Yes siree, the excitement never stops!
I do not actually know as this is the first time I am even hearing of Chrono Cross.
Youre telling me theres a sequel?!?!?
I only ever managed to play Chrono Trigger on ZNES something like 20 years ago and remember being blown away by how different and more interesting it was from basically every other JRPG up to that point.
Now I must find this sequel.
Well I am surprised no one has mentioned this but:
This is the best possible JRPG to do a retcon/reimagining of as is going on with FF7, but a bit differently.
Time travel!
So, start a new story with new characters, but intermix this with the old cast and story beats resulting in a completely new story that brings back old favorite settings and characters, introduces new ones.
Maybe you change significant plot points of the old story, maybe you don’t, maybe you doom the world to some entirely new kind of catastrophe, maybe you get stuck in what would otherwise be called a soft lock but is actually in this world an intentional plot device that just looks like a soft lock but isnt.
Hell, if you /really/ want to go hog wild with this:
Make the new set of characters generally opposed to the original set of characters, have their own method of time travelling, and make it so much of the game is actually about attempting to out-time-travel-wit the others, basically with certain characters attempting to be time demons ala DB Xenoverse and others trying to stop them… all mixed with the narrative possibilities at many points for many characters to switch allegiances, go rogue, or mostly team up.
even moooore possible endings
No I have no clue how you could actually write something this complicated, but the entirety of Kingdom Hearts exists and people tell me somehow that all makes sense, so I am confident a team of competent writers can pull off an absurdly complex multivariate story line.
It isnt so much vaporware as basically massively bad funding model and development practices.
They have software. There is a ‘game’ you can ‘play’.
Its just that its still buggy as fuck and the gameplay doesnt really meaningfully work.
Its… more like an alpha that never stops adding features and content… and as a result, never does a feature lock and actually make what they have into a non buggy, actually compelling game.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence
Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving.
LLMs are pretty capable of abstraction and understanding.
Though they obviously use logic in that they are constructed from/of it, they are not really capable of actual logical analysis, beyond emulating it.
They can’t really do any of the other attributes of intelligence at all, beyond basically decently to poorly emulating them.
Anyone who buys into this deserves the financial ruin that will so obviously happen to them.
Basically not unless /another/ anti-trust lawsuit is brought against them, and also somehow Teddy Roosevelt time warps into exactly Biden’s location, explodes him Dr. Manhattan style inside out, immediately asks for a fitting suit, signature glasses, and this somehow stuns everyone into just letting him be President for the rest of Biden’s term.
Hah, Ive gone uh, full tilt, and actually am working on making a game myself that will hopefully /actually have meaningfully innovative and compelling gameplay/, and i dont plan on or seem to have any real need to fall into the kickstarter/early access trap.
From a developer standpoint, both those approaches mean deadlines and managing expectations, which is basically maddeningly stressful and soul crushing.
From a gamer perspective, more often than not that means throwing money at a promise that at best will not live up to the hyped experience you have generated with the fandom, and at worst is just a total bust, failure, or scam.
So yep, my plan is tinker away for a year or two until the fundamentals are technologically sound and the actual gameplay is unique and compelling.
Then, only then, would i maybe release a demo or in depth teasers or testing session footage.
Yes thats right. Testing. Remember when games used to actually be playtested, not just for bugs, but for actual gameplay experience?
Many of at least my favorite games and mods were hugely shaped by tester feedback that radically reworked certain game elements to solve unexpected gameplay problems, or to further an idea that the testers found fun or useful that tje devs didnt even realize was really possible in the world theyd constructed.
Anyway… woo video games, shit sucks mostly these days but there are some notable basically niche exceptions, and hopefully i can make something thats at least niche successful.
In the words of a person i truly do think is an actual genius of game design:
These things, they take time.
Time where no one has any real clue wtf youre actually doing, haha.
First off, dang thats a pretty good username, second:
sigh yep, youre right.
I am the only avid video gamer I knew who actually refused and refuses to buy anything ever again from Bethesda after FallOut 76.
I personally know a good deal of gamers who said theyd do the same… and actually did not, some even pre ordering Starfield.
Gamers are basically hilarious hypocrites from the standpoint of market research, public sentiment analysis and actual dollareedoos.
Which is why i would have been an actual idiot at this point to think that an actually significant number of gamers could actually successfully pull off a boycott as a means to influence the overall market conditions.
This is not /that/ complicated.
Who plays video games these days?
Children, and adults who are basically working shit jobs and have little disposable income, but theyre generally likely to get hooked into a game that offers microtransactions of some kind.
Ok, so, we all know AAA studios are more or less led by extremely money hungry bullies who see games as a product to sell to consumers for the purposes of maximizing shareholder profit, and they know they have to mainly compete against other games, and movies and tv (netflix hulu fucking whatever).
Gamers also basically expect high quality graphics and the production value of basically a blockbuster movie, if you go by sales data.
Sure, other games with less astounding graohics and actually unique or novel gameplay exist, thats neat, they have teensy tiny draws, excepting the essentially totally unpredictable break out hit thats popular for maybe a month, maybe literally days.
So, we need huge studios for huge production values, and then the only way to possibly make profits on that is exploitative games as a service with microtransactions and season/battle passes.
Their brains are stuck in a loop state basically, and going by their logic, it makes sense from their position and with their motives and personalities.
Theyre following corpo logic basically perfectly.
You can say theyre the bad guys, and I can say go rewatch V for Vendetta and replay the part where V says ‘you only need look into a mirror’ multiple times.
How does this situation actually change?
Either, somehow, not one but a number of basically indie games somehow become huge successes with massive regular player counts, and most importantly they somehow have to draw people away from the mostly unoriginal schlock that is most AAA money printing games these days…
Or, basically, a significant number of big name studios/publishers need to basically just go entirely bankrupt.
Are either of these likely to happen?
Probably not, not soon, barring an extremely serious basically global economic downturn.
The fact that there is this much uniformity in strategy means that there will be sort of attritional damage done to the less successful, but that… might result in a sea change of market strategy to some other basically fad for AAA game studios… or it might result in even further buyouts and consolidation of once great IPs and studios.
Welcome to video game hell, nearly no one is truly innocent.
You are wrong about this, there are literally right now huge arguments going on and legal battles likely to start soon over the fact that ‘AI’ generated content is effectively a giant plagiarism/synthesis machine, as the models are nearly always trained on /massive/ swaths of content that include /many/ copyrighted works, as well as stuff that was simply never given express permission to be used in such a way.
Valve, for example, has officially taken a side, a few days ago stating in a policy update that you are not allowed to publish a game with ‘AI’ gen art, dialogue, or code, unless you can prove the training set for the ‘AI’ did not contain any source material you do not have the rights to use in a for profit manner.
Well that doesnt make any sense, because if it was not a reply specific to the commenter, then it must be you commenting on this topic or the comments generally.
Clearly something triggered you to post what you posted, a criticism of people who judge others based on the games they like.
Given that the post you were replying to does not do that, either you posted a reply to the wrong comment or topic, or you feel judged when that is not explicitly stated, which would basically mean you are judging yourself?
Had not heard that, interesting!
To me the funniest part is his praise for Amazon for being strong supporters.
So, ok, heres what that means:
Twitch will basically fold and crumble and be cannibalized and/or spun off it it cannot hit the growth rates it needs to hit in order for higher ups at Amazon to view it as a worthwhile money sink now that could actually contribute net positive to the company in the long run.
But, if Twitch cannot grow fast enough, they will basically pull the plug as it will be too much money lost that could better be used elsewhere.
And the inherent problem with Twitch is that its fucking madness, generates some new insane bad PR fairly reliably with some outrageous thing some streamer does, or doesnt do, or maybe did… or via generating the terms of service version of ‘a huge amount of people didnt like that’ that is impossible to not have happen for nearly any significant TOS change because again Twitch is full of crazy idiots who do not care about anything other than their really weird niche or their favorite streamer, because basicslly the whole point of twitch is to go there and have an unhealthy parasocial relationship with someone, at least thats the kind of interaction that generates revenue.
But that is also what generates all the insane PR nightmares that are preventing Twitch from growing fast enough.
Its essentially an unwinnable situation of paradoxes that will nearly certainly lead to business decisions that functionally either milk more money out of the current user base in one way or another, possibly combined with something like an adpocalypse.
This makes it more profitable in the short run, but lowers long term growth prospects.
The entire economy is currently under a lot of stress, and Amazon’s two core businesses of shipping stuff everywhere and providing basically servers for businesses are very likely to feel effects of a general economic downturn more rapidly than many other kinds of businesses.
Twitch isnt core, its not even profitable, its a PR nightmare.
What would you do if you were an Amazonian Higher Up and you wanted to preserve Amazon’s general profitability?
How many people will really cancel their Amazon Prime if that involves a curtailed aspect of Twitch benefits, or none at all?
Huh.
Well, whatever floats your boat I guess.
Or in this case builds your town?
The person you are replying to is not being judgemental.
No judgement was mentioned.
They just described a gameplay loop, didn’t say it was good or bad or boring or easy or fun or difficult.
Even if they had, you can have a personal preference about something inconsequential and not use it to judge others.
I do not get the appeal of idle games, but I dont think that people who do are being judged in any kind of way by me for having different game preferences alone.
I do not usually prefer or enjoy playing basically turn based JRPGs in general because I usually just get really bored of the gameplay and find it repetitive and unchallenging, but the only judgement I could possibly make about such people from those who do, knowing only that they like JRPGs is that they like grand and epic stories, and they are probably more interested in a graphically engaging story and hey maybe they like the gameplay or maybe that’s not even what’s important to them, they really just like a semi interactive well told narrative.
Some people want a game that doesn’t require the kinds of gameplay I prefer, and that doesn’t mean anything other than they prefer a different kind of gameplay, or they’re in the mood to experience the next saga of a narrative they love, or both!
I do not think they are bad or weird for this, just different in a way that is probably unimportant and neutral on a personal level.
The one I personally know of most people who play is Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms.
Its the natural evolution of a kind of JRPG gameplay. The actual combat is so boring you might as well just automate grinding. So they did!
I don’t even get why you have this be a game at this point. Why not just make a visual novel or like a YouTube series? Again, I just do not understand the appeal.
Here are some others:
https://diamondlobby.com/platform/steam/best-idle-games-on-steam/
There are so many people that play idle games.
Never understood the appeal.
If I am not mistaken, you /can/ have that be a thing, as I am fairly sure the actual SteamOS is open source and Valve would /probably?/ allow that to come stock on a potential alternate handheld…
But kind of their whole thing is it is optimized for the hardware set up they are using.
So… you could theoretically have an or multiple competing Not Valve but Yes SteamOS Decks, but from the standpoint of the economics of building a market viable gaming machine, Valve would still probably have a serious edge in that market for a while.
Almost like Valve actually understands the entire tech industry better than nearly any other tech company or something.
I realized after writing this all out that it was closer to a sequel than a remake but… oh well, I thought it was a neat idea nonetheless.
And yes now that you mention it this is actually similar to the Golden Sun series irt the dueling groups of protagonists (antagonists?), but I swear I did not realize this and was going more from the DB Xenoverse time demon angle.