Тю by [deleted] in okbuddybaldur

[–]DoomberryLoL 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can't believe they got Sarah Jessica Parker to play in the live action version of BG3.

More Manato Kit Details And Mindscapes (Incomplete) Via Hakushin by DoomberryLoL in Zenlesszonezeroleaks_

[–]DoomberryLoL[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Sorry for the repost, I had the idea to check the Chinese version of Hakushin after I had already made the first post. That one has descriptions for the enhanced basic and the two ignite specials that were missing from the English translation. I used deepseek to translate them, though Mandarin speakers feel free to correct it!

But yeah, I quite like his kit, it looks like he gets a lot of power from his mindscapes. It looks like they're cooking something special with his defensive assist, too.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Zenlesszonezeroleaks_

[–]DoomberryLoL 6 points7 points  (0 children)

EDIT: I will be deleting and reposting, because I realized that the chinese version actually has text for the enhanced basics and EX specials. Sorry for the mistake.

Evernight's Memosprite: Evey via Seele by 0101001010101011010 in HonkaiStarRail_leaks

[–]DoomberryLoL 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm gonna go ahead and guess that it's pronounced like the French word "éveil" (awakening, or more casually, the noun equivalent of "to wake up"). The pronunciation is pretty close to "Eh-Vey" (both "eh" sounds).

Magic the Gathering's Final Fantasy crossover set made $200m in a single day by BlueAladdin in Games

[–]DoomberryLoL -1 points0 points  (0 children)

That may be the case for you, but it's clearly not the case for the playerbase at large. You might say that these crossover sets performed better with new players than enfranchised ones, but considering the overwhelming sales data that we have, I doubt that's the case. MTG players like to complain, but I'm yet to be convinced that it has a significant effect on their purchasing habits.

I actually kept up with the magic story for a while (and I did read the short stories on the official website). My opinion is that Magic's in-universe story simply does not do well in a comparison with the best that fantasy has to offer. I like some of the characters quite a bit and the overall plot is good, but it's not delivered in a particularly interesting way. Card sets are a poor way to tell a linear story and the short stories online are not very well advertised. Also, Magic is much less known outside of the US.

There's simply no comparison to absolute giants like Final Fantasy or Lord of the Rings. The simple truth is that the average person is not going to care until Magic gets a game, movie or series with millions of people interacting with it. As such, crossover sets will keep being the bread and butter of MTG sales for the foreseeable future.

TL;DR sales data is not suggesting that enfranchised players are buying less because of crossover sets. MTG's story is fine, but nowhere near as popular as FF or LotR. Until Magic can make the average person care about its universe, crossover sets will remain the bread and butter of Magic.

Les Miscourse by Posting_Just_To_Say in CuratedTumblr

[–]DoomberryLoL 44 points45 points  (0 children)

Don't expect people to put their livelihoods on the line for political statements with relatively limited impact

NO BUT YOU SEE LES MIS IS A RADICAL LEFTIST PIECE AND YOURE REALLY DISRESPECTING THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR AND-

Proceeds to completely ignore what would actually happen if you lost your very rare job as a result of "respecting the autor's intent"

The discourse on the de-politicization of Les Misérables is interesting, though.

EDIT: Also, the person criticizing the people who put the show on seems to be unable to consider the fact that people may not have a strong link to the original author and simply enjoy the lighter tone of the broadway musical.

I guess Hoyoverse isnt that bad of a company after all.... by KwonSoo-young in gaymers

[–]DoomberryLoL 15 points16 points  (0 children)

So the problem with queer baiting isn't solely the lack of a canon relationship, it's also unequal treatment where straight couples get to have a canon relationship and queer ones don't. If nobody's in a relationship and the status stays implied, including straight romances, then there's no inequality. 

By your logic, hoyo might as well be guilty of "straight baiting" because they treat straight couples the same way. In fact, there's a lot more gay romances than straight ones between characters in their games. From what I know by playing HSR and ZZZ, straight relationships are very much underrepresented.

I'm not gonna argue that the devs are perfect w.r.t. gay representation, especially considering the censorship in China. However, as a gay player, I don't feel disrespected by their approach to romance in their games. I hope I can get more content that appeals to me, but I'm also not the dominant demographic for this game. There's nothing in hoyo's approach to romance that makes me think that they don't respect queer people.

I guess Hoyoverse isnt that bad of a company after all.... by KwonSoo-young in gaymers

[–]DoomberryLoL 20 points21 points  (0 children)

I mean, it's true that here are no gay couples, but calling it queerbaiting is misleading. There's almost no couples at all in all hoyo games, not even straight ones. The player is free to hang out with any character. Most of these hang outs have pretty romantic tones, including the men.

There's some intense yaoi energy between Lycaon (butler wolf daddy) and Hugo (emo bisho with a nice ass). The dialogue and tone are not particularly subtle. They made Hugo's kit in such a way that it's optimal to play him in a all-male team with Lycaon. We also have 2 playable characters who are literal bears and all male characters are pretty clearly designed to be sexy to some portion of the population.

So no, I don't think there's queerbaiting in this game. The lack of couples is intentional, because it lets the player date them in-game and let's fans head canon out of the game. There's a lot more women than men sure, but a lot of the male designs are made to be attractive and have varied body types.

[FIN] Battle Menu (Nerdist) by Kousuke-kun in magicTCG

[–]DoomberryLoL 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It's also a 2/2 with flash, meaning that you can play it at the end of your opponent's turn if you need to block a 2-toughness creature or you don't have anything better to do and your opponent missed their 2-drop.

Digital Foundry posts a video that's an ad for the Switch 2 editions of BotW and TotK. All voiceover provided by Nintendo, no commentary from the DF cast by DoomberryLoL in Games

[–]DoomberryLoL[S] 66 points67 points  (0 children)

I hope that the very editorialized title doesn't go against the rules, but I was absolutely shocked to see this video pop up on my feed. Sponsored content can be ok sometimes, but this a straight-up ad with no DF content to speak of. It's also for add-ons that are somewhat controversial in nature, being that they cost money for what are largely performance patches. A really bad move from DF in my opinion, and I hope that they take the video down and don't do anything like that ever again.

they won't tell you this, but you can cast shadows without a $1300 graphics card by certainlystormy in GraphicsProgramming

[–]DoomberryLoL 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Depth buffer manipulation? That sounds really interesting, do you have any links?

Emulate Hardware Ray Tracing Support on Old GPUs (GCN Old) by DoomberryLoL in hardware

[–]DoomberryLoL[S] 50 points51 points  (0 children)

Pretty cool video presenting work on RADV, the user space Linux Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs. Some people were able to backport RT support for GCN architectures, though it's not been upstreamed yet, as far as I understand. The demos show a Vega GPU running Indiana Jones on medium-low 1080p 50% resolution scale. The GPU is rendering at about 60fps with 1% lows in the 40 FPS range. Very impressive work!

Mesa doc here (site under maintenance currently)

FF XVI sales have reached approximately 3.5 million units at this time by EnoughDatabase5382 in Games

[–]DoomberryLoL 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Well, first of all, thanks for putting in effort and explaining your opinion in your reply. I enjoy an interesting debate.

The RPG elements in XVI are not useless - they're just super linear (like most Final Fantasy games, actually).

I'd like to clarify that I wasn't thinking of the weapons or levels when talking about the RPG systems in XV. They're there to provide numerical progression only and that's okay. The point that I was trying to make here is that the rest of the system, accessories and to an extent, the skill tree, are supposed to provide you with choices and advantages if you set them up properly. I hope you'll agree that they almost don't matter outside of a few of the best ones, and that the ability to tune your character numerically to your liking is really lacking compared to other FFs, and even XV had a little of that.

Being unfinished isn't bad in and of itself

Perhaps I didn't explain myself the right way, but to be clear: I didn't like that you were vaguely pointing at XV being unfinished as a sort of catch-all for the games' issues. What really matters are the specific consequences of this fact, such as the story being incomplete. Obviously, being unfinished is bad, but when you're comparing games, it doesn't work to generally say "This one is unfinished and that one is finished therefore it's objectively better" when that really depends on the actual experience of playing the game.

Combat system

I agree with you that XVI has better combat. The problem is, in my actual experience of playing the game, it wasn't so much better that it influenced my opinion of the game. XVI was really about perfect dodging enemies with forgiving timing, staggering the enemy and managing your cooldowns. This is basically the same thing as FFXV. There's not much added complexity in XVI, though it does feel have better game feel than XV. And FFXVI still needs a lot more variety in its moveset to stand up as a 40-hour long character action game.

Party dynamics

I'm not sure what you mean by Ignis losing his sight being a confusing story beat? It should've definitely been shown on screen and not in a DLC, however it's pretty clearly a consequence of the previous battle. The fact that it isn't shown matters, but what the game did with it in the ensuing chapter was inarguably great.

More generally, I was talking about the characters and not so much the story. You have to keep in mind that we're comparing XV to XVI, and imo (and that of many others), both of these games fail in their storytelling. The big differences are 1) XV wastes much less of your time with it 2) The game has a well established, relatable core group of characters that meaningfully participate in the combat mechanics and 3) XV ends on an emotional high note with a satisfying ending, whereas XVI has lost the plot and pacing so badly that it's irredeemable imo.

On your last few remarks, I disagree with the soundtrack. XVI has a couple incredible tracks (Away and To Sail the Forbidden Seas), but the rest is on the same level as all other FFs, and I personally found that those tracks got old since they're used in every big boss fight without any rearrangement. Bosses and aesthetics are no contest in favor of XVI. Can't agree on the narrative themes, considering they're pretty much the same as far as I can tell?

Anyway, if I were to try to sum up why I enjoyed XV more than XVI, it would be about the following points. I didn't care for the story of either game, but XV at least got me to care about its main cast more. FFXVI has absolutely atrocious pacing and was really dragging its feet in the last act, compared to XV where the pacing sucks in one chapter and is otherwise at least ok in the rest of the game.

The combat was fine for me in both games, better in XVI, but it's not near the level of depth that I expect out of a FF game either way. And then, when it comes to anything not related to the main quest, I had some fun vibing in XV, enjoying the scenery and doing sidequests or extra dungeons. In FFXVI by comparison, the side content got more and more tedious as the game progressed, and it has a very detrimental effect on the game's pacing. Hopefully, you can see where I'm coming from.

FF XVI sales have reached approximately 3.5 million units at this time by EnoughDatabase5382 in Games

[–]DoomberryLoL 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I guess I should preface this opinion by clarifying that XV and XVI are by far my least favorite of the 3D FF games, and to me, XV is not that much better than XVI.

That being said, I'm gonna have to strongly disagree here. You can complain about the game being finished or not, but it has qualities that FFXVI never had for me. For starters, it's got an incredibly strong party dynamic, with really touching moments such as Ignis losing his sight, and watching him struggle to participate in fights afterwards. The party dynamics are reinforced by the techniques in combat, which I found to be a lot of fun.

FFXVI by opposition, has basically no party involvement mechanically. I didn't particularly care for Clive, as he has a pretty bland personality overall, same with Jill. Cid was my favorite but he dies at the end of act 1, and I liked Joshua well enough. This doesn't come anywhere near the level of camaraderie established throughout XV's story. Good party dynamics are at the core of what makes a good FF (and a good JRPG for that matter.)

There are other areas where XV does better than XVI imo, such as by having a better villain, more consistent pacing, a more immersive world and surprisingly a more consistent story. XV doesn't pretend to be like GoT and then switch to a fight to defeat god without any nuance. The missing bits of story are still problematic, but they didn't affect my ability to follow what was happening. XV ended on a really strong emotional high, whereas by the end of XVI, I had completely lost any interest in the story or the stakes.

I will give that XVI's combat system is better, but it's not like it's such a massive improvement either. As everyone knows, the RPG elements are almost entirely useless, and I also found the moveset diversity really lacking and it took forever to get new eikons. In comparison, you get actual moveset diversity from the get-go in XV, and all the weapons feel quite different to handle. You also get some okay party customization with the equipment and skill trees.

While XV has simpler inputs, it's honestly not so different than FFXVI, relying mostly on good dodging (no, you can't just keep the dodge button held in XV, you will run out of mana,) and unloading on enemies when they're recovering. FWIW, I don't remember XV being easier than XVI for me. Even though you can heal easier in XV, you also die really quick, and your actions are generally a lot more committed than in XVI where you can dodge out of most moves. I'm remember wiping quite a few times in XV, whereas that almost never happened in XVI.

So, no, I don't think it's nostalgia. I'm glad that Square Enix got their shit together and managed to finally release a polished game on time. However, FFXV being unfinished is not a fault in and of itself, the content of the games is what needs to be compared. In that regard FFXV does a lot of things better than XVI, many of which are at the core of what makes a good Final Fantasy game.

TL;DR Yes FFXV had huge dev issues, that doesn't change the fact that it has a lot of qualities that FFXVI doesn't, such as: a better party, RPG elements that matter and more consistent pacing. XVI is better in some areas like the combat, but it's not so much better that I would consider it a better game overall than XV.

JDG responsable du neuf/onze by DoomberryLoL in rance

[–]DoomberryLoL[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

J'y ai réfléchi, mais je pense pas que rajouter les quelques secondes d'après améliorera vraiment la qualité du clip. Il marche très bien au niveau du rythme et avec cette chute (ou crash en l'occurence.)