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Unbreakable

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A year under progress, time to release a beta for my project.  The goal was to create a Hard mode of the game that also removes many abusive glitches, and nerf overpowered skills.  I hoped my target audience to be veterans, speed runners, and challenge seekers, to experience the vanilla game with new rules.  Monsters and bosses have more aggressive AI and there are many fundamental changes towards skills and equipment.  This is by no means complete, I need more eyes on the project to make changes and correct errors.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n8veq51m46febd...e.zip?dl=0
For 1.1 headered ROM

A ChangeLog here highlights the biggest changes:
http://pastebin.com/KEBwfnuH

I'm hoping to get a lot of feedback, even the smallest details are important to me.
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#2
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Nattak\'d
Nice, and congrats on the beta release! I'll definitely check it out and chip away playing it when I have time, the list of changes looks nice and comprehensively thought out & implemented. Anything specific you'd like feedback on? I'd assume difficulty, and opinions on the said changes. Have you played it through yourself yet?


We are born, live, die and then do the same thing over again.
 

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Anything you have an opinion about, I would like to hear it. My standards for the release are high, so I won't stop working until my dream meets the satisfaction of the people that play it.

I have played through it a few times. The battle script changes are quite amusing, and require some ingenuity to overcome. The difficulty should be tough, but fair.

Save as often as you can, and buy a full stock of tonics, you'll need them.
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#4
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Nattak\'d
Just fired it up for a bit, one thing I notice off the bat is all the characters names are in caps, but Biggs is not. Is there some reasoning behind this or are the rest still to come?

The Whelk fight, while lasting a lot longer, especially with slow being applied to the characters and no way to remove it, really didn't offer any more challenge other than the occasional attack by the shell now, but as far as I can tell he (the Whelk head) only used battle and special. You can expand the ROM with FF3usME to 4MB and use the battle script expansion patch it offers to give some more script options for even the most simplest boss like the Whelk, just to spice things up more.
This IS the first boss though and early on, I understand.

Ok, moving on...

The Marshal on the other hand beat me down, so I redid the whole sequence and fought the monsters this time and they were a lot more damaging, lost one party to monsters then had a team of Mog with 2 dead, so used my last Moogle party for the Marshal, put them all in the back row and focus-fired the Marshal. It was a tougher battle for sure, quite difficult indeed to keep my guys alive with very limited healing options - it's tough Stealing the healing items from the monsters prior to the boss battle for much needed healing when they are beating you down so much lol - the Vomammoth seems to be doing a bunch more damage with his 100% chance of Blizzard as his first move, killing them hopefully before they get that off became a high priority instead of stealing from them. That one Moogle's brush weapon that cast slow was a life saver I think for the Marshal.

Having Terra come with Sprint Shoes is nice, but begs the question why not just apply the Dash with B Patch if your intention was to give the player sprinting from the start? This would of course free up the Relic for something else, which is cool.

After that, the desert was alright. More regular poison attacks I think but luckily Antidotes were dropping and I had an unusual more amount of Sleeping Bags than normal, which was good.

Magitek Armor battle, they damaged plenty but nothing one couldn't handle so that's good. I like how Edgar has more HP like a tank it definitely helps. I managed to slam one with Locke's Mirager desperation attack when he got put into Near Fatal and I already inputted Fight, so that was a nice surprise.

Monsters in the Cave... first off it seems that every single monster/battle so far I've noticed has the 'harder to run from' flag applied to it, is there a reason behind this other than just making it harder to run from every single monster? IMO I feel it's a cheap way to increase the difficulty and I found it a bit frustrating and hilarious at the same time watching my characters run in place getting owned cause they cannot escape a 'Crawler' monster lol. I see a lot of monsters are using their specials right off the bat, which is kinda tedious at this point in the game when no Relics are available to prevent the flood of status effects these monsters use, and the castle is of course where you can buy items is under the sand. So one would have to have prior knowledge of these monsters before completing that event, or they will suffer. Got hit with 2 petrifies in a row as well from the Bleary, I did buy Soft though and lots of Antidotes at the castle lucky me, but I ran out half way into the cave. The cave isn't too bad though because of the Recovery Pool of course, so I just hung out there and leveled up a few times until the monsters were more bearable - I couldn't imagine a speed runner doing this however lol. So many status effects early on right at the start of battle with no way to prevent it is pretty cheap instead of a fair-hard difficulty, in my opinion. The cave monsters felt tedious, in other words, perhaps a variable check could be added in the script for 'if party member is already effected by X status, do something else'. I realize the monsters are not the brightest, but spamming there stats inflicting spells over and over even on people already effected seemed kinda...yeah.

This all being said, it IS definitely more challenging thus far and one surely cannot just hold turbo and attack down and expect to win, which from what I understand is a huge part of this mod, so good job there. And I've yet to experience most of what this mod has to offer. Anyways I will report back after I get my characters all pimped out with gear and scale the mountain.


We are born, live, die and then do the same thing over again.
 

#5
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Biggs was the first of the name changes.
Whelk, I had a hard time not getting bored, with the added health and weaker shots, what I did to change that was triple the amount of time Whelk is out of his shell. This makes him more aggressive and reduces wait time.
Marshall I made sure was always beatable even in a 1 hp team scenario. Mog can still ensnare him, so no soft-locks would happen.
I put a lot of thought into putting in the dash patch, and favored sprint shoes. Do I sacrifice move speed for combat related relic? Its another layer of decision making that adds more depth. I am considering making the item slightly more combat relative, or just patching it out. It deserves a bit more consideration, agreed.
Desert is deadly if you are unlucky, having stop on both your characters for instance. At least you have Ice, to deal with these nasty critters. Or you could run through it and not get a single encounter.
Magitek battle seems at the right place, and if you've leveled Terra enough Lightning is available.
Having Leafers and Darkwinds throwing status effects your way was my way of saying, "You'll need to get some status clearing items from that castle." The game forces you to be prepared, and having adequate supplies is essential.
Everything does have a harder to run flag, and I've reduced the run success too. In the original you can run from battles unscathed. Running should have a negative consequence. I liked the thought I had playing with this setting, "I'm taking so much time and damage running, I'd be better off killing the brutes." I started using actions for some of my running characters to cover my retreat.
Don't even think about climbing that mountain without at least 70 tonics.

P.S. I'm replaying this myself and am coming up with a number of issues. Some multi-target spell users in groups are just too strong, for instance. Beware the Lich.
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#6
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Here are the notes that I've been making so far.  Some things echo Nattak, some entirely disagree:

-Before Whelk:
-Clearly you are easing into the difficulty, which may be good.
-Mammoths using Blizzard early is nice.

-Whelk:
-You didn't really increase the difficulty, just the length of the fight.
-Weakening my attacks or increasing his HP is probably fine, but both at once makes this way too long, especially for the first boss fight.
-All of his attacks do borderline pointless damage, especially given the higher starting HP.
-It's barely worth expending effort to avoid Mega Volt, even, since it's not going to kill anyone unless the player falls asleep on the A button.

-Auto-dash:
-While giving Sprint Shoes right at the start is better than vanilla, do you have a reason for not using the auto-dash patch (or the patch for dashing with the B button)?
-I understand that you may want a tradeoff here, but this seems to me like the wrong tradeoff to make.  I want to make decisions based on which Relic will help me win.  I don't really like having a tradeoff between comfort and chance of winning.  The only times in the game where this makes an interesting strategic choice are during the timed segments, but those are few and far between, so they're not worth balancing around.

-Terra in the Mines:
-I feel like it's a bad choice to let the enemies here use Slow inducing specials.  It's not fun waiting thirty seconds for Terra to get a turn.
-If you want to remove Slow and keep the same difficulty, just double the enemy damage output.  I think this would be a large improvement in this case.

-Moogle fight:
-Good, robbing Mog is worthless now. Tongue
-Other than that, it's business as usual.

-M-tek Armor
-Okay, this one is actually a fight.
-The nerfs to the Autocrossbow and Bio Blaster are definitely warrented.

-Cave of South Figaro:
-A bit of a wake-up call in terms of needing status healing Items/protection.
-It's feeling like the Ice spell is completely worthless right now.   Maybe give something here an Ice weakness?
-I like how you can Steal status healing Items from the enemy that sets the status (Echo Screens from the Leafers, Antidotes from the Hornets).  I hope that trend stays consistent.  It works out nicely in this cave since it allows the dungeon to shout "Hey, status effects are a thing, you may want to buy status healing Items in the next town", while preventing the player from getting stuck due to lack of status healing Items.  The relative shortness of the cave also helps.

-Mt. Kolts:
-I like that you removed Cure from Terra.  It's more fun to use her as a Black Mage than to save MP for out of battle healing.
-It seems like a lot of the difficulty in this hack is going to come from managing resources.
-No battle here is hard on its own, really, but I used every single Tonic, Potion and Dried Meat that I had to get through this dungeon, and I had to play carefully to avoid running out.
-It's cool that Locke seems to be getting use as a fighter during this portion of the game.  In most hacks physically attacking with him here is almost a waste of time.

-Lete River:
-After a complete lack of changes to enemy names, suddenly seeing "HappySquid" is pretty funny. Tongue
-Enemies in random encounters with Silence specials are nice to prevent Banon's Health from trivializing this segment.
-It seems a bit unfair that a pair of Pterodons can effectively murder Banon outright if they both drop a Fireball on the same turn.  I think if you made Fireball a timed attack you could prevent them both from using it on the same turn. I'm not sure if you want to change this, since usually the player can take advantage of Confuse or keep Terra's turn constantly ready to slip in a heal between them.
-Ultros plays mostly the same as before, except now he casts Mute on Banon and Edgar is worthless.  One downside to the Mute casting here is that the fight could become slightly ridiculous if the player never bought any Echo Screens (or used them all on the Lete River).  And there's no way to go back and buy them if the player only has one save file at the last save point on the river.  I'm not sure what to do about this.  If there was a way to backtrack from the Lete River's Save points this would be totally fine (since the player should have effectively been warned to buy status healing Items), but in this case that may not be enough because this could potentially cause somebody to have to redo the entire game up to this point if they aren't prepared.

-Terra's scenario:
-Still short and easy, but I barely survived against the checkpoint encounter (I triggered it deliberately).  Doesn't help that I got a Back Attack there.

@"Gi Nattak" I disagree that making it harder to run from encounters is "a cheap way to increase the difficulty". I wouldn't like the idea of players being able to run through dungeons without fighting anything and then grind somewhere right next to an Inn to make up for it. I think making running harder and/or more expensive is a valid design decision.


Confused Moogles FTW
 

#7
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Nattak\'d
(07-24-2016, 06:28 PM)Lockirby2 Wrote: @"Gi Nattak" I disagree that making it harder to run from encounters is "a cheap way to increase the difficulty".  I wouldn't like the idea of players being able to run through dungeons without fighting anything and then grind somewhere right next to an Inn to make up for it.  I think making running harder and/or more expensive is a valid design decision.

Ah yes, I can agree with that point. It was so far mainly just in that cave where it really got to me since they were dropping so many status effects that I couldn't prevent, so when trying to flee the battle as a strategic decision and having them gang rape me into submission it felt a bit unfair compared to difficult. Once Relics come into the picture I'm sure it will be much more tolerable, not being able to run away as easily when needed lol...


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#8
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Version 0.02 update:
I found the fight against Kefka in Sealed Cave was unbeatable because I had my hidden monster who was meant just to sit there and stop you from using Smoke Bombs, was taking turns healing Kefka, making the fight unwinnable.
I fixed a problem with the enemy, General having targeting issues, and Rhinox lacking MP.
Lich and Coelicite, have been nerfed greatly.
Base names have been made lower case (except moogle helpers, they're special)

Discussion:
Sprint shoes. I think you're right, they don't add anything but convenience and if you don't have them in timed events you are boned anyways.
Whelk needs to die faster, I don't see any harm in buffing Biggs and Wedge damage.
I agree about the Pterodons, they do this in Vanilla too, you just don't see it often because they die so fast. I'll consider it. Another thing is this makes you consider using Sabin attacking to focus fire one of them out of the picture.
Ultros targeting Bannon is a trade off: Since mute does a little damage and misses if Bannon is muted, if he's already silenced and in the back row and defending, he's pretty easy to keep alive with tonics.

Things start getting more interesting in Sabin's scenario.
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#9
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I don't really run from battles in general, so maybe that's colouring my perspective a little. That being said, I only had one Soft and one Antidote when I went through there. The enemies there had status effects and nothing else that was all that dangerous, so I didn't feel it was unmanageable.

I still don't think that attacking with Sabin is worth it. I'm assuming that they can use Fireball only on their third turn, like in vanilla (my results while playing Unbreakable were consistent with that). Zerg rushing one using Sabin's physical attacks (assuming only minor damage from the rest of the party, who can't do much here) can't kill one by turn three (at least at my level). However, Pummeling every turn is very likely to kill at least one by their sixth turn. So it's very rare that focusing physical attacks on one, at least in my circumstances, would reduce the chances of a double Fireball at all. The major difference that could be made is if I stole the Claw from Vargas, assuming that can still be stolen. In that case, a Genji Glove setup could be useful, but otherwise there's no source of a second Claw yet and nobody else can use the Genji Glove.

I didn't Steal from Vargas because I would have almost certainly ran out of Tonics.


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#10
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I just loaded up a save state I had there, leaving the choose a scenario with Mog. I got a muted a Bannon and a 3rd turn Fire Ball the first encounter, and double Fire Ball the next encounter. It was the worst case scenario. I am going to do something about that.
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