i feel like rpgs have been dealing with "no really this time status effects matter!" for like 15 years at least

29 • chronically ill, ND, disabled 🌈🏳️⚧️ 💗🤍🧡

Cohost's #1 Draculaura Stan
i feel like rpgs have been dealing with "no really this time status effects matter!" for like 15 years at least
I feel like the Epic Battle Fantasy games aren't beatable without status effects. Also they're really good. Play all of them
The way I see it, there's a few too many indie RPGs out there where "status effects matter" effectively means "status effects are mandatory" which...just falls into the same issue of overly samey combat that devs who implement those systems are trying to avoid.
I'd say the best model to go with is probably the modern Etrian Odyssey games after they finally found the right balance between "completely unusable" and "wrecks the entire game." Or, failing that, just doing what Dragon Quest has been doing for decades
eo is... a weird case. the later games are like "this boss is functionally immune to all status effects except the one that disables their party wipe combo so i hope you have a way to reset resistances" but also random encounters being much more deadly than most games across the board means status effects are very useful for exploration
what specifically do you mean about dq?
I mean stuff like the general usefulness of buffs and debuffs, and how disabling effects gradually ended up being really good for random encounters even when they only last one turn. Hell, sleep was the god spell all the way back in DQ1.
Re: bosses resisting ailments in later EO games, that definitely got a lot better once they standardized baseline ailment effectiveness against bosses at 50% for non-critical ailments. And when they unfucked accumulative resistance so you can actually inflict ailments on bosses more than once