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Love the jr badge! I'd want to play in jr mode but it would be fun to try the full-difficulty bosses just to see how bad I get flattened
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Aug 16, 2020 13:56
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This is looking very good so far, this kind of polish is well-appreciated. I can see why this has been taking so long, but also it's definitely worth it, all that work is definitely paying off. Junior's Emblem is a clever way to do that too. Was that change inspired by Bug Fables?
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Aug 16, 2020 16:48
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Those are really awesome changes, especially the Jr badge. You're doing good work, Quackles.
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Aug 16, 2020 18:02
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This is wonderful, thank you for your hard work and pushing for these changes.
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Aug 16, 2020 18:24
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Explopyro posted:Junior's Emblem is a clever way to do that too. Was that change inspired by Bug Fables? It was Rain's idea originally. I don't know if he's played Bug Fables or not. Special thanks to goon JamieTheD for the Bowser Jr sprite.
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Aug 16, 2020 21:38
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Very cool. So with the jr. badge you can switch between the two difficulties whenever you want? That sounds like a win/win for balancing difficulty with accessibility.
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Aug 17, 2020 00:43
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Does Berserker Mario still hammer those Spear Guys who need jumping on?
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Aug 22, 2020 17:18
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Sorites posted:Does Berserker Mario still hammer those Spear Guys who need jumping on? He's supposed to not.
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Aug 23, 2020 01:37
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Ahh, glad to see things are still in motion here. I am really looking forward to this LP continuing!
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Aug 29, 2020 01:07
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I can't believe that we last saw this LP before the pandemic started. It feels like years ago
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Aug 30, 2020 13:02
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Ineffiable posted:I can't believe that we last saw this LP before the pandemic started. It feels like years ago You and me both. I've got a lot of free time right now, at least.
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Aug 30, 2020 21:26
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the discord link on the github is broken lol
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Aug 31, 2020 20:09
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heehee posted:the discord link on the github is broken lol I've passed the word along.
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Sep 2, 2020 01:52
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I'm mostly posting to bump the topic, but this is a reassurance that development proceeds apace. We're almost to the end of Milestone 1 (covering Chapter 1), which includes a good additional number of under-the-hood changes. Watch this space!
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Dec 5, 2020 08:53
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Quackles posted:I'm mostly posting to bump the topic, but this is a reassurance that development proceeds apace. We're almost to the end of Milestone 1 (covering Chapter 1), which includes a good additional number of under-the-hood changes. Watch this space! Well I'm personally looking forward to your return and update on what has changed since last time because I have completely forgotten basically everything.
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Dec 5, 2020 10:34
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Dev Blog Update: Milestone 1 Complete, Thamz Abdicates Well, after lots of hard work, Milestone 1 - covering Chapter 1 - is more or less done. Here's a few of the changes you can expect to see: Dizzy and Sleep Changes   Dizzy and Sleep now work like TTYD: Dizzy characters' attacks will miss, but they can still act. Sleeping characters will wake if they take damage. This cuts both ways - Mario can use Items and Star Powers when he's Dizzy, but those pesky Medi Guys will still heal when they're Dizzy! Better Chet   Chet Rippo has been tweaked - he now costs only 3.9 coins (he makes his money on the rounding), and he will raise one stat and lower another - you pick which. He also sticks around after changing your stats, so you can change them at will - as long as you have 3.9 coins. It's a good way to experiment with different stat builds! Enemy and Boss Reworks    ...no hints for these ones! There's also other news, that's just as (maybe more) important. Thamz Abdicates So something interesting happened: Recently, Thamz came out of retirement and decided he wanted to actively contribute to the development of MQ 2.0. However, recently, after a number of discussions with the rest of the dev team, he came to the conclusion that we had diverging visions. To make a long story very short, Thamz has hung up his Luigi hat and left the dev team, at least for now. It feels only fair to present to you his own account of his departure:    (Note that we're still on good terms. He's just focusing on other things now.) So what does this mean for Master Quest? Well, I'm not going away. I was doing the great majority of the work before Thamz left and I'm still doing it. So: Master Quest shall be made into something glorious. More soon. (ish)
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Jan 12, 2021 12:46
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Games > Let's Play! > Mario Gets Flattened - Let's
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Jan 12, 2021 13:10
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BisbyWorl posted:The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Games > Let's Play! > Mario Gets Flattened - Let's
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Jan 12, 2021 14:04
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Well that's an interesting turn. I'm glad you're all still on good terms. So many times, it doesn't happen that way.
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Jan 12, 2021 15:50
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Welp, thread title is changed. This was kind of overdue. It's not really a blind LP any more. By the way: I'm going to play through the game again once 2.0 is out, albeit in a condensed form, to show everyone what's changed. There will, after all, be a lot of changes. BTW: Props to Rain, another MQ dev who has figured out how to do arbitrary code execution in Paper Mario. Quackles fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Jan 12, 2021 |
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Jan 12, 2021 20:44
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Well, this is looking interesting. These changes seem promising so far; I certainly wasn't expecting to see TTYD status effects backported in. I'm certainly not going to rush you guys, but I'm looking forward to playing whatever comes out of this. I definitely did not anticipate you ending up as the lead dev on the project before the LP was finished! I'm glad there seems to be no acrimony, at least. Much as I complained about a lot of design decisions, I definitely think Thamz managed to accomplish his goal in quite a few places and should feel good about that (for someone like me, at least, the experience was very close to what he describes! although that definitely owes a lot to the fact I tend to shy away from the most broken of the vanilla mechanics like Danger abuse etc. Still, it's worth noting I managed to get through like 99% of the game that way). And as we learned in this thread, several fights did have multiple viable strategies while still being at that difficulty level. That said, the last version I played was 1.2.1.0. I think there are some worthwhile lessons to take out of this about the inherent design issues that arise from trying to fine-tune difficulty in small-numbers games like this (and don't get me wrong, the small-numbers aspect is one of my favourite things about Paper Mario).
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Jan 12, 2021 21:14
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Games > Let's Play! > Obligatory Screed About Someone Using Light Mode in Discord
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Jan 12, 2021 21:43
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I have nothing against him personally, but I honestly see this as a good thing. "Hard Mode Hacks" that are intended to only be doable by the skin of your teeth with perfect planning, as he says, just aren't fun to me, and are basically only made for a very select few people. Having a more reasonable difficulty curve makes the mod a lot more accessible to a lot more people.
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Jan 12, 2021 22:17
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BlazetheInferno posted:I have nothing against him personally, but I honestly see this as a good thing. "Hard Mode Hacks" that are intended to only be doable by the skin of your teeth with perfect planning, as he says, just aren't fun to me, and are basically only made for a very select few people. Same. That whole post really rubbed me the wrong way, and I am glad that this guy is no longer implicated. To me, he seemed self-interested and kind of arrogant, as if he wanted to make a game for him and (nearly) nobody else.
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Jan 12, 2021 23:35
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JustJeff88 posted:Same. That whole post really rubbed me the wrong way, and I am glad that this guy is no longer implicated. To me, he seemed self-interested and kind of arrogant, as if he wanted to make a game for him and (nearly) nobody else.
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Jan 13, 2021 00:56
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At this point Quackles journey is almost more exciting than mario's  NGDBSS posted:It wasn't even for him! Thamz went on record saying that he didn't personally playtest his work! I mean his stated goal was a piss hard hack to play with his cousin. And honestly, there's nothing wrong with making a hack for yourself and only yourself. Nobody gets angry at someone for building themselves a canoe or whatever. Having it expand into a weird thing with a community that needed pleasing to the detriment isn't an arrogant motivation for bouncing at all.
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Jan 13, 2021 02:00
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FoolyCharged posted:I mean his stated goal was a piss hard hack to play with his cousin. If you're only going off of the statement posted by Quackles then yeah, but there's some more context missing. It's been mentioned elsewhere that Thamz only ever played the Jr. version (the easier less bullshit mode of the hack), never actually beat it (on Jr. mode) and didn't even bothering testing his changes himself. Also that "salty streamer tears" was the primary goal of the hack. 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.
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Jan 13, 2021 02:12
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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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Omnicrom posted: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.  I've had it for a long time and been thinking of changing it in honor of something else recently, but glad someone else got as much of a laugh as I did.
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Jan 13, 2021 05:11
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BlazetheInferno posted:I have nothing against him personally, but I honestly see this as a good thing. "Hard Mode Hacks" that are intended to only be doable by the skin of your teeth with perfect planning, as he says, just aren't fun to me, and are basically only made for a very select few people. Yeah, that's my opinion of a bunch of those Mario Maker levels. It seems obnoxious building a level that has you performing actions in a specific order like it's DDR or something.
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Jan 13, 2021 11:11
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If said levels advertise themselves as such (usually with 'Kaizo'), that's fine - makes it clear it's for a specific gamer - It's not my brand of fun, but some people love that kind of pixel-perfect challenge. Master Quest here didn't advertise itself as a One True Way/Kaizo Paper Mario but instead as a regular hard mode, which is a problem.
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Jan 13, 2021 19:40
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Two things: 1) Firstly, this thread has really driven home to me that ultra-hard games need to have a base, reset point after every battle to use for calibration purposes - either that or out-of-battle recovery items piss easy to get. Trying to create a hardmode hack in a game like this where the player's state and his companion's can fluctuate so much and where inventory space is so limited seems like trying to build a house of card on the deck of the Titanic. B) I am going to confess that I do not know this series that well despite owning every entry but Origami King. This isn't the best thread to ask a in a way because it's all Paper Mario enthusiasts, myself included, but are these games piss easy by default or something? 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?
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Jan 13, 2021 22:13
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JustJeff88 posted:B) I am going to confess that I do not know this series that well despite owning every entry but Origami King. This isn't the best thread to ask a in a way because it's all Paper Mario enthusiasts, myself included, but are these games piss easy by default or something? 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? The base game is easy enough that my sister, who had never played an rpg before and decided to do so on a whim over Christmas break, beat it despite never really mastering timed hits/defenses.
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Jan 13, 2021 22:27
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fool of sound posted:The base game is easy enough that my sister, who had never played an rpg before and decided to do so on a whim over Christmas break, beat it despite never really mastering timed hits/defenses. IMO this is the main difference between Paper Mario and the Mario & Luigi RPG series. In the latter, if you don't get timed hits you're Going To Have A Bad Time. In the former they're much more of an optional thing to make battles go faster.
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Jan 13, 2021 22:38
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Yeah Paper Mario is generally pretty easy. Which isn't a bad thing, let me remind everyone. Still, some folks look for something different out of it.
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Jan 13, 2021 22:41
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Paper Mario hasn't really been a super difficult franchise. It's generally on the easier side of things, and as Carbon dioxide said, action commands are ultimately more of a suggestion compared to Mario and Luigi where you'd die really fast and fights would take far longer without using them.
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Jan 13, 2021 22:58
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I would say that while it is an easy game, it can also have some challenges if you don't know some things in advance. For instance putting a bunch of points in hp instead of BP or fp will make a lot of mid/late game fights much more of a struggle than they could be.
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Jan 13, 2021 23:45
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Yes, the Paper Mario games are easy. I would not say they're completely trivial - every game had at least one or two fights that were sufficiently difficult to prevent sleepwalking through (e.g. Huff n Puff in PM64) - but I think it's safe to say that most people should be able to finish the game without getting stuck, or getting very many game overs, etc. There are also a lot of mechanics that are overpowered and easy to abuse (to the point many don't find them fun and actively avoid using them), meaning that the games don't quite reward skilled or thoughtful play either unless the player goes out of their way to create self-imposed challenges. One of the strengths of the games, though, is this very lack of difficulty. I've found myself thinking this a lot, that one of the reasons these games have such lasting popularity and replayability is that the baseline difficulty is low and therefore you can succeed with all sorts of really different strategies. It encourages experimentation and customisation because everything you try can be rewarded and make you feel good about your choices. The badge system is very deep and customisable, but you could even argue that it's superfluous because a player can be successful with almost any choices; that said, I think that's a big part of what makes it work so well. Even if you want to break the game, the question then is how do you want to break the game? There are a lot of different types of broken strategies, so there's variety there too. I don't think it's impossible to preserve this kind of feel while simultaneously making a meaningfully challenging game (Bug Fables certainly did it!), but it's very difficult, as I think this thread has taught us.
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Jan 13, 2021 23:49
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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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Well, that's certainly a firm answer to my question. Having established that, why make the leap all the way from a "generally quite easy" game to "brutally hard"? Doesn't it make sense to take a game that's too soft and make it into a fairly meaty challenge rather than go full batshit and make it a nightmare that only Paper Mario grand masters with a masochistic bent would enjoy? I may well be the only person who finds that peculiar, but I stand by it.
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Jan 14, 2021 03:50
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