Final Fantasy XII Devs Considering a New Game Using the Gambit System

Gambits were great -- they really shine when you're doing hard hunts underleveled, actively turning different ones on and off and switching priority as the battle flows back and forth.

But that's also when the interface is most awkward and their limitations are most evident.

A game w/ a revamped, more flexible, and deeper gambit system would be fantastic.

I think it would help to have gambit load-outs you could save and hot-switch between.
 
dark10x said:
Shitty off-screen cell phone shot

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FFXII HD looks too clean. It's very sharp and they've definitely touched up on the textures, but it looks like they just made them nice and clear, rather than adding additional aesthetic detail to them. With a much higher resolution, on bigger TVs, and in widescreen, this means that the additional clarity makes the areas look cleaner and less natural than they were meant to be. Matsuno tends to be pretty obsessive about the "rough and dirty" look in the art direction for his games, to make areas feel lived in rather than feel like stage sets or props. Wish they had put in more attention to that aspect when remastering it...
 
duckroll said:
Matsuno tends to be pretty obsessive about the "rough and dirty" look in the art direction for his games, to make areas feel lived in rather than feel like stage sets or props. Wish they had put in more attention to that aspect when remastering it...
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I think the effect is still there, the art direction is strong enough that clean textures won't ruin the look.

Sub_Level said:
Boom, you beat FFXII. Not the hunts or a couple bosses mind you, but you beat it.
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So much wrong with this post.

Lothar said:
Yep, it was a really lame idea and system. 95% of the gameplay was pressing the directional pad. It shouldn't be used again.
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SO MUCH WRONG WITH THIS POST
 
I loved the gambit system, it made me feel a tiny little bit like an AI programmer or something. I would be totally down for another game using that system.
 
I have mixed feelings about the gambit system. It's nice to be able to write AI scripts so you can run through a field/dungeon without constantly pausing to enter fairly obvious orders. But it would be even better not to be bothered with trivial encounters (calling only for obvious responses) in the first place. The gambit system makes FF12's encounters less bothersome, but it doesn't make them fun.

There were also two execution errors. The first was making the player wait to acquire gambits, which ZJS remedied. The second was not allowing players to save gambit setups. A lot of the value of gambits goes out the window when stopping to manage your setups (in my experience it was not always possible to write a gambit to cover an entire dungeon) is as tedious as entering your commands manually. FF13's paradigm system, weirdly enough, kind of ran with the idea of quick-changing between AI scripts. I don't necessarily need a hotkey for mid-battle changes. But let me save three scripts per character, and I'll be happy.
 
I wasn't too crazy about the Gambit system but what could work really well is a hybrid between the Gambit system of XII and Paradigm Shift of XIII - where you configure several different gambit setups (like, one for defense and healing, one for heavy damage, one for status enhancements, etc...) and can hot-swap between them in the midst of battle...
 
I'd be down for this. It feels like they could easily add more conditions to make it more sophisticated.
 
Sub_Level said:
The system is fine. But the gameplay needs to encourage strategically using it.

You can get through most of FFXII with a simple HURR DURR setup of

1: Heal if below 50% health
2: Attack enemy

Boom, you beat FFXII. Not the hunts or a couple bosses mind you, but you beat it.
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Not in my case, I had to use a lot more gambits to get through the game. Maybe I was underlevel?
 
Sora the Cat said:
Not in my case, I had to use a lot more gambits to get through the game. Maybe I was underlevel?
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If you just buy the strongest swords for each character, you can kill each regular enemy with a few hits. It doesn't take much strategy. I don't think I would have been overleveled because I didn't even do hunts.
 
While I wouldn't go so far as to say you can always just set heal and attack gambits and everything's fine...that's pretty much exactly what I did for Yiazmat.
 
YES PLEASE. Every single party RPG should have a complex gambit/tactics system.

Spoony Bob said:
A single player FFXI could make great use of a system similar to gambits. It's such a shame it'll never happen though.
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That would be a dream come true for me. The only issue is that positioning is quite important in most fights (especially for mages, rangers, bards and corsairs) to avoid AoE damage, and that could be very difficult to do through gambits.
 
Lothar said:
If you just buy the strongest swords for each character, you can kill each regular enemy with a few hits. It doesn't take much strategy. I don't think I would have been overleveled because I didn't even do hunts.
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It requires about as much strategy as most of the other Final Fantasy games. I was grateful that XII at least let you automate all the brain dead "strategy" required to defeat most random encounters.

It also had the effect of making buff spells more useful, since you don't have to waste a turn casting them and the effects persist after the battle ends.
 
I feel like Gambits were undermined by how easy the game was. I acknowledge that you actually can beat most of the game with simple attack and heal setups and that there's very little incentive to think outside the box unless you deliberately pursue the optional content. I wish people cared enough to experiment more, but it needs to be incentivised. Everything is competing for attention and time these days, and I think the majority of people aren't interested in doing things just for the sake of it.

Ah, XII... Such a diamond in the rough.
 
Gambits with the ability to pause and issue on-demand commands was one of my favorite things about XII. I would absolutely love another game with them.

You could Auto-play or micromanage exactly as much as you wanted to, but the characters always followed your playstyle, whatever it was.
 
Sora the Cat said:
Not in my case, I had to use a lot more gambits to get through the game. Maybe I was underlevel?
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I think weapons and equipment are more important. The game gives you accessories early on to really increase the rate of getting both EXP and LP so I used those. I found the other accessories, like stuff that blocked against certain elements or statuses, or stuff that gave you buffs was only important in hunts.
 
Gambits were perfect for me. It made the mundane battles a breeze. But if you were like me and explored the higher level areas early, and took on all the marks and bosses, it definitely required some serious skills that gambits couldn't offer alone.

Not to mention that piece of equipment that lets you reverse the effects of all items. That was GODLY. I used that more effectively than the gambits to defeat tough foes.
 
shark sandwich said:
It requires about as much strategy as most of the other Final Fantasy games. I was grateful that XII at least let you automate all the brain dead "strategy" required to defeat most random encounters.
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Yeah, Final Fantasy games rarely have good gameplay but XII just shoves your face in it and makes it obvious. Why even have encounters if a system is desired to automate "brain dead strategy"?
 
Lothar said:
Yeah, Final Fantasy games rarely have good gameplay but XII just shoves your face in it and makes it obvious. Why even have encounters if a system is desired to automate "brain dead strategy"?
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Somehow I doubt you can literally go through the entire game start to finish with two basic gambits and do nothing but press directional buttons. The game would have received criticism for that full-stop. You are exaggerating to a hyperbolic degree.
 
Sub_Level said:
The system is fine. But the gameplay needs to encourage strategically using it.

You can get through most of FFXII with a simple HURR DURR setup of

1: Heal if below 50% health
2: Attack enemy

Boom, you beat FFXII. Not the hunts or a couple bosses mind you, but you beat it.
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To be fair you can get through pretty much all FF games just by using Attack and Cure. Maybe need to cast an elemental spell every now and then though.
 
CopperPuppy said:
For fuck's sake, please say this is true. Is this just speculation or is there some morsel of information out there in the universe that hints at this being a possibility?
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Pure speculation. However, we know Ito's been working on a large game for some time.
 
MogCakes said:
Somehow I doubt you can literally go through the entire game start to finish with two basic gambits and do nothing but press directional buttons. The game would have received criticism for that full-stop. You are exaggerating to a hyperbolic degree.
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You definitely can't do such a thing, they are over exaggerating. The only way I see being able to do it is if you grinded so many levels ahead of every battle, every new zone, and every boss that you deserve to one button kill things. Just like any other RPG.

Trash is always trash, no matter what game it is. Some games make trash more meaningful, dangerous due to resources, no healing/limited healing between checkpoints type of gameplay, and such, but it's not usually something that require too much new strategy from you every step of the way.

With FFXII fresh on my mind due to recent play, I doubt this auto play strategy will hold up against the skeletons in Lhushu Mines, the jelly ambush with the confuse spell, or the Bomb fight on the bridge. Then you have what I think is the meat of the game, hunts. There's no way you're getting through the higher rank ones with gambits doing absolutely everything.
 
Transistor said:
He produced it. He probably had very little influence at all
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He produced it and supervised the team which was made up of the newly absorbed Quest staff who previously worked on Tactics Ogre Knight of Lodis. IIRC, the base scenario was conceived by Matsuno, and many of the elements of the fantasy world in the story were based directed on concepts Matsuno was creating for FFXII.

It wasn't like some other S-E team was making something and putting Matsuno's name on it. As producer, he also picked the people working on the game, including Minaba and Sakimoto.
 
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