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Kingdom Hearts: An Observation in Fluctuating Level Design



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Audo

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-- It seems that some people requested more complex area maps.

Nomura: Personally, I think that the battles are the funnest part of the Kingdom Hearts series, and that’s what we were thinking about in KHII even more so than in the original game. But some people wanted more areas to explore, so we put more of that kind of thing in, but made sure it wouldn’t interfere with battles.

this was the quote that made me think the reason the kh series was so lacking of npcs was intentional. it doesn't outwardly mention npcs, of course, but it's not hard to make a connection.
 

Muke

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They're going for battle/gameplay over level design again? Oh man. That's what KHII suffered from the most. :/ Let's see how they're putting more of 'that kind of thing' in.
 

Audo

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They're going for battle/gameplay over level design again? Oh man. That's what KHII suffered from the most. :/ Let's see how they're putting more of 'that kind of thing' in.
That interview was for birth by sleep, not kh3 lol. Probably should have mentioned that.

I posted it, partly for the level design comment, but also because I think the whole "emphasis on battles, minimizing things that can interfere with battles" is likely why NPCs are so minimal in the series, because it's hardly a technical thing
 

Muke

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That interview was for birth by sleep, not kh3 lol.
Ohhh, hah, okay then.

Does anyone know if the Japanese Fanbase ever complains about NPCs? You'd think they'd ask more questions regarding them in interviews if so
 

DarkosOverlord

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"Personally, I think that the battles are the funnest part of the Kingdom Hearts series"

Then, unexplicably, Team Osaka stepped in
 

Muke

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"Personally, I think that the battles are the funnest part of the Kingdom Hearts series"

Then, unexplicably, Team Osaka stepped in
Not even kidding lol. I never had fun playing through BBS. DDD is mehh, it's okay but still not as fun as KH2 or KH1
 

Audo

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I had more fun playing BBS/DDD/Re:Coded (DDD and Re:Coded more so than BBS, but still) than KH2 or KH1.

personally, Days is the most boring gameplay wise.

i guess subjectivity is a thing.
 

Hirokey123

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I have the most fun explore and moving around the world when I play DDD.
KH1's too boxed in mazey for me I just find it frustrating and that's not helped by the physics.
KH2's too linear are constantly dragged down by lots of random mini-game fights that locked you in.
Days was actually quite nice but I mean eventually you've seen every area and then there are another 70 Days in the game still you will have to actually play so it sort of becomes very mechanical.
Re:Coded's I enjoy when I walk around the actual world portions but they are sooooo small and often they sub out actual world exploration for gimmicks OR system areas and dear lord do I hate system areas with every single fiber of my being.
BBS somehow feels as linear as KH2 yet as boxy as KH1 and everything just feels so short, what is there I kinda enjoy but it's always over before I felt I got to actually get some meat and also TAV just feel so extremely limited in their movement in a way that doesn't mesh with the design.
CoM doesn't need to be spoken about

But when it comes to combat KH2FM+ is definitely the game I find most fun in this respect, however not right away. KH2 you start out very limited and it gets a little bit better when you get to Sora's gameplay, but still I don't really feel like I'm truly having fun till around Disney. From there however it just gets better and better and by the end combat in that game feels soooo good. DDD is the second most fun to me but much like all command deck system games in longer play session it quickly starts to feel limited and repetitious, so it just doesn't engage me like KH2 does. However 0.2 I would actually say is the KH game I've had the most fun playing especially after that patch, it had fantastic combat and fantastic world design that was really fun to move around in, Aqua's movements are limited but things like double jump and air slide felt smoother and like they didn't kill your momentum like they did in BBS.

So really it kinda depends what I'm in the mood for, if I want to sit down and really have something I can just run around and enjoy exploring hunting down chests and what not or playing with fun various gimmicks I throw on DDD. When I want something more meaty and lasting and give me that combat itch I'm looking for I thrown in KH2FM+. 0.2 hasn't been out very long but I foresee myself going back to it very soon because it gives me sort of the best of both just over a short period of time.
 

Grono

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There's something about graphic design that I think needs to be said as well. The series has always, in my eyes, been a spectacle at the very least to look at, and that can be reflected in the level design as well. The reason I like Dream Drop Distance so much in this respect is because it really takes the time to make areas look and feel interesting; the full town in La Cite Des Cloches as well as the amazing caverns on the way to the fountain were stunning, the grid is cool and atmospheric, prankster's paradise does a decent job at making you feel like you're playing through a theme park, and the cool thing about The World that Never Was this time around is that it adds completely new areas we've never seen before and expands the world as opposed to revisiting old parts we've seen a thousand times (barring where nothing gathers of course). Sure, some of it is kind of monotonous or familiar-feeling, but I overall like the level design of Dream Drop Distance quite a bit and hope it only improves from there.
 

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I want to add it's not flowmotion I'm talking about, though that's a big part of it. It's that DDD is basically the only game in the series that sort of drastically switches up the way you can move around. Not in every world mind you but like take monstro with its springy platforms and tonsil switches that flip the whole room. Prankster's Paradise where you have all kinds of circus equipment to play with. The reality shift of Prankster's paradise that lets you turn things like barrels or enemies into bubbles then ride it through the sky like a noble steed you can explode to make you super jump with. The grid with your ability to hack the code of the game like a real user should be able to, letting you activate ships to carry you to all kinds of different spots on the maps. Or SoS where you've got a forest with a constant updraft keeping you from touching the ground. It's pushing you higher and higher, letting you stop at platforms in the trees along the way that block the breeze, and you use music to calm the winds making lots of little tornados appear so you can still reach the higher areas if you didn't on your way up. Using music to grow giant leaves we can jump along and walk along that make musical sounds with every step and drop munny. Using music to freeze over sections of lake, create snow rails to grind, ice spikes to spin on, snowballs to roll around on, and summoning giant snowflake platforms in the sky to traverse. Or heck how DDD is the only game with a proper water physics level. Normally we are limited to treading water we can't jump out of (and everyone who swims is apparently the master of the backstroke) or it's Atlantica where we are transformed changing our controls entirely, but in Prankster's Paradise we have a world with some actual buoyancy physics in play so whenever you jump you just go really high up and then float gently down.

All DDD was missing was NPCs.
 

ultima-demi

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I like to believe there's no way they can avoid NPCs this time around.Y'know with KH3 actually being on a current gen console and the expectations that comes with it.

Lack of NPCs will be even more noticeable then DDD because of the increased size/scale of the worlds and detail.

The films they chose for worlds so far have already done most of the work for them when it comes to obvious safe zone choices with plenty of places NPCs can stay without the need for them to have any interaction in battle.
 

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I know it contradicts the thread's title, my my statement was about the fights being fun, since Nomura said that.
He said they focused on making the fights fun and then they called in the one group that proved times and times again they don't even know what a balanced fight means and mix "challenge" with "frustration".
They did focus on the fights, it's the only excuse for how lacking everything else was, but they still screwed the pooch.
I also have more fun when playing BbS or DDD overall, I feel like I get more satisfaction in seeing the plot advancing there than in KH II, but not when I'm fighting Team Osaka's BS.

Short version: you said you focused on making they fights fun and then you gave us Terra-Xehanort.
 

Sephiroth0812

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I like to believe there's no way they can avoid NPCs this time around.Y'know with KH3 actually being on a current gen console and the expectations that comes with it.

Except that the gen of the console or expectations in this area never really played a role to begin with.

FF XII is originally a PS2 title and places like Rabanastre or the Imperial City of Archades are filled to the brim with eye-candy- and background-NPCs.
It would have been possible from the get go if there was the intention to include such things.

KH doesn't have anything like that because the dev team doesn't want to put effort into placing "superfluous" extra NPCs who are just "there" or are in the way of the action.
The crowd in the scene of Mulan on the Imperial Square in KH 2 is nothing but a shadowy blob of silhuettes and in X Back Cover for the Dandelions scene they used six or seven different models, got out some different paintjobs and then copy-pasted over and over to get a crowd because in these scenes a crowd was needed for it not being totally awkward.

In Olympus and Castle of Dreams they didn't even go that far and had the awkward empty scenery, most likely due to the reasons given below.

Part of it may also go back to the issue that due to the different art styles of different Disney works, they would have to design a unique set of NPCs for each world which takes time and money as well and they don't see the need for that when they can instead put in three or more additional enemy formations or perhaps another boss fight.

In the end, at least from what I have observed throughout the whole series, it comes down to a shoulder-shrug with "Why should we bother with/invest time into some background-people who have no importance whatever anyways?"
To be honest I do not even know if the "NPC-issue" is that much of a common complaint throughout the worldwide fandom, although I am relatively sure that it was never addressed/recognized by any official material.

---

@Darkos:
Your current signature is simply hilarious, lol.
 

ultima-demi

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Well of course it did,with the fans right?

The thing with FF12 is that it's a huge game compared to KH2 and KH1 and with a good amount of massive towns/city related locations with multiple zones in them so the NPCs were needed and made sense.I mean one city in FF12 generally was like the size of 1 whole world in KH2 or bigger alone.

I look back at the areas of past KH games and there's honestly no place for them add dozens of NPCs because the size of the games/worlds either weren't big enough to have them just placed anywhere or they just generally avoided adding most town related locations or there was just none that existed in the source material for them to bother.

When it did have a sort of Town/village type location they actually did put a little effort including a few NPCs most of the time like in Mulan/Timeless river/Twilight Town/Pride Lands/Radiant Garden,even though said areas were mostly still pretty small.

It's why in the end i generally had no issues overlooking the lack of NPCs from those games.
 
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Sephiroth0812

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Well of course it did,with the fans right?

Going from that viewpoint, yea, it probably did, although I certainly don't remember it always being an issue even within fandom itself.
I don't remember when it started, but if I had to take a guess it might have been around 2011/2012 with the more blatant examples in BBS.

It's still questionable though if this issue in particular has gotten any higher in the developer's priority list.

The thing with FF12 is that it's a huge game compared to KH2 and KH1 and with a good amount of massive towns/city related locations with multiple zones in them so the NPCs were needed and made sense.I mean one city in FF12 generally was like the size of 1 whole world in KH2 or bigger alone.

I look back at the areas of past KH games and there's honestly no place for them add dozens of NPCs because the size of the games/worlds either weren't big enough to have them just placed anywhere or they just generally avoided adding most town related locations or there was just none that existed in the source material for them to bother.

When it did have a sort of Town/village type location they actually did put a little effort including a few NPCs most of the time like in Mulan/Timeless river/Twilight Town/Pride Lands/Radiant Garden,even though said areas were mostly still pretty small.

It's why in the end i generally had no issues overlooking the lack of NPCs from those games.

This is correct of course, I used the example mostly to point out that it is definitely not an issue of hardware limitations as an apparently still widespread misconception claims.
The lack of background- or "unimportant" NPCs within the KH series is not a case of technical problems or restrictions but a conscious choice in priority by the developers, the generally smaller areas being certainly a factor but not the only one.

In past KH games there were several "town like" places already though in which some would expect more activity such as Traverse Town (which had a Tidus-palette swap and two or three generic NPCs but that was it), Agrabah (which is supposed to be a busy rather big city brimming with activity and people, the capital of a sultanate at that), Port Royal (which doesn't have any NPCs besides Will and Elizabeth), Radiant Garden (which has at least some shop owners and some of the FF cameos roaming about in KH 2, but only Scrooge and Merlin in BBS where it is supposedly at its height as the "capital of Light" and a place rivaling at least Rabanastre from FF XII in size even though TAV can only explore a bare minimum of the whole place).

In the case of BBS' Radiant Garden it is even more jarring since Nomura consciously choose to scratch the child-versions of the FF cameos (Leon and the gang, including Cloud) because he felt it would become "too crowded" with Ansem's apprentices (who also appear in cutscenes only and, with the exception of Braig, were arguably added only to pander to Organisation XIII fans as the appearances of Dilan, Aeleus, Ienzo and Even are arguably completely useless and unimportant to BBS' story and TAV as characters).
They could have added the child-versions of the FF cameos at least as wandering NPCs but actively choose to do not.

Twilight Town in KH 2 is literally the only place which actually had an actual wider number of unnamed actual background NPCs, so the issue that they could have placed more NPCs in town/city-like areas if they wanted to still stands.

I admit though that personally I never had (and still don't have) that much of an issue/problem with the "lack of NPCs" and considering all the other things that can (and in some cases probably will) go wrong it is still very low on my list of concerns.
 

Muke

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It's not an extremely big deal to me either, but I still don't think some NPCs can do harm. You mentioned Twilight Town, and the NPCs are one of the many reasons why I simply love that world. It's not a ghosttown.
 

Grono

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I feel like when the world lacks NPC's or interactivity, it really just lacks life. Birth by Sleep is my least favorite game besides days for a good reason, and that's because it's full of huge flat maps with little to no NPC's to interact with whatsoever. Birth by Sleep just lacks life in that sense; wouldn't it be cool if you had even the smallest bit of more interactivity within Radiant Garden, like being able to talk to Lea and Isa at any time and challenge them to a duel? Or being able to even talk to Aeleus and Dilan at the castle gates while they're on duty? This is why this game seems to be lazy to me.

Dream Drop Distance picked up the slack on interactivity in the level design, but, in my eyes, it failed even worse with the complete lack of NPC's whatsoever. And I'm really concerned that Kingdom Hearts III will feel as empty as DDD and BbS can feel sometimes at the moment.
 

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I'm of a mind that prioritizes combat over platforming and love KH2 most because of it. The game focused on exhilarating combat and choices as opposed to trivial tasks like jumping around different areas of the map for items and such. Final Mix does add items and such for people that do enjoy the platforming and incentivizes revisits through the growth ability system with puzzle pieces that can't be reached without those abilities, but overall, I don't think it adds much to the game. On harder difficulties, KH2 has the best, most fluid and thought provoking combat system in the series (I guess CoM would be the most thought provoking, but at the cost of breaking the fluidity of combat). There hasn't been a combat system in the series that has felt as good as KH2 since. 0.2 is close, but I feel that Aqua's controls just pale in comparison to Sora's in kh2, but this is by design, so I can forgive it, because it was meant to be a mix between BBS and KH3. I'm really hoping that of all titles, KH3 feels most like KH2 with a hint of DDD because world traversal in DDD was really fun and I didn't have to revisit worlds to get all the chests/items. That's a plus to me. I don't like to spend extra hours on the game just because, there has to be some sort of challenge involved. So KH2 FM's data battles were right up my alley. It occurs to me that most people in the fan base that prioritize combat over all else perceive KH2 to be the best in the series, but for people that care more for story or platforming, it falls short, and I think that's fair; but IMO, dropping platforming to focus on combat was the best decision square has made with this franchise.

But I'm glad people that enjoy platforming are enjoying 0.2's direction, because I'm enjoying the combat direction of 0.2, and if they can make both crowd's happy with the next installment, I'm all for it.
 

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It's funny how my favorite worlds of KH are the ones that makes sense about why there's no NPCs. Maybe that's why I loved 0.2 so much. I loved the atmosphere of that whole game. But then you have stupidly open areas in some KH worlds that looks like a colorful dessert that spreads over every direction.
 
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