Hello everyone! In this devlog, I want to talk about battles, namely how to run away from battles, and the concept of Surprise Attacks and Pre-Emptive Attacks. There probably won't be any screenshots of Untold Story in this post, because there's not much to show when it comes to talking about this subject.

Battle Escape

In Untold Story, during nearly every non-forced encounter with Monsters, the player has the option to Run, and end the battle right away. Running with provide no EXP or Items regardless of if Monsters were beaten or not. Otherwise, there is no penalty at all to running from a battle.

Furthermore, there is a 100% chance that the player will be able to escape from any battle they chose to. This allows the player to choose to run from battle and know that they will escape successfully.

I chose to do this because one of the most frustrating things to me as a player is wishing to escape from a battle, and not being able to. There are some fights I do not wish to fight, or I am getting somewhere soon, and being forced to fight dampens my enjoyment. By letting players decide the fights they want to battle, and provide no punishment for running, it lets them grow at their own pace.

Pre-emptive and Surprise Attacks

A common aspect of RPG battles is to have these two types of battle starts. Pre-empts will allow the party to start with an attacks while Surprises will allow the enemies to start the battle by attacking.

None of that is important because Untold Story doesn't have either of these things. Every single battle will begin with the player party taking their turns, followed by the enemies. This is how it will play, and that is how the game is balanced.

I removed surprise attacks because I simply don't see the benefit to keeping them around. In Untold Story, Monsters tend to come in large groups, and getting ambushed can easily lead to some serious problems, if not outright game over. There is nothing difficult or fun about losing because the game randomly decided that the enemies would get the first turn. Consistency is important, so the player always knowing they get the first turn will grant them that, and allow for their strategies to be planned.

Pre-emptive attacks were removed for much the same idea. Because of how the battle system works in Untold Story, getting a pre-empt would give the player a total of 10 actions max before the enemies even got 1. That is extremely imbalanced for the player, and would trivialize most fights. Again, for consistency, now the player will know what to expect when a battle begins.

That is it for today's post. Battles are an important part of any RPG, so I hope my decisions on these aspects make sense on why I wanted to remove them. I feel in the overall it improves the gameplay.