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Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]

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Someday theres going to be a video game RPG with destructible environment aspects built in so you can do to doors and walls what you do to monsters (and get fined appropriately) and itll blow everybody's minds

Tbh it feels like a Bethesda Sandbox type mechanic, or would if not for their marriage to an engine that cant do it
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
Someday theres going to be a video game RPG with destructible environment aspects built in so you can do to doors and walls what you do to monsters (and get fined appropriately) and itll blow everybody's minds

Tbh it feels like a Bethesda Sandbox type mechanic, or would if not for their marriage to an engine that cant do it
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did someone say red faction revival

because i heard red faction revival
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
Someday theres going to be a video game RPG with destructible environment aspects built in so you can do to doors and walls what you do to monsters (and get fined appropriately) and itll blow everybody's minds
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That kind of highly interaction-heavy environment is probably already possible, it'd just require the creators to work at a level of graphic that current trends have banished from commercial viability.

The original Deus Ex in 2000 had nearly every door that could be interacted with be given a durability in just this manner (with every door that wasn't indestructible being, by definition, possible to destroy), and extended the effect to mostly every sewer/air duct grate and window in the game. That's still relatively limited, but it shows that something like it would be possible with today's technology.

I imagine that, if you set your RPG in a relatively small, enclosed location (such as a single town, like in Vagrant Story, or perhaps a single space-ship, or a single castle - something of that sort), it would be possible to include a lot more interaction mechanics into the environment than the Deus Ex developers were able to do a quarter of a century ago on much less powerful hardware.
 
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Zap Rowsdower said:
Someday theres going to be a video game RPG with destructible environment aspects built in so you can do to doors and walls what you do to monsters (and get fined appropriately) and itll blow everybody's minds

Tbh it feels like a Bethesda Sandbox type mechanic, or would if not for their marriage to an engine that cant do it
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This is kinda what the immersive sim genre is built around, isn't it? It's a genre designed to push buttons in the brains of people who ask "why can Cloud stab a building-sized robot to death but not break open a barred wooden door?" by letting them put points into Strength and then having the door be an interactive object that can be broken through with sufficient strength.

It's not perfect by any means, video games by design can't be freeform because of the limits of programming, but playing, for instance, Prey (2017), there is a tremendous amount of intent put into making traversal ability- and object-dependent, such that when you find yourself thinking "can I use my abilities to just Go There" there's a good chance that you find that you can use, say, the Goo Gun and your ranks in Jumping to reach this impossibly high place and bypass that locked door or those hostile turrets.

When it comes to RPG, it's what Larian seems to have spent no small effort attempting with Baldur's Gate 3. I got distracted by other stuff and so never went that far, but when the game gives you a jumping ability, you can in fact use it to jump and reach strange places, and when a door is locked, you might find that you have the strength to bash through it.

There's a... complicated negotiation effort through it all. In a way, the more freedom you give your player, the more you draw attention to the part where that freedom is restricted. If the game is absolutely railroaded, then the player must simply grudgingly accept the rails, and on the plus side, doesn't find themselves wondering if this obstacle could be bypassed by clever navigation and use of abilities, because the game has clearly signposted that it was impossible: Every wooden door is as strong as an armored vault safe, every waist-high fence is as impassable as a twenty-feet wall of granite, and the game never deviates, so you can just accept that and roll with it. On the other hand, if many doors can be punched through with strength, then the one door that can't because it would break the plot draws immense attention to itself, and its experience is all the more frustrating for the freedom that surrounds it, and if jumping can get you over most waist-high walls then it's only stranger when you run into some invisible wall somewhere else.

Games deal with this contradiction more or less gracefully, and players have a different tolerance for them. I know people who find the BG3 approach only more frustrating than the FF7 approach, because BG3 gestures at the idea of being adaptive and responsive to player creativity but definitionally can never be as creative as a human GM and so the closer it tries to approach it the more attention it draws to its own limitation. Myself, I find the layer of abstraction that makes my characters' abilities real to the gameplay but not to the narrative in a way that leaves me wondering "okay, but what can Cloud actually do?" endlessly frustrating, and I've merely learned to put a muzzle on it and let me distract me minimally over the decades because that's just how 90% of all video games work and I couldn't play them if I let it stop me.
 
Thats easy enough, if you dont want a door to be breakable just put in a canned message about it being load-bearing, so if you damage it the frame cracks and you get a game over as the roof falls on you.

That would in no way get tedious.
 
Omicron said:
This is kinda what the immersive sim genre is built around, isn't it? It's a genre designed to push buttons in the brains of people who ask "why can Cloud stab a building-sized robot to death but not break open a barred wooden door?" by letting them put points into Strength and then having the door be an interactive object that can be broken through with sufficient strength.
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Having recently completed the Wutai sequence, I am once again reminded of how a party which has multiple members who can jump fifty feet in the air and lift entire colossally sized enemies cannot, in fact, step over a cat.
 
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It's even more absurd when you consider supplemental sources.

How summons and similar things work in world, apparently:
"The target gets drawn into basically a dimensional pocket where the summon does it's thing. So it's apparently not just abstraction and pretty effects, the turtle monster or whatever you're Fighting just got ripped into the air, dragged by a super dragon, and still wants a piece of you. And our party is on a comparable or greater level than the summons, so ya know."

Even discounting that, final fantasy and other games have almost universally struggled with protagonist powers in cutscenes vs. In gameplay. Sometimes vastly more powerful in cutscenes, sometimes vastly more powerful in gameplay...sometimes inconsistent and stronger and weaker in either or depending on what the plot demands.


Just a question of how far it goes and personal ability to suspension of disbelief, I guess.


Forget punching out scarlet, Saitama style, for all intents and purposes Tifa should have been able to dolphin blow her way out of the room unless the gassing knocked her down to non-jrpg levels...

Which I guess also explains why she was weak enough for scarlet to try and throw hands, tho weak Tifa vs scarlet still shoulda been Tifa styling on her with...kickboxing? Whatever she uses.
 
Cirina said:
I'm now kind of wondering, was there anything stopping you from just like, walking back into Midgar and checking on Marlene at any point during this? I can't actually remember if it's inaccessible after you leave it or not.
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There's this person who was super pissed that you stole the motorcycle and truck that he put a lot of effort into making so very clean because he was very proud of that and so Cloud and Co. decided it just wasn't worth the risk of running into them and wisely stayed far, far away from Midgar.
 
Omicron said:
There's a... complicated negotiation effort through it all. In a way, the more freedom you give your player, the more you draw attention to the part where that freedom is restricted.
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This actually is why I am never going to buy Phoenix Point.

Idle animations having mechanical impact in a turn based game is a knockout blow to my SOD.
 
21stCentury said:
what? Phoenix Point is that Xcomlike game, right? what's the idle animation thing?
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Basically, when shooting you have the option to manually aim your shoots, letting you have more control over accuracy... but enemies are still doing their idle animations when you're aiming/shooting, which can make some enemies hitboxes shift out of where you're aiming.
 
Jakobstj said:
Basically, when shooting you have the option to manually aim your shoots, letting you have more control over accuracy... but enemies are still doing their idle animations when you're aiming/shooting, which can make some enemies hitboxes shift out of where you're aiming.
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But that's optional, right?

Like, you still can have the diceroll?
 
BaseDeltaZero said:
Nope. The 'diceroll' is like World of Tanks' diceroll, it only determines where in the circle your shot falls. There's an 'auto-shot' mode but that just makes the soldier automatically aim center mass on the target and does the same thing.
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hmm

well, then, that makes it like vallyria chronicles, i suppose. A fine game to emulate
 
*checks date*

Dammit, I missed my chance to do a special Halloween "Horror in Final Fantasy" mini-essay that I'd been vaguely thinking about. I always forget about Halloween until it's already happened because it's not that big here.

Well, you might have an update later today, though sadly not an Halloween-themed one.
 
Omicron said:
*checks date*

Dammit, I missed my chance to do a special Halloween "Horror in Final Fantasy" mini-essay that I'd been vaguely thinking about. I always forget about Halloween until it's already happened because it's not that big here.

Well, you might have an update later today, though sadly not an Halloween-themed one.
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Don't worry, just write one up and save it for next year since you'll probably still be doing this.
:p
 
Cypocryphy said:
Shameful. I take back anything nice I've ever said about the French.
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Every year towards the end of October, you're guaranteed to see at least one news report on a major channel about how "Halloween used to not matter/not exist here until it was imported from the US in the 80s through the influence of Hollywood." I mean, once you've seen one you've seen them all since there isn't that much to say about the topic, but a bunch of people who pointedly remember not putting on costumes on October 31st as children are insistent on reminding you every year how this is a newfangled American thing that didn't exist in their youth when they went to school uphill both ways in the snow :V
 
Omicron said:
I always forget about Halloween until it's already happened because it's not that big here.
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Same in Australia actually, though it has become more of a thing. My Mum usually explains her disinterest in Halloween with 'it's an American thing' too, even if it's technically an Irish thing. The Internet however is pretty good at reminding me of the spooky season anyway.

I at least remembered to dress my Quest MC up as Mary Poppins though
 
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