I just finished normal mode. I talked to every person, visited every area and every corner of it, did every sidequest, killed every boss in the game and did many tests how somethings work in battles. Game timer is now 70+ hours but the real number including reloads after death and testing how things work in battles is probably about 100 hours.
Sega Chief, you did a wonderful work. Here are my thoughts (you don’t need to comment every single one):
-The lvl4 sidequests fits good into the story, best was cids because you need to visit many different places to complete this. Cait Cith and some others for example you just need to visit one place kill something and done. They all should feel more like the cid one. Collect here information, travel there, bring this thing here etc.
- The Jugon League is fantastic
- The Dark Cave is a very good idea, but I think It have much more unique potential, maybe it can be a endless random dungeon where only there you can find randomly some special items or (if possible) you make it like the ancients cave in lufia 2 or you remove the option to choose arrange mode on the start and when you enter the dark cave a new game+ starts in arrange mode.
- The changes to the materia are good, but I think there should be more 1star materia e.g. planet, contain, sneak attack, multicut, mega all, quadra magic, maybe more. Counter attack need still a nerf maybe 50% weapon dmg or make conter attack 1star and you can obtain 3-4 in the game or just lower the rate to 25% trigger. The thing is counter attack early on is not the problem, the problem begin when you you have many of them with a good phys char.
- The changes to phy and magic dmg are a good idea, but phy dmg got nerfed to much. In the playtrough I only used magic because the pyh dmg was not worth it only limits were good. Even with bad magic stats its better to attack with magic and with osmose the mp isn’t a big problem. In endgame I think Phy dmg needs overall a small buff like 25%. Conformer is to strong, especially with many conter attacks every boss is a joke.
- I like that any good armor now has a problem like no linked slots or halves healing etc. now there is not “the best” armor it depends on the fights and this is good.
- Crafting the ultimate weapons was a very good idea, I like it very much
- I like the new battle square bosses and the bosses in kalm as well. But maybe instead putting the omega and nemesis weapon on battle square they should get their own little part like ozma. And you can make the npc (where you currently can fight cait cith tank, omega and nemesis) a npc where you can rebattle the bosses you already defeated. Maybe for a special reward.
- The Special battle where you need to fight 8 bosses in a row. Is very good too. It would even better when you not fight everytime the same. Maybe you can make a boss pool where are 8 bosses randomly picked up. E.g. all the main story bosses maybe level adjusted, so they got some love.
- I not like the soft level cap every 10 level. In my opinion this feel unnatural and should be linear, even when I know its probably hard to balance, but I wanted to say that.
- Speaking of linear. We come to the rank up system. I like it very much you can choose which way to go, but instead of only 8 big rank ups I would prefer many small rank ups and if possible they should be linked to the level up system. Maybe every level up you gain a character specific item (one for every char, when cloud lvl up you gain a cloud item, when aerith lvl up a aerith item etc.) and you can trade this item on every save points for the sources you want. And for the flat +5 all stats you can do something like every 2 lvl ups automatic +1 all stats.
- the changes to defence, magic defence (2x) in the damage formular is awesome, now defence is thing to thinking about and is not overpowered since they are many attack which ignores them or deal %dmg.
- The 41 level cap in the damage formular on the one hand is good to limit the phy dmg, but on the other hand I wish the damage formular could be more linear without have the need to cap it at lvl41 so you can feel a difference between a lvl 50 char with 150 str and a lvl 99 char with 150 str.
- the implementing of innate character abilitys was a good idea to make a character different, as well as the possibility of skiping some story element like the nibelheim flash back, the possibility to remove random encounters on field maps and the fast morph materia.
- fighting for the strong materials like quadra magic was a good idea. Maybe this could be expanded to some others like planet, contain and comet.
- I would remove the lucky 7777, its feels like cheating
- I would fix the 2x item bug/cheat or remove the 2x item materia if its not possible
- I would remove the added effect barrier shield bug/trick. Early on and in mid game its overpowered.
- Since I had access to the crater and I mastered my materia and reborn it how many times I need, made good materia combos and got the ultimate weapons, the game become to easy. I played in normal mode. Maybe this is in arrange mode different.
I hope I could help you with my input to make your already wonderful mod a little better. I looking forward your final release even when it comes in one year or even later. I will play it probably in arrange mod.
-) I was wanting to revise the lv.4 limit sidequests a bit as, like you say, a lot are a case 'go here, fight'. I've most locked in, but one or two I'm still unsure of.
-) I'm not a big fan of the junon league thing myself; I was going to cut it from the last update, but what I could try doing is making it available to access from more locations like the Fort Condor minigame is and try to make it a bit more involved/less time-consuming.
-) I want to scrap Dark Cave and replace it with something else. I had been looking at a 'floor-based' dungeon that goes through lots of fields with punishing encounters and a boss/change of theme every five floors or so; make it more of a battle-based thing like that Ehrgeiz dungeon game or the FF Advance post-story dungeons.
-) Quadra Magic is a bit of an issue for various reasons; first it doubles the paired spell's attack and makes it four times as long, it also breaks the 1-use Summon limit I tried to put in, and it also causes a freeze when using a spell paired with both it and Absorb materia on any enemy that divides its model into multiple parts (jenova synthesis, bizarro, some others). Counter Materia can maybe be balanced using the materia stat bonus/penalties a bit more. The % chance to proc may be OK where it's at right now. What would be nice is limiting counter actions down to about 3 or so instead of 5 or 6.
-) Physicals vs Magic has been a long running thing in NT; I think physicals rely on elemental and fast characters too much to be viable, which I'm keeping in mind. I adjusted the critical and elemental damage modifers for the final build prototype and dropped the level adjustment hack in the character AI. I'm going to experiment with the physical damage formula (for level's impact on it) to see if there's a better solution I can find for it. Special weapon formulas are located (I think) so expect their modifiers to be adjusted.
-) I'm not too sure about ultimate weapon crafting; I think people probably find it more of an annoyance as the requirements are going into the Crater and farming for drops/steals/morphs from the enemies inside. What I'd like to try and do is get them put behind something that's a bit more actively engaging for the player. I think that crafting thing would be better suited to a sister ray version where the number of possible weapons + items is increased, meaning that weapon variants/upgrades could be produced.
-) Battle Square's Extra Battle used to be a lot more expansive, but a number of those fights were rolled into other things or dropped entirely. And there was an option to fight story bosses again via a menu on the Highwind once upon a time (that was the purpose of the two shinra soldiers in the chocobo pen, the menu was accessed through them). I wanted to renovate Extra Battle and was going to get rid of Omega + Nemesis in favour of having a roster of more weird and unique enemies like it used to be; I could restore the story fight boss menu and put it in Gold Saucer too but I reckon it'd be best if those story bosses were respecced to match a Disc 3 party rather than just as-is (I could add some AI for that). Kalm Traveler I think is going to no longer have fights attached to it.
-) That's not a bad idea with the Special Battle; I think I can manage that.
-) For EXP I've went back to the vanilla arcs and am speccing enemy EXP given against that. The soft-cap thing confuses/frustrates people I think, but I'll need to be careful as it's easy to overlevel when you didn't want to under the vanilla exp arcs.
-) In the final build, the +5 is being removed and is instead being handled by incrementing stats via level-up (like how the base game behaves) with the player choosing specific stats to buff whenever they get access to an upgrade. That helps cut down on having to mash a button and also makes levels feel less empty (while level does increase damage dealt and HP/MP, I think people like to see their primary attributes go up when they level). SP is also being removed and instead an upgrade becomes available when beating certain bosses/story events. I think that was how it was originally, can't remember. It helps make progression a bit more stable. I think additional ranks might make the system a bit tiresome to use though, not sure.
-) The defence change has created a problem with end-game balancing though, as the DR it provides is no longer capped at 50% (for 255) but at 99% or something (as it is effectively 510). Problem with going back to a vanilla formula is that a greater amount of defence is needed to make a tangible difference to enemy attacks as the incoming damage is lower and therefore a 10% or 20% decrease is less impressive (and also requires a lot of Vit/Def).
-) I'm dropping the internal level cap from the character AI for that reason; it means there's no scaling other than from Strength/Magic once you're past that level and once HP/MP caps out the level stat itself effectively becomes useless. It also causes problems with stealing and morphing from high level enemies. Of all the changes, I consider this one to have been the worst from a balancing and scripting perspective. I'm going to try balancing on the default physical formula and then make adjustments to it in the .exe if needed.
-) I've made some tweaks to the innates as removing the Defence x2 from the AI (and the level capper) has provided a lot of free space, as well as a optimisation to Aeris' innate that cut out a lot of bytes. I'll be trialing those with people before I commit to putting them in the final update though because innates can alter gameplay a bit and I don't want to rock the boat too much with drastic alterations. As for scene skips, I've not had thoughts on adding more but if anyone has requests for extra ones then let me know; I want to avoid having skip prompts appearing too frequently though as they can kill the story pacing a bit. I might make the prompts toggleable so that they don't get in the way if a player doesn't want them at all.
-) Bosses in materia caves was an idea I pilfered from the Hardcore mod, the issue with putting fights on other materia though is that it would quickly get tiresome having to fight for every single bit of gear the player comes across.
-) I'm fine with people using whatever, so long as they're having fun with it. W-Item does wreck the balancing of item placement a bit, but...it's not like the game is forcing the player to use it. And even if you don't use it, there's save editors so may as well leave it in there and save them the trouble of opening the save file.
-) I forgot that I put in the barrier thing until I was shown it recently by Uprisen and Caleb, I can't really remember the rationale for doing it either; it was one of those careless throwaway changes. I've kind of put myself in a corner with it as well because a few people are speedrunning the mod now and this change is used for a majority of the fights to make them more feasible at low level. I'll probably give Uprisen and others a prototype so they can see if it's possible to do within a reasonable timeframe without it, and if it is then I can give it the heave-ho.
-) With ultimate weapons retaining their formulas and trying not to cut out anything, this was unavoidable in the end because of how super strong some materia can be (Mime for instance). The ultimate weapons can be reined in a bit, but I think effects like Mime are always going to tip the balance a bit too hard. But that being said, it's kind of fun to get overpowered by the end once you've gathered everything up.
***
Thanks for the detailed feedback, bud. I've got some good stuff scripted up already in the final build's arrange mode (tested and working) that'll make it an interesting experience.