Ashtear

Ashtear, 23 hours ago

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

Ashtear, 1 day ago

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

Ashtear, 2 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 (edited 4 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, 5 days ago

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

Ashtear, 6 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, 7 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, 7 days ago

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

Ashtear, 8 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, 8 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, 9 days ago

Either SQEX thought they were going to sell PS5 systems, or they were happy with long-tail sales on timed exclusives. Maybe both. SQEX Japan has had a long history of success with their flagship titles, so I’m not surprised it took them this long.

I think the writing is on the wall for exclusivity in general at this point: unless you’re publishing the games and manufacturing the hardware, it’s not good business any more to have exclusivity. Even Sony’s first parties are struggling now. Maybe it’s not even viable unless you have crazy market share like Nintendo does.

That said, I wouldn’t lament the death of the AA game just yet. Team Asano has been a bright spot for the company, and he just got promoted. I’d be surprised if they moved him to AAA development.

Ashtear, 9 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.

Ashtear, 10 days ago

So what’s the top alternative? I’ve had quality issues with the last two Acer monitors I bought 😭

Ashtear, 11 days ago

Last time I dipped into Oxygen Not Included, the rocket program was enough to get me to push past self-sustenance. Unfortunately in the end, getting the details of the program right just annoyed me. I don’t know if it’s me or if the game’s just not set up well to handle large-scale construction. Building fuel production ended up being more fun than actually building the rocket silos.

Ashtear, 11 days ago

I think I need to check Nebuchadnezzar out.

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom is still my favorite in this genre by a mile. Dripping with cultural flavor, and there was really something about monument building in all of the games in this series.

Ashtear, 11 days ago

Yeah, the age of the series is its biggest problem at the moment. Hopefully they do get around to remaking Sky.

While there might be other worlds I like a little more, I don’t think there are any in the genre as fleshed out as Zemuria. Big part of why I enjoy the games so much.

Ashtear, 6 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, 5 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.