I'm struggling to think of a use-case for even having 'wind' as a damage element. What enemy type is going to be more weak to wind than other forms of injury? Wind should just be treated as equivalent to cutting or smashing damage.
Any flying creature should be weak to wind, because a sufficiently strong wind can knock them around.
I'm struggling to think of a use-case for even having 'wind' as a damage element. What enemy type is going to be more weak to wind than other forms of injury? Wind should just be treated as equivalent to cutting or smashing damage.
Tornados. Hurricanes. Wind can do some serious damage.
Oh, of course, I'm not saying it isn't powerful. I'm just saying the way that harm is inflicted is as a physical force. Unlike the reactions involved in burning or freezing, or being electrified, or biochemical process of being poisoned, etc, etc. Robots and creatures in water are more vulnerable to lightning, undead (being dried out husks) and plants are more vulnerable to fire, reptiles and fire monsters are more susceptible to the cold. Machines & undead resist poison. There's conceptual reasons to have all these different damage types. But it struck me as a weird design choice to distinguish wind from physical damage.
I'm struggling to think of a use-case for even having 'wind' as a damage element. What enemy type is going to be more weak to wind than other forms of injury? Wind should just be treated as equivalent to cutting or smashing damage.
Flying enemies, traditionally! Wind ended up being a primary element in Octopath Traveller.
Mostly it's just weird to me that "Aero3" exists in the game, but Aero materia does not.
I guess, but then the Dragoon's Jump ability traditionally does bonus damage versus flyers without being treated as its own element.
does the jump command traditionally work better on flyers? I don't remember flyers being an explicit game mechanic thing in most of the games other than 10.
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H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
does the jump command traditionally work better on flyers? I don't remember flyers being an explicit game mechanic thing in most of the games other than 10.
I could be mistaking things, but I'm pretty sure at least a few of the job system games give it a bonus against bird enemies, similar to how Jump gets a damage bonus when performed with a spear equipped. I know FF4 has a lot of enemies (including almost everything with wings) that are weak to "arrow attacks", which is boomerangs, bows, spears, and shuriken.
In most FF games (notably excluding X and XIII), wind element is a rather reliable damage dealer as little resists it. It often gets other special properties, like multi-target without splitting damage, or higher base damage and MP cost relative to the tier. It's also usually limited to blue magic.
Weirdly, wind is often absorbed by flying enemies, which is the exception to its otherwise safe bet.
Fleur de Alys on
Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
Out of Midgar and halfway through the Kalm flashback in my replay. I actually really love the Midgar section and never once had this feeling of "oh I can't wait to be done with this and move on".
The Kalm flashback, though...
Just. Don't put random encounters in a flashback when the player character can't do anything.
Now that I'm looking for it though, the Sephiroth connection is super sparse and poorly set up in the beginning of the game. Weaving him into the Midgar section more is a good choice, which will hopefully let them condense the flashback part quite a bit (or just skip it entirely).
The point of the flashback fights are to prove to the player the overwhelming power of Sephiroth. They do a good job of showing the player how screwed they would be if they ran into Sephiroth soon after leaving Midgar.
Yea. It does that job well. Nothing's a threat because Sephiroth is just so strong.
The dragon Kalm fight stuck with me for that reason. Really good gameplay integration.
I agree with the intent, though I think the execution isn't great. Having Cloud be totally useless against the dragon outside Nibelheim (not Kalm; that's where the party is listening to the flashback) is good--leaving it up to chance if he gets one-shotted or not isn't great, even if it really makes no gameplay difference (at least, I remember that Sephiroth can potentially attack the dragon before its flame attack murders you and tickles him). Maybe set the dragon to only attack Sephiroth, or if Cloud is hit, he goes into a passive mode rather than just being totally K/O.
Still, it's a good scene.
I think part of it is that they couldn't really script the combat engine like that (or at least that it would take extra time and effort they didn't have). Much easier to leave the enemies with their regular AI and have some FFXII gambits on Sephiroth; If Cloud is KOd when you get your turn, revive. Else If there are multiple enemies, use group magic. Else, attack.
I'm struggling to think of a use-case for even having 'wind' as a damage element. What enemy type is going to be more weak to wind than other forms of injury? Wind should just be treated as equivalent to cutting or smashing damage.
Tornados. Hurricanes. Wind can do some serious damage.
Oh, of course, I'm not saying it isn't powerful. I'm just saying the way that harm is inflicted is as a physical force. Unlike the reactions involved in burning or freezing, or being electrified, or biochemical process of being poisoned, etc, etc. Robots and creatures in water are more vulnerable to lightning, undead (being dried out husks) and plants are more vulnerable to fire, reptiles and fire monsters are more susceptible to the cold. Machines & undead resist poison. There's conceptual reasons to have all these different damage types. But it struck me as a weird design choice to distinguish wind from physical damage.
We can get really deep in the weeds here by first asking "what is harm?"; sure we can conceptually believe in a linear scale with the to terminal points being "alive" and "dead" and "harm" as a measure of travel along that line, but how do we define death? Lack of pulse? Lack of brain activity? I was reading a bit of Michio Kaku's work and he noted how we've been able to revive people who have been "dead" for a not inconsiderable amount of time (I had trouble finding a good source) so that our conception of what is fatal has changed considerably over the last millennia. Potentially our entire concept of death could change in the far future if we're able to reverse the process of cellular decomposition. But that's neither here nor there, the important thing is that for all intents and purposes the game has already made a linear distinction between "alive" and "dead" and provides a handy reference to that in the form of HP.
So knowing that some amount of HP is the requirement for being alive, damage is stuff that can kill you, whether that be through loss of blood, lethal trauma to the organs, paralysis/failure of the respiratory system, whatever. HP doesn't care what method is used to bring you closer to death, only on the relative danger of it. Defense does care though, since it can reduce that damage. So then the question becomes what kinds of defense do we want to measure in a given game. Do we make a distinction between blunt-force trauma, lacerations, and impalement or are those all lumped into physical damage? What about burns, do we differentiate between electrical, chemical, and heat vectors? For ice/cold damage are we separating the damage inflicted from the ice projectiles from the cellular damage resulting from extreme cold? At the end of the day there are a multitude of methods to kill someone, and they all can be differentiated in some way if your system has enough fidelity.
So back to Final Fantasy and your question which I'll rephrase: what criteria has Final Fantasy used to differentiate damage types in its games? And the answer is "a careful balance between 'tradition' and 'fuck it'". Sometimes Flan enemies are weak to the element the cast. Sometimes they absorb it. Sometimes flying enemies are weak to earth damage, sometimes wind. Sometimes the only earth damage in the game is from the quake spell which flyers are immune to in the first place! It's impossible to say why things are the way they are in any given Final Fantasy game so why try?
I mean, I think it would be fun if the various spells like Aero, Quake, et al had some neat impacts or functioned better in certain environments. I liked how in Dragon's Dogma there were the oil & wet debuffs that interacted with the fire/lightning/ice spells in unique ways. But if you're asking why or how does the blunt force trauma of Aero differ from a strike from a club or a hurled stone (or hurled ice!), then you have to start asking questions about why/how the burns from a fire spell are different to a lightning or acid spell, and that's a deep rabbit hole to start down.
This pedantic post brought to you by Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age on PS4.
I'm at the Giza plains (wet season) and a little frustrated with the job combos I chose. I shopped around as it were for which class guide I'd follow and chose this one (google doc link). It claimed to be the best and seemed pretty comprehensive so I followed it choosing only do deviate to their recommended build for using all 12 jobs. I get the feeling that the guide is incredibly optimized to the end game potentially to the detriment of the early/mid game. More than that I'm just a little miffed at how the game doesn't offer respecs on the PS4. Reading through some additional material it seems clear that the devs envisioned some kind of replay value in this game. I always assumed they were building it like a single player MMORPG, but I think their actual vision was closer to a rogue-like: they wanted players to adapt their strategy based on the items they got instead of realizing that most would simply grind or manipulate the drops to get what they want. I’m sure there are people who do replay FF games as often as I do with XCOM, but I don’t think there’s many of them.
At the end of the day the game is still easy, even with my poor planning. But I can see why few people say that FFXII is their favorite.
Well Maximillian noticed on his stream that the Jenova battle looks like its in the presidents office and the elevator bosses appear to be elsewhere (also with the datamine seeming to have no usable Red XIII) so I wonder if Rufus even shows up anymore? Or maybe he does after you escape which I think would be an interesting way to set him up.
I'm struggling to think of a use-case for even having 'wind' as a damage element. What enemy type is going to be more weak to wind than other forms of injury? Wind should just be treated as equivalent to cutting or smashing damage.
Tornados. Hurricanes. Wind can do some serious damage.
Oh, of course, I'm not saying it isn't powerful. I'm just saying the way that harm is inflicted is as a physical force. Unlike the reactions involved in burning or freezing, or being electrified, or biochemical process of being poisoned, etc, etc. Robots and creatures in water are more vulnerable to lightning, undead (being dried out husks) and plants are more vulnerable to fire, reptiles and fire monsters are more susceptible to the cold. Machines & undead resist poison. There's conceptual reasons to have all these different damage types. But it struck me as a weird design choice to distinguish wind from physical damage.
We can get really deep in the weeds here by first asking "what is harm?"; sure we can conceptually believe in a linear scale with the to terminal points being "alive" and "dead" and "harm" as a measure of travel along that line, but how do we define death? Lack of pulse? Lack of brain activity? I was reading a bit of Michio Kaku's work and he noted how we've been able to revive people who have been "dead" for a not inconsiderable amount of time (I had trouble finding a good source) so that our conception of what is fatal has changed considerably over the last millennia. Potentially our entire concept of death could change in the far future if we're able to reverse the process of cellular decomposition. But that's neither here nor there, the important thing is that for all intents and purposes the game has already made a linear distinction between "alive" and "dead" and provides a handy reference to that in the form of HP.
So knowing that some amount of HP is the requirement for being alive, damage is stuff that can kill you, whether that be through loss of blood, lethal trauma to the organs, paralysis/failure of the respiratory system, whatever. HP doesn't care what method is used to bring you closer to death, only on the relative danger of it. Defense does care though, since it can reduce that damage. So then the question becomes what kinds of defense do we want to measure in a given game. Do we make a distinction between blunt-force trauma, lacerations, and impalement or are those all lumped into physical damage? What about burns, do we differentiate between electrical, chemical, and heat vectors? For ice/cold damage are we separating the damage inflicted from the ice projectiles from the cellular damage resulting from extreme cold? At the end of the day there are a multitude of methods to kill someone, and they all can be differentiated in some way if your system has enough fidelity.
So back to Final Fantasy and your question which I'll rephrase: what criteria has Final Fantasy used to differentiate damage types in its games? And the answer is "a careful balance between 'tradition' and 'fuck it'". Sometimes Flan enemies are weak to the element the cast. Sometimes they absorb it. Sometimes flying enemies are weak to earth damage, sometimes wind. Sometimes the only earth damage in the game is from the quake spell which flyers are immune to in the first place! It's impossible to say why things are the way they are in any given Final Fantasy game so why try?
I mean, I think it would be fun if the various spells like Aero, Quake, et al had some neat impacts or functioned better in certain environments. I liked how in Dragon's Dogma there were the oil & wet debuffs that interacted with the fire/lightning/ice spells in unique ways. But if you're asking why or how does the blunt force trauma of Aero differ from a strike from a club or a hurled stone (or hurled ice!), then you have to start asking questions about why/how the burns from a fire spell are different to a lightning or acid spell, and that's a deep rabbit hole to start down.
edit: left off my conclusion.
You're basically threatening me with what I consider a good time. I have many, many abandoned attempts at design documents for JRPG ideas I've had over the decades, and this kind of minutia is the sort of thing I've spent a lot of time thinking about. Like, you make passing reference to how some game systems draw a distinction between different types of physical damage; my initial draft of the post you are responding to had a superfluous paragraph talking about certain editions of D&D (bludgeon/stabbing/cutting), City of Heroes (smashing/lethal), and Front Mission (impact/piercing) all doing that.
Also, Final Fantasy Tactics had the oil status that causes increased vulnerability to fire damage before Dragon's Dogma (to be fair, it was bugged and didn't apply the modifier in the PS1 release).
Anyone tried this New Threat mod? I've been watching Maximillian's videos of it, and it seems pretty good.
The Guard Scorpion boss stalking you throughout the game is pretty funny.
The main story path is a nice difficulty, just hard enough to make a veteran think a little. The optional bosses are very much in the tryhard category, so good luck with those.
Myself I'm stuck on Proud Clod who is completely wrecking me, and I'm not sure I can return to fight him later if I kill Hojo.
Anyone tried this New Threat mod? I've been watching Maximillian's videos of it, and it seems pretty good.
The Guard Scorpion boss stalking you throughout the game is pretty funny.
new threat boss spoiler:
There's a goof Safer Sith fight at some point in the game. I dunno how hard it is. But a one winged cait sith mog descending from the heavens to murder you is extremely A look.
M A G I K A Z A M
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DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
There are plenty of places to stop the game. The problem is I can't think of any way to evenly divide the game up into 30 hour parts. A trilogy seems ridiculous. You're either bloating some sections up big time (like Midgar) or heavily truncating others. It's been a super long time since I've played, but I have a feeling that Midgar to Aerith is a lot shorter than I remember it being. So part 1 would be end of Midgar, possibly stretching it to either the flashback or even the Junon boat and it would still work. Then part 2 to Aerith, which again you can probably bloat and stretch out so it's about the same length as part 1. Then part 3 is... the entire rest of the game. That seems like a lot.
This all assumes they go for the standard and obvious trilogy. The smart move would be to just make it as many parts as it needs to be and forget the whole "rule of 3" crap.
They haven't actually confirmed 3 episodes have they?
The last thing I saw was that they don't even know how many they plan to have yet. Which is honestly way worse.
Midgar is a third of the game's text. It is far more story-heavy than anywhere else, which is partly why an expanded vision can easily consume an entire game.
The issue I have is with Midgar already being two blu-rays. How are they going to represent the entire world at that fidelity within any one physical release? I have to think they significantly change the story so that you aren't freely roaming the entire globe in the end.
Anyone tried this New Threat mod? I've been watching Maximillian's videos of it, and it seems pretty good.
The Guard Scorpion boss stalking you throughout the game is pretty funny.
It is fucking amazing.
Like, I hadn't played the game in a long time, but the whole time I could have sworn I didn't remember some story points but also couldn't tell if I just forgot, or if it was an addition. They fleshed out the text in the game wonderfully.
It does start to get quite a bit hard at points though. And one fight was super confusing (but pretty cool after I figured it out) to win, otherwise it was excellent. The fixes to materia balancing are awesome as well.
Just be warned there is a HUGE difficulty spike in the final dungeon, but you also get a ton of super good materia I almost forgot existed. Plus tons of exp and shit. Then again, I also remember I chose the hard difficulty setting so that might have had something to do with it.
I fully recommend that mod. If you haven't played it in a long time, absolutely try it because it will feel like an actual remake before the massive remake we get soon. If you are waiting for the PC version of the remake, it might hold you over.
Is there an easy guide to getting FF7 mods set up? Many moons ago I installed like two of them on an original FF7PC install, but now I have the Steam version and an entirely different computer and version of Windows. I remember it being kind of a pain back then, and my most recent foray into modding caused Fallout: New Vegas to crash any time I tried to leave the starting area so I don't have much patience for debugging anymore.
I'm struggling to think of a use-case for even having 'wind' as a damage element. What enemy type is going to be more weak to wind than other forms of injury? Wind should just be treated as equivalent to cutting or smashing damage.
Tornados. Hurricanes. Wind can do some serious damage.
Oh, of course, I'm not saying it isn't powerful. I'm just saying the way that harm is inflicted is as a physical force. Unlike the reactions involved in burning or freezing, or being electrified, or biochemical process of being poisoned, etc, etc. Robots and creatures in water are more vulnerable to lightning, undead (being dried out husks) and plants are more vulnerable to fire, reptiles and fire monsters are more susceptible to the cold. Machines & undead resist poison. There's conceptual reasons to have all these different damage types. But it struck me as a weird design choice to distinguish wind from physical damage.
We can get really deep in the weeds here by first asking "what is harm?"; sure we can conceptually believe in a linear scale with the to terminal points being "alive" and "dead" and "harm" as a measure of travel along that line, but how do we define death? Lack of pulse? Lack of brain activity? I was reading a bit of Michio Kaku's work and he noted how we've been able to revive people who have been "dead" for a not inconsiderable amount of time (I had trouble finding a good source) so that our conception of what is fatal has changed considerably over the last millennia. Potentially our entire concept of death could change in the far future if we're able to reverse the process of cellular decomposition. But that's neither here nor there, the important thing is that for all intents and purposes the game has already made a linear distinction between "alive" and "dead" and provides a handy reference to that in the form of HP.
So knowing that some amount of HP is the requirement for being alive, damage is stuff that can kill you, whether that be through loss of blood, lethal trauma to the organs, paralysis/failure of the respiratory system, whatever. HP doesn't care what method is used to bring you closer to death, only on the relative danger of it. Defense does care though, since it can reduce that damage. So then the question becomes what kinds of defense do we want to measure in a given game. Do we make a distinction between blunt-force trauma, lacerations, and impalement or are those all lumped into physical damage? What about burns, do we differentiate between electrical, chemical, and heat vectors? For ice/cold damage are we separating the damage inflicted from the ice projectiles from the cellular damage resulting from extreme cold? At the end of the day there are a multitude of methods to kill someone, and they all can be differentiated in some way if your system has enough fidelity.
So back to Final Fantasy and your question which I'll rephrase: what criteria has Final Fantasy used to differentiate damage types in its games? And the answer is "a careful balance between 'tradition' and 'fuck it'". Sometimes Flan enemies are weak to the element the cast. Sometimes they absorb it. Sometimes flying enemies are weak to earth damage, sometimes wind. Sometimes the only earth damage in the game is from the quake spell which flyers are immune to in the first place! It's impossible to say why things are the way they are in any given Final Fantasy game so why try?
I mean, I think it would be fun if the various spells like Aero, Quake, et al had some neat impacts or functioned better in certain environments. I liked how in Dragon's Dogma there were the oil & wet debuffs that interacted with the fire/lightning/ice spells in unique ways. But if you're asking why or how does the blunt force trauma of Aero differ from a strike from a club or a hurled stone (or hurled ice!), then you have to start asking questions about why/how the burns from a fire spell are different to a lightning or acid spell, and that's a deep rabbit hole to start down.
edit: left off my conclusion.
You're basically threatening me with what I consider a good time. I have many, many abandoned attempts at design documents for JRPG ideas I've had over the decades, and this kind of minutia is the sort of thing I've spent a lot of time thinking about. Like, you make passing reference to how some game systems draw a distinction between different types of physical damage; my initial draft of the post you are responding to had a superfluous paragraph talking about certain editions of D&D (bludgeon/stabbing/cutting), City of Heroes (smashing/lethal), and Front Mission (impact/piercing) all doing that.
Also, Final Fantasy Tactics had the oil status that causes increased vulnerability to fire damage before Dragon's Dogma (to be fair, it was bugged and didn't apply the modifier in the PS1 release).
I love talking about game design, and I've gone a little out of my way on occasion to look into some more esoteric corners of knowledge simply to add realism to some TTRPGs that I've run. My general philosophy is that players should be presented with a few simple & impactful choices; anything less is just over complicating player decision making or otherwise will be ignored. Specifically on the topic of damage types I always look to how I want players to decide on their defenses. I think the simple division between physical/magical damage is fine for most games, but I'm always open to more complex systems when they allow for interesting choices. For example, in something that has a strong cyberpunk vibe I'm good with damage types like slashing/ballistics/explosives because there's usually a trade-off in your playstyle, i.e. each of those types is associated with 'louder' weaponry and armor, so equipping for more dangerous combat has the penalty of being much more conspicuous. Back to Final Fantasy, it's neat that there are some enemies that have an elemental weakness, but usually it doesn't factor into any strategic decision-making I'm doing. Like, I typically won't optimize to deal a specific elemental damage type because the games generally don't incentivize this kind of choice. The elemental properties of weapons & armor are generally a distant secondary consideration to their base stats. Sometimes an FF game will have a particular area that does, like an Ice-cave where all the enemies are weak to fire damage and therefor I use lower-level fire elemental weapons. But even then it's not a real choice but more of a check; do I have fire elemental weapons/magic? If yes then deal more damage.
Something that would be interesting would be if the different damage types affected my playstyle. Diablo games have something like this where Fire damage typically has good AOE or maybe has a DOT component, Lightning damage is very powerful but can be unpredictable or otherwise difficult to use properly, and Ice damage adds a slow with the trade-off of doing less DPS. Each of these requires my mage or wizard or whatever to play in a (slightly) different way. Actually, thinking about it further WoW at times has done a good job of defining different playstyles between its mage specs, and incentivized players to learn all three because they each work better in certain situations. Final Fantasy games haven't really done this to my knowledge, and I don't really see them doing so any time soon, and I'm not sure they need to. There are enough complicated things going on with how various jobs and abilities interact and that's usually enough to keep me engaged so that I don't really care about how binary the damage types are.
Is there an easy guide to getting FF7 mods set up? Many moons ago I installed like two of them on an original FF7PC install, but now I have the Steam version and an entirely different computer and version of Windows. I remember it being kind of a pain back then, and my most recent foray into modding caused Fallout: New Vegas to crash any time I tried to leave the starting area so I don't have much patience for debugging anymore.
Getting access to the largest number of mods requires the original PC version, which is quite a pain to get installed on win 10. I ran into snafus doing so that no-one else reported and you are likely to run into issues I didn't. If you have zero patience I would just search for the few steam compatible mods, those should be easy to install.
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Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
I gave up on the whole swathe of mods. I think new threat has a simple installer and can be done on the steam version. It has a few tweaks to make the game run a little better too.
There's a relatively simple way to convert the steam version to be modded. I got it working just fine with mods on Windows 7 64 OS. If you like I can post the guide.
There's a relatively simple way to convert the steam version to be modded. I got it working just fine with mods on Windows 7 64 OS. If you like I can post the guide.
If you have the original discs, it might save you a few steps. Really once you have the Steam version installed, the Mod Manger does the heavy lifting. Although you may have to do some resolution tinkering. This is a more detailed guide I wrote for a friend helping him get it set up.
Final Fantasy VII Install guide
Install from Steam (must be a non-user/program file/program file 86 directory)
NEVER run game through Steam! Creates registry conflicts
Download 7th Heaven and Install game converter
#1 https://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=15520.0
#2 https://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=14047.0
Run install converter with a mounted file or USB, mounting a fake Disc 1 MUST be done each time before launching the game.
Set .EXE, movies, textures, library paths
Extra library listings are:
iros://Url/http$pastebin.com/raw.php?i=dDbkYkDu
iros://Url/http$pastebin.com/raw.php?i=QBGsgGK6
Extra folders are : music + direct (check import automatic, updates automatic, and bypass locks)
Settings are set in workshop for display, all have readmes and config settings, but work well together.
Mods I used:
Ninostyle models (Nomura anime style for main characters)
Satuki’s Fields, movies, world textures, battle textures (HD textures without the hassle of Remako)
Spell Textures
Minigame collection
Enemies battle models
Field models NPCs
*Chaos NPC mod is downloaded separately from Nexus mods, other NPC mods don't work with Ninostyle.
Using that, I was able to get HD graphics and movies, along with battle model updates. The music I left untouched, but you can change that if you like to. It's essentially a user made original remaster. I was able to get it set up in about two hours, but it would have gone much faster if mod authors had any idea how to do documentation.
There are plenty of places to stop the game. The problem is I can't think of any way to evenly divide the game up into 30 hour parts. A trilogy seems ridiculous. You're either bloating some sections up big time (like Midgar) or heavily truncating others. It's been a super long time since I've played, but I have a feeling that Midgar to Aerith is a lot shorter than I remember it being. So part 1 would be end of Midgar, possibly stretching it to either the flashback or even the Junon boat and it would still work. Then part 2 to Aerith, which again you can probably bloat and stretch out so it's about the same length as part 1. Then part 3 is... the entire rest of the game. That seems like a lot.
This all assumes they go for the standard and obvious trilogy. The smart move would be to just make it as many parts as it needs to be and forget the whole "rule of 3" crap.
One thing to consider is that if they split it up like that, a LOT of part 3 would involve going back to locations used in the first two parts. They get to re-use a lot of assets.
So that makes it more realistic.
I do hope they don’t go too nuts with it. Expanding Midgar a lot makes sense, but I really don’t see a need to expand places like Coral or Rocket Town or whatever. I really don’t need to see the post Midgar content to be much longer than it already is. I’d rather they keep the pacing under control, and let us actually see the end of this remake in a reasonable timeframe.
I think they’ll do a lot with Crisis Core and maybe even Dirge of Cerberus stuff to fill in the relevant story bits. I see the weird bits with Lucrecia being a lot more story-focused than just some strange lines, and there’s a lot of room to fill in where Zack fits into everything.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
I think they’ll do a lot with Crisis Core and maybe even Dirge of Cerberus stuff to fill in the relevant story bits. I see the weird bits with Lucrecia being a lot more story-focused than just some strange lines, and there’s a lot of room to fill in where Zack fits into everything.
I don't remember anything about Dirge, but yeah, the Zack stuff will be front and center, and I assume the Lucretia/Hojo stuff will be more than a couple of hidden lines in an obscure spot.
If they include stuff from Dirge, I will dump on them for it, and encourage other to dump on them as well.
Everything connected to Dirge should be dropped down the memory hole forever.
Nobody remembers the singer. The song remains.
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
Better idea: they should have Platinum remake Dirge.
Vincent is too much of a story black hole NOT to include something. Or rewrite it, I don't care, but he has far too little backstory in the original game.
What would be really cool is if they added in super secret characters to the remake. Someone like Umaro or Gogo from FF6. Give them no real story relevence beyond a very small introduction and then just have them be this big blinking neon-sign that stands out and is never explained. Make them react to nothing if they're in cinematics.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
What would be really cool is if they added in super secret characters to the remake. Someone like Umaro or Gogo from FF6. Give them no real story relevence beyond a very small introduction and then just have them be this big blinking neon-sign that stands out and is never explained. Make them react to nothing if they're in cinematics.
Have them gesture at the camera to pay attention to what is actually going on, like that George Clooney gif.
I would be more than happy if they quietly forgot everything related to the Compilation.
All the stuff that just expanded on what was already in 7 was fine (read: the stuff in Crisis Core that was just Cloud/Zack/Aeris related), but all the new stuff they added was terrible. Genesis is a garbage character that reads like some 12 year old's fanfic OC.
Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
Omega Weapon is the best part of Dirge of Cerberus, IMO. It's a natural fit with the lore of the main game, that a planet's last defence is to pack up it's lifestream and leave. Carried a nice implication that JENOVA is just the Omega Weapon from another planet, conflicting lifestreams...
Omega Weapon is the best part of Dirge of Cerberus, IMO. It's a natural fit with the lore of the main game, that a planet's last defence is to pack up it's lifestream and leave. Carried a nice implication that JENOVA is just the Omega Weapon from another planet, conflicting lifestreams...
They use that theme alot but I don't mind it.
The Final Fantasy The Spirits Within movie used it and even FF9 uses it some.
I would be more than happy if they quietly forgot everything related to the Compilation.
All the stuff that just expanded on what was already in 7 was fine (read: the stuff in Crisis Core that was just Cloud/Zack/Aeris related), but all the new stuff they added was terrible. Genesis is a garbage character that reads like some 12 year old's fanfic OC.
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Any flying creature should be weak to wind, because a sufficiently strong wind can knock them around.
Oh, of course, I'm not saying it isn't powerful. I'm just saying the way that harm is inflicted is as a physical force. Unlike the reactions involved in burning or freezing, or being electrified, or biochemical process of being poisoned, etc, etc. Robots and creatures in water are more vulnerable to lightning, undead (being dried out husks) and plants are more vulnerable to fire, reptiles and fire monsters are more susceptible to the cold. Machines & undead resist poison. There's conceptual reasons to have all these different damage types. But it struck me as a weird design choice to distinguish wind from physical damage.
I guess, but then the Dragoon's Jump ability traditionally does bonus damage versus flyers without being treated as its own element.
I could be mistaking things, but I'm pretty sure at least a few of the job system games give it a bonus against bird enemies, similar to how Jump gets a damage bonus when performed with a spear equipped. I know FF4 has a lot of enemies (including almost everything with wings) that are weak to "arrow attacks", which is boomerangs, bows, spears, and shuriken.
Weirdly, wind is often absorbed by flying enemies, which is the exception to its otherwise safe bet.
I think part of it is that they couldn't really script the combat engine like that (or at least that it would take extra time and effort they didn't have). Much easier to leave the enemies with their regular AI and have some FFXII gambits on Sephiroth; If Cloud is KOd when you get your turn, revive. Else If there are multiple enemies, use group magic. Else, attack.
We can get really deep in the weeds here by first asking "what is harm?"; sure we can conceptually believe in a linear scale with the to terminal points being "alive" and "dead" and "harm" as a measure of travel along that line, but how do we define death? Lack of pulse? Lack of brain activity? I was reading a bit of Michio Kaku's work and he noted how we've been able to revive people who have been "dead" for a not inconsiderable amount of time (I had trouble finding a good source) so that our conception of what is fatal has changed considerably over the last millennia. Potentially our entire concept of death could change in the far future if we're able to reverse the process of cellular decomposition. But that's neither here nor there, the important thing is that for all intents and purposes the game has already made a linear distinction between "alive" and "dead" and provides a handy reference to that in the form of HP.
So knowing that some amount of HP is the requirement for being alive, damage is stuff that can kill you, whether that be through loss of blood, lethal trauma to the organs, paralysis/failure of the respiratory system, whatever. HP doesn't care what method is used to bring you closer to death, only on the relative danger of it. Defense does care though, since it can reduce that damage. So then the question becomes what kinds of defense do we want to measure in a given game. Do we make a distinction between blunt-force trauma, lacerations, and impalement or are those all lumped into physical damage? What about burns, do we differentiate between electrical, chemical, and heat vectors? For ice/cold damage are we separating the damage inflicted from the ice projectiles from the cellular damage resulting from extreme cold? At the end of the day there are a multitude of methods to kill someone, and they all can be differentiated in some way if your system has enough fidelity.
So back to Final Fantasy and your question which I'll rephrase: what criteria has Final Fantasy used to differentiate damage types in its games? And the answer is "a careful balance between 'tradition' and 'fuck it'". Sometimes Flan enemies are weak to the element the cast. Sometimes they absorb it. Sometimes flying enemies are weak to earth damage, sometimes wind. Sometimes the only earth damage in the game is from the quake spell which flyers are immune to in the first place! It's impossible to say why things are the way they are in any given Final Fantasy game so why try?
I mean, I think it would be fun if the various spells like Aero, Quake, et al had some neat impacts or functioned better in certain environments. I liked how in Dragon's Dogma there were the oil & wet debuffs that interacted with the fire/lightning/ice spells in unique ways. But if you're asking why or how does the blunt force trauma of Aero differ from a strike from a club or a hurled stone (or hurled ice!), then you have to start asking questions about why/how the burns from a fire spell are different to a lightning or acid spell, and that's a deep rabbit hole to start down.
edit: left off my conclusion.
I'm at the Giza plains (wet season) and a little frustrated with the job combos I chose. I shopped around as it were for which class guide I'd follow and chose this one (google doc link). It claimed to be the best and seemed pretty comprehensive so I followed it choosing only do deviate to their recommended build for using all 12 jobs. I get the feeling that the guide is incredibly optimized to the end game potentially to the detriment of the early/mid game. More than that I'm just a little miffed at how the game doesn't offer respecs on the PS4. Reading through some additional material it seems clear that the devs envisioned some kind of replay value in this game. I always assumed they were building it like a single player MMORPG, but I think their actual vision was closer to a rogue-like: they wanted players to adapt their strategy based on the items they got instead of realizing that most would simply grind or manipulate the drops to get what they want. I’m sure there are people who do replay FF games as often as I do with XCOM, but I don’t think there’s many of them.
At the end of the day the game is still easy, even with my poor planning. But I can see why few people say that FFXII is their favorite.
You're basically threatening me with what I consider a good time. I have many, many abandoned attempts at design documents for JRPG ideas I've had over the decades, and this kind of minutia is the sort of thing I've spent a lot of time thinking about. Like, you make passing reference to how some game systems draw a distinction between different types of physical damage; my initial draft of the post you are responding to had a superfluous paragraph talking about certain editions of D&D (bludgeon/stabbing/cutting), City of Heroes (smashing/lethal), and Front Mission (impact/piercing) all doing that.
Also, Final Fantasy Tactics had the oil status that causes increased vulnerability to fire damage before Dragon's Dogma (to be fair, it was bugged and didn't apply the modifier in the PS1 release).
The main story path is a nice difficulty, just hard enough to make a veteran think a little. The optional bosses are very much in the tryhard category, so good luck with those.
Myself I'm stuck on Proud Clod who is completely wrecking me, and I'm not sure I can return to fight him later if I kill Hojo.
They haven't actually confirmed 3 episodes have they?
The last thing I saw was that they don't even know how many they plan to have yet. Which is honestly way worse.
The issue I have is with Midgar already being two blu-rays. How are they going to represent the entire world at that fidelity within any one physical release? I have to think they significantly change the story so that you aren't freely roaming the entire globe in the end.
It is fucking amazing.
Like, I hadn't played the game in a long time, but the whole time I could have sworn I didn't remember some story points but also couldn't tell if I just forgot, or if it was an addition. They fleshed out the text in the game wonderfully.
It does start to get quite a bit hard at points though. And one fight was super confusing (but pretty cool after I figured it out) to win, otherwise it was excellent. The fixes to materia balancing are awesome as well.
Just be warned there is a HUGE difficulty spike in the final dungeon, but you also get a ton of super good materia I almost forgot existed. Plus tons of exp and shit. Then again, I also remember I chose the hard difficulty setting so that might have had something to do with it.
I fully recommend that mod. If you haven't played it in a long time, absolutely try it because it will feel like an actual remake before the massive remake we get soon. If you are waiting for the PC version of the remake, it might hold you over.
Do... Re... Mi... So... Fa.... Do... Re.... Do...
Forget it...
I love talking about game design, and I've gone a little out of my way on occasion to look into some more esoteric corners of knowledge simply to add realism to some TTRPGs that I've run. My general philosophy is that players should be presented with a few simple & impactful choices; anything less is just over complicating player decision making or otherwise will be ignored. Specifically on the topic of damage types I always look to how I want players to decide on their defenses. I think the simple division between physical/magical damage is fine for most games, but I'm always open to more complex systems when they allow for interesting choices. For example, in something that has a strong cyberpunk vibe I'm good with damage types like slashing/ballistics/explosives because there's usually a trade-off in your playstyle, i.e. each of those types is associated with 'louder' weaponry and armor, so equipping for more dangerous combat has the penalty of being much more conspicuous. Back to Final Fantasy, it's neat that there are some enemies that have an elemental weakness, but usually it doesn't factor into any strategic decision-making I'm doing. Like, I typically won't optimize to deal a specific elemental damage type because the games generally don't incentivize this kind of choice. The elemental properties of weapons & armor are generally a distant secondary consideration to their base stats. Sometimes an FF game will have a particular area that does, like an Ice-cave where all the enemies are weak to fire damage and therefor I use lower-level fire elemental weapons. But even then it's not a real choice but more of a check; do I have fire elemental weapons/magic? If yes then deal more damage.
Something that would be interesting would be if the different damage types affected my playstyle. Diablo games have something like this where Fire damage typically has good AOE or maybe has a DOT component, Lightning damage is very powerful but can be unpredictable or otherwise difficult to use properly, and Ice damage adds a slow with the trade-off of doing less DPS. Each of these requires my mage or wizard or whatever to play in a (slightly) different way. Actually, thinking about it further WoW at times has done a good job of defining different playstyles between its mage specs, and incentivized players to learn all three because they each work better in certain situations. Final Fantasy games haven't really done this to my knowledge, and I don't really see them doing so any time soon, and I'm not sure they need to. There are enough complicated things going on with how various jobs and abilities interact and that's usually enough to keep me engaged so that I don't really care about how binary the damage types are.
Getting access to the largest number of mods requires the original PC version, which is quite a pain to get installed on win 10. I ran into snafus doing so that no-one else reported and you are likely to run into issues I didn't. If you have zero patience I would just search for the few steam compatible mods, those should be easy to install.
That would be super helpful
Do... Re... Mi... So... Fa.... Do... Re.... Do...
Forget it...
Final Fantasy VII Install guide
Install from Steam (must be a non-user/program file/program file 86 directory)
NEVER run game through Steam! Creates registry conflicts
Download 7th Heaven and Install game converter
#1 https://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=15520.0
#2 https://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=14047.0
Run install converter with a mounted file or USB, mounting a fake Disc 1 MUST be done each time before launching the game.
Set .EXE, movies, textures, library paths
Extra library listings are:
iros://Url/http$pastebin.com/raw.php?i=dDbkYkDu
iros://Url/http$pastebin.com/raw.php?i=QBGsgGK6
Extra folders are : music + direct (check import automatic, updates automatic, and bypass locks)
Settings are set in workshop for display, all have readmes and config settings, but work well together.
Mods I used:
Ninostyle models (Nomura anime style for main characters)
Satuki’s Fields, movies, world textures, battle textures (HD textures without the hassle of Remako)
Spell Textures
Minigame collection
Enemies battle models
Field models NPCs
*Chaos NPC mod is downloaded separately from Nexus mods, other NPC mods don't work with Ninostyle.
Using that, I was able to get HD graphics and movies, along with battle model updates. The music I left untouched, but you can change that if you like to. It's essentially a user made original remaster. I was able to get it set up in about two hours, but it would have gone much faster if mod authors had any idea how to do documentation.
One thing to consider is that if they split it up like that, a LOT of part 3 would involve going back to locations used in the first two parts. They get to re-use a lot of assets.
So that makes it more realistic.
I do hope they don’t go too nuts with it. Expanding Midgar a lot makes sense, but I really don’t see a need to expand places like Coral or Rocket Town or whatever. I really don’t need to see the post Midgar content to be much longer than it already is. I’d rather they keep the pacing under control, and let us actually see the end of this remake in a reasonable timeframe.
My Let's Play Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC2go70QLfwGq-hW4nvUqmog
Everything connected to Dirge should be dropped down the memory hole forever.
Vincent Valentine? No, no, this is Henry Holiday. Totally new guy.
They should just totally deny his existence.
Vincent Valentine? What?
Edit him out of the steam version of the game while they're at it. Replace his model/name in game with traitorReeve and pretend like nothing happened.
Have them gesture at the camera to pay attention to what is actually going on, like that George Clooney gif.
All the stuff that just expanded on what was already in 7 was fine (read: the stuff in Crisis Core that was just Cloud/Zack/Aeris related), but all the new stuff they added was terrible. Genesis is a garbage character that reads like some 12 year old's fanfic OC.
Do... Re... Mi... So... Fa.... Do... Re.... Do...
Forget it...
They use that theme alot but I don't mind it.
Angeal sounds like a medical condition.