Ashtear

Ashtear, 3 days ago

This headline would have blown my mind years ago.

Ashtear, 7 days ago

Much of this isn’t unique to PC gaming. And if there ever was a dark age for PC hardware, we’ve recently crawled out of it, thankfully.

What bugs me the most right now (and doesn’t quite get addressed in this article) is low performance standards. Everyone’s pushing 4K and ray tracing, which makes it hard out here for us framerate nerds. It’s starting to feel like every major release that comes out is Crysis, something for my hardware to grow into. Only with blurry anti-aliasing/supersampling techniques now.

One new, big positive I’m not seeing talked about much is a growing variety of Japanese publishers are taking PC seriously now, and that hasn’t happened in over thirty years. I’m including Sony in this, even with their recent missteps in the space, and Square Enix’s recently announced restructuring suggests simultaneous PC releases in the future for their games. That will inject some competition in PC gaming, although be aware that Japan has its own share of publishers that release broken ports.

Ashtear, 4 days ago

It’s tough. A long-standing rule of video games media–even well before web publishing–is that reviews don’t pay the bills. Hype gets clicks, as do guides now that independent guide writing has waned.

Ashtear, 3 days ago

I think it’s the closest it’s been, yeah. Better than being five behind in the early XSEED days, I guess.

There was a three-year gap between CS2 and CS3 when they did the tech upgrade, so maybe the next game after Kai will be enough time to catch up.

Ashtear, 4 days ago

Yay, we’ll be one game behind for almost three whole months! 🙄

How long Daybreak 2 and Kai will take for us in the West is fully up to NISA at this point. They’ve seemed to be more interested in their own greater release schedule than catching up on the series. I figure we’ll probably get Daybreak 2 in late 2025.

The Switch ports of Reverie and Daybreak 1 took at least a year, so I’m guessing this is going to end up on the next-gen Nintendo console (especially considering the Switch ports haven’t been great).

Ashtear, 5 days ago

I’ve been wondering myself if their “no exclusives” restructuring also includes no more exclusives on the Epic Games Store.

Ashtear, 5 days ago

Ya, everything about this part was great. Loved the distant singing in the zone.

Ashtear, 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

I’ve played all of the mainline games over the years, but my only experience with FFXI was a couple of hours of the beta. Tried the marathon as a set of replays several years back and only made it to the start of IX. The load times and the glacial pace of the battles was too much by that point. I think I was planning on skipping XI.

You could also try asking in !finalfantasy and !jrpg.

Ashtear, 9 days ago

Been a while since I’ve seen that name. One of a long line of very meh Star Wars games.

Ashtear, 10 days ago

Ahh, the tool change is nice. Functionally, it probably doesn’t actually change the rate of resource collection, but it did feel bad seeing stuff you can’t harvest.

Ashtear, 10 days ago

A Sky remaster/remake is likely a long way off. Falcom’s still a rather small company, and their recent expansion has gone into more development of existing properties (like Tokyo Xanadu). Trails has also had a decline in Japan, which doesn’t help.

They’ve licensed the property out to mobile devs and anime, so it’s possible they’ll do the same for another Sky project. Not something they’ve done in a long time, though.

Ashtear, 9 days ago

If you do, I highly recommend the voice mod. Sky is fully voiced in Japanese and it adds a lot of texture to the characters since it’s such a text-heavy game.

Ashtear, 12 days ago

I don’t have experience with their systems, but I had to go back to the store twice for an Acer monitor. First monitor had a dead HDMI port, second had a gap in the chassis at the top. Don’t know why I didn’t just go with a different one after the second replacement; it would end up developing a line of shadowing after about 18 months.

Ashtear, 12 days ago

And here I’m thinking it’s not far enough, considering how sparse the trailer was (and there’s virtually zero additional footage on their Kickstarter page). That said, they’ve already raised half of their goal. Between this and Runa, it’d be cool if we ended up with a successful western Europe JRPG dev.

I certainly see the Chrono Cross and Lost Odyssey influence. Hopefully the combat pace is quite a bit quicker than the latter.

Ashtear, 11 days ago

Yeah, I’m all for some shorter experiences among all the marathon JRPGs we’ve been getting.

Ashtear, 12 days ago

Which includes the pricing model. Some regions even saw a price increase.

A lot of corps threw out the whole concept of a demand curve over the pandemic.

Ashtear, 13 days ago

So happy that Persona lit a fire under their asses. They need it.

Best thing that could happen to the genre would be Metaphor selling 10mil copies.