ughhhhhhh.
ughhhhhh I wanted to like this hack, it has so many good ideas and ughhhhhhhh
i even waited from 1.3 to 1.6.1 to 2.0 and a lot of things have changed but there's still ugh
To quote what I told a friend: Okay. I've played through the whole thing and yeah. Even now, I can't recommend BNW. It's... complicated to actually put into words, but the long and short of it is that for every fantastic thing it does, it also does something I can't fucking stand, and it does a lot of fantastic things.
If that sounds like damning with overwhelming praise, you're right!
For those curious, Brave New World is a full overhaul/rebalance hack for the SNES version of FF6 (or, rather, FF3) that has a whole bevy of under the hood changes including a touched up script, greatly improved character diversity (through character-limiting espers and thus spell access/stat growth) and a complete reworking of the game's stat formulas to pull it out of the trap the original game has of Magic being your god stat and the overwhelming statistic push to turn everyone into roided out spellslingers.
Unfortunately, it has a lot of problems, both in-game (balancing difficulty is hard, it turns out, and while they managed to get the first half of the game almost pitch perfect, the second half devolves into the same FF "You Can Only Win Through Overwhelming Force" game as every other FF endgame) and out of game (off-hand comments in the readmes combined with a few throwaway lines and attack names make me really question about the maturity of the writer, someone who thinks using words like 'retarded' and 'trigger' and constantly badtalking the game they're modifying is an acceptable way to act).
I was willing to give it a chance again with the newest update. I was willing to give it more than the chance it deserved, even, given that![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kjorteo has been playing Dragon Quest 2 and I've been thinking heavily about the very oldschool-oriented difficulty curve that expected you to grind for a substantial amount of time for levels and gear.
Unfortunately, it all fell apart at about the same point for me as it did the last time I tried, despite those considerations in mind. Somewhere between a third of the way through the World of Ruin to halfway through, difficulty becomes a binary. Either you're an adequate level and just kind of shrug off everything, or you're so much as a few levels behind and suddenly you're playing trampoline with the phoenix downs and struggling to put out fires as bosses and even random enemies counter most of what you throw at them with party-wide nukes. By the end of the game I was probably underlevelled, because random encounters were torturous, and so I spent the entire final boss violently abusing my SNES Classic's rewind function. There is no more comfortable middleground where you actually have to think about your choices, where the gameplay matters. It's either too easy or too hard, with no median.
After all, if we let you use those wildly debilitating status ailments on the enemy, or if we let your characters be immune to more than two or three at a time, well, then it's too easy, isn't it?
I'm done with romhacks for now, and if anyone wants to hear my opinion on difficulty/accessibility in video games:
I cheated the game, because it was cheating me.
I didn't play this to grow.
I didn't play this to improve.
I have enough room to do that living my life, which is an unending cavalcade of misery.
I took a shortcut and ended my suffering.
I experienced a hollow victory over a poorly-tuned game.
Nothing was risked and my sanity was gained.
It's sad that you think the difference matters.
ughhhhhh I wanted to like this hack, it has so many good ideas and ughhhhhhhh
i even waited from 1.3 to 1.6.1 to 2.0 and a lot of things have changed but there's still ugh
To quote what I told a friend: Okay. I've played through the whole thing and yeah. Even now, I can't recommend BNW. It's... complicated to actually put into words, but the long and short of it is that for every fantastic thing it does, it also does something I can't fucking stand, and it does a lot of fantastic things.
If that sounds like damning with overwhelming praise, you're right!
For those curious, Brave New World is a full overhaul/rebalance hack for the SNES version of FF6 (or, rather, FF3) that has a whole bevy of under the hood changes including a touched up script, greatly improved character diversity (through character-limiting espers and thus spell access/stat growth) and a complete reworking of the game's stat formulas to pull it out of the trap the original game has of Magic being your god stat and the overwhelming statistic push to turn everyone into roided out spellslingers.
Unfortunately, it has a lot of problems, both in-game (balancing difficulty is hard, it turns out, and while they managed to get the first half of the game almost pitch perfect, the second half devolves into the same FF "You Can Only Win Through Overwhelming Force" game as every other FF endgame) and out of game (off-hand comments in the readmes combined with a few throwaway lines and attack names make me really question about the maturity of the writer, someone who thinks using words like 'retarded' and 'trigger' and constantly badtalking the game they're modifying is an acceptable way to act).
I was willing to give it a chance again with the newest update. I was willing to give it more than the chance it deserved, even, given that
kjorteo has been playing Dragon Quest 2 and I've been thinking heavily about the very oldschool-oriented difficulty curve that expected you to grind for a substantial amount of time for levels and gear.Unfortunately, it all fell apart at about the same point for me as it did the last time I tried, despite those considerations in mind. Somewhere between a third of the way through the World of Ruin to halfway through, difficulty becomes a binary. Either you're an adequate level and just kind of shrug off everything, or you're so much as a few levels behind and suddenly you're playing trampoline with the phoenix downs and struggling to put out fires as bosses and even random enemies counter most of what you throw at them with party-wide nukes. By the end of the game I was probably underlevelled, because random encounters were torturous, and so I spent the entire final boss violently abusing my SNES Classic's rewind function. There is no more comfortable middleground where you actually have to think about your choices, where the gameplay matters. It's either too easy or too hard, with no median.
After all, if we let you use those wildly debilitating status ailments on the enemy, or if we let your characters be immune to more than two or three at a time, well, then it's too easy, isn't it?
I'm done with romhacks for now, and if anyone wants to hear my opinion on difficulty/accessibility in video games:
I cheated the game, because it was cheating me.
I didn't play this to grow.
I didn't play this to improve.
I have enough room to do that living my life, which is an unending cavalcade of misery.
I took a shortcut and ended my suffering.
I experienced a hollow victory over a poorly-tuned game.
Nothing was risked and my sanity was gained.
It's sad that you think the difference matters.
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I apologize for indirectly making you think about all of this because of that. I, uh, I was just trying to tackle a game I'd long wanted to try; I didn't mean to make you play a smarmy ROMhack. *blush*
But yeah, this... there's a tendency for the complete overhauls to devolve into smugness, since 1) everyone has a grand idea for what the game balance totally should have been, and 2) the kind of people devoted enough to make a ROMhack by definition kind of have to know the game inside and out and a lot of them tend to expect you to as well. BNW sounds like it's actually a cut above your standard "nerf the obvious OP classes, give all the monsters 50x their stats, put in a masturbatory git gud speech in the readme about how you need to THINK and use STRATEGY now, that's it that's the hack." It does a lot of great quality-of-life tweaks that more games should have. But like you said, every good decision has a bad one to counterbalance. At the end of the day, this is still a stereotypical "overhaul" ROMhack. Which is unfortunate, because of all the good ideas it happened to have along the way.
Oh, well.
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Some excerpts, since the wounds are still fresh. From the main readme:
"The first is that, due to bad coding/poor life choices[...]"
"[...]also fix some bugs it had so that it feels a lot more like a proper ability instead of a broken mess."
"[...]if you're the type of player that just mashes "A" to win, then Brave New World is not for you."
"[...] because whoever coded this nightmare was on crack."
"*There's actually an exception (Dice) since FF6 was coded by monkeys"
"*This game was programmed by monkeys, I swear"
"Others [...] were fucking retarded and were thrown in the trash where they belong."
"We thought it stupid that a cheap and freely-available item was functionally identical to a resource-consuming spell[...]"
"[...]this game's tangled mess of spaghetti code[...]
And from the locked/spoiler readme:
"[...]as part of our ongoing effort to remove hidden bullshit that really shouldn't have been hidden in the first place (people had a lot more free time on their hands back in the 90's)."
"An even MORE questionable design choice than the above was giving the player a magicite containing one of the baddest asses ever, only to have it immediately replaced with Hideo Kojima's biggest mistake."
"[...] the last thing we want to do is make the player feel like they need to drag Locke's vagrant ass along with them wherever they go[...]"
"For the curious and/or bored[...]"
"[...] but a cursory glance at the original code suggests that little, if any of that fucking mess was intentional."
"(warning: they're a goddamn mess)"
"[...]which I could very easily fix just by [...] but I honestly really don't give enough of a shit."
....I think some of those are enlightening even without context.
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Anyway, it was something about a sort of FF6 After Years setting where after FF6's plot happened, Magic no longer existed, so things like Items and Potions and Alchemy and Science became the dominant all powerful force, and then some new OC Big Bad built himself a lightning machine and tried to take over and/or destroy everything. The one part I clearly remember was the first time the entire reunited FF6 crew meet the new endboss: in an attempt to get him over as a new big serious threat to take seriously via the Worf Effect, he activates his lightning powers and instantly and in one move splortches Mog, Gogo, and Umaro, who are now dead forever.
Even back in my own shitty teen phase, even I remember thinking the choice of victims was immersion-breakingly obvious. Not only is it a rather glaring logic hole (we have established he has the power to turn three entire party members into a fine red mist instantly, but everyone else is able to band together and avenge them in a much more fair fight in which he somehow forgot he could do that) but seriously, those exact three? You very, very clearly just dropped a bridge on the ones who all happened to have the common thread of "the silly joke character/the character least relevant to the main plot." Not even the ones considered missable side characters by gameplay standards, because Shadow was fine, of course, even though he'd arguably ambiguously already died back in the actual game. No, this was a calculated fuck-you to your least favorites, and your least favorites were the ones you felt got in the way of your serious story for serious people. And that's teenaged me calling you out on this.
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Hi, I'm not still boggling over a bad fanfic storytelling decision twenty years later or anything.
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In romhacks specifically it’s also far more common to happen because in order to care enough to pull apart a game and really get into its guts, you’ve most likely played the original to death and know its intricacies backwards and forwards and so you want something that will engage you and people like you.
So you overtune it, only testing it on people with the same amount of game proficiency as you and your friends, who all find it tolerable because you’ve learned how to deal with the heat, whereas Joe Q Random will very likely have no idea that obviously Haste and Slow overwrite each other because they’re mutually contradictory statuses duh, etc etc.
If I made a romhack for FF5 for myself, as an example, I would be going in with esoteric knowledge like the fact that certain abilities pass on stat bonuses but others don’t, and I would tweak against John K Minmaxer instead of Joe Q Random. That would naturally make it harder and less casual-friendly.
Game design is HARD, yo.
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Edit: In all seriousness, though, the way you walk that tightrope is you aim the tweaks against only John K Minmaxer's bag of bullshit. In FF5's case, for example, there are so many arcane "Oh yeah if you pair this one obscure Mix combination with this other even more obscure equipment and blue magic combination you can just break the game completely in half" combinations that Joe Q Random would never even have heard of and would have no reason to touch, ever.
Like, make it so that while an enemy's level can still be manipulated for the purposes of debuffing/making them weaker (inflicting Old, etc.) Death By Math moves only ever check against their actual (start of the battle) level. In other words, if an enemy isn't naturally a multiple-of-five level, you can't throw weird Morrowind alchemy at them until they are just to L5 Death them. There, with one simple change you just completely atomized the entire Smogon-level metagame in a way that no casual player would even notice.
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There is no "simple fix", and all code is spaghetti code. What you're suggesting is to make a unique edge case for one specific spell, which wouldn't go back to affect all the other spells with similar attributes.
Like, mmh. For all I don't like how the stats in Brave New World were tweaked, the whole hack is a technical marvel. There's so many tiny changes and tweaks on a game that was ALREADY a Pokemon Red/Blue level abomination crammed into a cartridge three sizes too small. Like, the hacker made repeated mentions of "oh this was programmed by monkeys" but no, this was programmed by a dedicated team under a very clear time crunch and a much less obvious but far more limiting data crunch. By all rights, Final Fantasy 6 should not have fit on a Super Famicom cartridge with all the conditionals and tiny changes between plot events and plot flags it had. But they made it fit anyway.
The hackers have three advantages that Square themselves didn't have:
1) The luxury of time. If it doesn't work, they can tweak it until it does work. It took them seven years to get to this point, the entire team at Square had one.
2) The luxury of storage space. Being a ROMhack, they don't have the restriction of needing to fit in a 4MB cartridge. They've mostly managed to stay at that point for the final release, but I would be incredibly surprised if test builds didn't swell in size as things were tried.
3) The luxury of technology. Coding techniques and optimization have advanced since 1994, meaning it's easier and less eldritch-magicky to get a spaghetti code crunched down to fit the space required, plus FF6 is one of those games that has been dissected so thoroughly that they had an easy (well, "easy") reference guide for where things are in the code.
So yes, two guys fixed a lot of problems that a team of far more than that left in. It also took them seven times longer and they had more arm room to figure things out.
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"You know what you call a mess of functional spaghetti code that scares everyone who looks at it?
Shipped."
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But recall that, to the kind of person who's so deeply into FF5 that they'd be looking at ROMhacks to enhance the experience, breaking the game open with their favorite delicate synergetical mix of One Weird Tricks is why they're here. It's why FJF challenge runs are so popular, because just about any weird starting point can get you through in one even more weird way or another if you know the guts of the game well enough to exploit them.
So instead you get ROMhacks that are weighted toward John K Minmaxer, because what these people want isn't to have their favorite toys taken away, but to be given a new playground for them. Someone who's enough of a pro to blaze through Super Mario Bros. 1 in their sleep doesn't want SMB1 again but with jumping nerfed; they want Lost Levels. Or speedrunning.
This, of course, means that the hack assumes mastery of all the arcane bullshit as the new normal baseline, something you need and are expected to know just to survive your basic low-level random encounters let alone anything fearsome, and therefore the casuals are just kind of out of luck.
And that's why the Hell Run exists.
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There's a reason that the capstone Super Metroid speedrun at AGDQ this year wasn't the vanilla game, but a kaizolike masocore hack.
People have optimized Super Metroid SO MUCH - kind of like Super Mario Bros 1 - that the difference between the human world record and the TAS world record is counted in frames. If you have people racing it annually, even casuals get a bit "oh, again?" Especially because races are so tight that everyone has to play ultra-risky and a single death means you just lose. (That happened one year, where everyone game overed on Phantoon except the one guy who took a few extra seconds to make a save game. Kind of took all the tension out.)
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