Sega Chief

New FF8 Mod (New Threat) - Discussion Thread

58 posts in this topic

On 8/6/2018 at 10:15 AM, Sega Chief said:

Late reply, but good news on this front; I've figured out how to do exactly that. I've set 9 as a minimum and no ceiling on how many you can draw at a time.

this is the most important thing that could have happened

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If possible, you may consider trying to make it so that certain magics can't be junctioned unless you're a certain level. For example, since Curaga junctioned to hp early is so broken, make it so that Curaga can't be junctioned until level 40. Combine that with a full rebalance of the rewards from card modding and you may have a chance at making the game remotely difficult.

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7 hours ago, Foyboy said:

If possible, you may consider trying to make it so that certain magics can't be junctioned unless you're a certain level. For example, since Curaga junctioned to hp early is so broken, make it so that Curaga can't be junctioned until level 40. Combine that with a full rebalance of the rewards from card modding and you may have a chance at making the game remotely difficult.

In mexico's french mod what he did is to make sure that no magic could be gotten before the point of the story he wanted or only in limited amount (aka if you stay LLG you will not be able to get strong magic until the endgame which is balance by the fact that late game bosses were strong even at Low Level) unless leveling up (and so make ennemy stronger) and Card Mod was only available in Disc 4 and only if you get all the cards in the game before Disc 4 (and he removes the possibility to collect cards in Disc 4 so rare card can only be transform one time (and the item they give was nerf no more 100 Megalixir with one card for instance)) which in my opinion was a great idea making Card Mod effectivly a nice reward for completionnist and makes it an ability that upgrade your characters without being to overpowered since Ultimecia's Castle bosses, Omega Weapon and Ultimecia herself were made good enough so that having Card Mod doesn't cheese them. 

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Looking forward to this project! I personally think the game should be balanced in a way that keeps the "spirit" and game mechanics in tact as much as possible, so nothing super crazy. Here's a couple of my thoughts on some posts here and the game in general on what I'd implement. 

- I like setting a minimum draw amount of 9 per draw to speed up the draw process. Maybe raise the failure chance though to balance.

- Another idea besides the above though is to remove the "quantity" part of magic altogether. Let me explain.. so basically you would draw say a Cure spell but instead of drawing say 4 Cures or 9 Cures you would just draw the Cure spell as is, in an unlimited quantity. How you balance this is by making each spell very difficult to draw with a high failure chance. On top of this you set a limit of how many times a magic can be used per battle. (Perhaps if a char is lvl 1-9 it is one time, lvl 10-19 two times and so on up to 10 times per battle at max level?) This would make players want to use magic in battle, it would remove the tediousness of drawing 100 magic and keeping it at 100 since you just do it once and also provide a reason to level up. You could also make Junctioned magic scale better according to character level. 

- I like the Card Mod ability being tweaked/balanced and made less overpowered on Disc 1.

- I would much prefer the available magic selection be limited rather than placing some kind of level requirement. If you don't want players to have Curaga early, don't allow them to get it on Disc 1, much better than level requirement IMO.

- I also like giving each character an innate element that they have an infinity towards. For example Squall could be Fire and thus cannot Junction Ice magic and cannot Junction Shiva and receives better compatibility with Ifrit. (Quistis could be Ice as an example too, perhaps Zell would be Thunder, etc)

- I would make weapon upgrades more substantial/important and perhaps add a couple extra ones to flesh out the selection a bit. I would also gate certain materials behind specific events, so players can't skip weapons in favor of stronger ones.

- Limit Breaks should definitely be toned down, with only one possible chance per turn (no abuse) and maybe only allow them one use per "critical state" so that there is an incentive to heal themselves? I don't know about this one, but I think players need a reason to stay full HP and not purposely put themselves to critical to spam Limit Breaks and break the game. 

- I would also give each character a natural affinity towards certain stats, with higher base stats than the others to differentiate them a bit more.

- I would also prefer the system in which you earn Gil to be based on battles instead of steps taken, so I don't run around in circles in town lmao

- I would also prefer if the amount of money you earn per tier is toned down dramatically, but in compensation your Seed Rank never lowers. Maybe you all could discuss this point further.

 

I'll either edit this post or reply again if I think of other stuff. Can't wait to play whatever you cook up, I'm sure it'll be as awesome as FF7!

 

Edited by DrewDragoon

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On 18/8/2017 at 3:29 PM, Augestein said:

Well, to actually start, we'll have to analyze what's wrong with the game in the first place (yeah, I know there's a lot anyone could rant about, but we need to focus on the big things). 

Levels: Don't matter in this game at all. As a matter of fact, in many instances, the levels are actually detrimental to the game. Sure, you get some extra hp and a little bit of stat growth, but the reality is that for the most part, leveling is bad because the enemy growths far outstrip the player growths. That's not necessarily a bad thing in some regards, because it can mean that the player needs to focus on mastering the junction system instead of just trying to brute force their way through the game, but the problem is that this also consequently has the result of causing people to just not level up at all, and reap the benefits of junctioning without actually leveling and thus closing the gap between monster stats and ally stats. 

My proposed solution? I actually have two solutions that are possible. 

1) Give the characters normal stat growths that can sort of compete with monsters and are specialized with any junctions applied being bonuses to either enhance what characters are already good at, or mitigate their weaknesses. 

2) Have monsters have set levels so that way the entire point of remaining lower leveled is effectively removed. You could have key boss fights be the party level like Seifer, but I don't see much point. It makes for better pacing and it's more difficult to have difficulty jumps when enemies aren't insanely spread out among their stat distribution. 

Acquisition of Items: Some of the refine abilities are ridiculous. And the worst part? You don't even need that much power. Their existence isn't the problem, as it's nice that you can actually use money and abilities to get better items, but some of them need to be toned down. Refining a Bahamut card just straight up gives you 100 MegaElixirs. Are they serious? Let's think about this for a minute. Okay, so 10 Elixirs are 1 MegaElixir, so having the Bahamut card is essentially worth... 1000 Elixirs. Come on devs, you cannot be serious. Yes, the card is rare, but it's not THAT rare! Honestly, I'd tone down the refines from most of the refines-- more so card mod than anything else. Most of the other ones aren't nearly as insane as they require multiple version of the card etc. In other words, make "rare" items less rare / tedious to acquire later on, but make some of the refines nerfed making for a more progressive feel to the game. 

Characters

There's almost no reason to ever use Selphie. Well outside of beating people up with a girl in a yellow dress. Quistis is pretty much straight up better, I think Selphie should get more than 1-3 for a spell if she's going to hang around. "The End" doesn't even need to be what needs to appear more often, she just needs to be able to do something that a player can't do about half of the way into the game. Full Cure is a nice start and should stay though, maybe making it appear more frequently would help. Perhaps change rapture to the Phoenix summon? So she has Revival, Full Cure, Wall, and The End? That'd be a lot better. Although, Wall should change to "Mighty Guard" essentially. It doesn't make sense that Quistis basically has all of Selphie's moves but better (with the exception of Degenerator versus The End with Degenerator only be listed for being more usable).  Also, kill Degenerator. It's too good. Or at the very least, making it a stat debuff would be useful and cool. 

I'd also lower the multipliers on Zell's duel. That way people can't just use Punch Rush -> Booya combos for days. 

Honestly, maybe I'm a horrible person, but if you can, I'd make Renzokukuen use both magic and physical. The standard hits are physical, but the proc portions are all magic damage. That way, it's not enough to ignore Squall's magic and pump his strength. 

I'd also make some of the shots that Irvine uses magical in nature. Thus not pigeonholing all of the guys into melee builds and all of the females sans Rinoa into magical builds (seriously, was there any reason for this?).

GFs

It also might be worth your time taking a BNW approach and limiting which GFs people can get so that way you can make each character a bit more unique. I know this means basically ignoring compatibility on the GFs, but I'm not sure there's really much you can do to make this interesting-- although, if you could limit abilities that could be equipped based on affection between the partnership of the GFs and the unit in question, that *could* be interesting if they didn't all cap at 1000. I sincerely doubt that this is possible at the moment -- perhaps ever, so I suggest the initially proposed "limit who can equip what." 

Speaking of limitations, I think you should also limit how many GFs a person can equip. I'd say they should be limited to having 4 on at a time. Thus, making it pointless to just equip 3 people constantly and ignore the other 3. That's a huge problem in 8. There's almost no reason to use anyone except 3 units. It's really goofy. It could also serve to make the Laguna parts a bit more thought provoking rather than just jamming all of them on the 3 men. 

 

Also, magic should just plain hit harder. Considering I have to go out of my way to get it, it shouldn't suck so much. 

 

 

The major issue about levels aren't actually enemy stats, but drops.

Higher level foes drop higher level items? Neat! You may think... annoying is the reality. Commit the mistake of getting too much exp and you are gonna swear and a lot.

In ff8 there are plenty of skills that let you convert enemy drops into spells or other useful items, the problem is that when you need a certain drop from a monster, you often have to spam skills that raise/lower the enemy's level just, to increase the chance of getting the right item.

Sure, there's the card command, but still.

 

Now, to talk about what really bothered me when I played the game: DRAWING

Drawing is way to slow, it takes hours to get the spells you need to make your build, but that could be a matter of point of views, to me it's an issue, to others not.

The real fuck up IMO was that in the game I never, I say NEVER saw an enemy except for the final boss to draw magic from my party... and that's a very sad thing.

Think about it: the game lets you raise stats by boosting them storing magic, let's say you meet a boss that's vulnerable to physical attacks, good! If I was to develop the game, I'd make it so that boss was such a cunning bastard, that he would draw from my party the same magic I put into strenght, to lower my attack and strike me down at the same time. How cool would that have been?

And consider many enemies you encounter in the game are actual soldiers specifically trained to draw and use spells.

I think it would be very cool if that feature could be added to FF8, it would be a major improvement to the game.

 

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10 hours ago, SWhite said:

The real fuck up IMO was that in the game I never, I say NEVER saw an enemy except for the final boss to draw magic from my party... and that's a very sad thing.

Think about it: the game lets you raise stats by boosting them storing magic, let's say you meet a boss that's vulnerable to physical attacks, good! If I was to develop the game, I'd make it so that boss was such a cunning bastard, that he would draw from my party the same magic I put into strenght, to lower my attack and strike me down at the same time. How cool would that have been?

I can't think of anything that would bother me more than having to deal with drawing magic only to then have it stolen from me and thus have to draw that same magic again. Draw was a stupid system from the start and there have been numerous suggestions in this very topic to reduce or nearly entirely remove this mechanic. Beyond that bosses with exploitable AI like that tend to not fare well, slow down fights with constant counter attacks, or are highly gimmicky.

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That's why you don't stack on magic ;)

If you can steal magic, and magic can be stolen from you, no point in stacking.

Also, if stacking is inefficient, you can't exploit the broken junction system, so you can't get massive stat bonuses and "easy win" fights

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Added a few bits to shared Google Doc regarding Magic Stock system. @Bauglir -- I'm with you on many general aspects, but the implementation I proposed is different. What do you think of mine ideas?

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