FFTA was the game that got me into trpgs. Absolutely love it. Character progression feels so good and I love the ability to pull a little bit from one job to another via the way the skills system works.
I've been playing Tactics Ogre Reborn lately and it certainly has a much better plot, but I'd like it if character growth was closer to FFTA.
I have a lot of opinions about the plot to FFTA though. Marche frankly feels like the villain to me. His stated goal is literally to destroy the world.
So, yes and no. Acceleration due to gravity impacts all objects equally. With no air resistance, on earth, everything speeds up at 9.8m/s/s. But, that "no air resistance" is a big asterisk. This is why, say, parachutes work. It's also how we get terminal velocity. Often misinterpreted as "how fast you'd have to go to die from a fall" it's actually "how fast you need to go before the drag from your air resistance is a force greater than or equal to gravity"
I mean, drop shipping does feel like it could be easily profitable for someone with clout and a following to peddle his upcharged wares to.
At least he's doing better than last time when he was immediately shut down because the product was illegal (included roms), or when he bought an atari nft that he thought meant he owned atari. I really want to know how much he paid for that nft that he thought he owned the entire company
True, but one of the biggest things we're using that power for recently is "why bother optimizing?" With splashes of "can we obtain any more data from the user?"
Yeah, and that's okay, as long as you've taught your players to be looking for that.
If it's the fifth game in the series and suddenly shifts to a couple of small, subtle interactibles and occasional pieces of important destructible environment, where those never existed prior, you better be using them all over, and from the start teaching players that they exist.
It's so important to teach players what the game expects of them. Going "what do I do!?" Is such a horrible experience every time, even in otherwise good games
Yeah this is literally what happened in 2008. Economic instability stopped banks from lending to would be individual home buyers, but corpos bought up everything they could eagerly with a 20% price cut.
This doesn't make me super want to play 5, the only game in the main series I haven't played, but it does make me appreciate the rest, sometimes in ways I've recognized, and others not so much.
Halo was somewhat unique in the Halo 3 2007 era, where every game was shades of grey and brown, because enemies were still colorful, with distinct designs and silhouettes, and the game at least started in a lush jungle. While certainly waypoints made a difference, I want to say most interactive items were either brightly lit forerunner panels in blue, covenant panels in bright green, or human ones that were just a huge green button. Clearly that design was well thought out and done for good reason, even if it would be reasonable to consider them a little silly in their dramatic design. They stood out, even in halo 3s large setpiece battle areas
Someone talking about how a bunch of employees who weren't invested, oh hey that's me!
Gamasutra has since gone belly up, but I found an archive of the interview with Frank O'Connor, halos franchise development director (at the time? Idk if that's still the case).
On this page specifically, we open with the quote "We hired people who hated halo"
https://web.archive.org/web/20210116045012/https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/191234/making_halo_4_a_story_about_.php?page=3
I didn't reread the full article, couldn't say in 2025 whether it's worth a full read, but that sentiment did stay with me all these years later as a strange choice
Yeah, for me personally, I've got one or two devices that see irregular use that are linux now, but my main rig is still windows and will continue to be so, since I have a number of friends on xbox that I can get more cross play for via gamepass
But since I'm currently boycotting microsoft, and don't know how much longer friends will stick with xbox given their general market decline, and given all the stability issues with win11 lately due to an increase of AI code usage, and all the everything... It might be a matter of time
Good to know! I've just been having regular encounters with high quality content from there, rather than being a regular reader, so I haven't had any awareness of anything in the background.
In a world full of "gaming journalists have no place in an era of AI" this is really heartening to hear
Damn, it's the original founder? But, that guy actually gave a shit and I wanted him to succeed! The company got taken over by finance bros who just wanted to party, ipo, and walk away from a failing business they made, I assumed it would have been them, given the crypto
Sometimes. The only real difference is earnings. There was the rumor that a saudi prince kept a couple mobile games alive solely based on his own spending for a while. Anecdotally I know of at least one person making six figures who was spending five figures a month on mobile games (and eventually declared bankruptcy) and another spending a grand a month that fit it into his budget.
The point remains, games designed to extract thousands from individual players have grown very popular among industry execs because it's more profitable (and often easier) to squeeze an inordinate amount out of one player than to get $10 out of 100 players. Marketing for that top 1% spender is definitely exploiting addiction, but they're making it for the ones who will continue to afford it, and thus continue to fund the game
This just reminds me that modern goth women are hot and I want to fight the papal guard. Not that I'm mad at anyone, but I've done Historic European Martial Arts and they're one of very few forces in the world that train for weaponized combat with, say, a halberd. I want to know how badly a pro would toss my salad.
Strong woman in armor? Even better!
It's actually been this way for a while. The top 10% of American earners do half of all consumer spending. A massive amount of the economy has shifted to reflect this. Businesses are often targeting business to business sales rather than business to customer. Pay to win video games use free players as content for whales to play through. And if you're selling physical goods, you're probably either doing it as cheaply as possible, or absolutely gouging the assholes you're selling to (think ikea vs Kohler's premium brand, for which a lamp costs 5 figures and the website doesn't gave prices listed).
To my understanding, for H4/5 one of the big drivers for why the games are quite different is that, following the split from bungie and breakoff to 343, naturally, a lot of new devs had to be brought on. That's not terribly surprising, but additionally, during that hiring process, it was a goal to bring on devs who were not previously halo fans.
Strange choice imo. The goal was to bring in fresh ideas and attract a wider audience (for one of the biggest franchises of the moment). The effect was a bunch of the employees didn't have much investment in the franchise and often wanted to make changes that would alienate long time series fans.
While I agree with your general sentiment, I must say, a ton of that obtuseness was sanded away in World, imo, for the better. I would hope it continues to trend away
FFTA was the game that got me into trpgs. Absolutely love it. Character progression feels so good and I love the ability to pull a little bit from one job to another via the way the skills system works. I've been playing Tactics Ogre Reborn lately and it certainly has a much better plot, but I'd like it if character growth was closer to FFTA.
I have a lot of opinions about the plot to FFTA though. Marche frankly feels like the villain to me. His stated goal is literally to destroy the world.