Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

For the life of me I can't remember much about Voidwatch at all.

Things I remember:

Introduced the 4 armed SAM zombie giant mobs
Pil silver Caturae in Behemoth's Dominion
Kaagan or whatever, Mantis NM in Qufim?
Provenance Watcher and the cool themes there
Bird lady in Sky
Whale in Purgonurgo

Were there story NPCs ever? Hmmm

Not really, it was a very loose storyline but the content was really good honestly. I remember it was super hard at the beginning, people literally bringing 18 ppl and failing to the first few NMs. It was a huge wake up call after Abyssea made everyone felt like powerful gods. The beginning also saw people use all different kinds of jobs as a strategy, it was really unique time. Like you mentioned, it also introduced tons of monster models that were super cool looking. The only downside was the horrid drop rates, I'll never forget going like 1/280 on Pil and similar NMs, people used to have a counter in their bazaar comments lol. It also created some of the first heavily reliant PUG culture. Its crazy what they can create with very limited resources... that drove the end game economy for the longest time with the bare minimum, a simple force popped NM in the same zones we always had.

Yeah, I loved the Voidwatch age.

My friends and I who'd farmed Abyssea would team up with shout PUGs, sometimes make our own, and we'd get to really stretch out legs from all our hard work in Abyssea and other places.

I found Salvage II really fun around that time, too.

But yeah, the drop rates just made me say to myself, "Guess you're staying 90 forever, Ukon." Meanwhile my friends and Ex casually kept getting their HMPs and accumulating gil to buy them.

I always had a defeatist attitude about making gil and also about getting REM items/progress.

VW was the last time it was super fun (for my playstyle) Never having to play the fotm, there was no fotm when "every" job was "needed". No meta is the best meta.

Join any shout on any job in any language. No problem doing random ***like nin/blm bluprocbitch sch/pld

And then shouts and pugs vanished and fun gave way to metaonry and everything was dogturds.

I remember being so happy when procs were revealed as a game mechanic because unlike most folks I'd collected every spell in the game. So while everyone else was out hunting 1000 Needles and stuff I was already all over it :D

Voidwatch drove me away for a number of years. I do remember going 1/1 on my Toci's Harness, but that was the only highlight. The 1500 HMPs for four or five weapons was such a drag.

Last time I really had fun in 11 was when I was in a linkshell where we did PVP from time to time and I was allowed to go as Dancer to a lot of stuff. I remember proccing a ton in Dynamis. When I do come back to the game now I mostly just solo and it isn't as fun.

Then again I can say the same for FFXIV as well. It was fun when I played with my ex and the FFXIAH crew on Excal, but then that all ended and I changed servers. When I do log in its just to do dailies or lately to go to art parties and I don't really play the game for the game that much.

I have some great linkshells now that make it easy for me to maintain the willpower to play, but the most fun I've had in FFXI was in the early years. Not because the 75 era was so great gameplay-wise, but I made some good friends and there was something charming about the game when I was just exploring new areas and trying to get by instead of spending all of my time min-maxing the crap out of everything.

My favorite was the Delve era. I had so much fun with the content and my friends, def my favorite time of the game. I do love the freedom now though, so many different ways to improve your character and try all kinds of different combinations for stuff. I just wish we got a lot more content to use it all on but what can you do.

My favourite was leigon era you could do meeble u could farm empy weapons no need to 99 you can help others to get it too and compete aganist other people and fight over pop sites and timed nms!!!

Lets build a private server from delve era, so

Send me the money

Mwahaha

REm4ke today

Well, early access for strimmers

YOOOOOOOOOOOO

Last couple of hours of playing XB3, its to beat the last levels of the UNM bosses in Challenge.

Enjoying the AFK strat, made a self sufficient party and left it to try to fight alone the boss.

Currently like 20 mins fight for 35%HP. I can study while my party beat the hardest boss by itself

Im not sure, but I do feel excited when I can work something out in the game so that I can beat things... without playing!

The best play is not to play!

f0rest stream beta test on de_dust2. slick as hell the game play. very smooth game play. maps looks very beautiful. AWP looks more real than ever.

It always kinda blows my mind whenever I see a game advertise itself as an "Idle RPG". I make fun of a lot of modern games that they "practically play themselves", but a lot of games literally do... and people apparently seek them out.

And then folks talk about how there's no time to play video games anymore. As if the entire world was in high school at the same time, or as though people don't put 60 hours per week into Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley.

"No one has time for a grindy RPG anymore"
Wrong. It's that they've figured out how to make the grind profitable. Make it impossibly slow, but give once-per-day rewards that skyrocket your numbers to encourage players to log in daily, or sell XP Boosts or Level Skips for $9.99 in the in-app store. Grinding is no longer prolific, and therefore no longer fun.

They'll regenerate your HP and MP to full after every fight so there's no reason to be smart about resources, then wonder why players only ever use offensive actions. So then they'll make their next game where it's nothing but hammering an attack button since that's all players are doing anyway.

They'll give you 50 completely eye-rolling quests per area and then wonder why players don't read the dialogue. So then they'll put up giant glowing markers and GPS navigation and a map that sprawls across the whole screen, just so the player can complete all of those quests.

They'll try to make the next legendary story and build a carefully-crafted and detailed world, but then give it F-tier voice acting, a generic "power of friendship" story, one-note characters, and a surprise twist villain at the end. They'll tell the story backwards because they saw it in a movie once, but only tell you that story in chunks in the form of cutscenes after an hour of gameplay so you can't piece it together.

Or wait, I'm wrong. RPGs have just always sucked and society as a whole has simply grown out of them. My bad, everyone!

This. I love a grind, even if I've only got an hour to play I love me some grinding for marginal/slow upgrades. I don't have highschool levels of freedom, but also don't like feeling like I'm logging in to do homework the devs provided for us all. It's a shame the model for all games has turned to dailies/weeklies/login rewards and cash shops - just let me grind what I want to grind on my own timeline without the FOMO lol

A properly-designed RPG, no matter how linear, will always have flexible pacing. Diminishing returns means you can do something for as long as you want, but you'll always be encouraged to do other stuff. You're never wasting your time, because it's all progress. That's one thing a lot of my favourite RPGs have in common.

Go out, grind a few levels, come back to town, buy new gear, go out again, follow the story for a while, maybe fight a boss, grind a few more levels, maybe craft or do a couple side quests...

And there's a lot of ways you can make the grind fun, too. Making even the most mundane fights a challenge, forcing you to juggle resources between fights, or adding hard-counter systems to make you pay attention. Learning the game's mechanics so you can play more optimally is such a fun experience. The thrill of the risk of failure and the satisfaction of a hard-fought victory.

But instead of realizing this, the media has dismissed turn-based games as slow and nonsensical. Buttons must be mashed at least once per second or else fun isn't being had, the player must not be allowed to wander for risk of getting lost, and mechanics must be streamlined so no mistakes can be made.

I only have a PS4. I want to play resident evil 4 remake right now. I saw that you can change the time zone to NZ to play it right now… on the Xbox only.

For the first time in my life, I wish I had an Xbox. Didn’t think that’ll ever happen.

matusi making ff17 is real?

Problem is they gave us homework for a test that will never come.

Real issue is entertainment has changed, and the corpos control the companies.

Not only do they want to appeal to the lowest common denominator now, but they want to appeal to youth. And the youth these days are all tied up in short form content that doesn't demand much attention in the form of thought.

Games all wanna be action oriented so the hands are always kept active, so that the brain doesn't have to do much processing/reading etc. There's still a lot of thought, but it's all tied to the action, but due to the nature of action, you can get by on mashing.

Tie in the fact that there was a golden age of RPGs in the 90s, and they bring in the whole generational war thing with real young idjits talking smack about what was once the height of tech.

It's a pincer move that makes it look like what the present desires is aligned between corporate and their demographic, when in reality, the demographic doesn't really know what it wants as the lowest common denominator just likes what's popular by and large.

If enough influencers and mass media figures got behind turn based games, public opinion would shift. It's not gonna happen though, because the dollah dollah bills are rolling in right now, and a lot of the "influencers" do not like turn based games because most of them are younger or are media figures first and gamers second.

TL;DR

We live in an age where video games are no longer for the enthusiasts that grew the hobby till it burgeoned into the mainstream. We live in an age where games are controlled by corporate interests, not creatives.

Yeah, I'm getting sick of all the FOMO nonsense in games nowadays. Did you miss the beta, or the preorder bonus, or the
event that you couldn't play because you were on vacation, or the special code that they sent out on Twitter/Discord that expired in a day, or you didn't spend countless hours completing every battle pass, or you didn't win that in-game tournament, or you didn't drop hundreds of dollars on lootboxes to eventually get that limited-time item?

Welp, you're never getting that thing you missed out on. Sucks to be you. We still want you to play our game, though! ^_^

I will give FFXI a lot of credit for that, though. There are very few promotional/exclusive items in the game that are no longer obtainable, and the fact that they include old rewards in seasonal events and login campaigns is exactly how it should be done.