Opinions on Stellar Awakening?

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OpenStars, 4 months ago

Sorry to be negative, but I think this is a sign that the game is going downhill still further. :-(

On the bright side, Aldo can be made quite powerful with his upgrade from the end of the Goddess of Time storyline, and this further helps him keep pace with the ga(t)cha characters - this is very, very good. Also, the Stellar Awakenings (SAs) are optional atm, and not "needed" for any content in particular... yet. And, technically at least, we can earn some of these materials for "free"... so that's good...

On the other hand, WFS has already started releasing gacha characters - Suzette and Tsukiha - that can be Stellar Awakened, and soon Alma will gain an Another Style that already will come with this feature. This is good for their profits, as people will pull for characters that they already have, chasing these new SAs, but it will also generate hurt feelings and FOMO in both the short and long runs, plus also more confusion. Also the text for these new skills is VERY LONG, and adds still further to the complexity present in this game. Finally, I just saw today that there is a kind of sparkly effect that a character gains in the party screen when their SA is unlocked. That is precisely what happened in my former game (Realm Defense), just before I left it for good, as I realized that they were steadily changing it away from a "tournament-based/multiplayer tower defense/strategy" game into one based on gambling and more of a "pay irl money = win" model. So when I saw that shimmering effect, I hope you will forgive me for saying so but a little bit of me just died inside, seeing it here too in this beloved fantasy jRPG nostalgia game! (though... it is quite pretty, especially when animated I am sure, though have not seen that aspect of it yet)

I am of the mindset that anything that widens the gap b/t P2W Whales and F2P or Minnows/Dolphins is a bad thing in a game. Cosmetic stuff like cat gear would be entirely different - that's a great way to show off, Whales can whale to their hearts content and practically nobody minds (or would not if they think about it for a moment), everyone benefits (keeping the game alive), it's all good there imho - but when content becomes gated by cost then the game starts to die off, e.g. if you spend $100 to clear one thing, then will you next spend $200 to clear the subsequent thing, and what if you do both, you HAVE to know that there will be a cost behind that... and another one behind that too? Except the costs are rarely if ever transparent, and instead quite predatory.:-(

The reason I say this will cause confusion is b/c Tier Lists are already showing the SA versions of these characters to the exclusion of the non-SA versions of them - just like they do the (True) Manifestations. New players will see the SA characters in videos, and senior players will rarely if ever explain just how crucial vs. not it is to have the SA versions of the skills. In essence then, these SAs are already being treated as if they were mandatory - the "normal" experience of the character, rather than an optional add-on - again like the manifestations. Except UNLIKE the manifestations, these are not something that can be earned with any amount of in-game pure "effort", and instead must be either purchased, or else gone without. This game just suddenly became a lot less welcoming to F2P (and minnows) than it used to be...:-(

On the other hand, it would be somewhat cool to see some new life breathed into these older characters - Tsukiha NS or AS never graces any of my parties, and while NS Suzette has been useful occasionally, she played a very limited role, which her SA would expand upon significantly. Except... I am too afraid to spend whatever trickle of SA materials will come our way, realizing that Power Creep marches ever onwards, and that these materials, on top of being confusing, are going to be SO MUCH MORE RARE than Chant Scripts, or even Treatises/Codices/Opuses (as currently announced anyway).

So SAs are one of those nice ideas that if they had been implemented in a "friendly" way would have been an outstanding way to make older characters be more useful in more later-game content, which would have increased the fun of the game. Though everything that I am seeing so far seems to be pointing more in the direction that it is designed to increase their profits - which is fine, they need that to stay active - but at the expense of the playerbase, shifting everything significantly more towards whales now. Which aside from not being good to begin with, seems to me to be a harbinger of bad things to come - as F2P, Minnows, and Dolphins leave, even Whales will stop spending, b/c there is no longer as large an audience to show off to:-(. Again, I apologize for being so negative - I cannot help it, this is just what I think!? - and I hope I am not ruining anyone else's enjoyment of this new feature:-P.

niantre, 4 months ago

a valid opinion. but i think sometimes unpopular policies can still be financially successful. increase in youtube ads could be an example.
or, people will put up with a lot if they don't want to move onto something else (twitter is run very poorly these days, but people aren't leaving because there's no compelling alternative for them, or because of the network effect). companies i want to fail due to their ethics or bad business practices continue to do fine, or take a much longer time to fail than i expect.

but personally, i want them to add features in a way that's less cluttery. so my gripe is how the UI friction and complexity of the game is increasing over time rather than the power creep / F2P-friendliness perspective. adding yet another tab in the menu or another bar in the battle screen ruins the elegance or simplicity of some of the UI designs. i kind of ignore the meta as long as i have powerful enough characters to clear content.

if they can keep writing some compelling stories once in a while, then it'll be worth it for me to keep playing. i thought wanderer in the binding night (conclusion to wanderer in the vortex) was surprisingly good. the rest can be pretty hit-or-miss though.

OpenStars, 4 months ago

(giving up on kbin b/c it has such enormous difficulties)

AE will take a very long to fail that is true, and perhaps it will reverse its course and not even, I was just saying I did not like the direction it was heading in now.

Part of what gacha-style Power Creep entails is that the free characters are not CAPABLE of doing content, either without enormous effort or sometimes even just flat at all. AE always stood out from the crowd b/c it included the story characters into the Power Creep curve, so e.g. Aldo was made to be substantially more powerful, compared to how he was in the past. However, part of what this new direction means might entail him being left behind in the dust, where even the powerful gacha characters are not enough to handle the content, unless they are Stellar Awakened. So yeah, it depends on how the feature is rolled out, not precisely on today’s status.

I 100% agree about the menu UI - especially the grasta one, but also even those that have already received their redesign efforts. 100% of the time when I pull a new character, I will eventually want to put them into a team, you know? But I do not have them memorized yet, perhaps not their name even, but definitely not their weapon type + element. Also, they did not add a nonelemental filter (e.g. Feinne?), nor did they do anything at all to combat the problem of having left a character with multiple weapon types (e.g. ES) in a different form, nor did they help with finding alter chars, nor did they do anything about how sometimes when new chars are added, they don’t appear all the way at the right at level 1, but perhaps they are 30, or 50, or 60, or something else. And this doesn’t even begin to cover when the name is incorrectly ordered, according to the JP rather than the GL spelling! I STILL have to open up the wiki and find my character there, then use that info to try to find them in the game, and even that typically involves more than one or two or three or five or whatever screens full of scrolling, for overloaded weapon types like sword-wielders.

No, it is obvious that this is a STORY game, and that BATTLE is by far a secondary aspect. The ways that the characters move and interact with one another - you can really tell how great care and attention to detail was put into those. Many CQs are amazingly detailed, and fun - obviously not the early-game ones but e.g. Eva, Iphi, Melissa, and many ES ones. WFS does many things right… just not menu UIs, for some reason. :-(

When I started this game, I was unemployed and so remained entirely F2P. I looked forward to helping support it financially, at a low level. However, when I got a job I was super busy, so I told myself that when their next QoL came out, that would be the trigger for me to start spending. A year and a half passed then iirc, where they did not release one, and what we finally got after all that time was this horrible character filter screen that ignores half the aspects of the characters, and especially wanting to make use of NEW, just-pulled characters that you really have to put forth some effort into even finding at all.:-(

i.e., this game specializes in LOOKING good, to a casual inspection, like when you are new and your total number of characters is <10. But the longer you play it, the more problems you see with it. Especially SA, which over on Reddit is making a huge uproar - Bamiji even crawled out of Discord and made a post complaining about it, with some good analysis points imho (reddit.com/…/consider_sending_feedback_about_your… - sorry for the direct link to Reddit, I tried to get the internet archive to store it so that it would deny traffic to Reddit, but apparently Reddit is preventing such captures nowadays beyond a small segment of the article at the top, anyway it’s there if you are interested).

As you say, we shall see how the game goes forward from here…