FF7 REMAKE. IT'S A THING.

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I think part of what they're doing is studying the feedback from FFXV's battle system.

I didn't mind XV's battle system conceptually too much. My biggest criticisms were; 1. It's too fast. This might be funny coming from the person who likes fighting games such as Marvel vs. Capcom and Guilty Gear (fast as shit), but XV (and to a lesser extent, Kingdom Hearts and Dissidia) is just too much *WHOOSH SHING SHING FLASH FLASH* for me. I don't mind fast paced combat, but it feels too DBZish, things happen too fast for you to really appreciate, and it lacks that meaty substance (but still action packed) in the way that say, The Witcher or even (some) of the Tales games.

Which leads me to 2; XV was too easy. Part of it was because of the above, but part of it was intrinsic design, XV's gameplay didn't have as much depth as the battle system and the average playthrough in hours demanded, and after a while you really can just blast through everything. The only difficulty the game gives you is level based difficulty, which isn't really challenge. I almost never had to scale back and think "Hmm, how am I going to tackle this?" with FFXV.

With The Witcher as listed above, you can pimp out Geralt in a million and one very different ways and come up with very different playstyles in abilities, equipment, and strategy. It's a lot of fun seeing different players compare and discuss different builds in that game, and its a lot of fun romping through New Game+ trying out different things on beefier New Game+ enemies. And The Witcher has just one party member. FFXV doesn't have any of those layers; the whole game is easy as fuck.

Give that the Materia system in FFVII makes the game (potentially) more complex by default, I'm hoping the remake is not only a bit slower in place, and more challenging.
Sailerius
did someone say angels
3214
I'm not terribly concerned about the UI. The FFXV UI went through a dozen or so total overhauls, and it was even overhauled again between the time it went gold and the time the first patch hit. They'll probably keep iterating on it for a long time to come.


author=Feld
Which leads me to 2; XV was too easy. Part of it was because of the above, but part of it was intrinsic design, XV's gameplay didn't have as much depth as the battle system and the average playthrough in hours demanded, and after a while you really can just blast through everything.

It is certainly easy if you're a pretty experienced gamer, but I have an interesting anecdote to share. I took time off work to play through FFXV when it came out, and I pretty much powered straight through the game. When I got the achievement for clearing the game, only 2% of owners had gotten that far. The reason I mention this is on Xbox One, when you get a rare achievement, it tells you what percentile you're in.

I played the game on Normal difficulty, and a certain close-to-endgame boss had an achievement for clearing it on Normal difficulty. It was an achievement with 1% rarity. However, the achievement you get almost immediately afterwards for clearing the chapter had 6% rarity. In other words, at least 6x as many people had lowered the difficulty as people who had played through on Normal.

On top of that, if you read reddit discussions on the game, there are tons of people stuck on it and complaining that it's too hard, even on Easy.

The nature of the gaming audience has changed a lot in the past few generations. Back in the PSX era, gaming attracted a certain demographic that tended to be good at independent problem-solving. But gaming is mainstream now, and a wide array of demographics plays games, so skills that we take for granted aren't shared by everyone who plays a game.

That said, I do think that a harder difficulty would've been great.

That said, on The Witcher 3, I don't think it's a particularly good example of different playstyles and strategies. I breezed through the entire game by just constantly casting Quen and mashing attack. It becomes even more of a joke when you get the upgraded Quen that absorbs and reflects damage. I beat the final bosses by just standing still and reflecting all of their damage while healing whatever minuscule damage they dealt to me. It was even easier than FFXV - I didn't even need to move.
Red_Nova
Sir Redd of Novus: He who made Prayer of the Faithless that one time, and that was pretty dang rad! :D
9192
Too fast? That's interesting to hear. To me, FFXV was a flashy version of the waiting game. To attack, you hold a trigger and you wait. To guard, you hold a button and you wait. To heal, you warp out of combat and you wait. To travel, you tell your bro where you want to go and then you wait. Or if you REALLY want to get technical, you take the wheel yourself and... hold a trigger while you wait.

As long as the FFVII remake avoids that, we still have hope.
I don't mean 'too fast' gameplay wise (although I could make an argument for that, it's so fast its easy), I mean 'too fast' stylistically. If you watch a battle in FFXV, it's less 'a battle' and more 'things happening really fast with afterimages everywhere and people doing midair backflips' and such. Visually, it's just 'shit happening.'

I'm not really a fan of blindingly fast, hyper acrobatic combat in this series, and you can tell when Square Enix first starting going doing that path way back in FFVII Advent Children.
Red_Nova
Sir Redd of Novus: He who made Prayer of the Faithless that one time, and that was pretty dang rad! :D
9192
Ah, I see what you mean now. Yeah, I 100% agree with you on that front, then.
author=Sal
It is certainly easy if you're a pretty experienced gamer, but I have an interesting anecdote to share. I took time off work to play through FFXV when it came out, and I pretty much powered straight through the game. When I got the achievement for clearing the game, only 2% of owners had gotten that far. The reason I mention this is on Xbox One, when you get a rare achievement, it tells you what percentile you're in.

I played the game on Normal difficulty, and a certain close-to-endgame boss had an achievement for clearing it on Normal difficulty. It was an achievement with 1% rarity. However, the achievement you get almost immediately afterwards for clearing the chapter had 6% rarity. In other words, at least 6x as many people had lowered the difficulty as people who had played through on Normal.

On top of that, if you read reddit discussions on the game, there are tons of people stuck on it and complaining that it's too hard, even on Easy.

The nature of the gaming audience has changed a lot in the past few generations. Back in the PSX era, gaming attracted a certain demographic that tended to be good at independent problem-solving. But gaming is mainstream now, and a wide array of demographics plays games, so skills that we take for granted aren't shared by everyone who plays a game.

That's all fair and good, but it's not like the ancient average gamers of yesterday (seriously, it wasn't that long ago when this was the case) all dropped dead or something. Tons of games have difficulty settings nowdays, and many of them will even tell you straight up in the settings themselves what to expect. Like for example something like

Easy: For players who just want to experience the story
Medium: For players who have a general idea of how to play this genre of game
Hard: For players who actually know what they're doing and want a challenge and to unbox everything the game has to offer.

Seriously, Western games do this straight out of the box, and it would be a shame if Square Enix doesn't catch up. I get that gaming has to appeal to everyone nowadays, but players like me are part of that everyone.

author=Sal
That said, on The Witcher 3, I don't think it's a particularly good example of different playstyles and strategies. I breezed through the entire game by just constantly casting Quen and mashing attack. It becomes even more of a joke when you get the upgraded Quen that absorbs and reflects damage. I beat the final bosses by just standing still and reflecting all of their damage while healing whatever minuscule damage they dealt to me. It was even easier than FFXV - I didn't even need to move.

You can certainly say that if you played on the Default difficulty or lower and that would be a fair criticism (maybe Default needs to be tougher), but I absolutely promise you none of what you said applies to the higher difficulty levels, especially Death March, or hell, even many of the difficulty settings with Level Scaling on.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
The problem with increasing the difficulty in FF15 is that the player has absolutely no abilities, options, or tactics available to them, other than grinding. If an enemy is harder, you can't beat it by playing better. There's no way to play better or worse at all; the whole battle is more or less outside your control once it starts. So of course no one is going to play on a harder difficulty. The harder difficulty just makes you kill two or three extra packs of wolves before every dungeon.

I know this isn't the FF15 complaint topic but let's face it, any topic where FF15 is mentioned is going to instantly become the FF15 complaint topic. You can't stop it. It's a terrible game and I want a refund.
I don't think FFXV was that bad (it had a lot of cool ideas) but it really was pretty flat and simple as hell battle system wise. I mean, they stripped down the entire magic system to just grenades, dude. No support, defensive, or strategic element of magic, other than the fact that Fire/Ice/Thunder were grenades, possibly with effects. Come on.
Does anyone still care about this? The new trailer is nice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOn2bWuA_0w

The character designs are looking great. Cloud is an improvement over his sickly look from the 2015 trailer and Aerith looks lovely. The game has a slightly more toonish vibe to it than the earlier trailer. Check out those saturated green and orange lights in the scene with the Guard Scorpion, it's hot!

The teasers from 2015, and Nomura's involvement, made me think the game would lean into the Advent Children version of 7's world, but this trailer has me feeling lot better. I'm thrilled with the current aesthetic (although does anyone else think Biggs is a little too stylized compared to everyone else?)

The gameplay is still a bit of a mystery. We've known since the get-go that combat would play out in real time, but that never meant it was going to be Kingdom Hearts style like a lot of people of either been praising or bemoaning. It's possible to have real time combat and still have it feel like RPG gameplay: FF12, Xenoblade, MMOs, Dragon Age, KOTOR. I don't think FF7R is going to be as abstract as those systems, but I believe it's leaning in that direction. Imagine 60% Kingdom Hearts and 40% tab-target, I think that's what we are looking at.

My evidence: In the clip with Cloud and Aerith in the sewers battling the sahagin, the player pushes the attack button while Cloud is standing a moderate distance away from the enemy (the UI in the bottom left pulsates for every instance of player input). Cloud performs his classic floating dash from the original game to home in on the enemy and close the distance. This doesn't ask for tight precision on the player's part, it's more like FF12 where your characters automatically run to their target.

I'm guessing your character is always locked-on to an enemy like a tab-target system and performing an offensive enemy will be carried out against the target without the player needing to be precise about hitboxes. It won't be as abstract as Xenoblade where you see a damage number pop up as long as your character attacked regardless of whether your weapon actually touched the enemy - it's a AAA game, they're going to hide that stuff - but it won't ask for much more twitch skills than Xenoblade did.

The big question I have is how much of a thing mandatory damage is. We never see the characters dodge or jump. Guarding is a thing and it's a lot more Last Story than Kingdom Hearts. In KH you perform a block that lasts for a few frames and fully negates an attack during those frames. In FF7R, it looks full on Last Story, you can defend indefinitely and it halves damage you take (it'll be interesting to see if the cover system is still there and if that works like Last Story as well - it'd be nice for this game to have some Sakaguchi in its DNA). I'm wondering whether you can actually get around enemy attacks or if you have to take most hits like tab-target systems. The way your characters move just doesn't look as fluid as a full-on character action system especially with bits of automated movement. Mandatory damage would make more sense for filling limit break meters.

The last thing of note (then I promise I'll shut up), is the FF13 looking ATB gauges. In the bottom left UI, there is a label for 'commands menu' that seems to be asking for two of the blue gauges to open. My hope is that this an option to completely pause the action and que up commands for your party. It won't have the wonky stop-and-go flow of crpg real-time-with-pause systems but, again, could be more like the Last Story where you could pause the game when your skill gauge filled up after twenty-ish seconds so you have to decide when is the best time to expend the resource and pause the game.

I'm still fairly excited for this game. I was a Nintendo kid who didn't have a playstation and I was pretty young when FF7 came out. It wasn't until the PSN release that I played it, so I don't have the strong attachment to this game of a lot of other jrpg fans do. This may be skewing my outlook to the more glass-half-full side of things. I can understand why others who grew up with the game would be grumpy about though. I've been viewing it as just a new RPG to look forward to with characters I already know I like.
As someone who missed FF7 when it originally came out and has trouble getting very far into it now because its so archaic (and not in a nostalgic way for me) I personally look forward to the remake.
The art direction seems pretty standard as far as using Advent Children as a reference point. I'm kind of bummed out Midgar is just gonna have a bunch of open areas to fight in since the coolest part about that place was the claustrophobic areas. I also think it's hilarious that the episodic thing is still happening, kind of diminishes the point of it all since everyone knows the story.

But who knows maybe there will be e3 coverage and then like nothing for 2 years.
I was really on the fence, but last night's E3 demonstration may have swayed me. Consider me interested now.

Yeah I kind of warmed up to it, but maybe it was because the rest of e3 at that point was so depressing. Some of the combat stuff reminds me of an expansion on Parasite Eve rather than just going "turn based sux" It's kind of insane that Midgar is going to take up 2 bluray discs. The disparity between the sort of content late 90s Squaresoft was able to churn out and how much it costs to make fully real time assets to match that is just insane.
First game only covers Midgar and takes up 2 bluray discs. I wonder how many generations of consoles this game series will be released over...
author=Darken
Yeah I kind of warmed up to it, but maybe it was because the rest of e3 at that point was so depressing. Some of the combat stuff reminds me of an expansion on Parasite Eve rather than just going "turn based sux" It's kind of insane that Midgar is going to take up 2 bluray discs. The disparity between the sort of content late 90s Squaresoft was able to churn out and how much it costs to make fully real time assets to match that is just insane.


I gotta be honest, I don't like the...style? I guess, for lack of a better word of the final fantasies starting with 8. 9 is the exception but I've never played it. Like, look at the art for FF7, and then look at Advent Children. The characters were stylized and cartoony, and then starting with 8 it seems like they were trying to turn anime characters "realistic" and just ended up making them look like fashion victims.
I like it a lot. I'm looking forward to it. X3
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Tetsuya Nomura only cares about two things: his bizarre sense of clothing fashion, and making sure that anything resembling a story is deeply shrouded behind a hundred layers of bizarre symbolism that only he understands.

If he teamed up with Hideo Kojima to make a game it would cause reality to implode.
author=LockeZ
If he teamed up with Hideo Kojima to make a game it would cause reality to implode.


Nah, the cutscene that would precede it would give us enough time to build a portal to another universe or something.
I've been super interested in this since E3, with all that action/fighting combat it looks good to me.
SunflowerGames
The most beautiful user on RMN!
13323

After all the recent Disney movies, people might be over remakes by the time this comes out.