Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

Pat Robertson died.

I do hope he gets the afterlife he deserves which is not the afterlife he thought he had earned.

Paged!

AMEN sister!



(no troll, *** that guy)

I'm just chuckling that Alberta pretty much looked like the NYC pic for end of April and a bunch of May, but only now it's getting noticed like "CaNAdA iS oN fIrE?!"
Though we haven't even hit wildfire season which is a yikes. >.< But down to "only" 73 active fires with most being Edmonton and north.

Driving in NYC With the window down felt like rubbed my eyes with chili peppers - shits bad in nyc man...

Morning wasn't as bad but it still *** crazy here

Yeah, wildfire season hasn't even started yet and we've already reached halfway to the most wildfires we've ever had in a season. Not unlike Winnipeg exhausting its entire snow-clearing budget by November (the budget resets in October).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDXcGEo1TfU

Summer games fest goes live in 10

I didn't like the guy, but that's a bit harsh.

Welp, we got the FF7 Rebirth trailer people were expecting. Early 2024, though, which was expected but not as early as I was hoping.

Creating a new thread for it, but I'll drop the trailer here as well:

The previous trailer said "winter 2023", and it's SE so that was always gonna be like, March 2024. So 2026 for PC... ._.;
Also a new Ever Crisis trailer, and the game is up for pre-registration on Google Play now. Pre-reg gives access to the closed beta, which will be starting soon.

More great looking alt costumes. And the First Soldier squad gets to live on in another game after the death of their own. ;_;7

Two discs, in the year of our Lord 2024. JRPGs are back, baby

IIRC Remake was on 2 discs too. 1 was just pure installation dump, and the other was for playing.

It is not harsh to wish that anyone gets their just deserts.

I could go into excruciating theological detail about the whys of my statement but that would be way too religion for here. PM me if you are THAT curious.

They never did go away.

They had a relative low point after the rise of Xbox from about 2007 up into the mid-late 2010s.

That's the correct time period, but (and not to say that's what you're implying above) it's definitely no fault of the Xbox. I know the common understanding is that the West "evolved", leaving the East in the dust. But holy cow, have you gone back and looked at the crap they were putting out?

Compare games from the '90s and Early '00s like Final Fantasy VI (1994) or Skies of Arcadia (Y2k) with games from the Late '00s, Early '10s like The Last Remnant (2008) or MagnaCarta 2 (2009, and actually an Xbox exclusive) or Final Fantasy XIII (2009). All of these games are techincally under the "JRPG" genre. But you can go back and play games like FFVI and still lose yourself in their immersion like the day you bought them.

We can't blame the JRPG formula because JRPGs of old and JRPGs of new are still great. It's not that the genre was ever inherently bad. And we can't blame products like The Elder Scrolls or Mass Effect either because the "Western RPG" formula isn't inherently better either. There's just a weird window of time where so many JRPGs were kinda awkward.

I'm not even sure what the common issue was. If I did some more research into it maybe I could find some more patterns. The combat input was overly complicated, the combat output was overly simple, the worldbuilding and storytelling weren't competent enough for the scale they were trying to achieve, the translation and voice acting/direction were inadequate. It's like everyone looked at the successes of Final Fantasy X (2001) and XII (2006) and said "I want to be that".

He was good in Harry poster
Rip Cedric

With the rise of the Xbox came the rise of western game development marketing.
In the market of video games, RPGs, Japanese or Western, both compete with all other game genres for the dollah dollah bills $$$.
It was because of the increased pressure from the surging Western markets, and the way they advertised and took control of video game TV as well.
Within gaming's own sphere, JRPG enthusiasts were pushed to the fringe by all the newcomers (and had slowly been getting pushed that way for years with the late 90s being a heyday that quickly fell away), and any Xbox exclusive JRPGs were oddities / said to be hard to come by (lookin' at you, Tales of Vesperia).
Couple that with the fact that almost every game that came out on the Xbox also came out on PC, and PC gamers were starting to eat well/take from consoles, and transition lifelong console gamers towards PCs ( MMOs also had a hand in this, and this is important because there's an entire subsect of PC gamers who have always looked down on JRPGs due to viewing PC RPGs as better/true).
Then you take into account that the leading creative talents like Hironobu Sakaguchi weren't part of the biggest name brand in JRPGs, leading to weakness in those creative divisions.
Even in positive reviews for turn based RPGs, you read things like, "Even though they're making use of a dated genre..." or "Even though this spectacular game is for a niche market..."

It wasn't Xbox by itself. Xbox was just the launchpad to change public opinion via shifting the market demographic as well as through mass media presence/lack thereof. It's less that the, "West Evolved" and more that, "The West Became Exclusionary/Had an excuse to let that monster out of its cage."

You pair that all up with Eastern corpos not knowing what sells well/wanting to emulate other crap, and the greats of old either getting out of the game or run into creative dead ends, and then you get a wonderful thing where the negative things media say about JRPG = True to the fresh eyes of all those new gamers.

A lot of those "negative things" were true, though. But what wasn't true is that it was a dated genre. That's my point.

Would you say Star Wars is and always has been a crappy universe/franchise because Episodes 7~9 were crappy? It was just a sour note in its song. But that's how the media seems/seemed to portray JRPGs. "Dated genre" and "niche market" are a misunderstanding because the Late '00s is when gaming hit the mainstream and just so happened to correlate with a really crappy time for JRPG releases.

I agree that it all meshed together in the right place at the right time to create an awful situation. I just don't think it's fair to quality JRPGs to judge them based on the bad apples.

is there an addon that shows me current yells while am doing some stuff out of the city ?

Ffxiah

Umm no you just see Bott spam and it takes time to refresh not a good one, anyway where does Hexahedrite come from the Second floor bosses or the mega boss?

The decline of jrpg has nothing to do with marketing nor west v.s east sort of things. Jrpg decline more in Japan and according to Falcom their jrpg sales % in western market actually increased in the recent years.

I believe it's just traditional jrpg player demographics splitting into different genres, making the market smaller than before. There are genres like roguelike that focuses on player progression, min maxing and builds. And there are genres like walk sim, adventure or interactive movies focuses video game story telling. Both genre are faster to complete (average 2-10hrs) than jrpg (average 30-50hr).

Then there is mobile gacha game that you can play whenever you want at work or on bus, with similar gameplay and story quality as most jrpg. So spending 50hrs on one single game in front of a TV for mediocre story or mediocre gameplay just isn't worth it. Especially for Japanese people who often spend 10hr+ a day at work. If you spend 10-12 hr a day working would you still want to play a 50hr jrpg after work? Or would you play mobile games, turn on auto battle and make progression at work so you can go to bed after you get home? I think the answer is obvious.

Occasionally you get big budget titles like Persona 5 or FF7 Remake that's probably worth the time investment, only because such titles have higher budget and production quality than other competitors. And they'll be successful, sell millions, give you hope. That does not mean other companies have the resources to pull this off.

GUYS I HAVE A QUESTION WHERE DOES Hexahedrite DROP !!!

Everywhere. Wear your weapon.

Bit of a random thought...

I had a good conversation with someone recently about game complexity, and it got me thinking introspectively again about my taste in games and how to better describe the patterns that are present. I'm not sure if there's a proper industry-standard term for it, but I've started using the terms "input complexity" and "output complexity" to describe gameplay (in particular combat) in games.

What I've dubbed "input complexity" is stuff like how many choices you have splayed out in front of you at any given time. Games with high levels of input complexity might include Chess because you have a ton of options for every move, Final Fantasy XIV because every job/class gets in the neighborhood of 50 different active abilities, or spellcasters in D&D 5th Edition with dozens of spells to rifle through for every turn.

What I've dubbed "output complexity" is how deeply I need to consider every action I choose because of what it might mean for future actions further down the line. This often appears in the form of a variety of resources that need to be juggled. For example, debating on if I want to cast a stronger spell that costs 60 MP for 100 damage this turn or casting a weaker spell that's super-effective against the opponent for 40 MP but only getting 80 damage. I need to consider down the line what's going to be more valuable between the MP I'm exhausting or the number of turns it's taking me to win the fight.

And what I've discovered about myself is that I have great preference for both higher output complexity and lower input complexity, though I can usually tolerate games for which even one of those is true.

Are there real terms to describe these? And what are your guys' preferences?

OOOH OK i did not get wep yet
tHANKS

Also My chat log keeps resetting like it delets its self how do i fix this ***most me some addon stuff

You can't. Close XI and relog.

Definitely don't need to wear the weapon. Only one I have is GKT, and I'm forever sch and I'm getting them. Just make sure you have a weapon on the right phase.

I thought the gaming community tend to call it "depth", or amount of viable choices that you can make in a game.

Viable choice is not the same as any choice. If one skill is too weak or useless then it's not a viable choice. If you have 50 skills to pick from but 47 of them is weak then the real viable choice is only 3.

Here is an article about depth.
https://medium.com/@GWBycer/how-to-define-depth-in-game-design-52fadc6d1f9



Well yes, it's generally a bad idea to overwhelm players with too many choices. If one character has 5-10 viable skills to pick from and they are all are about as viable as another, then it's decent amount of complexity or depths already. If players get 60 skills to pick from then it'd suck.

Here is one very long article that you can read about choice overload.

https://www.playerresearch.com/learn/spoiled-for-choice-the-psychology-of-choice-overload-in-games-and-how-to-avoid-it/

tl;dr: "Too much choice can lead to dissatisfaction with or avoidance of choices".