FE8: Fire Emblem: Sacred Redesign

[Tables]

Firstly, sorry for posting in the wrong place. Wasn't paying attention. Secondly, sorry for the horrendous name. Up until now it's been called 'hack v1.0x', and it was only about 10 minutes before making this post I realised a name was needed ¬_¬. I'll almost certainly change it by the patches final release.

Moving on, this patch is one I've been working on for about 5-6 weeks now and I hope a number of people will enjoy. I'll list some more of the development story later but for now here's a concise list of the main changes:

Perhaps most importantly, I have tried to make every character roughly balanced in terms of overall usefulness (Seth now sucks lategame for example).

On a similar note to the above, weapons are hopefully more balanced now too: swords have their own, easily available ranged weapons and bows have a 1-2 range option. Dark magic no longer sucks, and generally everything has been changed around to make it more even.

The max level has been raised to 30, but at the 'cost' (read on...) of no promotion. This has been inspired by FE4, and on a similar note I've hopefully encouraged the use of a fairly large party rather than solo attempts, to at least some degree. I'm not sure exactly, but I think there's enough exp to raise a team of around 15 up to level 30 by the end of the game.

The no promotion means there are a lot more classes to play with 37 human classes, plus an extra 18 monster classes, each with their own unique sets of weapons, stat caps and skills. Of course, this also means all classes like Cavalier's and Paladins are equivalent in terms of power, so I've been careful to make sure that every class is unique.

With so many classes available, it made sense to make everyone their own class. There are no huge changes; the largest change is probably Duessel, and you'll find that one out if you pay attention to cutscenes.

Obligatory difficulty bump. I've aimed for roughly Hector's mode difficulty - HNM on normal and HHM on Hard. I think so far they're a little above that though.

Classes have been split into 5 tiers of power. While this doesn't affect playable characters, or bosses, it does mean generics are of slightly varying power levels. Why have I done this, you may ask? Two reasons: firstly, I can make enemies get stronger as the game progresses without inflating levels too much, and following on from that, I have less options to consider on each chapter, meaning rather than choosing between a male or female mage or sage, I can just go for the one that fits the tier I want. It's a very subtle difference in power, but you should notice the changing variety of classes throughout the game.

While I haven't got around to it in the demo, I'm going to be adjusting supports a bit. I'm not entirely sure how yet, they'll be faster for sure but whether their general power will decrease or increase... I guess it depends on the difficulty of the game

This covers all of the main changes, I think. Of course, they imply a lot more minor changes which have happened throughout the game, like... level 21 Seth, Ewan's 465% total growth rate (Which may fall if he ends up too easy to train ), the wide variety of enemies on every chapter, the cool defence boosting Blades, archers with critical boosts, the higher value of weapons...

Unless a few people request otherwise, I'm going to edit Eirika's route first, release a second demo with that in, then finish of Ephraim's route and release the final game (maybe then doing the tower, Ruins and skirmishes, but I doubt it).

Could people who play through to the end of the demo give me some feedback about difficulty and anything else they think should be changed? It'd be great if you can

Finally, some requests:

Does anyone know how to edit text? In particular item descriptions, with the changes to the sacred twins, Luna and blade weapons, I could do with edited descriptions, and class descriptions too (because a lot are now incorrect about weapons wielded). Also, is it possible to change which enemies drop items when killed? I want to add a few more item drops in, here and there (such as Sacred Twins... just to give a little taster away). Finally, how can I edit items from houses and end of chapter events? Obviously I want to get rid of all of the promotion items, and a few others could be changed to more (or less...) useful things as well.

Patch available from: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=05FIY6W1 (for some reason, I can't upload it onto here; it's 8kB big so that's not the problem, it just won't attach. Something against .IPS files?)

[Allan's Aokage]

I don't have a Sacred Stones ROM on the computer I'm using, so I'll just point out that with Nintenlord's "retain levels" patch, you can raise the cap up to lv30 and still allow people to promote.

Just sayin'. Might try this tomorrow.

[Todasmile]

I can text edit relatively well, although it sometimes takes longer than I'd like. It's actually quite easy to learn how, with the Anti-Huffman patch.

For reference, I'm pretty good at it if I do say so myself, and I've been editing for all of... a day, maybe?

[Tables]

Allan's Aokage: Nah, having more variety in classes is worth the loss of promotion, and it's kinda one of the interesting features of the hack.

Todasmile: Are you volunteering to do some text editing, or just telling me about the patch :P? If it's just telling me, then could I have a link to it? Thanks either way though.

[Kaplan]

For text editing I'd recommend Xeld's FEditor Adv. I find it even easier than using the Anti-Huffman patch. Also you can use the item editor nightmare module to find out what the item description pointers are, which you can then enter into FEditor Adv to edit the descriptions. I've probably made it sound complicated but trust me, it's really easy to do.

EDIT: You can also use the class editor module to find the class description pointer.

EDIT2: I think if you want to change the items given in villages and at the end of chapter events you need to know how to event hack, probably using Nintenlord's event assembler. I recommend joining FEU if you haven't already and checking out their hacking boards. This thread may be of use. http://www.feuniverse.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=6321

Edited December 22, 2009 by Tambo

[Tables]

Okay, I've got the editor, and I've tried changing some text - I changed Luna's description to 'Stong against Light' (leaving the [.][X] at the end, I'm presuming it's a seperator), and as soon as I try to view Luna's description, the game freezes <_<. Any ideas what the problem is?

[Kaplan]

Okay here's what I did:

I first opened FE8 rom in nightmare and then opened FE8 Item Editor by SpyroDi.

I then scrolled down to 0x45 Luna and found the pointer 0x466 for the description.

Next I opened the rom in FEditor Adv and opened the text editor.

Then I inserted 0466 into the input index box and the item description for Luna appeared.

I changed "Negates enemy resistance.[.][X]" to "Strong against Light.[.][X]", clicked apply then save.

I then closed FEditor Adv and used Nightmare so Eirika starts with Luna, but I won't go into detail about that.

I then started the game with VBA. On the prologue I went into Eirika's items and checked the description for Luna.

My results:

It worked perfectly, no freezing at all.

If you did exactly the same as me then what could have possible went wrong is you aren't using the American rom? The rom I'm using is 1997 - Fire Emblem - The Sacred Stones (U).

Edited December 22, 2009 by Tambo

[Tables]

Yeah, exactly the same thing. I don't know if it's the American rom or not, probably is, but it had a different name when I got it so... (trm fess I think). I'll try again, see what happens.

Edit: Okay, I tried it on the newest version of the hack and it froze again, so then I decided to try it on my original copy - that worked. So the conclusion I have to draw is: . And I have an idea what the problem is (I temporarily changed Luna's description pointer, although I'm not sure how that would affect it...)

Edit2: Okay, it seems that if I apply the patch and then edit from there it works fine. No idea why. Oh well, it works, I suppose.

Edited December 22, 2009 by I eat tables

[Tables]

I have to wonder... is anyone actually playing this? I'm not going to change things any further unless people are actually going to play it.

[Ether]

So,is all of the editing done,and your just doing asthetics now?Because that's the only reason I haven;t tried it yet,i wanted to know if all the gameplay changes were done.

[Tables]

Up to the end of chapter 8, and bar slightly faster supports and either getting rid of promotion items from villages and houses, or implementing some sort of promotion or class change feature, everything is done. Also some small changes might happen (balance stuff like making people weaker/stronger etc.)