EPTTldr: In the new system, I believe the ATB gauge is able to stack up to 3 times. This is because a lot of the FF7 Remake gameplay will be about actively re-positioning your characters during battle to avoid enemy attacks. A stacking ATB gauge removes the necessity for a Wait mode whilst allowing the player to deal with the mechanical demand of controlling 3 characters. The limit break gauge will also charge three bars, allowing us to utilise a greater variety of limits in battle than we have been able to in the past.
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![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/SzblLJk.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/5zvzWcu.jpg)
I have been able to make several interesting connections based on the two screenshots released today. Skip to Section 4 if you want the biggest one.
Section 1.
Enemy attack indications appear on the ground in some cases, and you are able to switch between characters and move them to dodge attacks. This is streamlined obviously to work well with console controls.
Section 2.
Your own attacks are auto-target as per usual in FF games. However, the ability to reposition characters might mean there is the possibility of positional/area-based user-controlled spells. E.g. to AOE heal, you would need to move close to your party members. Personally I think this would be unnecessary to make good gameplay and would have been discarded as an idea, making all user-controlled actions completely auto-target.
Section 3.
The limit break gauge charges up and you can release it at one of 3 charges. Why implement this? Well, in FF7 you were always locked to using 1 or 2 of your current-level limits. There was next to no variation or choice. You always used your latest limit learned, or you remained locked into the one before that if it was effectively more powerful (e.g. AOE vs single target vs multi-strike).
Having a 3-bar charge gives us the choice between our three most recently learnt limits, but there is still doubt on how interesting this is as a gameplay mechanic, when our 'choice' is actually just a choice on whether or not we want to wait an extra 2 minutes or not in order to charge the next bar, for the result of ending the current battle sooner, just so that the next battle takes longer.
To get a good idea of how they might implement this, take a look at Cyan's attack gauge from FF6. When it was your time to attack, you click Attack and then wait a stacking ~5 seconds to attain a bonus in your attack, up until something like 25 seconds.
Attack variations for Cyan's gauge include: 1 charge - an attack with bonus damage, 3 charges - half the HP of an opponent, 4 charges - perform 4 physical attacks at once.
How often did I actually care whether I waited to charge it up for 5 seconds or 20 seconds? Never. The system gave the developers a huge amount of freedom to implement variety in attacks, but as a gameplay mechanic it fell flat on its face. 'Do nothing to do more,' for me, was a counter-intuitive and non-interactive mechanic which consequently felt like it benefited me in no meaningful way.
Section 4.
This is the big one and is most indicative of how the game will play. The ATP gauge has 3 charges. The charges start at 0, so they charge up during battle. You gain one when your main ATP gauge fills and can expend each one to perform a menu action.
My first thought was that they may be used to allow us to dodge/parry attacks with a button prompt. In FF15 we can observe this dodge/parry mechanic, but I do not think this will be in FF7. This is because it will be too difficult for players to have to respond to arbitrary dodge/parry prompts for all three of their characters, whilst also moving their characters and performing regular actions. I think there will be no active user dodge/parry mechanic in this game.
Instead, you will have the ability to store up to three ATP bars worth of regular menu actions and then utilise them all at once, or one by one when you get around to it. This is because it ties into the fact that a large part of the game will be about the re-positioning your characters in order to dodge enemy attack indications, as described in Section 1. Refer now to the screenshot that shows this, if you haven't already.
The necessity to re-position your characters means you will be busy a lot of the time. Instead of forcing you to constantly pause/freeze the game (aka our well-known 'wait' mode), instead your ATP charges will simply stack up a bit until you have time to utilise them and perform your regular actions for each of your three characters.
There will be no 'wait' or freeze mode in FF7 because of this ATB bar stacking. This lends to a more fluid gameplay experience whilst, crucially, enabling the developers to fit in more complex mechanics such as the re-positioning and menu action coordination of three separate heroes.
It is for these reasons that I am now excited about the combat system in FF7 and an advancement in complexity from the system we saw in FF15.
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