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Releases / Re: [FF7PC-98/Steam] New Threat Mod (v1.5)
« on: 2017-11-16 22:06:53 »
I started playing this mod and really liked it in the beginning/middle of the game. The end-game however has turned me off of this, mostly due to what, I think, are limitations in the FF7 game/engine itself: in all mods I have tried so far that makes the game more challenging, it always end up being a damage-race, either from the get-go or, in this case, at the end.
I don't think that is intentional from the makers, it's just that FF7 is not a game about tactical decisions and a complete rewrite of the combat would be necessary to archive something like that. The main issue is that everything combat-related in FF7 is essentially overpowered. We all know how easy it was to generate insane damage in the original game, making status ailments useless or a waste of a turn. Lowering the overall damage while increasing the vulnerability against statuses in enemies just breaks the game in another way as each status ailment is incredibly powerful if you think about it. The materia system itself is so flexible that you can become all but immortal if you know what's coming up in future battles. All that makes it incredibly hard to balance for a harder tactical but fair game. The limited scripting the game supports doesn't help either.
Being at the Northern Crater my experience is that the main difficulty spike from the enemies comes from their damage output and that's fine by me. However due to the added (and much needed) character customization I now have characters that are completely useless. Glass canons like Tifa and Yuffie takes between 75-100% their max hp in damage from anything while tanks like Vincent and Barret can stay in the back-row and out-DPS the DPS-classes as you can freely boost their strength/magic.
I will, however, play through this and the Arrange mode and then at least once with a rank-gimmick build like melee-Aeris.
I don't think that is intentional from the makers, it's just that FF7 is not a game about tactical decisions and a complete rewrite of the combat would be necessary to archive something like that. The main issue is that everything combat-related in FF7 is essentially overpowered. We all know how easy it was to generate insane damage in the original game, making status ailments useless or a waste of a turn. Lowering the overall damage while increasing the vulnerability against statuses in enemies just breaks the game in another way as each status ailment is incredibly powerful if you think about it. The materia system itself is so flexible that you can become all but immortal if you know what's coming up in future battles. All that makes it incredibly hard to balance for a harder tactical but fair game. The limited scripting the game supports doesn't help either.
Being at the Northern Crater my experience is that the main difficulty spike from the enemies comes from their damage output and that's fine by me. However due to the added (and much needed) character customization I now have characters that are completely useless. Glass canons like Tifa and Yuffie takes between 75-100% their max hp in damage from anything while tanks like Vincent and Barret can stay in the back-row and out-DPS the DPS-classes as you can freely boost their strength/magic.
I will, however, play through this and the Arrange mode and then at least once with a rank-gimmick build like melee-Aeris.