A look at the downfall of turn based battle mechanics in the Final Fantasy series and through out the larger industry. Followed with new hopes in recent releases and upcoming ones like Expedition 33
What you’re referring to are “trash mobs”. They’re usually less incentivized in tun-based games that emphasize tactical positioning, like Baldur’s Gate 3; you won’t find a single encounter that felt like it shouldn’t have been there. If the combat encounters are very quick, the designers are incentivized to put in more of them, which is why I don’t usually like real time with pause (like old D&D games), though Pillars of Eternity II definitely cleaned up the trash mob problem from its predecessor, even when you play it in real time with pause mode.
Enemies are visible in Chrono Trigger as well, specifically so you can avoid them. If you’re significantly over-leveled, they’ll even run away from you, if memory serves. I’m playing through Metaphor: ReFantazio right now, and its solution is to make it so that you can one-shot those enemies outside of battle; and if they’ll actually challenge you, you go into the battle mode proper. That’s certainly one way to skin that cat. Meanwhile, The Thaumaturge (released this year) has a shocking number of similarities in its battle system to Metaphor (and, presumably, Persona), but its number of combats are fairly scarce, in a good way, never really ending up in that situation where you’re super over-leveled, because its leveling system doesn’t revolve around a lot of “number go up”.
No, I understand where they’re coming from. I played the original FF7 for the first time not long ago, and the combat is good, but there’s too much of it, and you can feel disoriented returning to the world map, trying to remember what you were doing and where you were going. I love the combat in Larian’s games, but there’s far too much of it in the first Divinity: Original Sin game relative to the other things you do in that game’s loop. It’s a problem of pacing. There was a really good article on then-called-Gamasutra breaking down the pacing of the X-Men Origins: Wolverine game versus Batman: Arkham Asylum. Even though people pretty unanimously thought the combat in Wolverine was good, we only really still talk about one of those two games today.
You control a full party in Metaphor. If you only played the beginning of the prologue, the game waits for a certain story event to happen before giving you control of other characters.
Online servers remain on for now. Offline mode requires a new profile and can’t be turned into an online mode profile. You’ll be able to have one offline and one online profile per account. Somehow it’s too difficult to add LAN, I guess.
I’m not very traveled in the looter space, but the idea is to prevent hacked profiles from cheating their way through the online item economy, right? In which case, I’d still imagine the solution is to allow you to migrate an online profile offline but not the other way around.
Beyond that, live service games are designed to delete themselves off the face of the earth when they stop making money rather than being a piece of the history of the medium we can revisit.
PC represents more than half of the market at this point, which we’ve seen in investor reports from the likes of Ubisoft and Capcom, even if many PC players are annoyed by fiddling.
I definitely don’t consider mobile to be the same market, for what you must find to be obvious reasons. I’m not sure where GOG comes into this discussion at all.
I would not be shocked to find that people are willing to go back to sub 6800 performance in exchange for something the size of those Android devices. There are tons of 2D and low spec 3D games that are very popular that they would run, and pocket sized handheld x64 machines are a niche to fill to stand out from the Steam Deck.
In an online forum, where you can write a paragraph, the replies you get may or may not pertain to the entire conversation and instead only one part of it. I responded only to the size of the market used to fiddling, and that’s the conversation you and I were having. However, you seem like an extremely unpleasant person, or maybe someone who just had a bad day, so I’m not interested in continuing that conversation.
I just got finished with beating Riven for the first time. I adored the way the game seeped into my real life with pages of notes about the world I was discovering. Are there any other games that can match this feeling? That really work best when you have a journal in hand?
It definitely does, and I’ll second the recommendation, but at least one set of puzzles only really requires the the notepad because they didn’t give you sufficient software tools in game, not because it couldn’t be done well in game.
Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
Speaking for myself, if it’s Epic only, it means I have no assurances as a customer that they’re going to keep letting me play the game on Linux. If I bought Alan Wake II, I’m doing so knowing that they don’t support my operating system and could break compatibility with Wine with any random update. If that happens on Steam, I can reasonably expect a refund if it was previously Verified, and because of the verification system, they also have an incentive not to break compatibility. So if I play Alan Wake II some day, it’ll be because it was a free giveaway on Epic, because I’m not paying for that.
I think sometimes they’re just slow, so you may have clicked into the thread before it found out you needed a notification. I’m not an expert though. It’s just a guess based on personal experience.
Critical Role could always licence another official D&D game with Hasbro…but my Insight check’s telling me that they might try and spin up something out of Daggerheart.
Eh, I hope not. I’m not really liking what I see in Daggerheart’s hope/fear system and how it interferes with initiative, especially. Plus it reminds me of that subplot from Donnie Darko.
It’s already a game that uses cards, after all, and I can very easily see its systems making for a solid turn-based tactics game. Or maybe they’re not gonna start small, and just barrel full steam ahead into an ambitious CRPG
I’ll bet you can make a small CRPG for the cost of what their merch store brings in in a year, akin to the Kickstarter era from a decade ago, and that’s if they want to be cautious with their spending. Given the layoffs of the past two years, they’ve likely had their pick of any talent they wanted to hire to realize whatever it is they’re building.
The potential for this project to sink their whole company would come from them being extremely reckless with the ample cash flow they’ve got right now, which this interview says they’re not, and hopefully they mean it. I don’t get the sense they’re trying to build an Immortals of Aveum or a Callisto Protocol.
It wasn’t the second they finished the game. It was after working on DLC for months, which was after a 6 year development cycle. That’s not the same as telling Hasbro to fuck off. That’s having the luxury of a war chest that means they can afford to do the less lucrative thing and make whatever is going to keep their talent happiest.
After this, they might. But it will be nice to have one of these games that focuses on the exploration and puzzle-solving stuff without resorting to body counts measured in the hundreds.
If you already purchased it a long time ago, and you can still get that copy working, then cool. But having a DRM-free copy designed to work with modern systems is very appealing. Buying DRM-free shows them where customers want to purchase their games. There are plenty of decades-old games worth more than $7.50 each.
tl;dw A debt trap that’s such a bad deal that you’d be better off financing it with a payday loan. They lie about their terms and their PC specs. They advertise no contracts but absolutely have contracts, and the terms are awful.
Ireland crossed its threshold, meaning the minimum of 7 countries in the EU have now done so. At approximately 395k total people signed, it is currently not on pace to reach 1M by July 31st without a signal boost from someone with a lot of followers.
Do asset flips even happen anymore? I feel like they were a problem that Stephanie Sterling brought to light a decade ago when Steam opened its floodgates to anyone who wanted to sell a game, but it seems to me as though standard market forces made them nonviable in just a few years’ time.
Do you think you end up with a more realistic development timeline by remaking things you’ve already made? Your comment can end up downvoted for calling one of the most common industry practices, for very practical reasons, “cutting corners”.
Because while it’s a tool in one’s tool belt to work smarter, it is obviously not the start and end of where crunch comes from. Nor is it cutting corners.
We need more turn-based RPGs (youtube.com)
A look at the downfall of turn based battle mechanics in the Final Fantasy series and through out the larger industry. Followed with new hopes in recent releases and upcoming ones like Expedition 33
Final season of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League content, offline mode coming (www.suicidesquadgame.com)
Online servers remain on for now. Offline mode requires a new profile and can’t be turned into an online mode profile. You’ll be able to have one offline and one online profile per account. Somehow it’s too difficult to add LAN, I guess.
How an Orchestra Plays Along With a Live Video Game (www.nytimes.com)
Austin Wintory’s Journey LIVE, as profiled by Annie Aguiar at the New York Times
F2P Hero Shooter Marvel Rivals Shatters Expectations With Over 400,000 Concurrent Players Less Than 24 Hours After Launch (www.techpowerup.com)
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Review Thread
Game Information...
FOAMSTARS to stop making new updates this January (www.square-enix-games.com)
Maybe SquareEnix will stop chasing GaaS now?
'Powered bv SteamOS' gaming handheld validation leaks in Valve documentation, Asus ROG Ally may be among first handhelds with official SteamOS support (www.notebookcheck.net)
What are some great games that require you to bust out a notebook and pen?
I just got finished with beating Riven for the first time. I adored the way the game seeped into my real life with pages of notes about the world I was discovering. Are there any other games that can match this feeling? That really work best when you have a journal in hand?
Ubisoft's XDefiant Will be Shutting Down in June 2025 (insider-gaming.com)
Another one bites the dust. I’m sure I’d enjoy it if I could have bought a copy and hosted the servers myself.
I hate when a PC game is ONLY available on Epic Games store (lemmy.world)
Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
Critical Role's plans to make a videogame have become an 'active pursuit', says CEO Travis Willingham, after almost 10 years of growing a D&D campaign into a full-on franchise (www.pcgamer.com)
What video game company/developer/publisher loves shitting on it's fans? (kbin.melroy.org)
My pick is Psyonix, the team behind the one and only Rocket League....
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Launch Trailer (www.youtube.com)
Blizzard is delisting the OG Warcrafts from GOG, but GOG says it's gonna preserve them forever anyway, hands out a discount, and announces new policy for its preservation program to boot (www.pcgamer.com)
Obsidian's new first-person RPG Avowed channels Baldur's Gate 3 in one key way: "The core of RPGs that makes them special is missable content" (www.gamesradar.com)
Do Not Buy NZXT | Predatory, Evil Rental Computer Scam Investigated - Gamers Nexus (youtu.be)
So, looks like NZXT are looking to rip off gamers with their computer “subscription” service.
European Citizens' Initiative to Stop Destroying Videogames: 7 countries have now passed the threshold (eci.ec.europa.eu)
Ireland crossed its threshold, meaning the minimum of 7 countries in the EU have now done so. At approximately 395k total people signed, it is currently not on pace to reach 1M by July 31st without a signal boost from someone with a lot of followers.
Sniper Elite Resistance dev defends asset reuse - “if they’re there to use, why not use them?” (www.videogamer.com)
What are your favorite "gotta go in blind" games?
Which games blow your mind, but only if you know nothing about them in advance?...