New Games on your playlist for 2019?

I played JD’A too, specifically because it was so similar to FFT. FFT is honestly the only FF game except for 1 and 2 that I’ve actually enjoyed, and it opened me up for games like the XCOM series as well. It may be a bit of a niche genre but tactical RPGs are awesome.

ahhh XCOM, how i loved and hated it. i added the “long war” mod to it and it gives the game more longetivity and other things. but you know, that game was so full of ■■■■. 90% to hit on an alien, “shot went wide!”. dude! youre 3ft in front of him with a ■■■■■■ 12 gauge shotty, how can you miss??? then next turn and i lose 3 guys cuz that alien survived. GG

xcomlul

IIRC XCOM uses predetermined seeds randomly generated every mission. If your hit chance is outside of the value parameters of the seed, it will be a guaranteed miss. I’m not sure how it’s calculated or rotated but it’s effectively a second dice roll used to combat save scumming.

The nerd in me takes issue with that meme :joy:

2 Likes

lmao if you played XCOM 1 or 2, the nerd in you will take issue with whomever coded the RNG in it as well haha

Lol. Yeah, I played the originals - they had some seriously dodgy misses on insanely high-percentage shots. :joy:

But no, the nerd in me bristles at the suggestion that two misses on a high-probability shot somehow renders the probability incorrect or inaccurate. That’s not how probability works, no matter how many people wrongly think it!

2 Likes

I don’t think I explained it very well above, but the seed package system used in XCOM means that it’s not actually RNG at all. All sequences of actions create a pre-determined success or failure outcome for your next attack, and your accuracy chance is only one (albeit major) factor in a bigger dice roll. The only true randomness is the seed values generated on the maps per mission and your ignorance of how the game is calculating your actions up until the point you decide to attack, making it more of a perceived pseudo-RNG.

Suffice it to say it’s a controversial system for those who know about it.

I don’t really follow this. If the RNG is done on a series of actions before you start the mission that’s still RNG. If it tells you you have a 95% chance to hit but it already determined you missed an hour ago, that’s still fine as long as you really had a 5% chance to miss at some point (or 0.25% to miss twice for @STORM179). If those numbers are modified by some invisible stat that might also be okay (I don’t really mind the idea of hidden information in a game like this). What’s not okay is if the percentages don’t have any meaning in determining whether you hit the target or not. I just remember in XCom the numbers seemed pretty meaningless. Although we are intuitively terrible at probability and I never wrote them down to see.

1 Like

That .25% thing made me unreasonably happy @BigBadAndy. You’re a good man :joy::+1:t5:

And yeah, to Andy’s point modern XCOM’s randomized seed system doesn’t mean that the battles/actions aren’t random - it just means that certain actions taken from certain places on certain turns have all had their values preset to some random result. That preset result is still randomly generated, just on the front end instead of the back end. Stated another way, if you had a coin that you wanted to flip 10,000 times, modern XCOM is essentially running its RNG at the very beginning of the “run” to determine how many heads/tails show up and where you get them, instead of pausing at each flip to apply the 50% RNG there. The result is roughly analogous, with the exception that the front end solution means you can’t game the run by save scumming the 4,457th flip to ensure you get a “heads” result.

Old XCOM games used a system that wasn’t truly probabilistic based, leading to accuracy values above 100% (not technically possible) that somehow still missed. I’ve never cared to dig into the numbers behind how they calculated things in those games, but it’s pretty different from modern XCOM in a few pretty critical ways.

1 Like

Ok. So my upcoming games list is as follows.

  • Astral Chain
  • MediEvil Remake
  • Mario & Sonic at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games
  • Final Fantasy VII Remake
  • Persona 5 Scramble: The Phantom Strikers

“One of these things just doesn’t belong here”

:thinking:

Definitely FF7 remake.

I can’t tell if your joshing me or passive aggressively hating of FFVII

its the way it is in XCOM to fight against save scumming from what i recall. still pretty ■■■■ funny though

I had zero interest in FF VII Remake until I saw the Square Enix presentation at E3 this year. Now I’m pretty sure it’s at the top of my list of anticipated games. That battle system looks REALLY fun and they found a great way to incorporate ATB, spells, abilities, etc. The voice acting, the graphics, the tone… There’s just so much that they’ve done well with this game. Can’t wait to play it!

Considering how many characters you don’t meet until after you exit Midgar and get out in to the world, I’ll be curious to see if Cloud, Barrett, Tifa and Aerith are the only four playable characters in this game or maybe a few Avalanche characters join your party, perhaps?

My hype rocketed up for Astral Chain after seeing the Treehouse demos. For some reason I assumed it was going to be a smaller game comparable to Metal Gear Rising, but it actually seems a lot more ambitious. I wasn’t expecting stuff like a character creator, mission hub, and some of the unique combat features involving the monster pets.

I am definetly playing FF7 remake.

I need my Tifa and Barrett :fire: :rage: :fire:

I was joking. I’ve never actually played FF7, and depending on how it’s structured may wind up playing Remake as my first experience of it. I hate ATB in RPG battles, but the hybridized approach FF7 seems to use may work for me. I’ll likely pass if I feel the episodic approach is too truncated/exploitative, but the game has my attention now where previously it did not.

Yeah, the RNG seed system modern XCOM uses is explicitly designed to stop save scumming, or rather a certain variety of it. It’s still entirely possible (and quite easy) to save scum, just way you do it is slightly different. While you can’t reload a save repeatedly in the hopes that Soldier Y finally hits his 82% shot, you can simply modify where Soldier Y stands to take the shot, or reload how the enemy pod gets triggered in the first place (which will change how they scatter into cover), etc etc. It’s a nice system for what it is, but is definitely still full of holes if the player really wants to prevent bad things from happening.

tifa <3 still gorgeous, fast, and destroying things. i like her updated look alot, thigh highs and a mini skirt are things im a sucker for

barrett, hell yeah he looks great too. hes got a pretty aggressive style and the shades are a nice touch. his gun arm is pretty beast too, i look forward to giving enemies the bullet hose lol

I played the PC version, which was supposedly better than the PlayStation version, but I don’t think I ever finished it. I was a first year grad student so lots of other things happening in my life and it didn’t really hook me. I was kind of annoyed they passed over Nintendo to make games for Sony, and the world didn’t appeal to me all that much. (As an aside that I probably shouldn’t make - it’s weird how the gaming community doesn’t bat an eye at all the weird, preachy social justice messages in Japanese games. I guess as long as the ■■■■■ are big and the skirts are short they can be as SJW as they want).

Anyway, the new game looks very cool. I’m on the fence because they haven’t changed the story - which I still find lackluster, and my time for playing RPGs is just not what it once was.

@R1stormrider for what it’s worth, I think the redesign of Tifa is great too. They adjusted her proportions for the sake of sanity but kept her iconic outfit. For me this seems fine. A lot better than “updating” her to look like Cindy in FFXV.

funny you say that, shes not been adjusted at all. sports bras compress, shes still just as busty as she was before lol. people arent really paying attention to that, her rack still protrudes a good amount even despite that, so yeah. Tifa is still the same Tifa from 1997, shes just dressing for the occasion to go beat up evil. also the japanese are ■■■■■■ off that sony moved their HQ to california, and western political correctness is now reaching their shores through gaming, i shouldnt bring that up either, but i think that is somethin you’d be interested to know with your previous statement.

edit: loved Cindy’s design from FF15, gearhead pin up worthy of sticking up on the wall of the shop by the tool box