned just as much about critical hits as I did about making a well edited video essay. Good luck on your RPG.
Thank you for your kind words I appreciate it :)
@@secretsofshadowsgame You bet! I also posted about it on BlueSky. I didn't see you there so I didn't tag you. If you're there, let's connect. I wanna follow your progress.
Ah cool, unfortunately i don't use BlueSky cus i already have my hands full with youtube at the moment but I do hear of good things on that platform. maybe in a few months i will look into that
Already seen a lot of comment on TF2's crit system so ill comment on another one that has a similar process but in a way more similar to RPGS.
In Warframe you have a crit chance and crit damage stat, when the crit chance goes over 100% you will have a 100% chance for a normal crit and then whatever % is left over for a chance at an orange crit. If you go over 200% crit chance then youll always get an orange crit and whatever is leftover is then the odds for getting a red crit.
Each of these crit levels changes the modifier for the crit from additional 1x, to 2x to 3x damage. There are entire weapons and abilities centred around having insanely low base damage but high crit, so youre doing very little base damage normally but then you do normal damage via the crit system.
Its a very interesting way of doing crits ive not often seen and it was entirely because they accidentally scale creeped too hard. Originally you werent suppossed to go above 100% but they added so many ways to increase it that now its an entire system of its own.
A funny side effect of this is people drastically underestimating yellow/orange crits. I've seen tons of builds that would do more DPS if they had a better balance of CC and CD instead of tunnel-visioning on the 300% pretty red numbers.
One thing you forgot to mention about random, high impact crits is that they provide a different sort of play independant from the main gameplay. Pchal for example, often says, "Play around the crit," which esentially means come up with a strategy so sound that even if you get the worst possible luck you still cant lose. This is a type of mastery over mechanics in itself that can be fun to engage with, if you are the type to plan everything out with spreadsheets.
I should mention that some games with scaling crits actually will allow you to crit multiple times in a single hit, such as warframe, including super critical hits and so on, differentiating them with yellow, orange, and red numbers
A thing to mention on Fire Emblem is that while a majority of the time crits are on the unreliable and high impact scale, there are weapons and classes that can increase your crit rate, usually by several times. Weapons like killing edges or the legendary Wo Dao tend to have high crit rates, and Swordmasters have increased crit rates. Even supports can add crit chances. Then there's the wrath skill which in some games just lets you crit guaranteed under specific conditions. Additionally while in most games crits and effective damage (bows on fliers, horse killers on cavalry) are separate, in the 4th game you auto crit when dealing effective damage.
I was working on my rpg maker game and realized that by having status ailments boost the counter and crit chance it allows for highly dramatic near-death situations turning into amazing moments organically.
Such a great breakdown, thank you for sharing! I shared this with some of my team and we’re going to discuss this today!
Wow thats amazing, happy to hear that and I hope your discussion goes well
Super interesting video about a topic i never thought about, well done
I love an in depth review of game systems.
I absolutely love games that Grant great build variety.
And your game looks super cool and like something I’d play.
Amazing video, cool to see how each type of crit has its place.
I'm gonna have to comment on 2 here. Random crits don't work as comeback methods, as on average they favor the winning player. A critical hit's usual effect is multiplying your damage, which favors the side doing higher relative damage to begin with. So I think the label is inaccurate. I think they're more accurately described as a game-swinging upset. If you want comeback crits to be a thing, you need to tie either their effect or their rate to how much a side is losing.
Relative damage is an interesting point yea I see what you mean on that. Game-swinging would be more accurate in that sense. You could say that if your only out for winning is through a crit then in that instance crits would be more impactful for the losing player though. Either way I wouldnt be mad for labelling these types of crits as game-swinging upset
@@secretsofshadowsgame I use "relative damage" to condense "damage relative to enemy health", but I should probably clarify that for anyone reading this. Raw health numbers are insufficient to assign meaning to an engagement. As an example, some RPGs have enemies that have extremely low HP pools relative to the rest of the game but are also extremely difficult to damage. 1 damage is 25% of such an enemy's health. So some amount of normalizing relative to the target is necessary to assign meaning.
I will also admit bias. Personally I am not fond of waiting to get lucky. So I don't like the idea of systems that incentivise so-called crit fishing. So that might also influence my opion.
And while you are right, a crit that swings a game back into the losing party's favor would be more memorable than one that cements a winner's victory, there is an awkward bit in that the *effect* of the crit doesn't change, only the context around it. So then you have to ask: What does impact mean?
@@dojelnotmyrealname4018 This is a thing about RNG in general, too, and subdivisions within it. Eg, there is a long-running debate in ttrpgs about the preferred action resolution die/dice. Some people prefer the swinginess of 1d20, whereas others prefer 3d6, or something else. D20 is swingy with a flat distribution whereas 3d6 has a chunky normal distribution. Emphasizing RNG and game mechanics also deemphasize player skill and vice-versa (unless and until there are player choices involved that enable the manipulation of RNG until that becomes part of the player skills), which can be desirable to level the field between high-skill and medium/low-skill players or casual games. And some games have enemies entirely immune to crits (eg undead in some editions of D&D). Whether and when to prioritize improved likelihood to-hit versus damage/impact of a hit versus likelihood and/or impact of crits is a major and long-running debate in D&D optimization and it is always somewhat context-dependent.
In Pokemon specifically crits ignore defensive setups (stat debuffs on the attacker, buffs on the defender), so they are a comeback mechanic, as a properly set up player has a huge advantage and often a crit is the only out the losing player has to break through that setup.
Setups and stalling are much more relevant in competitive pokemon, so single-player is a different topic.
@@EsperSpirit Except that's still not a comeback mechanic since the crits still favor the person in the lead. What you're describing is a counter mechanic where crits counter turtle strats.
TF2 has a base crit system that will _triple_ an attack's base damage and remove its damage fall-off (i.e., most attacks from further away do as little as 50% damage). For example, a Rocket Launcher from far away can go from doing 48 damage to _270 damage_ off of a crit alone, a 5.6x damage boost.
But the most interesting part of the crit system in TF2 is more so crit chance. A standard weapon has a 2% chance of dealing a crit per shot (15% chance for melee weapons), which is about what you'd expect from most crit systems that strong. But as you start doing more consistent damage, your crit chance actually rises as well. If you've done 800 damage in the last 20 seconds, your crit chance shoots up to 12% for standard weapons and a staggering 60% while using a melee weapon (making you _more likely_ to land a crit than not). This adds a sort of skill-based backing to the system, while still making it always random no matter what.
And even on top of that, there are weapons that enable _guaranteed_ crits depending on certain conditions. There are the Sniper rifles (and a bow) that deal guaranteed crits on a headshot, but cannot make use of the randomized crit system at all. There is a variant of the Medigun (Medic's gun that heals allies with a beam instead of damaging enemies) that temporarily gives a teammate guaranteed crits after you've charged it up for a while instead of making them invulnerable (both are just as broken as you think). There are the Spy's knives which, while not being conventional crits, will insta-kill enemies if you stab them while they're facing away from you. And so on. All of these bring the crit system into more of a reliable, skill-based light, while still co-existing with the traditional randomized crits.
An overall pretty interesting way to handle a crit system. It's to the point where some weapon variants are given the "no random crits" downside to stop them from overshadowing their default counterparts. Which, while often meme'd on due to how uncommon said random crits are, can sometimes make or break a weapon's balancing.
For example, Demoman has a bunch of swords he can use over his default beer bottle (he's a drunkard, so don't question it), which have longer reach and a bunch of other additional perks, but usually _cannot_ deal random crits. The one exception is the Scotsman's Skullcutter, which, on top of being a big f*ck-off double-headed battle axe instead of a sword, retains the ability to deal random crits on top of having a flat +20% damage bonus - the drawback instead being a movement speed debuff while the weapon is currently out. Its extra damage, combined with it being a melee weapon, makes attaining and keeping the coveted 60% crit chance with a melee weapon fairly easy once you learn how to dip in and out of combat well enough, now having a better-than-a-coin-flip's chance of nailing enemies with a massive 234 damage flat on their heads (or rather, skulls in thos case). And unsurprisingly, it is a pretty common choice for Demoman players to pick (though the sword that absorbs your enemies' souls to boost your max hp and movement speed and the sword that restores half your health on every kill are also popular picks).
Thanks for writing that out! I knew TF2 has a lot of interesting crit mechanics but I've never played it so I didn't feel comfortable talking about it, so this was a great read
I don't think paper mario (and to that extent all mario rpgs) action commands count as a kind of critical hit, it's just using the full damage potential of your attack. Consider Mario & Luigi, where you can do the same hammer swing as paper mario, also pressing the button at the right time for maximum damage. But in that game, you can also get a "lucky" hit, for an extra increase in damage (which tbh is also kinda low impact for those games,) and as reliable as your Stache stat allows for.
While they didn't really specify, I don't think they were actually talking about the action commands (largely because I definitely wouldn't call those low-impact, the bare minimum for most of them is double damage, with many offering more), but rather the stylish inputs and blocking.
@@AdmiralTails Those are still action commands, technically. You get them by timing an input correctly
The idea of control is superb 🎉
I can see a lot of thought went into this. If your game sucks, it wont be for lack of consideration. Wishlisted
I desinged an ttrpg using a 3W6 dice system. If a player rolls a 6 on one of his dice during an attack roll, it's a crit and based on weapon, it applies bleed or crippled. Your vid made me think "Hm.. That's pretty random, I should give players more control over crit chance, impact and effects to reward smart character building" Thx bro!
another crit system that fits into the pokemon "high impact-unreliable" quadrant is the crit table. My favorite is from GURPS 4e and they are pretty common in TTRPGs. Basically instead of doing extra damage, a table is rolled on when a crit occurs, some times just doing extra damage or doing something incomparable directly to damage like severing or otherwise disabling a limb.
There is also usually a fumble or "critical failure" table as well.
When I think about interesting crit mechanics, I think of Pequod 1st Mate Yi Sang from Limbus Company.
In Limbus Company, Crit is controlled by Poise. It's a status effect on the character. For every point in poise Potency, you gain 5% chance to crit. When you crit, however, the poise Count goes down by 1, and you lose all potency if poise count reaches zero (you also lose 1 count per turn, so some characters aren't very good at maintaining their poise).
Pequod Yi Sang isn't very strong, but he has a very powerful skill called Relentless Stabbing. Keeping details brief, every time the attack crits, it's reused, getting more powerful each time. There is a limit on how many times this re-use can go off, but it leads to very satisfying moments where he has enough potency to guarantee the crit, and enough count to get the full use out of the skill.
*Dragon Quest critical hits also have a series of their own*
Base game DQ1, crits have 1/64 chance to occur and now modern games have stats like deftness or luck to influence crits.
Martial Artists or Thieves tend to have a higher crit chance like Alena (DQ4) or Erik (DQ11)
And there is the hail mary strikes like *Hatchet Man or Thunder Thrust: Low accuracy attack but guaranteed crit if success*
Not only physical attacks, *even spells now have a chance to "go haywire" which is a fancy way of saying "spell crit"* . Spells do more damage/healing and debilitating spells are almost always hit.
That's interesting - hail mary crits and spells going haywire sound thematic and i love when games play into RPG elements like that. Also, from what I heard Dragon Quest was one of the first games to ever introduce a crit mechanic so it's cool that it kept evolving over the years
Darkest Dungeon has low crit chance (affected by class, gear, and abilities) to double your damage roll. Player crits grant a small 'stress' heal, which is the game's unique "second health bar" mechanic. :)
When speaking about comeback crits, you said to weigh whether a game would be better without them and then followed it by saying " players tend to linger on unlucky crits, but I find the unexpected moments to be just as memorable." and I just wanted to point out that (respectfully) you're wrong, or at least a vast minority. Crits in pokemon are a whole topic I could complain about, but the biggest thing I'd like to point out is the basic concept of loss aversion. Loss aversion states that on average, things like this have a net negative impact on the players. I think that the low control+high impact crits feel this the worst. You say that nothing is worse than just watching a game play out despite knowing the winner, but (competitive) pokemon is largely just a strategy and math game in singles, and a game about information and reading an opponent in doubles. I can agree that crits can make some interesting moments, but I would say that the feeling of winning off of a 6% chance is dull, and the feeling of losing off of a 6% chance is infuriating. I have yet to find a compelling argument for random high impact crits that actually acknowledges loss aversion.
Loss aversion plays into this for sure and I definitely would've mentioned that if I thought of it lol. I think when you get into really competitive or high level games then random high impact crits are generally pretty goofy. The point about determined games being boring holds true more from a casual or spectator perspective, and I would argue that from a game's longevity pov that making the viewing experiencing more exciting would be worth it. Good points overall though pretty interesting take and I can definitely see how pokemon RNG is a lil bit too frustrating.
A good example is Hearthstone vs a modern competitive card game (FAB, Altered, etc). HS has a lot of randomness as it is aimed at casual players, that is why the competitive scene died down. Those others if not balanced or designed well can feel samey and predictable instead
I think fire emblem is an interesting example in this respect. Each time you engage in combat you can clearly know ahead of time what your enemies crit chance is. Yes, unlucky crits still happen but they feel less random since by choosing your engagements wisely you can minimize or completly negate the chance of enemies crits. Whenever you do get an unlucky crit from an enemy it still feels bad but there is also a sense that you could have avoided this with better planning.
I also think when talking loss aversion we need to distinguish between pvp and pve. In pvp I agree that random high impact crits can add too much varience and feel like you lack control over the competetive outcome. In pve however, this isn't always a problem. I allready mentioned fire emblem and how loss aversion isn't a problem there and I'd argue the same applies to pve pokemon. Pokemon's base game is very easy. Unless you incredibly unlucky an enemy crit won't cause you to lose with a semi-decent team. But, an enemy crit can still cause you to reevaluate your plands and drives up tension even if the battles outcome is unlikely to change. Nothing is more boring than playing out an already solved matchup so every bit of variance helps here and I'd argue crits make pve pokemon more interesting in a positive way.
@@Chris3sfrom what I know Hearthstones competitive scene didn't die because of randomness but mainly because of Blizzard and how poorly they organized it (and treated the competitors or partners), while among the reasons related to the game itself the main issue was the ridiculous power creep with each new expansion and introducing wholly uninteractive combos. I'm quite sure randomness didn't play even the smallest part in this, it was just a mechanic that you had to account for within your strategies.
@@daruyami sorry yea you are right, but randomness was a huge part in it, in regular gameplay or in combos, everyone who played against that just wasn't a fan of it. It was one part in many that lead to its downfall (as it is with most other games)
Hi, great video!
Just wanted to share a thought on game design from a topic that I've not seen talked much about: how much a game is handcrafted and when to mix repeated stuff to save development resources.
Ooh that's a good topic, I might make a full video on that some day but I did touch on that in another video (mostly from the pov of art assets)
@@secretsofshadowsgame I will check it out but was mostly talking about game design itself, since I think that is what separates games like Elden Ring (which feels almost entirely handcrafted with the exceptions of some enemies and bosses) from newer Assassin's Creed games, which feels almost a repeated pattern that you can discover in like a quarter of its total playtime.
Some handcrafted examples may include non conventional interactions (talking cats that give you quests in Skyrim), secret places (underworlds mostly in Elden Ring but also in Tears of the Kingdom to a lesser extent), unique NPCs (the mentioned examples have a lot of them, but it is also a counter example of how Assassin's Creed mobs feel dead and pasted compare to those other games).
oh yea absolutely, newer AC and modern open world games are the biggest offenders when it comes to recycling content in a bad way. Monster Hunter I think does reuse content in a better way by adding in new attacks + rewarding with better armor, or put different enemies together in the same quest to spice things up. On the other hand when you add in handcrafted areas and make them hidden like in Elden Ring i think the awe of exploration is increased even further. Lots to think about and I think I will make a video on that in the near future (I already plan on making 1 about Quest design and I think this topic can fit in pretty well)
Pokemon crits also serve to break stalls and threaten passive play, since they ignore defensive boosts on the target
If you're sitting there using Calm Mind over and over again, you're giving your opponent more chances to score a crit and knock you out despite all your setup
I'm definitely more fond of controlled, low-impact Crits when designed well. A good example is from PSO2 (classic) where chaining actions together with the right timing rewards you with higher damage and lower recovery, as well as charging your Photon Burst and Focus Gauge faster. The player isn't doing anything particularly different from usual, but it's rewarding and players who can't hit those timings aren't punished all that hard.
Contrast with Dark Souls, where parries and backstabs are massively damaging and invincible, so you may as well just fish for them constantly. Obviously these games have different design goals but the point is that once you've built skill, the high impact crit becomes the objectively best option very quickly.
High impact high control critical hits can be really satisfying in a tactical setting because the designer can build scenarios where it's challenging to make use of them. But for an action RPG I find they can be fairly centralizing.
yea agreed with how action games and tactical games differ in terms of how high impact crits can dominate your options
I think "comeback crits" work better if there's a modifier (possibly secret) that increases friendly crit chance under certain conditions, such as low health or being in range of too many enemies. I've seen games where a key strategy for high-skill players is to keep one or more units under X% health in order to take advantage of a radically improved crit chance, allowing the game to shift towards the skill-based side for high-skill players.
A similar analysis applies in games where dodging is an extremely rare event, similar to a defensive crit. I think this works even better, especially in games with permadeath, because it increases the chances that you extract a key unit after a harrowing situation, which is exciting.
Yay! Love the video.
Your game looks cool, can’t wait to see more of it :)
Great video, i never thought too deeply about crits
I have played both Patapon and Sekiro but I have never made the connection with their "perfect rhytm" mechanic, pretty cool stuff
I actually have a perfect comeback crit with my Engage maddening playthrough. I was fighting the boss, but was just a little bit short of the damage threshold needed to kill it, so I sent a unit in hoping to trigger one of the chain attacks from a nearby unit. None of the chance based chains triggered, but I landed a 3% crit on the boss and cleared a chapter I had no right to win.
In Gunfire Reborn there's two sorts of crits. "Critical Hits" are where you aim for an enemy's weakspot, multiplying your damage by whatever your gun's CritX stat is.
But it also has what's called "Lucky Shot", which is a stat you spec into through upgrades, this gives a random chance of also multiplying your damage by your weapon's CritX. And it can stack too, so a Lucky Shot against an enemy's weakspot will do 2 times your weapon's CritX... And Lucky Shot in particular *_can exceed 100%_* ... This means that you can get a lucky shot chance of 150% or more.. Giving you a guaranteed Lucky Shot, but also a 50% chance of multiplying it again.
This means that people who haven't specced into Lucky Shot can still make use of their weapon's CritX if they aim well enough, but meanwhile people could spec into Lucky Shot to reach really high numbers.
What’s interesting to me is how a lot of this is more a discussion of RNG than just crits.
A classic strategy game I’m fond of is Battle For Wesnoth, which lacks crits, but has such an emphasis on RNG that it feels very similar. It has a terrain and hit chance system similar to Fire Emblem’s (in broad strokes), but the game is designed around manipulating those hit chances. There are units with a low chance to hit but which deal devastating damage each time they do land a hit (basically crits), and units who deal piddling damage fairly consistently. The game _feels_ like it’s built around adapting to random crits in your strategy.
Personally i deslike the high impact random crit. I'm fine if it's something you can build around and turn in a strategy, but even if it can give you a dopamin rush when that clutch crit happens, but it's comproved that humans weight negative thing more than the positive one, so that one unluck crit will frustrate you much more. Also, if you care about playing well, winning or losing because a random crit just feel bad overall.
Very cool little deep dive into a topic that feels obvious at first
An interesting take on "crits" is found in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (and some other traditional roguelikes). The game has no mechanic named "critical hits", but the damage of every attack and most spells is HIGHLY variable (ranging from +/-100% of the average damage, with a uniform distribution), so in effect the game has the same very irregular damage that a game with proper random crits has. This ends up having a "comeback" effect in the game *for the enemies*, as even an enemy much lower level than you can get a series of lucky hits, forcing the player to play cautious even against trash mobs. There is a saying in the DCSS community that goes something like "A player with a 99% chance of winning each of their fights has a 99% chance of losing the game".
I always do both critical damage and advantage damage, so if you would attack a Fire Enemy with a Water attack, it would deal more damage because water is effective, and it still can do a critical hit
Path of Exile's crits actually work completely differently depending on the side of the player/monster dichotomy. Players use critical hits as you mentioned: as a distinct source of linear damage increase. Monsters use it as a way to raise the ceiling on player invulnerability. It would not be impossible to stack your defenses to the point of out-regenerating enemy damage if not for random crits. If you want to nullify enemy crits, that's something you can plan around, too!
Here's my design for your critical hits implementation. It's asymmetric across player/monsters. Monsters have a low (~10%) chance to crit for triple damage, but you can completely zero out that chance by playing into very common and cheap skills. For example, a cavalier might gain crit immunity until end of turn by triggering the "Charge" skill by moving its maximum movement, encouraging long diving attacks. A fortress knight might gain crit immunity by triggering "In the Fray" by being surrounded by two different enemies, or by triggering "Hunker Down" by not moving at all. Player crits have a similar implementation to Fire Emblem's, but with a much bigger focus on weapons with increased crit chance instead of weapons with more damage and less accuracy. You can't fiddle with things until a kill is guaranteed, you have to decide which of your expensive weapons is worth using in this scenario. Or, yknow, use better tactics so you can checkmate the enemy instead of relying on random chance. This allows players not engaging with tactics to blame bad luck while encouraging them to solve the tactical puzzle. This lowers the excitement of the battle screen in general, but I think that's fine; in Fire Emblem I tend to find a random crit to make me dejected, like "I spent all this time solving the encounter then I just crit their cornerstone character so it was actually much easier than I thought it was".
Just watched the last two minutes of the video. Extra effects didn't really come to mind when I think of "critical hit", having played so much pokemon growing up. I REALLY like the idea that a crit is a hit so good it helps the rest of your units in the battle. That's unique enough you could make it the centerpiece of your game's strategy. It's not something that I would prefer in my ideal playstyle, but I'm sure there are many people who would be delighted to be faced with a brick wall, take a stab at it, and be delighted at seeing an unexpected explosion that drives the stooges' health into one-hit-kill territory.
Thanks for taking the time to write that, exactly the type of discussion I was looking forward to.
Some cool ideas here, I really like your idea of anti-crit conditions being something unique for each class of units. That's a great idea to negate some of the unlucky moments in FE where crits are so brutal
Interestingly Pokemon's crits do the same thing. Because crits in Pokemon ignore defense boosts they stop a Pokemon from just sitting on the field and spamming a move like iron defense to become untouchable. You can do it but if an opponent switches in a moderately strong attacker and just swings at you for a while they're likely to eventually crit.
"fire emblem has high impact and random crits"
rutger from FE6: *laughts in 105 crit chance *
This video is soo smooth and unexpectedly informative lol
Was alos wondering what the software you're usimg throughout the vid?
Thanks! The drawing software is Krita, and the editing software is Davinci Resolve - both are free
This was a great game design video! It made me think about potential ways to make crit mechanics interesting for my own hobby dev project! Definitely subscribing for more :3
Nice, I love reading comments like these, good luck with your project
Good shit, also love the use of streets of rogue music such a great game
7:34 About lingering on unlucky crits vs clutch comebacks, players who are familiar with the game and can choose their fights will practically never enter a fight where power balance is not in our favor. Thus, for better players clutch wins rarely if ever happen, fights will either go as planned or we will get unlucky crit and be mad about it.
The shadows have secrets, and this man just gave them away!
😱😱😱
Interesting video, can't wait to see what you have to say about skill trees. Maybe edit out the transition between your slides ? Or is it a choice to keep them ?
Thanks! Vid on skill tree is getting bigger than I thought so it'll be out in 2 weeks. For the transitions, it was my first time trying this style so I was just testing that out but it does look a bit awkward - appreciate the feedback
Enjoyed the video essay. A design choice I agree with in modern games is the splitting of criticals into chance stats and damage increase stats: this inherently imposes a tradeoff between reliability and impact while respecting player agency.
Comment and like for the Rustboro City + kerning city ost + little root town use
As someone who has played a ton of Genshin Impact the last few years, I found myself approaching this video asking where it falls. And each time you introduced a new section, I thought "maybe it goes here? No, wait, maybe it goes *here*..." But the way you describe PoE is probably most comparable due to the players' control and the relation to power fantasy.
GI characters start at 5% crit rate, +50% crit damage. One of the staples of gearing characters in Genshin is picking up crit stats, which would be a little long to describe fully here, but the short version is that it's possible to take some characters as far as ~100% rate, ~200% crit damage. One thing players agree on is the "2:1 rule" where you try to keep your CD at double your CR because of how stats are distributed on items. One other thing players agree on is that crit is usually the most fundamental way to raise a character's long-term damage, and not just their ceiling. Players begin to take them for granted, and get frustrated when they don't happen.
Having a character get 100% or near 100% crit rate is valuable in terms of the consistency. By comparison, players who want to show off forego crit rate entirely in favor of crit damage and engage in iterative attempts known as "crit fishing," which isn't ideal gameplay but is what certain players shoot for when they want "damage per screenshot." Ultimately, every damage-dealing character in the game, when played "correctly," will have at least 40/80 in their crit stats, aiming for 60/120, or higher if the character allows. Since this is a live service game, over time, more ways to push that higher have become available, with newer equipment sets like Marechausee Hunter and Obsidian Codex providing 36 and 40% CR (with a fairly trivial condition.) By contrast, players rioted back when the devs released the character Kokomi because they decided to try something different and make her effectively unable to crit...never mind the fact that she was a healer. I could probably do a full analysis video on the importance of crits in the game, both literally as DPS and in the players' overinflated importance of them.
Crit fishing sounds hilarious lol, great analysis and I never knew Genshin Impact was this intense
If you want something even funnier the character who "can't crit" actually just starts with -95% crit rate rather than 5% like any other character. This means she can actually crit and there have always been Critkomi meme builds that just stack up 150% or so crit rate through building and buffing. They're not good, but because there was a shortcut taken you can technically do this.
Crit stats play a pretty different roll in Genshin to most games when you're not doing dumb things like critfishing though. They're literally just a multiplier. They're a very strong multiplier because unlike almost all the other multipliers they stack multiplicatively with other multipliers. With one other exception all the other multipliers in the game are additive with each other. So crit in Genshin is a spicy "x% damage boost" that stacks really well with the normal "x% damage boost".
I've been futzing with crits in a ttrpg system, and honestly, my goal with isn't to make them an expected and reliable mechanic. It's purely to sike out the players.
There's five levels of success in the system. Major Success, Success, Failure, Major Failure, Catastrophic Failure. Despite there being more Failure outcomes than Successes, Failure isn't actually more likely. I just differentiate Failures with higher granularity.
In addition, Ive tuned Catastrophic Failures with the desire that no one actually rolls it all too often. The entire purpose isn't to be rolled but to instill in the players head that it can be rolled. So even if it's not super likely the probability that it can happen regardless it's enough to cause a player to hesitate. To second guess "but what if it all goes wrong?"
Thirdly, my system involves purposefully making your current roll worse to be able to make future rolls better. This happens after the dice are thrown, and so even if the roll is rubbish, it will most likely be a major Failure at most. With out Catastrophic failures, the player would be inclined to just sink their own ship and salvage what they can if something goes wrong. After all, it doesn't matter if you lose by 1 or 20, a there's discrete tiers of Success. But, with Catastrophic Failures looming over them, the player is disinsentivized to go balls to the wall in their salvaging. To leave some substance for the current roll because they know for how bad this is, it can easily become way worse.
This channel is gunna blow up. RockBark wuz here
Great video. Something interesting about scaling crits that is the relationship between crits, attack speed, and damage. Attack speed lowers variance, while pure damage raises it. This only really comes up in rougelites because almost every other genre expects you to get 100% crit pretty quickly. It matters a bit though because it makes early attack speed feel better for skilled players, assuming that you start off with a normal attack speed/damage ratio
Also, just a personal opinion, but the title cards feel forced. I think you could do without them completely. They mess with the flow, and I think your writing is good enough to not need them. But if you disagree, keep rolling with them because it really is just a taste thing
I like your analysis. One thing that I think you might have wanted to touch on (at least in an aside) is the fine line between rewarding system mastery and punishing a lack of system mastery. I haven't played Paper Mario, but I have played Super Mario RPG which uses similar mechanics. In my experience, the latter game punishes a lack of system mastery. The timing for crits is very tight, meaning that I could rarely hit them (about 10% success rate). This is because I have poor rhythm and I accept that. Unfortunately, the game is pretty much balanced on the idea that players will make perfect hits and get perfect blocks most of the time. The result of this design choice was that I was being punished for a lack of system mastery and unsurprisingly never found the game enjoyable.
Rewarding and punishing are definitely 2 sides of the same coin. I think Mario RPG is unique in that it sort of bridges action and turn-based elements, and a huge appeal for turn-based games is that people that are not good at action/input dexterity elements can have a more chill time playing turn-based games. So I can 100% see how Mario RPG was not enjoyable for you
@secretsofshadowsgame yeah, this is where I had issues with Sekiro- I have decent rhythm but overall miserable reaction times, so I had to struggle like hell to just get the shura ending. The souls games, bloodborne and elden ring all have alternate paths to power involving planning and strategy, so I do way better with those 😅
great work. very comprehensive.
Glad i found your channel. Good luck on your indie game
I love these game essay videos
Thanks for watching :)
neat looking forward to more. I love videos that show how the sausage is made