vasta_narada

That doesn't seem to me what @dontsleep was saying. The statement was "through the success of their peers", i.e. they saw that their peers could make patreon work, so they went for it too.

I rarely finish games anymore, I find. Usually that's because I get bored with said game, and I find that a lot of things I take on are too long (doesn't help that I typically play JRPGs). If I finish a game nowadays, it's usually because I'm very into it, it's not terribly long, or I have an urge to see it through. The last condition usually comes up when I'm trying a new series, or the game is jank/bad and I have to know. But as long as I feel like I got my money's worth of entertainment, I don't feel bad about not finishing games.

The most prominent series in the genre sell just fine, and most importantly there are a number of them. SFV (which is quietly doing just fine, despite what people think), MK (which has its own market), King of Fighters (which has a new entry on the way), Tekken 7 (which is still getting DLC and balance changes), Dragon Ball FighterZ, Soul Calibur, and Guilty Gear (Strive comes out next month, the netcode is amazing and can breathe life into online tournaments). Then you've got a lot of older and/or indie fighters: Granblue, Killer Instinct, Under Night, Them's Fighting Herds, Footsies, and Blazblue to name a few. And then there's Smash.

Fighting games are doing alright. Especially because of the pandemic killing tournaments and the genre's lack of good netcode, we're just in a low point of popularity. Streaming does a lot for the community, and recent pushback in the notion that the genre isn't newbie-friendly. Heck, we just got a whole-ass dictionary for the jargon the other day, and newer games like Under Night and GG Strive are incorporating some truly great tutorials.

That seems like an unfair comparison. Playing things at 0.5x makes things take longer for no good reason, which I'm sure is going to be your point for why you listen at 2x, to which I would say--even if there's filler involved for algorithmic reasons or episode counts--the content has an intended duration and pace. People's speaking has a cadence that can express information or emotion (e.g. speaking faster when worked up). A thoughtful gap between sentences can be interesting. 0.5x actively ruins the listening/viewing experience for those sorts of reasons and just from an audio quality perspective. Comprehending a whole sentence at 0.5x is just adding difficulty to the listening experience, none of which would necessarily happen at >1x.

My question is why not listen to things at the speed they are? You seem to want to cut through fluff (fair play to you), at which point I ask why not just skip ahead instead of experience it at 2x speed? Don't you run out of content to go through that's in your wheelhouse? I'm in the same boat as @justin258, I don't understand why people would want to cram more things into the same amount of time. That's so much stuff! I'm happy getting to what I get to with the time I have. I really don't understand the appeal of taking the content hose and shoving it down my throat so I can consume more, faster. Life is hectic enough, I don't need or want to increase the pace of my life on my downtime. Do people feel an obligation to watch things? Is that it? I don't get it.

Mana Khemia 3, thank you very much. Mana Khemia was the perfect mixture of good core gameplay, anime, and B-tier campiness. Mana Khemia 2 lost the campiness in favor of more anime, so it was a bit worse IMO, but taking another crack at the concept in a third game would be great. Every other Atelier game gets a trilogy, why not Mana Khemia?

Seems like I'm in the minority in this thread that enjoyed XV's combat (also 7R's), despite its shortcomings. XV was easy and frantic, but it was fun to mess with and concoct combo strings. Both of those games tried to split the difference with turn-based and action combat, however, so as long as XVI is trying to just be an action-combat game and not concern itself with FF's turn-based legacy, I'm optimistic. I prefer action-combat in general, so the series' shift isn't a big deal to me, and like someone else mentioned in this thread, combat wasn't FF's strong suit in the turn-based days either. Even still, I still want Square to make turn-based FF games; if they're planning on main FF games being action-based going forward, then I hope there's a healthy dose of non-numbered games that have turn-based or alternate combat systems as well. Variety is the spice of life and all.

Where are you getting that Yoshida prefers action-combat?

@iamdanthemanstan said:

While I agree with your second point about more being interested in if the game feels like it's worth the asking cost, I disagree with the inflation argument. Like yes, if you look at the inflation-adjusted prices then games got cheaper, but that doesn't take away from the fact that in 2020 even that cheaper-than-2005 $60 is a big chunk out of my budget. My $60 goes to less now than it used to because the price of everything else went up. It's the same thing I say when people mention that my 80 CAD game pricing is just because 80 CAD ~= 60 USD: yeah, that's true, but it's still $80 to me.

Now that being said, if game devs can get away with not adding in MTX and banking on DLC plans to get by, then I guess I can suck up the $10 increase. But there are better ways to fix the cost of development than that.

I think people say it's incomplete not to say that it's unfinished but to say that it feels like there should be more there. That's kind of a contradiction, but where many games feel like they needed an editor to cut some fluff away, XV may have been better off if there was no editor period if you get my drift. It's not that the plot doesn't make sense because there are scenes missing, it's that the plot suddenly goes at the speed of light because there's not much content between story beats.

Depends. If the concern was "I didn't understand the story because I missed some things that weren't given explicit screen time and wasn't able to put 2 and 2 together from circumstance and other (in-game) info sources" then yeah, it's more comprehensible. It's the difference between "I heard John said and did this thing" and "here is a scene where John says and does the thing". The added stuff is literally just making things explicit and giving more screen time to things that needed it. The story is better, but I think the additions break the pacing in a couple key spots: the last chapter is incredibly poignant and emotionally consistent, and then with the latest DLC they added a big explorable dungeon-like area with a pretty different tone immediately before that. That was the devs acquiescing to fan requests backfiring on them IMO.

My chief two complaints is that everything is way too large (I shouldn't have to scroll down the page just to see what's going on) and the forum preview at the bottom of the home page is gone. I also can no longer use the middle mouse button scroll functionality when first loading the page because the top, bigass video takes up the whole width of the page and just opens the video in a new tab.

FFXV is one of those this-is-clearly-a-7/10 game that somehow resonates with me despite itself at every turn and feels like a 8.5/10 when I play it. The story is broken, but I still largely enjoyed the moment-to-moment and the final chapter was incredible. The combat is my-first-action-RPG and severely unbalanced but I somehow have a blast. The world doesn't feature a ton to do, and most of the sidequests suck but it compels me to go explore it anyway. The characters are consistently awesome, except that many of those characters get unbelievably low amounts of screentime and have their potential be completely squandered. But man, I love those four main knuckleheads so damn much and their interpersonal relationships and dialogue are great.

Really disappointed to see the DLC getting cancelled, especially considering it was done as the opening act to a 2-year-anniversary presentation that had been hyped up for a couple days prior, but I'm not that surprised. XV's development has been tumultuous since its inception as Versus XIII, and I'm just glad I got to see it at all. I know the consensus is that the patches and DLC "fixed" the game or whatever, but...no. The game was flawed but never needing fixing in the way people mean when they say it. The patches barely add anything, mostly quality of life improvements, the DLCs largely only made explicit information that was already present in the game if you were looking for it (example, the reason for why one character dies is completely hidden behind a newspaper and radio broadcast unless you play one of the DLCs that says "hey, this is probably why that thing happens later"). The Royal Pack DLC they put out with the GotY version added some new story stuff that makes more sense of the backstory to the plot, but it also simultaneously breaks the pacing of the final chapter so like...awkward.

FFXV was clearly made by a bunch of people that really wanted to make a cool game, and that desire shows but that desire also doesn't make a great game. I still really like it though. At least the one remaining DLC looks pretty substantial and gives something that fans were asking for in a different way. Wish Square Enix would stop mismanaging the hell out of their big names like Nomura, Tabata, and Yoshi-P and associated teams though. Every FF starting with XII has been fucked by it.