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Indivisible: Lab Zero's Action-RPG! (General Discussion)

The Dave said:
As much as Extra Credits likes to fly the "games can make people cry! Notice me, formal-academia senpai!" flag, it's important to remember to laugh and have fun.

Side note, Extra Credits like 90% of the time talks about games under the light of fun. I don't get why you're saying that their base approach is Games as something to make you cry or even attempts to something for greater academia. If anything, they'll talk about games as Art, but mostly it's just boiled down basics of Game Design philosophies to make sense to common gamers. But even as inaccurate as that is already, that's still assuming Art (or the Design theory they try to talk about) =/= fun, which is completely wrong, or at the very least really is not Academia like you said.

If you want "Game Theory trying on the level of Academia", try to make sense of this.
 
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The Dave said:
As much as Extra Credits likes to fly the "games can make people cry! Notice me, formal-academia senpai!" flag, it's important to remember to laugh and have fun.

Also I might say that even if you aren't aiming for gaming to be taken seriously as an academic art form, you can still expect a level of quality from it.

Whether you think the quality is lessened by the presence of memes or references or what have you is entirely subjective of course, but I don't think it's fair to say people who don't want them in their games are just being elitist art snobs or nothing.
 
I'd rather us concentrate on making a game first. :]

DrinkBox already admitted that they were extremely heavy-handed with the references and regretted doing so. The game is light-hearted in tone, but I think the difference was that much of it was very overt and just felt like the environments were already designed for them, rather have them be clever or hidden nods. It's kind of funny at first, but just felt really forced and attention-grabbing so often. Hopefully we won't be hitting people over their heads with things like this. :]
 
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@ preemptive attcks. I like that battles can be entered and won quickly without breaking platforming speed but one thing I'm gonna miss, that's in other rpgs, is the dialogue and fanfare between characters after each battle.
 
You know I wonder how Ajna will handle language. Is it like other fantasy where everybody speaks english? Or everybody has their tongue until Ajna gets a new incarnation and then understands how speak, read and write in other languages.
 
superj3 said:
You know I wonder how Ajna will handle language. Is it like other fantasy where everybody speaks english? Or everybody has their tongue until Ajna gets a new incarnation and then understands how speak, read and write in other languages.
That makes me wonder about Lanshi if Ajna can speak dog.
 
Tank said:
@ preemptive attcks. I like that battles can be entered and won quickly without breaking platforming speed but one thing I'm gonna miss, that's in other rpgs
But is it in other Metroidvanias?

Tank said:
is the dialogue and fanfare between characters after each battle.
Yeah, I'm not. :^) That stuff adds up to unavoidable hours over the course of a game.
 
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[QUOTE="Mike_Z, post:
Yeah, I'm not. :^) That stuff adds up to unavoidable hours over the course of a game.[/QUOTE]
You can make it like persona 5 did. You have your loot screen, and on the background you have action between characters. Well it works if you have loot screen)
 
You could just have a voice clip play while the game keeps going. No need to pause for a results screen.
 
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If the Full VO stretch doesn't get funded, we might not even get any extra voice clips like you're talking about. :S

Actually, to be honest, I actually have never been too much of a fan of after battle dialogue/interactions in my rpgs*. And I say that as someone who's been a big fan of the Tales Of series for years which does this extensively. Most of the time the little quips are little jokes that are kind of cute but don't really have value or barely any relation to building up the characters; not that they have to be, but they just feel like wasted space. I don't need Asbel Lhant to exclaim "We Won't Fail!" after several battles to know what he's like, nor does Sophie talking about Crablettes really do anything or add anything. Making scenes like this for "a quick laugh" gets old when you see the same thing for 40 hours + on the same non-joke of "this Character likes Crablettes I guess", even if it is skippable.

Stuff like Portrait Skits and the like, totally fine, but I could stand just have battles end and that's that, no fanfare needed.

*Even though how much Indivisible is RPG vs Metroidvania is still unknown to us
 
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Just have Naga Rider do all of the victory quips, even when he's not in the party.
 
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To be fair, I think Mike's made it pretty clear that it's mainly Metroidvania with some RPG elements and themes.
 
Honestly, for a RPGVania game (can we call it this from now on) I would prefer no real post-battle anything. No menus, pauses, anything. Much like the Prototype, you beat the enemy and continue. The "notifications" that was shown off in the latest gameplay video would be good for reminding you to visit the menu/inner realm after a battle if you, say, level up or something, but for the most part I want it to be steamlined as heck.

Smooth like butter.
 
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The dialogues are fun for me if there are enough of them and they play at an acceptable rate. After every battle may be a bit too much. finding the dialogues can be fun too with such a big cast. All those people in her head someone has to be talking.
 
I think a good balance might be the way Resonance of Fate handles it, the game does have your standard repetitious pre-battle and post-battle dialogue for random encounters in the overworld, which probably won't even be a thing in Indivisible, but in actual dungeons there's no post-battle anything you just heal and move onto the next room, and pre-battle dialogue is all context specific (and also occurring during the battle, the game doesn't force you to wait until it's over to begin) so it gives a small amount of insight into what the characters are thinking or going through at that point in the story.
 
Goodbye18000 said:
The "notifications" that was shown off in the latest gameplay video would be good for reminding you to visit the menu/inner realm after a battle if you, say, level up or something
That was a quite different joke that nobody seems to have gotten. :^P

fenster said:
*Even though how much Indivisible is RPG vs Metroidvania is still unknown to us
Start with Metroidvania for answers to questions you have, rather than RPG. Just like starting with MvC2 for answers to SG questions, instead of MvC3.

......

After 10 hours of playing, I get hella sick of post-battle quotes in basically every game except Star Ocean 2 because they're so-awful-they're-hilarious there.

Then there are ones in other games like, "Special service, I upped my attack by 20%!" NO YOU DIDN'T, RUFUS!
 
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Now that we're talking about this, is the game going to have a HUD? I remember Murasa Demon Blade having a small bag icon in the lower left corner, with the number of items you had but didn't check. Maybe you can get some kind of notification like that after each battle... but do we really need items in the game? Ajna will have easy access to her weapons, and you can regain health from battles... unless you start the game without a healer, or maybe when you're in a pinch and want to play it safely.
 
I'd quite like some in-battle and post-battle chatter, basically to the same degree as SG in-battle chatter (i.e. Moves only sometimes get called and move calls vary), though for post-battle chatter I just mean a voice line or two every once in a while that doesn't interrupt gameplay. If I'm not mistaken the prototype does both of these.
 
Shadowfury333 said:
post-battle chatter
[snip]
If I'm not mistaken the prototype does both of these.
It doesn't do that one, but this would be the level we'd do it at, just a line while gameplay continues.

E!Damnation said:
do we really need items in the game?
Nope! :^)
 
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I wouldn't mind a little bit of after battle banter between the chars kind of like how Xenoblade Saga/Chronicle X does after winning a fight. Just... not as repetitive. There are some hilarious moments hidden in the post fight quips though XD
 
I completely forgot which game did this, but there was a mechanic wherein characters would have banter with each other, but it would progress as the game went on and they got more familiar with each other. I'm pretty sure it was just on a timer, like once you hit certain time gates with them in the party together, more dialogue would get spoken and it would progress from the last conversation. Sometimes it would cover interesting stuff, like a common ground between two allies, or initial disdain growing into mutual respect. I liked that it developed the members of the party as entities apart from the main character; they have stuff to talk about that isn't you, and that's cool.

For this kind of game, I think it might work like this:
dialog.png
 
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Thinking about about it some more, a Post-Battle quip could be kinda useful for gameplay if it signaled when a certain character, or the whole team, still had very low-health after the Iddhi Heal. I'm talking just a quick "We're in trouble guys," type of line, like in X4.

I've definitely watched some videos of the Prototype where the players burned Super at the very end of a tough fight, and they didn't realize how that affected their Post-Battle Heal until they got killed by an Ogre swipe or something. So, for players having trouble keeping track of the meters, that extra feedback might actually provide a nice warning to not jump recklessly into their next fight, or let them know it's time to take an Inner Realm break.
 
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How about the more Ajna battles with certain characters the more deeper the companionship becomes, like in fallout 4? Extra quotes and then more conversations about themselves. Maybe Ajna will discover why Ramzis so salty!
 
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Building relationships would be cool, but considering how many characters there are it'd be a ton of work for a ton of permutations, especially if they're all supposed to be voiced. I think the only way you could make it work would be to limit it to certain combos, but then that would feel kinda weak.
 
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It could be limited to just incarnations talking to Ajna.
Vasco at the beginning of the game: "You ain't payin' me enough for this..."
Near the end of the game: "Nice shootin', champ!"
 
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Start of game Lanshi: "Bark"

Mid-game Lanshi: "Bark bark"

Mid-Late game Lanshi: "Woof, bark bark"

End-game Lanshi: "Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust."
 
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Kai said:
I'm pretty sure it was just on a timer, like once you hit certain time gates with them in the party together, more dialogue would get spoken and it would progress from the last conversation. Sometimes it would cover interesting stuff, like a common ground between two allies, or initial disdain growing into mutual respect. I liked that it developed the members of the party as entities apart from the main character; they have stuff to talk about that isn't you, and that's cool.

While kind of a neat idea, if the game had no other way to reference or go back to previous dialogue, it'd be very hard to remember in cases where you switch characters out mid-conversation for a while. As a player, I would most definitely be in a situation myself where I'd have 2 characters in my party have a conversation, decide to switch to another party setup for a long while, and completely forget developments those previous 2 had when I eventually go back to them for completetions sake. I imagine someone starting a conversation like, "Do you remember that you said you were fond of the enemies commitment to their goals with X?", and I'd be like "Wait, did they say that?".

I like the approach that some of the Xenoblade Chronicle's heart-to-hearts took that reminds me a little on this. Where certain character conversation topics at lower affection levels would be referenced/talked about again in the higher level affection levels but the higher ones were usually more personally revealing. And bringing these up as their own points in new conversations made it so they (or I) brought it up I at least could kind of remember the subject at hand in general rather than a specific thing someone said. It's not as elegant as a continual conversation/discussed topic, but it gave the feel that these specific characters related on this specific subject and kept it on their minds even still.

MysteriousJ said:
It could be limited to just incarnations talking to Ajna.
Vasco at the beginning of the game: "You ain't payin' me enough for this..."
Near the end of the game: "Nice shootin', champ!"

Yeah, I mean it's likely that the incarnations can all hang out and talk to each other, but since Ajna is kind of the dominant vessel here I figured all the relations would just be with/through her anyways.
 
fenster said:
I like the approach that some of the Xenoblade Chronicle's heart-to-hearts took that reminds me a little on this.

even with Xenoblade having one of the best fast-travel systems in any RPG, making it location specific made them a PAIN to do. Unless they all take place in Ajna's inner realm that would suck for a RPGVania game i'ma keep saying it till everyone uses it
 
Ooo, I have a fun question:

For funzies of course~~ If Indivisible got a movie budget, how do you guys think it'd be handled? =3

Like, so far pretty much all the game movies blew chunks (cept Warcraft. Damn good and accurate).
 
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Goodbye18000 said:
even with Xenoblade having one of the best fast-travel systems in any RPG, making it location specific made them a PAIN to do. Unless they all take place in Ajna's inner realm that would suck for a RPGVania game i'ma keep saying it till everyone uses it

It was kind of a pain, but a lot of the heart-to-hearts were actually about those specific locations. But in any case, I was talking solely about how some of the specific heart to hearts could connect on previous topics. I actually dislike almost everything else about the heart-to-heart system they put in place, other than locking behind relationship levels which made sense.
 
Kit Ballard said:
For funzies of course~~ If Indivisible got a movie budget, how do you guys think it'd be handled? =3
Lisa Kudrow as Ajna
Owen Wilson as Dhar
Jeff Bridges as Zebei
Tress Macneille as Razmi
Ving Rhames as Tungar
Beethoven as Lanshi
Jaleel White as everyone else
</for comedic effect please ignore any racial implications herein, I just love Lisa Kudrow>
 
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I detest JRPG-style, "relationship level," systems. It just sucks all the actual energy out of the character interactions when you know, as a player, that you need to gift somebody a red rose pendant, or make sure they're with you at a certain story moment, or that you must answer a certain question correctly or something will get locked out. I always hated Star Ocean for that, even though I did love SO2 overall.

Building a relationship through conversation (or just time spent together) is one thing, and makes sense, but if the relationship is supposed to be developing due to other, more specific things, I'd rather they just be written in and played out for me, rather than making me go through the incredibly banal motions of buying a specific item or finding the character in-between two specific scenes.
 
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agreed.. I honestly skipped trying to do the Xenoblade ones after it became too much of a chore.. While hearing some of the side stories and thoughts of each member of the party was cool, it was way too much of a grind out of an already grindy game.
 
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