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What Does ATB Add to a Game?
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- čas přidán 20. 03. 2021
- For a many years, it seemed like ATB systems were the new standard for turn based RPGs, but now games have mostly moved away from them. What did ATBs bring to the table, and why don't you see it much anymore?
Music by Rifti Beats ( • Final Fantasy X - Besa... )
While not an atb system, I like it when games mess with the turn order based on stats like speed and buffs/debuffs, or special effects via certain conditions. Say you land a crit, that enemy now gets bumped down the ladder quite a bit. Now say you have a character with double speed, well they will have turns twice as often
sounds like it could be really unbalanced if care isn't taken to manage. interesting but potentially very cheesy, or if the boss can do this to you, very frustrating.
You would probably like press-turn systems then.
@@dmas7749 any system can be unbalanced, so I am not sure thats apt criticism.
@@fenixchief7 i felt pressed to bring it up
press turn is epic, but crits giving press turns is honestly one of the worst design decisions. at least for me, you probably don't share my rotten luck
There is an RPG maker game I really like that makes use of nice ATB
As you play mostly only one character and the choice of your equipment is crucial, with every weapon bringing unique combat skills and a playstyle with them.
For exmaple having a lighter weapon will make the atb bar fill out much faster than having a heavy one. There are skills and items that hasten up your bar, allowing you to go before enemies multiple times before they can make a turn.
In this case atb works imo because you dont manage 4 characters and it adds depth to controlling a single character and the ATB bar itself isnt that slow so you don't feel much of the wait.
What game? I'm curious lol
ATB with a single character sounds interesting :0
I always switch them to Wait Mode because I hate the stress of having to decide quickly, and usually just end up mashing the attack button. If I want that kind of gameplay, I would just go for a straight Action RPG. It's not like selecting Wait Mode completely negates the time aspect. From what I remember, enemies can still attack you if you are not in a menu. So there is still some tension and a push to act quickly.
I enjoyed all the evolution that happened with turn-based combat in the 5th and 6th generations. Games like FF10 introduced had CTB, which was just turn-based combat that could be as fast or slow as you needed it to be, while also having certain actions have longer cooldown times. Mana Khemia took FF10's combat, and added offensive and defensive combos, and attacks that would repeat at specific intervals within the turn order. There was other stuff like Grandia, Valkyrie Profile, Xenogears, Shadow Hearts, Baten Kaitos, etc that all found their own unique ways to keep turn-based combat interesting.
...Dude. Grandia was literally ATB.
Yes ATB is good BRING IT BACK
I really enjoy ATB systems and I absolutely love FF13. I played 1 and 2 on a GBA remake and 13 was my 3rd. Even though I have now played 6-10, 15, tactics advance 1&2, and a handful of others, I always remember 13 with fondness. So thanks for giving it some love.
I actually really like ATB, especially the Active one. Maybe it's just my love for menu-fiddling in RPGs, but there is a fun, immersive aspect of being hit while you are busy selecting the right move on your turn.
Funny, cause thats what I hate about it. Its like trying to menu in a Fromsoft game in combat lol
(Writing this comment while fully aware that the video is three years old and the things I'm about to point out might have already occurred to you or been pointed out to you in the time since it was made)
Something I definitely feel you've overlooked is the impact of visual presentation. You say FF4-9 could be converted to proper turn-based games without losing anything, but Wait Mode and the pause button don't change the fact that when you're down to one live party member at critical health, there's nothing tenser than watching their time gauge crawl toward full, praying the entire time that the enemy doesn't get another action in before you.
Also, minor nitpick, but just throwing it out there: I've played several turn-based RPGs where party members with high enough speed would lap other combatants in the turn order. (Meru from the Legend of Dragoon and Marino in her Hyper Mode from Mega Man X Command Mission come to mind.) So that thing about "one more point of speed than the opponent being as good as one thousand more points" isn't a universal truth.
FFX2 ironically had the best ATB system.
My favorite "ATB" system is probably the rolling health from the Mother series and Mother 3 specifically. It's a traditional RPG for the most part, but instead of just going all down at once when you're hit , your HP rolls down to the desired target at a set pace. This is so cool to me for a couple of reasons. The first is that early in the game, it serves as a way to ease players in if they suck as RPGs. They don't have to plan ahead if they can run and quickly use a heal. The second is that in the mid-lategame the bandage is ripped off and most enemies will be capable of one-two shotting at least one party member per turn. So the game expects you to function with the your party slowly dying a lot of the time and you can do that! You can heal to stop the roll or you can just spam inputs and hope you kill. This is further compounded by the rhythm combo mechanic where your physical attacks can squeeze out around 3x damage by tapping to the beat of whatever battle theme is playing. Do you spam because a character is wounded and you need the battle done quickly or do you take your time and combo because it does more damage and may technically get you out faster? It even gives extra utility to the defend command that most people never touch in RPGs because that causes the health to roll even slower. This is the kind of stuff I wish I got from ATB games when I played them, but that rush is almost never there. Given, I've never played any of the FFXIII games, so maybe that would change it.
mother may be one of the few turn-based RPGs i've used the guard command in, because the action for attacking is much longer.
Rolling health has nothing to do with ATB.
I think you're underestimating how important actice is to ATB era Final Fantasy. Attacks have a couple seconds of charge time based on how strong they are, and there are lots of phenomena that require real time awareness, most famously the first boss of every game having a phase of about a minute where the player can't attack them. It's not much, but the games would be substantially different if they were turn based.
I prefer games with a turn order list like digimon story cyber sleuth. Speed still matters and I get to strategize around turn order. And it allows for some very hard encounters where I have to find a way to survive 5 turns of the enemy's actions.
Great Video! I actually really enjoy ATB systems, or at least the concept of them. They are like "rapid strategy" games to me. The problem, to me at least, is that the more you utilize the unique aspects of the ATB systems, the more complex and difficult the games become to play. FFXIII's combat system is at it's best in the endgame where you can fully utilize the kits. But if you had forced the player to play anywhere near that level throughout the story you would completely alienate the casual player IMO. Fully utilizing ATB would have the player move at the speed of action games with the strategic decision making of Turn based games. Which is a cool idea for high end play, but not entirely for casual play imo. That's why i think ATB mostly evolved Horizontally, rather than vertically after 13. Adding action game systems, active defensive mechanics etc rather than more fast paced accurate decision making.
Awesome to discover such a good video in your catalogue from a while ago, and while I don't know if your a Final Fantasy XIII truther (like me), it does go to show how good that game's battle system is (after 20 hours). The only slight disagreement I have is with the "wait" option because I don't think it changes the game that much. Since it only pauses time inside sub-menus (like magic or tools), the ATB system still features its best qualities without navigation anxiety, which can be a real problem in Final Fantasy VI, where the magic menus get way, way out of hand for every character, but I do agree that, overall, ATB doesn't actually do all that much since it's defining characteristic is making enemies where the player has to actively wait in real time, which doesn't feel all that good.
I think part of what helped kill ATB was the success of Pokémon, which showed that traditional turn based combat could still be popular, and it showed that what people love is exploiting rock-paper-scissors systems, because even a more complicated game like Persona 5 is functioning the same as Pokémon under the hood, while action RPGs get to take better advantage of input management, which players love (and is why Paper Mario is fun)
I would argue that SMT dropping the tactical nuke that is the press turn system was what killed atb. FF went back to atb from ctb the same year Nocturne dropped and they have been running from turn-based combat (not atb) ever since.
Pokemon (which ripped off SMT in their own way) dropped 7 years prior and is the reason I think they went to ctb from atb for X. They were rock steady through the 90s with atb barely changing from game to game, then 2000 hit and it seemed like they had a crisis of identity with every game.
X was ctb, X-2 was atb, 11 was an rtb mmo, 12 was adp, 13 was "command synergy" whatever that means, Lightning returns has the satb, 14 is another rtb mmo, then you got "action x" for 15 and 16 is officially an action game more akin to DMC than any FF.
I think Square has just been an internal mess for that entire decade.
Great video. I agree with everything you said. I have loads of nostalgia for these games, but the ATB system isn't why.
Only thing to add is that when an ATB system is very fast, it tends to result in the player just entering in their normal attack over and over. This happens the most in FF7 where the ATB and battle animations are fast. It would happen in FF8 as well if the battle animations were faster.
Turn-based is also a little easier to program.
What do you think of the combat timing system in Blue Reflection: Second Light?
You have levels that build on an action gauge like FFXIII, but rather than staggering enemies you can push them back down the battle timeline to delay their attacks.
Also, you can see how quickly enemies will attack, thats kinda a big one. I think a problem with a lot of older games with ATB is how obtuse enemy info was. ATB is a lot more tense and entertaining if you see the enemy timers as well.
As for is blue reflection a good game? Eh. But the battle system is at least mildly notable.
Arguably wait turns ATB into CTB (charge turn based) where your speed affects how fast your turn bar charges and is otherwise just turn based. imo this mixed system is by far the best because it turns speed into a stat that both matters and can be planned around. It *does* make speed buffs and debuffs significantly stronger but I think that's fun as someone who likes breaking jrpgs.
Also, a lot of the FF games are not the same with turn based, even if youre using wait the ATB aspect matters.
My favorite example is in ff5 where the mimic command has a slight time delay before it selects what to mimic and then performs it. My mimic was slightly faster than my bahamut dualcast masher, but because of this delay i could hit mimic and then dualcast bahamut bahamut and id get 4 bahamuts instead of 2 + whatever random action was before them.
Oh boy, I love the ATB system.
To the point I expected Bravely Default to have it, and even though I have gotten quite far, I still have in mind the ATB bars despite knowing that's not what Haste will interact with in this game.
Personally, ATB is my least favorite type of RPG gameplay by far. It feels like the worst of both sides, if I want a game where I consider my actions and strategize, it needs to be turn-based entirely. If I want something fast-paced, I'll play an action game with more interesting and refined combat. I've never enjoyed the gameplay of an ATB game, it's always such a shame looking into a turn-based game and finding out it's ATB.
Also I dunno why this video is only getting reccommended a year after its upload, lol.
Just got into Grandia 2. The best form of ATB and a natural wait mode due to how important positioning is in that game. Such a good combat design
It just got recommended to me now lol. I don't like atb at all either tbh
I feel the exact same way! ATB is definitely the worst of both worlds. It’s why I gave up on FF7, and it soured me on the rest of FF’s 4-9.
I think ATB should be considered a separate category from turn-based combat.
I'm much happier with ATB when there isn't traditional menu traversal. If every fighter had a limit of, say, four possible attacks they could use, I don't have to worry about hunting it down through a menu. I hate menuing during ATB because I feel like anything near the top of my skills list will get more action just because its faster to execute than scrolling down the list. Or worse, I just mash the Attack button.
I hate ATB. Its the only turn based system that I would just straight up call bad. I want to be able to strategize and plan my next move.
Imagine chess with a move timer that just lets your opponent keep moving. Same concept. Being punished for thinking isnt fun.
Maybe its just FF ATB I have an issue with. FFX's conditional system is vastly superior in my opinion, but my goodness do I dislike Tidus and Yuna.
I feel ffx got it best
Hate ATB. Go full action instead or keep it turn based