BTB

1 hour ago, NGPGamer said:

*Snip*

Hey, glad you're enjoying things.

There are several items in the game that aren't mentioned in the Printme - think of them as "secrets"

The "dodging while asleep" thing is a weird bug from vanilla that rears its head every now and then here. Thankfully, it's pretty rare from my experience.

If Shadow dies on the Floating Continent, he actually moves over to Relm in BNW instead of just being inactive for the rest of the game. Otherwise, he sticks with Shadow.

While BNW 2.0 isn't yet "officially" released, the beta version is currently largely finalized with only inconsequential changes left to be made and we've reached the point of steering all new players towards playing it. So with that, I unveil the brand-new MVP thread for a new version, now with more voting options!

Please do take a minute to vote for your favorite character(s) after playing (and please do actually finish the mod before you do) since it's more than just a popularity contest - it's extremely useful feedback for gauging how well the characters are balanced.

2 hours ago, ff7hero said:

I'd say it has more to do with an increase in general balance.

 

Yep, that's the idea! The entire point of this poll was to help me identify which characters needed buffing and which didn't, so the ultimate goal is a wide variety of responses.

We made a policy of not delivering ETAs when we missed our initial launch prediction by a year and a half.

The odds of Goner never showing up at all are ludicrously low, actually.

Locke initially ran away with the first character poll we did back on ID. Seems he's been reeled in a bit since then...

I'm a helper o/

As a beta looms nearer, I'm going to supplement my list of things to look for with a few things I want specific feedback on.

__ Random encounters and enemy behavior (obviously), as well as boss fights (double obviously)
__ Hints about beating bosses from NPC - did you notice any? Did you TAKE that advice?
__ Watch out for erroneous "EP gain" messages that appear after the Battle of Narshe, but before you get espers: we need save data to examine this bug
__ Play with Setzer's Dice; does the damage suck? Do we need to fuck with the odds any?
__ Give us a few basic level benchmarks, specifically for the FC and the end of the game. I'm curious to see how often players will overlevel without deliberately grinding

That room doesn't exist anymore. A line of dialogue in 2.0 is going to make that fact more explicit.

Looks like the guys in Discord got you taken care of in figuring out how to patch everything yourself. We, of course, can't offer pre-patched ROMs because that would be *dirty* and *wrong*... >.>

7 hours ago, Nesouk said:

What trigger Goner ?

Anything does. Kefka's counter script occurs in "phases" rather than being specific to attack types.

Goner is used exclusively as a counter-attack, so yes you definitely triggered it.

Updated the beta testing list in this post.

RNG fuckery does still exist in Brave New World as it is. We've been trying to phase it out, but it's a difficult thing to do mainly for the reasons that Mishrak brought up.

A "true" RNG death is when absolutely nothing you could have done would have prevented it - the cranes are a pretty good example of this and a very good example of why I decided to trash the "back attack" damage bonus for pincer attacks in 2.0. The wrong sequence of enemy attacks in a pincer situation can kill any party that isn't overleveled or over-armored, which leads us to the tricky part of the argument. It's not *completely* unavoidable in the technical sense, but it's practically unavoidable through anything other than grinding or luck. These are the situations that we are seeking to eliminate.

On 1/17/2019 at 7:02 PM, RogueYun said:

*Snip*

Glad you're enjoying everything!

So, first of all... most everything you said about difficulty are things that I've already been thinking and the next update addresses it. The game's code doesn't allow enemies to take only half damage from elements - it's all or nothing, but I cut WAY back on the elemental immunities that made little sense and/or felt tacked on.

The translation, well... I guess a lot of it comes down to what we were trying to do. I can't in good faith say that our goal was to make a more faithful version of the original Japanese, because we didn't We went in a different direction with a lot of things, and it's totally okay if that's not what you're after. Most Players will point immediately to the humor for this, but take for example the scene when you're re-recruiting Setzer. In the original Japanese, it's really just kind of... bland. Brave New World makes Setzer very depressed and very much an asshole, and I had a lot of fun writing that scene.

A lot of people assume that Clean New World was written out of spite, when in fact the opposite is actually true. I wrote Clean New World as a personal "thank you" to our own @thzfunnymzn so that he could play the game with his sister. What *would* have been done out of spite - and why I never did it - was the "vanilla" translation that Deschain did for us that will be included in 2.0. I personally have a distaste for it, but appreciate the intent behind its creation and the effort that went into it.

Anyway, that's my take on it. Thanks again for playing and taking the time to write in your thoughts.

I greatly dislike the concept of a superboss, because the unspoken implication is that you have one boss in a game that's interesting and worth fighting, while everything else is boring garbage that is made even easier after the "optional" superboss has been defeated. That's not really how I roll.

12 hours ago, Mishrak said:

The best way is probably via dynamic AI scripting, but it’s a fine line to toe.

This is what I'm shooting for with Kaiser

1 hour ago, Reiker said:

I do agree that fights tend to devolve into a "rhythm" of using the same abilities on your characters for a few minutes straight, but I'd rather that be fixed with more dynamic scripting as opposed to just slashing HP values.

That's actually what's been happening in most cases, I just really haven't been discussing it much because I don't want to give anything away. The bosses who got HP cuts were the ones who REALLY needed it.

1 hour ago, Hapanpappa said:

Then how do you feel about fights with multiple stages rather than just having a single pattern or puzzle to be solved? As mentioned, it's been such a long while since my last playthrough so I don't really remember if you had any of those in BNW but surely that would be a way to make fights both longer AND dynamic so the 2 dimensions work in unison to create a multifaceted challenge that requires both short- and longterm planning? Because I interpret your words as indicating that BNW bosses are more about that one riddle - albeit complex, no doubt - that you have to solve and after that, there's not much at all except boredom. In that case, I wholeheartedly agree with shaving off some of the fight length.

Multiple phases is not problematic in and of itself. The issue becomes when the fight simply becomes more difficult without changing in an appreciable manner. A bad example of this is the goddess fights in 1.9, who simply just start using stronger attacks halfway through the fight. A GOOD example would be Atma Weapon, who still becomes more difficult in the second phase but also meaningfully changes up what is making the fight so difficult. Another example would be Guardian, who has more HP than most any other boss but is not really problematic because the fight has several distinct phases that are each difficult in a completely different way.

The key to a good, interesting boss battle is for it to be DYNAMIC. The thing I look for when I watch streams is when a fight becomes repetitive - when any challenge it has to offer has ceased and the player is just in a loop of performing the same actions over and over waiting for the fight to end. That is the specific thing to be avoided and something that was given a great amount of consideration in this update.

I won't be so full of myself as to say that's what I've accomplished, but it is what I was aiming for

9 minutes ago, Hapanpappa said:

Argh, I find it so hard to believe that I'm the odd one out when it comes to enjoying long&difficult boss fights in these "supermods" as I like to call them... Especially since there's more strategic options and it incentivizes to explore the whole game, complete every quest and battle because you know there will actually be a worthy challenge that's gonna put all that epic gear, levels, builds&the party that you've built to the ultimate test. 

Difficulty is like a penis: just because it's long does not mean that it's hard, and there's a very important distinction between those two things. None of those battles are becoming any less challenging, merely less repetitive. 

First of all, Happy New Year everyone. May your 2019 be pleasant and C.H.U.D.-free (or may it be loaded with C.H.U.D.s if you're into that sort of thing. I don't judge.)

And now on to Brave New World. Back in 2011, when Synchysi and I started working on our humble little project, we initially envisioned a release date of that Thanksgiving, and then later that Christmas. But then I started working on enemy AI and the first public release of Brave New World was in May of 2013.

What I'm trying to say is that shit takes awhile.

I've been working more or less non-stop on this update for the last nine months or so, and the lion's share of that has been on a very long-overdue look back over enemies and their behavior. Armed with a damage calculator (a LOT of 1.9's enemy stats are pure guesswork, believe it or not) and 6 years' worth of design theory and player feedback, I've done a thorough re-balancing act that Synchysi and I have been talking about doing for years. This overhaul is so significant, in fact, that it along with the largest changelog by far of any update we've done in the past is telling me that version 1.10 (a name that was already causing some confusion) really shouldn't ever exist.

This is 2.0.

It's not exactly the handful of expansion ideas that we had in mind as far as additional content goes (a future version 3.0 isn't exactly off of the table), but make no mistake that everything going into this update will make it a brand new game.

So where are we at now?

My work on this update is now finished and has been shipped off to Synchysi. He has some assembly work to do, as well as putting together the two dozen or so other hacks that have been provided by outside sources. Every significant contributor to Brave New World over the last eight years has pitched in something for this update and it's going to be *huge*.

And it's gonna need some testing.

So while Synchysi gets a beta patch ready, I've put together two lists of things for testers to look for. The first is a list of definitive provables (i.e. here's my proof that the Earth is round) - shit to check off so long as it is verified working - while the second is a list of unprovables (i.e. does God exist?) to keep a constant eye out for since they can't really be definitively *DIS*proved.

Got it? Good. Here we go.

DEFINITIVE PROVABLES

___ Does the shop preview hack display properly?
___ Does the Max HP/ATB view toggle work correctly in battle?
___ Do spells display their colored "dot" in battle? (Do the dots look ok?)
___ Do status auras display properly? (check with multiple statuses)
___ Do Regen/Rerise display properly in the targeting menu?
___ Do Slow/Haste/Stop display properly in the ATB bar?
___ Does Reflect properly wear off randomly when activated and not on a timer?
___ Does the Ribbon properly defend against Stop?
___ Is the tombstone puzzle correct? (Note: please try every possible "wrong" combination)
___ Does the Chainsaw death proc use the "cleave" animation ?
___ Do the Doomsbane/Tarot (anti-undead) death procs use the "X-kill" animation?
___ Does the Doomstick X-Zone proc heal undead enemies?
___ Does absorbing a spell with Runic remove the "vanish" status from Celes/Gogo?
___ Do ground-based attacks (i.e. Quake) clear the "vanish" status from floating targets?
___ Does Seraph grant immunity to "condemned" (easiest test subject: Wrexsoul)
___ Do Glare and Blow Fish miss targets with the "vanish" status?
___ Can Mog/Gogo cover allies while dancing?
___ Does dying to the Guardian (as Leo) result in a game over?
___ Do enemies properly respond to MP damage? (easiest test subject: Soul Train)
___ Does the chest at Ebot's Rock require to be fed its booty all at once?
___ What happens if you feed the chest, it moves, you leave, and come back?
___ Does Shadow's name appear correctly as an opponent at the Colosseum?
___ If Shadow is dead, does the opponent for the Kagenui display properly?
___ Does the "wait" option for the Apocyllumina work as intended?
___ Can you purchase Alexandr at the Fanatic's Tower without incident?
___ Do the Crusader, Alexandr, and Ragnarok espers have the correct settings/users?
___ Does GP Toss do the correct amount of damage (test single and multi-target)?
___ Does ??? do the correct amount of damage?
___ Does Mantra heal for the correct amount?
___ Does the Kusarigama properly cast net AND do additional damage to human targets?
___ Do the Viper Darts still do auto-crits with Daryl's Soul equipped?
___ Does the Imp spell work out of battle?
___ Does the Imp status still affect healing items (namely Phoenix Down)?
___ Does an Imped enemy healed by harvester get its regular sprite back?
___ Do SOS Safe/Shell/Haste relics proc the correct spells?
___ Does Phunbaba attack again right away if you do Mobliz after getting the Falcon?
___ Can Gau use "Leap" in the final battle?
___ Can the Soul Train be properly MP killed?
___ Do bosses correctly give exp./EP?
___ Can an enemy who counters melee attacks counter a counter-attack from your characters?

SHIT TO KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR

___ Random encounters that are too difficult
___ Colosseum encounters that are too difficult
___ Enemies that hit themselves
___ Enemy formations that look fucked up in pincer attacks
___ Typos in the dialogue
___ Blank text boxes
___ Beginner's (or Advanced) School dialogue that needs clarification or needs to be added
___ Enemy or item names that don't match up with the Printme (a lot of things were renamed)
___ Anything else that seems fucked up

I'll make a special note about that first item on the second list: enemy behavior is a *major* aspect of this update. The goal is for it to be more obvious when enemy attack patterns shift, which in turn should make it easier to figure out WHY they shifted. Under ordinary circumstances, enemies will be less aggressive than they are in the current version of Brave New World; when triggered, they will become much worse. The idea is to identify those tiggers and work around them.

SO, if you get your ass kicked in a fight - and you will - the first thing is to figure out why. What was it that killed you? Is it behavior that you can figure out how to prevent? If no, then post about it. If yes, then it's (clearly) functioning as intended.

They're in BNW and function the same as in vanilla.

So, progress report time! I've been quiet for awhile as I've been working on overhauling enemy AI from the ground up - a process which ate up about a year of BNW's initial development time. I am glad to say that has been COMPLETELY finished and I am very excited to see how the results play out in beta testing! I have updated the changelog for now; presently, we are waiting for just a few more hacks from outside sources, and all I have left to do is finish updating enemy stats (about a day's work, though I dunno when I'll have that day) before I have a working ROM to fire off to Synchysi.

Things are definitely starting to come along!

Zombies and Condors specifically are on a timer. Every time the global battle timer hits a certain point, they will use Doom/Gale Cut, respectively. This ensures that they don't all just spam said attack at once and identifies them as enemies that should probably be defeated first before they can get those attacks off (which admittedly can be hard to do). The flip-side of that is that larger, more powerful enemies tend to be triggered by either being alone or taking damage at all, so it becomes a puzzle to figure out.

Or that's the intention, anyway. As it stands, I don't think it's very well set up, and enemy behavior still feels very random. There are only a few isolated cases where enemy behavior is truly predictable, and I'm working on fixing that.