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

Classic: "Plot"

Soul is a concept

Imagine thinking ai has a soul.

Religions define what sin is for themselves and their followers. The followers decide what sins they will and will not commit.
Examples: All the Catholics on birth control, all the Jews eating cheeseburgers, all the Muslims who indulge in alcohol.

Non religious tribes still have taboos. Having no real legal system they cannot have laws but taboos serve the same function.

We are the only existent species that believes in sin. When a lion takes over a pride he usually kills all the cubs. This is biology. The cubs are not sinful and neither is he.

Im not religious and I know the different between good and evil, right and wrong, etc

They're not all like that, but yeah...

Basically the MARE thing popped up after the last big WoW refugee wave, and within a few months, it started to leak into the Roleplaying scene.

At which point people said, "Oh it's ok to not have it. We don't need it. This is about the writing."

Only for those people to become swiftly outnumbered by people who said, "No roleplaying without it."

And you'd think it'd only be in the ERP scene that this happened, but, alas, no.

You'd also think with it having died, that people would have no choice but to go back to the old ways... but also no...

Instead some grubby gavones that were into some Epstein Island type ***made an alternative that was even shadier, and people have started to use that instead. While others are opting to just not "play XIV" at all anymore.

And sadly it's all a consequence of a vertical progression based game.

When a game only adds more stuff to do when there's new, major updates, and nothing has longterm benefits or gameplay altering effects, then you literally run out of content to do.

Now, this debate's raged a bit on the XIV OF, with people claiming that there's always content to do because there's an achievements list. But the gist of the XIV achievements list is, "Complete random *** task #47 30,000 times." or, "Earn 10,000,000 gil through super low gil granting repeatable quests." or "Spawn an invisible treasure chest by standing on it in the randomly generated dungeon 10,000 times without using the in dungeon item that lets you see where to stand!"

And all the achievements do is make an achievement points counter go up, and they haven't added anything to achievement point turn ins since the first time they added those into the game, really.

So it's grinding achievement points to get more acheivement points without any real tangible rewards. It'd be like if one did Sortie, but could never spend their Gallimaufry.

Lost Soul Aside is out, it's currently 56% positive on Steam.

Also Radial's opinion on this game pre-release:


I wonder if RA played this, it should be a "better FF" after all.

Got the Ambuscade Axe made today as like... I'm running out of ones to make.

Better than expected!

Gave it a full dual wield build with Flametongue off hand.

Had a bit of memey fun with it on T3 Behemoth while farming up some beads to hopefully sneak into a full Aeonic clear (for which I'm still torn on which Aeonic to make next... It's like make NIN katana to make NIN worth considering orrrr.... Lockstyle pieces hmmm. Maybe Godhands?).

But yeah, dual wield on Warrior with just Trusts. Low end Retributions were 46kish, high end saw as high as 75335. Most were in the 52~58k range, with a buncha 60kish ones too!

Not Naegling or Savage Blade numbers, but nothing to sneeze at! Probably even better under proper full buffs.

You have come a long way, Vyre kun

I feel like my first stage while severely debuffed, at 1% health, using my subpar gear and lv1 weapon is alrwady no match against you!

Congratulations!

Average FFXIAH user

This is what nerds look like these days Panta.

Lost Soul Aside had 2 reasons for the hype surrounding it:
1- Solo dev!!
2- To spite FFXV, which was announced in 2013 but kept getting delayed till 2016

Those reasons had synergy: SE sucks!! this solo dev is doing better than SE!! His game looks more fun!!

But that was over 10 years ago lol. A lot of things have happened in the gaming industry. Even FF16 was released.

My first impression when I saw it after release: a very tryhard edgy game with no substance. Might turn out to have some merits on its own or might appeal to some, but for now, I don't see anything appealing to me

Well .... recently I read a poll asking females their preferred spouse occupation and IT engineers won the top spot.

Engineer is also one of the more "nerdy" occupation lol. And tons of gamers are software engineers or in IT industry.

So maybe, just maybe, nerds are actually in a pretty favorable position on getting a gf.

People thinks only muscle man gets girlfriends but not people who sits in front of computer all day. That's quite far from reality according to polls lol.

I don't see how the two are mutually exclusive.

Lots of nerdy IT engineer types that have desk jobs go to the gym every day after their desk jobs.

I never liked playing the card of lowmaning stuff as a plus.

I think things must be evaluated by its face value.

Considering production aspects of it just makes you make concession when evaluating.

As well, I dont think it is correct evaluating poorly a good game just because it spent like millions of millions of money.

I had this feel before release. The art assets from the trailer has very mismatched style that it looks like it's a student or hobby project using pre-made assets. Which is understandable since the main creator is a self-taught hobbyist, not someone with an long history of industry background.

That being said, gaming market is pretty forgivable towards low budget indie games and even if you are a small team you still have a chance to succeed. I've played solo dev indie 3D action games with even lower budget and worse look and I still enjoyed it. And I don't mind paying $10 for something like that.

What went wrong was the whole marketing strategy (probably Sony's fault).

The game try to advertise as a $60 game comparable with AA-AAA game, and community is calling it "Chinese FF". wtf? It's a hobby project that got funding that expands to a team size of 20(I think) or so. So it should be marketed as an smaller budget game competing at $20-$30 price tier. Then focus on one thing (combat), do that one thing really well instead of trying to do multiple things (combat+story+world design+cutscenes).

Furi is imo a good example of how a low budget stylish 3D action game should be made:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/423230/Furi/

It has combat and combat only, and did this one thing well. It doesn't need to deal with acting, story, level design and world building nor Unreal Engine optimization problem. It only delivers fun combat for a cheap price.

When you try to sell a game at $60 and compare with FF or Stellar Blade but don't have the budget nor technical experience to compete with them, then gamers will views it negatively because the expectations are way high the moment it gets "better than FF" kind of label.

There is a marketing advantage to advertise a game that way though. When you say "this is solo dev" (or change the term solo to another small number like 3-5 man team) people set the quality expectations lower. So when you deliver more than what normal small team could do you automatically gets bonus points.

The reverse also applies to expensive games with hundreds of people working on it. If you say you spend 10 years and 600 people on this game and it's a 7.5-8/10 game it gets negativity.

Yeah, when I saw the price I was like no way this game is asking for this price.

Furi was amazing!

IMO $20 would be a very favorable price, $30 should be acceptable. Post $40 it gets increasing harder to sell.

If they can polish the combat further to something at least 90% close to AAA action games, make it boss rush type of game, cut the story and cutscenes(that is the part that got criticized the most) and sell for $20 it would have get tons of positive review imo.

Its becoming a common theme that these Chinese games have severe optimization issues. It's probably time to just go back to the gacha category.

They'll figure it out sooner than later, and that's good

Keeps the Concords out

The reason why they keep investing in 3D single player action games recently is because Chinese gacha market is totally oversaturated, there aren't too many money making opportunity in gacha industry anymore. But single player game market still has a little bit more space.

So they'll keep making them until console style 3D action game space is totally oversaturate too.


It's just the matter of time before the market finally gets tired of those same-y 3D action games that's either souls-like or DMC-like made in unreal.

Wuchang didn't do nearly as well as Wukong btw, it's like 1m sales after a month(?). So this market is also getting smaller with more games coming in.

... I spend more on a single unit in a gacha than you're willing to pay for a whole game. Like 400$ for a unit.

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