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Jul 19, 2019 21:26
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FoolyCharged posted:Yeah, but bluffs are pretty universally bonkers. It's a rare game where push button to hit harder is something you don't want to open with. I can think of a couple (Golden Sun/TLA for instance), but those are mostly games which are either super easy already or where the buffs are incredibly trivial and not worth the time to put them up. Also in question is which buffs and what games? For instance Haste is super great in nearly FF game it's ever been in whereas Berserk is almost always a detriment except in FF4 where it engages Turbo Murder mode.
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Jul 25, 2019 04:08
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+2 on bad design now, especially Nthing that the attack+poison damage spike was way too much. If I was making this hack I might do something like start giving you inherent increases to defense and attack to compete with the enemies when you grabbed the Super Hammer. It's fine to make the ruins tough (though not "Poison pokey drop dead" tough), but then pull back on it once you get the super Hammer and you're back on parity. If everything has a point or two extra in attack and a defense why not make the Super Hammer do 3/5 damage instead of the usual 2/4? Paper Mario was very much balanced around the damage numbers of your attacks as they were, and that bugs me when this hack just keeps on giving everything ever some more on the top. I'm worried that long-term the hack is going to keep on pushing the player further back from baseline because the upgrades don't seem like they're going to scale with the enemies as they get tougher and tougher.
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Aug 28, 2019 20:16
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Sorites posted:It's interesting to think about the idea that the player ceasing to have fun and uninstalling just qualifies as a non-standard game over state or bad ending - in other words, counts as the hack working as intended. The thing is this isn't wrong, but the response and consideration of it totally is. Yes, a player's patience can be considered an expendable resource, and running out so they quit the game entirely could be thought of as a non-standard game over, but actually reaching that ending is overwhelmingly a failure on the part of the designer. There are caveats of course. Not every player is going to cotton on to every game, some people have specific things they like and they have differing degrees amounts of tolerance, some people quit games because they aren't very good at them and lack the introspection/desire/time/etc. to be able to improve their gameplay in those areas, some games seem like they want to be one thing but actually turn out to be something quite different and not what the player assumed which makes you want to stop playing, all these things are true. However, if someone goes into a game wanting to engage and be entertained and they run out of patience and "game over" in that manner then that player is not the person who lost the game. If I want to play a game and I flame out because it's incredibly tedious and unfun the shame is not on me, it's on whoever turned the experience into a draggy grind. Hard Mode Hackers may gloat about the Attrition rates on their hard mode hacks, but they do so as fools. "Look at all those losers who couldn't git gud" is a searing indictment of the SPEAKER, and demonstrates the weakness of their design sense.
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Aug 28, 2019 23:58
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:So he wants to turn it into Dragon Quarter, which is a difficult balance to achieve. Indeed. Also missing from this comparison is the Kill Anything button Dragon Quarter gave as a limited resource.
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Aug 31, 2019 17:14
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So a thing that stuck out here is that it seems like the game is struggling to account for timed hits. What I mean is that the game seems to be setting enemy stats as though it assumes you're going to nail every action command, because if you don't you're quickly killed/overwhelmed by status effects and then killed. That leads one to question why they don't just lower the enemy stats to their "assumed" damage and defense values after taking into account action commands, and the answer is if they did then you could do actions commands and be above/below what the hack creator wants the enemy damage intake/output to be. It seems like damage and defense are both a little too high because the player is assumed to always mitigate it to the value it "Should be", which seems a little backwards to me. Basically Nintendo's assumed desire with Paper Mario (IE a casual game where twitch reactions and timing in action commands could help make up for the assumed target audience of kids' assumed weaker strategic prowess) seems to run contrary to what the designers of Master Quest want to make, and so we have the rough edges of instant death mummy pokey and the possibility of a full lockdown on Tutankoopa. Omnicrom fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Sep 4, 2019 |
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Sep 4, 2019 19:07
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Double Dip and Flower Fanatic seem like the top choices to pick up from my viewing.
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Sep 6, 2019 23:22
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Quackles posted:This may amuse you. A fourth Blooper fight location (and, by extension, fight) is possibly planned to be added in the final version, at the chest with the Ultra Boots. After a certain point "Hard" turns into "Tedious stupid bullshit". That looks like tedious stupid bullshit.
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Sep 14, 2019 07:40
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bio347 posted:The thing that gets me is that this is literally punishing people for having Paper Mario knowledge, which is weird for a "know all the rules so that you can beat the puzzles" sort of hack. If you've played the game before, equipping Zap Tap for the Electro Blooper is a no-brainer and there's nothing to signpost that it's the badge that's screwing you. In a game that's very much trying its hardest to murder you, maybe this is just how it is now. Bolded is the thing that gets me the hardest here. Master Quest, be it intentional or not, has now more than once had boss fights were you're secretly disadvantaged for being the hack's target audience.
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Sep 17, 2019 01:50
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ChaseSP posted:I think the hp wall issue would be fine if there's enough hp plus to make up for it if a person is going hard on BPs which is commonly the best route esp for something like this. And there's just not enough. You need 25 HP, and if you don't do any HP levels you can get up to 20.
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Sep 18, 2019 18:04
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heeheex2 posted:I suck rear end at Paper Mario sorry dude. The other guy explained why though Gotta say I wasn't particularly impressed with either their explanation or yours, especially since "the other guy's" explanation was weak tea "Git Gud". And does it matter whether you're personally good at a game? People who suck at Dark Souls can be elitist gitgudnards about Dark Souls, and I see no difference here.
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Sep 24, 2019 00:09
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My understanding of badges in baseline Paper Mario is that you actually can't equip more than one of the same badge, every one of HP/FP/Power Plus badge you can multi-equip are actually internally DIFFERENT badges with the same player-facing name and the same effect. If you somehow gave yourself more than one of the exact same badge and tried to put them on all of them would equip at once to no additional effect.
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Oct 2, 2019 17:58
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heeheex2 posted:shoutouts to stryder's 14 hour video about this Yep! If you haven't watched stryder7x's stuff on Paper Mario you should, he does great/insane work pulling apart the game in weird ways.
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Oct 2, 2019 19:37
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Anti-Guy, Thunder Rage, Koopatrol, and Flower Fanatic.
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Oct 6, 2019 20:33
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Robindaybird posted:Jesus, some of these changes are ridiculous and will demand either One True Tactic for each set, or that you have to pump everything into HP to survive. The previous version already seemed to have a couple of "You must have this much HP or get hosed loser", I'm disappointed but not surprised to see that come back with a vengeance even earlier.
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Nov 16, 2019 19:39
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gourdcaptain posted:When I first encountered a game like that more than a decade back in The World Ends With You, I wondered why I hadn't seen other games attempt that, even if it doesn't make sense in every case it's so perfect when it does. I think the reason so few games give you full heals is because attrition is very much a valid challenge you can apply to a player. Consider Darkest Dungeon where things like limited inventory space and stress are explicitly designed to slowly bleed you out over the course of a dungeon run. Consider Etrian Odyssey or its peers in the Wizardry style dungeon crawler where the game is built around trying to reach further and further into the dungeon by slowly leveling and gearing up so you can make your limited pool of resources stretch longer and longer. Consider Persona, where the nature of the game's time management and calendar mean that you want to get as far as you can in any given visit to the dungeon and creates difficulty by encouraging you to press your luck. Of course there are many games where you could totally strip attrition out of the equation and not really have a major effect on the game, and in those cases I assume its just design cargo culting. Pokemon is a good example, how much would be lost if you were given a full heal outside of every battle? Not much, Pokemon is a game with designated free heal spots in every town (and even many dungeons) it never really pushes you to progress in the majority of gameplay. Up until Gen 7 the only time the game stopped you from popping out to heal after every trainer fight (with few exceptions) was when you were challenging the Elite Four. Before that point nothing but sheer tedium was holding you back from visiting a Pokemon center after every battle, and at that point why have HP and PP carry over between battles? Paper Mario is another game like that. The vanilla games are usually very easy, with the only place where attrition is a real aspect of design being the Pit of 100 Trials. Master Quest is not easy (And not in a good way, I'd argue), but it's another game where attrition is not a real mechanic and for basically the opposite of the original game. Paper Mario is easy so you can easily breeze through random encounters with little worry. On the extreme other side of he spectrum Master Quest's encounters are SO overtuned and SO difficult and each fight's One Correct Strategy SO specific that trying to fight two enemies in a row without healing is a disaster. The game even seems to expect you to fully heal between every single fight, so I agree, why not bake that into the experience? If Master Quest is so dedicated to turning every single encounter ever into a puzzle why not go all the way in on it and take out any sort of carryover between fights? Right now the carryover is just as constrained as the valid strategies, you're either at max resources (or near enough that it doesn't matter) or you don't have enough HP and FP and are dead. Bottom Line? Master Quest should go on as it means to start. Full heal after every battle. Why not? The game wouldn't be any easier just because of it.
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Nov 17, 2019 02:17
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DACK FAYDEN posted:...holy poo poo I keep learning things about vanilla from this LP None at all. You learn this only if you already have a Lemon Candy because he'll ask for it in exchange for the box.
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Nov 26, 2019 17:55
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Was that Anti-Guy there in the base game?
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Nov 30, 2019 04:06
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Discendo Vox posted:This is confirming my suspicion that the dev started with a baseline of perfect QTE performance in design. Yeesh. After the poison hell of chapter 2 I had no doubt this was the design assumption.
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Dec 29, 2019 01:12
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Quackles posted:The way the BLG’s AI is coded, whenever it does the flash attack, it queues up the jump. Whenever it does the jump, it would normally get ready to blow out the lantern - except, the Master Quest devs make it do the flash attack again, which overrides this, and so the jump attack is selected for the next move.  Well now. Hearing that I now fully endorse this strategy.
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Dec 29, 2019 05:06
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senrath posted:Yeah, the "learn 2 block" comment is a lot less dickish if your understanding is that a stunlock only happens if the player keeps missing every block, rather than missing just one. Very much so. I don't really agree with designing a romhack assuming you'll hit every imaginable block, but I'm glad there's some small modicum of restraint. I assume the stunlock is going to remain in Master Quest Sr. of course.
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Dec 29, 2019 16:55
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Evil Kit posted:That said, I think a lot of it what he wanted to do comes from a pretty genuine place, and for however arrogant Thamz may have been it takes a pretty self aware, well adjusted person to not just burn everything down around them just cause they don't like where it's going. Gotta give props to the dude. Seconding this part for sure. I've seen a lot of fan project creators go "I'm taking my ball and going home" in the most nuclear way, so Thamz peacing out and ending by telling everyone to look forward to this new and different version of Master Quest is a significant improvement. Also your Avatar/Title had me cracking up, so thanks for that.
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Jan 13, 2021 02:39
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JustJeff88 posted:I watched a blind LP of TYD, the longest and most respected entry in the franchise, a while ago by a fairly experienced gamer. Not only is it a long game, but he had some difficulties later in the game, so it can't be that easy, can it? Others have said it, but I feel it worth reiterating that even an easy game can have difficult sections or bosses. Both 64 and TTYD have some late game bosses that can be pretty rough. That's not to say these bosses are all THAT difficult in the grand scheme of JRPGs, or that they can't be trivialized relatively easily, but it's also not to say that these genuinely challenging bosses aren't genuinely challenging. I remember back in the day that there were a lot of people who struggled in PM64 with the aforementioned Huff'n'Puff or with the optional fight against Kent C Koopa, even though by and large 64 is a pretty gentle game. TTYD is no different, it's definitely long but it's generally not that hard. On the other hand, though, the final boss of the game especially can give you a real run for your money if you are un- or underprepared. You don't have to go far off the beaten track to put together a strategy to beat her, but by the same token you're probably get crushed pretty hard if you assume she's going to be a snooze. For a parallel point look at Pokémon, I remember a number of people having a lot of difficulty with particular late battles in Ultra/Sun and Moon, and those are games that are well known for being a breeze. And just like Paper Mario, Pokémon fan games that try to push the envelope in terms of difficulty often become painful and exhausting to go through. Both games are pretty simple in terms of their battle systems but also offer many exciting ways to create broken teams and setups that can smash through anything their respective games have to offer in terms of challenge. It was pointed out to back during the dire LP of Pokémon Reborn (and pointed out here in this thread) that the battle system of the Pokémon games (and the original to Paper Mario games) don't have much distance between face-role easy and the punishingly hard. This means you need to give a lot of thought and care to what you're doing if you decide you want to raise the difficulty, and that's why Master Quest.pushback from the thread in the first place. And this is what's up with Huff'n'Puff and why he stands out so much to so many players: because the two extremes are so close to each other it means that any bump in difficulty very very noticeable.
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Jan 14, 2021 00:25
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JustJeff88 posted:Well, that's certainly a firm answer to my question. As Robindaybird pointed out you're not. The reason is some combination of the perils of being overly familiar with the base game, making certain assumptions about the value and quality of difficulty, and related to the first making certain assumptions about who the intended player will be. To the first point and last point Master Quest was created from the point of view of someone who was extremely familiar with the original Paper Mario and knew all of the best strategies and had memorized all the various gimmicks and mechanical interactions of the game. If you look at a lot of similar "Hardtype" mods for games you often get examples where the modder specifically called out and removed certain strategies that were incredibly obviously overpowered. The classic strategy in Paper Mario 64 was usually Charge Up and Power Bounce, sometimes with things like Critical Rush, which let you effortlessly deal a frankly ridiculous amount of damage. Master Quest nerfed this interaction, which is completely justifiable, but the trick is that I am certain there are huge number of players the game who never came upon this interaction in their personal playthroughs. And that's the thing, the creator and the target audience for the mod are people that have already played through this game forward and backward and have an encyclopedic knowledge of it and know all the best strategies of the base game already and have an invested dedication in smashing their head against the wall until they find a place where it gives. Related with that is a problem of perspective, i.e. the perils I mentioned above. If you know a game incredibly well and you assume that the game will only be played by other people who know the game incredibly well and the people who are generally going to be helping out with the project and doing beta tests are also people who know the game incredibly well, you are going to have problems balancing the difficulty for the general public (if you even care, more on that below). If you want a real sense of a game's difficulty you need to get input and feedback from people with a wide range of skills in that game and that genre. Listening only to the most proficient and most experienced people is how we got trainwrecks like the base version of FFT 1.3 which not only required a lot of grinding but also grinding in a very very VERY specific way, the hellscape of Pokémon Reborn with such enjoyable nightmares as T H E B L A C K H O L E, and in actual commercial release land X-COM Terror from the Deep where the devs responded to feedback from all the crazy people who said the original X-COM wasn't hard enough. Related to all that is an assumption that difficulty equals quality. You may or may not be aware of the ongoing stupid backlash that comes to the fore when someone has the sheer, unbelievable, inconceivable gall to suggest that maybe, just maybe it wouldn't be a truly horrifically awful thing if there was some kind of difficulty selection in a Fromsoft videogame. Any time there is ever reporting or speculation on the idea of an easy mode in a Souls adjacent game you will inevitably find a number of small people who are apoplectic with rage at the very concept of it. The reason is inevitably in large part pride and lovely gatekeeping, but also part of that is assuming that the difficulty is somehow inherent in the quality of those games. The mistake is believing that the Souls games and their offshoots are good BECAUSE they are hard. I think it's actually the other way around, the games are good enough that they can get away with being as hard as they are. But it is a very common mistake, there is a genuine belief that making a thing harder makes something better, and if not that then there is a kind of fragile pride in having done such a hard thing and being angry and fearful and resentful that someone else will reach similar achievements more easily and that somehow makes what you've done less good even if you did it on the harder difficulty because... Well I probably don't have to tell you that there are a lot of gamers in the world who are sad fragile angry losers, right? So we have a game made by someone who knows Paper Mario inside and out, generally assuming it will be played by other people who know Paper Mario inside and out, in a culture that broadly overvalues difficulty and overestimates the value of completing superduper hard content and you get something like Master Quest 1.0. Moreover, Thamz made no secret, as was mentioned elsewhere, that he had specifically created much of the hack just for really talented Paper Mario streamers to struggle with. And so there you go, a Romhack made by an extremely experienced player to only be played by other extremely experienced players and designed to make those extremely experienced players struggle and curse and suffer. Frankly, it's amazing that Master Quest 1.0 was as functional and well-designed as it was.
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Jan 14, 2021 05:56
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dotchan posted:To be fair to the fans not wanting multiple difficulty modes, some of that comes with a genuine concern that trying to balance the game once is already taxing enough and trying to cater to multiple audiences might cause resource distribution issues and compromise the overall quality of the product. Yes, this is often an excuse that I've seen used. It's a curious excuse as well, because many people who make this argument also deny that a simple numerical adjustments could create a functional and effective easy mode and that an easy mode would necessarily take resources away from game developments and couldn't be as simple as just tweaking some numbers. The most recent hullabaloo I saw regarding Sekiro I encountered someone who refused to even consider that something as simple as "you have more health and deal more damage" could POSSIBLY be a functional and effective easy mode, even though it would be. I pointed out that this is how SMT has been doing easy modes for years without problems, but no, this person was quite willing to die on that hill. quote:And being good at games might not be the world's most impressive skill, but it's still drat impressive to be able to achieve the level of split-second decision making/precision/tactics/strategy/what have you that the top-level players exhibit so I also understand the feeling that lowering the bar cheapens genuine effort. I've also seen this one too, and it is much more nakedly gatekeeping. I will be blunt with my perspective here: being able to play through a game on an easy mode does not cheapen the skill required to play on a harder difficulty in any way. I've seen this come up again and again and it baffles me. How does someone playing through a Fire Emblem game on Easy or Casual "cheapen" someone else playing through the game on Lunatic/Reverse/Merciless/Maddening? How does someone playing through Persona on Safe take away from someone beating it and all the bonus bosses on Merciless? What does it matter to you if someone else plays through Kingdom Hearts 2.5 on Beginner if you can clear Data Org on Critical LV1? If you can beat Devil May Cry on DMD difficulty with all S-ranks is your pride in your accomplishment so fragile that you feel threatened by someone who can only squeak by on Human difficulty who averages a B-rank? quote:When I was a youngling I definitely did my share of using Game Genie codes to trivialize Super Mario World because until I buckled down and got gud I definitely lacked the wherewithal to make it very far past Donut Plains, but now I'm perfectly content to watch livestreams of games if I wanted to see content of games I know I wouldn't get past myself. If SMW had an "automatically clears the level for you" feature like that...uh...one Mario platformer that I can't remember off the top of my head, I definitely would have used it first if I lost patience for finishing a level myself, but on replay I'd probably only use it as a tutorial because I would still want the thrill of personally overcoming that challenge. Why do you think your experience is that different from anyone else's? People who talk about having easier difficulty options/accessibility options on harder games do not and never have argued is that using these options must be MANDATORY. Even Nintendo with the invincible Tanuki Suit you're talking about made it completely optional, if you don't want to use it you don't HAVE to use it, but people with certain disabilities or complete newcomers to the hobby have an option they can choose to use. Both Hades and Control recently came with a whole option menu of different ways you can make the game easier for yourself that were all entirely optional. You talk here about using a Game Genie until you had enough practice with the game to get better at it and that's exactly what these kind of easy mode/accessibility options are designed to be. The only difference here is that you can find them natively in the game instead of needing to use a third-party tool. It's no different from using training wheels on a bicycle. The assumption is that with enough practice most people will be able to move on to riding a bike without them and probably will. Meanwhile, for the minority that can't for whatever reason having accessibility options means that they can still enjoy this hobby, at no cost to you.
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Jan 14, 2021 21:25
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dotchan posted:I agree that gatekeeping is elitist and annoying, but so what? They can have their circle of friends with their membership requirements, I can have mine. The problem is that these noxious loudmouths are not live and let live kind of people. It's not that you can have your membership requirements and they can have theirs, no they want to enforce their assumptions about membership on you and me and everyone else. That's the problem with this kind of gatekeeping and why it is bad for video games in general. By loudly and aggressively filling the airwaves with rage and hate at the concept of any sort of difficulty adjustment or gameplay accommodation you've got a surefire way to turn away possible future fans, ostracize people with handicaps, and create an incredibly toxic atmosphere. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but videogame culture is septic already and does not need this kind of gatekeeping behavior because it only ever makes things worse. Indeed, an important way to get rid of these noxious jerks is to marginalize them and the way you do that is by pointedly ignoring them and moving past them. Having a difficulty adjustments/accessibility features are a ready and viable way of doing that both because you are ignoring the loud, angry losers who rage and hate at the idea of extending a bridge to the rest of the world, and because you are extending a bridge the rest the world and inviting them in to try in complete defiance of those loud, angry losers. So to put it another way, until someone can actually point to a real instance where having an easy mode ruined the game somehow, I am firmly of the stance that accessibility options are always for the better. Not because I need them, probably not because you need them, but because someone out there probably does need them and will appreciate them and because someone else out there who is overall just the worst will throw a fit that people aren't letting them be the one true arbiter of what is TRUE GAMING. I'm cool with the first person being able to give a game a try and want the best for them, and the second person can go gently caress themselves. Mind you I have no idea about you personally or where you fall on the spectrum. And I don't necessarily think that Thamz was explicitly aiming to barr the gates from newcomers for reasons of toxic elitism either. I think they wanted to make a more challenging version of Paper Mario and grief some streamers without giving much regard to the average player who might be interested in Master Quest. But even trying to loop around back to the game I'm still way off topic so I think it's about time to table this discussion.
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Jan 15, 2021 01:49
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