2388: Two Things The Witcher 3 Didn't Need to Be

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I've been playing a fair bit of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt recently, and while it is certainly a very good game indeed, there are two issues with it where I feel the experience as a whole would have been better served if they… well, if they weren't there.

As it happens, they're two rather major aspects of the game's design as a whole, but thankfully the things that the game gets right more than outweigh the annoyances that these two particular aspects present me with. (Your mileage may, as ever, vary.)

All right, let's jump right in then.

1. The Witcher 3 didn't need to be an open-world game

Here's how I play open-world games:

Spend first hour or so looking around, wowed in all the usual ways (wow, much draw distance, very mountain in the distance can go there, so pretty) and deliberately taking "the long way" to get to my specified destination.
After first hour or so, start using faster means of transportation. (Geralt's magical teleporting horse Roach, in the case of The Witcher 3)
After another few hours, start using fast travel points.
50+ hours in, start very much resenting the fact that there are approximately 300 miles of identical-looking forest/hills/mountains between me and where I actually want to be, and naturally I haven't yet unlocked a fast travel point where I want to be yet.
See destination is on other side of mountain. Attempt to climb mountain. Fail. Swear. Get annoyed. Go around mountain. Discover that there was passageway not marked on map that would have saved me about half an hour of virtual travel time. Swear again.

The fact that The Witcher 3 is an open-world game does have a few benefits, primarily that it gives you a good sense of both the geography of the various regions in which you find yourself and the scale of said regions. However, the fact remains that as with most other open-world games, there are far too many vast tracts of nothingness, and the few interesting things that are there out in the open world are throwaway distractions that become mind-numbing chores after a while.

The Witcher 3 could have been a much tighter game with a better focus had it taken a similar approach to its two predecessors: set the action in large and interesting but self-contained and more carefully designed zones that don't have any unnecessary fluff in them. As it stands, there's a whole lot of game world in The Witcher 3 that just isn't very interesting and really doesn't need to be there.

2. The Witcher 3 didn't need to be a role-playing game

I'm serious! Despite the game revolving around a man with swords chopping monsters' heads off, I really don't think The Witcher 3 benefits from its RPG mechanics at all. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that they are, by far, its weakest aspect. Combat is boring and formulaic (slash, slash, slash, dodge, Igni/Aard for fire elementals, repeat has gotten me through the whole game so far), the perks you acquire when levelling up don't seem to have particularly noticeable effects, and you spend most of the game fighting the same monsters anyway, only with gradually increasing numbers next to their names, and occasionally with a few extra spikes on their backs.

Then there's the whole dissonance thing in that protagonist Geralt is supposed to be some sort of monster-slaying badass, having survived the considerable trials of two previous games, but here he starts at level 1 again, barely able to hold his own against a drowner until he starts wearing some proper armour.

Chuck out all the RPG elements (including equipment, since once you get one of the sets of Witcher gear you pretty much make everything else in the game completely irrelevant), I say, keep the combat if you absolutely must (for, indeed, the world of The Witcher is a violent place, and fights are inevitable at times) but make it an action game rather than an RPG.

What The Witcher 3 gets right

I mentioned at the start that despite these two pretty major issues I have with the game, it still manages to be an enjoyable, compelling experience. And that's because the more adventure game-type aspects of it — the dialogue, the puzzle-solving, the detective work — are outstanding. I would have been more than happy to have nothing but the main plot of Wild Hunt and maybe a couple of the Witcher Contracts, presented more as a sort of adventure game with combat. Keep the player on a tighter leash when traversing the world, remove the extraneous and unnecessary fluff, and I think it would have been a much better game.

Ultimately all this is moot because The Witcher 3 is still an astoundingly good game that is well worth your time if you have a computer or console capable of running it, but I can't help feeling that some of that time and effort CD Projekt Red expended in making sure that there were just the right amount of trees in the south-west corner of Velen could have been better used for other purposes.

Let's hope they learn some lessons from this game with their upcoming Cyberpunk title, which I'm very excited for, particularly as, believe it or not, there's a throwaway teaser for it in The Witcher 3's main plot.

I've now beaten Wild Hunt's main storyline and I'm feeling like I'm probably just going to make a beeline for the two expansion main storylines without distractions along the way. I'm already at the recommended level to start the second expansion and I've only just started the first, so I feel this may end up actually being the optimal way to experience the game anyway, leaving all the side content available if I feel like just jumping back into the world at a later date to hunt some monsters.

2386: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius: Doing F2p Mobile Games Right

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A while back, I wrote a piece on my other site MoeGamer about how free-to-play games had quietly got good. While there is, make no mistake, still a veritable flood of absolute shit being released on a seemingly daily basis, occasionally someone gets it right, and it's worth celebrating when they do.

Which brings us to Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, a free-to-play mobile game developed as a collaboration between Final Fantasy rights holder Square Enix and mobile game specialists Alim and Gumi.

The astute among you will recognise the latter two as being behind Brave Frontier, one of the mobile games I had previously praised for not being a total pile of shit. Brave Frontier wasn't without its problems — most notably a lack of any real strategy in the combat thanks to a relatively limited number of things you could do — but so far as mobile free-to-play RPGs went, it was certainly one of the better ones, featuring an interesting story with some enjoyable characterisation and a wide variety of units presented in beautiful pixel art.

FFBE, as I shall refer to it from hereon, is essentially Brave Frontier 2 with a Final Fantasy skin. And that's not a bad thing at all, because it manages to fix the few issues I had with Brave Frontier while simultaneously being a surprisingly decent Final Fantasy game in its own right.

I'll rewind a moment for the benefit of those not already familiar with Brave Frontier and explain FFBE.

In FFBE, you take on the role of Rain, a young and rather idealistic member of the castle knights, who appears to have some unresolved daddy issues in true Final Fantasy tradition. Rain is accompanied by his longstanding friend Laswell, who ironically seems to have gotten on with Rain's father better than Rain himself. While out on patrol, Rain and Laswell encounter some strange happenings, including a mysterious girl called Fina trapped in a crystal and a man in dark armour who appears to be up to no good.

Unsurprisingly, the man in dark armour is indeed up to no good, and Rain and Laswell return to their home city to find it has been attacked. Their adventure then begins in an attempt to determine what the motivations of the black-clad man are and who exactly this "Fina" girl actually is.

Gameplay has a number of components. Firstly is the metagame, where you collect various units by "summoning" them using premium currency (which the game is pretty generous about doling out for reaching significant milestones), summon tickets (which often come as rewards for logging in regularly, or as part of events) or "friend points" accumulated when making use of your friends' units. The units vary in strength and their rough power level is denoted by a "star" rating — the more stars, the more powerful, or rather, the more stars, the more potential a unit has, because in order to make it useful, you're going to have to level it up. In other words, a fully levelled two-star unit may well be a better choice than a completely unlevelled four-star unit.

Levelling up can be accomplished in two ways: by gaining experience from participating in battle (an option that was absent in Brave Frontier) or by "fusing" it with other, unneeded units. In the latter case, you can fuse a unit with any other unit, but there are particular benefits if you fuse with an identical unit, or with a special "experience" unit, the latter providing you with significantly more experience points than a regular unit and thus being the best means of quickly levelling a character if you happen to have any on hand.

Your party can also be equipped with weapons, armour and accessories, which improve their stats to varying degrees, and most units can also equip up to two additional Abilities above and beyond their innate abilities that they acquire as they level up. In this way, you can customise your units as you see fit according to the challenges you know you're likely to be facing, or simply munchkin them all with the best gear possible so you can steamroller your way through every encounter.

On top of the battle units, you'll also acquire Espers a la Final Fantasy VI along the way, which can be attached to specific characters to provide them with various passive bonuses as well as a super Summon attack when a meter fills up to maximum in battle. Espers can be levelled up independently of characters, though you have to use collected materials to do this rather than just grinding, and each level awards them with Skill Points that can be used to unlock various abilities, both passive and active.

Once you're finished fiddling with your party lineup, you can either visit a town or go into battle. Pleasingly, visiting towns is presented in traditional top-down RPG style and there are even sidequests to complete, giving a great degree of personality to the world that Brave Frontier lacked somewhat, thanks to it being entirely menu-driven. For those for whom time is money, however, there's also a quick access menu that quickly warps you around town to the important places like the shops, though in doing this you'll probably miss out on NPCs who might have useful information or quests for you.

When you choose to go into battle, there are several different ways you can do this. You can advance the story, which presents you with a string of battles that you have to complete without stopping, punctuated by cutscenes. You can "explore" an area you previously completed the story for, which again goes into a top-down RPG-style exploration mode punctuated with random battle encounters. You can visit the Colosseum to battle monsters and earn points towards various prizes. Or you can enter the Vortex to the Farplane, which has a different special dungeon every day, plus a series of other specialised dungeons that you can unlock as you desire — one for free, additional ones for premium currency. These specialised dungeons provide a convenient means of acquiring experience points for your units, money, crafting materials or other materials needed to power up units or Espers, but the payoff is they tend to cost significantly more energy to jump into than story missions.

Yes, there's an energy system, but like in Brave Frontier, if you manage it carefully it never becomes an issue. Following story quests tends to see you level your player up regularly enough that your energy bar rarely empties — not only does its capacity expand when you level up, but it also gets refilled to maximum — so this is the best thing to do if you're spending a bit of time with the game. Alternatively, if you know you only have a few minutes, by far the most effective use of your energy is to tackle the most difficult Vortex dungeons you can manage, as not only will this burn through your energy but it will also provide you with far more loot and experience than regular missions tend to provide in the same amount of time.

The battle system itself is very much like Brave Frontier, with one notable exception: units have more options than just attacking or using their special Burst attack when it's charged up. Individual units can use items now, rather than you using items on your party from your omniscient overseer perspective, and each unit unlocks individual abilities as they gain levels, which are appropriate either to their Job if they're generic units or appropriate to their original incarnation if they're making a guest appearance from another Final Fantasy.

Yes, indeed, Brave Exvius features a considerable amount of series fanservice by incorporating characters from past Final Fantasy games, and they work exactly as they should; Edgar from Final Fantasy VI has his machinist "Tools" abilities present and correct, for example, while more magically-inclined characters have plenty of magic spells to fling around to take advantage of enemies' elemental weaknesses.

Which perhaps brings us to an obvious question: is this better than Final Fantasy Record Keeper, which is also a fanservice-heavy Final Fantasy free-to-play mobile game?

Yes, it is. And I don't hesitate one bit when saying that.

Record Keeper is a clunky mess of a game, with loading screens literally every time you tap a button. It's slow, sluggish, poorly optimised and generally a chore to play, and even the wonderful SNES-style pixel art depictions of every Final Fantasy from I to XIV don't make up for this. Record Keeper also has no real focus; it sees you leaping around from timeline to timeline pretty much at random, attempting to act as a sort of Final Fantasy Greatest Hits but losing all sense of coherence in the process. This lack of focus also extends to its progression and collection systems, in which you collect characters, but also equipment items, and the main "fuse and improve" mechanics come with the far less interesting equipment than the characters; it's way less fun to upgrade a sword that supposedly appeared in Final Fantasy XII than it is to buff up Balthier to the max.

Record Keeper makes nostalgia the main — no, the sole — point of its existence, and it suffers for this, particularly when it comes to the underrepresented Final Fantasies like XIV and XI. FFBE, meanwhile, uses nostalgia wisely; it just drip-feeds you classic characters without making a big deal about it, and it doesn't demand any knowledge of the previous games — if you're a Final Fantasy newcomer, you might just find that Firion is an awesome fighter, but if you know your Final Fantasy history, you'll have an understanding of where he actually came from, for example.

FFBE, while suffering from occasional loading breaks and the requirement to be online at all times while playing, at least preloads enough stuff into memory for it not to have to load after every button press, and both in combat and when wandering around town, it's smooth as butter.

Oh, and FFBE is also a beautiful-looking game. And a beautiful-sounding game, featuring one of the best Final Fantasy battle themes of all time. Yes, seriously. Listen.

Basically… look, it's really good, all right? And regular readers will know I don't say that lightly about free-to-play games.

Check it out here on Android, and here on iOS.

2385: What a Difference a Light Makes

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A fairly quick one tonight as I'm suddenly very tired, but I'll make it a "Pete's RPG Maker Game Teaser" post just to make up for it, or something.

I thought I'd talk a little about lighting effects, because they make a huge difference to the overall look and feel of a game (or part of a game's setting) and can add a lot to the overall personality of something you're making.

More than anything, lighting effects can be a huge contributing factor in ensuring your game doesn't look like "just another RPG Maker game", which is by far the most common criticism of games made with RPG Maker. Hey, you provide people with tools, they're gonna use them, sometimes lazily.

Anyway. Yes. So far as I'm concerned, the best ways to make your game not look like "just another RPG Maker game" without actually replacing the built-in graphics is a combination of fiddling with lighting effects (and screen tints to go with them) and tweaking the user interface so it's no longer recognisable as the default RPG Maker battle system. (Of course, there's nothing wrong with just using the default bits and bobs while you're learning, but once you start feeling ambitious, it's a good idea to try and put your own personal stamp on the project, and the easiest way to do that is through careful selection of audio-visual assets.)

So here are a few comparison screenshots of a map in the RPG Maker editor, which doesn't show lighting, and in the game itself (which also features elements of the UI).

Here's how a security computer room looks in the editor. (The checkerboard background means there's nothing there. If you set up a parallax background, it will appear where the checkerboard is; otherwise if will simply render as black in the game.)

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And here it is in game, using a lighting plugin for adjustable, colour-able light radiuses wherever you like on your maps. Makes some really nice atmospheric effects.

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Here's a house (currently with no door, because I haven't made the inside yet) in the editor:

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And here it is in game, the simple addition of a transparent "sunbeams" overlay image giving it a bit more life:

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Here's the edge of a swamp in the editor:

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And here it is in game, featuring a moving "mist" overlay image, plus a change to the screen tint that gives it a slight purple hue as well as desaturating the colours a bit:

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Finally, here's part of a forest labyrinth in the editor:

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And here's the dramatically different presentation in game, featuring an adjusted screen tint and a tiled overlay to simulate the leaf canopy blocking out sunlight:

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I know to all the jaded pros out there it probably still looks like "just another RPG Maker game", but given that I'm mainly using this project to experiment with the software and see how easy it is to put a complete experience together, I'm happy with the twists on the standard look and feel I've got going on so far.

More teasers in the coming weeks.

2384: Turbo Kid: The Best '80s Movie That Wasn't Made in the '80s

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After repeated exhortations of extremely enthusiastic approval from my friend Tom, I decided to watch the movie Turbo Kid this evening on Netflix. I was not disappointed.

Turbo Kid is a study in contradictions. It's a movie that is a perfect recreation of 1980s action flicks, but it was made in 2015. It's not a comedy, but it's hilarious. It is, at heart, simplistic and straightforward, but nonetheless compelling and thought-provoking. More than anything, though, it's terrible, but it's stunningly brilliant.

Turbo Kid is set in the apocalyptic far-off future wastelands of the year 1997, where some awful disaster that isn't really explained (but was probably something to do with the Cold War and/or robots) has turned everything to shit. Our story centres around a nameless young boy, known only as The Kid, who was orphaned early in the post-apocalyptic period, but who has, against all odds, managed to survive in the wasteland through scavenging and keeping his childish hopes and dreams alive through vintage comics about his favourite superhero, Turbo Rider.

Early in the movie, The Kid meets Apple, who initially seems to be a charmingly dimwitted young girl, but subsequently is revealed to be a robot, because '80s movie. Apple is dying thanks to getting hit in a skirmish, and The Kid, who after some initial reluctance to even be around her having been alone for so long, agrees to help her find some replacement parts before her "heart gauge" (rather beautifully depicted in Zelda-style pixel art on an embedded display in her wrist) runs out and she deactivates forever.

I'll spare you the rest of the details, but suffice to say, The Kid finds himself taking on the role of Turbo Rider to the best of his capabilities, and there are plenty of ridiculous action scenes along the way, not to mention a particularly loathsome villain in the form of self-appointed wasteland baron "Zeus" — who of course has a connection with The Kid, because '80s movie.

I was reading an article in a GamePro from a couple of years ago the other day, and someone — I forget who offhand, but I think it was someone like Tim Schafer or his ilk — made the very good point that the best comedy is made of juxtapositions, most commonly the juxtaposition of serious words with silly visuals, or vice-versa. Turbo Kid is pretty much entirely designed around this philosophy: it takes itself very seriously and never, at any point, winks knowingly at the audience to go "DIDYA SEE THAT?!". Instead, it makes use of the exact same techniques '80s action movies did to juxtapose the ridiculous with the deadly serious: terrible, extremely obvious special effects; excessive amounts of blood and gore; unnecessary swearing at the most bizarre moments; but, at heart, a rather touching story of a kid who realises he doesn't want to be alone in the world any more.

Of particular note is the blood and gore, of which there is lots, but it's so insanely exaggerated — again, like the best worst '80s action flicks — that it's impossible to feel grossed out by it. In one scene, a man gets his face thrust into the spinning blades of a blender. In another, someone gets his guts pulled out by them being attached to the back wheel of a bicycle (in this particular post-apocalyptic future, everyone rides pedal bikes — which sort of makes sense, when you think about it, as fuel would eventually run out). In the climactic battle scene, the dismembered torso and legs of two other enemy grunts become firmly lodged on the head of a third enemy. And, of course, Turbo Rider/Kid's unique gadget is a device on his wrist that immediately causes anyone it is pointed at to explode into a fine red paste.

Turbo Kid really benefits from being written and constructed as an '80s action flick, without any fourth wall-breaking self-awareness going on. In being designed this way, it provides commentary on how desensitised to violence we are these days — many of the more gory scenes in the film would likely have got the movie banned as a "video nasty" back in the '80s — while at the same time pointing out how far popular culture has supposedly come in the last 30+ years. Or you can look at it another way: it can be interpreted as a fond look back at the '80s, when not all entertainment was expected to have some sort of socially aware "message" behind it (with the possible exception of children's cartoons, which tended to lampshade these messages extremely obviously) and it could sometimes just be about many boys' childish fantasies: the ability to point at a bad guy and have them explode into goo.

If you have an hour and a half to spare, then, be sure to check out Turbo Kid on Netflix. If you grew up in the '80s and/or you enjoyed Far Cry: Blood Dragon (which is a similarly hilarious but loving homage to the more ridiculous side of '80s popular media), you will very much appreciate what it has to offer.

2383: Fencing with Fairies

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Doubtless I'll be writing about this in more detail at some point in the near future over on MoeGamer, but while it's still new and fresh I thought I'd give some initial impressions on Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force, Compile Heart's latest PS4 release.

FFF:ADF, as I will refer to it hereafter, is a Neptunia Re;Birth-style reimagining of the PlayStation 3 game Fairy Fencer F. It includes the whole story of the original game, updated and expanded with all-new mechanics, plus a whole bunch of brand new content as well, making for what looks to be an absolutely sprawling mammoth of a JRPG that I'm very much looking forward to sinking my teeth into.

For the uninitiated, FFF:ADF casts you in the role of Fang, a lazy asshole who we're introduced to as he's been locked in prison for stealing bread. Three days earlier, it transpires, Fang pulled a legendary sword known as a Fury out of the ground, and thus found his fate inextricably intertwined with the adorably cute but rather headstrong fairy Eryn. Fang, wanting nothing more than a good meal and a warm bed, finds himself rather hastily recruited into a quest to find all 100 other Furies scattered around the world and use the power of the Fairies within to wake up the Goddess and prevent some sort of horrible catastrophe from occurring.

FFF:ADF follows Compile Heart's usual RPG formula fairly closely. Town scenes are menu-based and allow you to visit a number of different locations to purchase and sell items or just chat with NPCs. As you progress through the game, more facilities become available in town.

When you leave town, you'll likely be entering one of the game's dungeons, which are filled with enemies you can see wandering around the map, and perhaps an event and/or a boss fight to complete.

Striking an enemy with your weapon while you're in the field — a challenge made significantly easier than in the Neptunia series by the simple addition of a visual and auditory cue when you're in range to connect a hit — allows you to get the jump on an enemy; mistiming it or letting an enemy run into your back, conversely, lets them ambush you.

Combat initially appears similar to the Neptunia series but there's a few twists on the basic formula. For starters, characters only begin with a basic attack rather than a multi-hit combo. Multi-hit combos can be unlocked later — and they include fighting game-style techniques such as launching and juggling enemies — but initially the bulk of your damage will probably come from your special skills, which are further subdivided into weapon skills and magic spells.

The thing that's looking most interesting about FFF:ADF at this early stage is its progression system. Whereas Neptunia's character progression was completely linear — though once you unlocked abilities you could customise your characters to a minor degree, and Megadimension Neptunia made more of this by making different weapons capable of different combos — in FFF:ADF you earn WP ("Weapon Points") through combat, which can then be spent on unlocking abilities, buffing stats and activating passive skills. In practice, there's probably a "right" order to unlock things in — and if previous Compile Heart RPGs are anything to go by, you'll probably unlock everything by the time you're through — but it's nice to at least feel like you have some options.

Other cool features include a battle system that allows up to six party members at a time, which will hopefully make for some interesting encounters later in the game — I only have two characters at present! Neptunia's Challenge system is back, too, providing you with useful stat boosts in exchange for completing various tasks.

It's early days yet, but FFF:ADF looks like Compile Heart's most polished title to date; there's none of the weird screen tearing from Omega Quintet and, so far, none of the frame drops of Megadimension Neptunia, and the 2D art (courtesy of Neptunia artist Tsunako) is as gorgeous as ever.

I'm looking forward to seeing what this game has to offer; everything I've heard from people who have already played it makes me feel like it's going to be a really solid JRPG, and I'm excited to see what other gameplay features I'll be fiddling around with as I progress further.

2382: A Tease

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Since I've just spent a bit of time painstakingly stitching together the various screens that make up the maps for one of my as-yet unrevealed game's "worlds", I thought I'd take the opportunity to tease said game a little by sharing said stitch.

Here we go, then:

This isn't the complete map as yet, though most of the south to southeasterly portions are now done. There's a fair bit to do in the north and the west of the map, and then I can finally start making some events to go on it. And building dungeons! Fun times ahead.

I decided early on to make the game non-scrolling and instead move screen to screen in a somewhat old-school fashion. This has proven to mostly be beneficial to my overall efforts of putting things together, because it means I can tackle it in small chunks rather than being overwhelmed by the prospect of creating an interesting scrolling map. It's also been a challenge, however, to ensure that the player can't wander off the side of one screen and find themselves on the next embedded in a wall. Fortunately, the very act of stitching the map above together has helped me to spot any such glaring errors and fix them easily.

To design this map, I did a simple old-school adventure game-style map on paper first, using a square for each screen or "room" and lines to indicate connections between rooms. Then I numbered each of the boxes, since RPG Maker numbers the maps you create, and the plugin I'm using for automatic transitions when you walk off the side of a screen is dependent on these numbers, before finally tackling it a bit at a time. In order to finish this "world" I'll need to get up to map number 125; as of the stitch above, I've reached 84, so things are flowing along quite nicely so far.

I had a rough concept in mind for the overall map when I started, though it's evolved a bit as I've been putting it together. I'm trying to give things a vaguely realistic scale rather than the skewed, exaggerated scale seen in RPGs with a "world map" screen; to put it another way, it's more a Zelda approach to an overworld than a Final Fantasy, though the gameplay uses a separate turn-based battle screen rather than Zelda's action RPG-esque combat.

As I've mentioned a couple of times, this is just one of several worlds players will visit in the game. Each world is going to have a slightly different style of play about it: this one has the aforementioned Zelda-style overworld with discrete dungeons to complete; another is going to be a Resident Evil-inspired haunted mansion kind of affair with plenty of puzzles; a third will be a more linear sci-fi world; a fourth will place emphasis on character interactions and narrative rather than combat; and the final world, which you'll only be able to enter once the previous four have been completed… well, that's a secret!

As a great man once said, please look forward to it.

2381: Awareness is Half the Battle

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Remember a few days ago I wrote about my own particular take on "creative block"?

Turns out the simple act of explicitly acknowledging the fact I'm aware of this issue with my own attention span has helped me to do something about it.

In the times when I've been working on my RPG Maker MV project, I've been considerably more productive than I have been in the past, with far less staring into space and far more in the way of map-making. The current map count for the project now stands at 72, which means I'm well over halfway to assembling the first of the five "worlds" in the game, which is also likely to be the most complex and largest, and so a good idea to get out of the way first. (I know I'm well over halfway because I've mapped out what I want the final overall map to look like on paper, and numbered each of the individual "rooms".)

I've also found this awareness to be very helpful when doing actual work rather than just pissing around with RPG Maker. I've finally had some freelance work start flowing in again, and I've been managing to sit down and concentrate on it enough to get it done efficiently and in plenty of time to submit for the deadline without having to do a last-minute rush on everything. (Even when I did a last-minute rush, I always got stuff in on time, mind you; it was just rather more stressful than it really needed to be.)

Whether this new way of thinking will stick around — and, for that matter, if it's anything to do with the new anti-anxiety drugs I'm on, which have just about stopped making me feel perpetually stoned now, thankfully — remains to be seen, but I'm going to take full advantage of it while it's here, and maybe even get a creative project or two actually finished. That'd be something, eh?

Incidentally, I'm not quite ready to reveal the full extent of my RPG Maker MV project as yet, since its very nature is something I'd like to keep as a bit of a surprise for some of my friends. Over the coming weeks as things start to come together, though, you can expect a few teasers of what I've been up to. I will, however, say up front that I've mostly been using RPG Maker MV's stock art resources with it (albeit with some lovely lighting effects courtesy of a wonderful plugin), because that always seems to be something that people whinge about with RPG Maker projects, even those just done for "fun" like this one. I am hoping, however, that the story, the writing, the characters and the humour in it will more than make up for my own lack of artistic talent and consequent reliance on provided art resources.

There's also going to be some great music in it; some of it stock RPG Maker tracks (RPG Maker MV's provided music is seriously way too good not to include at least some of it!) and some provided by members of the RPG Maker community. If I'm feeling particularly adventurous, I might even compose some of my own work for it, but let's take things one step at a time, shall we…?

2380: Gal*Gun: Deeper Than You Think

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Lightgun and rail shooters generally aren't regarded as particularly deep and meaningful experiences for the most part, and this is fine; after all, sometimes all you want to do is hold a plastic gun in your hand (or aim a crosshair) and blow seven shades of shit out of everything walking your way.

Sometimes, though, these games go the extra mile and provide a surprising amount of depth beneath the facade of mindless blasting. Nintendo's Star Fox series has been a good example of this in the rail shooter genre since Star Fox 64, with its complex scoring and medals system, and Gal*Gun: Double Peace does something similar for the (lightgun-less) lightgun shooter genre. Which may surprise you.

Gal*Gun's wrapper mechanics are that of a dating sim — a proper, full-on, stats-based one like True Love rather than the games that get called "dating sims" but are actually just visual novels with romantic themes. The protagonist has statistics determining his intelligence, athleticism, fashion style and lewdness, and these can be adjusted over the course of a playthrough either by taking girls into the "Doki Doki Field" and poking them until they emit some extremely suggestive moans, or by purchasing items between stages. The difference between the two approaches is that while purchasing items allows you to choose the stats you raise (or lower, if you need to) so long as you have the ability to pay for it, taking girls into the Doki Doki Field generally affects more than one stat at a time to a more significant degree, and each and every one of the girls in the game has a different impact on your stats. In other words, if you're trying to form a particular "build" — something that becomes particularly important in the more "freeform" mode that unlocks after you've beaten the main story-based routes — you'd better learn which girls are most useful for your purposes.

The stats are relevant in a couple of instances. Firstly, in the story-based routes, your stats need to be at a particular level in order to choose certain dialogue options. For example, if your lewdness level is too low, you are unable to make lecherous comments towards the heroines, which is probably for the best. Secondly, in the freeform mode, in order to pursue a particular girl, you'll need your stats to be in specific regions in order to be the type of guy they want you to be. I haven't got far enough to try out this mode yet, but it presents an interesting twist on the formula; in the story-based routes, you can pretty much get away with just raising all your stats as high as possible in order to have the maximum available options in dialogue.

As for the story-based routes' structure, they have a Good End and a True End, with the latter being dependent on a combination of your overall score for the playthrough being high enough and your affection rating with the heroine being high enough by the time you reach the final chapter. The latter is mostly a case of saying the right things in dialogue sequences, but it's also affected by the "event" levels where you're doing something other than just blasting incoming girls.

The scoring system, meanwhile, has a certain degree of depth to it, too. Most of your points come from fending off the girls who relentlessly charge towards the protagonist, but just blindly blasting away won't get you the best scores. No, in order to score highly, you need to achieve "Ecstasy Shots", which allow you to one-hit eliminate a girl by hitting her in a weak point. These are helpfully indicated when you move your crosshair over the girl by a piece of Japanese onomatopoeia appearing, though you can also learn where each girl's weak point is over time, too. There are four main weak areas: red popups indicate you should hit them in the head, orange means the neck, yellow means the torso and pink means the legs.

Each time you get an Ecstasy Shot, your combo counter increases by one. Your combo is broken if you take damage or eliminate a girl "normally" without performing an Ecstasy Shot. There's also an additional Quick Bonus for eliminating girls in rapid succession.

The Ecstasy Shot system makes the shooting a lot slower and methodical than the typical franticness of regular lightgun shooters, and there are a couple of other techniques you can use to tip the scales in your advantage, too. Firstly, shooting a girl anywhere but her weak spot without eliminating her stuns her for a moment, preventing her from doing her attack animation briefly. Secondly, holding down the fire button allows you to do a "Charged Shot", which covers a wider area and can likewise stun enemies briefly. Thirdly, taking one or more girls into the Doki Doki Field and poking them until not-an-orgasm-honest causes a smart bomb effect to go off, taking out all girls in the vicinity as if you'd Ecstasy Shotted them. These techniques are particularly helpful — even essential — during the sequences where enemies come at you from all sides and you have to manually turn to face several different directions to fend them off as they approach.

As well as the points earned through eliminating enemies in each level — not all of whom charge at you, so some need to be quickly taken out as they wander past during transitions between "shooting gallery" areas — there are also three bonuses at the end of each level for clear time (the quicker the better), amount of damage taken and accuracy, ranked between one and five stars, with five stars providing significantly more points than anything below. Clear Time is a particularly variable one, as many of the levels offer branching routes, with some being significantly quicker than others, but perhaps counterbalancing this with fewer enemies to chain Ecstasy Shots off.

As well as clearing the various story routes and attaining high scores, there are loads of hidden collectibles to uncover throughout the game. Some of these are hinted at by the "requests" you receive on your phone between levels, and largely involve finding either hidden objects or characters and shooting or staring at them, depending on what the request was. Others are simply hidden objects and provide anything from point bonuses to new costumes — the game's Dressing Room mode allows you to customise each and every character in the entire game to your own personal preferences (including undies), though disappointingly, the PS4's Share facility is blocked while you are using this, meaning you can't take pictures of your own personal take on the cast.

Alongside the hidden objects are student and teacher handbooks hidden in plain sight around the levels; shooting these unlocks parts of each character's profile, and you can complete said profile by taking each character's bust, waist and hips measurements by using the "zoom" function (also used to locate hidden objects by seeing through otherwise opaque scenery such as locker doors) and staring at them in the appropriate region before you blast them into euphoria.

On top of all that, there's at least one hidden ending that you can achieve by fulfilling a particular set of conditions (they're fairly obvious, but I wasn't expecting them to actually lead to a full-on ending) and a Score Attack mode that allows you to play either a whole story route or an individual stage and record your best score and highest combo.

So yes. There's a lot to this game. It's no Time Crisis, in other words, which, while it was great, pretty much played all its cards within twenty minutes if you were the slightest bit skilled with a lightgun. Gal*Gun, meanwhile, looks set to keep me busy for a very long time indeed.

2379: Two Cats

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After the sad departure of Clover a little while back, it wasn't long before Andie and I decided that it was far too quiet in the house without a pet around. It was surprising quite how much "presence" Clover and her predecessors had had in the house, and indeed it felt rather empty without her.

So it was that we headed off to the Stubbington Ark, a local RSPCA-run animal shelter, where we went "just for a look" at the cats they had up for adoption.

Naturally, we immediately found not one but two cats that we wanted to take home with us, and so we decided to set things in motion sooner rather than later. A couple of days later, a representative from the RSPCA was sniffing around our house to make sure we weren't some sort of cat-killing psychopaths, and thankfully we got the all-clear; then yesterday, we got to pick up our new friends and listen to them howling at us from inside the cat carrier while we drove them home.

This is Ruby:

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And this is Meg, which we've decided is actually short for Megatron. (If we were able to name our own cats, we were going to call them Patrick Stewart and Megatron, but Ruby and Meg both already had names, so Meg will just have to deal with being an effeminate Megatron on occasion.)

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They've both settled in very well, very quickly. The spare room is now "their" room, so far as they're concerned, and they're already finding the best places to sit and be in the way as much as possible.

We also had the inevitable "new pet scare" on the very first day we had them; Meg managed to jump out of a window that was only open a crack, and went for a little explore outside. Thankfully, she came back of her own accord after a few minutes, and we're now sweltering in a house with no open windows while they get fully accustomed to their new home. It's a rite of passage with every new pet that something like that has to happen, it seems; when we got Lucy rat she decided to pretend to be dead ten minutes after we got her home, which was mildly upsetting (though in retrospect it was probably to try and get Lara off her back, because Lara was fussing over her to a ridiculous degree); and pretty much all of the other rats managed to escape their cage quite early in their time with us and hide under various items of furniture.

So yes. We now have cats. Friendly cats. If you visit us, be prepared for that!

2378: People Ruin Everything: FFXIV Edition

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I quit Final Fantasy XIV today.

I am sad about this. Really, genuinely sad. The game has been an important part of my life for quite some time now, and will always be special to me — hell, it's where I proposed to my wife.

But I think I'm gone for good this time. I've just had enough.

Not of the game, mind you; the game itself remains one of my favourites, with an enjoyably rhythmic combat system, plenty of distinction between classes and some truly memorable encounters — not to mention an incredible soundtrack and a great story.

No, I've had enough of the people who infest it.

The community's slide into unpleasantness has been a gradual but noticeable process. Whereas I described FFXIV's player base in my USgamer review (circa 2.0-era A Realm Reborn) as one of the most helpful, supportive and friendly communities in gaming, these days I regrettably can't say the same — though I find myself pondering whether or not it's because at the time I wrote that review, I'd only been playing endgame content for a short period.

Let me talk a bit about the incident that drove me over the edge today, then I'll talk a bit in more general terms about what I feel has gone wrong.

A short while back — like, earlier this week — FFXIV introduced a new type of content called Deep Dungeon. This was a completely new way to play the game, and involved descending into a 50-floor dungeon with up to three companions and clearing it out, one randomly generated floor at a time. The rewards on offer include tokens called "potsherds", which can be exchanged for various valuable items, and if you fully upgrade the weapon and armour you use in the Deep Dungeon — these are separate from those which you use in the main game — you get a high-level weapon for a level 60 character that is not quite the very best in the game, but certainly very respectable and suitable for all levels of content.

Upgrading the weapon and armour requires that you find silver treasure chests in the Deep Dungeon. Opening one of these will do one of three things: upgrade your weapon, upgrade your armour or explode, dealing damage to you and anyone unfortunate enough to be standing nearby. The deeper you go into the dungeon, the more likely it seems you are to come across trapped chests, and your weapon's upgrade level is also capped by your character's level within the deep dungeon — also measured independently of progress in the main game. To put it another way: your weapon and armour can go up to level +30, and in order to upgrade them to this level your character must reach level 60 in the Deep Dungeon, though thankfully levelling up is considerably quicker than in the main game.

After completing all 50 floors once, it's likely that your weapon and armour will be around the +10 to +15 mark, depending on how lucky you've been. This means you then have to challenge the dungeon again from floor 1 but with your upgraded gear, hoping you'll get luckier on the deeper floors this time. As incentive to run it again, however, every 10 floors gives you a generous shot of gil as well as Allagan Tomestones of Poetics, Esoterics and Lore, all of which are used to purchase the best level 50 or 60 gear available, so it's not as if running the upper floors again is a useless waste of time. Alternatively, if you enter the Deep Dungeon on a class you don't yet have to level 60 in the main game, completing 10 floors awards you with a large chunk of XP for your character's level in the main game, so it's also a good means of levelling alternative classes.

You may have surmised from that description that this structure puts a lot of pressure on Floors 41-50 to get players up to the magical +30/+30 needed to take away a shiny new weapon into the main game. And indeed, this is where the problems arise, with players doing everything from skipping fights with monsters that they don't feel the party "needs" to fight (despite some players not having reached level 60 at this point, and some enemies dropping treasure chests) to outright Vote Abandon-ing the whole dungeon if they don't feel they got "enough" silver chests in the first couple of floors.

I ran into one of these people today: a white mage, which is to say, a healer, and so an important, useful part of any group. Deep Dungeon, unlike everything else in the game, doesn't matchmake you into a party made up of one tank, one healer and two DPS, so it's entirely possible you'll find yourself running in a group with no healer at times, and as such having a healer in your group is something to be celebrated.

Unless it was this guy. Right from the very start of Floor 41, he ran off in completely the opposite direction to the rest of the party, leaving the remaining three of us to fight off monsters and get afflicted with various status effects that could have easily been cleansed if he had been there. But no; he had places to be, apparently, and finding those silver chests was more important than actually helping the other three people in there.

"Will you PLEASE stop running off?" piped up one of my companions halfway through Floor 42, obviously getting as impatient as I was with this git's shenanigans.

"I'm skipping mobs," replied our friend.

I then pointed out that not everyone in our party was level 60 yet — one was 56, one was 58 — and thus it would be in everyone's interest to kill as many monsters as possible, particularly as it's also necessary to kill a certain number to open the exit to the next floor anyway. He then complained about us being "slow" and "inefficient", and took great umbrage at several of us accusing him of "speedrunning".

Speedrunning is a bit of an issue in Final Fantasy XIV as a whole, particularly in dungeons, most of which are tuned more to the "casual" end of the difficulty spectrum, but nonetheless remain a good source of income for those valuable Tomestones. With a well-geared, confident party that knows what it is doing, most dungeons can be cleared in about 10 minutes or so, but this relies on everyone being both well-geared and confident in the speedrunning process, which usually involves the tank pulling as many enemies as possible at the same time, the healer working overtime to keep their HP topped up and the DPS doing area-effect attacks as much as possible.

It's quick, sure. It's also boring, because more often than not fighting like this means that you use maybe two or three of your complete suite of abilities, and fighting the monsters just becomes a case of standing in place hitting the same buttons over and over for ten minutes. Not interesting, and certainly not doing justice to the impressive encounters the Final Fantasy XIV team have created throughout the game. But no, at some point between 2.0 and 3.35, where we are now, someone somewhere decided that the de facto way to run dungeons was as quickly — sorry, "efficiently" — as possible, and woe betide anyone who slows it down for any reason, even if, say, the tank or healer say they don't feel confident or geared enough to do it.

Now, the thing with Deep Dungeon is that speedrunning is largely pointless, because monsters respawn, everyone needs to level up, you need to kill a certain number of monsters to open the exit to the next floor and, as with any good role-playing game, if you split the party you're probably asking for a bad time. With the levels being randomly generated, too, there's no set route through each floor, either, so you can't even work out a route that lets you avoid certain encounters as in certain fixed dungeons in the game, so it's really more trouble than it's worth.

That didn't stop this obnoxious White Mage from arguing his case increasingly aggressively though, eventually descending to insults about his perception of the rest of the party's skill levels. Hilariously, he even had a go at me on the grounds that I "wouldn't last five minutes in Expert Roulette" (the current two highest difficulty level 60 dungeons, neither of which are very tough) — I chose not to engage with him by explaining that actually, I had been playing the game since its open beta and as such knew it pretty fucking well by this point. Instead, I just voted to dismiss him from the party; my companions silently agreed, and thankfully he was booted shortly afterwards, to be replaced by a much friendlier person who unfortunately wasn't a healer.

This White Mage's attitude is representative of a considerable proportion of Final Fantasy XIV's player base as it stands today: the game, for these people, is about the relentless pursuit of "efficiency" so that they can acquire all the best gear, get all the achievements — achieve whatever they want to achieve, in other words — as quickly as possible then, in all likelihood, go on the official forums and Reddit to complain that three months is too long between content patches and that there's "nothing to do", despite smaller patches with additional features (such as Deep Dungeon, which was a significant addition) being added on a monthly basis.

I also saw this among a number of active Final Fantasy XIV players I used to follow on Twitter. There was a marked shift in their attitude over time; one person in particular that I started following as a result of attending an in-game "funeral" for a player who had sadly passed away in real life began as a very pleasant person to talk about the game with. But gradually over time he started caring more and more about parser figures — a parser being an external program you can run to see how much damage per second (DPS) everyone in the party is doing, a common means of harassing other players for "not pulling their weight" and technically against the game's Terms of Service, though I don't know of anyone who has been punished for it. He'd complain about parties he'd come across in Duty Finder; he'd post images of the parser figures; he'd shame people for not playing "well enough" or being "lazy". That relentless pursuit of "efficiency"; your DPS must be this high to ride.

I just can't stand it any more. It's ruined the game for me. Dungeons that I used to love running, like A Realm Reborn's final storyline dungeons Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium, lose all their drama by people skipping all cutscenes — and yelling at people who don't — and speedrunning their way through as quickly as possible, even if someone in the group hasn't seen this part of the story before. (Not coincidentally, those two dungeons were also the last to have lengthy cutscenes in the middle of the dungeon run.) If I decide I want a leisurely run through a dungeon rather than a stressful but boring speedrun, I get yelled at. If someone in the party makes a mistake and there's a single death, everyone gets yelled at. And apparently not going fast enough in Deep Dungeon is now a cardinal sin, too.

Fuck all that. Fuck everyone who has ruined one of my favourite games of the last few years. And fuck this shitty behaviour being considered "normal" in all games, not just Final Fantasy XIV — indeed, I'm under no illusions, and am well aware that this sort of thing is a problem in all MMOs.

I just thought Final Fantasy XIV's community was better than that. It certainly was once — at least, I think it was. But no longer. The buildup of this crappy behaviour and how not-fun this makes the game for me has led me to both cancel my subscription and uninstall the game completely for the first time ever since open beta. And I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.