Bay 12 Games Forum

Whatever gets you the east the easiest, really. By the time a wildfire archmage gets there, they're generally unstoppable (although anti-magic types do tend to be the one thing that can stop them, and I don't remember if the oozemancer himself has that, probably does), but of course archmages can be annoying to get going in the first place.

Could try a mindslayer since they're also pretty beefy, or at least they used to be, and not susceptible to AM to boot. I haven't played in a couple patches so I don't know for sure how much this is useful advice.

Seems cheap to put open-ended games like World of Tanks or RollerCoaster Tycoon there, since they aren't really games you can win. Why not every MOBA ever or MMOs (actually, it is possible to "win" MMOs, in the same sense you can win jRPGs) or arena deathmatch (Quake or Counterstrike), etc.

Are you sure the butcher problem isn't simply that you accidentally toggled auto-butcher off in the Orders Kitchen menu?

Quote from: nenjin on March 02, 2015, 05:53:45 pm

...a hefty casual element...

What are 'casual elements'?  Only one I can think of is microtransactions.

Casual elements are, in theory, anything that devs make easier when you personally had no trouble with the current content. If you did BWL and AQ40 in vanilla, BC raids were casual. If you did Black Temple and Sunwell in BC, WotLK raids were casual, etc. Also how they got around to making most of the specs viable BC and especially WoTLK (more or less; at least a hell of a lot moreso than they were in vanilla): if you were a druid anything-else in BC, the druids who could raid only as resto in vanilla (and even resto sucked to play then) would call you casual.

Also things like capping income (valour/points etc) daily or weekly. I'm not sure if this is actually ironic or not because they'd be an absurd grind otherwise and only cause people to burn out quicker (and stress the people who can't keep up by running heroics 5 times a day every day). But I suppose the hardcore players would all have raid gear anyway so they wouldn't necessarily rely on the point/badge items. Of course, if raids themselves didn't have lockouts to begin with, then 'hardcore' players would complain that they could only run them once a week once Blizzard decided it's better gameplay wise to limit how often they can be cleared.

The thing that good JRPGs do better then Western RPGs almost EVER do is tell a personal story.

That's because (as you kind of pointed out) they go about things in a completely different way and have completely different goals, despite our nomenclature somehow both putting them under the "RPG" genre.

The thing is, "role-playing game" accurately describes both genres. But it's the difference between playing a pre-formatted role (JRPG) like an actor, versus acting out a role you designed yourself (WRPG) as one does in D&D. A JRPG will always play out the same way (incidentally, this is also the more 'traditional' story telling method used by practically all media, including modern non-WRPG games). A WRPG has more variations, but the nature of programming necessitates that it be shallow.

Maybe the [J | W]RPG distinction is enough to keep them separate, but probably one or the other should have a more distinct title to its genre.

Does remastered come with (or have the option to include) the physical manuals too? They had a lot of cool stuff in them, would be a shame if that aspect was also forgotten in the re-release. (A PDF isn't the same.)

Yeah, I really agree that it quickly feels like once you've seen one planet of a given type (or two, or five, or ten, or...) you've seen them all. I feel like the game might benefit from more information about what's on a planet EG "civilization detected" or "Avian Temple Detected",

Or describing what biomes exist that aren't surface biomes (such as sewage or eyeball biomes underground). Could be an upgrade somehow but would save a little time if you're looking for something specific.

Maybe the Anno series, but that is more about extracting, refining and production (as well as very, very minimal management of populations) than it is about the opportunity to design a robust production chain in detail. Anno is especially hands-off in terms of transportation, since one a product reaches a warehouse, it is instantly available to any other warehouse on that island (though you'll need to ship it manually, or semi-manually, to other islands if its needed elsewhere).