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There's one big thing dragging down DQXI for me and that's the music. Leaving aside the various political unpleasantness around the controller, it's some of the most low-effort music in an RPG I've ever heard. I'm used to games like this having unique interesting music for every location, but instead every town plays the exact same MIDI bleeps and bloops unless you pirate the Orchestral mod.
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Dec 7, 2021 03:52
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bewilderment posted:There's one big thing dragging down DQXI for me and that's the music. I think Orchestral is standard in the options on Steam, if you bought the Definitive edition.
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Dec 7, 2021 13:30
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bewilderment posted:There's one big thing dragging down DQXI for me and that's the music. The music is probably the worst aspect, true. That said the Definitive Edition at least has an orchestral soundtrack (and a synthesized one if you prefer it for whatever reason) and the soundtrack isn't bad per se, just weak.
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Dec 7, 2021 14:14
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The composer for the dq series also has some unbelievably hosed up political views
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Dec 7, 2021 20:39
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Zenithe posted:The composer for the dq series also has some unbelievably hosed up political views Had, he died a couple of months ago! I tried DQXI a couple of times and bounced off it hard, but I'm really glad it's been such a good game for so many people  (It's weird because I love a good JRPG but the series just never landed for me)
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Dec 7, 2021 21:27
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 Release Date: December 06th, 2018 | Developer: Lo-Fi Games | Platform: Steam | Where to Buy: https://store.steampowered.com/app/233860/Kenshi/ Here are some excerpts that happened while playing Kenshi. * My entire party, except one member were kidnapped by religious cult robots who tortured them in a ritual by skinning them alive and repairing their bodies over and over again, slowly killing all of them but the leader. The leader was saved by the single member, who was left alone because they were a robot like the cultists, who managed to get help by hiring mercenaries in a nearby town to raid the cult compound and save the human leader by turning her into a full into an android. * My party was attacked by a group of clinically insane wandering bandits who shriek gibberish at people. Once defeated my party played dead as a nearby Taliban-like government attacked the gang of bandits. Once the government left, my party attacked the bandit leader, kidnapped them, and turned their bounty into the government...only to find out that the government assigned the bandit leader to be a slave for life. So, the party ran into the slave compound, kidnapped the leader again and freed her just to get knocked out by a guard. Only for there to be another slave breakout happening at random, which the drivers turned their attention to leaving my entire party to bleed to death on the ground. Except that the bandit leader gains consciousness and rescues my party, takes them to a hiding spot and becomes their new mentor. * A previous treasure hunter distraught at losing all of her companions has nowhere to turn. So, she is taken in by a monk commune that prides itself in peace, discipline, equality, and the way of martial arts. The treasure hunter is so enamored with the group that she joins and achieves a series of tasks to get the highest ranking possible. Being so impressed by this the charismatic treasure hunter, many people begin to follow her which has her leading a splinter group that is dedicated to liberating the world from oppressive governments and instituting secular Buddhist Communism as they assassinate leaders and raid capitols around the world, taking over the cities for themselves and thus the people. During all the events I listed there wasn’t a single cutscene, choice prompt, or quest. Everything occurred organically. To elaborate, RPGs are extremely diverse in their nature and are hard to group amongst each other. However, people tend to be split RPGs into two camps stylistically. On one camp you have games that follow the Japanese model (also referred to as the console model) of grandiose stories where the player controls either a few or handful of party members. As the party undergoes their perilous journey the player does their best to manage their stats and battle strategy to overcome their foes in a linear gameplay fashion. On the other camp you have the Western model (also referred to as the computer model) of more grounded stories exploring lore where the player typically controls only a single character as they “live in the world”. These games tend to focus on a collection of smaller quests in addition to one main quest, in which each individual may not be too important, but as a whole really paint a lush world. But what makes these games stand out is the choices they give you. Unlike their Japanese counterparts, these quests practice branch pathing, in which throughout quests, the game presents players with choices to choose from. For example, say that you are in a part of a game where a character you care about has been held captive by bandits. In Japanese styled game, the game would simply have you run up to their compound, have you fight the guards and then have you fight their boss to free them. But with Western styled game things would work a bit differently.  The Western styled game would likely give the player the option to sneak passed the guards and upon surprising the boss give the chance for the player to sweet talk their way to having their friend be released. Or they could just punch their way out of the situation. However, at the end of the day the player is limited to the branch pathing the developers laid out. Everything is already predetermined, it just has you choose which path to take. At best these games are a little more than a choose your own adventure book, at worst they are a linear novel only where your choices may result in easter eggs of extra dialogue. Kenshi, however is very different. Kenshi has hardly any set branch paths in it, because there are no branches to take. The game is what you call a “sandbox RPG”. The developers simply give the player as many options and tools as they can in a harsh and unforgiving world and it’s up to the player how they plan to take on the challenges they face. The game has many starts you can choose from but typically it dumps you off in some random no-name town with no money, no food, and only ragged clothes to your name. It’s up to the player to forge their own destiny in the world. You want to make a living being a bounty hunter? Then be a bounty hunter. Want to be a successful merchant? Then be a merchant. Want to be a degenerate bandit robbing rich nobles as they pass by the wilderness? Then be a degenerate bandit. Want to be a drug smuggler? Then become a drug smuggler. Want to be a treasure hunter? Then become a treasure hunter.   The thing is that unlike other games there is no “questline” to follow to become these things, you simply gather enough money and skills to do them. If you want to become a merchant for example, then you need to decide what you want to sell, how to get those things, how to get the materials to build your business, and where to build it. So, say I want to setup a “general goods” store and I will make a profit by buying things for the cheap in yokel towns and find random stuff in the desert and then flipping them by opening up shop in an area filled with nobles. I can either mine copper/stone for hours and sell that to shops until I have enough money to purchase items to sell to consumers and materials to build a store in the northside of the map. Or I can simply train myself to be a thief as I break into homes and stores in one town, and resell the rest for massive profits so I can raise enough money to start a store...wait....why can’t I just make a living doing this? Oh crap I got caught selling stolen goods! I’m in jail! Now that I’m out, apparently there is this ninja clan nearby that buys anything, no questions asked. Oh cool I can buy a membership and train to improve my thieving and assassination skills. Cool I can try and be an assassin now! Wait they also sell and buy drugs? Wow this is so profitable! Should I do this instead?  There’s no “outline” for how Kenshi unfolds. You the player pick what your endpoint is and how you get to it. The game ends when you want it to end and you see where your journey takes you. If you can think of something you want to do in Kenshi, chances are you can probably do it. You can even overthrow governments. However, the more ambitious something is the harder you have to work for it. Want to have a super strong anime party capable of defeating anyone? You can do that, but you’re going to have to level up your attack skills by getting into a lot of fights. Want to be an Indiana Jones caliber treasure hunter? Well sure, but you have to train your character a lot on stealth and run speed. And of course if you need help, you can always hire or convince someone to join your party. Now what I’ve described above alone makes an incredible deep “role-playing” experience, but Kenshi takes things a step further. For everything the player does, the game reacts to it. If there is a dangerous trail filled with maneating animals and you and your party clear the nest, you will start seeing more NPCs and traders frequent the area. If you raid a nation’s capital and kill the leader, depending on who is alive, a rival faction or even government will take over the empire. If you kill enough slavers or prison guards it’s possible for their numbers to thin out to the point where they won’t be able to stop the next captive rebellion, having the entire camp or in some cases city fall.  Because Kenshi has events occurring real-time as you are playing the game, things constantly happen before you and you can influence them and vice-versa. It results in a plethora of options the player has to tackle things. For example, let’s look at this diagram again: Now let’s apply it to Kenshi:  There is essentially an almost unlimited scenarios of what you can do. You can simply raid the compound. Or you can sneak into the compound and break your friend out. Or you can disguise yourself and walk into the compound and break you friend out. You can improve relations with the faction’s compound by bribing them or killing their enemies so they are friendly to you and stroll in and release your friend. You can get yourself caught by the faction in the compound and orchestrate a plan to break out. You can kill the government/faction leader of the compound and the compound/city holding the compound will fall. You can simply bail out or buy your friend from the compound. You find a pack of ferocious animals walking near you in the area, run toward the compound as the animals chase you, just so that they end up attacking the guards instead so you can distract the guards so you pick up your friend. You can smuggle in a powerful weapon for your friend so they can wield it and kill all the guards to break out. The list goes on. Kenshi seems almost endless in the amount of stuff you can do. Until I eventually discovered the game’s modding community. With modding, if you can think of something you want to do in Kenshi, you will all but guaranteed be able to do it. The mods in Kenshi are all community made and allow the players to do pretty much whatever they want. There mods allowing the players to recruit literally anybody they want to, mods that overhaul the economy to put items in favor that players want to mine/sell, mods that allows players to work specific professions as a living, mods that allow the player to recruit up t o 256 characters so that the player has their own government scale military or an entire city of citizens to control, and mods that allow the player to take over any town they want so the player can literally take over the world. Ending there alone would be enough to be impressed at, but there are mods even more ambitious. Mods that overhaul the game’s engine and make the game even more reactive than it was before. Down to tiny details such as selling drugs over and over in the same town leads to a lot of addicts in the area or a much more complex game of thrones type power struggle when overthrowing and liberating governments.  And of course there are mods that just add an endless amount of content. New factions, NPCs, animals, treasures, cities, towns, weapons, crops, races, governments, etc. There are even mods that add more traditional questlines, but of course these are also anything but linear in how you achieve them.  But I feel an aspect that is not often discuss about Kenshi is the game’s stories. You see Kenshi may not have cutscenes and relatively little text, but due to the harsh environments and situations players find themselves in. Like the Civilization videogame series, Kenshi’s story strengths is having the player create little stories in their head to explain the chaos happening around them. They assign traits and personalities to their party members as they interact with the world around them. Kind of like a...role-playing game? This leaves Kenshi playthroughs to have tons of lets plays with deep story potential that results in Youtube videos, retail paperback books, and even me posting my let’s play. This may sound a bit conceded, but to me Kenshi is real role-playing game. Both Western style and Japanese style role-playing games, while fun, are both heavily watered down. With the former being a little more than a choose your own adventure book and the latter being just a book, but with RPG elements. This isn’t to be disrespectful to games in those genres, just to highlight how special Kenshi is. While games in the genre have focused more on delivering flashier graphics and bigger environments, Kenshi focused solely on the freedom aspect. It’s a game like no other, and one of the best there is. punk rebel ecks fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Dec 7, 2021 |
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Dec 7, 2021 22:26
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Goddamn, Kenshi is a game that just completely went under my radar, it sounds fantastic (and also like a gigantic time-sink  )
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Dec 7, 2021 22:56
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Ms Adequate posted:Had, he died a couple of months ago! I'm completely with you. I played the game and it ticked a lot of boxes for me but I just couldn't care about it. It was missing that certain factor that is present in TiTS, Persona, and Xenoblade that wasn't present there. I "beat" the game and didn't care to continue to the real ending. Jerusalem posted:Goddamn, Kenshi is a game that just completely went under my radar, it sounds fantastic (and also like a gigantic time-sink The crazy part is I didn't even touch on so many things. I didn't even mention the game's great setting and atmosphere of Max Max meets ronin samurai flicks. Or just how insanely brutal the world can be and how that leads to situations of very memorable moments. I mean I wrote about this but only brushed upon it. It would be like saying "Yeah, Dark Souls can be engaging because it can be difficult and it's atmosphere and environments reflect that" and leaving it at that. The developers posted a demo of the game here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/233860/discussions/0/1639792569855836658/ It's the entire game, only limiting you to level 20 with your stats.
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Dec 7, 2021 23:16
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Kenshi is brutal. I love the game dearly, but holy gently caress you will get absolutely mopped by hungry bandits, the lowest of the low enemies, repeatedly. Even if you roll in with a group that's larger than them, you'll still get mopped. Then they'll take all of your food. You need that food. And if you try to go solo, you'll get mopped even faster. You're not special in Kenshi. You're not some chosen one. You're just a guy or a girl or a hive bug person or a robot. You can train to become minimally effective, but even minimal is uh...Generous. You just get destroyed a little slower. This is a game where you get beat up a lot, but getting beat up is part of how you grow stronger. Literally. Your toughness stat grows each time you get your rear end beat. Your strength stat grows each time you carry heavy weight or fight while overloaded. Your dexterity stat raises as you run or fight while lightly encumbered. Your skills raise too. Weapons, hand to hand, shooting, blocking, dodging, you train it largely by doing it. Eventually, after getting your rear end kicked a lot, you start being able to take fair fights, of which there are few. Half of your group will be wounded and unconscious, maybe all but one, but that person bandages the rest. You strip everyone of their gear and sell it for food, because you're constantly hungry in the early game. You rest up in a bed to heal faster because that's really important, but beds are expensive. And slowly, you and your companions, or if you want, just yourself, start being able to take fights with the hungriest of bandits. If you're alone, you can take on two, maybe three at a time before running away if you didn't get beat down too much to run. Then three becomes four, becomes five. And after hours of brutal beat downs, you can solo a group of hungry bandits...Maybe. Honestly, it's probably better to have them follow you to the gates of a friendly city and then fight them. I did a lot of scavenging that way. And then you realize that hungry bandits are the lowest level trash enemies. You've probably run across worse. They always kick your rear end if you don't run away fast enough. At some point, after soloing ten hungry bandits, you can take two, maybe three of this group of ten regular bandits. The cycle continues. It pays off to be a crafty, sneaky, cowardly opportunist, especially in the early game. Kenshi does not hold your hand. But the number of games so brutal and punishing are pretty rare. The game rarely outright kills you. Getting your rear end kicked is part of the game. You may lose a limb or two, but you can crawl your way into a city, completely limbless and if you have enough cash, you can get sweet robot limbs installed. Great for martial artists or running a literal 100 kph. My favorite way to play this game is in a small squad. There are a number of weapons in this game and I like having each one broadly represented: Katana-like swords, huge, fuckoff swords that are slow as gently caress but will cleave through six people at a time with a good hit, polearms, martial arts for maximum punchiness and crossbows, though I also like modding in muskets because one good hit will down an enemy in a single shot, especially unarmed animals. I'll pick up named NPC's. Technically you can just hire some jerks out of a local bar, but I like the game's few cool characters like Ruka, the hornless shek and beep, the hiver, who says beep a lot. My crew assembled, after training them, I'll launch raids on the human male supremacist holy nation to free the slaves or on the United Cities, which also enslave a shitload of people. It's fun to try and sneak in to free the slaves. To lure in great beasts who will absolutely murder their way through the slavers and you can join in on the chaos or free people in it. Or if you're feeling froggy, take on an entire outpost with my small band of anti-slavers. And then, as I destroy each outpost, they're taken over by other factions. Usually friendly ones to me, though not always. I love this game and there are so many ways to play it. You can go solo. You can run multiple squads. You can build your own outpost and turn it into something of an RTS game. You can trade, you can steal, you can be a bounty hunter, you can delve into ruins for neato gear. And throughout the game, weird poo poo keeps happening that creates neat narratives that you wouldn't find in linear style games. Kenshi goes on Steam sale a lot. Get it. Play it. Be frustrated. Grow stronger and learn to kick rear end. Maybe use a guide, maybe don't. Play it if it's your style of game, because it scratches a serious itch that few other games reach for.
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Dec 8, 2021 00:15
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Jerusalem posted:Goddamn, Kenshi is a game that just completely went under my radar, it sounds fantastic (and also like a gigantic time-sink I as thinking the same thing. Game sounds loving bad rear end and an example of really delivering on teh true potential of "go anywhere/do anything" that so many open world games promise. I'd never heard of Kenshi before.
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Dec 8, 2021 01:18
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Kenshi is a GOAT tier game. This is a great writeup and I hope it encourages more people like Jerusalem to know of, and play, it! Like Ice Phisherman says Kenshi is a game that does not give a gently caress about you. You're just some guy/some guys. You have to scrape and suffer for pretty much every stat point, and every cat (currency), and every piece of gear. But when you taste success boy howdy does it taste amazing. e; I can't think of many game characters as universally beloved as Beep. e2; Oh yeah it's really worth emphasizing that Kenshi has some real unique vibes. I'm talking Morrowind-tier uniqueness, maybe even moreso, but it's one of the few games I can think of that comes up with a world as simultaneously weird and engrossing. The regular human empires are a theocratic nightmare of enslavement and genocide, and a feudal-corporate cyberpunk dystopia but with medieval tech, who also slaves and considers poverty a literal arrestable offense. The robots are called 'skeletons' and most of them have gone insane because they've been around for millennia and have Seen Some poo poo  so the least hosed up ones live in a city that is constantly awash with acid rain, which does nothing to them but keeps organics well away. The Shek are kinda Klingon expies but have literally driven themselves to the point of extinction because they can't tolerate the dishonor of backing down from, or retreating from, a fight, so they've attrited themselves into a major population crash. Their current internal politics revolve around whether the new leader, who is trying to reform so they don't go extinct, is too soft. The hivers are bugmans who live in weird bugman cities, some of them are pretty chill and some of them are crazy fuckers.Then there's all the other groups hanging around. Cannibals, skin bandits, fogmen, and that's saying nothing of the wildlife. You will learn to fear and dread Beak Things. Ms Adequate fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Dec 8, 2021 |
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Dec 8, 2021 01:19
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Kenshi is the sort of game that I would rather much be in 2d, bizarrely. I blame caves of qud for that
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Dec 8, 2021 01:49
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Honestly surprised Kenshi doesn't have a thread here.
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Dec 8, 2021 01:57
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BiggerBoat posted:Honestly surprised Kenshi doesn't have a thread here. It does though! https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3862574&pagenumber=1&perpage=40
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Dec 8, 2021 02:05
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Jerusalem posted:Updating the list for the OP: Thanks. I'm glad you added Ice Phisherman as it expands greatly what I meant about the difficulty. It really contributes to the feel of the world as well as the "story". Ms Adequate posted:Kenshi is a GOAT tier game. This is a great writeup and I hope it encourages more people like Jerusalem to know of, and play, it! Yeah, the world is very unique: Mad Max meets ronin samurai in an alien world with 1970s druggy style is definitely a trip to experience. What's is how attached some players get to certain factions. Be VERY careful of criticizing the theocratic nightmare of enslavement and genocidal government. I literally got gained up on Reddit/Discord for saying that they are the worst faction only for people to say "but they're repopulating the Earth!" and "skeletons/bugmen aren't people!" and "it's not slavery if they don't enslave people for profit!" Also, again mods REALLY expand things with tons of interesting races and factions. To the point that I'm shocked to remember that some aren't "canon".
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Dec 8, 2021 03:13
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My pick for favourite game of all time? The glorious and immortal Quake II (id software; December 9th, 1997). I bought Quake II the day after it came out, on the strength of the reviews, and having been an avid Doom player for several moths prior. Despite having probably the crappiest PC even able to load the game at the time, I adored it. I was immediately hooked. It was my Quake II addiction that led to me flunking out of university (and never going back) as well as basically abandoning my writing projects for almost ten years. Then, some months later, I discovered multiplayer. On the PC I was using at the time, with a 28.8k Winmodem, online was basically impossible, so I sated myself with Eraser bots and the Usenet Q2 community until I souped my PC up with some serious (for the time) upgrades. I was never GOOD at the online game. I usually placed (and still place!) in the bottom half of most deathmatches. But that's not the point in the end. The point is that I love playing this game of mine that I've been loyal to for almost 25 years, still love playing it, and as an aside my Q2 folder takes up over fifty gigs of disk space which is rather shocking for a game that originally took up only 400mb for a full install... Anyway, that's my personal, absolute favourite. Quake II. 
Et Earello Endorenna utulie'n. Sinome maruvan ar-Hildinyar tenn' Ambar-metta! imperiusdamian fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Dec 8, 2021 |
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Dec 8, 2021 05:11
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imperiusdamian posted:My pick for favourite game of all time? The glorious and immortal Quake II (id software; December 9th, 1997). It's a weird choice but let us all bask in the glory of the opening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miHAh2Q-U94 It's very Starship Troopers (book) e: not trying to shoehorn, not a warham fan but this made me think of the Q2 intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azVeFAETUyM BaldDwarfOnPCP fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Dec 8, 2021 |
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Dec 8, 2021 06:05
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BaldDwarfOnPCP posted:It's a weird choice but let us all bask in the glory of the opening: The Q2 intro was freaking epic especially in 1997 when most games didn't even HAVE a FMV intro.
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Dec 8, 2021 06:18
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External Organs posted:It does though! https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3862574&pagenumber=1&perpage=40 Thanks for the link. Somehow I missed it This game looks incredible. Only thing maybe dragging it down might be the graphics. I think at my age, being a dad and having so little free time this might be the one game where reading about it or watching a Let's Play of it might be more fun than playing it but, man. I've been looking into it a little bit and the things the developers pulled off here are really something. Have they worked on anything else?
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Dec 8, 2021 23:36
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BiggerBoat posted:Thanks for the link. Somehow I missed it Yeah the graphics are basically "PS2 HD" but there are a fair share of graphics mods that make the game look far better. Tsuki: https://www.nexusmods.com/kenshi/mods/509   Kenshi 2 Style Reshade (based on Artwork of Kenshi 2): https://www.nexusmods.com/kenshi/mods/534   Kenshi 2 Reshade REIMAGINED: https://www.nexusmods.com/kenshi/mods/569   Personally I use Tsuki, it leads to some real immersive scenes:  BiggerBoat posted:I think at my age, being a dad and having so little free time this might be the one game where reading about it or watching a Let's Play of it might be more fun than playing it but, man. I've been looking into it a little bit and the things the developers pulled off here are really something. Kenshi is absolutely a time consuming game, but just how time consuming depends on your playstyle and what you want to do. If you want to be a treasure hunter and run around trying to find random ancient buildings to steal from then you can easily get away with one hour sessions of "look for place, find a place, ransack a place". But if you want to do something like raid compounds or look for bounties (and get one before your play session ends) then things could take longer. Personally "satisfying playthroughs" to me were like a hour and a half. BiggerBoat posted:Have they worked on anything else? No it's the team's only game. The game was an almost two decade long passion project of one guy. He started work on it around the turn of the millennium and it progressed bit by bit. Eventually the guy started his own team and put the game on Steam Early Access as a "launch game" for that service. The game left beta just three years ago, and the team is already hard at work on a sequel.
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Dec 9, 2021 02:33
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I checked the latest post recap, and it appears that another one of my favs has not been posted yet. So here are some  about Hollow Knight. Trigger warning: If you are one of those people who get booty bothered when a game is described as "just like Dark Souls!", then I highly suggest you skip this post. Hollow Knight is a side-scrolling Metroidvania style action RPG, developed by Team Cherry, and released in 2017. At first glance, it might seem like any one of the dozens of indie platformers out there, but Hollow Knight is something special. You play as a silent, nameless Knight, a bug who wields a Nail as a sword. The Knight explores the tunnels and ruins below the town of Dirtmouth, home to the ancient ruined kingdom of Hallownest.  The Knight begins with only his Nail as a weapon, but in Metroidvania fashion, you find and unlock various skills as you progress through the game. Some are standard for the genre, like a double-jump, dash, and wall climb. Others give the Knight magical abilities to heal himself, or attack at a distance. The controls are very tight and responsive, allowing for precise jumps and combat. The difficulty feels similar to Dark Souls, where combat requires timing and patience. There are optional bosses and platforming challenges that crank up the difficulty from Hard to You Gotta Be Shittin' Me. Enemies and bosses include other bugs of all shapes and sizes, and a wide variety of flora and fauna.  Like Dark Souls (there it is again), the game allows for a range of playstyles. The Knight can collect various Charms that give unique bonuses or change how skills behave. By mixing and matching your Charms, you can go from being a sturdy melee fighter, to a powerful spell-slinger, to a zippy fast hit and run ninja.  For me, what really elevates the game into Masterpiece territory is the world itself. The Knight encounters other NPCs, some which act as merchants, some who are explorers themselves, or some who are just living in the shadows of Hallownest as best they can. Like Dark Souls, many of the NPCs have their own questlines that you can be a part of. The sound and music really makes them feel like unique living characters, and I found myself getting emotionally invested in their safety. Hallownest itself just feels old and used up. The ambiance reeks of emptiness and decay. I really enjoy re-exploring areas just to hear the music and sounds that are just for that area. Also like Dark Souls, there are hidden areas and quests that are easily missed, rewarding exploration and curiosity.  The art style is gorgeous and detailed, giving every enemy and NPC a feel of individuality.  Hollow Knight is a perfect example of Video Games As Art. It is widely available on various consoles and Steam, and it really needs to be experienced to fully appreciate it. Please go play it now if you haven't, it's cheap to buy, and it would be a steal at double the price. Go, go now!
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Dec 9, 2021 23:38
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It's the best metroidvania I've played since the original and also the cutest, most gorgeous, and most grotesque all at the same time.
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Dec 10, 2021 00:11
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Let's talk about my absolute favorite game, a little 20 year old MMORPG by the name of Final Fantasy XI This game is... another experience. I’ve played over 8000 hours of FFXI. And I love it. I love how esoteric it is, how arcane its features are, how strange and impossible some quests are to finish without consulting a wiki. Hell, in one storyline mission, an NPC tells you to meet them at Port San d’Oria and they aren’t even there when you go. You have to go to another town’s Port to continue the quest. I don’t know how you would’ve figured that out back in the day, and before there were teleports everywhere, you’d have to have ridden an Airship at least 5 times. Note, an Airship ride is 15 minutes minimum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Nqjz5R8LrU Players before doing anything in FFXI This game is quite an MMORPG. Released in 2002 in Japan for the PS2, and 2003 on PC and PS2 everywhere else, it has 5 expansion packs and a huge world to explore. It isn't in really development anymore, but the devs (which we suspect is probably like 6 people...) still release updates. The most recent update allowed the ability to increase your subjob levels, which, well, I'm getting ahead of myself. The Game [back in the day] FFXI is a story-driven MMORPG with party-based experience systems. It has a pretty good sized world to explore. You cannot jump. There is no flying. There are mounts, but when the game was first released up through the 75-era, you could not summon mounts at will, only rent them after a 6-hour long quest. The game was punishing, with brutal trains of monsters that would destroy you the minute you entered a zone, and you lost EXP on death, up to the point of de-leveling if you lost too much. Finding parties as a damage dealer was arduous. You could spend hours in the main hub with your invite flag up and your search comment talking up your gear and ability, and finally get an invite. You get a teleport-taxi to the nearest teleport point to the party (500-1000 gil depending, chump change overall), rent a chocobo/mount from a nearby NPC, travel for 15-20 minutes to the camp, get there, find your party, fight four monsters, and oh, your White Mage needs to go, and they did not find a replacement for themselves, Party is disbanded. Get warped home, kill yourself (blood warp) or hike your rear end back to town. Oh! This game has aggro-systems -- Hope you brought your invisible powders (for sight-based mobs) and silent oils (for hearing-based mobs) to avoid aggro on your adventure. Alternatively, you could simply avoid line-of-sight for sight-based mobs and keep your distance from sound-based ones, but that's a little trickier. Oh, I forgot to mention, these buffs the powders and oils give? Random duration. [This has been fixed]. Food buffs? Unknown what they do. You can reverse-engineer the buffs by taking a look at your stats before and after you eat the food. [Nowadays it tells you exactly what the food does]. But you know what? It kinda rocked. Every level felt earned, because it took hours to get it in the late 50s and 60s. And the experience of actually playing the game and getting stronger and better, nearly sublime. The game has a current level of 99. With gear that goes to level 119. That's the gear cap. No gear goes higher than 119, (yet) but figuratively gear does go much higher in practice: additional accuracy bonuses and hidden traits of Ultimate Weapons make them effectively level 125-135. Content varies between 1 to level 150~. The first time you reach level 99 and equip level 113 gear, your stats will dramatically increase in bonuses [say your Strength goes from being modified by +10 to +100] and you'll go from barely defeating level 99 monsters to utterly annihilating them. Nothing like it, I'm afraid. By the time you're super-end game with an Ultimate Weapon (or two) and can self-skillchain with capped haste and gear skill, your character's animations start glitching out and not playing even though the combat log is filling up with damage. It's incredible. The power game is like nothing else. Essentially, by the time you reach super-endgame, you can expect your gameplay to appear similar to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXWb5v-mZnY A monk using the Kraken Club, an incredibly rare weapon that has a special trait: [Occasionally hits 2-8 times], using their 2-hour ability "Hundred Fists" that removes delay from your weapon for 30 seconds. Gameplay FFXI is an Everquest-like game, you'll notice the release date predates World of Warcraft. WoW changed the game completely, but before WoW, there was Everquest. Everquest was a monster of a game. It did not respect your time, your life, or your effort. Along with a much, much, slower pace of combat in comparison to WoW, FFXI mostly focused on party-based experience point parties. The quests in the game were for flavor, unlocks, or story, and almost 100% of them did not grant experience points when the game released. Few still do, nowadays. To level up in FFXI, you gathered with a group of 5 other players, and went to an experience points camp and killed monsters for 200-400 exp a pop. It would take hours to level up at the higher levels. Hours of grinding monsters. The way combat works, essentially nowadays but more-so back in the day, was based around Skillchains and Magic Bursts. Every melee combatant gains Tactical Points (TP) when they inflict or take damage, dependent on the delay of their weapon they're wielding, and how much Store TP bonuses you have going on from gear or traits (passives). TP is essentially a form of a Limit Break. It goes from a range of 0-3000% [originally it was coarser, and went from 0-300%]. Once you've gained an adequate amount of TP [>1000%] from auto-attacking, you can dish out a Weapon Skill. Utilizing more than 1000% can increase damage, accuracy, or debuff duration. Weapon Skills are tied to your weapon's skill level (natch), which must be leveled separately from your job level. Oh, did I mention you can be any job in the game at any time? You can change your job at your home, and your retain the levels you've gained on that job exclusively. Thankfully, you also retain any skill levels you've gained, so if you have a level 99 Black Mage and capped Dark Magic skill, switching to Dark Knight will have a capped Dark Magic skill as well. Additionally, you can equip a sub/support job, which is always half the level of your main job. Say you're a level 50 Warrior and you've leveled Monk to level 50, you can equip Monk as your subjob to Warrior and be a WAR50/MNK25. You gain (almost) all the abilities, traits and skills of the support job up to the equipped level. There are 22 jobs in the game, ranging from classic Damage Dealers, Tanks, and Healers, to more interesting and varied support classes like Bard, Corsair, Dancer, Beastmaster, Now, when you dish out a Weapon Skill, you have a window of 3-5 seconds to deal another Weapon Skill to create a Skill Chain. Back in the day, few jobs could accomplish such a feat, self-skillchaining, but thankfully, you have 5 more party members, right? Another party member deals out their Weapon Skill, which creates a Skill Chain, which deals bonus damage dependent on the element of the Skill Chain. Distortion Skill chain? Ice/Water, so if the monster is weak to water/ice, it'll take even more damage. But wait, it gets better -- after you create a Skill Chain, the monster becomes vulnerable to a Magic Burst. Align an offensive black magic spell with the same element as the Skill Chain, and deal Magic Burst Damage. For example, Tachi: Enpi -> Viper Bite --> Skill Chain: Distortion --> Magic Burst! Water/Ice. Between these bursts of synergy, you're mostly auto-attacking, using skills on long timers (2-5+ minutes up to 2 hours long timers), and most of all.... talking to your party.  The pace of the combat opened up something that basically doesn't exist in MMORPGs nowadays, conversation. Chatting with a great or a lovely party was a great way to kill the time, get to know people, forge friendships, build a reputation, and build a community. You'd meet friends leveling up that you'd run into several times throughout your journey to to the level cap and you might party with them several times, or even go out of your way to stay in contact outside the party. I made friends back in 2004 I still talk to today from this game. Even nowadays, it is a difficult process to change your name in the game, mostly as a philosophical decision -- SE didn't want players to try and duck or skip out of whatever (read: bad) reputation they had built for themselves by being lovely party members, bad players, mean people, or ill-equipped. Unfortunately, nowadays, combat is quite a bit faster paced because of the power creep and there isn't much time to talk in pick-up groups. People might talk in end-game leveling parties, but it's less likely as they're busier hitting their abilities since they come up much faster. Gear Additionally, the gear in FFXI isn't vertical, it's horizontal. Most MMORPGs utilize a vertical treadmill for gear: Equipment level 300 gear is worse than Equipment level 350 gear, and every new content drop or expansion pack drives the gear level up until the old gear is completely obsolete. However, FFXI's gear isn't like that -- outside the level 100-119 gear, which is clearly superior in some ways, there is also weird poo poo in it. For example, most accessories like earrings and rings don't have gear levels, outside of required levels to equip it. So a level 75 earring from the olden days might still be useful in specific contexts. But who is going to wear that earring all the time? Gearsets are in the game that you can macro into your gear so you equip specific gear for specific circumstances so you can utilize all the gear from your range. Thank god, then, for Third party programs like Windower (the game was originally un-windowable, alt-tabbing would crash the game, so some people hacked together a program that lets you window the game, along with bonus features like showing your party member's TP alongside their HP and MP in the party window) which nowadays comes with powerful add-ons like Gearswap, a programmable add-on that lets you code for EVERY instance and circumstance your gear might come up. Fighting a monster and trying to maximize the amount of damage, accuracy and speed in which you gain TP? Equip a specific set of gear when you're engaged in combat. Running around the world? Equip a set of idle gear that maximizes your MP and HP regeneration, as well as defense levels. Dealing a weapon skill that utilizes STR and INT? Stack that poo poo in a gear palette. Charmed? Auto-equip your worst gear to not kill your party members. Nowadays the grind from 1-99 is extremely fast and you can be power-leveled to 99 in about 2-3 hours by a competent and well-geared player. You can also solo your way to 99 with NPC summons filling out the gaps in your party. You are still welcome to party with people, and the NPC summons start to fall short for true-end game experience parties. Which includes mastering your job/class, or doing end-game content. The grind for traveling around the world is much less intense as well, with the ability to teleport between Home Points (think of them as Save Points, you respawn at them if you die or are are Warped). This doesn't mean the game doesn't have tons of poo poo to do that'll suck dry all your time! My main job, Blue Mage, has about 180 pieces of gear that I use in different situations. It all gets used in one way or another. Gathering all that gear? Hell of a job. Took over a year to accomplish, and I was playing the game religiously. I feel like my job is in a good place right now, because of how I've tweaked my Store TP, Haste, Dual Wield, and other stat bonuses based on my gear, magic spells equipped, and other things, I dual wield 2 swords and gain exactly 100 TP per swing of the swords. I can cap my own haste with two different haste spells (very hard to do solo unless you're a Blue Mage). I think the swords I use usually gain 50-60 TP a swing, so I needed about +85 STP on my traits and gear to accomplish this goal, but it feels great-- I can self-skillchain extremely easily, almost clipping the 3-second window by going too soon and failing to skillchain. The Ultimate Weapons in the game are another league. They can fundamentally change the way your job plays, or add perks and bonuses you cannot live without after you gain them. For example, my main hand sword as a Blue Mage? The Tizona, restores MP when I deal damage, essentially keeping me topped-off, as long as I'm dealing damage, forever. Normally, your MP does not regenerate in the game unless you are 1) Being Refreshed by a spell or 2) Healing by kneeling. Refresh is usually generally slow -- 3-5MP a tick. Gear can give you Refresh, but you wouldn't wear it while fighting. But with the Tizona, I have essentially unlimited MP, which is extremely useful as my buffs can use up to 300 MP (out of about 900) a pop. However, they take a grind. To unlock the Tizona, which is a Mythic Ultimate Weapon, you have to do the entire story line for an expansion pack, then do 50 sub-missions... twice. Then you need to gather 150,000 tokens from a maze-instance that usually allows you to gain about 1500-3000 a pop and requires three people to do efficiently. Then you need 50,000 ichor from a instanced battle you can solo, but can only do once per hour. You can gain up to 1900 ichor per run. And finally, you need 30,000 Alexandrite, which is a material you can gain through a monthly event (maxing out at 1750) or by grinding an instance for 100-200 a pop. There might be other ways to do it nowadays, but there's the general path. Ultimate Weapons, when they released, were server-wide achievement level hard to obtain. Relic weapons were the first Ultimate weapons to be released and could require the effort of an entire guild (linkshell in the game) to obtain one for One person in the guild. People would remark "Oh so-and-so is the only player on the server to have an Apocalypse." More info here: https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/Category:Ultimate_Weapons You can augment the Ultimate weapons now too, but you have to deposit like... To be honest, the game looks older nowadays, but the art style has held up for 20 years, it looks decent-to-ok. There are graphical reshaders you can apply with some effort, but the game is kind of resistant to things like 60 FPS mods. There's been some nice QOL improvements over the years, such as being able to summon NPCs to solo your way to 1-99 as well as some end game content, several teleport systems to get around the world, lessened exp loss on death (almost none nowadays), +25% base movement speed (lmfao), and an insane amount of content to work on and do all the time. I could seriously go on and on and on and on about all the subsystems, intricacies, arcane and esoteric systems at play in this game, but this post is already 15000 words long, so I'll save it for a video I'm working on right now.
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Dec 10, 2021 21:12
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It's me! The guy who registered for Final Fantasy XI for the first time ever this year that you old heads are both excited for and are bewildered about. Final Fantasy XI is a really great game that clearly has its roots anchored in a different time that has none the less had many attempt to frankenstein it for a more modern era. For starters the game used to have you HAVE to party up with other people to do almost anything. Today that's pretty much just limited to long travels to new destinations as you can just use trusts for everything which are just A.I. party members. Apparently, teleports used to be limited within the cities back in the day, but today there are teleports throughout the world and you have a "return ring" that takes you back to your home teleport at anytime. Still the game has very memorable moments, and definitely some magical "classic MMO" moments you will encounter. Yes, you can relieve the experience of having no idea what to do while someone chaperones you across the continent to get from point A to point B in a literal two and a half hour journey. Yes you can travel from one continent to the other by 20 minutes boat rides. Yes you can do a dungeon with multiple party members that takes around three hour or more to do. The game also doesn't hold your hand as instead of there being giant markers on the map telling you where quests are and how to progress, you have to find them yourselves. It takes a lot longer and can be tedious but it is so much more rewarding. If I had to explain how the game is different from Final Fantasy XIV. I'd describe Final Fantasy XIV as the ultimate Final Fantasy game. It's like being subscribed to a service that gives you new additions to the epic single player story mode via piece meal, with a bunch of other modes you can play. There is a dungeon challenge mode (dungeons/raids), open world grinding mode (Eureka/Bozjna), boss rush mode (trials), etc. There are more traditional MMO things to do in Final Fantasy XIV such as blue mage quests, treasure hunting, FATES, and hunt logs. But as a whole Final Fantasy XIV is Final Fantasy: Live Service with a ton of quality content. Final Fantasy XI on the other hand is a Final Fantasy: Simulator. There is a story in the game but you yourself aren't special at all for dozens of hours. The role your character plays in the story? You know how in Final Fantasy XIV the Warrior of Light may be accompanied by random Eozorean Soldier #45637? Yeah that's you. On the other hand that makes the game more immersive as you have to make a name for yourself. The game rarely gives you guidance and things are obtuse at times (sometimes WAY too much) so you have to ask other players in the world what to do and where to go. So far this simulates the Final Fantasy experience completely. You are a no named adventurer who explores the city to find a way to make a name for yourself. You do that by registering to work for the palace/capitol and getting quests, and to complete those quests you speak with townspeople (other players in the game) which some may help you by being in your party (other players in the game). It eventually clicks and when it does its magical. Unfortunately the game isn't perfect. For one it can be just way to obtuse not to know what to do next to the point when you figure it out you go "How the gently caress was I suppose to figure that out!?" It's to the point when you ask other players half the time they'll just tell you to run the game in windowed mode with the game on one half of the screen and a wiki on the other. The game also becomes a bit repetitive some time through it. It really is kind of formulaic with "go to persona A and do: fetch quests, kill monster X times and collect Y pellets, and go through dungeon to kill monster X times and collect Y pellets, which results in you having to travel across the continent to meet with person B and rinse and repeat. It also takes way too long to do certain things. Item drops from enemies are absolutely ridiculously low some times. "Oh I need to collect 4 bunny ears from all the bunnies in this forest? I guess just kill 4 of them and be done?" Well to do RNG it's more like 40, on average. Final Fantasy XI is a fun and unique game to play in this day of age, as long as you are willing to overlook some of its flaws. It scratches that "freedom!" itch to a degree that so many MMOs are lacking these days, but it also reminds you why such tenets of the genre have been abandoned. I'd love for a modern "update" the game's mechanics but with Final Fantasy XIV becoming the biggest MMO currently, that seems unlikely. EDIT - Also don't be one of those "I want to play the game to beat all Final Fantasys but it's an MMO!" The game can be solo'd, for the most part, for the vanilla story quest, and it should take you only around 50 hours.
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Dec 10, 2021 21:45
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I played it for about a month and it was truly bizarre experience, and I'd just like to share a quick story (this was I want to say 2008?): I was running around a zone and some clearly much more experienced player says hi and introduced herself. She gave me an item you need to unlock your hideout, apparently it was very hard to find unless you know what to do. Then she took me back to where I was and based on the way I was moving told me to stop right away because something was off. She then showed me how to swap to using the proper keyboard controls instead of the default option of gamepad while running the PC version which was like, one hand on asd and the other on hjk or something wild. I didn't last long, but thanks to that random person I definitely lasted a lot longer than I would have.
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Dec 11, 2021 07:53
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Keyboard turners used to be a thing in WoW too.
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Dec 11, 2021 09:35
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The way FFXI was designed for a ps2 I really cannot emphasize enough how much better it feels to play with a controller than kb+m, but that's just me. I knew plenty of people who played with a kb+m and I always thought they were deranged.
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Dec 11, 2021 15:41
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Torquemada posted:Keyboard turners used to be a thing in WoW too. I think that was still using wasd though. Sounds like ff11 had the same bad controls as dark souls started with where your keyboard pretends at twin stick.
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Dec 11, 2021 15:56
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Harold Fjord posted:I think that was still using wasd though. Sounds like ff11 had the same bad controls as dark souls started with where your keyboard pretends at twin stick. I think these are the same thing? I think WOW default was a-d would turn your character, and slowly at that, instead of strafe, whereas mouse let you do an instant 180 if you wanted.
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Dec 11, 2021 15:59
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When you do pretend twin stick you have to use the right hand to spin and tilt and wasd does forward/back and strafing. It's the worst.
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Dec 11, 2021 16:01
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Thank you so much for posting this, it was an awesome read 
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Dec 11, 2021 18:38
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VideoGames posted:Thank you so much for posting this, it was an awesome read Thanks veeg! You made me pull the trigger on that stupid post
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Dec 13, 2021 16:59
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I played FFXI way way back in like 2004 and was thoroughly baffled but had a blast nonetheless. I still remember one of my earliest serious leveling sessions, got past the point where you could solo level and ended up in a party that had some other scrubs like me, a pretty good random DPS who helped us learn how to coordinate skillchains, and an absolutely godlike Japanese player who was a bard/WHM or something who seemed able to heal the entire party every few seconds without sweat. It didn't keep my interest for the long term (I went to CoH for awhile and then WoW) but I really appreciate some of the stuff it did like actually sitting on a ship as it sails around and stuff. I've been toying with going back for a couple of months just to see what it's like and all the things I never saw back in the day but I just haven't found the time.
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Dec 15, 2021 09:43
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A close friend of mine still plays Final Fantasy XI. Recently my life partner left me for him and now they are together. I loving hate my life.
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Dec 15, 2021 14:12
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star eater posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXWb5v-mZnY I never got a Kraken Club when I played, but my main was DRK and I was always acutely aware of the Kraken Club as the most hilarious way to completely annihilate yourself as a DRK. For those not aware, the job Dark Knight has the ability "souleater" as one of their core abilities, which causes you to take 10% of your HP as damage for each hit and adds the amount of damage taken directly to the damage of the attack. For multi-hit attacks, this applies to every single hit. In addition to this, using the ability pulls a shitload of aggro. So on a good Kraken club proc you can blast away 80% of your HP for a huge amount of damage which will almost certainly get the attention of the mob you're attacking to finish you off way before your healer can react. If you want to get really nuts, you can take NIN as your secondary and dual wield two Kraken Clubs (if you somehow managed to GET two). You could combine this with your 2-hour ability to actually make it a not completely suicidal thing to do, since the DRK 2-hour makes them heal on hit for the amount of damage they deal, completely negating the self-damage from souleater while still getting the extra damage dealt. You're still gonna die when it wears off though because absolutely no tank is going to be able to hold aggro off you while doing this. The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Dec 17, 2021 |
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Dec 17, 2021 00:16
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The Cheshire Cat posted:I never got a Kraken Club when I played, but my main was DRK and I was always acutely aware of the Kraken Club as the most hilarious way to completely annihilate yourself as a DRK. There was a super boss in the late 75-era that was never defeated per dev design in that era, but WAS defeated through some clever moves, one involved abusing invisible walls of kite the monster, and another was getting 6 dark knights together with kraken clubs and beating the gently caress out of it during souleater+blood weapon. the devs response to this was to make the monster RESISTANT TO SOULEATER DAMAGE. infamously a guild tried to fight the drat thing normally for like 16+ hours once until ppl supposedly started collapsing from exhaustion or throwing up lmfao.
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Dec 17, 2021 03:43
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star eater posted:There was a super boss in the late 75-era that was never defeated per dev design in that era, but WAS defeated through some clever moves, one involved abusing invisible walls of kite the monster, and another was getting 6 dark knights together with kraken clubs and beating the gently caress out of it during souleater+blood weapon. There were a couple that I think you're getting crossed. Pandemonium Warden was the one that had a group trying for 16 hours (though the collapses were an exaggeration, people were getting near that point)- a pure endurance shitfest with a gazillion very high health phases that included boosted copies of every other major boss in the game, with copies of themselves for adds. Absolute Virtue was the "how dare you, we'll rewrite it, your run didn't count" boss; if memory serves the problem was that the intended mechanism to beat the boss wasn't ever communicated clearly, and its response to "failing" that method was to fully heal itself, practically driving people to find some sort of jank workaround.
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Dec 17, 2021 05:57
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you’re right, i always do get them crossed for some reason.
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Dec 17, 2021 12:33
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credburn posted:A close friend of mine still plays Final Fantasy XI. Recently my life partner left me for him and now they are together. I loving hate my life. I'm very sorry, assuming this isn't a silly joke  Perhaps you can look at it as an opportunity for new things
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Jan 6, 2022 02:27
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