June 2015 – Page 8

Shiva Down

June 23, 2015June 17, 2015 by Belghast

Last Of the E3 Shows

I think at this point I am ready to be done with E3 2015 for awhile. In theory yesterday was the tail end of the major conferences. I have to say that when I originally made my statement that Bethesda had won E3, I was doing so with an over exaggerated amount of hyperbole. I have to say however as the dust settles… they still managed to put on the best event and was the only show where every single thing they announced was something I cared about, at least on some level. The most frustrating event for me personally was the Square Enix event, in part because they combined a line up of amazing games… with a high school speech classroom quality of presentation ability. I am not sure how they managed to make these games seem boring, but they certainly did. All of that said I am completely amped to get my hands on Just Cause 3… or that game that lets me blow everything up. I got a see a little bit of game play on Twitch yesterday evening that showed them taking out bridges… and I could not be more enthralled.

The surprise of the year still is Microsoft in the fact that they presented me with what was an overall enjoyable conference after several years of being frustrated by their product offerings. The problem being that last night during PC Gaming show they pretty much destroyed all interest I had in picking up an Xbox One, when they started announcing that several more previously Xbox exclusives would be coming to PC. It seems as though I am going to finally get to play Gears of War in the new premastered form, and get my hands in the new Killer Instinct. This makes me question even more of their previous “exclusivity” statements because it seems like they are treating Windows 10 and Xbox One as the same platform. I guess in the grand scheme of things I am completely fine with this. This lets me focus on a Gaming PC to get the Xbox exclusives and PS4 Console to get any remaining Sony exclusives.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5

Of all the games that I saw over the course of the last three days, the one that I am the most gleefully happy about is probably a surprising title. I am so damned excited to see the return of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater franchise to modern gaming, and yesterday I got to watch some game play on the twitch stream. It looks and feels like a beautifie d version of the game I loved and remember spending so many hours playing in the original playstation, and later the playstation 2. I cannot fully explain my love of this game, other than the fact that one upon a time I was a little skater punk kid. While I never had the skill to do half of the things that you can do in THPS, I always wanted to carve and insane session out like my one time idols. This is absolutely a guilty fantasy fulfillment experience for me, that allows someone who is relatively uncoordinated and has a shitty sense of balance to do insane grinds down every possible surface I can find.

Now Tony Hawk Pro Skater HD has been available on Steam for awhile now, and while I enjoy it quite a bit… it is missing a lot of the reasons why I enjoyed the THPS series. Firstly I loved the create a Skater mode that allowed me to essentially create a version of myself in the game and work my way through a “career mode”. This feature thankfully has been confirmed to be in the new THPS5, as is the create a skate park feature that is also missing from HD. Apparently there is going to be an in game market of sorts that will allow you to swap skate parks with folks online, greatly extending the replay ability of this title. The negative is that it will initially release on the PS4 and Xbox One and then later on the other platforms including PC. For me this is a simple decision since I played all the original Tony Hawk games on with a playstation controller in my hand, I have no problem picking this up for the PS4 which will also let me play it over my Vita. Watching folks play this game, and seeing the new version of Warehouse and School 2… that has been renamed to School 3… just put a massive cheesy grin on my face.

Shiva Down

I had originally intended to write about this yesterday, but wound up with far too much to talk about on the E3 news front. Monday night was our last raid night before the expansion lands Friday morning, and as such we focused on the two things that have been in our way for awhile now. The first of which is the last of the extreme primal encounters, Shiva. This fight is such a frustrating experience because it combines elements we are horrible at. Namely our group is bad at doing the same dance over and over. For example on Turn 9, everyone else does this method where they stack up and run as a group to drop the meteors. However for us we simply do this thing we lovingly refer to as the “Benny Hill maneuver” where we just try and spread out around the edge of the room and move as the meteors drop. Shiva combines elements of get away from everyone and stack the hell up in a way that ultimately ended up in many deaths along the way.

The worst of her mechanics is the bow attack, which she starts in phase two. This fires arrows in a 270* arc from the front of her meaning that you have to be stacked tight on her ass to keep from getting hit. What makes it worse however is that the normal damage dealt by bow to the tanks is truly insane. Ashgar and I had to essentially cycle through cooldowns while in bow phase to have a shot in hell of staying alive. On the attempt we defeated her, our strategy absolutely revolved around staying alive long enough to get a level three limit break… and then using that to resurrect the entire party and finish her off. There is something so damned satisfying about the level three healer limit break, it is like a giant screw you to the boss when you can bring back your entire party. It makes the whole experience seem like one of those insane Anime come from behind victories. While we did not get much further in Turn 9, we did manage to take down the last of the Extreme primals so I can go into this expansion with a feeling of accomplishment. Granted I know we will be fighting all of these extreme primals again partially for ponies and partially to get other guild members through the quests. I feel like I am completely ready for Ishgard now, and I am going to have so much trouble sleeping tomorrow night.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Shiva Down

Final Fantasy 7

June 21, 2015June 16, 2015 by Tamrielo

Why does a game from 1997 still matter, almost two decades later?

One of the least expected bombs dropped at E3 this year was the up-and-coming Final Fantasy VII “remake”. The darling of Internet speculation since at least the launch of the PS3, there’s been a persistent rumor of a modern version of the game for an incredibly long time. Two good questions come up when watching the E3 trailer:

— “Why does anyone care still?”

— “What is Square-Enix’s position here; why are they doing this *now*?”

The first answer is easy, though will be unpopular if FF7 wasn’t your thing: Final Fantasy 7 is the most popular Final Fantasy full stop. It has sold, over its lifetime, a bit over ten million copies… for just the base game. There are two spinoffs, pushing the FF7 franchise’s sales up to right around 15 million. None of the games in the setting are newer than 8 years old. There’s also a ton of non-game side content that I’m not counting in that number, but are immensely popular.

There’s a fairly common marketing standard that says that something is “mainstream” when it breaks 10 million sales. At the point at which that many copies have been sold, enough people have experienced [whatever] for it to be a cultural touchstone. FF7 is the only Final Fantasy game to break that number.

Here’s the other thing: there are not a lot of games from the 1990s that are still relevant today. A lot of the stories being told back then were extremely limited, for a variety of reasons, and have been outdated since then. Final Fantasy has been trying to push the storytelling envelope for most of its run, and as a result the overall arc of FF7 (and a lot of its side content) is still pretty reasonable with a facelift. The stuff that wouldn’t pass muster today can be easily removed or updated, and the high points the game couldn’t quite hit (due to technological or space or time limitations) can be fully addressed.

So, what’s Squeenix’s angle? Why now?

The common theory I’ve seen floating around is that Square is worried because its flagship series has been faltering, so dropping a new FF7 is a way to give itself a monetary shot in the arm. Let me dispel that one real fast. A remake of FF7 is an entire new game. The parts that you can port over to a graphical update are the EASY parts; new visuals, new engine, new models, new animations– all of that is expensive, and it’s what a remake needs. Even if the story is kept entirely as-is, and they don’t add voices (both of which are laughable), that’s just text, and text is cheap.

Don’t do this.

We haven’t seen an FF7 remake because doing so is *incredibly* expensive. The game is brutally dated at this point, being a PS1 title with some of the blockiest character models this side of Minecraft. There’s been a lot of work in updating character art and models for things like Advent Children and the other spinoffs, but nothing near the scope of redoing the entire game. Again, the most recent of these games was a PSP release in 2007– even that’s dated by now, if it wasn’t when it originally launched.

The FF7 remake isn’t a sign of money-grabbing on Square-Enix’s part. It’s not a sign of uncertainty or insecurity, mining nostalgia for quick bucks. The scope is just too huge for that.

Here’s the way I see it. Square faltered a while back, with some of the more recent FF games (12, 13, first release of 14), and has taken the time to figure out what they’d been doing wrong and how to fix it. We’ve been seeing the shot-in-the-arm re-releases for years now, as they use their old properties to bolster themselves while they work out what to do next. It’s been extremely successful– they’ve partnered up with external studios and made some acquisitions that have been EXTREMELY well-recieved. Lest we forget, the new Deus Ex, the new Thief, the new Tomb Raider, the new Hitman, and Life is Strange are all games developed under the Square-Enix publishing umbrella. These aren’t minor games.

For a closer-to-the-mark example, Final Fantasy 14 is the second-biggest MMO in the world, right behind WoW. It is closer to WoW’s numbers than any other MMO has ever been, and furthermore it’s closer to WoW’s numbers than its nearest competition is to it, and it’s GROWING. We’ll see how the expansion does, but FFXIV is a game that should be dead and is instead the second biggest game in a hyper-competitive, super saturated genre.

Square has been quietly rebuilding its empire for almost a decade now, recovering from missteps in its major franchise. It had difficulty with the transition to high-fidelity open worlds; when it became de rigeur to have a finely detailed game with HD graphics, Final Fantasy, attempting to maintain its reputation for sitting at the forefront of graphics, tried to keep pace, staying ahead of everyone else with stunning graphical fidelity. It’s how we got FF13’s pretty-but-linear corridors; the cost of doing big worlds with that level of detail rises exponentially, so keeping the big worlds and trying to stay graphically on top is an impossible task. Even the open-world games weren’t doing that at the time.

Now, they’ve found their footing. FFXV’s demo was very well received, FFXIV is quietly the most relevant MMO out there, and they have a stable of strong properties, all gunning for sequels, from satellite studios. Despite all of this, possibly BECAUSE of all of this, Square is seen by many to still be faltering. It’s been rebuilding and galvanizing slowly and quietly, so much so that it’s easy to miss if you aren’t paying close attention.

The Final Fantasy VII remake is Square-Enix dropping a bomb, making a big, loud noise to make people sit up and pay attention. They’re here, they’re back, and they’re relevant. FF7 is not a property they take lightly, and they could gently milk it for a long time– they’ve been doing it highly successfully for a while. A full-blown remake is a show of confidence: they believe they can blow you out of the water with it, and that they have all their cards in the right places to do so. It’s finally worth it to them to spend the exorbitant resources necessary to make the game, because they’re confident they can do it right.

It’s going to be different from the FF7 I played nearly 20 years ago, and I’m okay with that. I want to see what Square can do now.

Source: Digital Initiative
Final Fantasy 7

Job Training Part 2: The Squishy Casters

June 21, 2015June 16, 2015 by Ashgar

On to the mages! One thing to note here (because it comes up a few times) is that certain equipment boosts the damage of elemental spells by 50%. Fire/Blizzard/Thunder/Poison rods all boost the power of their matching element when equipped. Gaia Gear boosts Earth, Air Knives boost Wind, and the Sage’s Staff boosts Holy. The Magus Rod includes all of these except Holy. The only remaining element (Water) does not have a potential equipment boost.

White Mage

In the fiesta, White Mage is all about delayed gratification. It does have healing, but one of the things you may learn during the fiesta is that healing is generally less important than making things dead faster so they stop hitting you. Their innate command is !White, which allows casting of white magic. The only other ability they learn is MP +10% when the job is mastered. White magic includes the healing you’d expect, but also a number of useful buffs and status spells. Protect, Shell, and Blink can help you live a little longer. Confuse and Silence can keep enemies from doing much. Near the end of the game, you get access to Holy, which is the strongest single-target damage spell in the game (when cast with the Sage’s Staff).

White Mages struggle a lot if you get them at the start. The Flail is hidden early in the Ship Graveyard and can help a bit. Also, most of the enemies in this area are damaged by Cure, so it’s not a bad spot if you feel like you do need some grinding. On bosses, don’t forget about Protect, and Magissa is vulnerable to Silence.
Blink allows the target it’s cast on to evade two physical attacks. Berserk causes enemies to only use physical attacks. This doesn’t work on most bosses, but it does work on Shinryu, one of the bonus bosses.
In addition to its expected effect of halving magic damage taken, Shell also halves the hit rate of any spell that doesn’t hit 100% of the time, which includes almost all status spells. In a lot of cases, this is more useful than the damage reduction,
In the event that you have White Mage and no other caster, Fork Tower can still be done without too much issue. Omniscient is vulnerable to Silence (and you can Dispel him to improve its hit rate), and your other damage sources can use the brief window this gives you to do damage. Repeat until dead.

Black Mage

Black Mages cast the spells that make people fall down. They remain good at this throughout the entire game, but they see large power spikes whenever they get a new spell level (especially the -aga spells). Their innate command is !Black, and they have no innate passive. Their spell list includes 3 levels of Fire, Blizzard, and Thunder spells, along with Drain, Bio, and Flare to round out the damage dealing. They also have a few status spells (Sleep, Poison, Toad) and two ways to cause instant death (Death and Break). Mastering Black Mage earns you MP +30%. I suspect any non-mage job would get more MP from equipping !Black.

This introduces quite a bit of grinding to a game that normally doesn’t require much (if any), but if you really want, Black Mages can be your primary healers. Flame Rings can be purchased in Istory in World 1, or the Phantom Village in World 3; these cause you to absorb fire spells, making Fire, Fira, and Firaga reasonable substitutes for Cure, Cura, and Curaga. The problem is the price tag: 50k gil each. I recommend the wolves in the forest near Karnak for this money.
FF5 is not a game in which status spells are completely useless. Atomos, one of the more difficult bosses in the game for a lot of parties, can be put to sleep. Sleeping targets are not woken by spells, so this can make the fight pretty easy.
If you can get reflect on your party, casting a spell on your entire party will do more damage to a single enemy than casting on that target directly. This does inhibit healing with White or Black magic, however.
Against most targets, a boosted -aga level elemental spell will do more damage than Flare (which is non-elemental and can’t be boosted). The exception is against certain high-defense targets, since Flare ignores a large portion of magic defense.

Time Mage

Time Mages illustrate that no matter what you’re doing, it’s always better to be able to do it faster. Their command is !Time, which allows casting of Time Magic. Mastering Time Mage grants Equip Rods, which also includes staves. Time Magic is mostly supportive, with a few damage spells thrown in. Haste and Slow are some of the most powerful spells in the game. The Gravity spells mostly don’t work on bosses, but can cripple random encounters. They can do passable damage eventually with Comet, and great damage at endgame with Meteor. Probably their best spell is Quick, which stops time and allows the caster to take 2 actions immediately.

It bears repeating that haste and slow are incredibly strong spells, when combined you’ll get about 4 actions for every turn the enemies take. The only time you don’t want to use Slow is when facing Exdeath in his castle, as he’ll counter with Haste on himself.
The spell Return, when cast in battle, resets time back to the start of the battle. This is useful if things start going sideways, but you can also use it to reset back attacks.
Quick is a good spell, but it’s also the second most expensive spell in the game at 77 MP per cast. Try not to overdo it.

Summoner

Summoner has a lot of power and utility, but it’s locked up in sidequests. Their command ability is !Summon, which does what you’d expect. Mastering the job gets you !Call, which will use a random summon you’ve learned for no MP cost. The primary effect of most summons is damage, but there are some utility ones: Golem protects the party from physical damage, and Carbuncle casts reflect on all party members. Phoenix does a bit of damage, but also resurrects a party member with full HP and MP. The endgame dragons do quite a lot of damage, but Leviathan lags behind because there’s no way to boost the water element with items.

the first 3 summons are store-bought, the rest must be defeated in battle or otherwise acquired. Ifrit and Titan are encountered as part of the story, everything else requires seeking them out.
Some summons are missable: Shiva is in the basement of Castle Walse, Ramuh is in the forest near Istory, Catoblepas is in a forest surrounded by mountains in World 2, and Carbuncle is in Exdeath’s castle. Ramuh gives you a second chance in the final dungeon, but he’s not relevant anymore at that point.
Phoenix is an absolute pain to acquire (you have to climb the 30-floor Phoenix Tower) and costs 99 MP, but the fact that it restores a character to full HP/MP essentially renders your party immune to anything that doesn’t kill everyone at once.
Somewhat large Spoiler: Going to a particular location in World 3 gives you a familiar summon, who is wind-elemental. With an air knife, it does more damage than Leviathan, and almost as much as Bahamut, for a fraction of the MP cost.

Tomorrow: Some unfortunates (and also Mystic Knight). Hope to see you at the Fiesta next week!

Source: Ashs Adventures
Job Training Part 2: The Squishy Casters

E3 2015 Day Zero

June 16, 2015June 16, 2015 by Belghast

Microsoft E3 2015

Yesterday was a huge day of E3 shows with Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft and Sony all strutting their stuff with big press conferences. While I still stand by my statement yesterday, that Bethesda software is winning this E3, everyone involved had some interesting things to show off. Mainly for me this is the year that Microsoft figured out how to do a relevant press conference. The past two years since the announcement of the Xbox One have provided extremely awkward and disconnected moments, but for the most part Microsoft nailed it this time around. They provided a wide scope of games to appeal to all genres, and while I don’t believe in their exclusivity after seeing titles appear on steam months later, I do feel like they are trying really hard to wrap up a large stable of winners as far as software goes. The big title that I am interested in is the new Tomb Raider game, which makes me realize that I really need to finish the last Tomb Raider game.

I’ve never been a huge Halo fan , but even I have to admit that the Halo Guardians demo looked pretty amazing. The title I was most amped about seeing again however was The Division, since we had not really seen much since the last E3. It seems like now we have a pseudo release date and a beta beginning towards the end of this year. My big concern was with the lackluster showing of Destiny so far, that this title might have simply quietly been cancelled. Thankfully that is not the case, and we will be exploring a new action role-playing game setting early next year. The video that takes the cake however for Microsoft is the Hololens demo showing off a special Hololens version of Minecraft. The more I see of Hololens the more I think it is going to be a real force in gaming, and not just another gimmick hoping to find a Market. Virtual Reality headsets extract you from the world, and Augmented Reality keeps you interactive with the world… I think that is going to make a big difference. The little I have played with the Occulus Rift was cool, but I suffered a pretty massive headache and was dizzy as hell as my mind tried to readjust to the “real world” after being in the unit for only around fifteen minutes. I cannot imagine what it would be like after some of my marathon gaming sessions.

EA and UbiSoft E3 2015

As good as Microsoft did with their press conference, EA doubled that effort in the opposite direction. The entire thing was this awkward and disjointed mess trying to play towards too many different demographics and just coming off as frustrating to I believe all of them. The biggest frustration for me personally was the fact that this press conference was about one thing for me… getting to see the new Mass Effect game. We got a minute and a half trailer… and that was quite literally all we saw of Mass Effect. Similarly with Mirrors Edge Catalyst… the game so many people have been amped to hear more news about… we got a two minute trailer. It seems that all EA actually cares about is peddling the new years edition of the same damned sports titles they have been selling for decades. From what I can tell roughly an hour of the presentation was tied up in these sports titles with blips at the beginning and the end about something interesting. I do have to say though that Star Wars Battlefront still looks amazing, however I have had that on preorder from the Playstation network since the Fan Fest announcement. They didn’t really need to sell me on that title, but I am looking forward to it all the same.

UbiSoft on the other hand unleashed a whole bunch of interesting stuff. We are apparently going to colonize the moon in Anno 2205, which looked amazing. They are releasing a version of Trials Fusion where you apparently play a cat that rides a flame breathing unicorn. We got to see even more staged footage of The Division, this time centering around the “Dark Zone”PVP area. The game I never thought I would be interested in however was Ghost Recon Wildlands, which for all intents and purposes seems to be their answer to the Just Cause franchise. Big open world game where you take on drug lords in whatever fashion you see fit. It looks like it is going to be extremely fun in the same way that I lost serious amounts of time to Just Cause 2. The real triumph of the show however is that Aisha Tyler is amazing, and I want her to host every press conference from this point on. Additionally they brought out Angela Basset at one point, who is the absolute badass mocapped leader of the new Rainbow Six. While there was not a whole lot that I was extremely interested in, it was nonetheless a good show or at least looked amazing as compared to the train wreck that was EA.

Sony E3 2015

Finally we wrapped up the night of E3 events last night with the Sony Press conference, and honestly even hours afterwards I am not 100% sure how well it went. They dropped some massive bomb shells on the crowd, but it only really plays to the folks who were already PS4 fans. Ultimately the goal of an E3 press conference for both Microsoft and Sony is to sell hardware, and at the end of the day I end up with the same equation. Most Xbox One exclusives also come out on the PC, and I own a fairly solid gaming PC. Most PS4 exclusives don’t, and as a result that is the hardware I chose to buy. This years game conference only serves to give me more reasons to be happy with my decision. The show lead off with finally giving a date to a game many had just expected got cancelled… The Last Guardian. This game was originally slotted for the PS3, and it was questionable if it had survived the generation hop. The big reveal of the night however is that Final Fantasy 7 is in fact getting a Remake. It was glorious to see at least glimpses of Cloud and Barret as they moved past the camera in all their ps4 glory.

The title that both came from out of nowhere and stole the show for me however was Horizon Zero Dawn from Guerilla games. This apparently ushers in a brand new breed of post apocalyptic storytelling, that manages to do so without weaving in a zombie premise. We live in what seems like a Clan of the Cave Bear like setting, until we see the first giant robot roaming the landscape. This is Turok the Dinosaur hunter, meets Last of Us, meets Zoids. We get to see the female bow hunter protagonist take down a giant robot t-rex like creature. As Tam commented during the stream, we have apparently gotten really good at making fighting giant monsters seem awesome. Had I not already purchased a PS4, this would have been the title that sold me the console. I am really hoping this ends up being a vast open world landscape that lets us wander around and explore, hunting the big game and unfolding what happened during “the darkness” that lead to the machines roaming the earth. There were of course other titles announced that looked great, and that I will likely play, however at six in the morning… the day after the show… the Sony conference was all about FF7 and Horizon for me. You can check out the full show trailer below.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
E3 2015 Day Zero