T w e n t y S i d e d
A couple of sites have taken the time to write thoughtful reviews of my comic.
Thanks for that.
LATER: Link fixed. Whoops.
DM of the Rings CII:
A Minor Omission
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A Minor Omission”
DM of the Rings CI:
There He Goes Again
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There He Goes Again”
Final Fantasy XII: Level Up
There are two aspects that most people talk about when discussing Final Fantasy games: The story, and the gameplay. In my previous posts I said I was unhappy with both. I’ve started the game over, and I’m still not happy with the story, but this time through the gameplay is really working for me.
In previous FF games, I’d march straight through the game, occasionally taking little half-hour leveling sessions to level up a bit past the monsters and ease my way past the occasional bossfight. This usually worked well. I was doing that here, and wondering why the game was so murderously hard.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Final Fantasy XII: Level Up”
Guiding player movement
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When I do wilderness travel, I sort of make it a branching maze. For example: “You are in a broad clearing. From here you can go east into the valley or you can ascend the large hill to the southwest. You could also turn around and return to the pine grove to the north, which you just left.” The players understand that I’m presenting them with choices that are likely, given the terrain. Sure, they could choose some unlikely course of action, like going halfway up a hill and then walking around, but this will be slower, pointless, and they will just end up at a recycled version of one of my established locations anyway. This gives them a bit of freedom, and makes wilderness seem less arbitrary. Some ways are faster, some can be very slow (like a valley which gets thick with vegitation once they enter) and some can have encounters.
I really like this system. It lets players move around more or less freely, but still has enough structure so that the DM can keep track of where you’re going, where you’ve been, and how long it took to get there. For difficult topography like swamps and dense jungle I make the waypoints very close together, so that many movements are needed to cover a small area. If they are traveling over wide open grasslands, I’ll make the dots very far apart. I usually space them based on time, so that traveling from one waypoint to the next takes a couple of in-game hours. When the players have gone through a few of them and I tell them the sun is setting, they will actually have a sense that in-game time has passed.
This offers a nice theoretical “wall” around your gameworld. When the players say they want to go west and leave the game area, you give them a few waypoints of increasingly difficult swamp / desert / cliffs / mountains / jungle. If they are actually roleplaying, they will have to ask themselves, “would our characters really be wading through this crap for no good reason?” If they keep going and enter the blank, empty areas of the map, they shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of towns and other interesting locations. Who would build a city in a swamp?
DM of the Rings C:
Railroad Goes Ever on and on
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Railroad Goes Ever on and on”
Final Fantasy XII: Too Clever to be Understood
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| Hey, remember when I ran out of the room and let you guys all get captured? Yeah, I was just messing with you. Pretty funny, huh? |
In the comments yesterday several people said they found the politics and scheming in this game to seem small and uninteresting alongside the planet-smashing threats we’ve faced in the past. I said the same thing at one point, but after reading responses from people who like the plot I can see there probably is a gripping tale here. There isn’t any real reason a war and struggle for freedom can’t be just as thrilling as fighting Jenova and Sepheroth or Sin and Seymore, as we did in games past.
The problem here isn’t the scope, it’s the presentation. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Final Fantasy XII: Too Clever to be Understood”
From The Archives:
What is Piracy?
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
Overthinking Zombies
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
DM of the Rings
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
What Does a Robot Want?
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The Opportunity Crunch
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
The Gradient of Plot Holes
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
Control
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.