The Gaming Den

https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/p ... gy-switch/

It looks like we might be seeing a real successor to the Ogre Battle / Final Fantasy Tactics style tactical RPG next year. The TS demo is supposed to be around 5 hours, and a significant part of that is research and lobbying to get votes to go the way you want. Meaningful choices in and out of battle that can affect who ends up on your team and how the story goes. In battle, you can use magic to make some meaningful changes to battlefield, and ice walls matter a LOT when flanking and backstabs could mean double the damage.

Anyone tried this out? Any thoughts about what it might mean for tactical RPGs going forward? I am tentatively excited, it seems like they've been paying to the successes of recent Divinity and Fire Emblem games.

Sounds like a good pitch, but why did they make the terrible mistake of copying Octopath Traveler's artstyle instead of making it look like a real game?

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:Sounds like a good pitch, but why did they make the terrible mistake of copying Octopath Traveler's artstyle instead of making it look like a real game?

https://www.pocketgamer.biz/asia/news/7 ... ion-sales/

If you have a point to make besides appealing to me based on its sales, make it. Because I don't give a shit how much money it made, the graphics are hideous.

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:If you have a point to make besides appealing to me based on its sales, make it. Because I don't give a shit how much money it made, the graphics are hideous.

You asked me why they made an artistic choice. I answered. Happy to help!

In other news, it looks like the job system might be leaning towards having everyone in a unique class rather than having you swapping people's class through a pool of generic options. If that follows through, it seems unlikely that you'll be recruiting generic soldiers. A bit of a shift from the FFT/TA/Disgaea approach, but I suppose that it makes sense if they are emphasizing having to lobby people to vote your way.

I like the octopath look

I love Octopath's engine. I just don't love the game's AAA price tag.

I've heard it argued that the 3 Convictions aren't THAT much different from a law/chaos/neutral path, but I'm interested in the way you can absolutely make smaller choices that influence the way things go. Exploration phase decisions can unlock special options in combat maps later on, and mutually exclusive recruitments could change party composition a bit.

If they have another year to iterate on what is present in the demo, I hope we'll be able to see more than just 3 choices of ending. The PSP Tactics Ogre did some very impressive stuff with layers of sidequests you could unearth revisiting old areas.

Hmm... if you are making a bunch of mutually exclusive choices, that might make new game + end up pretty weird. Three Houses managed to pull it off, that's probably a decent benchmark to hope they'll hit. And hey, if that's their competition, there's more than 3 routes in 3H.

Dogbert wrote:I love Octopath's engine. I just don't love the game's AAA price tag.

Is that an objection to AAA pricing when combined with pixel art, or an objection to AAA pricing in general no matter the other circumstances?

'cause the latter I can get behind.

I downloaded the demo and made a shocking discovery that will shake the Den to the core: Wizards rule, Fighters drool.


Seriously though, what were they thinking with Corentin? Technically he's a water bender but he performs like a house of fire. He has at-will choke point control that doubles as an experience dance and his ability to gain extra TP by standing on the ice patches he generates allows him to break the resource management system over his knee. On that "resort to traps to stem the tide" map I just ignored the gimmick and locked everything down with ice walls instead. The one time they threatened to ruin things with bullshit spawning reinforcements I just had the strategist push Corentin back up the turn order and dropped a second ice wall ahead of schedule. And since Corentin has positive TP flow during all that bullshit I topped that off by nuking people with ice magic and doing a touch down dance because Corentin was now higher level than anything left on the map.

Omegonthesane wrote:Is that an objection to AAA pricing when combined with pixel art, or an objection to AAA pricing in general no matter the other circumstances?

I haven't paid full list price for a AAA game in perhaps a decade (with a single exception), I find it morally objectionable to pay $60 for a game when 90% of "production costs" are marketing. Granted, I won't deny that lacking AAA production values will make me doubly disinclined to pay such price. I probably wouldn't have bought Streets of Rage 4 on release day if the price tag had been 60 dollars.

The great thing about Switch games is that Switch emulation is pretty decent for a system that's currently released. I look forward to trying this and FE 3H in a year or so... ideally with hacks to remove all the nonsensical blur that ruins the game's style.
I still can't believe Octopath Traveler had depth of fucking field that I had to mod to remove. DoF on a fucking "pixel" game! People are insane!

Last PC game I bought was the cartoon skin for StarCraft. No, not the 3d one, the 20+ year old one.

Before that was Deadpool for about 20-something USD, Mass Effect 2 (complete shit) for 5 USD, and Dragon's Crown for ehhh 50 I guess?
All PS3.

So yes, this Octo-whatever Tactics clone looks nice, they talk the talk in the video, and show all the fancy battles, but knowing how this damned company works it'll be 90% reading pages of background just to get a new character ability, running through empty towns, or outright option paralysis when you have so many choices x number of characters.

The funny thing about this Octopoop being a caster game is that this is the diametric opposite of the ol' FF Tactics, where Knight/Ninjas dual wielding legendary swords, Monk (attack power and evasion rates scale with level, oddly), and Thieves (Charm at will, anyone? Yoink their weapon right out of their hand?) rule supreme against the slow, underarmored, late-to-cast mage types.
Sure, a Time mage might have good buffs, but you're better off with another Knight in your group.
A summoner might, after a slow turn or two, pull off a powerful Bahamit or whatever, but they're pretty much done for the rest of the battle unless you use multiple mana potions, which waste even MORE time, aaaaand you're better off with aforementioned Kinght hacking away at whatever monstrosity you have to take down.

JonSetanta wrote: ↑

Wed Nov 03, 2021 3:04 am

The funny thing about this Octopoop being a caster game is that this is the diametric opposite of the ol' FF Tactics, where Knight/Ninjas dual wielding legendary swords, Monk (attack power and evasion rates scale with level, oddly), and Thieves (Charm at will, anyone? Yoink their weapon right out of their hand?) rule supreme against the slow, underarmored, late-to-cast mage types.

Your take that physical classes rule the battlefield is a common one but it's born of the pernicious notion that endgame optimization is particularly necessary and that frontliners/balanced teams are desirable. And yes, it's actually true that the specific caster classes you mentioned are kinda sad. But you know what isn't sad? Black fucking magic. When deployed en masse black mages are the most jp efficient murder machines in the entire game. If you can afford to unlock Black Mages at all--which you can, they're a tier 2 fuckin' class--then you can afford AoE ranged elemental damage that is quick to cast and has low MP costs. You can seriously just ride those spells until you get Flare, the non-elemental damage boss killer of choice. Sure, it's slow and it's expensive, but it kills whatever it hits pretty much irrespective of what gear you have equipped and you can have unlocked it before Dual Wield is ever even a twinkle in a Ninja's eye. That's seriously enough to speedrun the game with but if you do care to optimize further then it's worth noting that it's the mage path which unlocks being a Calculator and being a Black Mage with Auto Potion and the ability to do some basic maths just makes you better than other people.

Ah yes Autopotion, the ability I neglected back in the 90s.

If D&D had an ability like that it would read "You may drink a potion as an Immediate Action" and literally no one would die until they ran out of potions.