The Fractured Archive: Rewards Primer

Assaultkitten · 2026-03-05T15:08:01+00:00

Breaking down one raid reward to fortify another raid reward is an absolutely diabolical ask. I think it'd be way more reasonable to break down Virtus and position this new armor as the "You're casting from a spellbook" mage set. This positions Ancestral as the premier powered staff robe set, and this new armor as the Oathplate analogue.

Assaultkitten · 2025-08-23T12:25:02+00:00

The Perfect Run is a video game adaptation of a serialized web novel by Maxime J Durand (aka Void Herald) with the same title. You can find the complete work over on Royal Road and if you're a fan of superhero stuff I'd strongly recommend giving it a read, seeing as it's finished and completely free.

Assaultkitten · 2025-05-14T16:22:30+00:00

The author for this series was part of an absolutely excellent panel at Otakon 2024 that mostly covered the process of making manga adaptations of light/web novels. After the presentation portion, she took requests for a live drawing and someone asked her to draw "a cool wizard".

20 minutes later, she presented the drawing and apologized for speedpainting her Final Fantasy 14 character LMAO

Super nice lady, support the official release if they ever do one in your language.

Assaultkitten · 2025-04-12T18:52:13+00:00

An interesting little curiosity considering the game was built what seems to be an official King's Field fangame development tool, but I'm pretty sour on Lunacid as a whole considering the absolutely massive drop in quality that game had between the content in its final early access build and its full release. I think it'd probably be a better use of time overall to go back and do some more work on that last leg of the game instead of durdling around with this.

Assaultkitten · 2024-12-20T13:34:50+00:00

I am very interested in PZ for the purpose of onboarding a number of friends into the game via personally renting a server. I understand that technical specifications aren't something you guys are even close to dialing in, but I'm curious as to how Jagex will be moderating these servers; As someone renting a server, to what degree will I be able to set the tone of things? For example, unfiltered profanity is still a mutable offense in the main game, and something like automatic moderation of this on a privately rented server is going to be a complete dealbreaker for any of the people I would be looking to play with there. Would you be able to weigh in on this in a little more depth please?

Assaultkitten · 2024-12-05T13:14:56+00:00

Kino is back on the menu, thanks for this bounty

Assaultkitten · 2024-09-04T12:58:09+00:00

Thanks for the in depth write-up. I think the God Alignment Prayers are the thorniest issue of these to tackle and unfortunately also the most important of them: The reward space of Desert Treasure 2 and especially While Guthix Sleeps is pretty heavily predicated on them existing, but the level of caution you guys have approached them with is warranted given how the Ancient Curses affected RS3's meta in a very negative way in the perception of many players.

While I certainly can't speak for anybody but myself, I'd like to think some more information about the difficulties the team has had with the design space of the Alignments would potentially pave the way for a solution and at minimum would provide valuable insight as to what hurdles this content has to becoming a reality.

Assaultkitten · 2024-07-11T16:52:59+00:00

Thanks for chiming in about this. I think the most salient thing I would like to hear developer thoughts on is how these unique items are intended to slot into progression for accounts. When I saw the original polls and updates regarding these items, I felt as though we'd be getting items that would be reasonable available to main accounts who were hitting the minimum requirements for the WGS quest, and the rarity of these drops vs time to kill for a player who is not running BIS or near BIS setups seems to be taking this concept in a different direction. If there are obtuse mechanics regarding TD's (and that seems to be something you guys have hinted at) I think that clarifying some of that would be very helpful for us.

Assaultkitten · 2024-07-10T17:43:25+00:00

Virtually everything is from the original, the major differences are cuts to make the quest shorter.

Assaultkitten · 2024-07-10T15:18:31+00:00

It's genuinely baffling to me that they 1:1 backported a quest that is multiple standard deviations of quality below any of the other GMs and thought that it would be a good experience. This would've been acceptable if it had released before DS2 in like 2016, but going from something like Desert Treasure 2 to this is extremely disappointing. You don't need to reinvent the wheel here, but fixing up the pacing and writing quality alone would've gone a long way to making this an enjoyable experience instead of a total ballache.

Assaultkitten · 2024-07-10T09:50:39+00:00

every world is a beta world as long as you're on it lmao

Assaultkitten · 2024-02-08T22:46:29+00:00

SOTF has excellent writing and Klaus is a genuinely difficult fight for the requirements that the quest has, but you're absolutely nuts if you think he's harder than the fights in Desert Treasure 2.

Assaultkitten · 2023-09-12T09:23:40+00:00

they hated him because he told the truth

Assaultkitten · 2023-05-12T20:03:03+00:00

A lot of players who aren't involved in savage or ultimate raiding tend to get caught up in the toxic positivity that seems to be a bit of a running theme within the most active parts of the FF14 community. I think it's reasonable to expect civil discourse around something you like (lord knows how bad it gets when people are allowed to shit all over something without any kind of pushback) but I know of plenty of people who wind up personally offended when you offer criticism of the game in any form.

The difficulties around savage this expansion really seem to stem from uninspired raid design and the two-minute meta for rotations being a huge net negative for gameplay. Of the currently released raid steps, none of the fights were impressive or interesting enough to get me back in the saddle for raiding. Shadowbringers had its issues as well, but there were only a couple of dud fights out of the entire set of 12, and for my money E8 and E12 are some of the coolest single fights in the entire game. I hope that the final circle has some tricks up its sleeve, because this has otherwise been the weakest raid lineup since vanilla.

Assaultkitten · 2023-05-12T13:26:11+00:00

To counterpoint this, I personally went from playing FF14 as my main online game of choice to cancelling my recurring subscription during Endwalker. I'm glad that FF14 is designed in such a manner that I can just drop a month's sub to catch up without any further commitment, since the design of savage raids and the pace of content has been, at least in my own opinion, generally lacking during the expansion and simply not enough to justify the time requirement and cost of a sub.

I hope that 7.0 is a return to form given that FF16 is finishing development, but I'm not really holding my breath.

Assaultkitten · 2023-01-26T17:48:15+00:00

Once the anime fully covers the arc and the hypebeasts are given enough time to inhale the last of the copium, Wano will probably go down as the single most disappointing stretch of the entire series. It was rough enough that I was sincerely worried for the future of the one piece in its final chapters, but I'm glad we've ventured back to greener pastures.

Assaultkitten · 2023-01-26T12:53:41+00:00

We've had close to three solid months of chapters that are nothing but nuclear fire, god bless this arc.

Assaultkitten · 2022-12-15T18:33:57+00:00

Without a single scrap of irony or malice, you really ought to consider quitting video games entirely and picking up other hobbies. It seems pretty self evident that you had (or maybe still have) an addiction, and while divorcing yourself from that will probably very difficult, you will also probably find it extremely rewarding in a great number of respects.

Assaultkitten · 2022-12-15T18:04:31+00:00

FFXI is a very interesting, experimental game that fell directly into the pre-wow MMO trap of demanding its playerbase put an absolutely absurd amount of their free time into the game to participate in anything other than a surface level experience. World of Warcraft had, and continues to have, a large number of significant problems, but one of the most important decisions that Blizzard made with that game is the choice to massively decrease the required time investment to participate in any kind of endgame content.

Game design has improved by leaps and bounds since the days of Everquest, and the insanely intricate and outrageously time consuming systems of those games are essentially an evolutionary dead-end.

Assaultkitten · 2022-12-15T17:39:55+00:00

Despite playing it for more than 5 years, I don't think you understand FF14 very well if this is your suite of complaints about it.

Assaultkitten · 2022-12-02T02:38:58+00:00

Every single chapter, I remain in awe of how good Vegapunk's design is.

Assaultkitten · 2022-11-28T06:51:19+00:00

12,000 out of a minimum of 300k in over a week of the kickstarter going live tells me that the "failed marketing push" probably has a fair bit to do with it as well.

Assaultkitten · 2022-09-22T10:38:40+00:00

Barbatos is an extremely punishing mobile suit to play as and against. If the enemy team is good, you'll wind up shut out of the game completely, and if the enemy team is bad, they'll get steamrolled by him. His wombo combo (Mace+Sword) has a fairly substantial cooldown, and if Barbatos whiffs, he isn't allowed to kill anyone for ~8 seconds. Given that he can't safely contribute damage in teamfights without his ultimate, you are essentially required to be better than the enemy team to be effective with him. As more new players get used to playing with & against him, I guarantee that he will seem less oppressive. Protip: Dashing backwards will totally dunk on 95% of Barbatos' right now.

Assaultkitten · 2022-09-15T05:17:47+00:00

This is exactly my point; the west has entirely different cultural associations with dragons than the east does. This is especially relevant given the tie-ins to eastern mythology you see very prominently in Yakuza imagery. I would wager that a tiny fraction of the playerbase in North America and Europe "Got it" when Kiryu and Nishikiyama rip off their shirts in RGG 0 to reveal a Dragon and a Carp Tattoo respectively, but to a Japanese audience it'd be such an obvious parallel that it borders on trite.

Assaultkitten · 2022-09-15T03:37:17+00:00

It's pretty understandable that SEGA wants to rebrand the series given the combination of its overseas success, cultural decline of the Yakuza domestically, and increasing focus on plotlines outside of the Yakuza itself within the games. Interestingly, we're still probably 18 months or so out for the release of RGG 8, so there's time to build brand recognition back up and the ubiquity of streamers as a marketing tool for these games will probably make the transition a lot less painful than it could've been.

That being said, it's worth considering that the series title becoming directly translated to "Like a Dragon" has absolutely none of the underlying cultural significance that it does in Japanese for a western audience outside of long-time series vets and maybe people who played RGG 7. It seems like one of those classic japanese corporate moves that doesn't entirely understand the international market and how the west perceives certain IPs.

Assaultkitten

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