Ashtear

Ashtear , 23 hours ago

I've played all of the mainline games over the years, but my only experience with FFXI was a couple of hours of the beta. Tried the marathon as a set of replays several years back and only made it to the start of IX. The load times and the glacial pace of the battles was too much by that point. I think I was planning on skipping XI.

You could also try asking in !finalfantasy and !jrpg.

Ashtear , 1 day ago

Been a while since I've seen that name. One of a long line of very meh Star Wars games.

Ashtear , 2 days ago

Ahh, the tool change is nice. Functionally, it probably doesn't actually change the rate of resource collection, but it did feel bad seeing stuff you can't harvest.

Ashtear , 4 days ago

And here I'm thinking it's not far enough, considering how sparse the trailer was (and there's virtually zero additional footage on their Kickstarter page). That said, they've already raised half of their goal. Between this and Runa, it'd be cool if we ended up with a successful western Europe JRPG dev.

I certainly see the Chrono Cross and Lost Odyssey influence. Hopefully the combat pace is quite a bit quicker than the latter.

Ashtear , 4 days ago

Yeah, I'm all for some shorter experiences among all the marathon JRPGs we've been getting.

Ashtear , 5 days ago

Which includes the pricing model. Some regions even saw a price increase.

A lot of corps threw out the whole concept of a demand curve over the pandemic.

Ashtear , 4 days ago

I don't have experience with their systems, but I had to go back to the store twice for an Acer monitor. First monitor had a dead HDMI port, second had a gap in the chassis at the top. Don't know why I didn't just go with a different one after the second replacement; it would end up developing a line of shadowing after about 18 months.

Ashtear , 5 days ago

Either SQEX thought they were going to sell PS5 systems, or they were happy with long-tail sales on timed exclusives. Maybe both. SQEX Japan has had a long history of success with their flagship titles, so I'm not surprised it took them this long.

I think the writing is on the wall for exclusivity in general at this point: unless you're publishing the games and manufacturing the hardware, it's not good business any more to have exclusivity. Even Sony's first parties are struggling now. Maybe it's not even viable unless you have crazy market share like Nintendo does.

That said, I wouldn't lament the death of the AA game just yet. Team Asano has been a bright spot for the company, and he just got promoted. I'd be surprised if they moved him to AAA development.

Ashtear , 5 days ago

So happy that Persona lit a fire under their asses. They need it.

Best thing that could happen to the genre would be Metaphor selling 10mil copies.

Ashtear , 6 days ago

So what's the top alternative? I've had quality issues with the last two Acer monitors I bought 😭

Ashtear , 7 days ago

Last time I dipped into Oxygen Not Included, the rocket program was enough to get me to push past self-sustenance. Unfortunately in the end, getting the details of the program right just annoyed me. I don't know if it's me or if the game's just not set up well to handle large-scale construction. Building fuel production ended up being more fun than actually building the rocket silos.

Ashtear , 7 days ago

I think I need to check Nebuchadnezzar out.

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom is still my favorite in this genre by a mile. Dripping with cultural flavor, and there was really something about monument building in all of the games in this series.

Ashtear OP , 7 days ago

Yeah, the age of the series is its biggest problem at the moment. Hopefully they do get around to remaking Sky.

While there might be other worlds I like a little more, I don't think there are any in the genre as fleshed out as Zemuria. Big part of why I enjoy the games so much.

Ashtear OP , 2 days ago

A Sky remaster/remake is likely a long way off. Falcom's still a rather small company, and their recent expansion has gone into more development of existing properties (like Tokyo Xanadu). Trails has also had a decline in Japan, which doesn't help.

They've licensed the property out to mobile devs and anime, so it's possible they'll do the same for another Sky project. Not something they've done in a long time, though.

Ashtear OP , 2 days ago

If you do, I highly recommend the voice mod. Sky is fully voiced in Japanese and it adds a lot of texture to the characters since it's such a text-heavy game.

Ashtear , 8 days ago

While I agree that seems the case, there likely has been a corresponding shift in niche communities, even if the effect is less measurable. I don't check in on my niche subreddits often anymore (I've fully moved over to here and Discord), but with some of them, their quality has dipped slightly. Possibly could be chalked up to continuing trends independent of the migration, though.

Smaller communities also require builders, so I'm sure the necessity alone has driven content quality on Lemmy.

Ashtear , 9 days ago

Finishing up Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. I wish it were polished, but it's still thoroughly scratching the Suikoden itch.

Ashtear , 9 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

There have been a lot of good responses to the studio closures and good articles written, but this is not one of them.

Hi-Fi Rush was not a small project, and putting it in the same bucket as Balatro and Manor Lords is outright bizarre. It's far closer to AAA budget scale than it would be solo/small indie projects.

Edit to add:

I don't know how the fact presented here ended up being controversial somehow, but don't take my word for it. Here's a quote from John Johanas, Hi-Fi Rush's director:

It was supposed to be a small project from Tango. And people probably see it as this weird, sort-of AA title. Or people are like, “Oh, they made a nice indie game.” This ain’t no indie game. Obviously, I can’t say how much it cost, but it was not a cheap game to make.

And lead programmer Yuji Nakamura:

For the first two years I would say it was a small project. But what John wanted to make was not a very small thing to do. We needed to get more and more people to help. In my mind, small projects would be maybe 20 to 30 people for two years. We ended up developing for about five; I wouldn’t call it a small project at all.

Hi-Fi Rush: From a Little Idea to a Very Big Surprise – The Exclusive Oral History

Ashtear , 9 days ago

I see the contradiction. And I'm not saying the game was AAA-sized, although live service, multiplayer, or ongoing support are not requirements for the term. It's a budget classification. Hi-Fi Rush had 1,400 people in its credits.

My comparison to Balatro was more in the line of "Cleopatra lived closer to present day than the era the Great Pyramid was built." We're talking about massive gaps in scale, and gaming communities tend to have trouble reconciling that. Balatro is not Hades, Hades is not Hi-Fi Rush, Hi-Fi Rush is not Starfield.

Ashtear , 9 days ago

One regime's political-dissident-by-speech is another's dissident-by-drug-addiction. America's "War on Drugs" was purely political disenfranchisement along racial lines, and it's a major reason why the US continues to have higher incarceration rates than the USSR had in many of the years the Gulag system was operational.

By the way, prison rape jokes have long been a part of those late night comedy shows, to give you an idea of just how ingrained the American prison culture is.

Ashtear , 9 days ago

Xbox buys talent, mismanages it in search of impossible scale, and cuts it loose - be that the 20-year experts of Fable, or the battle-scarred makers of Dishonored, or the invigorating new generation behind Hi-Fi Rush.

Talking up the demerits of capitalism in the massive gaming industry has been more common as of late (perhaps especially so on Lemmy), and I do think there is nuance in that conversation.

There's no reasonable nuance here. Microsoft clearly wants insane return on investment from their studios, and I don't see how that leaves room for the art of video game design.

Ashtear , 11 days ago

I wasn't big on it at release, but a lot of people were. In hindsight, there was still too much of the earlier DNA in the game: a lot of people just talking at you, and otherwise mostly a focus on driving around and shooting things. It wasn't engaging enough for someone like me that mostly played RPGs.

The move to 3D was impressive, though, and a necessary step for not just the series but a lot of games of the generation. Now that they had a big hit, they were able to take big swings by bringing in Ray Liotta and all the elements to make an amazing period piece with Vice City.

Ashtear , 11 days ago

It's an overlap between the back end of the fourth gen (aka 16-bit) era for consoles and then a full pivot to PC gaming in the years after. I really didn't like the move to early 3D on consoles with their abysmal framerates and load times. I felt then (and still think today) it was a generation too early.

Marking the starting point is easy: 1994. An insane year for the SNES, Donkey Kong Country, Final Fantasy VI, Mega Man X, and Super Metroid all came out in North America that year. That run continued on the SNES until Yoshi's Island in 1996. I did pick up a PlayStation but I wasn't thrilled with it. There are some personal favorites from this time, too, but they still had the sprite art I was desperately missing: games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Suikoden, Symphony of the Night, Xenogears.

I'd been a PC gamer for a while, but I started moving more towards the platform with Blizzard's ascendancy with Warcraft II in 1995 and Diablo in 1996. I'd finally get a dedicated GPU in 1998, and what a year for it: Half-Life, Thief: The Dark Project, Unreal, Tribes, Freespace. The less-demanding games of the year were no slouches either: Starcraft, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 2. With a similarly impressive console lineup, it's no surprise many consider 1998 the best year ever for video games.

The endpoint is harder to pin down. Maybe the death of the space sim genre with Freespace 2 in late 1999, or Blizzard's last landmark game before the MMO era, Diablo II in mid-2000. At the very latest, a new era for me definitely began with the release of the Game Boy Advance in 2001, where I shifted mostly to PC + handheld platforms, where I'm still at today.

Ashtear , 11 days ago

It's not just that. 2023 was a very good year for gaming, right? A lot of the heavy hitters last year were from long-running series. Look and see how many of those series had either their genesis or consensus fan favorite entries in that time period.

Not only that, Steam, Unreal Engine, e-sports, the mainstreaming of game mods, and even AAA development itself all trace back to innovations from that time. Historically, it's a massively important time period for video games.

Ashtear , 11 days ago

Local multiplayer--especially couch co-op--is a lost art. I definitely miss it.

Ashtear , 15 days ago

The convenience of an all-in-one solution is nice, as is the shader support.

That said, when I'm setting up something new, it ultimately depends on my current tolerance level for Retroarch's UI. It's scattered, bloated, and not intuitive. Setting up something that should take five minutes can easily take a half hour or more. Standalone frontends aren't always better, but they often are.

Ashtear , 15 days ago

The first Witcher encapsulates Geralt's (many) sexual conquests in collectible cards. And almost none of the encounters have any bearing on the plot. Having a hard time not calling that exploitative.

Much of what's going on, especially lately, is simple xenophobia. There are arbitrary restrictions on what can be sexualized when Asian character designs are used.

Ashtear , 16 days ago

Fascism's quite profitable until they start rounding people up.

Ashtear , 17 days ago

No JRPGs finished last month, I was super duper busy. Didn't even finish Yakuza 0! I dabbled a little bit in Unicorn Overlord but it hasn't grabbed me. Might be one of those games I just keep nibbling at for a while.

However, I jumped right into Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes and am having a good time after a pretty slow start. I'm about 30 hours in (maybe less than halfway through the story?) and so far I'm putting it around the quality of the first Suikoden. It's similarly unpolished, but the good stuff's still there.

Intending to finish that one and maybe jump back into Atelier Ayesha this month.

Ashtear OP , 18 days ago

I partly cross-posted this just for publicity for the community, but for anyone that doesn't know, shmuplations.com is an amazing resource for interviews on JRPGs, not just shmups and other games.

Ashtear , 19 days ago

This was the news to me on this whole mess. I knew about Ark but hadn't heard about this one. Shameless.

Ashtear , 20 days ago

I didn't see that coming, and it's a welcome development. If it warps the general PC hardware market enough that devs start optimizing for a standard platform, it'll result in less buggy products at launch. And maybe orienting development towards a relatively underpowered platform will make it easier for those of us dumb enough to that like to spend more on a desktop to hit those 60 FPS targets.

Ashtear OP , 21 days ago

I finished a replay of Xenogears last year myself. Really surprised myself with how much more I liked the trimmed-down disc 2 this time around. That first scene in the chair is so touching. Love the romance in that game. And as much as I dislike early 3D, some of the scene composition is timeless.

I hear that a lot about Xenoblade's combat. I think a lot of my enjoyment (or tolerance, in the second game's case) of it comes from my MMO background.

Ashtear OP , 19 days ago

Well... I have my issues with Torna. If you're someone that likes sidequesting, you'll probably like it. I personally don't (I think sidequest quality is a failing of JRPGs at large), so I was really frustrated with how many I was forced to do. However, I did enjoy the story and I wish I'd had more time with the characters.

And yeah, the settings for Xenoblade are phenomenal. It's kind of a simple idea but it works out so well.

Ashtear OP , 21 days ago (edited 21 days ago)

Yeah, I'm for sure interested in Metaphor, SMTV, Elden Ring DLC, and Suikoden remasters. Eiyuden is scratching the Suiko itch so it can wait, but Metaphor is likely day one for me. I've just loved what Hashino's put out.

Ashtear OP , 21 days ago

2023 was a bit slow for me in the genre, which is wild considering I think it might have been the best year in video games since 1998.

My favorites last year were the Trails releases, which both ended up being replays for me because I'd played the fan TLs. 🤷‍♀️

Ashtear , 21 days ago

Seems things have shaken out (for now) regarding defederation, including less chatter about Threads than there was. I don't anticipate much change on that until the next big influx of users, whether it's people coming in directly through Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin or a new player joining the Fediverse.

Other than that, I've just seen steady growth in my communities.

Ashtear , 21 days ago

I can't speak to Helldivers, but pinning Baldur's Gate 3's success on the recent growing popularity of the D&D franchise is beyond reductive. There's no huge publisher for Baldur's Gate 3; Larian's a licensee and an independent studio to boot, and Hasbro's not running massive marketing campaigns for them any more than Disney is for the typical licensed Star Wars game. There's also the game's pay-once sales model, which is something else you get when you're not beholden to publishers or public shareholders.

BG3 was the culmination of decades of iteration by Larian and was the studio's first attempt with a AAA budget. The game has more in common with Divinity: Original Sin 2 than it does Baldur's Gate 2, as the Baldur's Gate die-hards would be happy to tell you.

Calling CRPGs a popular genre is also going to get some laughs. Sure, we might be able to look on this point now in a few years as when CRPGs went mainstream (or maybe not, as the insane amount of choice built into the game set the bar so high that it's possible no one's going to bother with that kind of risky content-making). But by the time Larian started development on BG3, the genre had just risen from the dead after some successful Kickstarter campaigns and was still very niche.

Ashtear , 26 days ago

Could be wrong, but I have a hunch this is going to be one of those situations where they are showing way more action elements than are going to be in the actual moment-to-moment gameplay. Trails through Daybreak did something similar with early marketing.

It'll probably be something that comes up more on the sidequests and occasionally in the dungeons.

Ashtear , 25 days ago

A few hours in, I'm not very high or low on the game just yet. I'm a big fan of most of Suikoden so I'm mildly concerned I'm not quite enthralled with this game yet considering how much of the old series is in here.

That said, if I were facing the tech issues that Switch players seem to be having, I'd be pissed off. I think this game's rightfully getting panned for the state it was released in on that system. That raises some other questions about the overall project but I'll reserve judgment until I've finished the game.