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GeradFigaro

Review of v1.9

55 posts in this topic

Mind Blast isn’t a party wipe if you defend against the statuses that cause you to lose control of your characters. 

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28 minutes ago, Reiker said:

Have you ever looked into letting you control your character in the Colosseum?

Yes.

It's not happening.

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Is that one of those things that needs T-Edition's "magic" rom expansion or whatever to work?

So the situation we're in is that the developers don't want to improve the Colosseum because some streamers fast forward through the auto fights, but it's not possible to give players control of their character. So what's the solution? 

Edited by Reiker

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Well, as you've seen, my solution has been to marginalize it. I can't make the fights interesting, so I don't try. Instead, I tried to make the trades interesting.

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Changing the colosseum into something actually interesting would need a rom expansion. Or more likely, an entire redesign from the ground up.  It’s not a simple case of “developers don’t want to”. There’s very real technical limitations.  

Edited by Mishrak

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Personally I actually found the BNW Colosseum to be interesting, as it's more about trading out gear that you might not be using for something more interesting.

Some good examples, lets say you want dual Orochis for Shadow, and you're not using Cyan's Masamune because you already have him on the Mutsunokami (Which you have because you didn't really care about Relm's Ross Brush.) so you can trade in that Masamune you're not using for that extra Orochi have have dual throwing knife action.
Or you can trade out the Ninja Mask because your setups for both Locke and Shadow give them counters without the need for it, letting you get an extra Cat Hood so you can equip both Gau and Relm with one at the same time.
Or maybe none of your character builds end up using the Atma(Omega) Weapon, so you can swap it out to a Mirage Vest. (Very relevant in the new version coming up)
You don't use the Avenger, so you swap it out to a Wing Edge, which you can then swap to an extra Punisher. (Which them swaps back to the Avenger if you want.)

And of course the list goes on.
I guess my point to take away from this is don't look at the Colosseum as "I have to give up my good stuff to get anything" rather look at it as "Here is this piece of gear I'm not using, this lets me swap it out for something I will end up using more."

Honestly I'd say the hardest part is that there's usually no taksies-backies in most trades, so you need to already have your characters builds figured out so you know what you will and won't be using and can make decisions accordingly, which can make it tough when you wanna try out something gimmicky but then 2 hours after the fact you realize it doesn't work out quite as well as you'd hope, in which case your best bet is to make a separate save before you fully commit to anything. (Which then can have the issue of needing to replay certain sections if you figure out something isn't working out too well much later after the fact even if you did make a separate save.)

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1 hour ago, velsper said:

Is it on the level of the other bugs in the game? Or there's just no room in the rom left?

It’s really not related to bugs at all. It’s more about how the enemies work. It doesn’t use their script, it uses their “control” attacks. So it’s very limited. And the character stuff is also programmed to work a certain way. Changing it is a lot of work. And making it truly interesting would require a focused effort that is frankly probably not worth it when there are much simpler solutions. 

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That's really interesting. It's fun to hear how older games do things sometimes. You get stuff like this out of it. Thanks for letting me know. 

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On 8/13/2018 at 2:09 AM, GeradFigaro said:

Going forward, try not to get so caught up in "fixing Square's mistakes". Think more about what's fun for the player, and why we enjoyed vanilla so much (the good and the bad).

Oh, yeah, I also wanted to respond to this.

Although I went back into examining vanilla for the sake of the article I wrote, the honest truth is that Brave New World hasn't been about fixing vanilla's mistakes for a *long* time. With each passing version, it's less about looking at the original and saying "what were they thinking?", it's about looking at the last version of BNW and asking, "what was *I* thinking?"

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Disabling the auto-fight mechanic in the Colosseum and making monsters run their scripts is easy. Making one-to-one fights interesting is a lot harder. Unless BTB can come up with a set of scripts that are good both for Colosseum fights and normal encounters without using up too much space, it would require expansion.

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I think you're getting lost in the details a bit. Making your character controllable and overhauling the trade system to make using the Colosseum meaningful would already be a massive improvement that's worth making. You don't have to make every fight some super technical mega scripted thing. I think 1v1 fights with end-game monsters would be "interesting enough" already. If you want to go back later at some point and reevaluate the scripts then fine, but the 2 changes I just mentioned would already be a really nice addition to a new update.

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Chiming in to say that I agree with Reiker and I think some of the counter-arguments to what he says are weightless.

If it is, as seibaby says, technically possible to make Colosseum controllable, then even if there is no further change to the Colosseum, such a change would still be a pure QoL benefit to the player. The Colosseum, even without "perfect 1v1 scripts", would instantly become much more enjoyable, as well as a more proper fulfillment of what Square as aiming for with the Colosseum. "More proper fulfillment" is important here; axing the flavor of "1v1 Colosseum fights" pushes BNW away from being "FFVI fully realized," which, afaik, is pushing BNW outside of its intended design, on top of just plain pushing it in that direction when there's no necessary reason to do so.

Furthermore, I think ya'll are all thinking to inside the box with the whole "these fights aren't good 1v1 encounters." I mean, aside from the fact that doing 1v1 vs a foe that is normally fought 4v1, what about pulling from old WoB (mini-)bosses for Colosseum fights?

Bet Daryl's Soul? Re-fight the Soul Train! Make sure to Suplex him again as a "farewell, goodbye" to Daryl as she finally moves on into the afterlife.

Bet Muscle Belt, Power Glove, or Rage Belt? Re-fight Dadaluma!

Bet Gem Box? Re-Fight Number 024, Magimaster's little brother!

Could even re-fight Number 128 with his little arms, for a 1v3 fight.

Or, the granddaddy of them all, bet Atma Weapon to re-fight Atma Weapon!

There's plenty of room here for more interesting 1v1 fights without having to have "perfect" scripts for the job. Heck, Siegfried is only a Colosseum enemy. His script, at least, could purely be designed for the Colosseum. Again, even without perfect scripts, controllability is a pure QoL change that has no reason not to exist.

EDIT: I may have come across as to rude in this post. I apologize. Today's been a rough day.

Edited by thzfunnymzn

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What are the pros and cons of rom expansion? It seems to me like it would simply offer more space and freedom, yet as different discussions happen I keep hearing about a rom expansion almost as if it's something that would want to be avoided at all costs unless absolutely necessary. Why not just expand the damn rom instead of dealing with these space and design limitations? (Disclaimer: I don't know shit about rom hacking or how roms work)

As far as my thoughts on the colosseum - assuming it would be a simple change like seibaby said, why not just make the battles controllable. Even if nothing else was changed, it would be an immediate QOL improvement.  

Edited by Echoherb

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ROM expansion isn't necessarily the magic bullet that everyone thinks it is. Practically speaking, the primary tool used to accomplish it only creates more space in the enemy AI bank (which I presently just freed up 500 bytes and counting from in script rewrites) and the dialogue bank. I have refused to expand the ROM needlessly because I'm a firm believer in that restrictions breed creativity and I can assure you that a lot of what's currently in Brave New World would never have been thought up if infinite free space gave me carte blanche to shit up the AI bank with anything I wanted.

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On 8/17/2018 at 2:42 PM, BTB said:

ROM expansion isn't necessarily the magic bullet that everyone thinks it is. Practically speaking, the primary tool used to accomplish it only creates more space in the enemy AI bank (which I presently just freed up 500 bytes and counting from in script rewrites) and the dialogue bank. I have refused to expand the ROM needlessly because I'm a firm believer in that restrictions breed creativity and I can assure you that a lot of what's currently in Brave New World would never have been thought up if infinite free space gave me carte blanche to shit up the AI bank with anything I wanted.

If that's all it does then how is FF6 T edition possible? That mod has many more additions than just enemy AI bank

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It's interesting witnessing many opinions that contradict others I think due to everyone creating their own outcomes in their playthrough, and it's tricky to see how things could be done any other way unless you restart the game from Zozo which most of us don't feel like doing (or..?).

I'd like to see a reworked colloseum. I think there's ample strategy involved to justify the RNG that BNW frowns upon. It's fun taking a particular character out of his/her equipment comfort zone to create a RNG build for the appropriate enemy with reworked AI. BNW uses logic as the motivator for fun, therefore, irrational outcomes are not fun. However, gambling addicts exist for a reason. Because gambling is fun! 

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It's not really gambling if there's no penalty for losing, is it? That's my main problem with the coliseum, and really any type of gambling in a game like this. The player's going to save, gamble, and reload if they don't get what they wants. It becomes less reliance on RNG and more a test of the player's patience.

To me, making it easy to win and get whatever item you desire is more a QoL change than anything else.

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The penalty is losing the item you bet is it not? I don't remember. We save, and reload when we lose against bosses. Perhaps not the same as losing without control of your character, I actually prefer having control, and would prefer a muddle-less coliseum with uber serious bosses to earn top tier items. I just don't mind a RNG system either, though I can see the hate for requiring patience to deal with irrationality which sounds a lot like everyday life if you're surrounded by assholes. (Goes to therapy to talk about my problems that manifest based on a 24 year old video game).

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In theory, yes, that's the penalty. In practice, the player will reload their save and repeatedly try again until they win. It's not gambling if there's no possibility of the house winning.

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Well it's true that's not technically gambling, but the penalty for losing is the cost in time and frustration spent reloading and trying over and over again. If the loss of character control was fixed, then I feel like upgrades would be justified if the difficulty was large enough. It would be less of a gamble and more of a reward for overcoming the difficulty. 

18 hours ago, darknil said:

t-edition had to have a custom editor made for it, because literally *nothing* in it works in usME anymore

So then could BNW also make use of a similar custom editor? I understand BTB's point of limited space leading to more creativity, but I feel like it could also leads to missed opportunities, such as fixing the colosseum instead of scrapping it completely.

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On 8/16/2018 at 3:45 AM, seibaby said:

Unless BTB can come up with a set of scripts that are good both for Colosseum fights and normal encounters without using up too much space, it would require expansion.

I propose this as a alternative solution:  BNW already removed a ton of enemies, presumably to free up space in the AI bank mostly I'm guessing (and we don't need 250+ normal enemies anyway).  In addition, many of the remaining enemies aren't rageable anyway.  You could conceivably remove some more enemies from the main game.  You then create customized 1v1 scripts for some enemies, and that enemy is only seen in the colosseum.

The only problems I can see preventing this are the ability to create enough space to make enough of a variety of colosseum enemies; the other being the necessity to create new and interesting scripts that aren't insanely difficult/bordering on RNG-dependency, yet still different enough to feel unique.

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