One of my favorite moments is from Mother 3, when you have to choose a chimera to move water from one lake to an adjacent hole. One of them is a blowdryer, and it just blows on the water. "That's not doing anything." Another is a couple of kids. They try their hardest, but doing it one bucket at a time isn't fast enough. And the last one is a pump, and gets the job done.
They spent
hours making these animations that only get seen for a few seconds in a playthrough, that you might not even get to see. Completely unnecessary. And yet, completely necessary for it to be an Earthbound game.
Lander wrote: ↑Sun Jan 28, 2024 6:25 pmAnd I expect easy mule-ing via shared stash was a distant dream in the original, if the
I_am_literally_transferring_items has joined the game episode of Diablol is anything to go by.
Oh... oh god. The PTSD.
In multiplayer you had to sit in a game for around five minutes so it'd linger around for ~three minutes when you left. (Referred to as "perming" by the community.) You threw the items you wanted to move around on the ground in a pile. And logged out-and-in with your various characters as needed. A couple ways this could go south: the game instance could poof. You could have messed up the game name/password somewhere. It wasn't ideal.
Alternatives were to trust some rando stranger (haha) or to try to drop your stuff in some out of the way hidey-hole no one would ever go to in an open multiplayer game. Both of which were much less ideal.
Singleplayer was actually a lot better on this front. If you had a second computer you could just hand it over in a peer-to-peer multiplayer game, but everyone just used an inventory moving utility program. Singleplayer is also better since your characters don't get deleted for inactivity, and you can make an infinite number of them.
With one patch they were looking into expanding the size of the stash (please remember that the LoD expansion buffed it from being able to hold two things to almost being able to hold four), but they gave up because they were afraid the potato servers they bought back in 1995 would melt. (One thing that always makes me shake my head is how Blizzard shuts off all of their games every Tuesday morning for "maintenance". At least Starcraft and Diablo II never had
that stupid nonsense.
Unnovation can go straight to hell imho.)
Of course in the mod scene there are versions of the game with gigantic inventory and storage, tabs even. What Blizzard won't do, we have to do ourselves. (Unfortunately making new content like skills and levels is rather complex. Too bad they didn't make it more of a Roblox game like Warcraft 3 was.)
Ah. The highlight of my career was during one Bloody Foothills train in multiplayer, a fine level grinding spot. I was playing a Lightning Fury javazon, one of my favorites. A unique javelin dropped, and I instantly recognized it as Titan's Revenge. The best in slot weapon for my character. I remember my heart stopping as I went to click it. I missed. Some little barbarian weasel bastard was just barely offscreen, and he saw my drop too and began moving toward it. I clicked again. I missed again. At least I was moving closer to it, but I needed to seal the deal. I narrowed my eyes and managed to land on it with the third click.
The wonders of just letting anyone pick up everything. I've killed bosses hundreds of times, and don't remember any single one of them in particular. I remember that damn javelin.
Afterwards when I was able to take a look at the thing, it turned out it wasn't a normal Titan's Revenge: It was an
ethereal Titan's Revenge. The best of the best.
It's gone now of course, along with the character. Inactive multiplayer characters get deleted, after all.
For a game about greed and desire, Diablo was always a bit like a zen teacher. It was a cruel, abusive teacher, but a teacher all the same. That one should not get attached to worldly things. That all things are transient.
It's a lesson I often fail to learn. Playing a perfect run of Persona 3 wasn't nearly as fun as just playing it would have been, and what do I have to show for it after leaving the game behind?
Maybe it's ok Shadow's dead.
Even if that cheaty bastard Kefka survived somehow.
It almost sounds like one of those obtuse MMOs where the playerbase draws a sense of cameraderie from shared mechanical suffering. Or perhaps just frustration, depending.
Hardship really makes things memorable, you don't tend to remember when things go smooth unless it's rare.
Like I always say here, the early games like Dragon Quest 1 had stronger dungeon crawler roots. Where you had to grind in the same zone for an hour plus sometimes, and your reward was to get to grind in a new zone. Around the SNES era jRPGs became basically walking simulators on the whole. You walked from the start to the end almost completely unchallenged. No hardship.
I've been fascinated by kusoge - design choices that are the exact opposite of what you'd see in a "good" game.
There's been video essays on the topic, about how same-y everything feels with the corners rounded off. Umihara Kawase wouldn't be a shadow of the game it is, if mastering fishing in it wasn't so hard and weird.