actually so cool to see a bbts sponser. i havent bought from them in a few years but their flat shipping went from $10 down to $4???? now there is nothing stopping me
I was playing this game called Floppy Knights, a tactical deckbuilding RPG, and I was on the final level of the third episode. the level was divided into 3 vertical sections, 4-HP slimes were coming up the left corridor, 2-armor/3-health turrets coming up the right, and my Floppy Knights going up the middle My main squad was a 2-damage Vera that I buffed with Thorns to increase Vera to have 3 damage, a Quiver Kid with 2 damage and 2 range, and a Bamboomer with 4 damage and 3 range the math was simple and so I sent my Bamboomer to deal with the slimes, and the other two to deal with the turrets, leading to a fairly clean victory. I really enjoy smaller numbers for games like that because it's easier to conceptualize "okay, my dude does 3 damage, but that guy has 4 health, I can't take him out this turn but I can hit him and retreat so I can get him next turn"
Not gonna lie, a "health bar" on the debit/credit card would probably save a lot of people.. That's unironically a genius concept (too bad the companies issuing these things have every interest to not implement such a thing)
The only real issue with that is "what's your max health?". Where does it "start" and go down from? If it's just a means of budgeting, like a limit of 500$ a month that goes down like a health bar, then I don't really see anything special with that. From what I can tell banks generally already offer a means of helping someone budget(mine personally has one), let alone the million of other budgeting apps that exist. People seem to be served already. Would be a fun gimmick though.
It's like that one store that had a "no bullshit" approach to selling, where they intentionally avoided all the scummy store tactics (like inflated prices to make sales more appealing) but then went bankrupt shortly after opening.
@@phylippezimmermannpaquin2062 I remember there being a direct indicator of causation. Maybe the store used to sell well before adding that policy or something like that. There might be some info online, but I don't remember the store name as I heard about this a long time ago.
I think the discrepancy between the perception of one thousand, one million and one billion, and the reality of those numbers, also comes down to the fact that humans don't percieve numbers linearly but logarithmically. In a logarithmic scale, one million actually is halfway in between one thousand and one billion.
Something my highschool biology teacher once told me is that our brains aren't good at processing long numbers so we like to break them up into groups of 3 or less. Think about how you read off your phone number xxx xxx xx xx even though its written as (xxx)-xxx-xxxx and you could just say all 10 digits in a row without pausing. For both speaker and listener its easier to comprehend as blocks of 2 or 3. I'm sure this is part of why we like logarithmic scales, they change the axis from normal numberline to order of magnitude. And by order of magnitude all these big named numbers are separated by chunks of 3 0's. Thousand, million, billion, trillion, ect. are visually distinguished by only 1 block of 3 zeroes, but mathematically each one is insignificant compared to the next in the sequence.
I guess there were no math or engineering majors in that study. There was no mention of what the scale is, so I assumed it was a logarithmic scale and put it near the middle. That's where it belongs. When I see an "unlabeled axis" I will use whatever scale I need to to illustrate a point.
I'm surprised the logarithmic scale wasn't mentioned. It's a part of why we intuitively put 1 million about halfway between one thousand and one billion. Our brains are good at comparing sizes, not counting the exact numbers, and a log scale helps with that. We think logarithmically.
Yeah I think the only information you get from quadrillions of damage is a vague estimate of orders of magnitude. Which is pretty useless for knowing how effective an attack is (a ratio of 1 to 10 is still a big difference). So ultimately it just gives you a feeling. I think with something like Disgaea it's a meta joke about RPGs in general, and it's also making it very clear "these aren't numbers for you to do math in your head". It's not my favourite but I respect their choice to be absurd
@@SupposeKennethed Your comment has a veneer of intellectualism. This video is not an academic paper, sure, but it's... like, have you seen the rest of youtube? It's nowhere near the lowest common denominator type of content. Every time youtube signs me out and I see what's going on out there it's staggering. Anyway, what was your point again?
Paper Mario's the kind of game where it takes two levels to get the badge points to cover the cost of ONE. POINT. of attack. And that's worth considering! It's actually worth it to basically put two levels into a single point of attack power.
a really good roblox RPG I played (Block Tales) has this card system, you can increase damage by 1 if you have the BP, the space for the card… but they usually come at a cost. Ante Up is a card that makes it twice as difficult to correctly time attacks but increases damage by 1. Screwing up seems fine, it makes you deal a bit less damage… until you read that bad timing will negate all the damage in that attack. It also takes up 5 BP, which is two level’s worth of card space. Levels you could’ve used to increase HP or SP. Knight is quite simple. Deal 1 more damage, but lose your ball slot. Your sword is good single-target damage, but unlike the Ball, it can only target enemies in the front. And unlike the Ball, the sword does not have any moves that can inflict status effects like Dizzy and Frozen. Even the opposite, the Baller card that instead removes the sword slot, has its own problems. Balls are affected by enemy Defense. The sword can pierce a point or two of Defense, but balls cannot. On top of that, the sword can hit enemies with the Spiky effect, but you’ll need a special card to make balls hit enemies who are burning or Spiky. Oh, and both Knight and Baller take up 4 BP. That’s two levels’ worth of BP, with 2 left over. Most of the damage bonuses I’ve seen in that roblox game come at a cost. Cards that permanently increase damage usually take up a lot of space in your build, but cards such as Charge lets you use SP to increase damage for one turn. There can be a lot of thinking that goes into making a build. Multiplayer especially. One person might take cards such as Cure or Resurrect to heal and revive themselves and teammates, but they’ll do a lot less damage. The other might be the damage output, taking cards like Ante Up and Knight. Then, one person could take cards like Cannonball, Snowball, and Fireball to inflict debuffs. Of course, enemy health and damage scales with the players you fight alongside with, encouraging strategy, especially when using cards such as Hard Mode or Double Pain, which will massively increase the punishment for making a mistake. sorry for the long comment, I just found a reason to talk about one of my favorite games and… y’know.
Definitely. In Paper Mario, that boost of 1 atk can be the difference between an attack doing damage or doing no damage. For some attacks that hit multiple times (Fan Smack, Ground Pound), one singular point of defense can be the difference between dealing zero damage and dealing 10 damage.
Similar in a new game called DC20. Most weapons and spells have a base of 1 or 2 damage, which can go up to maybe 7 or 8 if you stack every possible buff.
And then on the opposite end, I use a badge in paper mario 64 that reduces damage by 2 instead of 1 when you block. Really helpful for staying alive even when you don't dump a lot of levels into HP
Oh, 100%. One of the big things I was happy about when I went from the new Paper Mario games to TTYD was how cool it was to have the numbers be so much lower. Also it’s kinda funny how this can be taken EXTREMELY low. Like, “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, the Hollow Knight’s Failed Champion is doing a whopping TWO DAMAGE to me??!?!”
The funny thing is that because Sticker Star is the shitty in-between of the other Sticker Star-likes and those that came before, it technically has decent damage scaling. You normally have stuff around 5-20 damage, but things deal 50-99 damage, and bosses have 300-700 health. It’s still inflated, but the ranges still suggest meaningful design given the upgrades are by better stickers.
Hollow Knight as well as games that use a similar health bar are a different topic however. HP in there is mostly treated as a "how many times can you get hit" bar, instead of an arbitrary "I have this number to survive the enemy numbers". When something in Hollow Knight deals 2 (or more) masks of damage, it feels ridiculous because 99% of the things in the game only do 1 mask, because that's just how the game is balanced.
@@DexuzNow I'm comparing it to the Zelda health bar. Most common enemies (outside of TotK and BotW because they have armor that reduce damage) do 2 damage (half a heart), puny monsters deal 1 damage, powerful monsters deal 4 damage and boss monsters deal 6 or 8 damage (2 full hearts). The late game has new ennemies that all deal double damage but there is also armor that divides the damage you take by 2
@@laytonjr6601 That depends on the Zelda game, some like Twilight Princess follow your logic, but others like Zelda 1 or ALTTP have extreme variations of damage, so the health bar there is not at all like Hollow Knight's, and closer to an RPG system where as you progress, you get more HP but so do the enemies in their damage output.
"And that's- wait, no no, the script keeps going... I'm- I'm sponsored? But who on earth would- oh, it's just an antivirus. I guess it's just a rite of passage of some kind... *Ahem*. Slip into a comfort fit with the newest line of flavored- hold a fuckin minute that's not-"
I imagine a horror movie turn to the camera with the foreboding line, "there's something here..." And then you do the horror movie violin as the sponsor pops out of the closet and jumpscares you. Ngl, I'd watch the shit out of that.
The biggest thing about the tiny numbers in the old Paper Mario games is that it enables *planning and strategizing*. You can make informed decisions about what moves to pick to optimize the battle, so you don't waste damage, turns or items. It is very satisfying if you have e.g. four enemies with 5 HP each and you do 2 damage to all with the partner then finish them off exactly using a fire flower.
Yeah the small numbers really make you actually choose between jumps or hammers, especially at the points in the story where you'd have one more boot upgrade than a hammer upgrade because they always give the attack method that deals more damage in one hit the upgrade after the multi-hit method.
There is a great saying out there that fits the theme perfectly: "One death is a tragedy. A thousand deaths is a statistic" When you're working with small numbers, your brain can actually visualize them better and in detail, while when millions and billions get involved - well, can you imagine a billion apples? No, you can't. The best your brain can do here is imagine a pile of apples and abstractly call it a billion, simply because it lacks processing power to detalize each apple individually. The summ of objects becomes a new object in itself - a pile. This is why big numbers suddenly feel smaller - because instead of counting individual objects that comprise them, we count the "piles". You don't say "My rogue deals 2153312 damage", you say "My rogue deals 2M damage" - you only count the biggest "pile", and 2 is a relatively small number.
I've tried visualizing individual objects, and even tho I have a fairly good imagination better than most of my peers, the best I can do is like maybe 6-8 if I'm really trying. It's really more a reflection on how easily we get task saturated and how we really aren't great at multitasking
One way to really understand this is to look through the lens of Clicker games. Those games function entirely off the concept of “big number go up” and the dopamine injections you get after reaching certain thresholds. The thing is though, the first time you hit a million cookies in Cookie Clicker might be momentous and allow a moment of meteoric growth, very soon after that value becomes trivialized as further upgrades are costing trillions of cookies and a million cookies are basically worth nothing. Once you raise the value ceiling to a new threshold, usually by adding another 0, the minimum value floor also gets raised up. Then anything at or below that floor feels no different than 0, and the numbers start getting so big you can no longer rationally conceptualize them. So then you reach the point of both your value floor and value ceilings feeling no different.
Monster Hunter is also a great example of a game that doesn't show life bars. Before MH World the game didn't even show your own damage numbers. Only your max and current HP. That was great because instead of focusing on numbers and watching a life bar, you rather observe the behavior of the Monster. Breaking body parts serves as milestones and the monster limping away shows that it's captureable and near death. Works perfectly fine and helps with the immersion.
It's funny that I remember people at the time saying that damage numbers ruined the series when they were added to World, even if they are defaulted to off (or at least I turned them off), because, like, what did you think was happening before? Every attack in nearly every game is dealing damage in numbers. It's a computer. Even those that claim to be simulations, it's still comparing number values to know the effect of a hit. And those that aren't? It's usually either the "did this kill" yes/no of a bullet or simulating stuff in such esoteric and incomplete ways that it doesn't feel good (and has a ton of math under the hood anyway).
@@wavesofbabies I love the reason why they introduced the damage numbers in world. They were testing out the inclusion of turf wars and the playtesters were annoyed with it, they thought it was annoying and getting in the way of their hunts. When they added damage numbers, the playtesters saw the huge amounts of damage that the turf wars were dealing and instantly became fans.
@@wavesofbabies Yeah, sure is crazy that how something is presented changes how people perceive and feel about it. Crazy. Never would've guessed. People obviously knew that there were hidden damage numbers before. Displaying the damage numbers ruins a sense of immersion and, as someone mentioned, you are likely to focus on the numbers rather than the monster and the fight itself.
As soon as you spoke about not revealing bosses' HP, it reminded me of D&D - our DM will describe opponents' physical state in combat rather than putting a number to anything, "how do they look?"/"they look bloodied" etc
I once read that in Etrian Odyssey series developers capped the maximal damage at 59630, because in japanese the sequence 5-9-6-3 is pronounced almost like "good job", and I have two reactions to this: 1. It's effing genius 2. It feels more visually appealing than the boring 99999
@@ultimaxkom8728 Go-ku-ro-san (ご苦労さん) About the trailing zero, I beleive the game's length and balance could not allow devs to stop character progression when they reach 6k damage - it's a classical turn based jrpg about watching numbers go up for dozens of hours after all :) As for the source - I'm not sure if youtube allows to post links, but I searched and found a tvtropes page about etrian odyssey III, where it is mentioned in the list of used tropes. > Cap: Damage from a single strike caps at 59,630. It's a Goroawase Number that reads "gokuro san", roughly meaning "good work on your efforts (in Min-Maxing)
@@ultimaxkom8728 Go-ku-ro-san (ご苦労さん) About the trailing zero, I beleive the game's length and balance could not allow devs to stop character progression when they reach 6k damage - it's a classical turn based jrpg about watching numbers go up for dozens of hours after all :) As for the source - I'm not sure if youtube allows to post links, but I searched and found a tvtropes page about etrian odyssey III, where it is mentioned in the list of used tropes. > Cap: Damage from a single strike caps at 59,630. It's a Goroawase Number that reads "gokuro san", roughly meaning "good work on your efforts (in Min-Maxing)
@@ultimaxkom8728 Go-ku-ro-san (ご苦労さん) About the trailing zero, I beleive the game's length and balance could not allow devs to stop character progression when they reach 6k damage - it's a classical turn based jrpg about watching numbers go up for dozens of hours after all :) As for the source - I'm not sure if youtube allows to post links, but I searched and found a tvtropes page about etrian odyssey III, where it is mentioned in the list of used tropes. > Cap: Damage from a single strike caps at 59,630. It's a Goroawase Number that reads "gokuro san", roughly meaning "good work on your efforts (in Min-Maxing)
there was an experiment done once where people were told to imagine they could buy a stereo sound system for $1500 at a local store, or drive an hour away to get the same one for $500, and everyone said they would drive an hour to save $1000. But then people were asked to imagine they could buy a car from a dealership for $30,000 or drive an hour to another dealership and get the same car for $29,000 and most said they wouldn't bother. It's the exact same deal but because the saving is smaller proportionally to the overall cost people perceive the value as less.
@@obsidianflight8065While, on some hand, that instinct is correct, you also kinda have to think how people buy cars and other big ticket items like that, they either pay out of pocket, or finance. The people paying out of pocket, sure that's the category you mentioned, people with 30k to drop on a car casually aren't going to be too terribly bothered to save 1k by inconveniencing themselves. On the other hand, people who finance a car are also... unlikely to have a car. So that hour away might actually be an insurmountable task compared to, "This dealership is two bus stops from my house, where that one would require all day to organize a trip to, and really I'm gonna be paying this car off for years, what's the difference between 30k and 29k when I'm never seeing that money anyway?"
There’s a reason you don’t hear many grouses about single attacks doing 8724 damage, and you hear a whole lot about how that one move just did half your health.
3:13 I have unironically been thinking about this recently. Damage is all relative. 1 HP, or even 9 million, is a scratch to something with a billion or more. Meanwhile 1 damage to an enemy with 5 health is equivalent to knocking off a limb.
I'm the same, though it's usually 4-6 digits depending on the game. For example in Genshin even though I regularly hit 5-6 digit damages, I just don't even read them because it's just noise. My hp is like 50k so me doing 10k dmg doesn't feel that impressive
@@Aryasvitkona It also depends on how frequently you hit stuff. In an MMO, I barely read my damage numbers, because there's just so much flying text. In a turn based RPG, or something like Monster Hunter though, I'm gonna watch my numbers like a hawk.
This was great. I’m a Montessori teacher, and I love the way quantity is conceptualized for young children. We have this material, where one unit is represented by a tiny green cube; one the ten is 10 of those cubes stacked together to make a bar (now it’s blue), the hundred is 10 of those bars put together which makes a square shape and is red, and the thousand is 10 of those hundred squares put together to form a cube (and it’s green), it goes like this up to a million and the million is HUGE, because proportionally it is the size of a million of those tiny units put together. Anyways, it’s cool and the children get excited, and they get a solid understanding of the hierarchy of numbers.
The Kingdom Hearts games have an interesting approach to damage values and health bars that I almost never see used anywhere else. The actual numeric values of damage and HP are basically pointless, you never even see them during gameplay. But the health bars still show absolute values instead of just a proportion. So health bars just get longer (or rather, turn into multiple health bars) as enemies scale up and get more health, and "half of one health bar" is the exact same amount of damage at the end of the game as it was in the beginning. It's just that tiny enemies start with like a tenth of a health bar, and the final boss has 15 full health bars. It's a great way of allowing players to intuitively gauge an enemy's health relative to other enemies, and relative to the amount of damage you do on an absolute scale without needing to get any numeric digits involved. It's also just insanely satisfying to see Sora's health bar stretch all the way across the screen, while you start dishing out attacks that burn away multiple health bars off the enemy at a time.
It's for this reason that I wish Donald and Goofy were allowed to have their KH1 style health bars. Fire Emblem on the 3DS also kinda did this. The health bars were all the same width as each other, but the color of the right side of the gradient, would be based on the absolute numerical value of their health. You could tell that an enemy whose HP bar was a red-to-green gradient, had less health than the one with a red-to-blue gradient, even though both their health bars were full.
You already mentioned how the Mario & Luigi games use rather low numbers, and I think this is a strength with all Mario RPGs, especially Paper Mario. I dare even say that the low, single-digit damage numbers are the very core of Paper Mario's combat, specifically because they are, as you said, tangible. Strategy in Paper Mario all singlehandedly revolves around precisely calculating how much damage you deal and take on any given turn. And yet, I only rarely see people discuss this point when talking about what makes these games great.
those small numbers are also a great part of the mindgames defense puts you on in TTYD specifically. Do you go for the safer block that just lowers the damage by 1 (or a bit more if you have the right badges on) or go for the more tightly timed Superguard that not only negates all damage but also, outside of most ranged attacks, deals the enemy a point of damage?
I’ve always seen it as “these are cute cartoon characters. I can totally see a goomba having only 3-50 hp or Mario kicking a plant in the face for 50-70.” It’d feel outright bizarre if Luigi flail’d his arms around and dealt 9999 or something. Though this also explains why I never really liked how much damage they do endgame. The Cackletta 1 area in Superstar Saga always felt like the sweet spot in terms of stats for me.
Id say it was mainly superstar saga where the numbers could start to heavily creep. I remember my playthrough back on the wii u all of their stats were over 100, and with busted badge and equipment their numbers got absurd. @Phoenixflara This gets reign back in the later games tho
I think my favorite "small number" game has to be Into the Breach. It's a terrifying game where you're protecting civilization from an army of alien, skyscraper-sized bugs, but nothing in the game ever has more than like... eight health, max. It really helps you instantly understand everything's relative strengths and plan out your turn, which is really useful because you have to do a lot of thinking during every single turn
Never forget that making big chunks makes for a better understandment of what you're losing every time it hits in terms of narrative. It's probably inspired by the original system for hit points (maritime strategy documents, in which 1 health point reflected how many shots of a mortar they could take) and that makes it very impactful cuz a mortar can just destroy thousands of lifes by destroying a building.
Excellent example! Into the Breach takes a ton of cues from board game design - which has to be small numbers because there’s no CPU processing stuff. In such a context, the ideal number of damage for one attack to deal is usually… 1. This makes it easier for players to conceptualize how long it will take to defeat an enemy in terms of numbers of actions/turns, rather than damage, or a health bar. A 4HP enemy will take 4 standard attacks to defeat. Simple! Then it becomes super easy to build upon that. You can get an attack buff to deal 2 damage for a while, which essentially means you’re attacking twice in one turn. Or the game is multiplayer cooperative, so if there’s 4 players at the table, everyone needs to commit to doing a single standard attack to defeat the enemy in one round. It’s all very elegant.
I love it when games have numbers that start very small and progressively get big but not to the insane lengths of the millions. Everytime you hit another extra digit (e.g. first 99+ damage hit or first 999+ hit) it always feels soo much more impactful since you’ve never dealt that much before and further strengthens the progression you’ve made as a player.
Yes, that is exactly what I look for in most RPGs with numbers. Not enormous numbers, but a significant progression when comparing start and finish. It's like in my childhood, catching a glimpse of gameplay from my older sister being far ahead in her file, see the big numbers and feel in awe, and then being hyped to pick the game myself and work my way to get to those numbers, and possibly surpass them. The 4 digit cap is also very harmonious to look at when it's animated in a wave ( Final Fantasy IV, V, X, XII, Super Mario RPG... ), you kinda want to reproduce that by waving your 4 long fingers and tap your desk in the same way.
Yeah I remember it blowing my mind as a kid when in FF7 you could bust through 1000HP, then when it capped at 9999 for both damage and your party HP I felt like I was a badass by then. I feel like to me anything over 9999 is kinda ridiculous. Plus I loved in FF7 that if you happened to get your HP reduced to 777 some buff happened. Or maybe it was all 7777. Can't recall but I loved that idea.
the way my jaw dropped when you revealed the hp at 15:45 what an amazing way to make the player feel the size of that number. It reminds me of the summoning salt tetris video where he revealed how far that one got guy got ahead in the competition and the chart just scrolls for like 2 minutes
The controller vibration with each punch, the baffled expression of the villain, the monstrous expression on lea for doing so much damage, the smug look on sergey for making her able to do that...thay is how you make big numbers feel big. Its kinda like berserk in which guts has big fuck off sword that is described as a big hunk of iron and everytime he swings it, in every frame in the manga i can almost hear the sound of that heavy thing swinging.
Gastropolis is such a great boss. Thrown as a last ditch effort to stop you while you're quite literally breaking through dungeon instances, an impossible obstacle created by someone who loathes such a concept. But, with Sergei's help, you manage to damage, and eventually kill, it. The nigh impossible, about to be overcome, as as The Designer says. For the game designer that he is, nothing is more thrilling. And so his exasperation turns into pure, undiluted hype.
Spoilers for CrossCode The Creator in Vermillion Tower is also extremely well made in this regard, as Gastropolis was a long while ago in terms of the game progression, the high damage rush hangs in the back of your mind, and seeing the damage slowly yet exponentially multiply again gives even more hype than even the Gastropolis Fight. But The Ultimate Experience fighting with The Creator is even more of a power trip than the Gastropolis fight, and Gastropolis serves as a huge part of being a comparison for the huge numbers. Oh you're dealing maybe quadrillion amounts of damage at a time in Gastropolis? Well The Creator drops the ball with damage numbers that span almost the entire screen, with the added multiplier bar also serving as just how much power you're inflicting with just one strike alone. Truly The Ultimate Experience.
@@Tetramare spoilers Yeah I fucking loved the final boss. When you have to solve a mini puzzle and then blast his head with a ether snipe is peak gaming for me. And the D'orbis or whatever his name was in the dlc? Best boss fight ever
The smaller numbers of _Paper Mario_ and _Bug Fables_ have an additional advantage over larger numbers. This was briefly touched upon in the video but not dived into. Because they can be readily known and usually quickly calculated, the smaller numbers encourage a knowledge and exploitation of the surrounding battle system in a way that the large-number systems can't. When every attack deals three digits or higher of damage, it's harder to evaluate which strategies and techniques play best together. When you're mainly dealing in 2s and 3s, such evaluation is much more manageable, and the game can push you to think more deeply about the system (see _Bug Fables_ ' hard mode badge).
Small numbers like in Bug Fables and Paper Mario help to highlight another important part of this conversation - balance. Elden ring can afford to have a lot of small buffs or debuffs to damage - a 3% increase to defense, for example. But for Paper Mario, the difference between 2 and 3 damage is MASSIVE and, as a result, any change in those numbers can be the difference between overpowered and weak attacks/skills. For the developers, there may be a lot less freedom to tune items and mechanics when the numbers are very small, but when done right, it can be more satisfying to see strategies play out.
Paper Mario is nowhere any bit balanced. Hammer attacks are bad and danger mario exists. Mega and power rush with powerbounce, stampede etc is so broken. Paper Mario couldn't even balance small numbers well.
@@dave9515 the entire point is that smaller numbers are a lot harder to balance. For example, you may have situations in wich 2 damage are too little, but 3 damage is too much. But if they were 20 and 30 you would have 21, 22, 23 and so on.
@@purplecrowbar1332 Op is saying it can be much more satisfying seeing what people come up with in low number games. Strategies don't change because of number values alone. There has to be friction and other things to influence. that. Low number games will never work as well as games with higher numbers is my take on this whole topic. There is no way to account for all the variables at play with low number scaling and such.
Another thing that makes big hits in games with small numbers feel even more powerful is VISUAL AND SOUND EFFECTS. Playing through that snail fight in crosscode made me feel *powerful,* and not just because I can finally deal damage to this behemoth by dealing trillions of damage, but because the screen SHAKES and the hit sound is LOUD and whenever it changes phase the game STOPS like I just stopped a speeding train with my bare hands. It's AWESOME
I think it also might be compressibility: When you see 9999, you go "oh they're just trying to exaggerate, it's just a 9 with exclamation marks, 9 spam, who cares". It's possible the very repetition of the number makes your brain try to compress it to a simpler number, efficient memory usage and learning strategies and all that, just like a computer does with long decimals.
Yeah when I see 9999 in a Final Fantasy game, I'm running under the assumption that odds are, I'll need to do that damage 15-20 times to win the fight. Nothing to do with the actual numbers involved, I just try to condense down as much as I can to make it simple
@@hammerstix5791 Yeah 9999 is an interesting case. Maybe it's just because I grew up with FF and got used to it but having a damage cap when you're high level has an interesting effect that sort of shrinks everything to feel like small numbers again. How many hits of ~ten thousand do I need to deal? Do I have moves that can go over the cap by hitting multiple times? If a move can reliably hit the cap it now feels like 1 and something that does 7000 feels like 0.7
@@silphvAs a casual player of FFX, hitting the damage cap is such a satisfying milestone in a playthrough, and then breaking the damage cap with summons or celestial weapons feels godlike.
I think it’s because capped damage feels bad after adjusting to it. After a certain amount of progress in one of these games, to the point where every move is dealing 9999, your brain recognizes that it keeps seeing the same thing over and over again and starts treating it as 9999=1 or even as just a visual symbol that indicates “the move dealt standard damage”.
@@MonochromaticPrism Definitely depends on the game. For me, when I think of JRPGS, you might reach capped damage super late in the game, and it's still relatively powerful at endgame(except for superbosses). That makes hitting all 9s more novel and rewarding, even if you're seeing the same number over and over. It'll only get really boring if you spend like 100+ hours in the endgame doing something tedious, which is just natural to grinding.
The gastropolis fight in crosscode and [spoiler final boss] were the few examples of big numbers feeling right. It even played into the relationship between lea and sergey. Sergey uses the hax to repeatedly double lea’s attacks, increasing the damage by a power of two each time. But beyond the numbers, they are both using the “power of two” as in teamwork! It’s such an effective moment.
yeah, it not only works mechanically, but is wonderful as a storytelling device. not to get into specifics, but the section of the game before Gastropolis makes you (Lea) feel very powerless and hopeless for awhile. things finally start changing here and this fight shows that very well
One great example I had with big, BIG numbers is Disgaea. Playing the first one I tried tackling the last optional boss (who is level 4000, but I was playing with harder levels so he was 9999). It attacked me and did a 5 digit number. I thought "that's so low" until I noticed, it wasn't 5 digits It was 4 digits + a kanji And the kanji meant ten thousands. That's what "big" means to me: when you have to change the way to write to represent it
There's a lurking variable in this phenomenon in your Yugioh example. Yugioh is an extremely fast paced and highly lethal game where interaction density and interaction types means far more than raw damage at the end of the day. Getting chunked for half of your health in Yugioh doesn't feel cataclysmic because it means you're still going to see your next turn, have a chance to rebuild your board, break their board, and win. The most stressful moment in Yugioh is when you run out of interaction points before your opponent runs out of gas in their combo and you're sitting there anxiously waiting to see if what you did was enough to survive whereas the moment you're getting bonked for 1900 is the point of relief where you know you did survive, as counter-intuitive as it sounds compared to something like Magic. A monster hitting you for 7999 in Yugioh would feel a little bit silly for how specific it is, but would still be a relief where you know you're still in the game as you draw and start your own combo; the scale of the numbers isn't really much of a factor here.
I found it funny when he mentioned Yuhioh and showed Gameplay of Chaos Golem being Summoned 😂 4500 to the face is bad enough but if you thought to set a few monsters you are dead to 100% just because it hits over defence and attacks all monsters Like he himself does a bit more then half your LP
Fun fact: My friends and I played Dnd for a long time and they would always comment on how I measured my characters health score, which was having my Total at the top, drawing a line underneath, and then tallying up the damage. Any time I was healed, I just minus'd it from the damage tally. Made it significantly easier to follow than starting at 106 and reducing it over and over.
Another example of “suddenly having a lot more numbers” from personal experience: The hardest superboss fight in EBF5, a long-lived Flash game that has mobile and Steam ports, has been preceded by a bunch of other strong superbosses that actively limit you in some way. A turn limit, no summons, a sudden need for extreme fire resistance, and so on. You go to fight the last boss, mouse over its main gimmick, and- It’s a free stacking omnibuff? Like within 4 turns you’ll hit the cap on buffs in this game, from HP to evade. Numbers like this don’t usually happen. And then your first salvo of attacks either whiff or barely scratch God (the boss). And then God (actual boss name) kills a party member in one swing. And has two attacks each turn. Dying resets buffs to zero. All your buff spells only accelerate how fast you get back to max buffs, and are otherwise totally useless. It’s a power trip, followed by realizing this is the cruelest prank you could pull in a JRPG. The rest of the fight just compounds on that feeling, where God’s damage options get stronger and stronger with no true relief besides desperately trying to win a damage race.
I wouldn't call the buff spells useless here, specifically *because* they increase your stats quickly. In fact, Seventh Heaven and Art Attack are no less of a Godsend (ironic pun intended) for that very reason. Auto-Revive, from the likes of Nine Lives and even Genesis when it's available, is also more important than ever for preserving those max buffs. However, God's Limit Break hits everyone (including backup, albeit somewhat less ridiculously hard) *15 times,* over a long enough period of time that Morale becomes useless and _even Auto-Revive might not save the party!_ The Enchant status (which can be self-inflicted by Defending with certain equips, or summoning an Angel Mirror) is the only reliable way to survive this attack...but it leaves the frontline party susceptible to double damage from a Physical follow-up.
@@steam-powereddolphin5449 This are also true, and when I say “the buffs do nothing”, I mostly mean your non-Limit options. At best, you are spending one turn to gain 3 turns worth of the omnibuff, which doesn’t sound too bad until you consider some of them have no spell or are single target buffs only. At least raw defense is pretty easy to solve. And sometimes the initial type of magic attack is relatively easy to survive with no buffs, even if it will absolutely chunk you if it’s used twice. And just to throw my hat in the ring for strategic advice (and mention some other aspects of the fight): - God also has access to two very simple buff actions that make your life a little harder. Both of them max out attack/defense, putting him briefly on about the same level as you. The attack buff heals him too, and the defense buff adds Defend (a generic halving of damage for a turn) and Bless (debuffn’t). I’m pretty sure at least the defense buff also clears negative statuses - Those actions can happen randomly, but also if you try to cheese God with status effects. High poison/scorch/curse stacks trigger defense, and high weaken stacks trigger the heal and damage buff. You can actually use this predictability to your advantage with poison spam and Giga Drill. - Get your relevant status resistances maxed out, but you can safely ignore Weaken as an immunity. It’s only relevant when you’re struggling to get your buffs back, and you’ll only be losing out on 5% damage. - The sword cats are okay to leave around. The gun cats can sometimes ruin an attempt if you don’t have full death resistance. DO NOT LET MAGE CATS LIVE. Healing scales with health, and God will be healing plenty as-is without help. - After getting your immunities in order, get as much of either kind of defense on you as possible (or work around a designated glass cannon, you’ve got options). There’s no damage types in this fight and evade is awful for a bunch of reasons here, so things like knight armor and robot gear are your friend. If you have enough defense set up, tanking Spirit Bomb from full health is possible, and free if you’ve got Auto-Revive handy. - Do not damage God until you’re ready to tank a Spirit Bomb or know you’re safe. His Limit Breaks are based on damage dealt, not HP%, so do not try eyeballing it if you don’t want to do math. - Give NoLegs your Pixel Shades. This is good advice and also does something.
Nice seeing an EBF fan here. And I think that the numbers you see in EBF are on the cusp of being too high but not quite. Unless you're playing New Game+ or have grinded like crazy you didn't see attacks dealing more than 5 digit numbers without lots of setup.
@@TheDemonChara By the time you're at the final bosses, certain limit breaks can usually deal 6-digit damage with the standard arrangement of (de)buffs, STAB equipment, and weakness abuse. 7- or even 8-digit damage still tends to require higher level/stats (such as in NG+) and/or more elaborate setups.
the reason why a million feels like the middle of that line is because humans think logarithmically- at scales that big, orders of magnitude are generally more relevant and important. Relative Largeness is useful, and 1,000 is as small compared to 1,000,000 as 1,000,000 is to 1,000,000,000. three orders of magnitude.
Something I find really interesting is how our understanding (or lack thereof) of numbers can also work in the complete opposite direction. When IO Interactive was beta testing Freelancer in Hitman 3 everyone complained that the rewards weren't high enough, and sure enough they reworked it when Hitman Freelancer officially released and everyone felt satisfied. All they did was add two 0s to the dollar amounts displayed in the game (so instead of earning $5 you now earned $500 e.g.). The costs of items in the shops also got two 0s added to them, the actual values didn't change, but receiving bigger numbers as rewards *feels* better, even if it's all worth the same at the end of the day.
@@JrTroopa Well it's not literally US dollars, it's a made up currency called Merces which I always kind of assumed was meant to be some sort of cryptocurrency or whatever. Getting paid 5 bitcoin to kill someone wouldn't be minimum wage. The point is the value is entirely made up so it can be whatever, but bigger numbers *feel* better as rewards.
@@jubjubwantrubrub The mind definitely associates the currency to dollars, don’t you think? A bitcoin can sometimes feel big because it’s written like 1.0000000 bitcoin
Another funny effect this reminded me of, was in World of Warcraft's beta. There was a mechanic that was basically universally loathed by the players: exhaustion. When you play for a long time and get a lot of XP, you became exhausted and started receiving just half of that. The game was telling you to go touch grass for a while. Players hated it. So Blizzard completely reversed it: turned it into Rested bonus for not playing the game for a while, doubling your XP gain. Meanwhile, the normal XP you gain was halved. They made it so that *players are by default exhausted*, reframed it into seeming like a bonus, and people loved it! It's how the game works to this day! Of course in modern WoW the XP rewards are designed with this in mind, but the initial levelling experience was made assuming players would be trying to avoid exhaustion. I feel like this is part of why WoW's original level grind was kinda hellish, you'd run out of quests to do and had to just farm mobs for long periods of time. Though even with "permanent rested" I think there were a bit too few quests, it would certainly make it more comfortable.
its not the opposite, its the same way. except instead of a healthbar thats taking damage, its a bank account. as he said, losing 1900 out of 8000 felt small, but losing 4.75 out of 20 felt large. so spending $1 out of $5 feels large, but $20 out of $100 feels small.
Something that also interests me is the sheer difference between the numbers the players deal and the numbers enemies deal. In Honkai: Star Rail for instance, if you deal 10k dmg (in the lategame), that's barely significant, but if one of your characters takes 10k dmg, they've been absolutely obliterated.
Saw this premise and immediately thought of Oldschool Runescape When you start the game off at level 3 hitting mostly 0's and 1's, every time you gain a single max hit feels like a massive leap. When your absolute max health is 99, even chip damage feels substantial. With a max of 28 inventory slots, every item you pick up or drop is a meaningful decision. I think that design is part of what keeps a 20-year-old browser-based point and click adventure game relevant (and arguably more popular than ever), despite being such a notoriously "grindy" experience; each level increase feels meaningful and impactful. The scaling is also really well designed, too- level 92 in a skill is exactly halfway xp wise to 99, meaning that unlocking most of the skill-locked content in the game is pretty reasonably accessible but getting those last 7 levels to max is rewarding in its own way for those that suffer through the grind. It's part of what keeps me coming back to it while numerous "triple-A" titles collect dust in my Steam library That and the flexibility of attention you can pay to it- currently watching this video while grinding my last level to 99 strength for that sweet, sweet +1 to max hit. Case in point
13:23 "Can you imagine if your debit card had a life bar" I can. I think most banking apps in Poland let you display your statement as a bar or percentage meter of your set "base value"
My biggest problem with gigantic numbers is when they don't have separators. You just dealt 1000000000 damage or got that many coins as a reward or something. The zeros start to blend in with each other, you'll just be confused instead of feeling like a millionaire. 1,000,000,000 is way easier to read, especially when the game also wants to be fast paced and flashy. Or just use K and M, that's even clearer. 999K, dang, so close, then BAM, you're in 1M territory. Much more rewarding than a random string of numbers you probably won't be arsed to read anyway.
This is just a random thought but maybe the fact that it's often RPGs with the ridiculously high damage values that are impossible to imagine is just... part of the fantasy feeling. Like, you're not *supposed to* imagine exactly what is happening there, just let go and let the magic happen until the boss drops dead.
Absolute facts. Sometimes lower numbers hit harder for the reasons discussed, but the stupidly high numbers are so integral to the experience and aesthetic of certain in-game worlds.
Vampire Survivors had a very different use for them: It's designed in every way to emulate the dopamine-dispensing addiction tactics of casino gambling, without the insidious move of actually charging you money for each hit.
Well, in rpgs, it is pretty common to go from fighting goblins to fighting gods, so the use of such large numbers could be seen as indicating the shear difference in power scale from early game enemies and late game bosses. Of course an early game goon is gonna have 10 hp, while the dread god Yaldabaoth the demiurge is gonna have 10 million hp.
I think the battle cats handle the puny paradox in a good way. There’s no health bars nor damage numbers except for the bases, so when your fighting an enemy the only way you know how tanky they are is a knock back that happens when you deal enough damage. So you just go by vibes and vibes only when It comes to enemy health (excluding bases) and the funny thing is that everyone is doing massive damage yet you’d never know if you didn’t look behind the scenes
I like looking to Undertale for using numbers in a creative way. The actual damage numbers don't really matter that much (unless you are like a speedrunner grinding out quads or something idk), since you have the information from the healthbars, and they are typically smaller numbers. But, whenever they want you to feel the impact of an attack from a story perspective, they will change it to whatever they want. I'm putting some spoilery examples I can think of off the top of my head in the read more. Killing most bosses instantly in Genocide, Undyne the undying resisting that damage, the normal last hit on Asgore surprising you with like 7x the normal damage, the tiny hits on Omega Flowey turning into massive hits in the finale, Chara filling the screen with damage 9s, Sans and the Amalgams flipping the script by having no numbers, Asriel doing sort of the opposite by taking your health into the decimal places by orders of magnitude
@@merlin9845 Okay this is kind of half-spoilers so read carefully: 143 means “I love you” (the letter counts match up) and this is emotionally significant as it’s something that the character Mari is known for saying frequently, and Mari and the Something (actual name of the enemy) have some kind of connection.
Undertale also lies constantly with the stats. The code is 98% spaghetti and the atk/def you get when inspecting enemies does not match the in game stats Also there's no damage formula, it's only if/else statements
I grew up on the big numbers of final fantasy, and I do admit its always satisfying to reach the 9999s, but over a dozen games it just taught me to ignore numbers, that they are just a thing that steadily grow over the course of the game and dont really matter that much as long as you are keeping up with the dificulty curb. Sometimes it even has the opposite effect, where keeping numbers low but winning on strategy makes it way more satisfying
This is the bread and butter of low level runs of FFVI and IX. As someone who did both ( Regrouping the entire party of VI at level.... 17? in WoR and a near-full party of lvl1s for most of IX and 1 single forced XP absorber... ), beating the incredible odds stacked against you feels amazing.
The funny thing about YuGiOh is that, since YuGiOh never uses a number below fifty, the big numbers are entirely ornamental. The game's numbers could be scaled down by a factor for fifty, and on a *technical* level, they don't change (however, you addressed the actual change in the video). If I were to fancy a guess, the size of YuGiOh's numbers come from two sources. First of all, the card game we know today had its origin in being a plot device for a manga about a kid who likes all manner of games. Second of all, the flashy nature of huge numbers in the thousands helped YuGiOh set itself apart from the tens and hundreds in Pokemon and the ones and tens of MTG.
Probably had to juice up the numbers so they look impressive to people who deal with prices in Yen on a daily basis. "20 lifepoints? That's not even worth a fifth of a basic riceball!"
An interesting thing that I don't think is mentioned enough in this video, is that in a lot of RPGs, the player is dealing hundreds of damage to enemies, and the enemies correspondingly have that much health to tank it, makes sense. But then you look at your player, and they only have 120hp, they deal out hundreds tp thousands of damage on the regular, but the moment an enemy deals you 45hp, it's a HUGE deal. I think it's interesting how they play with the numbers to make you feel powerful yet frail like you could die at any moment in the same time.
A good example is in smt nocturne the players HP cap is 999 but the mc regularly deals out 3500+ damage to the final boss with proper use of buffs, debuffs, and charge
That IS the case in D&D as well! I think it's interesting how, despite them blowing up the numbers to absurdity, the core mechanic of "players deal a shit ton of damage, monsters not so much", was kept.
Hey Daryl, I love your vids! This is definitely a concept that has been bugging me for years since I noticed it. Interestingly, as an amateur game dev, I've been working on an FPS game last week where each person has 3 HP, and every single gun deals 1 damage. No exceptions. Stupidest idea ever, huh? Surprisingly it turned out pretty fun, adding a real sense of danger and tangibility to every bullet whizzing by you haha. When you took a single damage, or dare I say, TWO damage, you knew you weren't going to recover from that. This might actually be more of a low-health effect rather than a low-numbers effect, but whatever, I already wrote this whole thing XD Once again, keep up the amazing psychology videos man!
Kinda sounds like Superhot or Hotline Miami where 1 shot always = 1 kill either way round (Tho ig both also have stun/knockdown mechanics (throwing weapons in both games, doors in Miami))
Only problem, what would the “max health” be on the health bar? I don’t know much about money, but I feel like if it used your life savings as max health most purchases wouldn’t even register on the display.
@@kaleenar963 I would just set it based on my budget. If I want to spend X per month, that's what I'd set the health bar to, and then I'd do a better job at saving the rest
Interesting idea. It looks like Visa beat you to the idea of a live balance display (US8308059B2), but I haven't seen a "healthbar", per se. (For the record, this is not legal advice.)
as a SRPG nerd i've always greatly appreciated games that use small numbers. when games expect you to strategise around the damage you're dealing/taking, keeping those numbers low means it's quick and intuitive to understand the magnitude of damage which makes executing strategies much more interesting and snappier since the focus is what you do with the numbers you're given, rather than deciphering the numbers themselves. It's a big part of why I always find myself coming back to Fire Emblem; it's low damage values and simple damage calculations (ex. defense is just a flat -damage taken, not a % reduction and accuracy is just a %chance to hit, not a variable damage roll) makes the games just flow really nicely while still providing an enjoyable challenge in how you use the very simple info to your advantage.
oh yeah FE's low numbers make the fact that crits deal triple damage something to FEAR... or something hilarious when the poor early game bandit who's already dealing 0 damage to Frederick lands his 1% hit/1% crit & still deals 0 damage followed by Frederick's axe to the face. (yes this happened to me & I still find it GLORIOUS)
In the original Gamecube TTYD, the highest enemy HP value in the game is Bonetail at 200. The Switch remake adds two new harder bosses, and with them in the game the highest HP is…still Bonetail at 200. The new bosses have HALF her total HP. Instead they challenge you to deal that damage smartly. Excellent design that keeps the game’s intent intact.
I don't know that game but I really like that approach. I used to play Magic in the early 2000s, which by then had been out for enough cycles that they'd learned some lessons about game balancing. And the trend then was generally away from big number creatures or at least where they existed, they were often expensive enough to be seen as not very good. The scariest thing on the field might be 1/1 but it has a strong ability, or maybe your deck is built around making yourself discard the too-expensive big creatures and have something else bring it into play for free, but it was complicated and risky. Anyway I liked that, it wasn't "bigger is better" it was always "more efficient is better". (I don't know what the game is like these days.)
@@silphv There’s never been a better time to get into it! The Remake has even caused prices on the original game to sink dramatically if you have original hardware.
Smaller numbers really help if games expect you to do more specific calculations in your head. In many JRPGs, the damage calculation formula is very obtuse and you’re not really supposed to know how to calculate. In these cases, you’re meant to mostly vaguely know “high strength = bigger damage” but not much else. Large damage numbers with quite a bit of variance helps keep damage calculation vague in this case. However, in a game where you are meant to plan much more thoroughly, being able to calculate stuff ahead of time really helps. Small numbers really help with this type of game. A good example of this is Fire Emblem. Fire emblem puts a lot of focus on planning. All enemies can (usually) be seen, enemy movement range/attack can be seen, enemy stats can be seen, combat results can be mostly seen before fighting, and in newer games even the target an enemy will pick on their turn can be seen. Fire emblem likes to give a lot of information to the player and doesn’t like to keep many things vague. As such, its stat system reflects this. Damage has a consistent formula: Strength + Weapon Might - Enemy Defense = Damage. This only works because stat numbers are kept small around 1-50 and damage numbers are small around 1-140. I think this is a good example of how the scale of the damage can also affect how a player is meant to strategize.
Yeah you're right. Another good example is Pokemon, while it doesn't matter for regular players, calculations around the stats are extremely important for competitive. Pretty much everything deals in numbers up to maybe a few hundred at most, whether stats or HP or base damage of moves, and high-level players have a very good idea going into a tournament about which attacks from which pokemon under which conditions will be an OHKO or a roll or a guaranteed survive. The way the math works out is just small numbers leading to other small numbers in roughly the same range so it stays meaningful
I love when numbers get significantly higher the more you understand and fully utilise the game’s mechanics. Put simply, big numbers = BIG serotonin 🙏🙏
Counter exemple: clicker games (like cookie clicker). 10H gold is miles lower than 10T gold but when you start reaching numbers that high it just becomes noise
PSA for people with money health bar thing. In Canada at least (dunno about elsewhere) TD offers an app that visualizes how much money youre spending using a gauge. It calculates your budget based on your previous spending. Very helpful. Called myspend. I will say having it be a health bar rather than a pressure gauge would be better imo
"Death's Door" is a perfect example of how to handle lifebars and dmg output, by removing them altogether. You really feel how powerful you are only by how enemies react and look and it's brilliant.
I think one of the things I think got glossed over here that I'd want to add about large numbers, is that IIRC, when it comes to large numbers, we automatically start to process things logarithmically instead of linearly. That is to say, we start to conceptualise the distances between things not in terms of addition, but in terms of multiplication. One million is one thousand times one thousand, so in a linear metric, yeah, it's 1000th of the way there. But in logarithmic space, where things are multiplied instead of added, it's half way there, because you only need to multiply by 1000 a second time. It definitely doesn't explain everything about how and why we give up on processing big numbers and how estimation can fail to make us process the scale of things, but I do think it's interesting in and of itself, and helps explain why people make the specific mistake (or perhaps, non-mistake in some sense?) at the start.
Dude. Idk what it was, but when you started playing on my watch later, I was like, "Yes! Finally, a video I'll like! " and I didn't even look at the title yet. Keep doing what you're doing, man!! God Bless!
TTYD feels like such a perfect example. Having a build dealing 10-20 damage per hit in a system balance around 1-6 is so much more fun then when numbers scale up to the quadrillions
Totally agree with the Copy Flower point. If an attack deals 120 damage and is dealt in one blow, it makes that one strike more impactful. But if it's dealt in a series of 4 damage strikes, suddenly it feels like a gargantuan accomplishment and feels like you're doing more damage despite it still being 120 damage total. (Plus, those volley attacks are fun with percentages and multipliers!)
This makes me recall how Mario + Rabbids is mostly a copy of X-Com in the way the battles work, but one of the differences is that X-Com uses single-digit numbers, but Mario + Rabbids uses 3-to-4 digit numbers, and one interesting thing that comes out of that is the way it’s implemented in the games, the small numbers actually make X-Com *more* intense and the larger numbers help Mario + Rabbids feel more *more* relaxed, which is in stark contrast to comparing Paper Mario to Final Fantasy or something.
It's funny, I experienced this when travelling in Japan. The yen is really tiny, with 100 yen being around a dollar. So if 100 is nothing, then 1,000 isn't really much either, which means 10,000 isn't too much either. After looking at all these big numbers (after a lifetime of 40 dollars feeling like a lot) I kind of lost perspective and spent a lot more than I should have.
Huh. I had a different experience. The Japanese yen is in the same category as the Korean won for me, both of which I have no issue with because I see them as basically one to one equivalents - just move the decimal. My brain would just hack off the last two zeros for the yen, or the last three for the won, without much thought ... now the Czech koruna on the other hand~
100 yen = 1 dollar is an easy mental calculation to make, but it's not really true anymore. 100 yen is only about 64 cents today. Or, to convert the other way, 1 dollar is about 157 yen.
When you think about it, 40 Dollars are 4000 cents, so we could bloat our numbers just like with Yen and some others. That said, the tiny, basic cheeseburger at McDonald's currently costs 239 cents here.
@@magicalgirlnicole I'd shamelessly round that to 50 cents in my head like I've done with Dominican Pesos, and then probably overspend by the end of the day lol.
My personal favourite for this is a dice based card game I played a while back. I don't remember the title sadly, but the base concept is that you start off with attacks that deal 2 damage, and healing that gains you 3 life. You face bosses ranging from 20 health to stuff like 999, 999, 999 (on 3 different sets of health!!) However, you get to do shenanigans! You get to roll dice, and replace any of the numbers on the screen with the result. You can reroll that attack that deals 2 damage 2 times to deal 20 damage 20 times!!! You can reroll that 999 to be a 6! It feels epic, and it feels powerful, both because the numbers are kept small enough to understand, and because seeing those huge numbers, when you're used to dealing with smaller ones, feels terrifying! The final boss being three sets of 999 is terrifying! Right up until you reroll their health, and begin to chew through them! Works brilliantly, by utilising small numbers to make those bigger numbers hit all the harder. (And, to be fair, 999 is a lot!!!)
not sure if it's the exact same game, but I played something really similar called DICEOMANCER. Getting to replace any number you want with a 1-6 was really fun, and opened up a lot of options just seeing what numbers you could change and what effect it would have
I’m glad you showed so much Persona 4 when talking about health/mana bars. I was irked the whole time that everyone’s bars were the same size regardless of the size of their numbers. It was hard to wrap my brain around 50 mp being nothing to Yukiko and being a problem for Yosuke
In octopath, attacks at low levels are double, sometimes triple digit. But by stacking buffs, debuffs, breaking, and using your boosts, you can easily reach quadruple digits. This makes your strategy feel very impactful right from the start. In addition, the numbers themselves, that is to say, the visual representation, get bigger and redder along with the numerical value. This makes it easy to just disregard the exact value. You just intrinsically know "this is big damage".
This also applies to stories! A story that is more grounded/low stakes like someone you like being ill feels *more* real than one where the city/continent/nation/world is at stack. In the former, behind basic empathy, the writers have to pull out those emotions out of you if they want you feel something, while the latter, well, if you want to read the story or just like the characters, the world *has* to stay alive for that. Of course knowing when and where to employ low and stakes would make you stories better than just sticking to one of them. Conversely, this paradox is the reason why a lot people dislike power scalers, since they strip away all that makes up a character just to turn them into stat sticks and that feels disingenuous to lot of people.
And even if there's a high stakes situation, there's probably a low stake stealing the spotlight. A surprise tornado is headed for the city and might kill hundreds or thousands? I'm getting out of here, BUT WHERE IS MY CAT?!
During the intro when you were talking about how smaller numbers hurt more I legitimately winced at the idea of a 4/4 to the face. I dont even play magic all that often but from my few times playing you would definetly feel 1/5 of your health gone in a single attack.
I think that Final Fantasy 16 uses damage number for evoking a feeling of being badass well. Sometimes, while playing story missions, you turn into an Eikon, this big badass kaiju and fight other kaijus. These fights are arguably the best parts of the game, the setpieces sometimes made me go apeshit lol. I think one of the main reasons what make these fights so fucking cool and badass is shifting the damage numbers from 450 with light attack in human form, to dealing 23,800 (also light attack). The big number doesn't necessarily represent the percentage of health pool (duh, you're fighting other badass fantasy dinosaurs), but the numbers alone definitely contributes to power fantasy.
Honestly, this helped me realize how my math wired brain works differently from the rest, as i always try to check the numbers not the health bar, since if i know the attacks is going to do 1000 damage and the boss barely noticed it, upgrading my weapon or leveling up to get 300 damage may not be enough, and i intantly go into mental calculator mode to figure or how many hits the boss will tank right at that moment, and try to estimate how many it would tank with x amount of upgrades
Yeah, happened to me in Terraria. Bcs game gives you your dps it's much easier to divide boss health by it then try to figure out something from a boss bar
13:26 mine kinda does! All the budget tools in the financial institutions’s official app are visual. They have the dollar amounts there and it’s all visualized mostly by pie graphs (occasionally bar graphs). It really does give a better grasp of how much of our budget we’ve spent/how much of each budget item we have left.
I would say if the battles with high numbers would also be devastating to the surrounding (as soon as physics simulations are not that expensive anymore) would be a good way to visualize such strong attacks
This was another cool video, thanks Daryl. I've had thoughts on these orders of magnitudes in game also since FFX and ever since through my game design journey. It's always great to delve into why we do things the way we do and why it works or doesn't. You could tie into this topic well by analysing the ways that games do information feedback to the players, as the numbers and health and such are exactly that. The next step from "No health bars no numbers" is other methods of representing damage inflicted without showing a player numbers: changing target appearance to match a certain health state is an obvious one, or breaking parts apart. In all case, they are interesting mixes of trying to convey important information to the player, while also serving game vibes which may or may not be harmed by simply splashing the screen with numbers.
I think you will get different results regarding whether people prefer big or small numbers depending on where you get your sampling from. And I'm not even talking about whether it's from people who are good at math or not, but rather what they want out of the gaming experience. Mark Rosewater talked about this in one of his MtG design columns a long, long while ago (at least 10 years, closer to 15 probably) and he said that, while they were working on Kaijudo, one of the things that market research found out was that new players were more easily attracted by big numbers, and that it was more exciting to try out a game and see you were doing thousands of damage points at once instead of two or three at a time. So that's what they went with for that game. I think the difference is that if you're flying by the seat of your pants you're probably not trying to think tactically, or even trying to win, you're just feeling things out, and that's when big damage values feel most effective. Meanwhile, if you are an established player trying to use your brain to win a difficult challenge or to optimally conserve resources, seeing seven digits just forces you to disengage because at that point it's all an amorphous mass of math. Similarly, casual players of competitive or tactical games love random effects on their characters. A 5% chance to crit for 2x damage on any given attack is, statistically, meaningless and not something worth planning around. But when the player sees that big number pop up, even if it was against a slime, they get the enjoyable brain chemicals going. When given a choice between a random super effect or a reliable but much smaller constant effect, they will greatly overestimate the likeliness of that random proc, dreaming up of how cool it would be if they killed a boss in turn 1. More competitive-minded players instead loathe that randomness and want to minimize its impact on their game experience as much as possible, because they want to be able to run the game in their head. This is a phenomenon so prevalent you don't need to play Advance Wars or MtG to see it, because it happens even in fighting games, as you probably know from the old Final Destination Smash meme. I will say that working with large numbers gives you more wiggle room to balance effects differently (oh this spell is too strong at 2 but too weak at 1... If I add another digit to all calculations I can make it hit for 15 and it'll be in the right place), so while I prefer smaller numbers in general there have been times where I wish I was working with three digits instead of two. That can be a factor as well. Anyway, good video. Glad to see you finally doing CrossCode and loving it. Enjoy the NG+! It's one hell of an experience!
1:10 When you asked this question in the beginning, I thought, I'd rather use a logarithmic scale, so I'd place it in the middle. It's NOT an error I made.
I’m feeling really smart because I got the question at the beginning right, and I’m gonna riding this high for the rest of the day lmaoo Great video! It was really interesting as always :)
what i think is interesting about the number line is that if you put 1000 and 10'000 and asked people to pick 2000, they'd intuitively pick a good position but if you put 1000 and 1 billion, it's probably further right than the first example xD
Yooo, I started the video immediately thinking about bringing up the exponential growth segment of CrossCode, I'm so happy you touched up on it. The game already makes you feel on a power trip through other means, like the S-Rank combat music or the flashy Combat Arts, but the way that sequence plays out as a plot point is BEYOND SATISFYING. It makes sense that Sergey would give Lea that immense buff to fight back, and introducing a ridiculous power trip like that was nothing shorter than genius. It felt genuine, authentic like you said. I love this game so much. By the by, a funny example on the power creep topic would be Phantasy Star Online 2. In the original game, we were easily dealing up to 200k damage with even normal attacks, easily nailing everything that wasn't a boss. In comes the New Genesis update, where by year one our endgame was barely hitting the 1k mark. Years later and we just barely touched the big hitters with 100k damage. But they still don't feel as "good" because everything, and I mean EVERYTHING is tankier than in the original. We're currently at lv90, and the lv15 Pettas at the first area still take a good few seconds to deal with. And that's not to mention the mechanic that bottlenecks your Attack stat on lower level foes, making so that even small fry at lv1 still take two or three hits to kill. But I still can't wrap my head around how it works, so I sadly can't bring it up.
The tweets you showed in the beginning are why darkest dungeon feels so satisfying when you crit a damage move. It *feels* like you’re hitting them with a truck. The comparatively smaller health pools (despite some bosses having hundreds or so) make your stronger hits feel like they hit harder. Like that tweet with Chris in it, the smaller numbers hit the hardest
I remember during my early MMO days hearing high level players in map chat saying stuff like "My combo only does 30k damage", meanwhile my low level char was pushing barely 3 digit numbers. I couldnt even comprehend why those players would be sad with their damage output. On higher levels I later understood that the numbers just inflate into meaninglessness and my 130 damage was just their 130.000 damage in a different level context.
And for the reverse maybe take a look at Antimatter Dimension. Basically you would have no idea how huge your goal is, but you quickly realize that how little your progression is, and how hard it is to improve your progression speed using what you got. After you struggled to the goal and receive new tools for the next run, even though the tools might seem pointless at first, you quickly realize how much of help they offered, and you do feel the power of it because you remember how hard it is without this new tool.
Thank you for giving CrossCode some spotlight. It's my absolute favorite game that nobody seems to care/know about. The fact that it saves those unholy strings of numbers for only climactic moments is a great tool the devs used to show just how stubborn your enemies are, and the lengths you have to go to stop them.
The Gastropod boss in Crosscode isbmy favorite boss battle in the whole game. It's not mechanically difficult, its a mandatory boss in the story and has a gimmick. But what makes the Gastropod fight so memorable and instills a feeling of...intensity, is the story that is surrounding the boss itself. Spoilers for midway of Crosscode Lea is attempting to flea from the tower in the corrupted zone and in this attempt, you are given a sample of how to break the game. Breaking through floors of the tower and smashing through walls in ways you never thought would be possible. In an attempt to test you and see if you really are, The One who will push the limits of Experience, Gauthum puts the Gastropod before you. You attack and, as in the video, do vitrually no damage to the creature at all. It no longer is a boss fight for victory, its now purely about survival. Until youre companion, who has been with you the whole story, breaks the game another time and gives you the power to exceed what is conventionally possible in the game. And that fight for survival? Its no longer a scrappy fight to run away when you're able. Simply buying time ao that an exit can appear. Instead, what was once a battle between what essentially felt like a mouse vs a war machine, now becomes a battle of equals. As the damage buffs continue to flow in you feel that sense of potential come with it. Instead of mashing dash to dodge and preserve HP, youre now gunning in as often as possible, knowing you can infact, take this thing down. It is a marvelously crafted moment of empowerment. It is short lived, as the buffs and method of acquisition have to be left aside after you escape. But while the escape takes place, you are given this rush of "I can do this" and i have never been more invigorated in a boss battle in my life because of it.
@@knopfiri found the final boss to not nearly have the same impact as the Gastropod did, though. I think its because by the end of the game, youve proven that, you can do this. Its not a matter of if. But a matter of when. I dont think it was a bad idea to include the buffs in the final boss but it felt less impactful because previously, there was still alot of uncertainty around what you can do and where you stood in the "food chain" so to speak. By the end game, the only thing that can really stand in youre way is the arenas, and even those arent much of a challange unless your trying to farm for end game equipment.
My first, instinctive thought was to place the million mark in the middle, but then I *immediately* thought "Wait, that's not right; it should be much closer to 1000." Still wouldn't have placed it as close as it actually is, but I at least understood to an extent.
@@xerveeon I don't think it's a matter of thinking too hard - I think it's a matter of instinct versus knowledge. I've thought about bigger numbers quite a few times before, so I *knew* it wasn't as simple as being in the middle, but because our brains are designed for smaller numbers, that was still my *instinct.* It makes sense that our brains would consider instinct before knowledge; instinct is instant, and in a moment of danger, every second counts - there's not necessarily going to be time to access knowledge, because that takes longer.
I really love Paper Mario for giving such small numbers, it was the first RPG i played that simplified it so much that each hit felt impactful. Most RPGs with high values makes battles feel a bit random but the smaller ones in Paper Mario always gave me an idea of how much damage i needed to do with tougher enemies really feeling sturdy when a simple 1 damage becomes 0
Usually when I begin a new game that has numbers in some form, I tend to "reset" my expectations as to how much the size of these numbers even means. Frequently enough in especially roguelikes/roguelites I get some options that deal X amount of damage, or prevent X amount of damage - but that number means nothing to me initially. Because until I have more experience with the game, I have no context to understand how much the individual numbers even mean More often than not, in most games something like "5% poison resistance" is an absolute joke. However, in the right context it could bring your poison resistance from 95% to 100% and have pretty drastic consequences when you are now immune to poison rather than taking little damage from it, since it could have various negative side effects. But with 100% those side effects are cancelled.. But... Until I have a vast amount of knowledge, that 5% poison resistance still means absolutely nothing to me, even if it theoretically could have a great impact. I think, in the end it's all about context to me personally. Although - Numbers that cap out at 9999 like most Final Fantasy games seem to be a bit of a sweet spot - The numbers usually start in the 10s or 100s, and go to the 1000s in the endgame. Anything above 100k just starts to become muddled and meshed together int the [large number]-category, which ultimately is meaningless. At that point I just start checking how many hits I need to defeat something, and ignore the numbers. If the numbers start out very small like Paper Mario, then there is not really any potential "reach" towards the lower end. 1 is still a lot in that game. But if you have your defense high enough to only take 10 damage in a Final Fantasy game, that can feel very impactful and rewarding for choosing an especially defensive approach And not sure if that's relevant, but I immediately put the line on the left side for the 1000 to 1 billion. I have seen enough questionable statistics-graphs to immediately question why it would not start at 0, which kind of revealed the entire thing instantly Either way, I haven't even finished watching the video yet... Jeez, you always make me think, in a good way. Thank you so much for your thought-provoking videos, even though I doubt you'll end up reading this. Whoever reads this, I hope you have a great day :)
Don't forget to go snag some goodies from Big Bad Toy Store! - bit.ly/4d5Cyuc - A massive xoxo to BBTS for the sponsor
An interesting and unique sponsor!! Yes please???
$4 is $4
actually so cool to see a bbts sponser. i havent bought from them in a few years but their flat shipping went from $10 down to $4???? now there is nothing stopping me
I was playing this game called Floppy Knights, a tactical deckbuilding RPG, and I was on the final level of the third episode. the level was divided into 3 vertical sections, 4-HP slimes were coming up the left corridor, 2-armor/3-health turrets coming up the right, and my Floppy Knights going up the middle
My main squad was a 2-damage Vera that I buffed with Thorns to increase Vera to have 3 damage, a Quiver Kid with 2 damage and 2 range, and a Bamboomer with 4 damage and 3 range
the math was simple and so I sent my Bamboomer to deal with the slimes, and the other two to deal with the turrets, leading to a fairly clean victory. I really enjoy smaller numbers for games like that because it's easier to conceptualize "okay, my dude does 3 damage, but that guy has 4 health, I can't take him out this turn but I can hit him and retreat so I can get him next turn"
@@squid-patrol5043 Right??? They've been around for almost 2 decades I think.
Not gonna lie, a "health bar" on the debit/credit card would probably save a lot of people.. That's unironically a genius concept (too bad the companies issuing these things have every interest to not implement such a thing)
Time to make a credit care company to implement this design.
The only real issue with that is "what's your max health?". Where does it "start" and go down from? If it's just a means of budgeting, like a limit of 500$ a month that goes down like a health bar, then I don't really see anything special with that. From what I can tell banks generally already offer a means of helping someone budget(mine personally has one), let alone the million of other budgeting apps that exist. People seem to be served already.
Would be a fun gimmick though.
It's like that one store that had a "no bullshit" approach to selling, where they intentionally avoided all the scummy store tactics (like inflated prices to make sales more appealing) but then went bankrupt shortly after opening.
Correlation doesn't mean causation @@alvin_row
@@phylippezimmermannpaquin2062 I remember there being a direct indicator of causation. Maybe the store used to sell well before adding that policy or something like that. There might be some info online, but I don't remember the store name as I heard about this a long time ago.
When you teach a player to be afraid of a 3, they’ll be terrified of a 4
but what if 7 8 9
I think the discrepancy between the perception of one thousand, one million and one billion, and the reality of those numbers, also comes down to the fact that humans don't percieve numbers linearly but logarithmically. In a logarithmic scale, one million actually is halfway in between one thousand and one billion.
Huh, that makes sense actually
@@sailorenthusiastYeah, that's what a log scale expresses.
Something my highschool biology teacher once told me is that our brains aren't good at processing long numbers so we like to break them up into groups of 3 or less.
Think about how you read off your phone number xxx xxx xx xx even though its written as (xxx)-xxx-xxxx and you could just say all 10 digits in a row without pausing. For both speaker and listener its easier to comprehend as blocks of 2 or 3.
I'm sure this is part of why we like logarithmic scales, they change the axis from normal numberline to order of magnitude. And by order of magnitude all these big named numbers are separated by chunks of 3 0's. Thousand, million, billion, trillion, ect. are visually distinguished by only 1 block of 3 zeroes, but mathematically each one is insignificant compared to the next in the sequence.
I was hoping he was going to bring this up
I guess there were no math or engineering majors in that study. There was no mention of what the scale is, so I assumed it was a logarithmic scale and put it near the middle. That's where it belongs. When I see an "unlabeled axis" I will use whatever scale I need to to illustrate a point.
I'm surprised the logarithmic scale wasn't mentioned. It's a part of why we intuitively put 1 million about halfway between one thousand and one billion. Our brains are good at comparing sizes, not counting the exact numbers, and a log scale helps with that. We think logarithmically.
Yeah I think the only information you get from quadrillions of damage is a vague estimate of orders of magnitude. Which is pretty useless for knowing how effective an attack is (a ratio of 1 to 10 is still a big difference). So ultimately it just gives you a feeling. I think with something like Disgaea it's a meta joke about RPGs in general, and it's also making it very clear "these aren't numbers for you to do math in your head". It's not my favourite but I respect their choice to be absurd
These videos are not exactly made for the smartest people on the internet. its as tabloid as Peoples magazine but has a veneer of intellectualism.
@@SupposeKennethed Your comment has a veneer of intellectualism. This video is not an academic paper, sure, but it's... like, have you seen the rest of youtube? It's nowhere near the lowest common denominator type of content. Every time youtube signs me out and I see what's going on out there it's staggering. Anyway, what was your point again?
We also hear logarithmically.
@@silphv this is pretty much my exact feeling on Disgaea.
Paper Mario's the kind of game where it takes two levels to get the badge points to cover the cost of ONE. POINT. of attack.
And that's worth considering! It's actually worth it to basically put two levels into a single point of attack power.
a really good roblox RPG I played (Block Tales) has this card system, you can increase damage by 1 if you have the BP, the space for the card… but they usually come at a cost.
Ante Up is a card that makes it twice as difficult to correctly time attacks but increases damage by 1. Screwing up seems fine, it makes you deal a bit less damage… until you read that bad timing will negate all the damage in that attack. It also takes up 5 BP, which is two level’s worth of card space. Levels you could’ve used to increase HP or SP.
Knight is quite simple. Deal 1 more damage, but lose your ball slot. Your sword is good single-target damage, but unlike the Ball, it can only target enemies in the front. And unlike the Ball, the sword does not have any moves that can inflict status effects like Dizzy and Frozen. Even the opposite, the Baller card that instead removes the sword slot, has its own problems. Balls are affected by enemy Defense. The sword can pierce a point or two of Defense, but balls cannot. On top of that, the sword can hit enemies with the Spiky effect, but you’ll need a special card to make balls hit enemies who are burning or Spiky.
Oh, and both Knight and Baller take up 4 BP. That’s two levels’ worth of BP, with 2 left over.
Most of the damage bonuses I’ve seen in that roblox game come at a cost. Cards that permanently increase damage usually take up a lot of space in your build, but cards such as Charge lets you use SP to increase damage for one turn. There can be a lot of thinking that goes into making a build. Multiplayer especially. One person might take cards such as Cure or Resurrect to heal and revive themselves and teammates, but they’ll do a lot less damage. The other might be the damage output, taking cards like Ante Up and Knight. Then, one person could take cards like Cannonball, Snowball, and Fireball to inflict debuffs. Of course, enemy health and damage scales with the players you fight alongside with, encouraging strategy, especially when using cards such as Hard Mode or Double Pain, which will massively increase the punishment for making a mistake.
sorry for the long comment, I just found a reason to talk about one of my favorite games and… y’know.
Definitely. In Paper Mario, that boost of 1 atk can be the difference between an attack doing damage or doing no damage. For some attacks that hit multiple times (Fan Smack, Ground Pound), one singular point of defense can be the difference between dealing zero damage and dealing 10 damage.
Similar in a new game called DC20. Most weapons and spells have a base of 1 or 2 damage, which can go up to maybe 7 or 8 if you stack every possible buff.
Paper Mario is peak for many reasons and this is one of them
And then on the opposite end, I use a badge in paper mario 64 that reduces damage by 2 instead of 1 when you block. Really helpful for staying alive even when you don't dump a lot of levels into HP
Oh, 100%. One of the big things I was happy about when I went from the new Paper Mario games to TTYD was how cool it was to have the numbers be so much lower.
Also it’s kinda funny how this can be taken EXTREMELY low. Like, “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, the Hollow Knight’s Failed Champion is doing a whopping TWO DAMAGE to me??!?!”
The funny thing is that because Sticker Star is the shitty in-between of the other Sticker Star-likes and those that came before, it technically has decent damage scaling. You normally have stuff around 5-20 damage, but things deal 50-99 damage, and bosses have 300-700 health. It’s still inflated, but the ranges still suggest meaningful design given the upgrades are by better stickers.
Hollow Knight as well as games that use a similar health bar are a different topic however.
HP in there is mostly treated as a "how many times can you get hit" bar, instead of an arbitrary "I have this number to survive the enemy numbers".
When something in Hollow Knight deals 2 (or more) masks of damage, it feels ridiculous because 99% of the things in the game only do 1 mask, because that's just how the game is balanced.
@@DexuzNow I'm comparing it to the Zelda health bar. Most common enemies (outside of TotK and BotW because they have armor that reduce damage) do 2 damage (half a heart), puny monsters deal 1 damage, powerful monsters deal 4 damage and boss monsters deal 6 or 8 damage (2 full hearts). The late game has new ennemies that all deal double damage but there is also armor that divides the damage you take by 2
@@laytonjr6601
That depends on the Zelda game, some like Twilight Princess follow your logic, but others like Zelda 1 or ALTTP have extreme variations of damage, so the health bar there is not at all like Hollow Knight's, and closer to an RPG system where as you progress, you get more HP but so do the enemies in their damage output.
"Oh. Oh, that's right. This video... is sponsored."
That was the most foreboding sponsor transition I have ever heard
"And that's- wait, no no, the script keeps going... I'm- I'm sponsored? But who on earth would- oh, it's just an antivirus. I guess it's just a rite of passage of some kind... *Ahem*. Slip into a comfort fit with the newest line of flavored- hold a fuckin minute that's not-"
I imagine a horror movie turn to the camera with the foreboding line, "there's something here..."
And then you do the horror movie violin as the sponsor pops out of the closet and jumpscares you.
Ngl, I'd watch the shit out of that.
@@TextualDeviantCLONE VPN
The biggest thing about the tiny numbers in the old Paper Mario games is that it enables *planning and strategizing*.
You can make informed decisions about what moves to pick to optimize the battle, so you don't waste damage, turns or items.
It is very satisfying if you have e.g. four enemies with 5 HP each and you do 2 damage to all with the partner then finish them off exactly using a fire flower.
Yeah the small numbers really make you actually choose between jumps or hammers, especially at the points in the story where you'd have one more boot upgrade than a hammer upgrade because they always give the attack method that deals more damage in one hit the upgrade after the multi-hit method.
There is a great saying out there that fits the theme perfectly:
"One death is a tragedy. A thousand deaths is a statistic"
When you're working with small numbers, your brain can actually visualize them better and in detail, while when millions and billions get involved - well, can you imagine a billion apples? No, you can't. The best your brain can do here is imagine a pile of apples and abstractly call it a billion, simply because it lacks processing power to detalize each apple individually. The summ of objects becomes a new object in itself - a pile.
This is why big numbers suddenly feel smaller - because instead of counting individual objects that comprise them, we count the "piles". You don't say "My rogue deals 2153312 damage", you say "My rogue deals 2M damage" - you only count the biggest "pile", and 2 is a relatively small number.
Is that a Stalin quote?
@@Inverse_to_Chaos
Yep; the saying of broken clocks being right twice a day feels extremely applicable here.
@@Inverse_to_ChaosI dont think he actually said that.
I've tried visualizing individual objects, and even tho I have a fairly good imagination better than most of my peers, the best I can do is like maybe 6-8 if I'm really trying. It's really more a reflection on how easily we get task saturated and how we really aren't great at multitasking
That's a phrase specifically regarding deaths in war, so tread carefully.
One way to really understand this is to look through the lens of Clicker games. Those games function entirely off the concept of “big number go up” and the dopamine injections you get after reaching certain thresholds. The thing is though, the first time you hit a million cookies in Cookie Clicker might be momentous and allow a moment of meteoric growth, very soon after that value becomes trivialized as further upgrades are costing trillions of cookies and a million cookies are basically worth nothing. Once you raise the value ceiling to a new threshold, usually by adding another 0, the minimum value floor also gets raised up. Then anything at or below that floor feels no different than 0, and the numbers start getting so big you can no longer rationally conceptualize them. So then you reach the point of both your value floor and value ceilings feeling no different.
Yeah, the difference between 10A gold and 10T gold is astronomical but when you reach that point the numbers are just noise
Monster Hunter is also a great example of a game that doesn't show life bars. Before MH World the game didn't even show your own damage numbers. Only your max and current HP. That was great because instead of focusing on numbers and watching a life bar, you rather observe the behavior of the Monster. Breaking body parts serves as milestones and the monster limping away shows that it's captureable and near death. Works perfectly fine and helps with the immersion.
And even when we do have damage numbers, a Hunter with dinky little dual blades is just as effective as one with a giant f*ck-off greatsword.
It's funny that I remember people at the time saying that damage numbers ruined the series when they were added to World, even if they are defaulted to off (or at least I turned them off), because, like, what did you think was happening before?
Every attack in nearly every game is dealing damage in numbers. It's a computer. Even those that claim to be simulations, it's still comparing number values to know the effect of a hit. And those that aren't? It's usually either the "did this kill" yes/no of a bullet or simulating stuff in such esoteric and incomplete ways that it doesn't feel good (and has a ton of math under the hood anyway).
@@wavesofbabies I love the reason why they introduced the damage numbers in world. They were testing out the inclusion of turf wars and the playtesters were annoyed with it, they thought it was annoying and getting in the way of their hunts. When they added damage numbers, the playtesters saw the huge amounts of damage that the turf wars were dealing and instantly became fans.
God the days of 4U...I miss them😢
@@wavesofbabies Yeah, sure is crazy that how something is presented changes how people perceive and feel about it. Crazy. Never would've guessed. People obviously knew that there were hidden damage numbers before. Displaying the damage numbers ruins a sense of immersion and, as someone mentioned, you are likely to focus on the numbers rather than the monster and the fight itself.
As soon as you spoke about not revealing bosses' HP, it reminded me of D&D - our DM will describe opponents' physical state in combat rather than putting a number to anything, "how do they look?"/"they look bloodied" etc
I once read that in Etrian Odyssey series developers capped the maximal damage at 59630, because in japanese the sequence 5-9-6-3 is pronounced almost like "good job", and I have two reactions to this:
1. It's effing genius
2. It feels more visually appealing than the boring 99999
What does that trailing 0 add to the pronunciation
Go Kyu Roku San ... Rei?
Some explanations and source would be great.
@@ultimaxkom8728 Go-ku-ro-san (ご苦労さん)
About the trailing zero, I beleive the game's length and balance could not allow devs to stop character progression when they reach 6k damage - it's a classical turn based jrpg about watching numbers go up for dozens of hours after all :)
As for the source - I'm not sure if youtube allows to post links, but I searched and found a tvtropes page about etrian odyssey III, where it is mentioned in the list of used tropes.
> Cap: Damage from a single strike caps at 59,630. It's a Goroawase Number that reads "gokuro san", roughly meaning "good work on your efforts (in Min-Maxing)
@@ultimaxkom8728 Go-ku-ro-san (ご苦労さん)
About the trailing zero, I beleive the game's length and balance could not allow devs to stop character progression when they reach 6k damage - it's a classical turn based jrpg about watching numbers go up for dozens of hours after all :)
As for the source - I'm not sure if youtube allows to post links, but I searched and found a tvtropes page about etrian odyssey III, where it is mentioned in the list of used tropes.
> Cap: Damage from a single strike caps at 59,630. It's a Goroawase Number that reads "gokuro san", roughly meaning "good work on your efforts (in Min-Maxing)
@@ultimaxkom8728 Go-ku-ro-san (ご苦労さん)
About the trailing zero, I beleive the game's length and balance could not allow devs to stop character progression when they reach 6k damage - it's a classical turn based jrpg about watching numbers go up for dozens of hours after all :)
As for the source - I'm not sure if youtube allows to post links, but I searched and found a tvtropes page about etrian odyssey III, where it is mentioned in the list of used tropes.
> Cap: Damage from a single strike caps at 59,630. It's a Goroawase Number that reads "gokuro san", roughly meaning "good work on your efforts (in Min-Maxing)
there was an experiment done once where people were told to imagine they could buy a stereo sound system for $1500 at a local store, or drive an hour away to get the same one for $500, and everyone said they would drive an hour to save $1000. But then people were asked to imagine they could buy a car from a dealership for $30,000 or drive an hour to another dealership and get the same car for $29,000 and most said they wouldn't bother. It's the exact same deal but because the saving is smaller proportionally to the overall cost people perceive the value as less.
only people saying they wouldn't bother are well off I guess, 1k is 1k
@@obsidianflight8065While, on some hand, that instinct is correct, you also kinda have to think how people buy cars and other big ticket items like that, they either pay out of pocket, or finance. The people paying out of pocket, sure that's the category you mentioned, people with 30k to drop on a car casually aren't going to be too terribly bothered to save 1k by inconveniencing themselves. On the other hand, people who finance a car are also... unlikely to have a car. So that hour away might actually be an insurmountable task compared to, "This dealership is two bus stops from my house, where that one would require all day to organize a trip to, and really I'm gonna be paying this car off for years, what's the difference between 30k and 29k when I'm never seeing that money anyway?"
fair enough, didn't think about the mindset of people when buying like that. Although in my case I'd still take the effort since I'm broke haha
There’s a reason you don’t hear many grouses about single attacks doing 8724 damage, and you hear a whole lot about how that one move just did half your health.
Reminds me of when Ganon's healthbar just extended past the usual margins to the end of the screen and I audibly went "OH, FUCK ME"
3:13 I have unironically been thinking about this recently. Damage is all relative. 1 HP, or even 9 million, is a scratch to something with a billion or more. Meanwhile 1 damage to an enemy with 5 health is equivalent to knocking off a limb.
I stop reading numbers after a million, and if there’s enough numbers after a million, I stop reading numbers. It might as well be screen noise.
I hope you dont run any countries of a decent size
I'm the same, though it's usually 4-6 digits depending on the game. For example in Genshin even though I regularly hit 5-6 digit damages, I just don't even read them because it's just noise. My hp is like 50k so me doing 10k dmg doesn't feel that impressive
@@Aryasvitkona It also depends on how frequently you hit stuff. In an MMO, I barely read my damage numbers, because there's just so much flying text. In a turn based RPG, or something like Monster Hunter though, I'm gonna watch my numbers like a hawk.
Flying numbers and text is clutter and noise period.
@@sauceinmyface9302 I really hope no one in office ever hears of Balatro.
This was great.
I’m a Montessori teacher, and I love the way quantity is conceptualized for young children. We have this material, where one unit is represented by a tiny green cube; one the ten is 10 of those cubes stacked together to make a bar (now it’s blue), the hundred is 10 of those bars put together which makes a square shape and is red, and the thousand is 10 of those hundred squares put together to form a cube (and it’s green), it goes like this up to a million and the million is HUGE, because proportionally it is the size of a million of those tiny units put together. Anyways, it’s cool and the children get excited, and they get a solid understanding of the hierarchy of numbers.
Wait, it goes up to 6 dimensions? (Kidding of course)
The Kingdom Hearts games have an interesting approach to damage values and health bars that I almost never see used anywhere else. The actual numeric values of damage and HP are basically pointless, you never even see them during gameplay. But the health bars still show absolute values instead of just a proportion. So health bars just get longer (or rather, turn into multiple health bars) as enemies scale up and get more health, and "half of one health bar" is the exact same amount of damage at the end of the game as it was in the beginning. It's just that tiny enemies start with like a tenth of a health bar, and the final boss has 15 full health bars. It's a great way of allowing players to intuitively gauge an enemy's health relative to other enemies, and relative to the amount of damage you do on an absolute scale without needing to get any numeric digits involved.
It's also just insanely satisfying to see Sora's health bar stretch all the way across the screen, while you start dishing out attacks that burn away multiple health bars off the enemy at a time.
I miss the colored HP bars KH1 uses to have
Superbosses white HP not going down is legit terrifying
@@Spiderrtank some Yakuza games also scratch that itch, especially with their superbosses.
I'm taking notes.
It's for this reason that I wish Donald and Goofy were allowed to have their KH1 style health bars.
Fire Emblem on the 3DS also kinda did this. The health bars were all the same width as each other, but the color of the right side of the gradient, would be based on the absolute numerical value of their health. You could tell that an enemy whose HP bar was a red-to-green gradient, had less health than the one with a red-to-blue gradient, even though both their health bars were full.
Dark Souls has been doing this since the beginning, health feels more "real" when one inch of HP is always once inch of HP.
You already mentioned how the Mario & Luigi games use rather low numbers, and I think this is a strength with all Mario RPGs, especially Paper Mario.
I dare even say that the low, single-digit damage numbers are the very core of Paper Mario's combat, specifically because they are, as you said, tangible. Strategy in Paper Mario all singlehandedly revolves around precisely calculating how much damage you deal and take on any given turn. And yet, I only rarely see people discuss this point when talking about what makes these games great.
those small numbers are also a great part of the mindgames defense puts you on in TTYD specifically. Do you go for the safer block that just lowers the damage by 1 (or a bit more if you have the right badges on) or go for the more tightly timed Superguard that not only negates all damage but also, outside of most ranged attacks, deals the enemy a point of damage?
I’ve always seen it as “these are cute cartoon characters. I can totally see a goomba having only 3-50 hp or Mario kicking a plant in the face for 50-70.”
It’d feel outright bizarre if Luigi flail’d his arms around and dealt 9999 or something.
Though this also explains why I never really liked how much damage they do endgame. The Cackletta 1 area in Superstar Saga always felt like the sweet spot in terms of stats for me.
Id say it was mainly superstar saga where the numbers could start to heavily creep. I remember my playthrough back on the wii u all of their stats were over 100, and with busted badge and equipment their numbers got absurd. @Phoenixflara
This gets reign back in the later games tho
I think my favorite "small number" game has to be Into the Breach. It's a terrifying game where you're protecting civilization from an army of alien, skyscraper-sized bugs, but nothing in the game ever has more than like... eight health, max. It really helps you instantly understand everything's relative strengths and plan out your turn, which is really useful because you have to do a lot of thinking during every single turn
It also makes getting +1 damage pretty big, and getting a +2 is huge, which is great for rewarding progression
Never forget that making big chunks makes for a better understandment of what you're losing every time it hits in terms of narrative. It's probably inspired by the original system for hit points (maritime strategy documents, in which 1 health point reflected how many shots of a mortar they could take) and that makes it very impactful cuz a mortar can just destroy thousands of lifes by destroying a building.
Excellent example! Into the Breach takes a ton of cues from board game design - which has to be small numbers because there’s no CPU processing stuff. In such a context, the ideal number of damage for one attack to deal is usually… 1.
This makes it easier for players to conceptualize how long it will take to defeat an enemy in terms of numbers of actions/turns, rather than damage, or a health bar. A 4HP enemy will take 4 standard attacks to defeat. Simple!
Then it becomes super easy to build upon that. You can get an attack buff to deal 2 damage for a while, which essentially means you’re attacking twice in one turn. Or the game is multiplayer cooperative, so if there’s 4 players at the table, everyone needs to commit to doing a single standard attack to defeat the enemy in one round.
It’s all very elegant.
Yeah, it has an achievement "Overkill": deal 8 damage
Great game
I love it when games have numbers that start very small and progressively get big but not to the insane lengths of the millions.
Everytime you hit another extra digit (e.g. first 99+ damage hit or first 999+ hit) it always feels soo much more impactful since you’ve never dealt that much before and further strengthens the progression you’ve made as a player.
Yes, that is exactly what I look for in most RPGs with numbers. Not enormous numbers, but a significant progression when comparing start and finish. It's like in my childhood, catching a glimpse of gameplay from my older sister being far ahead in her file, see the big numbers and feel in awe, and then being hyped to pick the game myself and work my way to get to those numbers, and possibly surpass them. The 4 digit cap is also very harmonious to look at when it's animated in a wave ( Final Fantasy IV, V, X, XII, Super Mario RPG... ), you kinda want to reproduce that by waving your 4 long fingers and tap your desk in the same way.
Yeah I remember it blowing my mind as a kid when in FF7 you could bust through 1000HP, then when it capped at 9999 for both damage and your party HP I felt like I was a badass by then. I feel like to me anything over 9999 is kinda ridiculous. Plus I loved in FF7 that if you happened to get your HP reduced to 777 some buff happened. Or maybe it was all 7777. Can't recall but I loved that idea.
My brain did offer using a log scale in the immediate time from the question.
Same, then I realize he didn't say it is. And then I went to the left most pixel.
Same. I hope the mentioned study took conscious log-scaling into account…
Engineering hit, immediate thought was "ok, on log it would be about here - but this is no log"
Having a number other than zero as the minimum also implies a log scale (somewhat).
I immediately thought "which scale?"
the way my jaw dropped when you revealed the hp at 15:45 what an amazing way to make the player feel the size of that number. It reminds me of the summoning salt tetris video where he revealed how far that one got guy got ahead in the competition and the chart just scrolls for like 2 minutes
the number written out is wrong, though. it's got three too many zeroes
The controller vibration with each punch, the baffled expression of the villain, the monstrous expression on lea for doing so much damage, the smug look on sergey for making her able to do that...thay is how you make big numbers feel big. Its kinda like berserk in which guts has big fuck off sword that is described as a big hunk of iron and everytime he swings it, in every frame in the manga i can almost hear the sound of that heavy thing swinging.
*CLANG*
Gastropolis is such a great boss.
Thrown as a last ditch effort to stop you while you're quite literally breaking through dungeon instances, an impossible obstacle created by someone who loathes such a concept.
But, with Sergei's help, you manage to damage, and eventually kill, it. The nigh impossible, about to be overcome, as as The Designer says.
For the game designer that he is, nothing is more thrilling. And so his exasperation turns into pure, undiluted hype.
Crosscode is just a phenomenal experience from beginning to end
Spoilers for CrossCode
The Creator in Vermillion Tower is also extremely well made in this regard, as Gastropolis was a long while ago in terms of the game progression, the high damage rush hangs in the back of your mind, and seeing the damage slowly yet exponentially multiply again gives even more hype than even the Gastropolis Fight.
But The Ultimate Experience fighting with The Creator is even more of a power trip than the Gastropolis fight, and Gastropolis serves as a huge part of being a comparison for the huge numbers. Oh you're dealing maybe quadrillion amounts of damage at a time in Gastropolis? Well The Creator drops the ball with damage numbers that span almost the entire screen, with the added multiplier bar also serving as just how much power you're inflicting with just one strike alone. Truly The Ultimate Experience.
@@Tetramare spoilers
Yeah I fucking loved the final boss. When you have to solve a mini puzzle and then blast his head with a ether snipe is peak gaming for me. And the D'orbis or whatever his name was in the dlc? Best boss fight ever
The smaller numbers of _Paper Mario_ and _Bug Fables_ have an additional advantage over larger numbers. This was briefly touched upon in the video but not dived into. Because they can be readily known and usually quickly calculated, the smaller numbers encourage a knowledge and exploitation of the surrounding battle system in a way that the large-number systems can't.
When every attack deals three digits or higher of damage, it's harder to evaluate which strategies and techniques play best together. When you're mainly dealing in 2s and 3s, such evaluation is much more manageable, and the game can push you to think more deeply about the system (see _Bug Fables_ ' hard mode badge).
A 50% increase from 2 to 3 feels so much more powerful than a 50% increase from 100 to 150 for some reason
Small numbers like in Bug Fables and Paper Mario help to highlight another important part of this conversation - balance. Elden ring can afford to have a lot of small buffs or debuffs to damage - a 3% increase to defense, for example. But for Paper Mario, the difference between 2 and 3 damage is MASSIVE and, as a result, any change in those numbers can be the difference between overpowered and weak attacks/skills. For the developers, there may be a lot less freedom to tune items and mechanics when the numbers are very small, but when done right, it can be more satisfying to see strategies play out.
Paper Mario is nowhere any bit balanced. Hammer attacks are bad and danger mario exists. Mega and power rush with powerbounce, stampede etc is so broken. Paper Mario couldn't even balance small numbers well.
@@dave9515 the entire point is that smaller numbers are a lot harder to balance.
For example, you may have situations in wich 2 damage are too little, but 3 damage is too much. But if they were 20 and 30 you would have 21, 22, 23 and so on.
@@dave9515 Way to miss the point
@@purplecrowbar1332 Op is saying it can be much more satisfying seeing what people come up with in low number games. Strategies don't change because of number values alone. There has to be friction and other things to influence. that. Low number games will never work as well as games with higher numbers is my take on this whole topic. There is no way to account for all the variables at play with low number scaling and such.
@dave9515 but have you considered the fact that little number makes big number hurt more.
Another thing that makes big hits in games with small numbers feel even more powerful is VISUAL AND SOUND EFFECTS.
Playing through that snail fight in crosscode made me feel *powerful,* and not just because I can finally deal damage to this behemoth by dealing trillions of damage, but because the screen SHAKES and the hit sound is LOUD and whenever it changes phase the game STOPS like I just stopped a speeding train with my bare hands.
It's AWESOME
I think it also might be compressibility: When you see 9999, you go "oh they're just trying to exaggerate, it's just a 9 with exclamation marks, 9 spam, who cares". It's possible the very repetition of the number makes your brain try to compress it to a simpler number, efficient memory usage and learning strategies and all that, just like a computer does with long decimals.
Yeah when I see 9999 in a Final Fantasy game, I'm running under the assumption that odds are, I'll need to do that damage 15-20 times to win the fight. Nothing to do with the actual numbers involved, I just try to condense down as much as I can to make it simple
@@hammerstix5791 Yeah 9999 is an interesting case. Maybe it's just because I grew up with FF and got used to it but having a damage cap when you're high level has an interesting effect that sort of shrinks everything to feel like small numbers again. How many hits of ~ten thousand do I need to deal? Do I have moves that can go over the cap by hitting multiple times? If a move can reliably hit the cap it now feels like 1 and something that does 7000 feels like 0.7
@@silphvAs a casual player of FFX, hitting the damage cap is such a satisfying milestone in a playthrough, and then breaking the damage cap with summons or celestial weapons feels godlike.
I think it’s because capped damage feels bad after adjusting to it. After a certain amount of progress in one of these games, to the point where every move is dealing 9999, your brain recognizes that it keeps seeing the same thing over and over again and starts treating it as 9999=1 or even as just a visual symbol that indicates “the move dealt standard damage”.
@@MonochromaticPrism Definitely depends on the game. For me, when I think of JRPGS, you might reach capped damage super late in the game, and it's still relatively powerful at endgame(except for superbosses). That makes hitting all 9s more novel and rewarding, even if you're seeing the same number over and over. It'll only get really boring if you spend like 100+ hours in the endgame doing something tedious, which is just natural to grinding.
The gastropolis fight in crosscode and [spoiler final boss] were the few examples of big numbers feeling right. It even played into the relationship between lea and sergey. Sergey uses the hax to repeatedly double lea’s attacks, increasing the damage by a power of two each time. But beyond the numbers, they are both using the “power of two” as in teamwork! It’s such an effective moment.
yeah, it not only works mechanically, but is wonderful as a storytelling device. not to get into specifics, but the section of the game before Gastropolis makes you (Lea) feel very powerless and hopeless for awhile. things finally start changing here and this fight shows that very well
@@icebearlikestrains6238 never before had a game made me feel such contrasting emotions so close together.
I misread the title as "The funny paradox" and was fully expecting a video on funny numbers by seeing the thumbnail
Now I’m wondering: how many funny numbers are there?
The funniest is 25
@@BananaWasTaken At least a handful but the reason why they're seen as funny is a whole concept in and of itself to debate
I mean they are funny numbers
@@YoutGotThisManThe one number funnier than 24.
One great example I had with big, BIG numbers is Disgaea.
Playing the first one I tried tackling the last optional boss (who is level 4000, but I was playing with harder levels so he was 9999).
It attacked me and did a 5 digit number.
I thought "that's so low" until I noticed, it wasn't 5 digits
It was 4 digits + a kanji
And the kanji meant ten thousands.
That's what "big" means to me: when you have to change the way to write to represent it
There's a lurking variable in this phenomenon in your Yugioh example. Yugioh is an extremely fast paced and highly lethal game where interaction density and interaction types means far more than raw damage at the end of the day. Getting chunked for half of your health in Yugioh doesn't feel cataclysmic because it means you're still going to see your next turn, have a chance to rebuild your board, break their board, and win. The most stressful moment in Yugioh is when you run out of interaction points before your opponent runs out of gas in their combo and you're sitting there anxiously waiting to see if what you did was enough to survive whereas the moment you're getting bonked for 1900 is the point of relief where you know you did survive, as counter-intuitive as it sounds compared to something like Magic. A monster hitting you for 7999 in Yugioh would feel a little bit silly for how specific it is, but would still be a relief where you know you're still in the game as you draw and start your own combo; the scale of the numbers isn't really much of a factor here.
Yugioh also doesn't have the same resources as other card games and because of that, LP are just a resource and you only really consider them for that
I found it funny when he mentioned Yuhioh and showed Gameplay of Chaos Golem being Summoned 😂
4500 to the face is bad enough but if you thought to set a few monsters you are dead to 100% just because it hits over defence and attacks all monsters
Like he himself does a bit more then half your LP
Fun fact: My friends and I played Dnd for a long time and they would always comment on how I measured my characters health score, which was having my Total at the top, drawing a line underneath, and then tallying up the damage. Any time I was healed, I just minus'd it from the damage tally. Made it significantly easier to follow than starting at 106 and reducing it over and over.
So essentially you were counting damage points instead of health points?
Another example of “suddenly having a lot more numbers” from personal experience:
The hardest superboss fight in EBF5, a long-lived Flash game that has mobile and Steam ports, has been preceded by a bunch of other strong superbosses that actively limit you in some way. A turn limit, no summons, a sudden need for extreme fire resistance, and so on. You go to fight the last boss, mouse over its main gimmick, and-
It’s a free stacking omnibuff? Like within 4 turns you’ll hit the cap on buffs in this game, from HP to evade. Numbers like this don’t usually happen.
And then your first salvo of attacks either whiff or barely scratch God (the boss).
And then God (actual boss name) kills a party member in one swing. And has two attacks each turn.
Dying resets buffs to zero.
All your buff spells only accelerate how fast you get back to max buffs, and are otherwise totally useless.
It’s a power trip, followed by realizing this is the cruelest prank you could pull in a JRPG. The rest of the fight just compounds on that feeling, where God’s damage options get stronger and stronger with no true relief besides desperately trying to win a damage race.
I wouldn't call the buff spells useless here, specifically *because* they increase your stats quickly. In fact, Seventh Heaven and Art Attack are no less of a Godsend (ironic pun intended) for that very reason. Auto-Revive, from the likes of Nine Lives and even Genesis when it's available, is also more important than ever for preserving those max buffs.
However, God's Limit Break hits everyone (including backup, albeit somewhat less ridiculously hard) *15 times,* over a long enough period of time that Morale becomes useless and _even Auto-Revive might not save the party!_ The Enchant status (which can be self-inflicted by Defending with certain equips, or summoning an Angel Mirror) is the only reliable way to survive this attack...but it leaves the frontline party susceptible to double damage from a Physical follow-up.
@@steam-powereddolphin5449 This are also true, and when I say “the buffs do nothing”, I mostly mean your non-Limit options. At best, you are spending one turn to gain 3 turns worth of the omnibuff, which doesn’t sound too bad until you consider some of them have no spell or are single target buffs only. At least raw defense is pretty easy to solve. And sometimes the initial type of magic attack is relatively easy to survive with no buffs, even if it will absolutely chunk you if it’s used twice.
And just to throw my hat in the ring for strategic advice (and mention some other aspects of the fight):
- God also has access to two very simple buff actions that make your life a little harder. Both of them max out attack/defense, putting him briefly on about the same level as you. The attack buff heals him too, and the defense buff adds Defend (a generic halving of damage for a turn) and Bless (debuffn’t). I’m pretty sure at least the defense buff also clears negative statuses
- Those actions can happen randomly, but also if you try to cheese God with status effects. High poison/scorch/curse stacks trigger defense, and high weaken stacks trigger the heal and damage buff. You can actually use this predictability to your advantage with poison spam and Giga Drill.
- Get your relevant status resistances maxed out, but you can safely ignore Weaken as an immunity. It’s only relevant when you’re struggling to get your buffs back, and you’ll only be losing out on 5% damage.
- The sword cats are okay to leave around. The gun cats can sometimes ruin an attempt if you don’t have full death resistance. DO NOT LET MAGE CATS LIVE. Healing scales with health, and God will be healing plenty as-is without help.
- After getting your immunities in order, get as much of either kind of defense on you as possible (or work around a designated glass cannon, you’ve got options). There’s no damage types in this fight and evade is awful for a bunch of reasons here, so things like knight armor and robot gear are your friend. If you have enough defense set up, tanking Spirit Bomb from full health is possible, and free if you’ve got Auto-Revive handy.
- Do not damage God until you’re ready to tank a Spirit Bomb or know you’re safe. His Limit Breaks are based on damage dealt, not HP%, so do not try eyeballing it if you don’t want to do math.
- Give NoLegs your Pixel Shades. This is good advice and also does something.
Nice seeing an EBF fan here. And I think that the numbers you see in EBF are on the cusp of being too high but not quite. Unless you're playing New Game+ or have grinded like crazy you didn't see attacks dealing more than 5 digit numbers without lots of setup.
@@TheDemonChara By the time you're at the final bosses, certain limit breaks can usually deal 6-digit damage with the standard arrangement of (de)buffs, STAB equipment, and weakness abuse. 7- or even 8-digit damage still tends to require higher level/stats (such as in NG+) and/or more elaborate setups.
@@steam-powereddolphin5449 I guess I should've elaborated that it wasn't taking Limit Breaks into account, mb
the reason why a million feels like the middle of that line is because humans think logarithmically- at scales that big, orders of magnitude are generally more relevant and important. Relative Largeness is useful, and 1,000 is as small compared to 1,000,000 as 1,000,000 is to 1,000,000,000. three orders of magnitude.
Something I find really interesting is how our understanding (or lack thereof) of numbers can also work in the complete opposite direction. When IO Interactive was beta testing Freelancer in Hitman 3 everyone complained that the rewards weren't high enough, and sure enough they reworked it when Hitman Freelancer officially released and everyone felt satisfied. All they did was add two 0s to the dollar amounts displayed in the game (so instead of earning $5 you now earned $500 e.g.). The costs of items in the shops also got two 0s added to them, the actual values didn't change, but receiving bigger numbers as rewards *feels* better, even if it's all worth the same at the end of the day.
That feels more like an immersion thing than a numbers thing, at least to me. Making less than minimum wage on a kill just feels wrong.
@@JrTroopa Well it's not literally US dollars, it's a made up currency called Merces which I always kind of assumed was meant to be some sort of cryptocurrency or whatever. Getting paid 5 bitcoin to kill someone wouldn't be minimum wage. The point is the value is entirely made up so it can be whatever, but bigger numbers *feel* better as rewards.
@@jubjubwantrubrub
The mind definitely associates the currency to dollars, don’t you think?
A bitcoin can sometimes feel big because it’s written like 1.0000000 bitcoin
Another funny effect this reminded me of, was in World of Warcraft's beta. There was a mechanic that was basically universally loathed by the players: exhaustion. When you play for a long time and get a lot of XP, you became exhausted and started receiving just half of that. The game was telling you to go touch grass for a while. Players hated it. So Blizzard completely reversed it: turned it into Rested bonus for not playing the game for a while, doubling your XP gain. Meanwhile, the normal XP you gain was halved. They made it so that *players are by default exhausted*, reframed it into seeming like a bonus, and people loved it! It's how the game works to this day!
Of course in modern WoW the XP rewards are designed with this in mind, but the initial levelling experience was made assuming players would be trying to avoid exhaustion. I feel like this is part of why WoW's original level grind was kinda hellish, you'd run out of quests to do and had to just farm mobs for long periods of time. Though even with "permanent rested" I think there were a bit too few quests, it would certainly make it more comfortable.
its not the opposite, its the same way. except instead of a healthbar thats taking damage, its a bank account.
as he said, losing 1900 out of 8000 felt small, but losing 4.75 out of 20 felt large.
so spending $1 out of $5 feels large, but $20 out of $100 feels small.
Something that also interests me is the sheer difference between the numbers the players deal and the numbers enemies deal. In Honkai: Star Rail for instance, if you deal 10k dmg (in the lategame), that's barely significant, but if one of your characters takes 10k dmg, they've been absolutely obliterated.
Saw this premise and immediately thought of Oldschool Runescape
When you start the game off at level 3 hitting mostly 0's and 1's, every time you gain a single max hit feels like a massive leap. When your absolute max health is 99, even chip damage feels substantial. With a max of 28 inventory slots, every item you pick up or drop is a meaningful decision.
I think that design is part of what keeps a 20-year-old browser-based point and click adventure game relevant (and arguably more popular than ever), despite being such a notoriously "grindy" experience; each level increase feels meaningful and impactful.
The scaling is also really well designed, too- level 92 in a skill is exactly halfway xp wise to 99, meaning that unlocking most of the skill-locked content in the game is pretty reasonably accessible but getting those last 7 levels to max is rewarding in its own way for those that suffer through the grind. It's part of what keeps me coming back to it while numerous "triple-A" titles collect dust in my Steam library
That and the flexibility of attention you can pay to it- currently watching this video while grinding my last level to 99 strength for that sweet, sweet +1 to max hit. Case in point
13:23 "Can you imagine if your debit card had a life bar"
I can. I think most banking apps in Poland let you display your statement as a bar or percentage meter of your set "base value"
My biggest problem with gigantic numbers is when they don't have separators. You just dealt 1000000000 damage or got that many coins as a reward or something. The zeros start to blend in with each other, you'll just be confused instead of feeling like a millionaire. 1,000,000,000 is way easier to read, especially when the game also wants to be fast paced and flashy.
Or just use K and M, that's even clearer. 999K, dang, so close, then BAM, you're in 1M territory. Much more rewarding than a random string of numbers you probably won't be arsed to read anyway.
This is just a random thought but maybe the fact that it's often RPGs with the ridiculously high damage values that are impossible to imagine is just... part of the fantasy feeling. Like, you're not *supposed to* imagine exactly what is happening there, just let go and let the magic happen until the boss drops dead.
Absolute facts. Sometimes lower numbers hit harder for the reasons discussed, but the stupidly high numbers are so integral to the experience and aesthetic of certain in-game worlds.
Vampire Survivors had a very different use for them: It's designed in every way to emulate the dopamine-dispensing addiction tactics of casino gambling, without the insidious move of actually charging you money for each hit.
Well, in rpgs, it is pretty common to go from fighting goblins to fighting gods, so the use of such large numbers could be seen as indicating the shear difference in power scale from early game enemies and late game bosses. Of course an early game goon is gonna have 10 hp, while the dread god Yaldabaoth the demiurge is gonna have 10 million hp.
Gotta hit that 9999 when you are killing god
23:42 You just introduced me to the perfect outlet for my fandom dependant memorabilia needs. Of course I'm gonna buy stuff!!! Already on it!
I think the battle cats handle the puny paradox in a good way. There’s no health bars nor damage numbers except for the bases, so when your fighting an enemy the only way you know how tanky they are is a knock back that happens when you deal enough damage. So you just go by vibes and vibes only when It comes to enemy health (excluding bases) and the funny thing is that everyone is doing massive damage yet you’d never know if you didn’t look behind the scenes
I like looking to Undertale for using numbers in a creative way. The actual damage numbers don't really matter that much (unless you are like a speedrunner grinding out quads or something idk), since you have the information from the healthbars, and they are typically smaller numbers. But, whenever they want you to feel the impact of an attack from a story perspective, they will change it to whatever they want. I'm putting some spoilery examples I can think of off the top of my head in the read more.
Killing most bosses instantly in Genocide, Undyne the undying resisting that damage, the normal last hit on Asgore surprising you with like 7x the normal damage, the tiny hits on Omega Flowey turning into massive hits in the finale, Chara filling the screen with damage 9s, Sans and the Amalgams flipping the script by having no numbers, Asriel doing sort of the opposite by taking your health into the decimal places by orders of magnitude
Without spoiling things, Omori also does a cool numbers thing where things with a connection to Something will use the number 143 in damage or health.
@@kaleenar963 That's interesting, what does "143" mean?
@@merlin9845 Okay this is kind of half-spoilers so read carefully:
143 means “I love you” (the letter counts match up) and this is emotionally significant as it’s something that the character Mari is known for saying frequently, and Mari and the Something (actual name of the enemy) have some kind of connection.
@@kaleenar963 Oooh i see, that's very interesting. Thanks!
Undertale also lies constantly with the stats. The code is 98% spaghetti and the atk/def you get when inspecting enemies does not match the in game stats
Also there's no damage formula, it's only if/else statements
Man, CrossCode is so good. That one moment was awesome, and it’s just one of many!
Someday I’ll replay it.
I never bothered to get the good ending of CrossCode for some reason. In retrospect I should have but wanted to move on to other games lol.
@@VoluXian It's so worth it! All the post-credits stuff is excellent
@@FBracht Post-credits does look really good. I also have yet to play the DLC, which is even more incentivizing to go back. 🤔
I grew up on the big numbers of final fantasy, and I do admit its always satisfying to reach the 9999s, but over a dozen games it just taught me to ignore numbers, that they are just a thing that steadily grow over the course of the game and dont really matter that much as long as you are keeping up with the dificulty curb.
Sometimes it even has the opposite effect, where keeping numbers low but winning on strategy makes it way more satisfying
This is the bread and butter of low level runs of FFVI and IX. As someone who did both ( Regrouping the entire party of VI at level.... 17? in WoR and a near-full party of lvl1s for most of IX and 1 single forced XP absorber... ), beating the incredible odds stacked against you feels amazing.
The funny thing about YuGiOh is that, since YuGiOh never uses a number below fifty, the big numbers are entirely ornamental. The game's numbers could be scaled down by a factor for fifty, and on a *technical* level, they don't change (however, you addressed the actual change in the video).
If I were to fancy a guess, the size of YuGiOh's numbers come from two sources. First of all, the card game we know today had its origin in being a plot device for a manga about a kid who likes all manner of games. Second of all, the flashy nature of huge numbers in the thousands helped YuGiOh set itself apart from the tens and hundreds in Pokemon and the ones and tens of MTG.
Probably had to juice up the numbers so they look impressive to people who deal with prices in Yen on a daily basis.
"20 lifepoints? That's not even worth a fifth of a basic riceball!"
there are actually a handful of really old cards that use numbers like 30 and 80
An interesting thing that I don't think is mentioned enough in this video, is that in a lot of RPGs, the player is dealing hundreds of damage to enemies, and the enemies correspondingly have that much health to tank it, makes sense. But then you look at your player, and they only have 120hp, they deal out hundreds tp thousands of damage on the regular, but the moment an enemy deals you 45hp, it's a HUGE deal. I think it's interesting how they play with the numbers to make you feel powerful yet frail like you could die at any moment in the same time.
A good example is in smt nocturne the players HP cap is 999 but the mc regularly deals out 3500+ damage to the final boss with proper use of buffs, debuffs, and charge
That IS the case in D&D as well!
I think it's interesting how, despite them blowing up the numbers to absurdity, the core mechanic of "players deal a shit ton of damage, monsters not so much", was kept.
Hey Daryl, I love your vids! This is definitely a concept that has been bugging me for years since I noticed it.
Interestingly, as an amateur game dev, I've been working on an FPS game last week where each person has 3 HP, and every single gun deals 1 damage. No exceptions. Stupidest idea ever, huh? Surprisingly it turned out pretty fun, adding a real sense of danger and tangibility to every bullet whizzing by you haha. When you took a single damage, or dare I say, TWO damage, you knew you weren't going to recover from that. This might actually be more of a low-health effect rather than a low-numbers effect, but whatever, I already wrote this whole thing XD
Once again, keep up the amazing psychology videos man!
Kinda sounds like Superhot or Hotline Miami where 1 shot always = 1 kill either way round
(Tho ig both also have stun/knockdown mechanics (throwing weapons in both games, doors in Miami))
holy crap. debit card healthbars. im getting this patented
Only problem, what would the “max health” be on the health bar? I don’t know much about money, but I feel like if it used your life savings as max health most purchases wouldn’t even register on the display.
@@kaleenar963 maybe some way you could set it on your banking app
@@kaleenar963 I would just set it based on my budget. If I want to spend X per month, that's what I'd set the health bar to, and then I'd do a better job at saving the rest
@@diribigal That could work
Interesting idea. It looks like Visa beat you to the idea of a live balance display (US8308059B2), but I haven't seen a "healthbar", per se. (For the record, this is not legal advice.)
as a SRPG nerd i've always greatly appreciated games that use small numbers. when games expect you to strategise around the damage you're dealing/taking, keeping those numbers low means it's quick and intuitive to understand the magnitude of damage which makes executing strategies much more interesting and snappier since the focus is what you do with the numbers you're given, rather than deciphering the numbers themselves. It's a big part of why I always find myself coming back to Fire Emblem; it's low damage values and simple damage calculations (ex. defense is just a flat -damage taken, not a % reduction and accuracy is just a %chance to hit, not a variable damage roll) makes the games just flow really nicely while still providing an enjoyable challenge in how you use the very simple info to your advantage.
oh yeah FE's low numbers make the fact that crits deal triple damage something to FEAR... or something hilarious when the poor early game bandit who's already dealing 0 damage to Frederick lands his 1% hit/1% crit & still deals 0 damage followed by Frederick's axe to the face. (yes this happened to me & I still find it GLORIOUS)
In the original Gamecube TTYD, the highest enemy HP value in the game is Bonetail at 200. The Switch remake adds two new harder bosses, and with them in the game the highest HP is…still Bonetail at 200. The new bosses have HALF her total HP. Instead they challenge you to deal that damage smartly. Excellent design that keeps the game’s intent intact.
I don't know that game but I really like that approach. I used to play Magic in the early 2000s, which by then had been out for enough cycles that they'd learned some lessons about game balancing. And the trend then was generally away from big number creatures or at least where they existed, they were often expensive enough to be seen as not very good. The scariest thing on the field might be 1/1 but it has a strong ability, or maybe your deck is built around making yourself discard the too-expensive big creatures and have something else bring it into play for free, but it was complicated and risky. Anyway I liked that, it wasn't "bigger is better" it was always "more efficient is better". (I don't know what the game is like these days.)
@@silphv TTYD is Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. One of the games talked about in the video.
@@kenji6492 Ohh okay thanks. I didn't play it but I do know it.
@@silphv There’s never been a better time to get into it! The Remake has even caused prices on the original game to sink dramatically if you have original hardware.
I mean one of them has 6 defence and the other can heal 25 hp
1:45 the semifinal theme from the shadow games + the beat drop with that kick... peak taste man, great editing, here is a subscribe just for that.
Smaller numbers really help if games expect you to do more specific calculations in your head. In many JRPGs, the damage calculation formula is very obtuse and you’re not really supposed to know how to calculate. In these cases, you’re meant to mostly vaguely know “high strength = bigger damage” but not much else. Large damage numbers with quite a bit of variance helps keep damage calculation vague in this case. However, in a game where you are meant to plan much more thoroughly, being able to calculate stuff ahead of time really helps. Small numbers really help with this type of game. A good example of this is Fire Emblem. Fire emblem puts a lot of focus on planning. All enemies can (usually) be seen, enemy movement range/attack can be seen, enemy stats can be seen, combat results can be mostly seen before fighting, and in newer games even the target an enemy will pick on their turn can be seen. Fire emblem likes to give a lot of information to the player and doesn’t like to keep many things vague. As such, its stat system reflects this. Damage has a consistent formula: Strength + Weapon Might - Enemy Defense = Damage. This only works because stat numbers are kept small around 1-50 and damage numbers are small around 1-140. I think this is a good example of how the scale of the damage can also affect how a player is meant to strategize.
Yeah you're right. Another good example is Pokemon, while it doesn't matter for regular players, calculations around the stats are extremely important for competitive. Pretty much everything deals in numbers up to maybe a few hundred at most, whether stats or HP or base damage of moves, and high-level players have a very good idea going into a tournament about which attacks from which pokemon under which conditions will be an OHKO or a roll or a guaranteed survive. The way the math works out is just small numbers leading to other small numbers in roughly the same range so it stays meaningful
I love when numbers get significantly higher the more you understand and fully utilise the game’s mechanics.
Put simply, big numbers = BIG serotonin 🙏🙏
Counter exemple: clicker games (like cookie clicker).
10H gold is miles lower than 10T gold but when you start reaching numbers that high it just becomes noise
PSA for people with money health bar thing. In Canada at least (dunno about elsewhere) TD offers an app that visualizes how much money youre spending using a gauge. It calculates your budget based on your previous spending. Very helpful. Called myspend. I will say having it be a health bar rather than a pressure gauge would be better imo
The naming convention you used for Pokemon Scarlet/Violet @ 12:14 was pretty funny. I almost missed it while watching the video!
CrossCode being use as an example to explain something? Let's freaking go
"Death's Door" is a perfect example of how to handle lifebars and dmg output, by removing them altogether. You really feel how powerful you are only by how enemies react and look and it's brilliant.
I put it in the middle and declared it to be a logarithmic scale.
Exactly what I thought
Hi Daryl! Just wanted to express how great I find your videos. There are so many things we just glance over while playing video games
I think one of the things I think got glossed over here that I'd want to add about large numbers, is that IIRC, when it comes to large numbers, we automatically start to process things logarithmically instead of linearly. That is to say, we start to conceptualise the distances between things not in terms of addition, but in terms of multiplication.
One million is one thousand times one thousand, so in a linear metric, yeah, it's 1000th of the way there. But in logarithmic space, where things are multiplied instead of added, it's half way there, because you only need to multiply by 1000 a second time.
It definitely doesn't explain everything about how and why we give up on processing big numbers and how estimation can fail to make us process the scale of things, but I do think it's interesting in and of itself, and helps explain why people make the specific mistake (or perhaps, non-mistake in some sense?) at the start.
Dude. Idk what it was, but when you started playing on my watch later, I was like, "Yes! Finally, a video I'll like! " and I didn't even look at the title yet.
Keep doing what you're doing, man!! God Bless!
TTYD feels like such a perfect example. Having a build dealing 10-20 damage per hit in a system balance around 1-6 is so much more fun then when numbers scale up to the quadrillions
Totally agree with the Copy Flower point. If an attack deals 120 damage and is dealt in one blow, it makes that one strike more impactful. But if it's dealt in a series of 4 damage strikes, suddenly it feels like a gargantuan accomplishment and feels like you're doing more damage despite it still being 120 damage total.
(Plus, those volley attacks are fun with percentages and multipliers!)
A life bar for your bank account is actually such a brilliant idea and I want it
This makes me recall how Mario + Rabbids is mostly a copy of X-Com in the way the battles work, but one of the differences is that X-Com uses single-digit numbers, but Mario + Rabbids uses 3-to-4 digit numbers, and one interesting thing that comes out of that is the way it’s implemented in the games, the small numbers actually make X-Com *more* intense and the larger numbers help Mario + Rabbids feel more *more* relaxed, which is in stark contrast to comparing Paper Mario to Final Fantasy or something.
It's funny, I experienced this when travelling in Japan. The yen is really tiny, with 100 yen being around a dollar. So if 100 is nothing, then 1,000 isn't really much either, which means 10,000 isn't too much either. After looking at all these big numbers (after a lifetime of 40 dollars feeling like a lot) I kind of lost perspective and spent a lot more than I should have.
Huh. I had a different experience. The Japanese yen is in the same category as the Korean won for me, both of which I have no issue with because I see them as basically one to one equivalents - just move the decimal. My brain would just hack off the last two zeros for the yen, or the last three for the won, without much thought
... now the Czech koruna on the other hand~
yea i have this problem with yen too it always seems like a ton if you dont take off the last 2 numbers
100 yen = 1 dollar is an easy mental calculation to make, but it's not really true anymore. 100 yen is only about 64 cents today. Or, to convert the other way, 1 dollar is about 157 yen.
When you think about it, 40 Dollars are 4000 cents, so we could bloat our numbers just like with Yen and some others. That said, the tiny, basic cheeseburger at McDonald's currently costs 239 cents here.
@@magicalgirlnicole I'd shamelessly round that to 50 cents in my head like I've done with Dominican Pesos, and then probably overspend by the end of the day lol.
What an amazing video, I feel like everything I could’ve possibly wanted to hear thoughts on was here!
My personal favourite for this is a dice based card game I played a while back. I don't remember the title sadly, but the base concept is that you start off with attacks that deal 2 damage, and healing that gains you 3 life. You face bosses ranging from 20 health to stuff like 999, 999, 999 (on 3 different sets of health!!)
However, you get to do shenanigans! You get to roll dice, and replace any of the numbers on the screen with the result. You can reroll that attack that deals 2 damage 2 times to deal 20 damage 20 times!!! You can reroll that 999 to be a 6! It feels epic, and it feels powerful, both because the numbers are kept small enough to understand, and because seeing those huge numbers, when you're used to dealing with smaller ones, feels terrifying!
The final boss being three sets of 999 is terrifying! Right up until you reroll their health, and begin to chew through them! Works brilliantly, by utilising small numbers to make those bigger numbers hit all the harder. (And, to be fair, 999 is a lot!!!)
not sure if it's the exact same game, but I played something really similar called DICEOMANCER. Getting to replace any number you want with a 1-6 was really fun, and opened up a lot of options just seeing what numbers you could change and what effect it would have
The lifebar on your debit card is actually genius, on several levels.
I’m glad you showed so much Persona 4 when talking about health/mana bars. I was irked the whole time that everyone’s bars were the same size regardless of the size of their numbers. It was hard to wrap my brain around 50 mp being nothing to Yukiko and being a problem for Yosuke
In octopath, attacks at low levels are double, sometimes triple digit. But by stacking buffs, debuffs, breaking, and using your boosts, you can easily reach quadruple digits. This makes your strategy feel very impactful right from the start.
In addition, the numbers themselves, that is to say, the visual representation, get bigger and redder along with the numerical value.
This makes it easy to just disregard the exact value. You just intrinsically know "this is big damage".
This also applies to stories! A story that is more grounded/low stakes like someone you like being ill feels *more* real than one where the city/continent/nation/world is at stack.
In the former, behind basic empathy, the writers have to pull out those emotions out of you if they want you feel something, while the latter, well, if you want to read the story or just like the characters, the world *has* to stay alive for that.
Of course knowing when and where to employ low and stakes would make you stories better than just sticking to one of them.
Conversely, this paradox is the reason why a lot people dislike power scalers, since they strip away all that makes up a character just to turn them into stat sticks and that feels disingenuous to lot of people.
And to real life as well, yeah it sounds cynical to say it, but it's true.
And even if there's a high stakes situation, there's probably a low stake stealing the spotlight.
A surprise tornado is headed for the city and might kill hundreds or thousands? I'm getting out of here, BUT WHERE IS MY CAT?!
During the intro when you were talking about how smaller numbers hurt more I legitimately winced at the idea of a 4/4 to the face. I dont even play magic all that often but from my few times playing you would definetly feel 1/5 of your health gone in a single attack.
I think that Final Fantasy 16 uses damage number for evoking a feeling of being badass well. Sometimes, while playing story missions, you turn into an Eikon, this big badass kaiju and fight other kaijus. These fights are arguably the best parts of the game, the setpieces sometimes made me go apeshit lol. I think one of the main reasons what make these fights so fucking cool and badass is shifting the damage numbers from 450 with light attack in human form, to dealing 23,800 (also light attack). The big number doesn't necessarily represent the percentage of health pool (duh, you're fighting other badass fantasy dinosaurs), but the numbers alone definitely contributes to power fantasy.
Definitly an interesting way to show how powerfull Eikons are.
from the same game in a similar vein, 999999. If you know, YOU KNOW
@@Triforce_of_Doom oh yeah, this is the perfect example. I remember getting goosebumps
These videos are so iconic, truly, im using a lot of concepts from this video to consider in my future game dev journey! Thanks Daryl! ❤
Honestly, this helped me realize how my math wired brain works differently from the rest, as i always try to check the numbers not the health bar, since if i know the attacks is going to do 1000 damage and the boss barely noticed it, upgrading my weapon or leveling up to get 300 damage may not be enough, and i intantly go into mental calculator mode to figure or how many hits the boss will tank right at that moment, and try to estimate how many it would tank with x amount of upgrades
Yeah, happened to me in Terraria. Bcs game gives you your dps it's much easier to divide boss health by it then try to figure out something from a boss bar
13:26 mine kinda does! All the budget tools in the financial institutions’s official app are visual. They have the dollar amounts there and it’s all visualized mostly by pie graphs (occasionally bar graphs). It really does give a better grasp of how much of our budget we’ve spent/how much of each budget item we have left.
I would say if the battles with high numbers would also be devastating to the surrounding (as soon as physics simulations are not that expensive anymore) would be a good way to visualize such strong attacks
This was another cool video, thanks Daryl. I've had thoughts on these orders of magnitudes in game also since FFX and ever since through my game design journey. It's always great to delve into why we do things the way we do and why it works or doesn't. You could tie into this topic well by analysing the ways that games do information feedback to the players, as the numbers and health and such are exactly that. The next step from "No health bars no numbers" is other methods of representing damage inflicted without showing a player numbers: changing target appearance to match a certain health state is an obvious one, or breaking parts apart. In all case, they are interesting mixes of trying to convey important information to the player, while also serving game vibes which may or may not be harmed by simply splashing the screen with numbers.
I think you will get different results regarding whether people prefer big or small numbers depending on where you get your sampling from. And I'm not even talking about whether it's from people who are good at math or not, but rather what they want out of the gaming experience.
Mark Rosewater talked about this in one of his MtG design columns a long, long while ago (at least 10 years, closer to 15 probably) and he said that, while they were working on Kaijudo, one of the things that market research found out was that new players were more easily attracted by big numbers, and that it was more exciting to try out a game and see you were doing thousands of damage points at once instead of two or three at a time. So that's what they went with for that game.
I think the difference is that if you're flying by the seat of your pants you're probably not trying to think tactically, or even trying to win, you're just feeling things out, and that's when big damage values feel most effective. Meanwhile, if you are an established player trying to use your brain to win a difficult challenge or to optimally conserve resources, seeing seven digits just forces you to disengage because at that point it's all an amorphous mass of math.
Similarly, casual players of competitive or tactical games love random effects on their characters. A 5% chance to crit for 2x damage on any given attack is, statistically, meaningless and not something worth planning around. But when the player sees that big number pop up, even if it was against a slime, they get the enjoyable brain chemicals going. When given a choice between a random super effect or a reliable but much smaller constant effect, they will greatly overestimate the likeliness of that random proc, dreaming up of how cool it would be if they killed a boss in turn 1. More competitive-minded players instead loathe that randomness and want to minimize its impact on their game experience as much as possible, because they want to be able to run the game in their head. This is a phenomenon so prevalent you don't need to play Advance Wars or MtG to see it, because it happens even in fighting games, as you probably know from the old Final Destination Smash meme.
I will say that working with large numbers gives you more wiggle room to balance effects differently (oh this spell is too strong at 2 but too weak at 1... If I add another digit to all calculations I can make it hit for 15 and it'll be in the right place), so while I prefer smaller numbers in general there have been times where I wish I was working with three digits instead of two. That can be a factor as well.
Anyway, good video. Glad to see you finally doing CrossCode and loving it. Enjoy the NG+! It's one hell of an experience!
1:10 When you asked this question in the beginning, I thought, I'd rather use a logarithmic scale, so I'd place it in the middle. It's NOT an error I made.
I’m feeling really smart because I got the question at the beginning right, and I’m gonna riding this high for the rest of the day lmaoo
Great video! It was really interesting as always :)
what i think is interesting about the number line is that if you put 1000 and 10'000 and asked people to pick 2000, they'd intuitively pick a good position
but if you put 1000 and 1 billion, it's probably further right than the first example xD
Yooo, I started the video immediately thinking about bringing up the exponential growth segment of CrossCode, I'm so happy you touched up on it. The game already makes you feel on a power trip through other means, like the S-Rank combat music or the flashy Combat Arts, but the way that sequence plays out as a plot point is BEYOND SATISFYING. It makes sense that Sergey would give Lea that immense buff to fight back, and introducing a ridiculous power trip like that was nothing shorter than genius. It felt genuine, authentic like you said. I love this game so much.
By the by, a funny example on the power creep topic would be Phantasy Star Online 2. In the original game, we were easily dealing up to 200k damage with even normal attacks, easily nailing everything that wasn't a boss.
In comes the New Genesis update, where by year one our endgame was barely hitting the 1k mark. Years later and we just barely touched the big hitters with 100k damage. But they still don't feel as "good" because everything, and I mean EVERYTHING is tankier than in the original. We're currently at lv90, and the lv15 Pettas at the first area still take a good few seconds to deal with.
And that's not to mention the mechanic that bottlenecks your Attack stat on lower level foes, making so that even small fry at lv1 still take two or three hits to kill. But I still can't wrap my head around how it works, so I sadly can't bring it up.
8:14 of course the Pthumerian is researching the brain
The Ancient Greek word "ptoma" meaning ruin or corpse is likely the actual etymology of the Bloodborne faction but that's a hilarious coincidence.
The tweets you showed in the beginning are why darkest dungeon feels so satisfying when you crit a damage move. It *feels* like you’re hitting them with a truck. The comparatively smaller health pools (despite some bosses having hundreds or so) make your stronger hits feel like they hit harder. Like that tweet with Chris in it, the smaller numbers hit the hardest
I remember during my early MMO days hearing high level players in map chat saying stuff like "My combo only does 30k damage", meanwhile my low level char was pushing barely 3 digit numbers. I couldnt even comprehend why those players would be sad with their damage output.
On higher levels I later understood that the numbers just inflate into meaninglessness and my 130 damage was just their 130.000 damage in a different level context.
And for the reverse maybe take a look at Antimatter Dimension. Basically you would have no idea how huge your goal is, but you quickly realize that how little your progression is, and how hard it is to improve your progression speed using what you got. After you struggled to the goal and receive new tools for the next run, even though the tools might seem pointless at first, you quickly realize how much of help they offered, and you do feel the power of it because you remember how hard it is without this new tool.
13:20 I would absolutely love to see a health bar on my debit card
Honestly if my phone constantly showed me how much is in my account I'd spend much less
I'd rather not have that info displayed to others
My debit card is playing the low HP alarm :(
And my monthly payments as undispellable DoT
Thank you for giving CrossCode some spotlight. It's my absolute favorite game that nobody seems to care/know about.
The fact that it saves those unholy strings of numbers for only climactic moments is a great tool the devs used to show just how stubborn your enemies are, and the lengths you have to go to stop them.
The Gastropod boss in Crosscode isbmy favorite boss battle in the whole game. It's not mechanically difficult, its a mandatory boss in the story and has a gimmick.
But what makes the Gastropod fight so memorable and instills a feeling of...intensity, is the story that is surrounding the boss itself.
Spoilers for midway of Crosscode
Lea is attempting to flea from the tower in the corrupted zone and in this attempt, you are given a sample of how to break the game. Breaking through floors of the tower and smashing through walls in ways you never thought would be possible. In an attempt to test you and see if you really are, The One who will push the limits of Experience, Gauthum puts the Gastropod before you.
You attack and, as in the video, do vitrually no damage to the creature at all. It no longer is a boss fight for victory, its now purely about survival.
Until youre companion, who has been with you the whole story, breaks the game another time and gives you the power to exceed what is conventionally possible in the game. And that fight for survival? Its no longer a scrappy fight to run away when you're able. Simply buying time ao that an exit can appear.
Instead, what was once a battle between what essentially felt like a mouse vs a war machine, now becomes a battle of equals.
As the damage buffs continue to flow in you feel that sense of potential come with it. Instead of mashing dash to dodge and preserve HP, youre now gunning in as often as possible, knowing you can infact, take this thing down.
It is a marvelously crafted moment of empowerment. It is short lived, as the buffs and method of acquisition have to be left aside after you escape.
But while the escape takes place, you are given this rush of "I can do this" and i have never been more invigorated in a boss battle in my life because of it.
my doubly favorite part of this whole scenario is how they recapitulated it during the final boss. really feels like a climax to end all climaxes
@@knopfiri found the final boss to not nearly have the same impact as the Gastropod did, though. I think its because by the end of the game, youve proven that, you can do this. Its not a matter of if. But a matter of when.
I dont think it was a bad idea to include the buffs in the final boss but it felt less impactful because previously, there was still alot of uncertainty around what you can do and where you stood in the "food chain" so to speak. By the end game, the only thing that can really stand in youre way is the arenas, and even those arent much of a challange unless your trying to farm for end game equipment.
This is one of the best videos I've ever watched, no joke. Was enthralled the whole way through ❤
My first, instinctive thought was to place the million mark in the middle, but then I *immediately* thought "Wait, that's not right; it should be much closer to 1000." Still wouldn't have placed it as close as it actually is, but I at least understood to an extent.
Exact same experience. Don't know if that slight hiccup in thought counts as thinking too hard, but I'll take it.
@@xerveeon I don't think it's a matter of thinking too hard - I think it's a matter of instinct versus knowledge. I've thought about bigger numbers quite a few times before, so I *knew* it wasn't as simple as being in the middle, but because our brains are designed for smaller numbers, that was still my *instinct.* It makes sense that our brains would consider instinct before knowledge; instinct is instant, and in a moment of danger, every second counts - there's not necessarily going to be time to access knowledge, because that takes longer.
Crosscode mentioned! The commentary it makes on gamedesign, devs and players is just so awesome.
Dang this is actually so relateable though. It's like video game inflation
I really love Paper Mario for giving such small numbers, it was the first RPG i played that simplified it so much that each hit felt impactful. Most RPGs with high values makes battles feel a bit random but the smaller ones in Paper Mario always gave me an idea of how much damage i needed to do with tougher enemies really feeling sturdy when a simple 1 damage becomes 0
Usually when I begin a new game that has numbers in some form, I tend to "reset" my expectations as to how much the size of these numbers even means. Frequently enough in especially roguelikes/roguelites I get some options that deal X amount of damage, or prevent X amount of damage - but that number means nothing to me initially. Because until I have more experience with the game, I have no context to understand how much the individual numbers even mean
More often than not, in most games something like "5% poison resistance" is an absolute joke. However, in the right context it could bring your poison resistance from 95% to 100% and have pretty drastic consequences when you are now immune to poison rather than taking little damage from it, since it could have various negative side effects. But with 100% those side effects are cancelled..
But... Until I have a vast amount of knowledge, that 5% poison resistance still means absolutely nothing to me, even if it theoretically could have a great impact.
I think, in the end it's all about context to me personally. Although - Numbers that cap out at 9999 like most Final Fantasy games seem to be a bit of a sweet spot - The numbers usually start in the 10s or 100s, and go to the 1000s in the endgame. Anything above 100k just starts to become muddled and meshed together int the [large number]-category, which ultimately is meaningless. At that point I just start checking how many hits I need to defeat something, and ignore the numbers. If the numbers start out very small like Paper Mario, then there is not really any potential "reach" towards the lower end. 1 is still a lot in that game. But if you have your defense high enough to only take 10 damage in a Final Fantasy game, that can feel very impactful and rewarding for choosing an especially defensive approach
And not sure if that's relevant, but I immediately put the line on the left side for the 1000 to 1 billion. I have seen enough questionable statistics-graphs to immediately question why it would not start at 0, which kind of revealed the entire thing instantly
Either way, I haven't even finished watching the video yet... Jeez, you always make me think, in a good way. Thank you so much for your thought-provoking videos, even though I doubt you'll end up reading this. Whoever reads this, I hope you have a great day :)