New Interview with the Devs.

[Anacybele]

8 minutes ago, NeonZ said:

Chrom's party comes from the beginning of Awakening and Corrin comes from before the split of fates. It's very likely this Lucina also hasn't met Chrom yet, and they'll pretty much reenact their Awakening encounter. They mention redoing dialogue from the existing games in that interview too.

...Wow, that's so boring. Why would they just redo the stories from the other games instead of coming up with a new one?

[Folt]

5 minutes ago, Thane said:

And that's a ludicrous excuse for saying there are too many sword users in the game while giving swords to not one but two new protagonists. Even if this were a set rule, there would be countless ways of remedying this that are much less contrived.

Except, there might probably yet another reason to keep it that simple:

Story Modes in Musou games often have varying difficulties like Fire Emblem. We know that all mainline FE stats are used in this game. Now, imagine there'd be an unlockable Hero Mode like in Hyrule Warriors where the player should be Lv. 50-60+ (or even 70-80) before attempting the first stage or so. Now, let's say Speed increases attack speed. You have only one guy at the beginning and must go up against enemies as that guy before others join you. If they were Lance users, Myrmidons and Thieves could be among the first enemies you meet and with high Speed to make their attacks speedier at a point where you have only one person...

[Thane]

1 minute ago, Folt said:

Except, there might probably yet another reason to keep it that simple:

Story Modes in Musou games often have varying difficulties like Fire Emblem. We know that all mainline FE stats are used in this game. Now, imagine there'd be an unlockable Hero Mode like in Hyrule Warriors where the player should be Lv. 50-60+ (or even 70-80) before attempting the first stage or so. Now, let's say Speed increases attack speed. You have only one guy at the beginning and must go up against enemies as that guy before others join you. If they were Lance users, Myrmidons and Thieves could be among the first enemies you meet and with high Speed to make their attacks speedier at a point where you have only one person...

Wait, what does late game stuff have to do with the tutorial that's supposed to justify the decision of the twins' weapons?

[Folt]

2 minutes ago, Thane said:

Wait, what does late game stuff have to do with the tutorial that's supposed to justify the decision of the twins' weapons?

Because Hero Mode is going to jack up the enemies stats, probably give them higher quality weapons as well, so they are a challenge for high-level characters and the experienced players who are playing this mode to challenge themselves.

[Thane]

2 minutes ago, Folt said:

Because Hero Mode is going to jack up the enemies stats, probably give them higher quality weapons as well, so they are a challenge for high-level characters and the experienced players who are playing this mode to challenge themselves.

So, the twins need to both have swords because otherwise Hero Mode would be too challenging?

[Truthblade]

11 minutes ago, Anacybele said:

...Wow, that's so boring. Why would they just redo the stories from the other games instead of coming up with a new one?

It is not a complete redo technically, given that they are also dropping the twins in the stories, it might go in a slightly different direction. There is also the fact they get involved in the story right before Fates path split, which might result in a hypothetical "fourth path" for Fates. I also suspect it might be because certain characters (mostly villains) die after their respective stories that they would want to appear in the game. 

[Sentinel07]

2 hours ago, Luankachu said:

This interview kinda frustrates me slightly.

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"However, the twins are Lords, and while we were designing the game prologue, we wanted those who don’t really play action games to be able to properly play it too, so we wanted to create the right kind of tutorial. In that case, the enemy positions and gameplay experience would change, and it wouldn’t feel right if they would change based on the protagonists’ weapons."

This only explains why they wanted to make them the same weapon, not why they wanted to make them sword users, and it really doesn't explain why Darius is also a sword user. Heck, they could have also made the tutorial also teach about Character Switching so they wouldn't need to change the enemy positions or make us choose which Lord we want before we even experience playing with them.

"Lucina is Chrom’s child, so they have the same swordsmanship, but they will have their own uniqueness in special attacks. But when we were creating their actions, there were talks that we had to definitely change the standing loop animations between them. That’s why although their actions are the same, they have different standing loop animations."

Does that mean that aside from Specials and Standing Loop Animations, Lucina will have the exact same moveset as Chrom? That's a little disappointing.

"And the weapon type is also a big factor. When we lined up the character candidates, we didn’t have enough axe characters"

This is less frustrating and more confusing to me. I can actually think of a lot more Axe users than I can think of Lance users or Bow users. And that's counting Frederick as a Lance user.

"And since we also have the non-mounted and armored Knight that will use a spear, Great Knights shall end up appearing with an axe."

Did they really change Frederick's weapon because of one unit that won't be mounted and won't play even remotely similar?

"There were a lot of Nintendo’s titles out there so I was worried it would get buried (laughs), but I think we could convey that “these characters will be the core main characters of the game”. It’s still just about 20% of the whole contents though."

This is some really good news. I think this means that there will be somewhere between 25 and 40 characters, but I'm worried that they will end up being clones like Lucina seems to be.

{Edit: The spoiler was supposed to end here. For some reason I've been having some issues with the spoiler tags lately}

Don't get me wrong, I'm really excited for this game and I'll definetly buy it as soon as I can (which might take a while since I don't have a N3DS or a Switch) but some design decisions just rub me the wrong way.

As far as I can tell, outside of Hector, there really aren't many popular axe units. Or at least characters in which the axe is the weapon they're most known for.

[Anacybele]

1 minute ago, Truthblade said:

It is not a complete redo technically, given that they are also dropping the twins in the stories, it might go in a slightly different direction. There is also the fact they get involved in the story right before Fates path split, which might result in a hypothetical "fourth path" for Fates. I also suspect it might be because certain characters (mostly villains) die after their respective stories that they would want to appear in the game. 

Yeah, but I feel like it's still just going to be the twins thrown into the other three games' stories, which is still kind of boring. I'd rather the whole story be unique.

[Interdimensional Observer]

3 hours ago, phineas81707 said:

I will never understand the mindset of making a classic and then referencing it to infinity. And that's things like Super Mario 64 and Kirby Super Star, too.

Whatever do you mean by this? Are you criticizing the gameplay format of SM64 and KSS, or are you criticizing games that just reference them in some smaller non-gameplay-way too much?

If you mean the former, well Ninty has had Mario experiment away from the SM64 format plenty recently and them bringing it back for SMO isn't a problem because we've had 4 NSMBs and SM3DL and SM3DW. As for KSS- I think the Kirby formula, while certainly better in KSS style than Dark Matter Trilogy format or KEY, but I won't deny Kirby could use some more experimentation.

As for non-gameplay referencing, I don't see it here- care to explain?

[Jedi]

17 minutes ago, Sentinel07 said:

As far as I can tell, outside of Hector, there really aren't many popular axe units. Or at least characters in which the axe is the weapon they're most known for.

Theres an ok number, but they just happened to pick the 3 games where there aren't many popular axe users outside of Camilla, Cherche & Minerva

[Folt]

24 minutes ago, Thane said:

So, the twins need to both have swords because otherwise Hero Mode would be too challenging?

The beginning could be nightmarish if you're only one character against enemies with enough speed, and probably attack power too because Hero Mode tends to not hold back. In the Fighter's case, they'd have higher strength, but their speed would make them manageable for one character against a stage where the majority are fighters because their attacks are still inherently easier to see coming, and thus let you block or dodge out of the way of their haymakers and still inflict decent damage because they're not defensive tanks like, say, the Knight.

It's kind of like why the majority of Fire Emblem games have your sword lord face armies that's composed mostly of axe users in the early game because the sword is inherently accurate and the weapon triangle further skews the numbers to further favorize the player before upping the challenge in latter stages + Fighters and/or Brigands don't have a lot of defence.

So in this case, when you're starting out, having every possible advantage that an army of one playable character can have would let you play around, make mistakes, and familiarize yourself with the game mechanics as they are introduced to you in order to ease you into the game and learn what to do and not do in a nice, non-intimidating manner before moving on to the trials that test and further develop your skill with the game as it puts you into increasingly disadvantageous situations, but give you other advantages that compensate for this. On higher difficulties, the advantages you had in the beginning is to allow the start to be hard, but in a fair way because you have none of the possible advantages you had in latter stages.

Edited August 12, 2017 by Folt

[Thane]

1 minute ago, Folt said:

So in this case, when you're starting out, having every possible advantage would let you play around

Right.

So just don't make the tutorial enemies the Flash and you're golden. Violà, I just cleared up two sword slots for Intelligent Systems.

[Truthblade]

23 minutes ago, Anacybele said:

Yeah, but I feel like it's still just going to be the twins thrown into the other three games' stories, which is still kind of boring. I'd rather the whole story be unique.

Well when you really think about it, there isn't much of a choice. Having it take place after the games (which would be the only practical alternative) would be incredibly confusing for people who have not played those games, and might end up excluding several characters because something happened to them diring the story. Fates would also suffer the most from this because the developers would have to choose one of the three paths for Corrin to choose, which would completely destroy the idea behind Fates (by forcing a canon path on the player). Especially given that this would mostly be Lianna and Rowan's story, it would be more practical to have it overlap with the others' than invent completely new stories for each of the games, as that would technically make a new story all on its own.

(And i secretly hope the throw some shots at Fate's story)

[Anacybele]

2 minutes ago, Truthblade said:

Well when you really think about it, there isn't much of a choice. Having it take place after the games (which would be the only practical alternative) would be incredibly confusing for people who have not played those games, and might end up excluding several characters because something happened to them diring the story. Fates would also suffer the most from this because the developers would have to choose one of the three paths for Corrin to choose, which would completely destroy the idea behind Fates (by forcing a canon path on the player). Especially given that this would mostly be Lianna and Rowan's story, it would be more practical to have it overlap with the others' than invent completely new stories for each of the games, as that would technically make a new story all on its own.

(And i secretly hope the throw some shots at Fate's story)

Yes, it's fine to make it take place before the events of Awakening and Fates, but does the game HAVE to include actual scenes and dialogue from the games?

[Folt]

3 minutes ago, Thane said:

Right.

So just don't make the tutorial enemies the Flash and you're golden. Violà, I just cleared up two sword slots for Intelligent Systems.

But how much decrease in Speed would they need before they're at a managable level, especially when we already have an enemy that is perfect in every way for the beginning stages on all difficulties?

[Thane]

Just now, Folt said:

But how much decrease in Speed would they need before they're at a managable level, especially when we already have an enemy that is perfect in every way for the beginning stages on all difficulties?

I'm pretty sure you're overselling this quite a bit, not to mention overthinking things. There are countless ways they could make the tutorial more beginner-friendly in a way that doesn't negatively affect the rest of the game. 

Trust the player a tad more, mate.

[Folt]

5 minutes ago, Thane said:

I'm pretty sure you're overselling this quite a bit, not to mention overthinking things. There are countless ways they could make the tutorial more beginner-friendly in a way that doesn't negatively affect the rest of the game. 

Trust the player a tad more, mate.

Not in this case I won't.

[Thane]

Just now, Folt said:

Not in this case I won't.

So, the twins using axes/lances = new players will inevitably get squashed by an army of Speedy Gonzales? That's quite a leap of logic, and a weird way of looking at both game design and players.

[Folt]

2 minutes ago, Thane said:

So, the twins using axes/lances = new players will inevitably get squashed by an army of Speedy Gonzales? That's quite a leap of logic, and a weird way of looking at both game design and players.

No. It's simply more tedious to battle fast opponents than battling slow opponents, especially if they make up the majority of earlygame enemies. Though if we're gonna argue for the opposite of that, Knights would be a different kind of tedious.

[Jedi]

12 minutes ago, Thane said:

So, the twins using axes/lances = new players will inevitably get squashed by an army of Speedy Gonzales? That's quite a leap of logic, and a weird way of looking at both game design and players.

New players in Warriors games do tend to complain about moveset speed quite a bit (look at a number of people saying Cordelia looks really slow without having experience in the genre), so giving them faster & more controlled situations is probably a good idea, eventhough i'm not super fond of the idea. 

Edited August 12, 2017 by Jedi

[Interdimensional Observer]

4 minutes ago, Folt said:

Though if we're gonna argue for the opposite of that, Knights would be a different kind of tedious.

There is a solution you know? You know those armorless Soldiers? That god awful Lance Infantry class from numerous FEs? Which exists solely for early chapters and easy EXP feeding?

[Thane]

1 minute ago, Jedi said:

New players in Warriors games do tend to complain about moveset speed quite a bit, so giving them faster & more controlled situations is probably a good idea, eventhough i'm not super fond of the idea. 

But controlled situation does not equal the weapons both twins have to wield, that's what I'm arguing against. It feels like a very weak excuse for giving the mayo twins swords while arguing they can't implement more lords because they'd oversaturate the roster with swords.

[Folt]

1 minute ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

There is a solution you know? You know those armorless Soldiers? That god awful Lance Infantry class from numerous FEs? Which exists solely for early chapters and easy EXP feeding?

But then they'd have Axes which tend to be inherently slow and inaccurate. At that point, they'd also probably need to change Frederick's weapon back into a Lance so that you have someone with an advantage for when sword users naturally start appearing more because Chrom would still only be neutral against them at best, and it'd leave Lissa who you also get at a disadvantage.

[Jedi]

5 minutes ago, Thane said:

But controlled situation does not equal the weapons both twins have to wield, that's what I'm arguing against. It feels like a very weak excuse for giving the mayo twins swords while arguing they can't implement more lords because they'd oversaturate the roster with swords.

Yeah that excuse of theirs is kind of weak in general and feels like it was like a very poorly timed PR thing in general. 

Of course this interview interestingly had them state they didn't want Lucina so maybe it was quite a bit more true back during that time.

[Thane]

1 minute ago, Jedi said:

Yeah that excuse of theirs is kind of weak in general and feels like it was like a very poorly timed PR thing in general. 

Of course this interview interestingly had them state they didn't want Lucina so maybe it was quite a bit more true back during that time.

There are few things I'd like more than to sit down with the blokes at Intelligent Systems and have a talk. I want to know how they work and rationalize when writing and planning, because I swear they've got so many good ideas and have no idea what to do with them. It's always one step forward and two steps back with them. 

As for Lucina, I wonder why they didn't want her there. Maybe due to similarity with Chrom. I can see why Nintendo would tell them to implement her though. Hopefully this means we'll get more Awakening kiddos.