Ironically, the turn based combat in Final Fantasy is the biggest reason I don’t play it. I find that the combat feels too repetitive, because its always the same animations, same music, same background per area, etc. Also, the random battle encounter mechanic annoys me when I just want to explore and I have to fight an entire army just to move from one side of an area to the other side.
I’ve loved most of the Final Fantasy games. But the PS1 games (the golden era) were the worst about this.
Pre-PS1 typically required more thought. You had to balance magic use, item use, and of course melee. But even then you had to debate whether to spend a turn reviving your healer or try to get the victory before a team wipe.
Post PS1 you had X’s rock paper scissors battle. You had to figure out who could attack who. It wasn’t too complicated but it forced variety.
XII streamlined the auto attacking and allowed you to focus on the exceptions (enemy weak against fire, use silence, cure). That could be automated too, but I liked to handle that myself.
XIII & XIII-2 forced you to balance your jobs/classes constantly in battle.
Lightning Returna, XV, and XVI were real time.
Tactics was PS1, but it definitely required more than just attack.
The PS1 games, for the most part, could be dominated with “press X”. Most of the strategy took place outside of battle.
I played FFX for like, 20 hours give or take. The combat wasn’t so obnoxious in that games like previous ones. But then I got to the Seymour Wedding part, what I can only describe as “the part where you must defeat all these enemies in order with no save points in between and if you werent prepared with 30 billion healing items and Lulu (the GOAT) gets killed, your game is basically softlocked” part. Beat that (thank you savestate scumming) and was already not having fun but that cutscene at the end of that part was frustrating to me. It felt like every character was acting extremely out of character, except maybe Seymour, and it was at that point that I decided I wasn’t having fun anymore and didn’t really care enough to try to potentially suffer more of that.
I really tried to like Final Fantasy. I want to like it. I just don’t like that kind of gameplay experience.
That part is like only like five fights against humans and robots, the only tricky part is the kicky robots will ruin you if you save them for last. And you’ve been without Yuna for a bit by that point so somebody (Kimahri or Rikku) should be filling in the healer role already. It is a weird and kinda weak story sequence but I think the game starts improving after that point.
This is certainly a good strategy but this probably assumes the player has been grinding levels. I don’t do that. I play the storyline, and do absolutely no extra grinding because it is boring. I must have been underleveled because those “just humans and robots” were getting a TPK in 2 or 3 turns of combat on I think the 4th group.
Sad to hear the game gets better, but honestly it took me 20+ hours to get to that point and I wasn’t absolutely loving the game. By the time I quit, I just kept thinking that I wished I could play as Jecht instead of Tidus. Jecht had a better design and his voice acting seemed less annoying. I understand the specific voice acting quirks of FFX, but it sure sounded like Tidus’ english actor was some random Square picked up off the street and paid $50 to read the lines. Along with other annoyances, I just decided dropping it was probably for the best. Lulu was my favorite character, with Jecht or Auron being second place. Seymour was good as a character, I just didn’t like him.
I love it when I’m playing a game and I can feel the genuine love put into it. Old Nintendo games for example. now most games feel so bland and corporate
That always takes the fun out of games for me. You can do whatever, but there’s a correct way of following the story, which is subconsciously grasped by the community and thrown down your throat if you deviate and complain you are having issues.
Yes, it is fine as long as they dont advertise "a huge branching story", when really there's only a handful of endings. If you dont count random game over screens.
BG3 has a lot of dialogue options, but they rarely change the outcome of the story.
I made a tool that migrates from one DB format to another. Then another format was introduced. Of course I reused the assets from the tool to expand the tool to migrate to the new DB format. But then I know more of what can go wrong with the tool, so even then testing took longer, but the tool ran cleaner.
So only games that are made from scratch can charge full price? What about reusing code? Engine? Animations? Textures? Lighting system? Rendering backend?.. Games are made of everything that came before, being angry about a game using assets that were originally developed for an older game is like being angry about a movie reusing props made for an older movie, should they burn all of the Christmas decorations between one movie and the next? Or can the studio hang the same glass ball on two different movies? Does that detract from the movie? Will you really only consider it’s worth the full price if all props were made exclusively for that movie?..
Online games are different because you control the hosting and the service has much higher upkeep. Don’t try to apply the same shenanigans to single player games. Also pissed me / pisses me off that they started doing this Borderlands 2+
But then they say,
Despite the massive backlash and more than a decade of memes, Horse Armour DLC’s popularity was proven by the wallets of gamers. While Bethesda was being flamed for releasing the paid content, the numbers don’t lie, and gamers were actually very interested in paying for the DLC
Their main market focus is on whales now. They make it very clear, they see the Horse Armor DLC as a success story.
I don’t know how people there are like me, but I have forked over a lot on TES:O that I will no longer ever fork over again, and I regret having fueled their foray into single player. I will not preorder TES6, and I will have to wait for discounts to begin applying to their new franchises. As someone who was deep into TES lore, I will no longer care about TES6’s monetization or their attempts to tie into and guide players into TES:O.
Bullshit, Bruce Nesmith. You’re just a dishonest coward trying to absolve yourself of blame.
Edit: the paid horse armor was extremely controversial among gamers at the time, and plenty of people prophetically warned about what the consequences were going to be. Bethesda damn well knew or should have known exactly what Pandora’s box they were opening.
60 hours in and loving it. Enemies get much harder further in. I find the lore excellent as a Dune fan. Graphics are great and gameplay is fun and challenging, every thing feels like a constant threat and achieving anything is rewarding.
I don’t think you need to be weird to make weird games. I mean, it wouldn’t hurt but it’s not necessary. Just do what Fromsoft does: make the game first using the rule of cool, then write the story around it instead of the other way around.
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