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Well, although we could make such a helmet, I don't think we will. Believe me, if some of these spells cost only one MP, bad things would happen. Even if it lowered your defense, you won't need it if you can do mass damage all the time. Heck, just go Bare class, equip Masamune and that helmet and !Black or !Call, and you can deal massive damage as the very first action for 1 MP! Broken.

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Is PJ

it's fine i didnt want too many just a coulpe that you really had to work more for. Anyways good luck i hope it turns out well.


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Don't fear the reaper!
Wonderful system this "Democracy" is no mechanism to break a tie -Dinobot-
It's spelled Raymond Luxray Yatch but it's pronounced Throat Wobbler Mangrove.
Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici
Sic Semper Tyrannis bush.

Hey Caesar, SilverLance

Hope you guys are doing well. I've some suggestions for your guys' project.

It might be an interesting idea to have some of your tougher fiends capable of overriding armor immunities. For example, a behemoth that can inflict "toad" status on your characters even if a char equips a ring that's immune to "toad" status.

Originally this was supposed to be an idea for my ShadowNexus project, but I figure you guys could make better use of it. It might be interesting to have an X-zone where everything is "flipped around." Statuses reversed, cures damage instead of heal, phoenix down redlines target, etc. For added difficulty, swap the HP attack/heal attributes -- folks would actually be fumbling for X-potions on opponents instead of a sword with a "4x Hit" slot! (Of course, you'll need to secure some of your tougher fiends against Elixir/Phoenix Down KOs)

Not sure if this would fall under "impractical" far as coding goes, but just thought I'd throw some ideas out there.

Best of luck on your project, you guys

Actually, there are magic damage forumlae that completely override status protection, and they do have a few other interesting parameters in addition to that, so we will definitely make use of statii in this hack. For instance, there's a damage forumla that induces a status effect, bypasses immunities, but also doesn't work if you already have a certain status effect. It's similar to Slow, in that it won't work if the target is Fasted (instead Fast is just removed). We will probably make use of that with some healing spells or with some attack spells (e.g. can only be used if all allies are alive).

We could do something similar to that X-Zone idea, but we actually have something much crueller in store for the players. I am not at liberty to release this, but believe me, it'll make the X-Zone look lame.

Thanks for the suggestions!

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Is PJ

I guess this is gonna come up sooner or later...
What new spell animations will there be? By the sound of the spells you've created, they'd need some decent explosive space/time-warping deathyness to do them justice.
Naturally, strong enemies, and new enemy sprites? The kind of things i've seen you do, even the "weakest" enemy there will be destructive.

Was also wondering if you guys would be doing a "Game Plus" mode so players can play through again with the same stats, weapons, etc. Might increase replay value.

FBM: I can't tell you what new animations we will have for two reasons: 1) we havent found the battle animations data yet, and 2) it'd ruin the surprise. You'll just have to wait for screenshots or the release. Sorry.

ninthcircuit: We weren't really planning on it, because, with the level cap, there would be nothing left to do. You'd restart at like level 37 or something and have 3 levels to gain. Plus, the final weapons and weapons you get from the final battle are going to be too good to use from the get-go and it would take all the fun out of the game. Plus, you won't want to fight these bosses more than once. Believe me, you won't.

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Is PJ

Ahoy,

Had a busy weekend but I got some code done and released something for Caesar to toy with. He already explained the Job System we'll be using, but the code hadn't been released at the time.

My experiences with the new system were entirely positive. Wow. It sounds good in theory, but in practice it's even better. In short, you start with a few basic classes right from the start (ie, immediately after starting a new game.) As you level up, you gain job levels (as you always did.) When you attain the requirements for a certain class (ex: Knight Lv.3, Thief Lv.3) it becomes unlocked and you can use it, but only for the characters which have the requirements. So there isn't a "pool" of jobs anymore because two characters will almost certainly have different available jobs.

A few quick notes... all-or-nothing attacks/enemies/items are a no for this hack. They take away the challenge of the game and break it (Offering/Genji Glove anyone? KotR? FF8's Aura spell?) So while it's a good idea, a 1MP helmet is too overpowered to have a place here (especially if you can just toss an inexpensive Phoenix Down to the character every turn they take a hit anyways - small price to pay for near-infinit MP.)

While we expect to have different enemies/sprites than the original, we won't necessarily make every enemy into some unbeatable horror.After all, if it takes everything your party has to beat the weak start-of-game enemies, well... tough.

We've vastly diversified the spellcasters and so more summons may prove a problem. Like Caesar said we'll probably have some unique stuff, but at this point I'm just repeating his post so... I'll shut up now.

At this point we've dealt with the new job system and most of the theory behind classes. I suspect we might release a job list soon... or not. No, actually, maybe we'll let it be a surprise. ;D

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Sounds good, not too hard, but at the same time not too easy. Tell me though will you be upping the amount of money you recive for some enemies? i recall in the PS version, it taking several hours of play just to obtain the the nessicary amount of money for armor and swords and spells. If you could fixing this little problem would help, maybe not changing the difficulty of the game much but at least you dont have to spend and hour fighting enemies just get a weak spell or summon.

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Don't fear the reaper!
Wonderful system this "Democracy" is no mechanism to break a tie -Dinobot-
It's spelled Raymond Luxray Yatch but it's pronounced Throat Wobbler Mangrove.
Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici
Sic Semper Tyrannis bush.

We're really trying to emphasize balance and strategy with this hack more than anything else. I hated Life 3 in FFVI because it made everything wayyy too easy. !X-fight is kinda the same deal here. It just destroys everything, which is why we got rid of it. We're changing all the magic spells and items and equipment and enemies, and so we will also likely change the role of money in this hack. Seeing how almost everything in this hack is purchased, money will play a large role. I can't say how many battles it'll take to buy X item/spell, but I can say that we are probably going to be spending a lot of time trying to get a workable system for prices.

Same goes for weapon power, armor defense, enemy stats, and magic spell power. We have a general idea how powerful things should be, just like we have a general idea how difficult things shoudl be to acquire. The problem is just going to be fitting numbers to these. Don't worry, though. Before it is released everything should be sorted out and hours upon hours of fighting around shouldn't be necessary just to buy one stupid Angel Ring for your Berserker before trying to fight Sol Cannon. I mean, seriously, it's just a ring that prevents Age, which is hardly even a status effect. Why must it cost 20,000 gold to arm your party for one battle?! :sigh:

Anyways, having finished the job tree, we are currently working on the finer details of the classes (equipment, abilities, commands, and spell lists). I can imagine that by the end of the week, we will have begun making these classes and implementing our changes into the ROM. Just a quick heads-up. We're eliminating some statii from the game in order to allow for some more creative measures. Just throwing it out there.

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Is PJ

go ahead, most of the statuses didn't affect the fight anyways

who honestly took the time to ever remove poison during a boss battle.

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"Have you ever seen a baby do that before?"

*raises hand* i did, mostly because i needed all my guys just to beat the boss and didnt want to have to keep raising them. The money system was rediculous anyways, i am at the point in the game where i am trying to buy coral rings for the fight with levithan and it's taking for ever cause no enemy gives more than like 20 gold, i stopped playing because of that fact.

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Don't fear the reaper!
Wonderful system this "Democracy" is no mechanism to break a tie -Dinobot-
It's spelled Raymond Luxray Yatch but it's pronounced Throat Wobbler Mangrove.
Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici
Sic Semper Tyrannis bush.

No no, we won't get rid of poison. I'm talking about other statii that you might be accustomed to using. I'll just let you figure it out later.

Edit: Bah, nvm. Maybe I misread.

This post has been edited by Caesar on 29th January 2007 23:15

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Is PJ

Sorry, I had some ideas to post, but I haven't yet, mostly because its been a bit of a rough weekend.

One job I'd like to see would be elementalist. Essentially, they would be similar to a black mage, except have three spell levels for Water, Aero, and Quake. Perhaps the higher tiers could have some interesting side-effects like potentially causing status ailments.

I'd like to see more boss battles against multiple opponents. There's only a handful of important ones - and they're somewhat tough in the original game.

Equipment/Item-wise, I'd like more effects on higher-level equipment, even if they're relatively minor.

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Oh sure, I don't have to get kicked in the junk to activate it, but I like it anyway. -- Thief commenting on the difference between Throw and Blue Magic.

Statii should find a more important use, strategy-wise, than in the original. We're aiming for a slightly more original use of most statii, possibly by having other abilities rely on statii for their use. If anything, we want to avoid A-mashing battles and the likes.

While there has been no word on which classes there'll be publicly, I'm sure WildHalcyon'll be quite pleased with them. As well as at least one particular battle - my lips are sealed.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Maybe some statii relient weapons, such as weapons that do more damage when poisoned etc. Maybe if two statii mixed together then the form a worse status effect. Or, let's say, you're under effects of poison. If you get hit by a poison element attack, then it does double damage?

Hm...those are some interesting ideas, FBM. We might consider using some of those to make really unique weapons.

Believe me, though, we are going to have a lot of unusual weapons. You don't even know. It's so easy to be creative with equipment with this game because the weapons can use the same damage algoriths as the magic spells. In fact, the Excalipur and Blowfish share the same damage formula (makes sense).

This means, essentially, that we can make a sword that does damage based on your current HP, inflict statii on yourself everytime you swing (a la Fusion), only hit if the target's level is a certain multiple of smoe constant (Lv5 Death), halve the target's level with low accuracy, or even, oh I don't know, instantly destroy the target regardless of immunities. There are many, MANY more option out there, but that's just a teaser to tie you over.

This is fun!

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Is PJ

Quote (footbigmike @ 30th January 2007 14:48)

Maybe some statii relient weapons, such as weapons that do more damage when poisoned etc.

Yes! A death sword that saps you unless you're in zombie status, and if in Zombie, it doubles or triples attack strength...

Make it double handed tho, just so that you have to be zombie for the multiplier to be effective without overpowering the character.

Or better yet, make an accessory that it's only ability is to allow a dual-wield of a normally single wielded weapon(one specific weapon, not all weapons in general). Kind of like sacrificing your Acc slot for more damage, rather than any kind of protection that you might normally get from that slot.

Vote yes on power-swapping!

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If internal struggles were as enjoyable and glamorous as the self conflicted wars within video game characters, we would all be statues, reveling in perpetual self war. -Me

Play me on Rock Band 2, GH-WT, or any other Xbox GH!
Xbox Gamertag-MeanJerry

How about more undead equipment to compliment the Bone Mail? Perhaps its normally rubbish, but in undead status, they offer better protection. Of course, a necromancer-ish class wouldn't hurt in that case either...

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Oh sure, I don't have to get kicked in the junk to activate it, but I like it anyway. -- Thief commenting on the difference between Throw and Blue Magic.

rofl, zombies

Seriously though. Caesar and I have been discussing a little something pertaining to our living-impaired shambling friends. I won't spoil it, and we have yet to implant it so there's no guarantee it'll make it into the final release (then again, this IS Caesar and myself we're talking about ) but I'm sure it'll please a few people.

We're nearing the end of our class-related preparations and should be starting implantation soon. I suspect that once we're done with all class-related junk (sprites, commands, stats, spells...) we'll have a good third of the hack done, maybe more even considering the potentially large amount of assembly involved.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

However, RL, that remaining two-thirds includes all the maps, shops, enemies, and glorious new equipment we still have to brainstorm and make. And that's assuming we find the animation data and include the animations in the first third you mentioned.

But yea, things are progressing smoothly. I just want to get my hands dirty making some of this!

This post has been edited by Caesar on 31st January 2007 20:52

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Is PJ

I think it would be interesting for play-around purposes if you could implement all the new jobs and abilities into the original FFV, and let the audiance of your hack try some off-base hands-on-ed-ness with the new classes...

But you guys are all about ur little secrets...

Edit

This is seriously the strangest emoticon in existence!

This post has been edited by leilong on 31st January 2007 21:28

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If internal struggles were as enjoyable and glamorous as the self conflicted wars within video game characters, we would all be statues, reveling in perpetual self war. -Me

Play me on Rock Band 2, GH-WT, or any other Xbox GH!
Xbox Gamertag-MeanJerry

Leilong, you mean you want us to implement only the new jobs and abilities into the hack and then release it so everybody can play around with it? It's an interesting idea but it would actually be more work than doing the entire hack we plan on doing. Since we changed the size of the !Black and !White commands and added some more spells, alllll the enemy AI would be messed up, sine the spells now use different ID's. Same goes for weapons. Mage Masher used to cast Mute with 33% chance...if we just changed the jobs, it could potentially have the chance to cast a GODLY spell. It would take a lot of time to go back and change all the enemy AI and weapons and such.

It is simpler for us to start from scratch, remake all the spells, weapons, equipment, and enemies systematically and then release that. Plus, this way the game is modeled around the new class system to an extent. The abilities are more effective against our new enemies than they will on the previous enemies in FFV. Some later bosses might be unbeatable because they start with a status effect that we changed (if, hypothetically, we changed like...reflect to "invulnerability to weapons", then omega instantly becomes unbeatable, not to mention somewhere in his AI script is a new spell that will destroy you all, I'm sure).

Plus, surprise is so much better. We might release the specs of a few jobs at a later point in time, but we definitely will not reveal all the jobs prior to the release, and we certainly will not release how the abilities work until much later, if we ever decide to release these specifics. It's more fun to experiment with the new material than it is to instantly know all the cool stuff. If we told you what every spell did, you would just be like "oh...nobody uses Sleep anyways, though, so I don't care...WHEER IS T3H ULTIMA!!?!?!!11" and then get tired of the game after watching the animations once or twice.

Now, that being said, we may release a very short demo at some point when we get some weapons and equipment implemented. We'd prolly just enable a few jobs, and make the others unattaniable so you can't unlock them, and then just let you play around for awhile to get a feel for the hack. This may be months into the future or just a few weeks. Your guess is as good as mine at this point.

Edit

There's an important thing I'd like feedback on. What is everybody's opinion of the Bare class? Do you feel that it is necessary for the Bare class to have all the passives that you learned, or do you think that makes the job a little TOO good? RL and I were thinking about giving the Bare class three free slots (eliminating the mandatory item slot, a la Mimic) and getting rid of the innate passives. This would make the game MUCH harder and make you rely on strategy a lot more than usual because you can't just have everybody double-wield knight swords and !X-Fight. I don't know if we'd keep the equip-any-weapon-you-want property of the Bare class or not, but I think we're leaning towards the elimination of the passives. You would still get the stat bonuses from the jobs, but you wouldn't get the evasion bonus of samurai and other passives from the Thief.

Keep in mind that doing this lets us make the passives a lot better. We can raise the bonus of "Evade", and add more hidden passages without feeling bad that any bare job can come and easily find them. Basically, it seems like a workable idea, and it definitely could have its uses. We had to be a little more conservative with our passives because we didn't want the Bare class to become godly, but if they don't inherit all passives by nature, we can boost them up a LOT.

What is everybody's opinion of this?

This post has been edited by Caesar on 31st January 2007 22:08

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Is PJ

I think bare should be left just the way it is. The class is fine and it's nice not to have to switch to a million different classes for each charecter just to get all the things you want. It adds to the fact that the charecter has there own natural strength.

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Don't fear the reaper!
Wonderful system this "Democracy" is no mechanism to break a tie -Dinobot-
It's spelled Raymond Luxray Yatch but it's pronounced Throat Wobbler Mangrove.
Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici
Sic Semper Tyrannis bush.

I think it'd be interesting to remove all passives, and keep the stat bonuses, but as a catch give the Bare class, 3 slots to fill.
so it'd be

Attack
empty
empty
empty

It'd add some increased difficulty, but more customization.

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"Have you ever seen a baby do that before?"

I second the additional ability slots idea.


And please dont make things heavily dependant on random things. I dont want my only chance to beat a boss to have a lucky 1/100 chance on a weapon proc

Hm...getting rid of all the passive bonuses would make the game a bit more challenging. But...don't do something crazy and get rid of the ability to equip everything too!

In my opinion, you guys should just leave the Bare job alone.

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OSonic Rave
/ \Last Arcanum
[ ]Strike Raid
XRagnarok

So two in favor of the new Bare class, and two not so much. Alright. I'll keep this in mind.

Kaijyuu, I'm not sure what exactly you mean with the "random" thing. There's nothing really depending on randomness or luck. You can use the same strategy on every boss if you want. We're just removing the easy combinations that were in the original FFV (!X-Fight, for one) so that you have to use a little more creativity in your battle strategies. We also set a level cap so you can't just powerlevel your way through the hack.

RL and I like to think when we play games, so our monsters will make you think, in turn. We're not going to make every boss battle into a mind bender or a puzzle, but we're not going to let you physically attack your way through the game. Stat-building spells, statii-inducing spells, unique ability combinations, and some teamwork will basically power you through the game. We're just trying to make it interesting is all.

And no, we're not going to make a weapon that kills everything in one hit and is absolutely necessary to beat the final boss, but is a super-rare steal from an enemy that is a super-rare encounter in a hidden area and uses "escape" on the very first turn. That'd be stupid. We WILL have a few easter eggs hidden here and there, but nothing mandatory. Some of the hidden things aren't good to pick up, actually. One of them destroys the map. Errr....nevermind. >=)

This post has been edited by Caesar on 1st February 2007 03:50

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Is PJ

Well, I was more or less reffering to things that, if with good/bad luck, makes it impossible to beat a boss, or too easy.

For example, I would not like a boss that as a rare move kills the entire party instantly. A timed event to do such, sure, but not a random one.

Another example would be the one I was reffering to before. Having a 1/128 chance to instantly kill a boss with an item, and this being the only way to kill him, would be something I'd dislike.

I'm just saying too much random-but-neccessary things is bad.


Your post pretty much dispelled any notion I had of that happening though Me likey stratagy.

I should point out a little something about changing the Bare class - it'd allow us to put in much more powerful skills.

For instance, imagine a skill that makes your character permanently hasted. Or that grants immunity to certain ailments. Or that gives you Image when low on HP automatically. Your party is now rock-solid once they switch to bare, unless you have to activate those yourself like Berserk by using a slot for them. At which point the class is essentially acting exactly like if it had to equip abilities.

I'm not trying to influence opinions, and if it's no, it's no. But I wanted to illustrate this in a more concrete light. There,s a reason for everything. Except FF8 - there was no reason for that. :/

Something I might work on this weekend is a map editor. This means we could start having real material in the hack soon other than just code tweaks (job tree FTW!)

Right now our focus are jobs and spells. We're finishing up jobs and preparing to implant them (wheeee, assembly hacks!) and working on spells (most classes are set, but a few still need some spells.) I'm sure Caesar may be finishing up a few awesome ideas as I write this, but suggestions for really out-of-the-box ideas would probably help. Stuff that's far-out and useful. Not just "zomg ok so teres thies big explosian and lasers, then u c a dome liek Ultima but theres comets and stuff lol ok heres teh thing it uses all ur mp but does a flat 999!!!! lol!"

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."