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eRonin

Xenoblade Chronicles X - good bye Earth

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I haven't played this but I'm just posting here to say that all the hype surrounding this made me revisit Xenoblade sans X and I'm LOVING IT. Holy cow it is so dense but in just the right way. How did they pack in all those character interactions? The relationship menu and the way it triggers new interactions and quests is insane and puts Oblivion's "living world" to shame. Is this stuff still in X?

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I haven't played this but I'm just posting here to say that all the hype surrounding this made me revisit Xenoblade sans X and I'm LOVING IT. Holy cow it is so dense but in just the right way. How did they pack in all those character interactions? The relationship menu and the way it triggers new interactions and quests is insane and puts Oblivion's "living world" to shame. Is this stuff still in X?

 

Yep! There's still an affinity chart, and talking to different NPCs and doing quests will unlock more quests. There are also way more possible team members; I still haven't met all of them 35 hours into the game.

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That stuff is all kind of still in Cross, but greatly simplified, unfortunately.

 

NPC's don't have routines anymore, there's just a day/night phase change, and where the affinity web in Xenoblade was this big growing thing that was shaped by choices you made in various side quests, such choices do not appear to happen in Cross. You're sort of just filling out the chart as you go. Branching quests might appear further into the game, but as far as i've seen, any choices Cross presents you with only have the affect of providing affinity bonuses with certain immediate party members. (It's a bit of a Dragon Age-esque system.)

 

There's something like close to 20 possible party members though, and they all seem to have their own major side quests.

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Got my Giant Robot the other day! Holy cow, I cannot advise getting it fast enough (the quest shows up after Chapter 6). Tons of missions that were seemingly impossible at the recommended level were clearly designed for skells, namely anything with apricas, tenticulas, or other Big Enemies. Binding is a *crucial* mechanic, and also lets you actively recover fuel in combat. I wouldn't be concerned about Arts using fuel as a result; I've been slamming all the 50/100 fuel skills whenever they become available (they don't charge to secondary levels). I've got one that's a scythe blade which takes out most limbs in one hit right now.

 

This game owns.

 

(also did I immediately buy a better one and then paint it up like Eva-01? you betcha)

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I got my Skell, but I'm still not level 30 so I can't buy a new one yet. Also I went away for holiday and didn't bring my Wii U, so I can't play for a couple of weeks ;-; ;-; ;-;

 

I found this orange-coded sword that I equipped immediately, and it does a crazy amount of damage with its art. It's the first time I've seen anything do 5 digit damage, and it does area damage in a wide arc in front of me too, so it's craaaazy. Binding is neat, but that pilot mode thing...uhhh I still have no idea what it actually does. I read that it's supposed to reset your cooldowns, but it seems that during the shot inside the cockpit, I can't actually use any arts. 

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So i like to take open-world games pretty slow, i'm not one of those people who fast travels everywhere, racing from objective marker to objective marker.

As such, i'm fifty hours into this game, i still don't have a skell, but i understand i'm close since i'm looking for my way into... Chapter 6, i think? and i think my world survey rate was somebody absurdly low number like 10%. I mean, and it's not like i've just been sitting around doing nothing. I think i'm level 24, i have a build i really liked sorted out and have been trying to keep my party up to pace despite how awkward managing more than just a few of them is. I've been doing affinity quests, and i've done so many NPC quests. (Don't worry, i know that most of the ones on the BLADE board are repeatables.)

 

It's just starting to click with me how astronomically enormous this thing Monolith has created is. The main quest path seems relatively short, i totally believe people finished this game in 50 hours, but... That so dramatically undersells how much is going on here.

 

You look at that map and you see five areas with distinct biomes and your brain reads that as "Okay, yeah, grassland area/desert area/jungle area etc." So pretty early on you end up feeling like you've come to a confident understanding of what each area's geography is, and you look at your map again and you see that there's two thirds of whatever given continent you're on that you haven't explored, so you go over in that direction and find radically different terrain upsetting the understanding you had with the game.

 

I mean, and okay, so it's big and filled with diverse terrain, but it must all be pretty empty, right? Except it kind of isn't, the game is this constant deluge of shit being thrown your way. It's impressively populated with things to do.

 

You know, and i'm starting to see quests with choices that actually shift their outcomes, and conversations start popping up that clearly indicate that the affinity web is starting to spiral out in different directions based on how i'm interacting with NPC's.

 

I also love the battle system, i think it perfectly builds on what the first Xenoblade was doing. I kind of wish the premonition thing was still in there in some way, and i'm not sure i understand the overdrive system at all, but on the whole it's a deeper and more active set of mechanics. (Protip: Staggers guarantee that a topple succeeds. It's the remaining vestige of the break/topple/daze system from the first game. Staggers apparently guarantee skell binds too.)

 

I'm also seeing faults.

Some of their online stuff is really cool, but i think the division stuff is kind of broken, right now it massively favors prospectors and now everybody is dog piling in with that faction to get easy salvage tickets, which just exacerbates the issue. The miiverse stuff on the other hand is a total nonstarter. I think the way it's supposed to work is that if you post a message while there's a little prompt on the screen telling you to make a report, it's supposed to file it away and send it out accordingly, but nobody engages with it like that, and even if they did it seems like it would still only send out ad infinitum whatever small pool of messages have some community traction.

 

I... Think i might have had a couple of non-essential NPC's glitch out of existence? I talked to one, got its first response, and before i could go back and chose the second topic, it... Disappeared and has not come back. I've seen NPC's move around after certain lines of dialogue go out, but i don't think that was the case here, i looked around. (It also wasn't the game shifting between the day/night cycle.) As it is, i'm just hoping that when all the city stuff shuffles around with the next story chapter, that will right things. It probably doesn't even matter, outside of potentially interfering with the affinity grid.

 

It does raise a light on the fact that this game only gives you one save slot, which always, always seriously unnerves me in big RPG's. I know the game is going to break in some weird way at some point, give me the tools so that i can at least save scum out of it.

 

THOSE PLOT HOLES THOUGH. It feels like whoever wrote the side quests wasn't entirely aware of what the main story was going to be. There's a lot of side quests of people mourning their comrades fallen to indigens and things like that, when the main story pretty clearly establishes that nobody in NLA can actually die, at least not until that clock tower ticks down.

 

One last thing: Let the game sit on the title screen for a while, there's one hell of an attract mode in there. Come on, you know you want sweeping camera views of the game's various environments.

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Reading that kind of reassures me that I might get into X after I (eventually, some day, maybe a few years from now) finish with XenoChron sans-X.

 

Still playing and loving it. It's still constantly surprising me with little details that make me think whoever was in charge of plotting out the dialog was completely insane. I just got to the Nopon village, wandered around for a bit, did some random helpy quests and some backtracking which eventually landed me back in Colony 9 (the first city). I decided to have another wander around to see if I could trigger any new dialog or unearth any quests I missed, and randomly talked to some unnamed Nopon NPC. Their dialog had actually changed to "oh, so you've been to the Nopon village?" and some small backstory about how they grew up around Homs and had never been there.

 

They actually thought that up and programmed a trigger for a random unnamed NPC that 99.9% of players would never bother to interact with again. I don't know if it has more to do with my expectations of games in general or just of JRPGs, but that blows my fucking mind.

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THOSE PLOT HOLES THOUGH. It feels like whoever wrote the side quests wasn't entirely aware of what the main story was going to be. There's a lot of side quests of people mourning their comrades fallen to indigens and things like that, when the main story pretty clearly establishes that nobody in NLA can actually die, at least not until that clock tower ticks down.

 

I think it's also mentioned that they only have a set number of mimeosome parts to revive people with, so if someone is well and truly blown up or eaten, they can't be rezzed until the Lifehold is found. There's a mention that if they are strong enough, people can transfer their consciousness to a new mim, and my gut tells me that's absolutely going to happen to the player character, but it's not happening to Rando Partner Buddy. Note also that a lot of the general populace has kind of resigned themselves to the idea that the Lifehold is not gonna be found. Remember also that only a select few know that the countdown is for Super Death.

 

Divisions are a horseshit idea because it's so biased towards Pathfinders and Curators (fun fact: Curators get 5 points per collectible! Get your skell, become a car, and go to town!). I rolled Reclaimer because that seems like the Canon Thing To Do and I'm a sucker for stuff like that, and my BLADE level has ground to a halt since I can't level up my Field Skills enough to do my actual task. I'm sitting a 4 mech/2 bio/3 arch and 80% of what I come across now is tier 3 Bio or tier 4 Arch. Combine that with the fact that I pull in almost no tickets, and some of the "collect x rare drops from y enemy" can get really tedious. I haven't swapped to Curator yet, but I'm thinking about it.

 

Also, I think the Skell Insurance is borked. The game claims that if you nail a perfect on the Soul Challenge after your Skell explodes, it doesn't eat an insurance ticket, and you'll keep your insurance level intact. After two perfects, I can confirm it *sure as hell does* and 400k later I'm now infinitely more cautious. Falling off the cliff in Oblivia also counts as losing your skell so uh, don't try to jump to that island just yet.

 

Also, I can confirm that the city reshuffles and changes after every story chapter. It also adds a whole bunch of affinity quests and other random quests around the city, which are Choice for raising affinity levels for party members you would otherwise never touch (HEY BOZE). You only need to have them in the party for the last section of the quest to get the largest chunk upon completion. I tend to add a bunch of randoms (H.B., Boze, Gwin) to my party before hitting up the board, checking all the quests, accepting any that I already have the collectibles for, writing down the others, not taking them, getting Good Party Members, and then repeating the process.

 

On a related affinity note, has anyone figured out how to trigger Heart To Hearts? I have both Elma and Lin's starters sitting in their respective places, with the game telling me the times and everything, and I cannot for the life of me get them to trigger.

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The character you want to have a heart to heart with needs to NOT be in the party, which goes completely against how H2H's worked in Xenoblade Wii. I have Lin and Elma with me 90% of the time so I haven't done any of their H2H's. I randomly did one with Gwin while I was running around the hangar or just outside BLADE Tower. I know it's been said a million times but oh boy the way parties work in this game blows and could really use some tweaking.

 

Also, are you sure you're getting a perfect? I think it needs to be perfect and not merely "good", otherwise it still eats up a ticket. I know you say you got the perfect but I don't know why else it would be doing that. I nailed a perfect and found my skell waiting for me in my barracks with 3 tickets remaining.

 

I haven't been able to play the game for almost a week now, I'm subsisting on my friends discussing the game and this thread =P please upload any cool screenshots you happen to take =D

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I've gotten the perfects (big ol' PERFECT on the screen with audio cue and all) and had no luck! Maybe the game just hates me :(

 

And yeah, the party system is *hot-ass garbage* and would be easily improved by something as simple as an additional kiosk option (Party Management?) in the Barracks. If everyone was in one area I'd be less mad, but so far I've got Alexa in the Industrial District, Phog in Commercial, Boze and H.B. in Residential, L, Lao, Gwin, and Irina in Admin, and then Elma and Lin in the Barracks.

 

That's a lot of goddamn running around if I'm trying to level up affinities, and it's made even more frustrating by the fact that experience doesn't carry to non-party members. Nothing like having to put someone in your party for a mission and they're level 18 and can't equip any of the gear you have!

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That's a lot of goddamn running around if I'm trying to level up affinities, and it's made even more frustrating by the fact that experience doesn't carry to non-party members. Nothing like having to put someone in your party for a mission and they're level 18 and can't equip any of the gear you have!

 

Oh noooooooo that's the worst. Didn't RPGs solve that problem 10+ years ago?

 

Wasn't it solved in the fucking first game?

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You'd think!

It's not heinously awful, as I tend to just hop in the ol' Giant Robot, throw a level 15 helm with EXP Boost IV that I keep around expressly for this purpose and go wreck shop on level 35s (my MC is 38 right now). Bonus points if I have some quests to grind out for "Kill X Enemy" at the time.

 

That said, it's still back asswards and I wish I could just get on with it. Affinity not carrying over makes 100% sense and should be that way. EXP not carrying over is The Past.

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I've been seeing some discussion around the game regarding some potentially game breaking issues. I guess there's a few affinity quests in particular that can be especially problematic, but it doesn't sound like there's any consistent causes or solutions, and it sounds like it can actually happen almost anywhere in the game. It seems like the game just sometimes fails to properly load in quest triggers. The advice i've seen going around is simply to save before starting an affinity quest and to then not save again until it's done. (So you can save scum out if there's an issue.) If a normal/basic quest breaks, it's an annoyance. If an affinity or story quest breaks, it ends your game. The issues sound fairly rare, at least, and apparently fast-traveling away and back to an area can right things some times. (Completely resetting the game apparently sometimes does the trick too for people who had already saved past a point of no return.) It sounds like it's more of an issue with the way the game streams in content than any actual quest scripting. (There also seem to be a fair number of quests with some really obtuse conditions that are causing people to freak out, but are not broken, just confusing.)

 

It is terrible for long RPG's to give you only one save slot.

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So far I've come across two "riddle missions," which I think are the cause of some freak outs. My other Big Frustration is that some board quests will get markers, and others with essentially the same goal will not.

 

Hunt 5 Merciful Dilus in Noctilum, for example, will give you an arrow pointing towards where they tend to spawn. They're easy to find (in the water right at the entrance from Primordia), so this isn't a huge issue, but it's nice, especially for some more random enemies (Spear Insidias, which sit up on a ledge close to a story mission area I barely go to). However if I run "collect 5 cloudy eyeballs from Merciful Dilus in Noctilum," I get zip shit even though I'm going to the exact same place. This is *garbage*, and made worse by the fact that some tyrants only spawn under certain bizarre conditions, so you spend fifteen goddamn minutes in a yellow zone trying to get Edgardo, the Carefree to spawn before you give up.

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One more week until I get back to Sydney and can start playing again, hurray. I'm so woefully underleveled compared to my friends now; our dreams of doing 4-player squad missions might go awry with the level differences. The level capping for those missions don't seem to matter when people in Skells with rare weapons can just wreck everything of any level anyway.

 

So how's everyone doing in the game? Anyone beaten the final boss here?

 

Speaking of bosses, if anyone doesn't mind, could you check the worldwide stats for Volkampf, the Pursuer for me? Just curious about those numbers since, being the only tyrant required to kill (and quite early too), it's somewhat indicative of how many players there are now.

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I took a break because Saints Row IV Re-Elected was $10 during a PSN Flash Sale and it's one of my favorite games ever.

 

Gonna pick it back up after New Year's, I think. I got a little overwhelmed post Chapter 8, since a lot of new things open up. My compulsion to complete *as much as possible before doing main story* took a toll as well, since a party of level 30 Skells make it possible to truck enemies way above your level. I had a successful kill on Dieter, the Epicure (a level 39 Grex that tends to get Up In Your Business during the Welcome Back, Conner mission at the beginning of the game) when I was level 34 or something, and that... that should not be allowed.

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I sort of took a break from Cross until i had more uninterrupted time to play it outside of the holiday rush, so i'm still in the mid twenties level-wise, and still without a Skell.

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Okay so here's the multiplayer low-down:

 

  • when you start the game connected to the internet, the game always asks you to join either a lifehold squad (for people who want to ignore MP) or conquest squad (for people focused on MP), or join a friend's squad
  • these squads are 32-person squads of people playing at the same time, but not together in the same world
  • about once an hour, each squad is given 5 generic and random "squad tasks" with a 50 minute time limit, that are basically kill or collect X enemies/things, which is shared across all 32 players
  • completing tasks gives you reward tickets which you can spend to get normal monster loot drops
  • completing tasks also unlocks "squad missions", which are 4-player missions that are level-locked (if you are higher level, you will be scaled down), where you can team up with 3 other players from your squad to play together simultaneously; the more tasks are completed, the more missions are available
  • squad missions put you into a small arena which is a subset of the map, where you are given a number of targets to kill or collect
  • squad missions reward you with experience, money, loot drops, etc. some of which can only be found through squad missions
  • there are also super-bosses named "Global Nemesis" that appear at certain intervals (don't require squad tasks to be completed), which respawns continually until it runs out of respawn points. The number of respawn points is shared across all players (not sure if it's separated between NTSC/PAL though)

They're pretty fun, especially the higher level missions against strong enemies where you have to actually work together, though the low level missions are just pushovers. I haven't fought against a global nemesis yet, they kinda need at least a level 30 skell to fight against. Besides this, other players' characters will appear as NPCs in your single-player game, where you can talk to them to recruit them for 30 minutes. You can also use the BLADE scout console to search for players to scout. Experience they gain from being recruited is transferred to them at the end. 

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Can anyone explain briefly how the multiplayer system works. I have no clue, and it's apparently quite good.

 

First, you have to be a ways into the game, a few chapters deep. When the game starts asking you to join a squad when you boot up, you know you're in far enough. (It happens around chapter 4, i believe?)

 

So...

Okay, there's a few different systems to talk about.

1 - Miiverse integration - It's junk, turn it off. It might be the worst Miiverse integration in a shipping Nintendo game.

2 - Scouts - So either from the hub or actually out in the field you can recruit AI versions of other players into your squad as party members, complete with their own soul voice setups and class configurations. Use them to beat tough bosses or whatever, then go release them at the hub. The player whose scout it was will be notified that their scout was deemed useful and will be rewarded appropriately. It's quite a bit like pawn system from Dragon's Dogma, minus the whole "learning" thing the pawns did.

 

3 - Divisions - In a lot of different ways, this feels like a PVE take on the covenants idea from Dark Souls. You perform certain actions in the game to earn points for your division, and each day based on the results of this the division members can claim rewards from the barracks. It's a neat idea, but it's massively imbalanced in favor of certain divisions and seriously needs some patching. There's also something about being passively buffed by players in other divisions who, in their own instance of the game, are in the same region as you. You can also get time-limited versions of those buffs from scouts you find in the field. Honestly, I don't really understand the buffs that well. The bar for it sits below the radar map, but i don't really understand how to read it. Sometimes it shows numbers, sometimes icons are gold, i have no idea what's going on. (Keep in mind, you only get passive/active buffs from these scenarios, you do not get a buff simply for being in a division.)

 

4 - Squads - This is the big one.

So when you start the game you'll be asked to join a squad that is either solo or MP-centric, or to join a friend's squad. If you just want to play the game and don't want to be bugged with invites and stuff, choose the solo squads. (Lifehold squads.)

 

So you're now passively connected to 31 other players and you have a whole lot of different options available. First off, i said turn off the miiverse stuff, but leave the social notifications on so you can see when people are trying to invite you to co-op or trade items. Probably turn off squad achievement notifications though, those never stop.

 

So first step: Squad tasks will show up and give you a list of things to go kill in your solo instance. As those tasks are completed, co-op missions will open up in the barracks. They disappear when the session time limit is up though, so go play them. This will be a dead end if you're playing in a lifehold squad where everybody is just solo questing, because you'll need to find people to join your co-op missions. (Friends can join, of course.)

 

As people complete these actual real multiplayer co-op quests, which are quite enjoyable in and of themselves, a global meter fills up for a global raid boss that everybody can contribute to fighting. (The one fight that has happened, i couldn't join. You need blade medals and... I have no idea how to earn them, i haven't actually gotten any from co-op quests i've done, i don't know what's up.)

 

Also, i mentioned above that there's trading, and there is. You can only trade from fight rewards though, it's an option on the resolution screen. Get something you don't want, give it to somebody else. Seems kind of dumb to me.

 

So yeah. Lots of weird online stuff happening in Cross. Some of it's really cool, some of it doesn't really pan out.

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Ok I get it, it still sounds pretty complex though. I've just joined Lifehold squad every time, not really knowing what I'm doing.

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I should mention that the squad missions are accessible through the console at the back of the barracks. Griddle, I think I've got you added on Wii U already, so let's hit up a mission together sometime.

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Speaking of bosses, if anyone doesn't mind, could you check the worldwide stats for Volkampf, the Pursuer for me? Just curious about those numbers since, being the only tyrant required to kill (and quite early too), it's somewhat indicative of how many players there are now.

 

This is a bit of a delayed response, but i looked at the numbers for a few of the early tyrants and it seems to imply that around a quarter of a million people are playing Cross. (Now, that's for North America. I don't think that includes Japanese players, i think they must be on their own servers, but i do think Europe is sharing servers with NA.)

 

Ok I get it, it still sounds pretty complex though. I've just joined Lifehold squad every time, not really knowing what I'm doing.

 

I think this is a big problem a lot of games are having in the last few years, big ambitious online systems that completely fail to engage players because they're poorly understood.

 

I am all for games not hand-holding players, but i think online systems should be an exception to that. Those should be the things that are laboriously explained in detail, because people being able to use those systems depends on lots of other people also understanding and using them.

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Just skimmed these posts but cool to see some enthusiasm for this. It's joint top on my to-get list. I've still got a couple of hours left of GB's mammoth goty 'casts, but so far there seems to be absolutely zero Xenoblade talk, like they've forgotten it. They've discussed EVERYTHING in the final debate, so it's weird that this slipped through the net.

Next week I'm planning on getting Xenoblade or Splatoon. I'm leaning towards Splatoon because I feel like the multiplayer focus is more time-sensitive than this. If I didn't get to this until next year, would the play experience differ at all? Are they changing it on the fly a la Dark Souls 2 or does the multiplayer rely on having a super active player base?

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Not at all. I'm playing this purely single-player and having a great time, so I think a dwindling player base won't really hurt it in the long run. Splatoon is definitely a Do It Now game (and also the better one of the two >_>).

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