I read such "not good" reviews about 13 that I have avoided it, although I still want to try it out. I hope its not going to be like X-II (X-2, w/e). Then nah, don't want.
Heres its trailer: AND because ive been waiting for this game forever, final fantasy 13 versus complete with actual gameplay footage: To be honest, im getting them both.
Having played X, X-2 and XIII i must say i am going to be looking forward to this! XIII did get mixed reviews but i think that was mainly because the battle system was quite different to anything in previous games. I didn't mind it once i got into the game and found the story quite good. Hopefully the sequel is even better
They need to start using subtitles and not numbers. It was odd enough when they made a sequel to a game called Final Fantasy, which was supposed to be final. Then they made a few dozen more sequels. And now, they're making sequels of sequels. Really says something about their creativity and marketing. On another note, I haven't played any FF game past FF9. FF10 threw me off with its use of fully-rendered environments, which looked terrible on the PS2 for my tastes. I tried playing FF12, I really did. And it's too bad, because I was enjoying it... but I had to stop playing because it used inverted camera (looking around) controls. I couldn't get used to it as I played Halo on the side and I used non-inverted controls. You can only do one or the other.
And in the end that's all they care about. <3 I for one am excited, seeing as Square has promised to "try to appeal more to the Western market" this time around.
Versus 13 I have hope for as KH team has been releasing some good quality shit. Just 13 was a major letdown overall (and I own both the jp and na release). I still enjoyed 12 the most just cause it was more open like a mmo and had way more customization for strategy.
I enjoyed 13 enough but was unable to finish it because the difficulty curve was like trying to climb Mt. Everest.
But not to me. The Final Fantasy series has always, in my opinion, needed a difficultly selection. I mean, Kingdom Hearts has one, why not FF?
*shrug* I always pick the hardest difficulty anyway. But some games just get retarded with it. They don't make the game harder they just up all your enemies HP. When instead they should up their AI.
Truth, and what my thesis is about. Hopefully the research and models that I'm making will get some attention at least with bigger companies that can afford to implement them
Well originally it was going to be about making an effective adaptive AI for games, but had to be reworked a bit for approval. So I cheesed it and it is now Dynamic Difficulty basically it's about addressing the cognitive limits of human information processing with pattern manipulation to accurately scale the difficulty of an encounter. The easiest examples of it are for MMOs, but if done carefully and correctly it could be applied to smaller scale (read: single, limited multiplayer games). In MMOs, you see a rise in gimmicks to keep fights "fresh" and then the companies rely on the gimmicks to maintain that difficulty. However, once people crack the pattern of the gimmick the difficulty then drops to an irrelevant level. What I'm proposing is to allow the AI to analyze the situation and change the pattern on the fly. The exact variable would vary based on design, but if the boss makes you perform a step in a certain way X amount of times it can simply change the order/duration of event/time allowed to execute event based on how well the group executed it. The challenge for developing it will be making it so that it just doesn't keep scaling up, making it impossible which is something I have to address. ATM, i'm still heavy into the research phase trying to get data from studies on how quickly the human mind adapts to things, or what the average limits are on fast pace changes. I do have the data on what constitutes challenge, what aspects influence the perception of challenge, and an actual formula to aide developers in gauging challenge. When I finally get it done, I'll have some models to create a guideline and probably a set of heuristics to go by on implementing it. The target is for larger companies that house big time MMOs since it allows for better illustration of the effects, but like I said it could be applied to single player games if desired.
Cool, I think myself if I were to approach the topic would look more at the psychological aspects of challenge, risk, and reward and if it is possible to measure it enough to more appropriately create challenge in games without removing the "fun" factor. -KM
yeah, a lot of the challenge research I was doing brought in a lot of good info regarding that. I touch on it lightly during the why it helps as you don't want the challenge the increase such that when the group fails that it feels like the game was cheating. The primary drive for it is a response to the feelings that "PvE isn't challenging once you figure out the pattern". However, the thesis also isn't supposed to be a giant dissertation or else I'd have kept my initial scope which was dynamism in general in gaming.
just finished XIII wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great either doesn't matter though was the most beautiful game ever made.
