2020 Miscellaneous Links: Untitled Moose Game

[Cotigo]

Gourry -> http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-07-14-earthbound-director-shigesato-itoi-pays-tribute-to-satoru-iwata

[Luther Lansfeld]

I think I have something in my eye

[Excal]

Critical hit to the feels.

[Fenrir]

On a lighter note

You and Grefter both talked about the game like you were trapped by it. But I honestly don't feel anymore 'addicted' to FFRK than any other RPG I play. Yes, it's a Skinner Box, but most games are in some way or another?

Allright, for those who do not know much about FF Record Keeper:
FF Record Keeper has a"stamina" F2P mechanic, which I'll call Timebux from now on
You have to spend Timebux to play the game for a bit, and you get one Timebux every three minutes (20 Timebux per hour). There is a max Timebux value, that you can raise by playing the game. Right now I have 100 max Timebux. If I don't play the game for five hours, I get to max Timebux, and I stop getting any more Timebux until I spend it. Ok?

Personally I don't really care too much about wasting Timebux.

But...

Someone on the Record Keeper subreddit asked whether waking up in the middle of the night to play FFRK for five minutes, so as to not waste even one Timebux, was bad for your health.

...

Here are some answers:



"I'm just glad I'm not the only one..."

"max out that stamina boy... you can get 5:45 good hours of sleep every day"

"Lol exactly this, I've started this game only three weeks ago and I felt like I was missing out on so much and needed to catch up. Everyday I burn my stamina before sleep and set my alarm clock to ring in 4 hour intervals during the night. Do I feel like crap? Yes. Did I catch up? Yes. Eventually this will phase out when I have more stamina though."

"Sometimes I wake up in the mornings typically around 4 or 5 to burn all the stamina.
It is kinda worth it sometimes for farming dailies."

"By waking up in the middle of the night, you'll reset your sleep cycles. You have to ramp up and ramp down for sleep, and you get the greatest benefits from sleeping during the ramped up periods (REM cycles)."

"I usually sleep 5 hours and my stamina refills in 5.5 hours, so Im good in that aspect. Before I did wake up sometimes to use stamina before it was wasted, but now I have almost nothing to do until new events appear so I just farm orbs peacefully at my own pace"

"I'd pay a dollar to not have to interrupt my sleep if I was really interested in guaranteeing I get 24 hours of stamina a day. "

"I turn the brightness down and auto through dailies"

"I wake up 2-3 times throughout the night because I'm such a light sleeper, and I have a cat that has zero sense of personal space. I've recently begun taking advantage of this time to mindlessley run through content, like farming for Joseph/Garnet/DK Cecil RM. I've got an auto attack party favorite setup, set that right before I go to sleep, wake up in the middle of the night, speed set to five, burn through ~40 stamina, fall back to sleep."



Here's the link
https://www.reddit.com/r/FFRecordKeeper/comments/3ddu49/about_wake_up_every_day_in_midnight_health/

[Dark Holy Elf]

They can quit any time they want.

[The Duck]

This is all still crazy. I've played timebux games but usually they're at least somewhat gratifying while I'm playing them. RK from what I played requires the least amount of consciousness of anything I've played, as in while you're playing it you would basically do just as well if you were a corpse. I guess it sounds like it's more involved at higher levels? But the main loop is a little too braindead for me, even as a commute or waiting around game.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

FFRK becomes actually pleasantly involved in higher levels of play - some of the design decisions are very reminiscent of FFV's in term of battle flow and strategizing. Like Elite Sinspawns being a tense status puzzle with a lot of moving parts, or most boss rushes, where you have to optimize your ability loadout in order to properly handle a multitude of situations and keep any given fight from running out of control - all while favoring efficiency both on actions taken and damage suffered along with rewarding you far more with intelligent ability usage and knowledge of enemies, those being things I highly appreciate in a game. Getting there, though, involves a lot of mindless grind, which obviously plays into your initial reaction.

Of course, I saw Fenrir's thread and that made me shake my head. And I thought I had problems.

[Captain K]

It's the mindlessness of FFRK that makes it work.

I'll contrast it to another timebux game, Puzzle and Dragons.  In P&D, you attack by playing a match-3 puzzle game.  So you always have to pay attention to the game to play it.  That's fine for the most part.  However there is a big wall of difficulty in P&D that can only be overcome by grinding.  You can get through about 2/3rds of the game's content by getting better at match 3 and slowly assembling a stronger group of monsters.  But for the last part of the game it not only matters what monsters you have on your team, you also have to "hypermax" them by feeding them a ton of + stat eggs and maxing out their skills.  Getting those + stat eggs is horribly slow.  Like the most efficient timebux to + egg dungeon gives you maybe 1 + egg every two times you run it.  So you're going to be running this dungeon thousands of times to get what you need.  You don't want to be playing match 3 constantly.

FFRK?  Enter battle, hit Auto, watch youtube.  There's stuff that's stupidly rare to get like some of the second record materias, but the game doesn't demand much attention from you while you're farming those.

[Sierra]

I dunno you guys. Call me crazy, but I struggle to grasp the basic appeal of any game whose selling point is "you don't actually have to pay any attention to it."

[Cotigo]

Its all about addiction and obsession. Gotta fill those bars bro. Like not everyone is gonna fall for it but there is a decently sized section of the populace who falls into these traps really easily and finds it difficult to get out. For instance, it took kind of a herculean effort for me to delete the app and then not reinstall ot as people kept talking about it in the games topic.

And yeah not everyone is gonna fall into it. Some people don't have the same issues with addiction.  But saying "Pssh well I never had a problem with this game. I don't even see the appeal" while true for you yourself doesn't negate other people's experiences with the game.

Like, I smoke cigarettes occasionally and haven't gotten addicted for various reasons, and I don't see the appeal to smoking all day everyday. That's not gonna cancel out the fact that cigarettes are really fucking addictive and some people find it impossible to quit.

For the record, I agree there isn't much to the game itself. Maybe at higher levels, I won't ever know. But the hook isn't complex gameplay, it's all about habituating your play, making you worried about being inefficient with timebux, then getting you trapped in the skinner box and wrecking your sleep schedule to play something that amounts to straight up bullshit.  It's horrible fucking outright predatory game design.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Well that was heartstring pulling. Sad face.

[Fenrir]

I found the very beginning of RK still interesting because I was getting used to the mechanics (including weapon forging for example), and then I got thrown into very interesting battles pretty fast.

I don't really play for the mindless parts. (Or so I'm telling myself??)

Timebux is a straight up evil, they could have easily multiplied max timebux by 3 or 4, but they want you constantly coming back. This leads to terrible things like the thread I linked to.
Otherwise the game's pretty fine, I think!

[Excal]

I know those feelings.  Got me a bit the first time I ran into a timebux game.  Nowadays, it's pretty simple, when I notice something like this starting to take over, I make a point of slapping down the part of me that responds to that mechanic each time it pops up.  Only takes a few times these days before the whole "the world will not end if I am not hyper efficient" thing sticks and it loses its hold.  Still, it's telling that it does take a few goes despite knowing all this.

All things considered, it's probably a good thing this game is on a system I cannot access.  It sounds like something that really plays to my biases, even if I'm reasonably sure I wouldn't lose sleep over it.

[Cotigo]

Side note, I don't think Timebux is INHERENTLY evil. The way it's implemented in FFRK, and most mobile games? Absolutely. However, I spent a while playing Kingdom of Loathing, another Timebux game, but it's implemented entirely differently there. One, timebux only regenerate at the start of the day. Two, it takes like 5 days to hit max Timebux. Three, a day's worth of timebux takes like, an hour to complete even if you use the in game systems to generate more timebux (and that requires crafting). Overall, just in general the system of timebux seems to be there less to have you playing constantly and more so you don't blow through all the content in one go. There's still a habituation factor but it's not nearly so insidious.

[Grefter]

Pacing mechanics vs monetization mechanics.

[Dhyerwolf]

https://www.youtube.com/user/MTV?v=crjkQHnDYu0

Shannara getting a tv series.  Looks pretty good, although being on MTV makes it a bit suspect.

Jesus. This is...a horrible idea. Shannara is probably the worst high-profile fantasy book I can think of. I got through part of the first book before I put it down (which I believe I have only done with 2 other fantasy books ever). It was the most boilerplate trope-laden book I have ever read. And bafflingly, I don't even think it's particularly popular or well liked (looking up long ass lists of recommended fantasy series or books, Shannara basically never appears).

As much as I hate it, they would have been wise as hell to go for Kingkiller Chronicles, which almost feels like it was perfectly written to be a TV series (not a complement). That would be an instant massive hit on the fandom alone (maybe they are holding out for movies there though).

[DjinnAndTonic]

It's the mindlessness of FFRK that makes it work.

I'll contrast it to another timebux game, Puzzle and Dragons.  In P&D, you attack by playing a match-3 puzzle game.  So you always have to pay attention to the game to play it.  That's fine for the most part.  However there is a big wall of difficulty in P&D that can only be overcome by grinding.  You can get through about 2/3rds of the game's content by getting better at match 3 and slowly assembling a stronger group of monsters.  But for the last part of the game it not only matters what monsters you have on your team, you also have to "hypermax" them by feeding them a ton of + stat eggs and maxing out their skills.  Getting those + stat eggs is horribly slow.  Like the most efficient timebux to + egg dungeon gives you maybe 1 + egg every two times you run it.  So you're going to be running this dungeon thousands of times to get what you need.  You don't want to be playing match 3 constantly.

FFRK?  Enter battle, hit Auto, watch youtube.  There's stuff that's stupidly rare to get like some of the second record materias, but the game doesn't demand much attention from you while you're farming those.

I overall agree with this plus I'd take it a step further and say that I'd play with this app even if it didn't have battles at all and was just a free graphical team building app with FF characters because seriously I already spend a good portion of my week here doing the same mental exercises by way of forum.

[SnowFire]

As a side comment, when I played through FE Awakening, I definitely remember times where I was thinking "bored, it's 2:30 AM, lemme check the barracks for free lootz".  But you basically only had to check once a day to get maximum barracks farm.  It is for the most part insignificant, although farming Celica's Gales is actually quite important for some of the endgame content (e.g. Apotheosis), although not a huge deal as you can also buy it off travelling SpotPass teams usually.

Dhyerwolf: Sword of Shannara is a "first book" from a lawyer writing in his spare time, so it's basically glorified fanfic that inexplicably got published and became popular.  Brooks was very clearly learning the ropes in that book and also rips off LOTR hardcore.

My understanding is that the TV series will be based on Elfstones of Shannara, which is the best book in the series by a wide margin (book #2 of the original trilogy).  Basically Brooks still has interesting ideas and isn't doing as much a remix of Tolkien, and while the writing is still not perfect, the prose is much better.  (What they'll do if it's successful, I dunno, as later books will involve a mostly different cast of characters.)  How he managed to grind Shannara into the ground with tons of more books later I'm not sure; Heritage (=books 4-7) has both some okay parts and some horrible parts, but the later books I have on good authority to be awful.  So who knows.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Oh god if Elfstones is the best I don't want to see the rest of the series.

[Dhyerwolf]

Well, it's good that it gets better (although from NEB's post, sounds like that better amounts to little). Still a horrible idea to base a TV show on a series with a bad first book and little in the way of critical acclaim when they certainly could have found something that might have a few more current fans.

[Excal]

Shanarra is one of those titles that I suspect a lot of people just know and has that cultural penetration that most fantasy doesn't have.  Toss in the nostalgia kick from all the people who read it when they were teens and now have more disposable income.

Granted, given that my own attempt to read a Shanarra book ended poorly, I'm kinda expecting this'll flop, and it'll be used as evidence that what we need is another superhero show.

[SnowFire]

I definitely think you need to be 12-16 to really enjoy Shannara books.  Was not nearly as good on re-read, and I don't mean as an adult, I mean re-read in high school or thereabouts.

But to be clear, I enjoyed 'em enough at the time to go through 'em all 3 times or so.  Well, all of them that existed then.  So clearly there was something compelling about them?!  I distinctly remember being very gripped by a certain plotline in Heritage that I realized on re-read was in fact extremely stupid, so go figure.  Anyway since the DL is obsessed with ranking things, from memory...  Elfstones >> Elf Queen > Wishsong > Druid  > Sword > Scions >> Talismans.  (Clearly having the word "Elf" in the title helps or something.)

[Ranmilia]

I like Shannara decently.  It's YA pulp at heart, and the first books are straight up ripoffs, but it's gotten a lot better as the series has kept trucking.  There's a relatively big twist that only became explicit in the prequel trilogy; I'd guess this twist is what Snowfire's source believes makes the later books awful, but I think it makes them better.  The setting is far future Earth, after multiple nuclear wars.  "Magic" isn't really magic, there's a technological explanation for most of the magic-looking things and the supernatural metaplots map to feuds between some ancient AIs and factions.  The surface plots remain stereotypical fantasy, but for older readers there's an increasingly visible subplot that plays more to the Fallout/sci-fi angle.  It's still something of a gimmick, of course, but I find the layering quite enjoyable!

[Captain K]

And bafflingly, I don't even think it's particularly popular or well liked (looking up long ass lists of recommended fantasy series or books, Shannara basically never appears).

Never read it but I think it's one of the better-known series.  Been around a long time, easy name recognition.  Shannara being in the book titles is smart.  Compared to say A Song of Ice and Fire, which I imagine 90% of the people who watch Game of Thrones would never have heard of.

[Dhyerwolf]

That's not an uncommon style of plot twist, but if you go that far, you need to be an excellent world planner or else it's literally the cheapest fantasy gimmick you can find.

I actually have logistic questions about that spoiler:


1. Is there even any implication or reference to the world as we would recognize it or is it just thrown in from out of nowhere? If you reread, would there be things you would miss the first time that would be blatantly obvious the second time?
2. Is there any true or cohesive attempt to create a scientific explanation that makes sense about how they world was able to change so much that upon initial review, there was literally nothing in common with Earth now?
3. Do any maps ever given resemble Earth in any manner?

If they answer to all these are "no" then it's a bad gimmick. I was trying to find a map for another book series that did this, but it was a semi-alternate Earth. It had a massive catastrophe several books in the making that re-arranged the world. At that point, the new map made it very clear that it was taking place in Europe (different names though) and if you looked at the earlier map, it was very obvious in retrospect (it was Europe turned on it's side and slightly different shapes, but still pretty clear). I think I can only find the after map though.


While Shannara has been around a while, I suspect that Snowfire's point that the prime age range is 12-16 (also MTV's main demo) actually makes that a negative because young fans (the people most likely able to stomach Shannara) will be reading something that is either current or popular.

I just hope that potential failure wouldn't be used an excuse to not develop other potential series. Mistborn would be a fantastic one to recreate (It's short, it's world is extremely unique and easy to imagine, has very well defined powers that would make a visual impact, and most importantly, it's awesome).

I would say that Legend of the Seeker turned out amazing but...Sword of Truth started out well enough and devolved into shit. There was definitely more to initially work.