I think the whole mandatory invasion thing is legit. Why? Because now the gear has stat caps so there are no more invincible twinks who you are completely unable to fight against.

Of course, I could be wrong, but assuming everyone has more equal defense in the game, invasions should be more forgiving. Usually in Dark Souls, low level invasion means it's literally impossible to kill the invader.

Of course, there could be a torrent of hackers. But assuming it's Steamworks-based, hopefully hacking will be punished unlike GFWL.

Few sentences after that:
Quantic dream make story driven game. And they need a big studio (100-200 people) with in house motion capture studio to make something good. (They make mostly QTE). And they are the only one capable, in my opinion, to do something great for a story driven game (I know many people working their and they all are very talented). But they know one think: they compete with Blockbuster movies. So they need to give at least has much to the player than any movie.
That's why this kind of game is out of the reach of most indie dev. (and that's why most indie studio don't do it).

IMO, there are ways to make story driven games without trying to compete with movies.

If you are really trying to imitate Quantic Dream, it's better to get out there with a camcorder and become a filmmaker instead. It's a lot cheaper and less risky. Quantic Dream is doing something highly expensive, experimental and fraught with problems. The  more you put in the more people expect of you hence their bad reviews for acting.

If you want to make a story-driven GAME, however, you can make a visual novel or adventure game. Often the smaller in scope it is the better. For example, Digital: A Love Story was made with extremely basic graphics and got a lot of internet acclaim.

However, it is also true that in games with more action, the story must be concise. Which is why I went over to the story side of things while not trying to design an incredible game at the same time.

I don't need to make 80k a year from a "safe" job. I just need to be able to live and game. Which is why I don't think I need College. I would like to just work at my own pace, while still disciplined and getting things done on time, which I am good at. I am not good at listening to instructions from other people though.

You might not right now, but the problem is you are only thinking of what you need now. Later on down the line when you do start caring about having a steady income, whether due to expenses like insurance, car, children, family, etc., you will have no backup plan if your game dev fails to bring in the money. Which you have no idea of since you haven't really started making money from it yet.

Most business people who dropped out of college already were bringing in the money through whatever business venture they set up.

Finally, once you drop out of college it will be much, much harder to go back once you have job responsibilities and the like (even if it's freelance).

P.S. Socializing in college is a really good idea. Think of it as your secondary preparation for the real world. You learned the book smarts in H.S., now you have to learn the social smarts. It's easy as walking up and talking to people.

I got Shadow Wars during the sale after hearing how much it's like XCOM. It just feels dated compared to XCOM though. I was a little disappointed after playing and beating XCOM for the PC, but I'll probably play it eventually.

Beating SMT IV on neutral, I have to say it was a really fun game. Recommended for any RPG fan on 3DS. IMO the thing that was lacking is a waypoint system to keep track of where quests are located. That and a built in way to avoid weak demons - considering you have 100% flee chance Estoma Sword is way too limited.

The thing is, the boss weapons aren't stronger than the Black Knight weapons, just different. They are all, however, relatively underpowered despite their cool special R2. If you are going to max strength, the +15 Demon's Greataxe is without a doubt the strongest weapon in the game, with 150 more attack than Black Knight Sword. And unlike Boss/BK weapons, it's buffable with your choice of magic or resin.

The miracle gameplay greatly disappointed me.

Miracles have a heavy PVP element to them. For example, you can cast heal while you are summoned or are invading, and spells like Emit Force and WotG work best against PVP enemies. However, there is Darkmoon Blade if you want a powerful offensive miracle. (or sunlight blade if you don't want to be a darkmoon).

By the way, there is any weapon better than Black Knight Sword or Snakemen Sword?

I used the first for most of the game, until I could do a +15 with the second one (and it do like 20 damage more than the first one).

The Black Knight Sword is seemly so overpowered... I got it on the first Black Knight I killed, and then  I could just blaze through the game (excepting weight issues, of course, and the grinding needed to wield it), the thing do frigging crazy amounts of damage.

The problem with it, is that I ended never using any other weapons that might be cool, like spears, whips, whatnot... I DO tried Lightning Spear, but the damage was so shitty near the black sword... You know, it is so fun to hack a boss and see that each hit takes a huge chunk of HP bar (I think some bosses I could take 1/5 of its HP with one hit...)

Also I don't used any enchantment yet, the sword alone can kill anything I wanted to kill.

Black Knight Sword is a good weapon for the entire first half of the game. It even does bonus damage to Capra and Taurus. Heck, you can beat the game with any black knight weapon. However once you get the ability to +15 there are stronger weapons. Demon's Greataxe, Large Club, Manserpent Greatsword, all of them can be buffed unlike the BK sword. Depending on your stats there are quite a few +15 weps that are better.

The reason I suggested enchanted halberds is because enchanting works similar to elemental weapons - the higher the base damage the better it does. Halberds have some of the lowest stat requirements to damage for weapon enchanting. In general, the better scaling it has, the worse it will be enchanted/elemental.

Two good builds you can do for caster are DEX+INT or pure INT.

For the first build you will want to end up with something like 40 dex and 32 int. 32 being enough to wield the Tin Crystal Catalyst and be able to buff your dex weapon to a high degree. It also lets you make use of all dark magic, which should be more than enough without Soul Spear. Getting INT higher is optional.

For the pure int build, you should have 50 INT to wield all sorceries (just 'cuz). This is somewhat harder in the first half of the game. However, you can still make a magic weapon for close range combat. Good weapons for it are Enchanted halberds (lucerne, gargoyle halberd, etc.) and Moonlight Greatsword. You can also use Logan's Catalyst with the build.

The PC like architecture could make PC ports more common in next gen. As it would not require as many modifications, testing, etc. to make sure it works correctly.

I do tend to like 2d better even as a player, though. It's what I grew up with and it seems like people are better able to make weird, distinctive styles in 2d than they are in 3d. A lot of 3d stuff looks too samey to me.

That could tie into the whole cost argument as well. Since it's cheaper to make 2D games, devs have more freedom and/or time to try unconventional art styles rather than go with the "safe bet", a.k.a. realistic 3D. It's also easier to implement them into the game.

IMO, all the big companies inflate their piracy rates based on faulty data to justify not releasing on PC. IMO, as long as downloading a non pirated game is more convenient people will buy it legitimately. After all, it's hard to patch and keep track of a pirated game. Ubisoft is a terrible offender with added DRM to their products - I bet if they removed Uplay, a lot more people would buy their games legit.

I also think a lot of people who pirate wouldn't have got it if they couldn't pirate it.

Single player online is the bane of existence. That's a good way to make people want to pirate it just to cut that crap out with hacking the game files.

Well, Skulls of the Shogun was on sale recently, that seems pretty fun and strategical as well as indie and western. Even though Japan are kings of the whole grid based SRPG genre (Disgaea, Front Mission, Final Fantasy Tactics etc.)

Unfortunately, porting to PC is rarely profitable, so companies tend to cut corners and push deadlines. If it's good, it likely means it took too much time and resources to recoup the costs.

But that's not necessarily the case. It could be unprofitable because they didn't budget for marketing on the PC. PC is a huge market after all.

Hm.

The combat system is super refined and fast paced; the game wastes very little of your time, something I really appreciate. However, the actual art assets in battle are extremely disappointing. The game has basically no animation; instead of 3d models, the only illustration of the demons you fight and recruit are cutout portraits that vary wildly in quality.

Actually this is the first "2D" SMT game where the characters ARE fully animated. They have idle animations at least.

As far as the art goes, yes that's a valid criticism, some of it is probably a bit old. One thing I wish SMT would do is switch up their art style more. But there are a ton of demons.

Which sort of makes sense if you consider how many demons there actually are, but that just brings me to the game's big problem: the demons have very little, if anything, that set them apart from each other. Aside from alignments and weaknesses (and one or two exceptions), demons have no unique abilities, due to the fusion process that you mentioned earlier.

They might not have "unique" moves but they have different stats, appearance, strength/weaknesses, manner of speaking and sometimes moves you haven't gotten yet. I'd say that's a pretty large amount considering most Pokemon don't have unique moves either.

And on top of that, the number of abilities actually available is comparatively tiny, and most of them do the SAME THING: damage. The only difference between Agi and Zio is the animation that plays on screen. I wish JRPG developers would stop it with the rock-paper-scissors "hit them with every element till something crits" bullshit; it's seriously boring gameplay design.

There are a ton of status inflicting abilities, even mixed in with regular attacks. There is the -kaja series of spells that also modify stats. OK, so damage dealing spells might be better, but how is that different from 99% of other RPGs?

In addition, the whole "I don't know what crits on what" argument is kind of flawed. Often it's obvious what crits based on their appearance and the moves they use. Do they like spamming dark magic? Use Hamaon!

IMO Persona was worse with that aspect. As the enemies were often super abstract and it wasn't clear what element they were.

I would have preferred having far fewer demons, and instead have them be fully fleshed out and different in MEANINGFUL ways. But that would ruin the whole 'demon recruiting' aspect and then it'd just be a different game entirely.

If there were less demons there wouldn't really be any point to having them then. As it would also be more like a typical RPG with characters.

SMT IV exceeded my expectations- it is really fun. Having a non random encounter system like the Persona games makes it better than the PS2 incarnations and the visual effects for battle are the best "2D" ones I've seen, a lot better than Devil Survivor. Plus, they got rid of the random demon fusions and now allow you to select the skills to pass on. I went in thinking the 2D battles would be a bit meh and was pleasantly surprised.

Mainly because some companies don't budget enough for a port, maybe because they assume it will sell badly. For Dark Souls at least, it went in a good direction - rushed PC port to gauge interest, followed by the sequel being developed natively for PC.

1) Old school appeal - easy to pick up and play

2) Easy to program - therefore popular amongst indies

3) Requires less art assets and can accommodate lots of different artstyles

4) Lots of different gameplay types possible

So basically platformers are cheap and flexible as well as appeal to a large audience.

That's the thing that drove me away from Demon's Souls in the end. It isn't that the game was hard (I've played plenty of difficult games like Megaman Zero, God of War or Bayonetta) but that the game didn't seem to want me to get better. The mechanics were almost all designed to punish at every turn, rather that reward the player for gradually accepting greater challenges.

Au contraire, I don't feel like Demons or Dark Souls is punishing. Punishing is when you lose all your progress because you goofed on an enemy or boss, and are set back to square one. The game basically gives you a gut punch because you messed up. In the Souls games, you are never set back to square one because each death gives you knowledge and experience that you can use later. It might seem frustrating but it's usually beneficial. And also, you can always get most of your stuff back if you use that knowledge to your advantage.

Playing DKS on a hypothetical easy mode would therefore ruin the game's core concept, by letting the player hack and slash enemies to death. As, the enemies are easy even in the regular game if you know what strategies to use. And yes, the game is beatable only using a shield as long as you take advantage of the lightning upgrade, which boosts Spike Shield's damage to that of a mediocre normal weapon.

I heard the real game is actually a lot different (read: better) than the demo.

Still don't plan to get it until a lot later though, as it has random battles, however optional they may be, and I already got the RPGs from the Atlus sale. Well, Etrian Odyssey does technically have 'random' battles, but they are semi-random and the game tells you when they're going to happen.

[steamworld dig]

re: steamworld dig: im interested in the game but idk which version to buy. does the 3ds version have anything over pc version? i'm asking this because the 3ds version got rave reviews and the pc port was kinda ignored. (i play games on a laptop and i never take my 3ds with me on the go, so portability is a moot point.)

The PC version seems to be better graphics wise, but I got the 3DS version 'cuz it seems like a very "portable"-style game. Personally, I like getting platformers and the like on portable. If you have a controller and don't like having to play on a small screen then the PC version may be for you.