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This Week in Anime - What Makes the MMO Anime BOFURI Stand Out?


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Denys Lalande



Joined: 28 Jan 2018
Posts: 88
PostPosted: Fri Apr 03, 2020 12:17 am Reply with quote
This should have been called "Why Every Game Invariably Gets Ruined By Munchkins".

Game designer Steve Jackson once wrote: "Playtest The Dumb Strategies -- make sure that a strategy which *isn't* supposed to work *doesn't* work." (In his case: In the game _OGRE_, a GEV received 4 move points in its second move; this made it invulnerable to OGREs once the OGRE's Main Battery was destroyed, and its MP was reduced to 2.) Clearly, the game developers in this anime hadn't read that article -- just like pretty-much-every game developer ever....
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Key
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Joined: 03 Nov 2003
Posts: 18137
Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley)
PostPosted: Fri Apr 03, 2020 12:57 am Reply with quote
^
While your point is correct, it's much easier said than done. My experience with MMOs is very limited, but I have played tabletop RPGs and miniature games (and at one point also CCGs) for well over 30 years now, so I have dealt with many rules iterations over time and even occasionally been involved in play-tests for some of them. Once a game reaches a certain level of complexity, catching all of the things that shouldn't work is practically impossible. That's why even thoroughly play-tested games almost invariably need errata or outright nerfs within just a few months' time.

And that's why I don't have a problem with the game mechanics here, despite the arguments and examples that have been used against them. NWO was likely was set up so that Maple's build shouldn't have worked; indeed, the speed factor because of having no Dex alone should have been a big limiter. (And in Sally's case, she's making an all-Dex build work only because it requires an enormous amount of VRMMO skill to pull off and she has that skill.) I've also seen numerous cases over the years where players have blundered into exploits and/or broken games by either stepping outside of normal game logic or else simply not using it in the first place.

Seeing how people can break adventures by operating outside of expectations and normal logic, rather than just overpowering them (as is all too commonly the case in these scenarios in anime) has always entertained me as both a player and Game Master, which is possibly part of the reason why I love this show.
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teferi



Joined: 16 May 2006
Posts: 400
PostPosted: Fri Apr 03, 2020 3:38 am Reply with quote
lossthief wrote:
meiam wrote:

I'm sorry to break it to you, but if you really think that... you're the newbie. In almost every game with stats, spreading them around is the newbie move. She's not playing the game in an atypical way at all, she's literally playing by min-maxing, one of the most common way of playing game. She's playing a full tank. It's one of the most common role, part of the holy trinity.


But even for a Tank build Maple dumping every single stat point JUST into her Def/HP is atypical. Tanks will certainly prioritize those stats, but a certain amount of agility/dexterity/strength is also necessary to play a high level tank. And within the VRMMO setting it's even more important to have well-considered stats since Agility also determines how fast your character moves from place to place. Maple can't travel anywhere faster than a casual stroll until she gets a mount (read: Sally, then Syrup) and a tank that is totally sedentary is pretty much a liability in anything but a single enemy boss battle. Not to mention if they don't have the proper skills and attack necessary to maintain aggro in a hectic and busy mob battle.


A lot of MMOs have caps/diminishing returns on the effectiveness of stats that force you to invest in secondary or defensive stats. Most games don't let you just dump infinitely into defensive stats so you don't take damage. Achieving what Maple does by dumping all her stat points into VIT would require an exploit in most games. IMO the show just requires suspension of disbelief because any game that actually worked like NWO would be absolute garbage.

More than Maple's character build the way the devs in the show hand out skills/items/stat bonuses as one time awards to the first player/guild to do something is probably more ridiculous than anything else. MMOs in particular are built to allow other players to replicate what everyone else is doing. Intentionally creating a system where it's impossible to replicate another player's build would never happen.

maximilianjenus wrote:
yep, they also skipped the part of maybe taking a pounding and enjoying it.


This sounds so wrong.
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Calsolum



Joined: 11 May 2010
Posts: 898
PostPosted: Fri Apr 03, 2020 7:25 am Reply with quote
maximilianjenus wrote:
I think there ws a punding-gate where the subtitles got cahgned and some people compained


Oh right, now I remember it.

Key is right, the more parts you have in a machine the higher a chance that something can go wrong. Sure you can playtest the hell out of it but the chances won't ever be zero. Now there are certain bugs or exploits that should have been found as some are more obvious than others but I don't think Maple's build is one of them. The speed issue should have been enough of a demerit that grinding and levelling up would have been tedious and as the game goes on that issue would have only gotten worse, but Maple just happened to acquire a random set of skills that complemented her absurd playstyle and snowballed into the force of nature that she became. The acquisition of the skills wasn't random but the requirements were, at least that's what I heard the anime glossed over.
Maple just sorta lucked out and I totally believe it. I assume that other people didn't just copy her build or tried but couldn't get the same results because she did a lot of things on a whim, like cheer on a rabbit trying to kill her for an hour.
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Kuroi Ren



Joined: 09 Dec 2018
Posts: 143
PostPosted: Fri Apr 03, 2020 10:24 am Reply with quote
Nothing. It's overhyped AF and the plot is quite bad IMO. The whole all defense, nothing else was kind of thrown out the window as soon as she started "conveniently stumbling" on OP power ups
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meiam



Joined: 23 Jun 2013
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 03, 2020 11:10 am Reply with quote
Key wrote:
^
While your point is correct, it's much easier said than done. My experience with MMOs is very limited, but I have played tabletop RPGs and miniature games (and at one point also CCGs) for well over 30 years now, so I have dealt with many rules iterations over time and even occasionally been involved in play-tests for some of them. Once a game reaches a certain level of complexity, catching all of the things that shouldn't work is practically impossible. That's why even thoroughly play-tested games almost invariably need errata or outright nerfs within just a few months' time.


That essentially never happen in MMO for a number of reasons. They can be patch very quickly so exploit are very short lived. Usually if an exploit comes out it'll be only for a particular fight (like, if you stand on a particular spot it'll reset the boss but because it has to walk back to it's starting location you have small window of time to attack it again). It then quickly get talked about because MMO usually get played by a large number of people (MMO that aren't popular die very quickly since running server is very costly). Because MMO are inherently online experience, player are very quick to report they're finding online (usually on the MMO official forum). This means Dev get alerted to it almost immediately and can easily fix the issues. MMO also go trough pretty extensive beta (or PTR public testing realm). Exploit can also lead to getting banned from the game, which is easily enforceable.

MMO tend to be more formulaic than tabletop too with a fair limit on what player can do which makes chance of exploit less likely. Tabletop also need to limit themselves to small round number which makes it more likely that broken things will get in the game (say something can do between 1 and 2 damage, at 1 it's too weak but at 2 it's too strong). Tabletop also sell power, so whenever new option come they have to make sure they're worth buying, which means they'll err on the side of things being stronger rather than weaker.

For example, a well documented case of something being broken is the corrupted blood incident back in vanilla WoW. This was fixed very quickly and despite being well known only affected few server (with the server running into the problem being reset).
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Yuvelir



Joined: 06 Jan 2015
Posts: 1529
PostPosted: Fri Apr 03, 2020 3:01 pm Reply with quote
My biggest gripe with this anime is that the STR-hyperfocused twins couldn't one-shoot the AGI specialist guy after managing to land a hit.

JaffaOrange wrote:
When I started watching I remember thinking "WTF the balance in this MMORPG is broken af. Have the creators never played one?". And then I remember every single online game I've played and everything clicked.

After that, the most surprising thing was that there weren't more people doing stupid builds because it's just fun to do.

What was surprising is the sheer ammount of content the game has. Like, it's a game based on randomly finding skills and bosses, and performing unusual actions to get even more skills; all that with the purpose of generating unique builds all over the place instead of happening as the result of a level up (which is working!). All those secrets reqs, secret quests, secret locations, secret bosses... on top what is supposed to be commonplace. It's gigantic.
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DRosencraft



Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 665
PostPosted: Fri Apr 03, 2020 3:42 pm Reply with quote
At the end of the day, BOFURI is just a "cute girls doing cute things" anime with a video game/isekai setting. The over-analyzing of the in-world game mechanics misses that point. It is already supremely obvious that the mechanics of the game they created are bad. They're supposed to be. They dumbed it down as much as humanly possible so that they didn't get in the way of just having run around being a goofball. The big close fight that caps the season is nothing more than cover to suggest that there is something more to this game world than a group of devs forced to oversee a game that was terribly designed to not account for something as basic as stat-dumping.

The show works because unlike the vast majority of in-game world anime that have come out in recent years, even this season’s Infinite Dendrogram, BOFURI doesn’t decide to take any turns into real grim-dark fantasy or set some super-high-stakes theology to be debated. It’s all just a game. The highest stakes the story ever lays out is Maple getting in trouble with her grades at school because she was playing instead of studying. It is simply a very easy show to watch and like because other than laughing at a bad game, there’s not much to think about – the bread and butter of a “cute girls doing cute things” anime.
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Animegomaniac



Joined: 16 Feb 2012
Posts: 4070
PostPosted: Sat Apr 04, 2020 6:34 am Reply with quote
I'm fairly certain that the developer's voice that sound human at the end was Maple's grandfather. "Oh, a random human voice when the rest are altered, that's not suspicious at all. And he's the one making the argument not to nerf Maple, calling her cute."

It's all conjecture but the game threw all the quest upgrade items at her, all she had to do was pick them up. Or, more likely, the game was reworked for her so that whatever random piece of junk she had was what the "player" needed. That Regeneration Ring drop that turned out to be a "quest item" for the next zone was pushing the notion and validity of "fetch quests" otherwise.

If that was an actual in game quest then that is bad game design. It's usually "Give me a totally common item", "give me an item that drops nearby so there is some randomness involved" or "Get me the item clearly marked Quest Item in your inventory" not "Give me something you possibly sold before moving to the next zone".
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Yuvelir



Joined: 06 Jan 2015
Posts: 1529
PostPosted: Sat Apr 04, 2020 9:26 am Reply with quote
Animegomaniac wrote:
It's all conjecture but the game threw all the quest upgrade items at her, all she had to do was pick them up. Or, more likely, the game was reworked for her so that whatever random piece of junk she had was what the "player" needed. That Regeneration Ring drop that turned out to be a "quest item" for the next zone was pushing the notion and validity of "fetch quests" otherwise.

If that was an actual in game quest then that is bad game design. It's usually "Give me a totally common item", "give me an item that drops nearby so there is some randomness involved" or "Get me the item clearly marked Quest Item in your inventory" not "Give me something you possibly sold before moving to the next zone".

There are games where quests items don't exist, and other where you can rechallenge bosses. Different quests sharing the same reward is also pretty common.

If you don't have the ring, well, go figure where to get it. I don't remember exactly how it went in this series but she probably could have gotten another one (and maybe the item was undroppable and unsellable even if it was just marked as regular equipment).
Ragnarok Online actually did this A LOT where most quests would have you fetch a laundry lists of items, most of which were on the other side of the world (or maybe closer but at a lower drop rate) and sometimes included items only dropped by minibosses and MVPs (sometimes at very low drop rates, and they might also have other uses besides those specific quests). So, yeah, a random rare item being necessary to access a new area? Been there, done that, in a game that 20 years after its creation is still being played.
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