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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcLETpzeWgI
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 22:09 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 01:55 |
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StrixNebulosa posted:
That actually sounds pretty much exactly like X-2, do spells have charge times you can play around with as well? Edit: I think grandia is kind of similar too? Never played that though I'd love to play another game with that style combat, even if it's a bit jank!
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 22:12 |
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The Colonel posted:ideally the combat shouldn't be something where you're disengaging from it that hard. disabling encounters is different to me that's just cutting out the middleman and not having to bother with fights you know aren't going to be interesting or worth wasting your time with in games that were designed before encounter systems were really figured out all that well. it took me too many edits to properly sort out what i was trying to say in this sentence Oh okay I missed the comment that started this whole thing. Yeah I don't get it if you're gonna both disengage and complain about it. That's pretty silly. But as far as this goes divorced from that, I feel like nothing's really sacred in terms of how someone is enjoying a single player experience. Even if it doesn't make sense to a lot of folks that doesn't invalidate their approach to experiencing the game. Weird Pumpkin posted:That actually sounds pretty much exactly like X-2, do spells have charge times you can play around with as well? Grandia owned.
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 22:23 |
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Endorph posted:there is also at least one tales game where if you set all the characters to auto and run around long enough the game will spawn in the game's superboss to instantly murder you. This is peak game design
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 22:23 |
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Endorph posted:This sounds like Grandia's combat. oh that is very similar! neat! I've never played grandia... hmm. How is its plot? Weird Pumpkin posted:That actually sounds pretty much exactly like X-2, do spells have charge times you can play around with as well? I have played x-2 for an hour or two, but that was like, a decade ago so I don't recall. Spells do have charge times! I'm not going to vouch for the quality of Dark Rose Valkyrie yet though, it's only been an hour and while I'm charmed / tolerant of jank / enjoying idea factory games, that doesn't mean you will.
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 22:26 |
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StrixNebulosa posted:oh that is very similar! neat! I've never played grandia... hmm. How is its plot? grandia 1's decent. it's like a 90s adventure anime, very colorful and lighthearted, just about a group of kids who wanna go on An Adventure and then get wrapped up into big evil empire and ancient civilization stuff. it has some decent cheesy jokes and bad guy goon squads. if you can though, play the saturn version. it's not super hard to emulate these days, it has a tl patch that imports the ps1 translation which is, serviceable, and it looks a lot nicer than the ps1 version which seriously breaks a few of the game's nicer visual effects. iirc hd doesn't fix any of that and the smoothing filter it applies is really bad so it's kinda the worst of both worlds
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 22:34 |
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StrixNebulosa posted:oh that is very similar! neat! I've never played grandia... hmm. How is its plot? Oh man, yeah that sounds like it's pretty much exactly the same idea minus dress spheres then. Maybe I'll pick up Grandia as well come to think of it...
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 22:35 |
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Weird Pumpkin posted:Oh man, yeah that sounds like it's pretty much exactly the same idea minus dress spheres then. Grandia 1 and 2 are unarguably aged game but they have a lot of charm despite it. Anything past that is diminishing returns sadly though the combat systems generally remain fun.
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 22:36 |
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When I think about RPGs that get me really excited about the combat, it’s generally either tactical RPGs that give you a bunch of different game pieces on a board or optimization exercises where you "solve" the combat by assembling all the little components you need, and are rewarded for your time in the spreadsheet mines or lab-ing out sick combos. I’m also generally in favor of games that give players more freedom to pick and choose which elements of the game they want to engage with, but there is a difference between accessibility functions and "solving" the combat puzzle. Troubleshooter does both, and I love how you can “solve” combat for a bit and then face a paradigm shift that means you need to scheme a bit more. I also seriously enjoyed Fire Emblem starting in the Awakening era, and there’s many reasons for that, but part of it was definitely being able to progress from playing extremely carefully to just setting my team to auto-fight and then skipping a whole tactical turn. Granblue Fantasy is probably my favorite RPG for pure charop scheming. There’s so many different multipliers and modifiers that can be combined for different types of Weapon Grid, and there was a LOT of enthusiasm from the player base when it introduced a more sophisticated auto-battle mode that let your characters use their skills semi-effectively. It's important that the combat part of the game exists, but most of the game is just budgeting and allocating resources in order to make your combat numbers bigger. Dominions 5 is a fantastic strategy-RPG for me, in single or multiplayer modes. You don’t even have the option of micromanaging battles in progress. The fight happens, and you *hope* that the clowns in your army will follow the 5 turns of scripting you gave them and not waste all their nature gems on gratuitous poison resistance buffs. It's a game where you can come up with a cool trick that will let you brainlessly win every battle you move your stack into... until you run into someone with a different weird trick that counters yours. Conquest of Elysium from the same devs is also great... and there are several factions that you can play who are all about generating Stupid units that may solve the war without you needing to fight it yourself. The games I am most interested in trying in the future purely for RPG progression fantasy and combat elements are Path of Achra (roguelike game with crazy builds and, importantly, a very solid auto-play function) and Siralim Ultimate (mentioned earlier in thread). I've been considering Caves of Qud, but I figure I should probably wait until it is 100% complete. The Colonel posted:i wouldnt even consider automation games to be that because obviously the literal point of those is you setting up the automation yourself, there's a game there you're engaging with, you're trying to figure out how to automate smaller tasks so you can use them to make automating bigger ones easier. it's less about hitting the button to make the game play itself for you and more about figuring out how to solve problems so you can apply those solutions to bigger and bigger ones I think that if we consider things through the framing used in the Bottom Feeder article I linked earlier, some players will find trivializing challenges more compelling partially because the game isn't telling them to do that. They are exercising power over their experience in a way that breaks from the implicit script that they have been handed by the game. It's definitely going to vary from person to person, though. PS, wanted to throw this in as a joke answer, but I didn't see a good place to stick it
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 22:40 |
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ImpAtom posted:Grandia 1 and 2 are unarguably aged game but they have a lot of charm despite it. Anything past that is diminishing returns sadly though the combat systems generally remain fun. DEEP FRIED GOODNESS is a spell quote that will live rent free in my head forever.
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 22:41 |
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avoraciopoctules posted:That's a very interesting point, and there are definitely nuances in the ways pure RPGs and management games entertain players. setting a tales game to easy and autobattling through it isn't breaking the implicit script though. you're just setting the game to easy and then not playing it. it's not grinding up job xp to unlock mime in the first chapter of final fantasy tactics it's just setting game options so you dont have to touch the controller for like 20 minutes
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 22:47 |
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I think optimizing and figuring out how to optimize can be fun but I also don't think that most people associate that with mindless grinding. Even even in games like Disgaea where grinding is a major part of the point, a lot of the fun comes from optimizing the game as much as possible to minimize that need. It's why people kind of poo poo all over Disgaea 6's autogrind thing because it went against what the series actually encouraged which was looking at all the various mechanics to figure out how to get hilariously powerful in ways that didn't involve automating it. I don't think there is anything wrong with enjoying becoming overpowered and wrecking the game's poo poo but there are so many better ways to do that then grinding, whereas the idea that you need to grind tends to enforce bad habits that make people not actually explore parts of the game or how they work. Setting Tales of (x) to autogrind isn't really becoming overpowered in any meaningful way because the best ways to break Tales games involve poo poo like Infinite Tidal Wave Spam whereas simply grinding to level 100 is going to both be slower and make you less powerful overall. Even if you just enjoy wrecking the game's difficulty curve you can do it faster, easier and usually cooler by investing in the mechanics instead.
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 22:47 |
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usually when we talk about enjoying the act of breaking games or optimizing them we don't include "setting the difficulty to very easy" as part of that optimization lol
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 22:51 |
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breaking final fantasy tactics is mildly fun when you start figuring out how to do it cause there's something inherently funny to getting attacked by a band of goblins and immediately killing all but one, pushing the last one into a corner and then having everyone alternate between punching the goblin, healing the goblin and punching each other when they can't get close enough to punch the goblin or the goblin is about to die and nobody is able to heal it yet. you're still, effectively engaging with the mechanics. you're just doing it in the most jabroni way possible so you can turn learn the art of the ninja and chop argath in half with dual wielded axes way before ramza even realizes his brothers are tyrants auto battling through tales on easy is just like. idk you're not playing a video game. you could be playing one but you're choosing not to. the game is going on right there on the screen right now. you have the power to pick up the controller. why aren't you picking up the controller...?
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 22:51 |
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I don't trust autobattle in majority of the games I play; Fire Emblem, Disgaea before 6, Tales, etc. Dragon Quest XI and Blue Reflection 2 are the only exceptions so far because they're both so easy that sure I'll leave them to make their own decisions and see what they try as status effects on enemies.
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 22:59 |
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The Colonel posted:setting a tales game to easy and autobattling through it isn't breaking the implicit script though. you're just setting the game to easy and then not playing it. it's not grinding up job xp to unlock mime in the first chapter of final fantasy tactics it's just setting game options so you dont have to touch the controller for like 20 minutes Uh... sorry, in that case I'm not sure what we're talking about. Maybe I misread something. Best wishes with your games though, however you like to play them! RareAcumen posted:I don't trust autobattle in majority of the games I play; Fire Emblem, Disgaea before 6, Tales, etc. Dragon Quest XI and Blue Reflection 2 are the only exceptions so far because they're both so easy that sure I'll leave them to make their own decisions and see what they try as status effects on enemies. Absolutely. I remember getting some really rough surprises in Fire Emblem Awakening even when I had units nosferatu-tanking. Trying to work around the foibles of the autobattle AI can be quite challenging sometimes.
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 23:07 |
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StrixNebulosa posted:- The combat system is... honestly I've never seen anything like it? At least, the closest comparison I can think of is the ATB system from Final Fantasy 7 and similar - every character is on a timer/timeline, and as time progresses their action bar fills up and they can act. Except in this game, attacking itself takes up time, so while character X is attacking, character Z can join in, and so on until the entire party is beating up one wasp with their giant swords. And the game clearly wants to push for more combos like this - lining everyone up to whale on one enemy does a lot more damage and enables special moves. Dark Rose Valkyrie here also looks like it's combat is similar in some respects to Blue Reflection Second Light's, for the sake of example. The only thing that pauses the timeline is when you hit the button to select who acts and you're choosing their move, otherwise the timeline keeps moving. You can also just let them sit at the ready and not take any action if you want to delay their action. As soon as you input an attack, time resumes and as they do it. Nothing is stopping you from telling the other two characters to jump in on the enemy too as long as they have the ATB to do it, and it's in fact a large part of the game's knockdown system to reward strategically dogpiling your enemy. Special moves happen through a different mechanic though, but in general building up combo adds a multiplier to your whole team's damage. Also your characters get faster as they attack, which is sick. I'm sure there's some other games out there that do similar things. i feel like most of the time that when i do post in games, it's probably about BR at this point, and i can't help talking about the combat As for the autobattle stuff, I tend to only really like it when it's just how the game controls naturally. Otherwise, I just don't trust the AI to do a good job, and especially not for a strategy game. I will even manually move all my units up in a Fire Emblem just because I don't trust it to not make a silly decision.
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 23:07 |
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Barbatos is still the best
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 23:08 |
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Oh and also I love Blue Reflection 2's gameplay style where you get asked to build a structure and then you get scenes with that character and Ao interacting with it.That and just being ambushed with scenes around the school as you progress the game. It's the closest thing to skits I've seen in a game since Tokyo Xanadu but sadly that game just didn't grab me at all. I got to the green teen with the magic staff and just quit there.
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 23:17 |
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avoraciopoctules posted:Uh... sorry, in that case I'm not sure what we're talking about. Maybe I misread something. im going to make this my last post about it but i am simply just, very confused about what positive point there is, to saying that unlike this game where you have to engage with the part of the gameplay people find fun and the game is built around that aspect because it was designed to be fun for people who like it, in this game you can set the difficulty to easy and avoid ever engaging with the main reason anyone plays it while you instead engage with other things instead of the game
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# ? Jul 4, 2023 23:43 |
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The Colonel posted:im going to make this my last post about it but i am simply just, very confused about what positive point there is, to saying that unlike this game where you have to engage with the part of the gameplay people find fun and the game is built around that aspect because it was designed to be fun for people who like it, in this game you can set the difficulty to easy and avoid ever engaging with the main reason anyone plays it while you instead engage with other things instead of the game It sounds like you're asking what value there is in highlighting ways that people can bypass part of a game experience to focus on just certain elements. If I am understanding that correctly, I think the value is that it makes the game more accessible to people who struggle to engage with some parts of a game experience. And that's definitely valuable to me, because it generates more variety in the articles and video essays about people's experiences with different games. I like reading stuff by people who play fighting games for the story, RPGs for the exploration, action games to dissect their politics, etc. I read a really cool article a while back that talked about someone's experiences exploring old FPS games with cheats on, and how the game could be rewarding as an exploration experience even if the player had infinite HP and noclip on. Or maybe it was a video essay, don't remember exactly. Either way, it was super neat seeing how differently they experienced those Hexen castles, and I'm really glad the game allowed them to engage with it that way.
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 00:16 |
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no i mean the part where you're doing it so you can do things other than play the game. i don't understand why you're doing that to grind. by the time you've set the difficulty to the lowest setting and started auto battling you don't need to be grinding. there's no point in having the game on and doing that if you're not actually interested in playing it and seeing any of the things that you would potentially be difficulty gated by. i dont know why you'd open a tales game to let it auto battle while you read a book, you could just read the book while listening to music without awkward background noise and then play the game on its own time when you're interested in playing the game whether a game should be forcing the player to engage with all aspects of it is a separate discussion and i dont care about anyone doing something to bust a game's difficulty if it's an option available to them, it's a complex topic and i have a lot of varied thoughts about it. i just don't understand what point there is to having a game open if you're not playing it and not doing anything that would meaningfully effect the experience of playing it. that idea is very strange to me. when i'm watching or playing something i have any interest in the specific ideas of i like to give it the most attention i can and not split it between other things. i'll listen to music or background noise when there's a particular lull in something but usually i dont really like it when it hits that point in something that isn't purposefully built to be an epic grind, when i play a video game i want to be playing the video game in some way and not turning away to look at something entirely unrelated. The Colonel fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Jul 5, 2023 |
# ? Jul 5, 2023 00:19 |
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anyway the fate/extra ccc fan tl team is assuring they're gonna get the game fully edited finally soon. it's ok though they had a good reason, one of their editors was busy translating the worst psx rpg of all time https://iwakuraproductions.wordpress.com/2023/07/04/fate-extra-ccc-editing-update/
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 00:39 |
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the one man blocking us from the fate psp rpg full of lesbian monologues
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 00:43 |
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Someone had to Guerilla release the persona translation to get them to finish their persona version. It was very funny
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 00:46 |
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Gaius Marius posted:Someone had to Guerilla release the persona translation to get them to finish their persona version. It was very funny No, they canceled their project since someone else stole their thunder. Kind of sad but still funny.
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 00:52 |
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The Colonel posted:i dont know why you'd open a tales game to let it auto battle while you read a book, you could just read the book while listening to music without awkward background noise and then play the game on its own time when you're interested in playing the game OK, so this is not a general question, it is a specific question about why I would play a Tales game and auto-battle encounters while also doing something else? Grinding in games to become more powerful is fun. Number go up, very nice. But if you only need a certain amount of attention for Number Go Up, that means you have some extra attention you can put elsewhere. (This could lead to a very interesting conversation about people with attention deficit disorders and the coping mechanisms they use to function in society, but that's a bit outside the scope of this thread. If you're curious, I could link you some writing on the subject via PM or something.) Grinding in multiple games in once can be super satisfying. If you are the type of person who enjoys RPG grinding, might be worth giving it a shot! It can be kind of fun testing your limits, seeing how many games you can put a minimum viable progression effort into at once. And if that helps you develop multitasking skills, they might be transferable to other stuff! Not sure if I want to check out the literature on that, but it's fun to imagine . Been a while since I played Tales of Arise, but I remember being kind of intimidated by the gameplay at first. Something about it just wasn't clicking. Plus, people in the Tales thread were talking about the first boss being a major difficulty spike. Scary! So, I found a progression loop that seemed like it would be a slow but steady path to improving my chars. I set the auto combat on, and then all I had to do was check people's health levels after fights, and heal/rest/save as necessary in between. I could study how the AI played the characters, and every now and then I could do manual inputs and see how that changed things. When I wasn't feeling up to it, I could get a little light reading in, and the victory fanfare in the battles would tell me it was time to check back on the game. By the time I finished the book, my characters felt super powerful! It was great, and I no longer felt intimidated by the prospect of the game getting much harder once I progressed further. It was a really satisfying way to engage with the game for me, and I will probably try it again if the action in the next Tales game feels a bit too daunting. Especially if I can find a book that's thematically relevant to the game. If I do revisit Tales of Arise, I'm imagining that reading some of the book club stuff from Trashfuture might help me think about the plot/chars in a more rewarding way.
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 01:05 |
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The Colonel posted:the one man blocking us from the fate psp rpg full of lesbian monologues why do people want to translate the worst poo poo and games that don't need a re-translation
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 01:05 |
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Willo567 posted:why do people want to translate the worst poo poo and games that don't need a re-translation In the former case I actually really appreciate it because there's zero chance I'm ever going to get to see it otherwise. Sometimes it's fun to just see a really terrible game
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 01:22 |
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ancient roman is culture, it deserves to be gazed upon. it is an important relic of some time a bunch of guys saw ff7 make a ton of money and thought they could make their own ff7
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 01:40 |
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Willo567 posted:and games that don't need a re-translation If you're talking about Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, its original translation is just kinda rough and a new one up to modern standards would've been nice. Also, the PSP version of both games has got much more responsive performance and that alone is worth it. They just feel so much better to actually play in every way.
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 02:06 |
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avoraciopoctules posted:OK, so this is not a general question, it is a specific question about why I would play a Tales game and auto-battle encounters while also doing something else? Grinding in games to become more powerful is fun. Number go up, very nice. But if you only need a certain amount of attention for Number Go Up, that means you have some extra attention you can put elsewhere. (This could lead to a very interesting conversation about people with attention deficit disorders and the coping mechanisms they use to function in society, but that's a bit outside the scope of this thread. If you're curious, I could link you some writing on the subject via PM or something.) Grinding in multiple games in once can be super satisfying. If you are the type of person who enjoys RPG grinding, might be worth giving it a shot! why not just watch a YouTube compilation of cutscenes at that point
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 02:17 |
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You can even watch this guy do random solo runs of the bosses to make number go up immediately and with zero need to touch the game https://youtube.com/@RinKiriTales
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 02:19 |
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Dragon Quest autobattle hits the sweet spot where it can win easy encounters optimally (and, importantly, very fast) but can't really handle the fights that push you to the limit of your abilities. The game also retains the concept of endurance between rest spots, so that the challenge isn't just to win but to win efficiently. The grouping of enemies, the high but not perfect reliability and power of status effects, the randomization of HP, and the tradeoffs between single and area attacks, all combine to keep the outcome of a turn from being predictable. It captures the excitement of gambling when the odds favor you. I think that's what's good about it, but it's definitely attempting a different kind of fun than more rigid and tactical systems.
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 02:23 |
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i like several tales game stories a lot but i dont think reading entirely separate literature is going to give you a deeper appreciation for the plots of the series about seeing hot young men have jokey interactions with middle age dudes and experience existential crises, they aren't really based in political theory
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 02:25 |
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Erg posted:You can even watch this guy do random solo runs of the bosses to make number go up immediately and with zero need to touch the game im developing my multitasking skills by not watching this channel while simultaneously not playing the game
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 02:26 |
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Look, this entire conversation stops dead if you answer one question: Are you doing this with completely new games you know nothing about, or is this something you're doing with a game you've beaten multiple times and you already know how it all goes but you just like to play the game in general?
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 02:32 |
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avoraciopoctules posted:
The enemies getting harder in games where your input matters for combos or the like is often mitigated just by...becoming familiar with the game and its systems and more comfortable with your execution. Which you cut out completely by auto grinding for raw numbers and hoping pure stats will get you through and eventually a boss will come along and just say "Learn how to knock me down and combo me or you will turn this into the worst goddamn grind of item spam in your life". it's also true of my classic/turn based RPGs that aren't very simple or easy where they have a certain threshold of player knowledge that you'll skip learning by grinding out stats to carry you through early poo poo.
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 02:40 |
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Erg posted:why not just watch a YouTube compilation of cutscenes at that point
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 02:43 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 01:55 |
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avoraciopoctules posted:Believe it or not, many games have more than just combat and cutscenes in them. If this is a serious question I suppose I could elaborate, but this sounds pretty insincere. ive played 30 hours of arise and there's no way in hell the fishing minigame is worth whatever setup you've got going on there vs just watching someone's let's play
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# ? Jul 5, 2023 03:05 |