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Sakurazuka posted:This probably isn't news to most people but holy poo poo FF13 feels like a game designed by 100 people none of whom actually spoke to each other, it's just full of the most baffling crap. Why is the difficulty all over the place? It feels like an MMO beta before encounters have been tuned properly. Why do I have to kill a monster I may or may not be able to beat at that point just unlock a fast travel point? One thing that really helps is to set the battle speed to low for bosses that cast doom. The turns don't go slower, but the doom counter does. It made some bosses (like Odin early on) way easier. The only boss I couldn't beat was the final boss. At that point I just cheated, because I wanted to get it over with. I didn't feel like grinding just to get to the ending of the game. That said, I liked the part where the game become more than a hallway simulator and I was able to just explore the world and do some side-quests.
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Nov 11, 2016 02:47
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Sakurazuka posted:This probably isn't news to most people but holy poo poo FF13 feels like a game designed by 100 people none of whom actually spoke to each other, it's just full of the most baffling crap. Why is the difficulty all over the place? It feels like an MMO beta before encounters have been tuned properly. Why do I have to kill a monster I may or may not be able to beat at that point just unlock a fast travel point? It's a bad game
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Nov 11, 2016 02:50
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Grawl posted:One thing that really helps is to set the battle speed to low for bosses that cast doom. The turns don't go slower, but the doom counter does. It made some bosses (like Odin early on) way easier. Isn't the final boss weak to instant death?
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Nov 11, 2016 03:03
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Cleretic posted:Isn't the final boss weak to instant death? Poison.
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Nov 11, 2016 03:03
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Sakurazuka posted:This probably isn't news to most people but holy poo poo FF13 feels like a game designed by 100 people none of whom actually spoke to each other, it's just full of the most baffling crap. Why is the difficulty all over the place? It feels like an MMO beta before encounters have been tuned properly. Why do I have to kill a monster I may or may not be able to beat at that point just unlock a fast travel point? Well the nice thing is that there's 0 penalty for dying ever, so if I ever ran into an encounter like that I just turned around and went somewhere else
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Nov 11, 2016 03:10
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True but it's annoying when it's blocking your path and you just want to make some progress. But yeah I've gotten more into the habit of just going 'yeah I'll come back later', though it goes against my nature.
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Nov 11, 2016 03:16
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In Training posted:Well the nice thing is that there's 0 penalty for dying ever, so if I ever ran into an encounter like that I just turned around and went somewhere else Actually once you get to, like, the second to last place you fight this rear end in a top hat boss and he does doom and poo poo and if you go back the way you came you find out all the enemies are back and they're somehow harder and then a giant robot kills you and then you realize you have to backtrack through a bunch of areas because you didn't do the sidequest that unlocks the fast travel system because you just wanted the game to be over with you just want it to end
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Nov 11, 2016 03:48
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Cleretic posted:Isn't the final boss weak to instant death? The second form is weak to Death in stagger, but that part of the fight's pretty much a gimme anyway.
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Nov 11, 2016 04:00
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Yo people I hope you have your Japanese PS4 accounts ready 'cause there's a FFXV demo out on the Japanese store of the first half of the first chapter.
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Nov 11, 2016 06:10
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Terper posted:Yo people I hope you have your Japanese PS4 accounts ready 'cause there's a FFXV demo out on the Japanese store of the first half of the first chapter. Apparently it has full english VA and text, too.
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Nov 11, 2016 06:48
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ImpAtom posted:Poison. It can't be stressed enough how amazing Poison is there. I could not beat the final boss "cleanly" but if you get Poison on it, you really don't have to do anything else. I think I had Snow attack it just to give him something to do but otherwise I just had Hope and Vanille keep healing until eventaully the Poison killed the boss all on its own.
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Nov 11, 2016 06:50
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I hated all the bosses in XIII that casted doom on your party leader. it's fine to have a timed ranking system that affects drops and stuff to let you know you're playing suboptimally. it's dumb to have that and still say "if you don't finish the fight in x minutes, you automatically lose" in addition to the fact that it's dumb that you lose a fight just because your party leader dies
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Nov 11, 2016 08:00
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8-Bit Scholar posted:Actually once you get to, like, the second to last place you fight this rear end in a top hat boss and he does doom and poo poo and if you go back the way you came you find out all the enemies are back and they're somehow harder and then a giant robot kills you and then you realize you have to backtrack through a bunch of areas because you didn't do the sidequest that unlocks the fast travel system because you just wanted the game to be over with you just want it to end
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Nov 11, 2016 16:05
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FFXIII is a game you can finish without leveling up. If you've been upgrading your characters you shouldn't hit a roadblock at all in the main story. Make sure you upgrade your weapons and accessories too. Like, yeah, I know, if you're trying to ~platinum~ the game that would mean you have to grind more. Who gives a poo poo. You're not trying to platinum the game. Upgrade your drat accessories and equipment using the boatloads of poo poo you've probably got lying around.
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Nov 11, 2016 16:11
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Sakurazuka posted:This probably isn't news to most people but holy poo poo FF13 feels like a game designed by 100 people none of whom actually spoke to each other, it's just full of the most baffling crap. Why is the difficulty all over the place? It feels like an MMO beta before encounters have been tuned properly. Why do I have to kill a monster I may or may not be able to beat at that point just unlock a fast travel point? If a game feels rushed and pieced together at the last minute, then it probably was rushed and pieced together at the last minute. The development team didn't have a clear vision of the game until they started to develop the demo that came with the Advent Children Blu-Ray. Even then, there were major rewrites to the ending very late in development. This has been a trend going back to FF12 and I expect it to continue with FF15. morallyobjected posted:I hated all the bosses in XIII that casted doom on your party leader. it's fine to have a timed ranking system that affects drops and stuff to let you know you're playing suboptimally. it's dumb to have that and still say "if you don't finish the fight in x minutes, you automatically lose" They probably realized halfway through development that players could simply turtle up, ignore the stagger system, and win any boss battles by doing chip damage.
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Nov 11, 2016 17:09
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morallyobjected posted:I hated all the bosses in XIII that casted doom on your party leader. it's fine to have a timed ranking system that affects drops and stuff to let you know you're playing suboptimally. it's dumb to have that and still say "if you don't finish the fight in x minutes, you automatically lose" Outside of the Eidolons (which are puzzle bosses) and the final final boss (which will go down in a single stagger if you are even remotely competent at the game), every single boss that has a doom counter requires you to spend something ridiculous like 15-20 minutes on the fight before it tells you to hurry the gently caress up.
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Nov 11, 2016 17:28
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Artix posted:Outside of the Eidolons (which are puzzle bosses) and the final final boss (which will go down in a single stagger if you are even remotely competent at the game), every single boss that has a doom counter requires you to spend something ridiculous like 15-20 minutes on the fight before it tells you to hurry the gently caress up. it happened to me when I fought whatever boss you get to when you complete all of Titan's Trials. I was underleveled for it, certainly, but I got him down to pretty low health before that happened and I couldn't finish him off, so it mostly felt like a "gently caress you". I feel like if people want to try and slog it out to get rewards before they might be expected to, they ought to be able to, even if it's tedious to most.
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Nov 11, 2016 18:26
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The issue is if you're gonna have a timer just make it both clear that it will happen and also don't just make it an auto loss. Buff the hell out of the boss and it's damage so if the player can still hang on or alpha strike they can win and feel like they achieved something while encouraging them to go ham.
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Nov 11, 2016 18:58
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A hard time limit is necessary to make fights more challenging in a game where healing has no resource cost.
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Nov 11, 2016 19:13
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Punishing the player for taking forever to kill the boss isn't a bad mechanic but the doom timer is a lazy way to present it that makes it feel more bullshit.
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Nov 11, 2016 21:20
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If a player wants to take 20 minutes to defeat an encounter, let them. Then you can brag about your game lasting a hundred hours and kinda mean it!
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Nov 11, 2016 22:50
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the enrage timer is supposed to be a warning sign that you're not engaging with the (fantastic) combat system in an unfun way that you're not supposed to. if you're actually hitting enrage on any non-postgame fight you are literally doing a quarter or so of the dps even basic play would get you, and this is pretty much a hard fact because of the way the crystarium works. the enrage timers aren't the problem, and killing players if they don't interact with the game in any way other than going into SEN/MED/COM and pressing A for 20 minutes shouldn't be considered bad design. why is bad design: - the game never explicitly tells you that you're dying because you're doing 25% of the damage you're supposed to. - the game never explicitly tells you about the literal 50% dps/hps boost you get from just switching paradigms regularly - the game never explains the buff-stagger-exploit loop of the system to a player in anything but the most facile of terms - the game waits until the 20th hour to put in a fight in which it's possible to lose because you didn't have enough dps - corollary: at no point before the 20th hour is it ever explained to you that doing damage is preferable to grinding a fight out via chip damage - the waits until the 19th hour to give you access to a full paradigm deck, without which it is impossible to interact with the combat system in any meaningful way
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Nov 11, 2016 23:06
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the only game I've ever put 100+ hours into is FFXII. I did pretty much every hunt (excluding Yiazmat) and every esper and generally just ran around exploring and had a good time
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Nov 11, 2016 23:05
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Mega64 posted:If a player wants to take 20 minutes to defeat an encounter, let them. Then you can brag about your game lasting a hundred hours and kinda mean it! Nah, enrage timers as a metric to show players that they're either/both under-geared/leveled or not doing mechanics correctly is actually a pretty good mechanic if you're trying to teach a player about a combat system. Like it or not there is a 'correct' way to play most games and designers try to create systems that teach you to do it the good way and to punish you for doing it the bad way. That said, FF13's got real problems doing the teaching thing given that so many people seemed to struggle with even the basic mechanics of the paradigm swapping systems.
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Nov 11, 2016 23:08
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Wasn't there someone in this thread or the steam thread just the other week poo poo-talking about how every fight in Lightning Returns was taking them 15+ minutes? Like sometimes people need saved from themselves (or just put out of their misery)
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Nov 11, 2016 23:07
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If the game just let you tank through whatever and take a long time on bosses the game would get exponentially worse with each passing boss. If Dahaka just let you pass by tanking through, every boss after would just get longer and longer and there are some challenging bosses up ahead. Roach's mech thing would be a nightmare if you didn't understand the game mechanics. I think the game has a bigger issue not explaining stagger mechanics well. The game is needlessly wordy and embellished when trying to explain things at times, but also expects you to pick up all the subtle mechanics without explanation. Like, the first Sazh/Vanille section is probably there to teach you that you need Commandos to stagger things properly since Sazh doesn't have it yet, and how without COMs the stagger bar grows really quickly but drains even faster. A lot of the bosses of the two person segments tend to become easier with using new skills you've gained in the last Crystarium segment, like Hope's Bar-element skills for Astrabulbasaurion, Protect and Shell for Odin, Slow for almost any boss after getting Fang because it's the only debuff they bothered giving her beside Curse early on. It's an attempt at teaching? If you pay attention, things begin to click and you get better, but it's really easy to miss a lot of these things and the battles just get harder.
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Nov 11, 2016 23:10
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it occurs to me that i'm slipping into talking about ff13 using mmo terminology not just because i play a lot of ff14, but because a lot of this conversation accurately mirrors the perpetual "content can't be meaningful without fail conditions" vs "it's my $14.99/month and i can do whatever the hell i want with it" argument in the ff14 thread ff13 is unlike a lot of other final fantasy games in that it is highly opinionated about how you should play it. its problem is that it never bothers to actually explain this opinion
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Nov 11, 2016 23:10
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Saint Freak posted:Wasn't there someone in this thread or the steam thread just the other week poo poo-talking about how every fight in Lightning Returns was taking them 15+ minutes? This is almost as bad as that one DMC4:SE review where the player complained that bosses took way too long because the gun damage in the game was so low and they should have buffed it. Reiterpallasch posted:it occurs to me that i'm slipping into talking about ff13 using mmo terminology not just because i play a lot of ff14, but because a lot of this conversation accurately mirrors the perpetual "content can't be meaningful without fail conditions" vs "it's my $14.99/month and i can do whatever the hell i want with it" argument in the ff14 thread Yeah FF13's combat has a bit more in common with character action games than it does traditional FF, where knowing when to and timing form swaps and hits are super basically the most important poo poo in the game. Then you get to LR which has perfect parry and perfect guard gimmicks and all sorts of Dante-style nonsense built into its encounters. The 13 sub series games have very focused, very designed combat systems but you're 100% right that they hosed up explaining any of them. but that's kind of an issue with a lot of action games in that style. I've got a lot of friends that are fans of DMC/Bayonetta that have no idea what move cancelling is or what the hell Dodge offset is, let alone the more esoteric nonsense like Distorted attacks. ZenMasterBullshit fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Nov 11, 2016 |
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Nov 11, 2016 23:09
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if it's not clear by now i think it's a really good opinion and i will die on that hill. shame about the rest of the game. (music was good too)
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Nov 11, 2016 23:14
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Reiterpallasch posted:if it's not clear by now i think it's a really good opinion and i will die on that hill. shame about the rest of the game. Have you played LR yet? Because it's just 13's combat but better in every way and a decent open world RPG built around it.
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Nov 11, 2016 23:16
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Ff13 is a good rear end game bogged down by everything that isn't the combat system. And also the combat system loving up with that mandatory cut scene. I'd have loved a sequel that didn't completely gently caress up the core formula like FF13-2 but hey what're you gonna do.
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Nov 11, 2016 23:16
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pichupal posted:If the game just let you tank through whatever and take a long time on bosses the game would get exponentially worse with each passing boss. If Dahaka just let you pass by tanking through, every boss after would just get longer and longer and there are some challenging bosses up ahead. Roach's mech thing would be a nightmare if you didn't understand the game mechanics. The first Sazh/Vanille section is to teach you that Saboteurs are almost as good as Commandos at stopping the stagger gauge (with a side helping of making you figure out how to stagger folks with double Ravagers). FF13 is actually really good about making you learn by doing rather than shove a giant tutorial in your face, but the things it does give you a tutorial for are borderline useless and it doesn't tell you a lot of poo poo it really should.
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Nov 11, 2016 23:19
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No seriously Lightning's Return is probably one of the most fun Action RPGs out there gameplay wise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ENVk0AHGpk
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Nov 11, 2016 23:18
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"Action" is questionable when there's so many rpgs that actually are corresponding one to one on controls and button pushing.
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Nov 11, 2016 23:21
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Tae posted:"Action" is questionable when there's so many rpgs that actually are corresponding one to one on controls and button pushing. Any game with perfect guards and parries is an action game, sorry those are the rules.
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Nov 11, 2016 23:23
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I enjoyed LR, but a lot of the beauty of FF13 is how the party's strength and available abilities is fairly closely controlled to make for interesting fights. The devs clearly knew exactly how much damage/healing a party could do at the correct point in the story for any given boss fights, and at least tried to make intelligent decisions based on that. Neither 13-2 or LR have that kind of design rigor, and it really eats at me. related: The saddest video game review experience i have ever seen is this little gem for the ps3 called Vanquish, a third person shooter made by platinum. As you might imagine, it's a Platinum game, so you're supposed to jetpack boost everywhere while dropping grenades on the ground as you go and do sick rocket-assisted kickflips off of enemy robots while going into slow-motion as you fly through the air and headshot more robots on the way down, then chainsaw another robot so the i-frames protect you as your jetpack recharges. Unfortunately, it also has a "press A to cower behind a rock" button, so basically every reviewer ever played the game by hiding behind scenery for half an hour while blindfiring randomly, then declared it a bad Gears of War clone.
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Nov 11, 2016 23:25
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Reiterpallasch posted:
The best thing about Vanquish is Jim Sterlings refusal to back down from calling it garbo and maybe rethink if he just didn't get it at the time.
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Nov 11, 2016 23:26
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Reiterpallasch posted:related: The saddest video game review experience i have ever seen is this little gem for the ps3 called Vanquish, a third person shooter made by platinum. As you might imagine, it's a Platinum game, so you're supposed to jetpack boost everywhere while dropping grenades on the ground as you go and do sick rocket-assisted kickflips off of enemy robots while going into slow-motion as you fly through the air and headshot more robots on the way down, then chainsaw another robot so the i-frames protect you as your jetpack recharges. Unfortunately, it also has a "press A to cower behind a rock" button, so basically every reviewer ever played the game by hiding behind scenery for half an hour while blindfiring randomly, then declared it a bad Gears of War clone.
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Nov 11, 2016 23:36
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Artix posted:The first Sazh/Vanille section is to teach you that Saboteurs are almost as good as Commandos at stopping the stagger gauge (with a side helping of making you figure out how to stagger folks with double Ravagers). FF13 is actually really good about making you learn by doing rather than shove a giant tutorial in your face, but the things it does give you a tutorial for are borderline useless and it doesn't tell you a lot of poo poo it really should. I think it would've gone better if they put you in control of Vanille to teach that though. If she gets lucky getting debuffs to land, she'll switch targets quickly then do nothing so staggering could still be hard, if I'm remembering the SAB AI properly. Or you can be the type of person who does SYN/SAB to RAV/RAV to get the buffs and debuffs out of the way quickly and never stumble upon RAV/SAB, although there are only 6 possible paradigm combinations at that point so you probably should be trying it eventually. It also immediately follows up with the 3 way battles where you could mix up the SABs stagger effects with what the other enemies are doing since they also act as COMs a little for staggering. I honestly did enjoy when the game was subtle in teaching something, it just contrasts so wildly with the over explained simple stuff it seemed unintentional at times. pichupal fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Nov 11, 2016 |
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Nov 11, 2016 23:48
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Reiterpallasch posted:I enjoyed LR, but a lot of the beauty of FF13 is how the party's strength and available abilities is fairly closely controlled to make for interesting fights. The devs clearly knew exactly how much damage/healing a party could do at the correct point in the story for any given boss fights, and at least tried to make intelligent decisions based on that. Neither 13-2 or LR have that kind of design rigor, and it really eats at me. To be fair you are intended to use cover and there are several mechanics to make use of it in unique ways. It just didn't click with a lot of folks the purpose of those mechanics was to make exiting cover to shoot robots from point blank range then kick flip off their corpses more fluid and easy since there aren't any other game in the genre with those mechanics where you do that.
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Nov 11, 2016 23:49
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