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Aegius_NaTL

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  • Pronouns
    He/Him
  • Interests
    Games and music and writing and history
  • Location
    USA

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  • Favorite Fire Emblem Game
    Genealogy of the Holy War

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  1. The links should be working now. Let me know if there are any issues.
  2. Apologies for the delay, I mainly check FEU. I believe you killed Calis instead of recruiting him (Dark Mage toward bottom left of map). Recruiting him is a requirement to finish the level. I think I was going to implement a function to force a Game Over if you kill him, but I decided that was a bit mean and should instead try to figure out another way to force you to recruit him. Then I guess I forgot about it! Thanks for bringing this up, I'll review how it's set-up and add additional functionality to make it less unfair. I'm not sure what this is referring to. The Privateer (Pirate) class has a generic class card. Or did you mean something else? EDIT: Oh I think I see what you mean. There's a character portrait that kinda looks like Sailor Uranus (as I've discovered upon Googling "Sailor Uranus") - one of the judges from the beginning of the game. That portrait was taken right out of the large art repository on Google Drive. I had no idea who it was supposed to be lol.
  3. I was a bit concerned with this in Valhalla after seeing the initial trailers/interviews. AC is no stranger to revisionism, but Valhalla is probably the most excessive it its perpetration among the series. From weaponry to armor to culture to architecture, the game misses the mark quite a bit. One of my big problems is the complete lack of mention or representation of slaves (tbf, I'm not even half way through this very long game yet, so maybe this will happen?). Slaves were a huge part of society in this era, and to exclude the aspect entirely is pretty poor. The game does get right the fact that the relationship between Saxons and Vikings was complicated, with each side having internal factions that would ally with like-minded folks on the other side. I am enjoying the game overall and just trying to appreciate it for what it is: a theme park in 9th century England in which I can (sort of) roleplay a member of the Assassin's Brotherhood. Also, those of you shunning Ubisoft games on principle, I hope you do the same for other companies with anti-consumer and/or offensive policies. That would include Nintendo, Sony, Riot, and others. I'd also add that the team that built Valhalla is comprised of hundreds (or more) of individuals of varying professional levels and varying personal demographics and views - seems a bit unfair to discount their work because some executives were backwards morons.
  4. Oh man, there are some good ones, that's for sure. That VS XIII one is great. The very best: Runner up: Third place: Honorable mention to literally every other AC trailer because they're all varying degrees of great. EDIT: Oh right... 'why they're good.' Well, the first one is a reference to a monumental narrative moment for Geralt from the books. It sort of emblemizes his conflicting journey toward being a helper of the people rather than an emotionless bounty hunter. The ending of him saying "killing monsters" makes it doubly more powerful. It's actually a "quieter" trailer and not as over-the-top as something like VS XIII or AC3, but I think it doesn't necessarily need to be that involved visually. The AC trailers are always nuts. 3's and Brotherhood's are great at telling a contained story and referencing the overarching narrative at the same time, while maintaining maximum badassery. There are a number of AC trailers I could have posted instead of those two, like Revelations', Unity's, and 4's.
  5. I'm about one hour into AC Valhalla. Liking it a lot so far. My biggest problem with Odyssey was the weightless combat and "bullet sponge" enemies. It's slightly improved in ACV (though, still not where I'd like it to be tbh). Can't comment much on the open world yet. I've heard it's more concentrated and less copy/pasted than Odyssey... fingers crossed. I am kind of disappointed with the combat animations. It looks like you use the same animations for both single wielding and dual wielding. Maybe as you get more abilities, it will be become varied. We'll see. Still pretty early, but overall I'm optimistic and liking it. EDIT: Had some more time with the game. My new biggest gripe by far: the audio quality. It's horrendous. It's almost inexplicable how a AAA company shipped something with this level of audio degradation. I'm staggered and a quite a bit annoyed. It's very jarring. It's hard to explain without hearing it - but the environmental/ambient audio is the worst quality audio I've ever heard in a AAA game. Heck it's worse than most indie games and movies I've played/watched. Hoping for a HQ audio pack that isn't as poorly compressed (FWIW, the voice audio is mostly passable).
  6. Coincidentally, I'm currently finishing the Odyssey DLC in prep for Valhalla. I also decided to finally play Syndicate, since I had skipped it in the aftermath of the Unity debacle. Origins' "live service" component was wholly ignorable and added very little to the game (not counting the paid DLCs). Odyssey improved a bit in that area, with The Lost Tales of Greece - but both are just attempts to extract MTX from you. Odyssey's grind and XP curve were particularly built for that. I would recommend buying The Fate of Atlantis DLC for Odyssey. It has a decent amount of interesting content, and it will very likely relate to Valhalla's story. You can definitely skip Odyssey's first DLC (Legacy of the First Blade, or something like that) - it's horrible. It's a totally self-contained story with some of the worst writing I've ever seen in gaming. I was a bit disappointed that Odyssey didn't go more in-depth with the Peloponnesian War. Very few pieces of popular media portray this era in history, and I was excited to be a fly on the wall for all of the major beats from ~430 - 405. But the game really only covers the first 1/3 of the war and not that comprehensively. I have an AMD reward code for Valhalla, but I haven't gotten the Season Pass yet. Probably will though. On the direct topic of the thread though, I am surprised to be enjoying Syndicate as much as I am. I do find myself in the camp of people who feel the newer AC games should be their own spin-off franchise, and the older formula should remain as Assassin's Creed. I wouldn't mind if they are still in the same universe and have related lore, but Origins and Odyssey are barely Assassin's Creed games (both in content and gameplay). You don't really play as an Assassin in either game (you do "assassinate" people, but you're not a member of the Assassin's Brotherhood, which was the initial basis for the entire franchise). Also, the modern day story has been wrecked by carelessness and needs a reboot to the point right after Desmond... ya know. Anyway, Syndicate is a breath of fresh air to me. It's much simpler than Unity - it's almost like the essence of what an AC game is (or used to be). It has a fairly simple gameplay loop, but it's fun and rewarding. Whereas I haven't been able to finish Unity, I think I will finish Syndicate.
  7. Huh. Why was the Chinese government even intimately enough involved in this random FF game's development to know the premise? Is there something in Chinese folklore/culture that makes receiving power/energy from darkness/death a taboo? What was their problem with this story?
  8. Great call. Back in the mid/late 2000's, I remember them talking about integrating land and space combat in the same map. Fast forward to 2020, and Battlefront II (2017) has not even implemented that, as far as I'm aware. I think it's perhaps more feasible with the new console hardware. So we'll see.
  9. Star Wars 1313 is the first that comes to mind (usually gets mentioned in this discussion). The vertical slice looked really cool, and having a non-Jedi game is always fun.
  10. This is the one PS exclusive I'm actually angry that I can't play. I'm considering buying a PS4 just to play GoT and then to sell it right after. Kind of hoping they upgrade it for PS5 and do a PC release along with it... but that's unlikely (well, the second part is unlikely). The very fun, although quite dated, Way of the Samurai 4 is the closest I'm getting. 😕
  11. Not sure if this thread has been done before, but I thought it may be interesting to have something a bit opposite of the "games that disappointed you" thread. To start: Way of the Samurai 4. It's hilarious, the combat is pretty satisfying, and it has insane replayability and MANY character/skill builds. I didn't expect much from it - I had barely remembered playing the first or maybe second one on PS.. 2? 1? can't remember, and I saw it on the Steam store. Was very happy with my purchase. Put about 35 hours on it and there is definitely more content I didn't get to. Would recommend if you're into the samurai thing.
  12. I'm sure we've all heard this track a million times, but I hadn't seen this orchestral rendition:
  13. On normal mode I was able to get every chest/village and still not lose gold. I think I just need to adjust the thresholds by +3/4 turns for hard mode. I have your save file, so I'll check what your turn counts have been up through Ch 11. Once I gather more data and amend the values for hard mode, I'll post it in the top post (along with growths and promotions in a few hours, in a new "Data" section or something like that). For now, here are the turn thresholds in which you start losing money, for the rest of your game: Chapter 20: 21 turns or higher Chapter 21: 21 turns or higher The wall thing is weird... sometimes breakable walls just don't work, and I don't have any idea as to why - this didn't start happening until my most recent playthrough a week or so ago. I'm not at the limit for objects, and usually they work if you just restart the chapter. Generally, it's probably not worth it to restart the chapter just for a wall or two, but the fact that a restart resolves it, points to something being odd for sure. It's on the list to debug. I initially had notes on Eve's and Sythe's promotions in General Notes, but I cut that part out in an effort to shorten this (already quite long) post. I'll bring this info back. Eve should grow to be pretty strong. She also has access to a special set of swords - the Energy Swords, you may have seen them. Tbh, the sword thing did not end up being as useful as I imagined/hoped, and during testing I ended up mainly using her as a battle-focused sage-type. Her growths (and Sythe's too) should justify leveling them. But, Anni or the sage you get around Ch 15 can probably be just as good. Really, I just wanted an excuse to use those Celica animations. EDIT: Just uploaded the growths sheet... Eve's growths are a bit lower than I thought they were. I will be increasing them for the next version, and I'll update the sheet when it releases. XP gain is complicated. It's a bit of trial/error to get it right too. From a philosophy standpoint, I also like the idea of leveling up a lot. Killing an enemy in the vanilla games and getting 15 experience or 3 or 4 (if you're promoted) always annoyed me a bit; like it's not enough XP to even warrant the kill. So I attempted to have fairly generous XP gains and have fairly buffed enemies compared to regular FE8 to compensate for the player party's growth. As you get into the game's third act, enemies should get tougher. See if you think this balances out the XP gain. I imagine you'll have 3 or 4ish player units at the level cap right around the last few chapters. Another factor in all of this is hard mode - I think there's additional XP stuff that goes on in hard, so it may be that I need to tone down hard mode bonuses (if those exist? I can't remember). If you choose to favor a unit or two who become unstoppable and relegate the other 8/10 slots to just supporting them, I'm okay with that. But if all of your units are naturally becoming behemoths without you doing it on purpose - yeah that's not what I intended. Enemies should start getting tougher where you are currently though, so see if that justifies the player party progression. Those extra units are a very simple "bug" actually. They're the helpers from when Aaron promoted. I thought I deleted them, but it seems not. I've changed it now for the next version. You can just ignore them - you won't get close to reaching the party limit anyway. Hero Crest thing is another simple bug, fixed for the next version. Thanks for reporting it.
  14. Thank you for the notes. What would you recommend for Bastila and/or Reed in terms of classing? Or, what did you feel was noticeably missing (aside from a healer)? I've found that Bastila is consistently pretty useful - Reed has been hit or miss on my playthroughs. Vulneraries are meant to be the main method of healing until you get a T2 promoted magic unit. There should be plenty of Vulneraries, but let me know if you feel there hasn't been enough. The script measures about the same as FE8 - around 40,000 words (not counting Supports). That dialogue sequence at the end of Ch 9 is one of two long ones - I'm guessing that one is what prompted this note (mostly). There's only one more exchange that is similarly long. I can look at pacing again though as I continue to polish and take feedback. Portraits are all splices done by me (well, a few exceptions - you can probably tell which are mine and which are from the mug respository). Some are passable, some definitely need touching up. I learned splicing for this project as I went about building the game. I may re-splice some of the poorer ones. If you try to get the Boots, the chapter is supposed to get almost unreasonably hard. I think that's a fair trade-off for giving you Boots so early - someone tested the game on hard mode, and they were able to get the boots. Personally, I recommended just doing the chapter without going for the Boots (and this is how I play it every time - except for one test run). I sort of took inspiration from TLP on this - which also has early game Boots available, but are very difficult (or maybe impossible?) to get. If you can, let me know which chapters you felt were unfairly punitive in the economy system. I tried to lean generous, but I guess this is the kind of thing that needs more than 1 or 2 people testing it to make sure it's fair. Be careful about arena abusing - you may end up losing the gold you think you're earning. As a bit of a failsafe, there is also a way to get 50K gold by simply visiting two villages in two different chapters (did you get the Note in Ch 8)? If you feel it's continuously unfair and you're struggling to buy basic weapons/items, send me your save and I'll raid the imperial treasury myself for funds. I can draft growths and promotion paths tonight or tomorrow; will do. I sort of jokingly consider Tethes more of a Siegfried than a Jeigan. And Tethes not only has good growths, but he should also get XP gain similar to the unpromoted units. He's not meant to be Marcus or Seth soloing the game, but he's definitely worth investing in if you like the character/animations or have a use for what he offers in your party.
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