Unsung Story Raises Ruckus With PvP That Kickstarter Backers Don't Want

[Smooth Operator]

Oh damn here it goes again, running out of cash, delays, odd cheap version of the actual game being made...
I would want my money back quickly.

"But they said it's only an addition"... buddy you must be from fantasy land, out in the real world you don't get to add shit when the money runs out, what devs do is finalize some content so they can't get sued for delivering nothing.
But yes in the land of make believe this news means the game will get at least twice as good as promised.

 

[Naqel]

I would prefer to see them spend the time and effort they put into mulitplayer towards more polish.

Which if you read the kickstarter update is exactly what the PvP first approach is meant to do.

They already have a chunk of the game written, and the writers aren't exactly going to benefit much from seeing prototypes of their work(which they might have to later re-write).
Testing the gameplay in the most competitive fashion possible: human on human where everyone should have a fair shot at victory, is the absolute best when it comes to polishing core gameplay.

 

[Lotet]

I have Tactics Ogre for the PS1, after being a huge fan of Ogre Battle on the SNES. I forget exactly what the deal was but technically Tactics Ogre came out first and FF Tactics borrowed heavily from it. It's been forever since I played them but the differences I recall is that TO had a more rigid & less fun class system than FFT, but you went to battle with 12 units instead of six & battle was less forgiving, the story was more brutal and had distinct branching paths.

How about Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for the GBA? I thought that was pretty good.

"Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together" for the PSP.

Aren't Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced and Tactics Ogre Let Us Cling Together both remakes?

I've enjoyed both... for a while. Tactics Ogre I stopped early, about Lv4, when fighting a Necromancer and his undead, the horrible amount of misses against the Necromancer as the undead came back to life, I was real annoyed and finally quit when the zombie completely blocked my path with their inanimate corpses. Plus reading about the weird level scaling put me off.

FFTA I stopped when a quest with a really annoying law, a single fighter immune to the law who had some other annoying ability that made it hard to fight when combined with the law. Too much frustration.

I might give them both another try but this time with a wiki to figure out how to unlock classes, items, abilities and stuff like that. It's real frustrating not knowing such basic knowledge. Or maybe the knowledge was right in the game and I just didn't know where to find it.

WTF? I haven't touched my PSP in ages and now it's battery has popped out and is bloated to being like 30% thicker, it won't fit back in. The battery is all squishy... well, guess I'm not playing Tactics Ogre...

 

[Morti]

Oh boo hoo. They're not taking away from the game - just adding new features. Sounds like the backers are a bunch of crybabys.

But at the same time is " was being delayed to late 2016 because of a "financial crunch" resulting in layoffs". It's not an irrational stance for backers to go "well maybe you would have better finances if you stopped wasting our money on developing features we never wanted".

It kind of is if that stance comes from a belief that they have any rights whatsoever to dictate development. What they did or didn't ever want has no bearing on what gets made.

But they do to a certain extent, they are investors, at the very least they should have the right to say "this is no longer the same project that I originally backed, I want my money back."

 

[RedmistSM]

FFTA isn't a remake.

I'm a backer, but this kind of stuff isn't really that frustrating. Development is going to take years at the best of times, and with kickstarter, it's always you gambling on what you want to see made. If anything, I'm just annoyed at their lack of updates. On the other hand, I think something like Might No. 9's number of updates were too much and opted out. I guess what I really want is for the developers to clearly tell me that they are working on it once in a while.

 

[Lotet]

Continuing something I mentioned earlier about competitive PvP, I hope they don't make it too annoying to min/max or even just make a not terrible build. It's annoying that these games have imbalanced growths between classes. Sure, maybe a Paladin should be stronger than a Soldier but that causes a big power gap between a Soldier that changes to a Paladin at Lv30 or Lv8 then both level to 99. I'd like it if they let you unlevel bad levels or just do what Bravely Default does and give you set stats for each class on each level, no stat transferal. Though Bravely Default also has different growth between individual characters so their stats aren't exactly the same when they're all of the same class, though any character can still do any job effectively.

 

[sageoftruth]

Just what the hell is "Polish[/i] anyway, in a game?

Depends on the game, but there are some universal forms of polish, like making sure the game has no bugs, inserting easter eggs or other unique responses for when a player does something unexpected, making sure everything animates smoothly without any glitches (if the game has animation), creating a full and functional options menu, adding a variety of soundtracks and placing them appropriately...

There are others, but the thing to remember is that a game is created from scratch using lines of code and the smallest touches that can seem trivial can take a long time to program. Polish is what makes you see a game as a game, rather than the sum of a bunch of command lines.

 

[SlumlordThanatos]

Which if you read the kickstarter update is exactly what the PvP first approach is meant to do.

They already have a chunk of the game written, and the writers aren't exactly going to benefit much from seeing prototypes of their work(which they might have to later re-write).
Testing the gameplay in the most competitive fashion possible: human on human where everyone should have a fair shot at victory, is the absolute best when it comes to polishing core gameplay.

I suppose there's some merit in that. I still fondly remember breaking Final Fantasy Tactics Advance with my Concentration Assassin dealing instant death to almost everything, or my Doublecast Summoner with Turbo MP laying waste to huge chunks of the battlefield.

The trick is to make a character feel broken when they really aren't. Maybe this will help the creators get it right.

 

[Wiggum Esquilax]

I've enjoyed both... for a while. Tactics Ogre I stopped early, about Lv4, when fighting a Necromancer and his undead, the horrible amount of misses against the Necromancer as the undead came back to life, I was real annoyed and finally quit when the zombie completely blocked my path with their inanimate corpses. Plus reading about the weird level scaling put me off.

I might give them both another try but this time with a wiki to figure out how to unlock classes, items, abilities and stuff like that. It's real frustrating not knowing such basic knowledge. Or maybe the knowledge was right in the game and I just didn't know where to find it.

WTF? I haven't touched my PSP in ages and now it's battery has popped out and is bloated to being like 30% thicker, it won't fit back in. The battery is all squishy... well, guess I'm not playing Tactics Ogre...

That battle against Nybeth is entirely optional, you could have gone back to the starting area and continued from there, though you'd have missed out from doing so. More usefully, fighting random battles levels you up, but doesn't level up scripted battle enemies. This game's balanced around fighting random encounters while travelling. If your party was all still level 4, then you'd probably only fought 1 random battle at that point, assuming you fought any at all.

His minions will keep coming back, and if you exorcise them he'll summon new ones. Best bet is to lead the charge with a level 5 Knight that's learned healing magic, while your flier flanks on the right.

There's an in-game guide detailing the various game mechanics. On the map screen, go Warren Report > Play Guide.

You can buy new (used) PSP batteries. Just make sure you get the right type, PSP batteries in a PSP slim don't allow you to close the battery compartment door. Or if you got the Vita to play it on, Tactics Ogre is available on the Playstation online marketplace for 20$. Just make sure you get Let Us Cling Together, not the PS1 version.

 

[deleted_by_strongbad]

Oh boo hoo. They're not taking away from the game - just adding new features. Sounds like the backers are a bunch of crybabys.

I'm not a backer, FFT was pretty dec, but I don't care if we get another clone of it, but I know software development. If they are making cutbacks, development will slow down. If they add in new major features development of what was promised will grind to a halt. Lastly, the backers thought single player was the primary focus, but if multiplayer is going to be used to polish the single player then single player won't be 'finished' until after release, so it clearly is no longer the focus. Over time single player may be stronger as a result, but after a delayed release, single still needs to wait for enough multilayer based feedback/data to inform a new design, then the code refactored to the new design, that product to be qa'd, then finally released, oh but wait that all now has to contend with fixing the usual bugs found after release, AND all the bugs discovered for the other half of the game that the investors didn't care about to begin with.

Long story short, single player will be half finished at release, a few token improvements will be made, but no way will it ever fulfill it's promise to the investors. Using traditional funding, this company would be sued into the dirt.

 

[Naldan]

Oh boo hoo. They're not taking away from the game - just adding new features. Sounds like the backers are a bunch of crybabys.

I'm not a backer, FFT was pretty dec, but I don't care if we get another clone of it, but I know software development. If they are making cutbacks, development will slow down. If they add in new major features development of what was promised will grind to a halt. Lastly, the backers thought single player was the primary focus, but if multiplayer is going to be used to polish the single player then single player won't be 'finished' until after release, so it clearly is no longer the focus. Over time single player may be stronger as a result, but after a delayed release, single still needs to wait for enough multilayer based feedback/data to inform a new design, then the code refactored to the new design, that product to be qa'd, then finally released, oh but wait that all now has to contend with fixing the usual bugs found after release, AND all the bugs discovered for the other half of the game that the investors didn't care about to begin with.

Long story short, single player will be half finished at release, a few token improvements will be made, but no way will it ever fulfill it's promise to the investors. Using traditional funding, this company would be sued into the dirt.

Except of course if they release it as an Early Access title with mostly the multiplayer, wait for one and a half years and then release it with an end-chapter. Or they playtest it properly, super expensively, like back in the days iirc.

 

[Quellist]

As a backer my instinct is to shrug, sigh and figure that if they ran out of money and require new investors to go forward i guess they have to follow the desires of the new investors. Yes, its exactly what kickstarter was supposed to avoid but if its the choice of not getting the game or getting the game with nothing (apparently) taken away and some stuff i'm pretty meh about added it becomes a pretty easy choice.

In other words "This too shall pass"

 

[SecondPrize]

Oh boo hoo. They're not taking away from the game - just adding new features. Sounds like the backers are a bunch of crybabys.

But at the same time is " was being delayed to late 2016 because of a "financial crunch" resulting in layoffs". It's not an irrational stance for backers to go "well maybe you would have better finances if you stopped wasting our money on developing features we never wanted".

It kind of is if that stance comes from a belief that they have any rights whatsoever to dictate development. What they did or didn't ever want has no bearing on what gets made.

But they do to a certain extent, they are investors, at the very least they should have the right to say "this is no longer the same project that I originally backed, I want my money back."

You're not an investor with kickstarter. You're pre-preordering and every bit of legal language present when setting up an account or funding a project makes very clear that the people putting on the projects have no obligations to you beyond meeting the product and stretch goals to the level you funded.