Aegius_NaTL

The links should be working now. Let me know if there are any issues.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

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. 😕

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.

I'm sure we've all heard this track a million times, but I hadn't seen this orchestral rendition:

😉

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.

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.

It looks like the mercenary up there may be the cause of this problem; others are now reporting it too. This new version should fix it - I've just removed that mercenary, for the moment. I have to go out for a bit now, but I'll look at it more in-depth when I return. If you don't want to restart the chapter, send me your save, and I can get you setup at that point so it isn't freezing. Also, it seems some people are able to circumvent this issue by just not moving the cursor near that mercenary; may or may not work for you.

Yeah that's a potential problem that I thought, "eh, no one will kill the soldier that quickly anyway." Guess I was wrong. A fix for it isn't too difficult, I will implement it for the next version. Looks like you got passed it. In this case, if you could send me your battery state or save file, I can look into it. This freezing hasn't been reported before. As I said to Bilal too, please try another emulator if you have a save nearby. Otherwise, I can debug and look into it today/tonight.

Huh, I have not seen this issue reported before. If you could send me your save, I will look into it today. I'd also recommend trying on another emulator - testers said Chapter 11 didn't work on mgba, maybe there are other similar issues.

Good afternoon everyone, I've been working on this FE8 hack for about 10 months. I plan to continue polishing it, especially as more people play, but it is definitely feature and content complete. There’s a lot to read here, but none of it is truly necessary to play and (hopefully) enjoy the hack. If you do play the hack, I’d recommend at least reading through ‘General Notes,’ ‘Major Changes from FE8,’ ‘Chapter-specific Notes,’ and ‘Spoils of War.’ And maybe ‘Known Issues’ too. Please be mindful of spoilers and use tags to hide comments where appropriate. In addition to the 'main hack,' I built a short prequel which details relevant world history. It is two chapters long, and more information about it can be found in the prequel archives below. Main hack, version: 10422-1 Prequel, version: 10422 (note: Ch1 is a forced loss - Kenner's death triggers the ending, or allowing the enemy general to arrive at the throne room does too. The former should take about 15 minutes, with the latter taking a bit longer) General Notes Major Changes from FE8 Data (growths, recruitment, etc.) Relevant Lore (including world map) Chapter-specific Notes and Recruitment Spoils of War Screenshots and Trailer Known Issues Atrocity of Love - prequel archive Prequel lore overview archive Credits

"There are problems in X area" does not mitigate the fact that "there are problem in Y area." And if you really want to keep up this comparison: the nature of the auto market is inherently more expensive. Cars are more expensive than video games; it doesn't take a mathematician or economist to surmise that car "addiction" (or whatever you're referring to) is a more costly endeavor (on average) than participating in gacha. That said, you've spent more on gacha than I did on my last car, so your example is not totally accurate. I guess I had one of those "plebeian brands" that you noted before. Maybe I'll upgrade to "low end luxury" one of these days. We can go back and forth with anecdotes about what people spend money on, but quoting random industries' marketing practices doesn't negate the nefariousness of gacha. And 'uncertainty' is a component of the addiction for gacha, not the entire definition. The fact that gacha machines are uncertain and don't have the same addictive potential as digital games does not affirm a lack of correlating relationship. Uncertainty alone doesn't constitute addiction, but it is undeniably one of various tools that are used to facilitate addiction the case of gacha gaming. The lack of barrier of entry for sure is a big reason for gacha's market size. No doubt there. The point of a TCG is not to facilitate addictive behavior; at least, that's not how it started and was treated over the last few decades. Yes, TCG and all businesses also want you to spend your money on their product/service. We can reiterate this point in every post, but it is not the same thing as purposefully designing a service that produces and cultivates addictive behavior on the scale that gacha does. The point of gacha is to encourage recurring purchases and addictive behavior. That is not the fundamental purpose of TCG. TCG (namely, digital) and gacha have blurred in the last 5 years or so, and I don't know enough about the individual IPs or games to say which are genuinely trying to be a TCG vs. which are gacha in disguise. My suggestion for regulation would be for these digital TCGs that lean into gacha mechanics. First point, is your conjecture. And you're probably mostly wrong anyway. The point of making a game as a learning tool for a child is to make learning fun and engaging for the child. Not sure why these games aren't made by "actual developers" according to you, but purely recreational games are not substitutes for learning tools. You can still learn from purely recreational games, certainly. And btw, many "actual game developers" have also worked on non-gaming projects - that includes learning games. Software devs often have various experiences throughout their career - Larian for example, has made several children's/learning games in addition to their Divinity series. Yes, I know: businesses want to earn money and marketing exists. You're saying, "it's all business, anything goes." But the government disagrees regarding behavior that is addictive and destructive. It's a false equivalence to suggest marketing an iPhone is exactly the same as the meticulously abusive mechanics that constitute gacha. Apple products are a fad though, I agree there. I do complain about that, but most people don't want to hear it. Apple's stringent management of their environment is off-putting, and more problematically, it presents problems for the customer/user (like having to go through a stupidly workaroundy process to install apps on my iPod). I tolerate my iPod Touch, but for something like a phone or computer, I'd never bind myself to Apple's chains. No, you can't just as easily say any hobby is addictive to the same degree. Again, you are suggesting this is all equivalent. Gacha is not ubiquitous to selling a car or guitar or washing machine or whatever. It is equivalent to gambling. Any hobby could be addictive, depending on the person. But saying unregulated/unrestricted gambling is OK because collecting socks could be addictive too, isn't really a tenable defense.

Yep, that is marketing. Many companies engage in marketing that includes children as a target demographic. But selling kids miniature Lambos does not produce a meaningful potential for addiction. Gacha genuinely does target children by using knowingly deceptive and addictive practices. And car companies offer a product with certainty - you know you are getting a car, and you know roughly what specs/history it has. If you want to believe your Mustang is a mini GT, go for it. If you grow up playing Need for Speed and want to outfit your Toyota with a body kit to look like an Aston, sure, do it. There's nothing terribly deceptive or wrong about any of that. But the nature of gacha is to encourage you to continuously spend money because the company withholds details about what you are receiving and applies practices to encourage continuous spending. It is purposefully made to be ambiguous and sometimes even misleading. Car marketing (and marketing in general) can be misleading, ambiguous, and deceptive as well. But the nature of the product is generally certain, and the potential for addiction is not present. TCGs probably should be regulated to some degree, if there is a problem. But I have a few ideas regarding why it is not immediately pressing/dangerous. Since the TCG market is pretty small compared to gacha, the conversation revolves around the far more sizable and growing market. And the act of playing a TCG is not really addictive on a general scale - the games are made to be played with a skill-level in mind. The way gacha operates is far more nefarious and large-scale. The fundamental design of a gacha game is to push the user to keep spending money. While you can spend a decent bit of cash on TCGs, their inherent goal is to facilitate a skill-based game. $0.25 arcade machines don't encourage addictive behavior on the same scale that gacha does. Physical machines are generally limited by how much you can spend: 25 cents at a time while the venue is open. Sure, you could rack up a bill of a few hundred dollars probably, if you literally spent all day doing it. But is that realistic? How big of a problem is that in society? This question goes for the TCG example as well. Yes, the potential for addiction is there, and there is uncertainty to your purchase. But in practice, do we see the same frequency of addictive behavior and potential destructiveness in TCGs that we do in gacha? Yes, every toy and game company markets to children. But when you see an ad for the new Elder Scrolls game, you know exactly what your $60 is getting you. When you see an ad for the new dinosaur figure, you know what you're getting. There is no uncertainty and no real impetus for addiction in these scenarios. Even if parents give a child $20 a week to spend, I don't think it should be permissible to allow someone under 21 to spend it on gambling; whether that's physical or digital. You wouldn't tell your middle-schooler to go spend their allowance at the casino, right? And aren't almost all of these gacha games free-to-start? That's one of their prime marketing directives: "Hey! It's free to play! No, you don't have to spend any money on it!" <4 hours of gameplay later> "To continue you need to pay" or "If you want a chance at being competitive, you have to pay" Learn about resource management and gain patience? There are games designed by teachers and learning experts that do that - this is not that. Are you really suggesting the use of gacha games to teach kids about resource management and patience? The entire point of these games is to goad the player into acquiring more digital resources via real money purchasing, because the games wear down your patience in all the ways that their market research and clinical psychologists tell them will be effective. Even if you forget about children, these games are made to be addictive. A few posts up, someone shares that they've spent "at least $500" on gacha in the last month, that they know it's sort of wrong, but they can't stop doing it. This is a singular case, but it is representative of behavior for a significant amount of people. In this case, it sounds like everything is mostly OK and the person is not overextending themselves financially (and I don't mean to levy genuine addiction accusations on them - but this highlights the genre's designedly addictive nature). Casino gambling is regulated because of its addictive nature. Why is digital gambling getting a pass? Online gambling is not even legal for US companies to operate (though US citizens technically can gamble online via websites registered elsewhere). But overall, the government has a pretty clear message about participating in gambling (due to its purposefully addictive nature, much like gacha): only in licensed jurisdictions/venues, and only for people of a certain age.

Just as an FYI, OP has switched gears and is now working on a Pokemon in FE8 hack. I much prefer the FFX project myself, but I don't think he'll be updating this or doing much work on it any time soon. The Pokemon thread is on FEU.

People tell others how to spend their money all of the time, both overtly and covertly. We are constantly being bombarded with marketing, conventional cultural wisdom, and basic financial instruction - all of which attempt to manipulate us into doing something with our money; whether that is buying one product over another, not over-consuming alcohol, advocating for using a savings account and/or investing, etc. "There are problems in other areas," is not a tenable rebuttal for investigating the question of "to what degree of wrongness exists in this topic?" Sure, some people buy cars or houses or boats or whatever, that they can't really afford. Additionally, there is a difference here: gacha genuinely does target children - car companies, banks, etc. do not. Would Mercedes sell one of their cars to a 12 year old? And just for fun: it looks like car companies generated $280b revenue last year - mobile gaming generated $50b (which was 60% of total gaming) and is projected to steadily increase for the next 5-10 years. The various projections range kind of wildly, from $60b to $130b in the next 5 years, but either way, it's not an inconsequential market. Then, why is gambling illegal in most states and for those (generally) under 21? The government stepped in and made it illegal. But it should just be up to the parents? The government feels otherwise. Are gambling laws instituted because of "arbitrary moral grounds"? Why is gambling in games different than gambling in a casino? Agreed about the debit/CCs though - giving your kid a blank cheque and thinking they won't spend it all is pretty irresponsible. That said, the addictive nature of gambling can be difficult to navigate, especially for a child. Society and government tend to view addictive behavior with some responsibility on the individual, and some shared responsibility on the entity that facilitated the addiction. Generally, both are regulated by law. And the facilitator is often the party that gets the harsher punishment. We are not the ones who brought children into this. The game designers and marketers who are literally sitting in meeting rooms trying to figure out how to make the most money from their targeted demographic are the ones who brought children into this. Fortnite's latest marketing campaign aggressively targets children and paints Apple as some draconian, overly-greedy corporation that is unfairly treating Epic, and Epic is pretending that they're some noble crusader for acquiring financial autonomy on iOS. #FreeFortnite is sickeningly targeting children, all because Epic wants more money than they are getting now. I agree that an outright ban is not warranted. I like the 2FA requirement, but there's a reason companies are averse to mandating this (same goes for online games with cheating problems) - it's another barrier to purchase/play. Companies don't care about your safety or security (unless they are legally bound to) if it cuts into their bottom line. Perhaps requiring age verification of 18 or (ideally) 21, would be prudent, for games/apps that contain real-money gambling mechanics. That's what we do for casino gambling. Why is digital gambling different? The ESRB and ESA were created by and are still largely overseen by the big game publishers. Talk about conflict of interest, eh?

I'm probably in the minority, but I use FE units based on if I: A) like their class/animations, and then B) if I like their character. I don't really pay attention to which classes/units are "A tier" or the most usable by strategy standards, because honestly most of the FE games can be played basically however you want with decent success. Optimizing a party is sort of optional. When I am allowed to post in Fan Projects, I'll be posting my completed FE8 hack - the main character is a myrmidon lord.

He is a producer. Apparently the guy who led Stormblood (I think that's the 14 expansion? I haven't played much of 14) is the director of 16.