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Prism posted:The concept of using field effects during boss fights to shake things up is not a bad one, but the actual implementation they used is a bit more of a problem. Oh god is the actual implementation the problem. Look at Sun and Moon, that was a game where the boss fights could be made memorable and challenging via the power of a gimmick, and the difference was the gimmick wasn't overblown and didn't suck. What did the Totem Pokemon have that made them unique? Two things: A stat boost and some helpers. Notably both of these things are stuff that's already established in the game. Stat boosts are a thing in Pokemon Sun/Moon normally and so are SOS battles. SuMo didn't need 37 discrete field bonuses to make a challenging battle, it did quite fine with nothing more than "+2 speed and also some Castforms". The game didn't and doesn't need "Explosion is Electric and bonus power and Focus Punch always fail and countered by Mud Sport", that's something needlessly faffed up. It's overdesigned as all hell. Speaking of implementation the concept of spending a big chunk of the game in a giant city is actually kind of cool, as is getting a slew of pokemon from finding them around town or via events. It's honestly the sort of stuff I'd want to see in a fan-game. The idea of exploring a different kind of setting or breaking conventions in neat ways is the sort of thing that in general I think Fan games and fan media should do. However the city lay-out looks like a complete mess and the level cap is very poorly considered and the writing is bad and I read all the horror stories in the Uranium thread about this game's writing and the incredible edgitude so I'm not holding my breathe it turns out well. Also dumb memes are never the hallmark of quality writing in a fangame. Just saying.
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Jun 10, 2017 17:45
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I'd actually rather not vote on what pokemon you use for the gym. You see one of the things that I really enjoyed and appreciated was not just your exhibition of the game in the first update but your strategies to skip past the game's stupid crap. I was actually impressed and enthused to hear about Pickup shenanigans, and to see how you fought stupid fire with stupid fire via Lightningrod, as well as going into what Pokemon you could possibly use to counter stuff and why the pokemon selection was trash. In short one of the things that really drew me in was your guile. Leaving it up to the mercy of the thread removes a chunk of that, I'm more interested in seeing how you counterattack against the game than seeing you struggle through it. As for Gym Leaders with six pokemon I don't mind them eventually appearing, but having it on the first gym leader is a massive spike in difficulty especially when two of those pokemon exist for no other reason than to use Hyper Terrain Explosion. Those two Voltorbs really do nothing at all to add to the experience of the battle except maybe getting a cheap instant kill because difficulty amiright?
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Jun 11, 2017 15:03
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AmewTheFox posted:while the comparisons to MegaTen have been made, y'know when you fight Matador? a good amount of hours into the game, instead of being the FIRST BOSS. This right here is worth reiterating: All those hard Megaten games aren't hard right out the gate. The reason the Matador is such a shitwrecking difficulty spike is that up till that point you can sort of fumble through the game. The Hospital is easy street and the first couple of towns and overworld areas are pretty forgiving. Then you get to the Amala Network trip which is harder but you can still doable brute force and then the Underpass is also harder but you can still brute force it and then you hit the Matador whoops you're dead. Matador is the end of Nocturne's the tutorial. By the time you've gotten to him you've had access to demon fusion, fought a lot of random encounters and a handful of bosses, encountered a bunch of different demons, had the opportunity to fiddle with a couple of Magatama, and had it hammered in that the Press Turn System is REALLY IMPORTANT. The first couple hours of every Megaten game is you being trained how to play a Megaten game, explore everywhere, play cautiously, go for advantages, pay attention to weaknesses and resistances, bring a wide spread of elements, fuse frequently, and remember that buffs are super powerful. The reason Matador is so notorious is that he's the comprehensive test for a class that a lot of players were not aware they were taking. If you "know" how to play Shin Megami Tensei games then Matador is completely fine, you have all the tools you need in front of you. On the other hand if you come into Nocturne because you heard it's a good game and you go about playing it like it's a Tales of or a Final Fantasy or a Golden Sun or something of a similar stripe he'll seem incredibly unfair. A key to SMT is that there's a great degree of balance in what you have and what the enemies have. You can also buff yourself like crazy, be functionally invulnerable to nearly every attack, charge up and do ridiculous damage, spam weaknesses, load up on resistances, hobble and sicken your foes, and overall fight fire with fire. SMT games are hard because they have a specific way they want you to play and you'll suffer punitive results if you go astray from it, but they're also fair because within their system of play you can have success even if you aren't a hardcore Min/max fusing prodigy who creates exactly perfect demons. It's not until later in the game when you're well established that you run into gimmick bosses with unique super attacks and oneshot hard-mode mechanics and even then you can muddle through if you're muddling along in the right mindset. Bad Romhacks like Uranium are like SMT but without that leeway, you do not win unless you go about actively abusing the small number of ways that the game maker has deigned to allow as valid choices. "Hard" must be coupled with "fair" or else you aren't making Dark Souls or Shin Megami Tensei you're making dreck.
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Jun 15, 2017 20:18
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Bruceski posted:It really depends on the game. From what I recall in FFX-2 they're very useful once you figure out which ones stick to which enemies, and in FFV they absolutely wreck various bosses, though in that game there's enough ways to absolutely wreck bosses that it really only matters in Four-Job Fiesta runs. One of the reasons that FFX-2 has good status effects though is the Songstress Dressphere, a Job whose primary feature is that it inflicts status ailments pretty much 100% of the time if the enemy is vulnerable to it. FF10 and 10-2 also go the extra mile to differentiate "Miss" from "Immune" which is extremely useful. As for FF5 you got it in one, in general people don't go fishing for status effects on bosses besides from Blue Magic unless they're on a Fiesta and have to start poring over game information to invent some way to beat a beat that would otherwise stomp them.
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Jun 17, 2017 00:22
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Pvt.Scott posted:The original FF had so many terrible bugs. Buff spells not working or actually making you worse, opposite for debuffs. Weapon special properties not working at all, I don't think some class features worked right, etc. One of my favorite FF1 facts is that in the original version you can buy the spell AMUT/Vox, which cures Silence. The trouble is that no enemy in the game has the capacity to inflict silence on you.
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Jun 17, 2017 02:11
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Bruceski posted:In FF Mystic Quest, you could kill the final boss with healing due to overflow values. Only with your companion though, your hero's magic was so strong that it would overflow twice and go back to healing the boss. Or maybe I have those backwards. I believe you have it backwards. I also seriously thought at the time it was intentional, I started using healing magic offensively against the last run of bosses on the advice of a guide that thought it worked because they were actually undead.
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Jun 17, 2017 18:17
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Jesus that misty terrain write-up, it just kept going, and going, and going, and going, and going... Also, invisible Revives with no tells? gently caress you game. You either give people the itemfinder or its equivalent early in the game so they can find random hidden stuff or you make hidden item locations intuitive or you do both and have both. Putting a completely unmotivated Revive in the middle of nowhere speaks to a misunderstanding on the part of Reborn about a fundamental aspect of gameplay design. Put simply, on a certain level you actually want your players to have things and be successful and win. Yeah, sure, if you're making a game you can put in a hidden item that your players can't ever find, but that's easy and stupid. The trick is to put in a hidden item that your players CAN find, that's good design.
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Jun 19, 2017 07:05
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Pulse, sorry PULSE Tangrowth? You know I was all set to say that some of those ideas were almost kind of good. I still like the idea of a heavily Urban setting for a Pokemon game with a slum as a mini-dungeon (of course not done like this), the gang of Scraggies is actually kind of adorable and a workable non-trainer trainer battle, and the scene where a trainer rescues a water pokemon and decides to train and take care of it is the sort of simple positivity that marks a real pokemon game. Of course it's way too wordy (Incidentally the way you're presenting the overwhelming words is real good), the attempt to be edgy with that swearing trainer spewing blaxsploitation dialogue is one of the most juvenile things I've ever seen in my life, and of course PULSE Tangrowth.  has never been more appropriate.Honestly the thing that strikes me as most dubious out of all of this oddly are the one-shot healing stones. That's a mechanic that would make sense in a game with a major emphasis on attrition, IE that you're worn down slowly over time and have to gauge whether or not you want to use one of your full heals or whether you can press on to the next/make it back to the previous one. Those light stones feel like they'd fit easily into a late-game Shin Megami Tensei dungeon, or a Dragon Quest style marathon dungeon. They do not, however, fit comfortably into Pokemon. Pokemon is not a game that handles attrition well. Pokemon in general is fairly easy, but healing items (especially PP restores) are rarely in great number, money doesn't flow freely until late in the game, and the damage values of the game and the massive power of weaknesses means that it can often turn into rocket tag. If you don't take someone out super fast you're liable to suffer retaliation, and unless you completely outstrip them retaliation from random encounters will wear you down. Mainline Pokemon counters the small pool of free/cheap healing items and high damage by making full heals free and readily available. Moreover the free, ready access to healing is pretty vital for the central gimmick of the game, IE catching Pokemon. Putting aside Quick Balls for a second it takes a couple of rounds generally to knock a pokemon low enough to catch them, and that means taking hits in return. Unless you COMPLETELY overwhelm the wild pokemon and use False Swipe catching a pokemon means taking hits from that pokemon which means that free and ready heals are necessary to encourage you to catch pokemon. Assuming the slums are actually long enough that you'll need those healing stones it feels like making them one-use comes from a place of not really getting how Pokemon plays. Honestly that comes across a lot in Reborn so far, making interesting changes that nonetheless are born from not really getting why Pokemon does the things it does.
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Jun 23, 2017 02:09
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Haifisch posted:It's swearing written by people who are just doing it to be edgy, meaning they don't have the writing chops to make it flow naturally. Those fuckers. This is what struck me about the swearing kid in that last update, it made the game seem juvenile. One of the ironies of maturity is that displays of maturity usually come across as immature. Swearing is a signifier of maturity, but it does not ipso facto make your game skew older, it may just make the mentality behind the game appear childish. There's little as childish as frantically trying to appear like an adult. I could see an alternate universe where the purpose behind the kid was to show that he was actually very childish and trying to childishly look like a grown-up, but the writing behind Reborn has been far too spotty to suggest it was intentional. As for the fangames discussion those are the things I occasionally praise Reborn for. I like the idea of being set largely in a big city, I dislike every single thing this game has done with it. One of the possible virtues of a fangame or a work of fanfiction is that it can explore different aspects of a setting or look at things from a different perspective to the canon material. The problem is that pulling it off demands a baseline of quality and Fanworks have a notorious and completely justified reputation for being largely crap.
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Jun 25, 2017 01:09
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Onmi posted:Also because most Galactic Grunts don't know what the hell their leader wants to do. And Cyrus even outright admits they're all idiots who're basically in a cult and don't know what the gently caress is going on. This is true of about half the villainous teams out there.
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Jun 25, 2017 20:13
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I think my summation of all this storytelling talk is that Pokemon is only "for babies" if you approach from a childishly superficial level. Pokemon is absolutely marketed at children, but like a good Disney or Pixar film it also manages the trick of "For All Ages" by including material in the setting, characters, and storytelling that's only apparent to older audiences. Stuff like Lusamine and her children or the stuff around Ghetsis or the Eevee sidequest from SuMo touch on some genuinely mature themes. To reiterate another point worn through from the Uranium thread Pokemon has been getting more mature and serious, it's just escaped all the fans out there who confuse edginess with maturity. Edit: Haifisch said it better first and cited their work.
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Jun 28, 2017 01:26
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get that OUT of my face posted:Is that actually the rationale behind Bug > Dark? I know that there's a reason for every type strength and weakness, and some are less obvious than others. That's awesome if that's the case. I don't think there's ever been official 100% confirmation, but "Kamen Riders defeat evil" is a pretty safe bet. At this point Kamen Riders 1 and 2 are ingrained in the cultural consciousness so it wouldn't be hard to put "Bugman fights evil" alongside other more metaphorical type match-ups like "Mind over matter" or "Cold iron harms the fae".
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Jun 28, 2017 16:09
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Ace of Aces posted:He's pretty antagonistic, albeit in a different way than Blue is - Blue is loudly arrogant, Cheren is quiet but tends to look down his nose a bit (or a lot, where Bianca is concerned). Similarly to Silver, it takes a high-ranking trainer throwing poo poo back in his face to make him realise that maybe the reason he's been getting wrecked is because his attitude is the problem, rather than his skill. Cheren is more like that friend everybody had who absolutely had to be the best at whatever it was, and when he takes an objective loss he clearly doesn't like it. As you say, though, that's less important to him than backing up his friends, so he works with you on and off throughout the game - his personality is antagonistic (as in, he antagonizes the protagonist repeatedly... and about 80% of what he says to Bianca is passive-aggressive at best), but once he pulls his head out of his rear end he's a great guy. In broad strokes, he's actually pretty similar to Silver, and you see similar characters crop up periodically in the anime as well. My view of Cheren in BW2 is that he's basically trying to pay forward the good advice he got. He teaches at a trainer school, and the way he talks about being a Gym Leader suggests he sees it as a job where he can spur on new trainers. While he tries to be motivating and inspirational what's interesting is that he's still a bit prickly. For instance when you call him out to the world tournament he gripes a little bit about being interrupted and called out, but decides he wants to enter anways. Similarly if you take him on the Ferris Wheel he comes across as kind of stodgy but lightens up a little bit while riding it. Nonetheless he seems really enthusiastic about battles win or lose, and does seem generally more positive about his role. He fully embraces the fact that his job as a Gym Leader is to lose to worthy challengers, and I think that's a pretty big step. From where I'm sitting Cheren is trying to fake it till he makes it. He really wants to be for others what Alder was for him, but he's not quite there yet. I think if Cheren randomly popped up in Ultra SuMo he'd have probably gotten to where he was trying to go, but it's kind of interesting that Pokemon showed Cheren struggling to really put the life lesson into action.
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Jun 29, 2017 18:01
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Commander Keene posted:Wait, they patched their own intended solution out? Yep. Because it wasn't the "INTENDED" solution to killing Absolute Virtue. Yes, the video that was posted by the devs as "this is how you're actually supposed to kill this boss" was not how you were actually supposed to kill this boss. Seriously. So a brief history of ways people killed Absolute Virtue: Glitching him out. The world's first kill involved trickery relating to the layout of the zone, namely they got him caught behind one of the zone's dividing walls in such a way that people could hit him so they couldn't be hit back. The people who did this were banned. A very telling point of fact about this was that Absolute Virtue dropped nothing on this first kill, despite having items he was allegedly supposed to drop none materialized. Glitching him out again. This second kill involved kiting him across an extremely dangerous zone to an NPC that let you rewatch cutscenes then doing shenanigans. The end result was that AV would glitch out and you could just kill him. The people who did this got drops, but were banned. Then right around now was the Pandemonium Warden affair, were a group of players took on similarly OP (but mortal and killable) raid boss Pandemonium Warden for so long that some of them were hospitalized for dehydration. This was also around the period where there was that highly publicized marathon 30 hour fight against Absolute Virtue where he decided to fully heal for funzies leaving the raid to quit in disgust. For further reference the raid had managed to knock off a whopping two thirds of his health by the time this happened, yes after THIRTY HOURS. In response to this bad press double wammie Pandemonium Warden and Absolute Virtue were changed to only spawn for two hours and Absolute Virtue's HP was cut by a third. Now you still couldn't actually kill the fucker, but at least people weren't going to have severe medical problems while they were trying. Following the HP nerf was Dark Knight Zerg Rush win. Dark Knights in FF11 had two specific abilities on hand for this strategy, one was Soul Eater which let them burn 10% of their Max HP to add it straight to their damage, the other was Blood Weapon, the DRK 2-hour ability which let you recover 100% of the damage you dealt for about a minute. Combining the two with the uber rare and uber expensive Kraken Club (which hit 8 times with every swing but basically had no stats) let a raiding party of very wealthy Dark Knights kill Absolute Virtue in under a minute. The players who did this were miraculously NOT banned, however immediately afterwards Absolute Virtue became the first boss ever to become resistant to Soul Eater so back to the unkillable status quo. The video method vaguely revealed three years after the fact that was allegedly the "Intended" strategy was to counter all of his 2-hour abilities by having a raid member use their own two-hour ability within seconds of him charging it up (GL on lag for that one), but then like I said that strategy was patched out because it wasn't the super secret intended strategy. I'm sure there were some other gimmicks. I've heard the "overflow error" in passing but I don't know the specifics on it but it wouldn't surprise me. To this day the "intended" strategy has never actually been revealed. Nowadays Absolute Virtue can be taken out by well geared level 99 players (since AV came out when the level cap was 75), but Absolute Virtue is still a punchline and still held up as the epitome of dev team hubris. Absolute Virtue is to MMORPGs what super protected precious Mary Sue characters are to bad fiction is to what stupid OP Metaplot characters are to Tabletop RPGs, an author's pet they refused to allow to be touched or besmirched by your dirty, scumsucking, media consuming, game playing hands. Absolute Virtue was too pure and perfect for this world and had to be protected, good game design be damned. krisslanza posted:It's certainly something that the FFXI team went onto make FFXIV. When it flopped and ARR was made, the first thing they did was sack the entire original team, because they had no idea how to make an MMO. It's genuinely amazing that FF14 managed to become as good as it is today considering both the original design team and the Indian burial ground of coding it's built off of. Meanwhile in the realm of Reborn I'll say the one thing I liked in this last update were the candy items. It actually makes a lot of sense to see Friendship boosting overpriced candy to act as a counterpoint to friendship lowering overpriced medicine, that's good fangame faffery. Also getting a Vanillite out of an ice cream machine made me chuckle. Meanwhile the Double Intimidate dogs, MECHANIGHTMARE and its nerfed as hell reward, the bullshit surrounding the department store, weirdly angry blind lady, the poor pacing of the game, ORIGINAL TEAM DUN STEAL, the incredible verboseness of the game in general, and the incredibly lame Lillipup chase remind me again this isn't a good game. Honestly I wouldn't mind all these sidequests if there was a semblance of a main quest worth a drat happening. Omnicrom fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Jul 4, 2017 |
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Jul 4, 2017 01:46
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Bruceski posted:They approached the MMO problem of "we spend years on new content, and then people kill it 24 hours after launch and whine about wanting more stuff" (a problem to which I don't think there's ANY good solution) and "solved" it in the worst possible way. It's worth mentioning that Absolute Virtue was technically in the game since the release of Chains of Promathia, but it actually took like 6 months for people to reach Absolute Virtue. To make him spawn you had to kill your way up a list of Notorious Monsters (overworld bosses) who were at launch brutally hard, and as previously stated AV itself only had a 50% chance to spawn initially. The obnoxious part was that the final link on the other Notorious Monster chain was Pandemonium Warden (he of the "players literally being hospitalized the fight took so long") was actually mortal and could be killed conventionally. MarquiseMindfang posted:People tried coordinating 18 Scholars to cast Modus Veritas at the same time to kill it in one hit. MV doubled the tick damage of a Scholar's DoT spell, but halved the duration. The strategy relied upon trying to time it with server ticks such that even the halved-many-times duration would tick once and only once and deal its entire HP in one shot. I think I knew people started using Alexander to beat Absolute Virtue, but again Alexander was released as a thing you could summon some Five Years after AV dropped and in the same era where the level cap was being raised above 75. Basically SE worked to make Absolute Virtue basically unkillable for as long as they drat well could.
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Jul 4, 2017 06:57
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SSNeoman posted:If I'm thinking of the same story, then yes, that was a thing. And players killed it. Then the devs shut off the servers to figure out what happened. It also didn't drop loot. If you're talking about the big rear end dragon you got the order of events wrong. What happened is that when the boss was down to like 23% the servers unexpectedly went down. The devs to this day swear up, down, and around that they did not deliberately shut down the servers to keep the boss from being killed, they claim it was just a SUPREMELY unfortunate accident. For what it's worth when the servers came back up people actually did go and promptly (well "promptly", it was an hours long affair) killed the boss. The strategy for that was was actually kind of simple: The boss instantly kills the crap out of whatever he touches so just have dozens and dozens of healers constantly spamming resurrection spells. As for Wildstar... Who boy... When Wildstar launched it was announced that it would take 6 months to complete their first raid tier. This turned out not to be a "we think it will be that long to reach and complete" but a "We are going to make sure it takes that long by hook or by crook". People who actually made it through attunement hell and go into the raids reported that some bosses were literally impossible, as in it was not actually mathematically possible to do enough damage in the time allotted to kill the bosses. The devs explicitly nerfed one item because it let people boost their DPS to kill a boss that was not supposed to be killable yet. Yes, the developers were completely candid that the boss that was killed was killed too early, that the hardcore raiders had to sit on their hands and check back week after week to see if Carbine had deigned to make their boss mortal. Raid groups also reported that bosses would change week from week, often drastically. They would go in and raid bosses could be completely different with absolutely no warning. The real reason Timetraveller's gif response to the world's first clear is so maddening is that Timetraveller was the dude in charge of the raid design. He was the guy who made them LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE in the first place, and when people perservered through his bullshit and waited until the raid was finally actually possible his response wasn't "good job" or "thanks for hanging in there", it was "git gud loser". And Wildstar has a very special fanbase. The Wildstar Subreddit for the longest time had a mod named Franbunny who absolutely REFUSED to have Wildstar go Free To Play, and so when the news broke it was doing that Franbunny put a clampdown on it. She deleted every post about it, including posts by the DEVELOPERS. Developers on Wildstar who actually showed their legitimate credentials were kicked off the Wildstar Subreddit because they were going to mention the payment model shift Franbunny absolutely REFUSED to accept that Wildstar would F2P. That's why DrTugjobs got in as Reddit mod, a person who said "I don't play this game and I don't even like it" was a remarkable step up from the previous reddit mod. And now I think I'm also done with talking about other bad games. Omnicrom fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Jul 4, 2017 |
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Jul 4, 2017 17:52
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As bad as this drat game is I gotta say this LP is actually really really good. I adore the fact you went the extra mile and evolved a Staryu just to poo poo on the game some more. I love all the character dialogue because it's so emblematic of the game's crapitude. Did someone say once that a pile of the NPCs are actually all lovely RP personas from a chat room? Because the four diaries make that agonizingly plausible. Also Fern is an edgy shitlord even by this game's standards. I almost admire the misguided effort that resulted in him standing out as crappy even by this game's standards.
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Jul 28, 2017 15:32
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Super Jay Mann posted:Even if the idea is to provide a challenging experience, this game makes the fatal mistake of trying to punish the player for not playing the game the way it wants to be played, when what it SHOULD be doing is rewarding the player for playing the way it wants to be played instead. Getting Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume vibe. Which incidentally would be cool.
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Jul 31, 2017 03:29
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Duelist of the Roses is a game with a really weird difficulty curve. Matches are either incredibly tough and unfair or pushovers basically. There are so many cards in that game that just make the difficulty roll over and die, but if you don't have them you're in a bad way.
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Jul 31, 2017 16:06
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Robindaybird posted:I'm going to have to agree, it sounds like Tie's just really bad, because while I remember some fights being rough as I never had the cards, but yeah - the only way the game would seem completely unfair is if he never read the manual or go through the tutorial, because I admit if you just go in the game blind and expect it to play like a normal YGO game, it will be rough. I haven't seen Tie's, but to give him at least the benefit of the doubt if people like Weevil get a lucky draw (Cocoon of Evolution and Larva Moth in the opening hand for instance) it's possible you're just screwed no matter your starting deck. However there are also a lot of starting hands for the CPU players that are just them spewing garbage or making very bad gameplay decisions. Actual outright stonewalling for a couple of hours does sound like player error though.
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Jul 31, 2017 18:37
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Regalingualius posted:At least that gave us "I attack the moon!" You say that like attacking the moon was something that went away. 
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Sep 8, 2017 08:03
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