FFT: Ultimate Edition

[drbretto]

This is a proposal for a future project. A collaboration in which I'm willing to do as much legwork as is needed but I don't need to put my name on it. FFT:Ultimate made by the FFT enthusiast community.

There is a PSP emulator that is on the cusp of running FFT:WOTL at the same kind of speed rates as epsxe can run FFT (I was getting frame rates in the 220 range, but crashes on world map screen). I have been tracking their progress for a few weeks and asked the developers about the possibility of netplay, and they said it's a ways off but it absolutely is on their list of things to do. Netplay, and WOTL, would allow us to play rendezvous and melee battles over the internet without the need of convoluted save files and skype-based execution.

What I'm aiming to do is sort of combine the PvP balance of the Arena patch (with any necessary tweaks) with the difficulty and flair of 1.3, with my PvE tweaks for WOTL like the activation and placing of traps, redesigned poaching, etc. I believe this can be accomplished.

Basically, the plan is to have the already established Arena tweaks added directly to all generics, have all items deemed usable in Arena tweaked and balanced exclusively for PvP, throw in the 1.3 ENTD (with tweaks to counter the generics). Newer flair like sage job, etc, can easily be added back to the game for PvE only by adding in recruitable generics.

I can do the legwork. I've done it before with WOTL (my PPF is up to over 5 MB and there aren't a lot of sprite changes) so it's not like I'm just some guy who just discovered the site and is all like "hey guise! Let's make a patch!". This is legit and has a chance to be something pretty special. I don't need my name on it. I don't want anyone's name on the front. Just individual credits where credits are due on patch notes and FAQs.

This WOULD require a collaborative effort with ID. Please, please keep all old grudges out of the discussion. You are not dealing with Arch. You are dealing with me. I will be the mediator between the two parties if necessary.

It's a long way off, so we have a lot of time to plan. But let's make this happen. Who's in?

[formerdeathcorps]

drbaretto, what are you trying to accomplish?  Is the final hack PvP, PvE, AIvAI or all of the above?

[drbretto]

I am trying to accomplish a single patch that will:

-Allow for balanced, live PvP, including official tournament rules and just plain PvP fun
-Allow two people who are just playing the game from different states/countries to group up and do rendezvous for WOTL exclusive equipment to take into PvE
-Allow people to enjoy the difficulty and class balance of 1.3 through the regular game
-Allow people to experience the main game with some new and interesting skills/jobs/items and game mechanics while still feeling like FFT
-get more actual hackers involved in ASM hacks for WOTL

All of this is doable. If it's just one guy doing it, you get half a patch. If it's a combine community effort, you come up with the single greatest and most complete version of Final Fantasy Tactics there has ever been. It's about the game, not about us. And I have plans for the structure and execution of the patch's creation.

The emulator and netplay are a ways away, so we have a lot of time to figure out exactly how it's going to pan out, but it doesn't hurt to start now.


edit: All of this will allow for a single ISO and single memcard file. Basically, it just takes FFT:WOTL 1.3 and allows for seamless Arena-style balanced PvP within the same patch. And rendezvous that actually matter because you take what you've earned with you into the regular game.

[formerdeathcorps]

The problem here is that PvP and AIvAI's balance is totally different.  You cannot actually fuse the 1.3 the FFH members remember on here (1.3027-32), the current 1.3 (more suited for PvP Deathmatch), and Arena (more suited for the idiosyncrasies of AI v AI) into one patch without creating a massive headache.  For example, no human class would use Move = 0 or Move - 1, but on some AI classes, it actually improves their behavior.
In the long-term, I believe this may be fixable with a smart search tree that combines the knowledge of all the players and / or a memory bank (so it can learn behavior as you play alongside it) but that's a long-term hacking project for me as well.  16 MB of RAM (PSP's) may not even be enough there.

[drbretto]

I think you're overthinking it. AI vs AI is more of a vanilla thing, if you're referring to, like the AI tournaments. That's not part of this proposal at all.

I'm talking about balancing the generic classes for LIVE player vs player combat over the internet, and combining it with 1.3-like PvE regular storyline gameplay.

This is far less complicated and doesn't even necessarily require any actual hacking beyond the modding tools that are already created. We balance generics skillsets and approved equipment for PvP, then build the PvE experience around that, and add in some fun special units and equipment for PvE (that you can choose to use when dueling a buddy but won't be permissable in an official tournament).

Then, when it's time for a tournament, you don't have to create a specific memcard file, etc. You just have people take their own save file with their own stuff and have them meet their opponent online at a specific time, bring in their units, someone records it and uploads it.

Or, if you're mid-game (single player) and you want to pick up some new WOTL exclusive items, you an a buddy can team up for a live rendezvous and you take your new, shiny, WOTL exclusive item back with you to the regular game.

To be clear, this is not a direct combination of Arena and 1.3. It's like if Arena and 1.3 hooked up and had a baby, and that baby's name is Awesome.

[formerdeathcorps]

I'll be willing to work on it after you provide some specifics of how the game-play intends (not the extra features and emulators) to be different than the current 1.3 for WotL on ID.

[drbretto]

It will be a completely different patch.

First and foremost, the generic jobs will be balanced specifically for PvP, including growth and modifiers, abilities (and specifically JP costs), and equipment options, starting from scratch with vanilla FFT:WOTL, but balanced to be modeled towards 1.3 style, like a useful basic skill skillset, maybe the longer range on YinYang, etc.  I will have a separate forum on ID for discussion of this stuff.

Once the generics are in, I will have a separate discussion on ENTD changes that take into account the PvP generic changes to keep the single-player game interesting. In this case, it will start with directly importing the ENTD from 1.3 and editing accordingly.

After that, I will go into the WOTL specific items/rendezvous/melee stuff and optimize accordingly.

Then I will create recruitable special units to fill in the gaps for PvE and to reintroduce certain aspects of 1.3 that won't work with PvP.

[formerdeathcorps]

That sounds like a plan.  In this case, then we aren't throwing out / fusing any generic jobs?

[drbretto]

Well, the specifics on that are still pretty hazy in my mind. I figure the FFH community has a better idea of what would be needed to make the pvp portion of the game balanced, and if combining some job's abilities into single units is the way to do it, then that's what we'll do. I'm opening up a forum on ID right now (or when arch gets off his ass) and I'll make separate sticky threads for each aspect of the game for exactly this kind of discussion.

My vision for PvP is that there should be some reason you could want to bring in just about any class/job, and all severely overpowered skills should be removed (blade grasp, move +3, etc). I want the primary focus on level 35, secondary on level 99 for "official" tournaments. The tournament rules I have in mind include a set amount of JP being allowable for each job and JP costs set specifically to limit overpowered combinations both at level 35 and level 99 so during a tournament "season" (a la fantasy football), we can host a save file with generics leveled in each class with set amounts of JP to spend and set equipment available.

After all of the PvP stuff is relatively balanced, we'll tackle the PvE stuff.

edit: One sticky for each aspect, then a thread for each job so we can figure out all of the specifics as a community, one by one, until we have a decent balance to start with. I want as many (intelligent) people as possible contributing.

[3lric]

I like the thought of being able to actually control units in a 2 player battle against each other (i used to do this with my brother using the debug menu). Dunno how much help I could be given that I primarily work in events and attack.out, but I support this either way.

As for the subject of working with ID. I dont see an issue here. We are all hacking/modding the same game and thats the bottom line. There are several people between the 2 sites who do not get along. But that should not effect the rest of us who are merely hacking/modding a game we all love.

[formerdeathcorps]

How "far" from FFT is "too far"?  If I were to say....up the tempo by having all status cancel/add spells heal HP or deal damage, would that be too far?  The reverse case...of course, would be like R999 Tactics where literally stat growth doesn't exist, you are seriously forced to choose between dealing damage or dealing status or healing, you are locked into one type of character due to how weapon types are assigned, and the idea of balance is to make hybrids as ineffective as possible.
If I were to delete movement abilities altogether and have shoes cover them (as AeroGP suggests), would that be too much?  Or what if we went in the opposite direction that Raven suggested and have movement and support both function as one big list out of which you can choose two?

I'm just throwing some ideas out here, but any community patch cannot continue without an official judge because developers will have design plans that are contradictory.

[drbretto]

Elric: I agree, there should be no problem with the combined efforts. Everyone who was actually involved has moved past it, so as long as no one brings up stuff for no reason, we should be fine. We are all doing this out of the love for this game, and I want this to be a product of that passion.

FDC: How far is too far? The idea I have is that gameplay is the only thing that matters. I know that doesn't answer the question exactly, but it's the golden rule here. Ideally, as long as the jobs are based on the actual jobs that they are, it should be ok. I do want to keep some diversity between job growths though. It adds to gameplay. But I would like those job growths to be a little more normalized. We have been discussing this on ID for a little bit lately and I don't think it's that hard to accomplish.

Basically, you set a growth value for best, good, and OK, and set them according to class style across the board. Thieves would still have the best speed growth, for example, but Mystics could have their growths adjusted to not be a complete waste of a level by upping their MA growth to OK level and HP growth to good (which would be high for a caster) so that no job is a complete waste.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

You want to do too much in one patch.

• Balanced PVE - It's possible to do it and do it well, but a large part of 1.3's PVE (which you reference) comes from the AI and Player having different yet equally OP resources optimized to the way they approach problems.  What you want to do won't directly make PVE worse but it won't be a main component on making it better either.



• Class Growths - Completely anemic to balanced PVP because you either need a save game editor or to spend tons of time raising new units if you don't have good Growths on the ones you already have.  Growths are part of a PVE Patch, not a PVP Patch.  This is basically not negotiable.  You talk about people just being able to meet Memcard to Memcard but Growths go directly against this by forcing you to constantly re-train or re-generate units instead of just being able to Job Change and re-equip them.  Growths also greatly inhibit the flexibility of Class Multipliers to make things equally viable.  The randomized HP/MP of units also does this to a small degree.



• "PVP" and "PVE" Items - This sounds like fucking WoW-territory shit, and on there its grindy as hell.  Obviously (or at least hopefully) you don't want the grind aspect involved, but it's still basically making gentleman's rules when the entire point of something like this seems to be just "plug and play", which this would go against and result in people bitching or calling each other cheaters if they accidentally or intentionally brought a "PVE" item to PVP.



• Merging 1.3 with Arena - This is a terrible idea.  1.3 is designed for PVE against differing-resource enemies as I mentioned before with only a loose sense of PVP balance at best.  FFT: Arena is "better" as a base only in a very, very loose sense.  It's mostly designed with the idiosyncrasies of the AI in mind, and a lot of it doesn't translate well to PVP.  Many other things do, and stealing some of their mechanics such as Brave/Faith balance, Reaction%, etc. isn't invalid if you can get those changes moved to the PSP, but there are many other things that won't translate well too.  You'd be much better off finding mechanics you want to use from either patch (and others) as bases but building the Jobs ground-up as none of them will give you what you want.



• Like FDC said - if you try to make things "community" based, they go south quickly because no one likes to agree on anything, and compromise usually leads to terrible mechanics, items, jobs, and abilities.  Even when I make 1-player FFT patches on a team, such as with Journey of the Five, the work that had been there and made "communally" when I arrived was really, really bad, and I took over the mechanics as a monarchy to fix it all.  You can see some of this in FFT: Arena too - Lots of arguing and text walls over the smallest of mechanics, and because a lot of the mechanics ARE decided based on these compromises instead of just going "Fuck you, we're balancing it on these principles, not your ones that don't match what we're doing", a lot of the results of those compromises are... bad.  Even ones I've tried to salvage myself back when I gave input on Arena were very subpar in the end due to compromise instead of just having one overall mechanical guru fixing problems as they're brought up by the players.

There's probably other issues but these are the big issues.  The tl;dr of these issues is that you basically want a "Perfect" FFT that handles everything, but your priori goals will come in constant conflict.  You could still make a game based on PVP that has a storyline aspect, but you need to compromise a lot of things toward PVP first which will result in a very strange PVE experience.  ie, to do PVP properly, there has to be no Growth, and units need to be balanced around a specific Level, meaning you need to have flat growths and just have the entire game balanced flat around the Level you balance PVP against.  (This would also allow you to have every item open at the start of the game, giving you a lot of flexibility in regards to the PVE setups, so it's not bad - but it's clearly not how you currently envision the PVE going by any stretch.)  You seem to want to favor the PVP but you don't want to actually go all-in to make it happen then build your PVE with the leftovers.  If you don't go all-in you just end up with a wishy-washy mess that's likely better than Vanilla for multiplayer but clearly squandering its potential for shit it doesn't need to be doing.

[drbretto]

RoR, I only mentioned the Arena patch because I was under the impression that it was something designed for skype based PvP. I'll start it from scratch and I absolutely CAN make something that you can play through the story with 1.3 type difficulty, while taking your actual crew out for rendezvous and fairly balanced PvP. It absolutely can be done.

When it comes to tournaments and whatnot, no grinding is necessary. There can easily be a save file with empty generics for people to set up their team before the fight.

edit: and it's not separate pve and pvp items. It's just that items that would be too poswerful for pvp will have an asterisk on the description so you know they shouldn't be used in any serious pvp fight. Anything that would basically only be useful in pvp can just be bought in a store. There's no grinding there.

Like FDC said - if you try to make things "community" based, they go south quickly because no one likes to agree on anything, and compromise usually leads to terrible mechanics, items, jobs, and abilities.  Even when I make 1-player FFT patches on a team, such as with Journey of the Five, the work that had been there and made "communally" when I arrived was really, really bad, and I took over the mechanics as a monarchy to fix it all.  You can see some of this in FFT: Arena too - Lots of arguing and text walls over the smallest of mechanics, and because a lot of the mechanics ARE decided based on these compromises instead of just going "Fuck you, we're balancing it on these principles, not your ones that don't match what we're doing", a lot of the results of those compromises are... bad.  Even ones I've tried to salvage myself back when I gave input on Arena were very subpar in the end due to compromise instead of just having one overall mechanical guru fixing problems as they're brought up by the players.

I just want people involved so things get done right. Mostly because one person can't think of everything. But if I have to think of everything and do it myself, I'll do that, too. And on the opening screen it'll have a giant DRBRETTO over the FFT logo in neon pink. But I'd honestly just rather make the better game.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

So you wanted to borrow from a mod without researching what it is first?

This would work better if you had a more concrete idea to work with.  "I want the perfect PVP/PVE FFT" isn't that.  If you had something more concrete to work with (ie a rough plan of actual things that would be in the game instead of a bunch of vague ideas) you'd probably catch more interest to develop with instead of a bunch of flak.

You clearly completely missed the point I was getting to about the community thing.  Go read the thread about Arena Balance for the new version or one of the other community-focused threads out there and hopefully you'll see the problem regarding it.  It has nothing to do with you needing to be a super genius game design master who can think of every idea and more to do with you being the one who decides the design principles and needing to be able to adhere to them.  And I mean "design principles" in far more specific and nuanced ways than merely "FFT for PVP".

[drbretto]

I only mentioned Arena because someone had told me that it was already set the way I wanted the generics to be in another discussion a few days ago. I have a pretty concrete outline of what I want the generics to be like. So basically, when I mentioned Arena meets 1.3, I meant basically that I would like to set up a patch that is like a spiritual successor to what I was told Arena already was and the idea behind 1.3. And I have a decent, if not slightly jumbled outline on exactly how I want to implement it.

And yeah, I guess I was being naive about the community part because I wanted it to be something we'd all like, but just dealing Arch right now, even before going into detail on the whole plan, I can see how nothing will ever get done if everyone's arguing over a different vision and compromises would basically destroy the original idea in the first place, so I'm going to have to just make the patch the way I think it should be like it's my own and will be happy to hear anyone's input once I've put the whole thing down on paper.

[formerdeathcorps]

Actually, can you post what you currently have planned?  I'll give you my feedback, but I have to have something concrete to work with.

[drbretto]

Yep. The whole thing will be up in the next couple of days. I just got the subforum set up and it's late, plus working all weekend. Gonna take a few hours to write up, there's a lot of ground to cover. I'll post a link when it's done.

edit: There would have been a decent outline up already but I spent most of the day arguing over why I was arguing with arch over the subforum to put it in, which sucked the energy out of me.

[drbretto]

http://www.insanelyderpy.com/board/index.php?/forum/135-fftwotl-ultimate-edition/

Basic outline set up, if anyone is interested.