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Octopath Traveler: Preview Thread
- Thread starter Meelow
- Start date
Does time played have any effect on the game?
Curious as to why it is there. Is it fairly common to have in RPGs nowadays?
I just stopped playing and left the music running in the background yesterday.
The trees and flowers blowing in the wind and the water glistening combined with the godlike soundtrack....just great stuff!
Curious as to why it is there. Is it fairly common to have in RPGs nowadays?
I just stopped playing and left the music running in the background yesterday.
The trees and flowers blowing in the wind and the water glistening combined with the godlike soundtrack....just great stuff!
Just purchased it & started the download. Now for the painful task of waiting until Saturday (time zone difference).
Does time played have any effect on the game?
Curious as to why it is there. Is it fairly common to have in RPGs nowadays?
Yeah it is somewhat common to have time in JRPGs. Recent ones that I played and had it Persona 5, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and Ni No Kuni 2
It's a common thing, I don't think it'll make any difference.Does time played have any effect on the game?
Curious as to why it is there. Is it fairly common to have in RPGs nowadays?
People like timers to know how long they've played for, it gives them a sense of pride to know how long they've played for, when it really probably should give them a sense of shame for wasting so much time.
They're mostly there to keep track of how fucked up the pacing is.
I don't think it does. Most JRPGs have timers, it's useful when a friend asks you how long X game is before buying it, because some people (me included) are really bad estimating how many hours they've played a game.
Time spent doing something enjoyable isn't time wasted imo. Obviously there are extremes, though.
my xeno2 probably has like 10 hours of the game being on but me not playing, so I'm safe.
or so I tell myself.
I am actually a little bit in this camp. Those enemy sprites are so reminiscent of FF6 that it might be enough for me. That slow long winding dialogue is my biggest issue though.
And do not forget the step counters. Steps are very important to track..
(Sorry dp)
Why should playing a game you enjoy be considered wasting time. There seems to be a lot of self-loathing on here and among gamers generally – people have really internalized outside criticisms about games not being a worthwhile hobby.
That post about the colour issue has me worried. This:
Is what Sunshade Sands looks like to me, it has this weird green tint to the edges that definitely harms the image. I've tried every single black level and contrast option on my TV and nothing seems to remove it. However, it is visible to around the same level on docked mode so I'm not sure whether it's intentional or not.
Can someone confirm whether this is just me or is this place supposed to look like this?
Is what Sunshade Sands looks like to me, it has this weird green tint to the edges that definitely harms the image. I've tried every single black level and contrast option on my TV and nothing seems to remove it. However, it is visible to around the same level on docked mode so I'm not sure whether it's intentional or not.
Can someone confirm whether this is just me or is this place supposed to look like this?
It's the same for me on TV and when i'm watching youtube videos on computer. I actually have some of the red thing going on a previous poster mentioned for H'annit's area, too. I chalked them up to being intentional, but it does feel a bit weird like it should be black instead.
Undocked that's the only place I've seen so far where the shadows get noticeably pronounced, though not to the level shown in that picture.
Dude comes to a forum full of hardcore gamers, and says playing games is a waste of time. Draw your own conclusions.
The picture's not a great representation as the lamp in the corner there seems to be muddying things a little. It definitely looks a little less pronounced, especially with the "Black Level Corrector" option I have on my TV put on. Maybe I should start H'annit's story (and skip all the cutscenes) just to see whether I need to worry or not, as Youtube videos like this one seem to have the same look as well.
Sorry for the double quote but I just went to H'aanits area and, whilst the red isn't pronounced, it's definitely there. The same can be said of handheld mode as well. I've also looked at a Youtube video of the demo on both my computer and my phone and both have that red tint to some extent.
I'm going to chalk it up to being intentional, it wouldn't make sense for my Switch, TV, laptop screen and phone screen to all have the same issue. Though it's definitely not as bad as the image posted before.
Yeah, that's what I figured! Nice to confirm w/ others that it appears intentional though and not something going wrong with TVs or such. I don't think it looks so bad as to take away from the game or anything, but when I first noticed it I totally thought there was something wrong with my tv or the settings, too, lol.
You know, it's slightly annoying that I can't bench my starter (H'aanit), because I would like to have a new group of four afterwards with Cyrus being the the first one.
To weigh in on the topic of reviews, I believe reviewers should play as much of a game as they can until they can build a well informed opinion. For some games, this means playing the full thing but for others that's not so realistic.
We've had Octopath for a little more than a week and if our reviewer were to rush to completion I think that would produce a negative effect on the pacing of his adventure. He'll try to finish it for sure but there comes a point in games the scale of this where you know whether you would recommend it to others or not.
By all means reviewers should try to complete games but dismissing opinions from those who have only spent, say, 40 hours with Octopath is frankly ridiculous.
We've had Octopath for a little more than a week and if our reviewer were to rush to completion I think that would produce a negative effect on the pacing of his adventure. He'll try to finish it for sure but there comes a point in games the scale of this where you know whether you would recommend it to others or not.
By all means reviewers should try to complete games but dismissing opinions from those who have only spent, say, 40 hours with Octopath is frankly ridiculous.
That's the first thing I did lol. It does help, but it's still there, though not as nearly to a noticeable
Yeah, it's definitely a strange choice on the part of the developers. It's quite easy to get used to tbh, especially with the corner shadows off. Just looked and it's in an official trailer so I think it's definitely intentional.
Some people here has really put unreal expectation on this game and hence becomes very defensive towards any criticism or very aggressive if certain aspects of the game don't meet their expectations.
If everyone can just stay calm and not overreact over every single "impression" from reviewer, we wouldn't have even reached page 30 for this thread.
If everyone can just stay calm and not overreact over every single "impression" from reviewer, we wouldn't have even reached page 30 for this thread.
I think it really depends on what the criticism is. If a reviewer criticises the game for not having something when it's there in the game itself then, yeah, that deserves some flack. However, yeah, if they criticise what they've played by itself and acknowledge that then that's fine.
We need a dumb saturday morning cartoon intro where good guy Octopath squad battles the evil Traveler squad.
This would be fine, if the reviewer explicitly states that he has not finished the game yet in his piece. Another way would be not publishing a review before finishing the game, but that would mean less clicks, I guess. Either way, you don't see people publish book reviews before actually finishing the books, do you? Reading a books takes as much time as playing a game, if not more. I guess publishers should provide review copies sooner. In any case, the reviewer should either finish the game, or say that he hasn't. Those shiny clicks, though...
As someone that's done both professionally, I promise you it often takes far longer to review an RPG than it does a book... even a sci-fi or fantasy epic.
But you're right - back in the games magazine days, lead times used to be far longer (sometimes 1+ months) but now because of leaks et al, publishers are more skittish about it. Longer review perioids would be great - Pokemon games had them until a few years ago - but then like an enitre build of the game + all info leaked so it kinda proved the publishers' point a bit
I mean the bolded just isn't true. Octopath as a game is roughly on par with reading every Harry Potter book. A longer fantasy book is on par with a short single player title. Games are long.
Plus again, not finishing the game is usually more reflective of the average consumer experience than actually finishing it, as weird as that is. They should disclose it, sure, but it's really not a big a deal as people make it out to be.
Yeah, it is impossible to require reviewers finishing a game before publishing a review, especially when huge, long games like Xenoblade 2 exists. One does not need to completely know the full picture before giving opinion.
Do you like, not read books? Serious question because that's a really wild claim. Games these days are increasingly longer on average, while RPGs have always been really long. Playing something like an Uncharted game to completion could take 10 hours. Something like Mario + Rabbids is closer to 30 hours. A decent sized RPG can take 50 hours. Bigger adventures are 80-100 hours. There's a lot about games which are non-interactive, especially story driven games, and you simply cannot play them "faster" even if you are very familiar with games. You can read a lot faster if you're a fast reader. Books tend to be a few hundred pages, the big ones go up to 1000ish, but there's a limit to how long a book can be because of binding. At about 100 pages per hour, reading the longest book would take about the time shorter games take to finish. Even a slower reader taking twice that speed would be able to finish a 1000 page book (pretty rare) in less time than it takes to finish a 30 hour game.
And that's only because you have to stop reading every few pages to slam your head against the wall a few times before subjecting yourself to more suffering. :)
Since you said serious question, here's my Goodreads page:
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/60680796-pouyan
Also, your numbers are off, or that's simply not my experiencece. Depending on the typeface, I do around 1 page every three minutes.
I've been thinking about whether or not I like the idea of having 8 completely separate stories instead of one unifying narrative. I've concluded for myself that I see a lot of potential in telling 8 separate stories in a joint world, and this is why: For me, an important part of a game's story is how the world is made real and how civilisation is contextualised in the world. To put it another way, a game needs to use the world it takes place in to contextualise the peoples and countries, not just use them as an accidental fact of life that the story does not (significantly) use. As a consequence, for me the most important part of narrative is to contextualise the world and tell the story of the world, not the story of the main character. It's why I love the Elder Scrolls games so much: if you play it as it was intended, you will be wandering around the world, finding out parts of the lore and how these play into the current state of the world. It's also why I loved YS VIII a lot, but I won't go into details with that one because of spoilers.
So, with the above in mind, here's why I see a lot of potential in telling 8 specialised stories that don't unify into one single narrative: the 8 stories allow for the writers to flesh out a number of different narratives that each can contribute to my learning about the world an its intricacies by highlighting different aspects of the world. With one unifying narrative, it's more difficult to intertwine the history of the world and its geography and cultures into a coherent story. As a result, the single narrative tends to focus more on the individuals than on the world in which they exist, which to me takes away from learning about this fantastical world they've built but aren't dedicating enough resources to.
Of course, a unique game can combine a grand, unifying narrative with more than enough exposition about the world and its features, but in the end, most games fail to combine the two to an equal degree and also with a high quality. As such, there's usually a trade-off between having a great character narrative and having a great world-building narrative. In my eyes, then, the 8 separate stories' structure allows for the writers to explain and criticise the world itself, rather than focus on a narrative that develops characters more than the world.
In the end, it's a personal preference, so I completely understand when other people don't feel the same way. It remains to be seen whether the game manages to achieve what I've laid out above, but this is why I feel like it has a lot of potential. Of course, we can't completely separate the character focused narrative, and one of the problems could be that having 8 travelers with you for nothing but the battles feels a bit weird. I'm definitely interested in seeing how these stories develop.
So, with the above in mind, here's why I see a lot of potential in telling 8 specialised stories that don't unify into one single narrative: the 8 stories allow for the writers to flesh out a number of different narratives that each can contribute to my learning about the world an its intricacies by highlighting different aspects of the world. With one unifying narrative, it's more difficult to intertwine the history of the world and its geography and cultures into a coherent story. As a result, the single narrative tends to focus more on the individuals than on the world in which they exist, which to me takes away from learning about this fantastical world they've built but aren't dedicating enough resources to.
Of course, a unique game can combine a grand, unifying narrative with more than enough exposition about the world and its features, but in the end, most games fail to combine the two to an equal degree and also with a high quality. As such, there's usually a trade-off between having a great character narrative and having a great world-building narrative. In my eyes, then, the 8 separate stories' structure allows for the writers to explain and criticise the world itself, rather than focus on a narrative that develops characters more than the world.
In the end, it's a personal preference, so I completely understand when other people don't feel the same way. It remains to be seen whether the game manages to achieve what I've laid out above, but this is why I feel like it has a lot of potential. Of course, we can't completely separate the character focused narrative, and one of the problems could be that having 8 travelers with you for nothing but the battles feels a bit weird. I'm definitely interested in seeing how these stories develop.
This is weird to me, I see so much complaining about arguing and this thread being bad. To me the bad threads are the ones where everyone agrees, they get boring super fast. There are better sites out there if people want one homogeneous opinion to surface
Sometimes you just want to talk about a game you like/love with people who feel the same.