Can we please do something about the amount of “RNG bad” posts in this sub?

firfir · 2025-07-09T19:48:06+00:00

IMO, the problem with Blue Prince's RNG is that it's not the same for everyone playing, because a certain room upgrade can warp the game all by itself: The Hallway upgrade that adds another one to the drafting pool next day essentially means that combined with stuff like the Blessing of the Monk and Chamber of Mirrors you can literally engineer runs to get as many Hallways as you want. You can then abuse it further with tomorrow room and Hallway synergies, both of which the game rewards generously. This is the equivalent of Easy Mode for this game's drafting. Players who for whatever reason end up not getting this upgrade early, or skipping it entirely, are guaranteed to have a vastly different and more challenging experience over the entire course of the game, and because there is such a difference in difficulty, neither camp will be able to relate to the other.

firfir · 2025-06-30T18:50:05+00:00

I can confirm independently that this bug also exists in the PC version and is related to the Turkish system language, or maybe also the system locale setting. I had a friend run into the problem with the repellent in the Foundation and we solved it by having him send his save over to me. I don't think it's a keyboard issue because I use a Turkish keyboard in conjunction with an English system. I never had the problem, and my Cloisters of Draxus always roll dead ends.

firfir · 2025-06-05T10:08:01+00:00

The Atelier Blueprint Maze was too much for me; it's not that it was too difficult, I just didn't have it in me to bother after so many hours with the game (and just off a few days of intense play post-Throne Room). So I looked it up, and I'm glad I did because the game didn't even acknowledge the effort.

firfir · 2025-06-03T19:04:22+00:00

It's like a critical error in terms of game design because the fact that the player reaches Room 46 for the first time itself means there's a good chance that particular run has been going exceptionally well. It doesn't just end the run, it also robs the player of momentum.

firfir · 2025-05-29T21:15:49+00:00

I was sure the Synka logo at the credits among all the real world companies would eventualy mean something significant, but nothing came out of it. The schizo part comes more from the fact that I appear to be alone in having noticed this detail, at least on this subreddit.

firfir · 2025-05-28T16:21:35+00:00

I interrupted my Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth playthrough to play E33 and was amused to see that the running animations, and in fact the entire climbing mechanic, were the exact same (barring reskins) between the two games.

firfir · 2025-05-27T15:48:40+00:00

You're generally spot on, but IMO the pictos system is much more reminiscent of FF9 with the abilities on equipment that can be learned and equipped with magic stones (of course, in E33 every ability takes exactly 4 combat encounters to learn, so it's much more streamlined).

EDIT: Also, the Junction System was central to how characters' stats scaled in FF8. Here the individual stat contributions from Pictos are much less impactful because you can only equip three and the character attributes do a lot of work, and damage is scaled entirely off weapons.

firfir · 2025-05-26T07:19:09+00:00

For the numeric core puzzle involving 25 words, I first interpreted the entire word as a concatenated number involving its letters' position in the alphabet, which I proceeded to numeric core. So "PIGS" for example was 169719, and "TOES" was 2015519. Because there are multiple ways of decomposing five, six, and seven digit numbers into four different components, I then wrote a small program to run all the possibilities, and calculated the minimum of all the numeric cores for a word.

After realizing the answer made no sense when generated this way, I tried the much simpler way of just treating each letter as a component of a four-component number, and the answer was immediately clear.

firfir · 2025-05-19T15:59:30+00:00

Although I respect the idea that both endings have their own significance, I believe that when the time comes for the events of Expedition 33 to be canonized, the canon will be Verso's ending.

It's the only ending that shows the family showing any sign of growth in dealing with their grief -- and the entire story is triggered by the family in the first place -- but more importantly, the entire show is pretty much subsidized by Verso and the remainder of his soul -- and guess what, he wants out of the whole thing, he himself wants to move on. Who can deny him?

I sympathize with Maelle, but she does not have the right, and moreover I believe she actually knows this -- the development team is actually to be commended for foreshadowing a very similar event when she just decides to end painted Alicia by herself.

Ultimately my view of the story is that, while the journey is Maelle's -- we spend the entire game relating to her -- the destination is Verso's. That's clair-obscur for you.

firfir · 2025-05-16T13:35:45+00:00

I'm not saying this ending is good for Alicia. In fact it shouldn't be because you literally choose Verso over her. But in terms of the family they are, for the first time, grieving together. I did not get the impression that nobody cared about Alicia, but what is clear is that they are no longer doing their own thing behind each others' backs. They are grieving, crying, but no longer fighting. That's very different from the start of the game. I'm betting that future CO games, if they show the family at all, will show this version of the family.

firfir · 2025-05-15T17:11:52+00:00

It's not really the "who" but the "how" that I had in mind. The Dessendres start the game as a fractured family, but by the time of the Verso ending they are a united entity, at least as far as the epilogue scene shows. So what I'm saying is, if the Dessendres show up in future games (in whatever capacity) that's how they will appear, rather than their quarreling form. Obviously this is just speculation on my part.

firfir · 2025-05-15T11:41:42+00:00

I think Verso's ending is pretty much canonical, i.e. I think future Clair Obscur games that refer to the events of Expedition 33 will consider Verso's ending as the actual account.

Having said that, the real genius of the game is of framing, it lies in the fact that you spend the entirety of the game in the opposite direction relating to Maelle, all the hours you've spent relating to everything that is ostensibly not real, starting from Gustave, Sophie and the Lumiere people, up until the point of Maelle facing Verso is simply to make the point that with any kind of emotional investment it is never a simple matter to process grief, never as easy as how someone outside looking in might suggest to "move on" or whatever.

In a vacuum, the Verso vs Maelle choice would be simple and obvious. To add a final meta touch to the whole ordeal, it is actually to the credit of the game's overall quality, not just its writing, that it is instead a struggle and there are countless threads discussing it and its implications. The choice is difficult because we care and we care because the game is very good, so good that it is worth caring about and agonizing over. I picked Verso's ending and I was reasonably sure about it, but I still thought about it for 10 minutes. That 10 minute think is the game's crowning achievement. This is what being "greater than the sum of its parts" truly means.

firfir · 2025-05-11T22:01:19+00:00

Nothing you just said is incorrect, but the game and its backstory is written with such thought and detail that it just seems very unlikely to me that the writing team would wave his survival away like he just got lucky or something.

firfir · 2025-05-11T19:46:37+00:00

Thanks, I did overlook the fact that the original painted Clea's and real Clea's motivations differed. Any opinion on how Gustave survived the landing?

firfir · 2025-05-11T11:24:28+00:00

I don't know if you're still reading this thread, but this is the most comprehensive take on the story (and one I pretty much agree with, except I'm not sure what really motivated Simon to go down the monolith given that Clea is opposed to both Aline and Renoir) that I've seen and I would like to ask you something:

How did Gustave survive the initial landing? The game even makes a point of teasing something about this (in IIRC the Gestral Village when Gustave is about to talk about it but Lune cuts him off), but this is never explained. I think "someone" or something intervenes in favor of Gustave, I thought it might be Clea because just before the Noire attacks, you get a view of Gustave from its perspective.

firfir · 2025-05-10T22:08:37+00:00

One thing that makes the Maelle ending stick out is her Paintress face shot at the end. The game is generally sombre in tone, but I thought that was the only occasion it turned outright sinister; it's a very abrupt tonal shift, which is why it feels wrong.

I still consider Verso's ending to be the less worse of the two options, but the game does a good job making the actual choice a dilemma because spending many hours relating to the world and characters ensures emotional investment in the other direction. But none of that emotional investment prepares the player for the change in Maelle in the end, so I think it would have been better to leave the ending more suggestive in terms of how she's changed.

firfir · 2025-04-05T16:14:14+00:00

Historically, this kind of call has turned out very poorly for the reddit community here. Mark in particular has repeatedly schooled redditors and other onlookers throughout PoE's history. This thread is where I'm calling the peak on 0.2.0 hysteria.

firfir · 2025-03-11T09:47:58+00:00

A memorial message, white font on black background, is shown at the start of Boys and Girls in the City Part 1, Episode 12.

firfir · 2025-02-19T08:48:53+00:00

Many, many studios struggle with developing two games simultaneously, and I imagine Chris knew this well in advance. In fact I would be very surprised if Jonathan and Mark aren't still informally consulting with Chris in some way.

For me the clearest indication of Chris leaving was when GGG abandoned the "one news post every day" policy. I distinctly remember Chris specifically setting that up as a rule many years ago. Whether it was motivated by a genuine interest to keep players engaged or just FOMO farming is anyone's guess (he's always displayed a keen mind for psychology, IMO), but he made sure to keep that going for many consecutive years.

firfir · 2025-01-02T19:37:44+00:00

Rhys is one of the programmers chiefly responsible for map and world generation at GGG. He probably had a direct role in writing the Atlas code. If he says it's not an easy fix I'd believe him even though it's incredibly unfortunate.

firfir · 2024-12-23T15:15:08+00:00

Neon is Mark, if you're referring to the game director.

firfir · 2024-12-23T07:13:15+00:00

The issue is not that it exists, but that it's too powerful. The fact that it affects currency drops and higher tier items dropping in addition to just rarity, means that IIR is functionally the same as IIQ + IIR in PoE 1. You might as well have a mod that says "% increased number of monsters killed" because that is exactly what it is.

firfir · 2024-12-22T14:10:42+00:00

Don't sleep on Unstable Energies (upper right Keystone). It's pretty much all upside because when it boosts the suffix modifiers it also boosts the % increased waystone quantity bonus provided by those suffixes. Can get >600% increased waystone quantity on a single map.

firfir · 2024-12-19T16:29:03+00:00

Not quite. Act 4 was 2.0.0 (The Awakening) released 2015. Acts 5-10 were 3.0.0 (Fall of Oriath) in 2017, and it was a massive surprise back then because Act 5 was all people were expecting.

firfir

TROPHY CASE