X's Big, Very tl;dr Remake Thoughts & Development Analysis (Here be Spoilers)

[Knights of the Round]

There are fights I struggled with that I shouldn't have, and I'm afraid of hard mode, so I definitely don't think I'm great at this game, but I seriously don't understand what so many people struggled with on Motorball. All of his moves are so obviously telegraphed. It just felt like an action movie. Attack wheels, swerve away when he lifts the wheels up or fire shows up in the exhaust pipes, swerve back in and resume the attack, don't hit the wheels that glow, slam on the brakes when he starts charging the big blast, when he pulls ahead use the long range attack, when he's staggered use spin attack?

I found Roche WAY harder, I finished that fight with like 25% health. I barely took damage against Motorball.

I really don’t get it either and think some are missing the forest for the trees.

The fight against him felt very similar to the other bike sequences in the game.. felt very similar to the Roche fight in Ch. 4. Mechanics felt identical except for him never going into stagger.

The controls also felt fine. I just had to compensate for the side camera angle where your brain is normally telling you to go up/down. Once I got used to it it worked well and, I believe, worked the same as it did in the OG.

I don’t get the argument about strategy or mechanics for fighting bosses needing to stay consistent from end to end, either. Personally, I enjoy curveballs that will mix things up a bit. Gameplay can become stagnant, otherwise.

In fact - if you’re going to play through a Nomura game you should probably check your expectations at the door and expect some curveballs.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

Eligor is one fight that left me feeling "Well I won, but it took me such a ridiculous amount of time, there must've been some mechanic I wasn't getting." I've seen others on Discord express similiar thoughts.

Ok! I'll definitely take some time tomorrow & Friday and see if I can go replay that fight & watch some replays of it online to do a proper breakdown of it.

I think that in addition to that one, I'm also gonna try to break down the amazing extra final battle in the story that you do in the Corneo Coliseum – because I think that while it's extremely challenging, that fight in particular is a brilliant example of a near-perfect execution of everything the game has to offer at that point, and something that is absolutely bursting at the seams with polish from literally every department – specifically where the things that I've been covering are deeply lacking it.

Also, before I dive into this, I just wanted to cover these responses really quickly:

@ForceStealer – It's likely just a matter of camera controls (I am very curious if you use Inverted Y-Axis or not) – and me having... almost zero experience with that type of gameplay, because I quite honestly don't find it fun at all, so I don't play games like that. For reference: The only games I own that have any driving simulation in them at all are Arkham City – which is 9 years old and whose Batmobile sections I utterly loathed, & Final Fantasy XV – where I literally never drove the Regalia manually at all outside of the one time that I needed to fly it in order to get over to and back from the Pitioss bonus dungeon.

The main point I'm making is not just about me personally struggling with that boss fight though. That's just the biggest example that I ran into that is representative of a point of frustration connected to drastically reduced the level of polish that the game has throughout those final chapters, which itself is a result of development issues that I spoke about earlier. When I went back and replayed Chapter 18, I beat M.O.T.O.R. in one go – but I still finished the fight at about 25% health.

@Knights of the Round – Continually talking about just the issues with M.O.T.O.R. is missing the forest for the trees of the actual point that I've been making in this thread about the entire development cycle of the game itself at the point where it was released. Also, this is extremely different than a game "throwing curveballs" since suddenly challenging the player is good – if it is following along the throughline of what you're attempting to teach the player with all of the bosses. Making something that actually works in a game as a "curveball" takes an insane amount of intentional planning & work, because failing to execute that sudden surprise correctly just means that your game is either broken or unfair because it's failing to give the player the adequate information they need according to whatever system is established to be able to do that. I think that this new post and my last post which responded directly to your earlier comment should definitely clear all of that up to make my main point overwhelmingly clear.



Also, thanks to everyone who's indulged me with actually reading all of this stuff so far <4


Today, I wanted to cover a couple follow-ups to what I talked about yesterday to expand the context even more:

First is that I want to cover what those failed boss fights are there to do. I want to get into why their current designs are so limited to the too-sharp or too-simple things that they have in place, as well as how those elements are SUPPOSED to show up in a completed version, as well as how they will build up to the player's understanding of the battle system into and through the Final Chapter. This should help get an idea on why what exists is the way it is, and what I mean when I'm talking about the core design around gameplay progression and execution for moving players through the story. This is sort of the groundwork for the main topic I want to hit on today, and I'll even include a brief mention of the boss who I didn't include the other day, because...

The second thing that I want to discuss is Red XIII as a playable character & cover the specifics around The Drum, because that is the big thing that stands out to me as the specific feature that got cut from the initial release. It's why I also think that all of the rest of the game's interactions and bosses from that point on are heavily dependent on that work being completed first, and this is why so much of things as soon as he shows up is only partially developed, instead of being deeply polished and refined. I also replayed the whole section to grab video of what I'm talking about to hopefully make things easier to follow if anyone wants to reference things and less of just the text wall that I'm gonna be starting out with.

SO, without further dudes

Spoiler: What's Up With Those Unpolished Boss Fights in the End Chapters!?

Just to make sure that I mention this first: M.O.T.O.R. has already had its tl;dr, & it's not connected to the game's main combat system. There's no reason to go over it here, as there's nothing else to add outside of the tl;dr I have already written about it. There's no indication that there is a true Boss Battle against it after the minigame, so I'll just leave this one alone as the thing that needs polish all on its own.

What I talked about in my last post is gonna connect to all of this here. I previously talked about why those fights don't work and how they're broken experiences, but I haven't talked about how they're meant to work & why they're designed this way at this stage of development. Additionally, I think that when I start breaking this down, it'll become a lot more clear why something like Boss Fight gameplay progression is nearly impossible to leapfrog, and you feel all of the issues are just growing and compounding upon each other – because they are. Each of these fights can't focus on the lessons that they're supposed to teach the player, and then the next fight can't be built off of that properly because what came before doesn't have a solid enough base. They're all currently in a testing state that's just been made playable, which means that they're compounding the lack of being refined from what all the other fights before them do, as well as not standing up to what came before.

This is again COMPLETELY different from both Hard Mode & VR Fights, where because of the multiplier added to EXP & AP in post-game, you just get to instantly establish that your balance scenario is for max player level & with unlimited attempts. You can play harder at expecting them to adjust their strategies as much to hard counter the encounters as possible through trial-and-error, rather than still being in the process of teaching the player. Game Overs are open and welcome here, and the hard ceiling exists, so these fights are way easier to balance for challenging difficulty.


So, what's supposed to be getting taught in those fights, why are they teaching it, and why doesn't it pan out?

Spoiler: H0512

This fight is pretty much completed in comparisons to the ones that are gonna follow, but the finishing polish just isn't in place yet. The phase change animations emphasize that the main thing that's happening that the player needs to focus on is H0512 is both respawning and changing the attacks & forms that its H0512-OPT Minions show up in. This is the first fight where I ran into normal bugs, and noted the issue with the polish on the in-game storytelling.

It's the first introduction to Bosses & Minions that we get repeated later on, and there's just a ton of emphasis that could be added by completing some character dialogue interactions. What's meant to introduce you to is teaching the player to be ready for Bosses with Minions that you're meant to learn a specific cadence to. You should be learning to balance prioritizing against the minions until they're down, and then going up against the Main Boss. Additionally, having Minions that change their attack strategies in a way that directly correspond to the combat phase of the Main Boss is the big part of this fight.

This Boss & Minions is setting the player up for the Chapter 18 "Mega Boss & Mini Bosses" fight against Whisper Harbinger and its minions Rubrum, Viridi, & Croceo. There are other fights that reinforce those things, but specifically this one is about how Rubrum, Viridi, & Croceo would come back multiple times, but every time they regenerated, they would also have different attacks & combat interactions based on the which Boss HP phase the player had reduced Harbinger to – and eventually even how they transform entirely in order to fuse into Whisper Bahamut.

Spoiler: Swordipede:

Now, I'll be getting to the brunt of this when I break down the gaps in The Drum in detail in the next section, but the key here is that your party is split up. You cutscene swap from one party to the other when specific boss phase events get triggered during the fight. This is here to introduce the concept of starting a boss fight with one team, hitting a key cutscene, and that cutscene swapping control over to another party. Additionally, this is also to help give you an idea of how Red XIII fights against an opponent at range, both on a large open battlefield, as well as on a small contained battlefield.

This is here to introduce the mechanic that's SUPPOSED to be a key gameplay element in fighting Whisper Harbinger, Rubrum, Viridi, & Croceo. One party is designated to actually fighting Harbinger when it's in a weakened state from a small platform of road. The other is there to fight against Rubrum, Viridi, & Croceo until they can defeat one of them to create an opening for the other team to attack on a much larger arena. Beating Rubrum, Viridi, & Croceo should trigger a cutscene that swaps over to your other party who're located in a different section waiting to attack Harbinger when it become vulnerable, and then the damage to that triggers the flashbacks that pass control back to the other party. This is why when you finish them all off, the final blow against Harbinger doesn't die to a cutscene of Barret & Red XIII hitting it – it is still designed to be dealt by the player, but through their other party who's in position to attack it directly – rather than just being felled by a slow, anticlimactic magical orb from Aerith.

There's a ton more of this that I'll discuss when looking at The Drum, and everything that leads up to this fight.

Spoiler: Jenova Dreamweaver:

While the tentacles are an expansion of H0512's like Bosses with Minions part II, this one throws in a slightly different component to the mix, that we're going to see loosely repeated with The Arsenal. The real lesson here is supposed to be how to switch combat cadence from attacking the Boss when it's vulnerable, and to change context to attacking the Minions when the boss makes itself invincible.

This is the second part of the lesson for the penultimate boss fight in Chapter 18 against the Whispers. This is the combat cadence that is going to take place with the Whisper Harbinger. Rubrum, Viridi, & Croceo are its 3 Minions, and the back-and-forth flow of the fight being dictated based on player combat choices against multiple minion opponents and then context switching to the main boss is setting up the gameplay lessons for that fight on a smaller scale.

Additionally, given the way that the game is currently set up – you don't have two separate parties at this point because Barret is seemingly dead. However... I think that this is meant to also introduce the initial element where you're going to have to fight with a party that's being determined by passive "friendship" choices that you've made earlier in the game – which you see happening at Destiny's Crossroads constantly.

That being said, it's a little tough to say how it should work, because it's hard to tell exactly where the seams are. Suffice to say that I feel like there's a possibility that there alternative Destiny-averted character death options to just Barret's in this scene, the same way we had alternate character dialogue options in Chapter 14. This would also mean that with Red XIII as a playable character, you'd only have access to a true party of three, and instead of him showing up as a very passive "Guest" combatant one of the others would be tending to the "dead" character. This would leave you to fight against Jenova Dreamweaver with the other two. This is in place, so that they can do a bunch of initial practical tests on how the player reacts to this fight, and how they adjust initial predictive data with their party going into Destiny's Crossroads, so that it can take that information and expand off of it when the player goes about creating two different parties to have one fight against Whisper Harbinger and the other to go up against Rubrum, Viridi, & Croceo. All of this data would be coming together hereto try and refine the predictions about the player's character choices to help determine who should be showing up to help during the phases of the Sephiroth fight.

It's hard to say this for certain before really getting a lot deeper into the specifics of of just how unfinished a ton of things are in The Drum is in its current state, which is why I'm also gonna cover that today. It's worth noting just how limited All of the dialogue in Jenova's fight is just very limited given what an important moment it is in the game. The fight intro dialogue is ONLY between Tifa & Red XIII – despite the fact that Aerith is present as well. This makes it seem like the combat is designed for Cloud+2, and the dialogue scene are there to match – especially with how the characters basically don't even discuss anything about it at all afterwards. This is because I think that this fight is where a lot of character dialogue interactions in the primary scenes for it should be operating off of an absolute metric shitton of character choice data based on the player's actions regarding certain characters, and they're only following a smaller path of the ones that the game basically has to choose for you. There's just SO MUCH data that should be getting filled out in The Drum that the game literally doesn't have in its current state, which is why This data-dependent limitation issue gets further exacerbated in the RNG for both the Whisper & Sephiroth battles.

Spoiler: Rufus:

Rufus is pretty straightforward. The fight is designed to start you out with the now-familiar Minion & Main Boss setup. Now it's just going to reinforce that interplay through a slightly different mechanic that involve more specific punishments if you try to prioritize targets out of order as a way of just ensuring that it's getting the player's mindset centered in on that interaction. That lesson's already been taught, so it's just here to keep that interaction fresh & repeated.

The battle is then also meant to focus on what a solo battle with Cloud looks like. He's going to start out several key moments in Destiny's Crossroads while he's alone, so preparing the player with a 1:1 fight this way is explicitly for that. While the other fights have been something to prepare the player for the Whisper Bosses, Rufus is more focused on what Sephiroth is going to be like.

The final counter-state interactions I think are meant to develop the player's skills around an attack, defend, parry, counterattack cadence that involves more closely paying attention to your opponent. The issue here is that this lesson is currently VERY different from the combat in the rest of the game, and it's extremely hard. I think that this is a result of it being still in a pretty early stage of development still. This being still in early development is why I think that the Assess dialogue is so vague about how to deal with it – but more specifically, this is a mechanic that Sephiroth just flat out doesn't actually use.

Clearly, what you want between the Sephiroth & Cloud 1v1 fights is something that looks like swordplay between them. This is also why Cloud gets the Twin Stinger in Chapter 17, and it comes with the ATB Ability Counterstance. This is supposed to be a key part of what the tense back-and-forth of one of the opening Phase section of the Sephiroth fight is supposed to look like before you have an ally who joins you. Before Sephiroth opens up his wing, this is just the SOLDIER vs. Ex-SOLDIER raw combat. For these types of much harder-counters to work, you have to limit the interactions to be explicitly between one enemy and a single player.

The issue is that in the current version of Chapter 18, there's no real moment to let the player prepare for that after coming directly off of the Whisper Harbinger battle. Additionally, the Rufus fight is just too restrictive and sharp in its current state to expect most players to be able to excel at it enough to repeat it for Cloud's solo opening of the Sephiroth's fight. Again, boss fights that are story-specific are meant to be ones that push you as close to a Game Over as possible without giving you one, but ESPECIALLY when it comes to the Final Boss. Sephiroth knows Cloud through several terrain transitions, which are like how he was getting knocked around by Rufus, so it matches the prepared animation, but not the combat itself.

The fact that it isn't used here is what further reinforces my stance that while the Rufus combat is very possible to learn and master, from the developers stance, it's not good enough in how it's currently configured to be reused on a more difficult boss.

Spoiler: The Arsenal

This Boss starts off with Three Minions protecting the large main body from damage – and I hope that by now the reason for this is overwhelmingly clear. So, since this boss clearly isn't here to re-teach us THAT lesson, what is it here to do?

This boss is here to teach about using cover, making ranged attacks during openings to prioritize breaking boss limbs, fighting on a transforming battlefield, and most importantly – doing this without having Cloud in your party. The Arsenal makes a slight callback to the fight with the Crab Warden, who is the other large enemy boss with this same body & limb configuration, who we fought using shipping containers as cover, and who weaponized the rails – so the overall approach will already be familiar.

This Boss is one that brings back individually breakable limbs AND Minions. Starting out with the shielding Minions, and then breaking Limbs to expose a weak spot is a core component of what this fight is meant to be teaching the player. These are all returning lessons that it's are just serving as a refresh for. The real difference is the way that The Arsenal clears out the battlefield around it by blowing up pillars as the fight progresses, and finally narrowing down the fight onto a single tiny platform & destroying the last piece of cover at the crescendo of the fight to really hammer in the sense that the end has to be a huge give-it-everything-you've-got last ditch assault.

This fight is supposed to be the setup for your team of two who are going to be following up attacks directly against Whisper Harbinger. We see from the few completed animations that Whisper Harbinger does have individual body parts that break and also regenerate. Additionally, and it also has a massive glowing heart at its core, which is clearly the weak point. On top of that, there are only a couple of existing traversal sections – which are done while player combat is active. One of them is in a pipe where the Whisper Harbinger's arm blocks the path, which is showing an the earliest stages of the Whisper Harbinger destroying terrain that the player is using.

All of the things that I covered from the previous Boss Fights leading into this one is what really indicates that Whisper Harbinger itself is actually supposed to be its own full Boss Fight, where you switch from the Primary Party of Three who are fighting Rubrum, Viridi, & Croceo and transition over to the Secondary Party of Two to deal damage to Harbinger, rather than it just taking damage synergistically from the main party attacking the others while they're staggered. This is also why in the cut scenes, we see Red XIII & Barret actually standing on a wide section of road that's open and designed for them to maneuver on, and using their own Limit Breaks – rather than just being placed on purely cinematic bit of rubble and for those attacks to be separate cut scenes like the memory flashes. This is also why the final hit of them shooting it in its core still ensures that it has a small amount of remaining HP and that control passes back to the player for the last few hits. The way Whisper Harbinger collapses with its vulnerable core exposed is meant to be more familiar to the player from having spent time attacking it directly through the other party – but again, nearly all of the elements here are incomplete.

Given that the Square Menu option is already in place I think that it's probably likely that having Aerith, Barret, & Red XIII as a team of three is the intention here. We already know that Aerith is ranged, and this battle would also help us get a better, scripted understanding of Red XIII's Limit Break and abilities as a ranged fighter (which is why he's paired with Barret during the current Whisper Harbinger fight). This also means that Tifa is always the one to go back and save Cloud post-Rufus, but also that the battle prep for choosing your own Ranged-focused team of two that you'll need later, you have a better understanding of Red XIII's combat options.

Spoiler: Whisper Harbinger:

The massive Boss with Mini Bosses is supposed to be an active enemy that is putting you in danger. It's supposed to be wrecking the road you're on, and forcing you to find the others in a chaotic battlefield, while holding off against the constantly regenerating Rubrum, Viridi, & Croceo. The Whisper Harbinger isn't ever meant to take damage directly from them when they're staggered. You're meant to have to slowly regroup while holding off against them, until all 5 of you are together, and then you're supposed to divide on your own into two separate teams – one to take down Rubrum, Viridi, & Croceo and create an opening so that Whisper Harbinger is temporarily vulnerable, and the other to attack and break its individual sections of armor while it's still in a vulnerable state until its weakened with its core exposed.

This fully realized two-party split-up combat of the final battle against the Whisper Harbinger is meant to be a culmination of all of these previous elements of the bosses that came before it. On top of that, it is also designed to work feel a micro-version of the original game's Bizarro Sephiroth fight, where you get to use both teams to participate in one ongoing large scale combat against a massive enemy. The reason for that is not just to have another echo of the events of Destiny's Crossroads seeming even more like it's an echo of the original game's final two bosses, but also for the developers to test out what is essentially a brand new approach to handling fighting mechanics for the sequel, so that they can do much larger boss battles that feel like they involve the entire cast of characters – while still maintaining the tight mechanics of three-person-teams.

We know that engaging in combat against enemies this size is also something to help the developers start to tackle some of the challenges associated with things that we know are going to be coming up in the sequels, like the Weapon fights. Testing these things with the Penultimate boss in Remake would mean that they not only feel fun, but also that when the player eventually gets to do these types of battles in Remake's sequels – no matter how many other things get updated with the inclusion of new characters, players will already have an idea of what the huge boss battles can look like. It's meant to be a tease of the sorts of things to look forward to where you can get player-specific information about who each player prefers, without spending massive development time on developing characters that are going unused, or forcing the players to not have access to the characters that they actually want any more often than is necessary. The number of three-person configurations is MASSIVE on a modern game, and by the time you have the whole team together, you want the game's big cinematic fights to feel like Advent Children's battle against Bahamut SIN with everybody working together, but without that feeling totally unwieldy.

Everything about the build up of design through the other bosses culminating with this fight is intended to help them get important feedback for what players think about when used with everything already present in the current combat system, really early in the development cycle of what they're doing for the sequel. Lastly, this section being an intentionally divided party is one last data check for the game's system for who it's going to have dive in to join Cloud in the fight against Sephiroth.


What that fight currently is represents the absolute bare minimum of data that the team was able to get together into a functioning and technically playable state, because of the issues I mentioned earlier with the release date, and them needing to make a public statement about the game releasing with Red XIII still only complete enough to be used as a guest character – which we've seen happen in Final Fantasy XV. This happens because you have to make PR and marketing adjustments to sell the game, and you know that if there are issues, you can keep the game alive long after the initial release if you handle that well. The issues that I covered with the boss battles in my previous post are all only painful because those fights aren't polished and they're inconsistent with how good something feels when it's in the stage of development that the entire rest of the game is in.

THIS IDEAL VERSION that I'm talking about is very clearly what the developers were going for. This is what they planned and laid out. It's building up on carefully crafted execution of every boss fight before it. It thematically echoes the original game. It's giving them all sorts of player-specific data that they can actively use to help shape Remake's monumentally ambitious sequel. What I'm talking about here is the kind of thing that we'd expect to see from a game like Remake that actually had all of the polish needed to finish everything from the end of Chapter 16 onward. That is in no way representative of what exists in the game as-is.

And it's not just something that's apparent with the Boss fights either, but I'll get to that in just a moment. At this point, there is enough information for me to reinforce my thoughts:

Spoiler: This is why I am so deeply certain of two things:

First: That Red XIII is going to be released as a playable character in the future as a piece of DLC. Without having all five party members as individually player-controllable characters, none of these mechanics I'm talking about for Whisper Harbinger will work, because you don't have the ability to actually form two different teams until that's completed.

Second: The DLC that's released along with Red XIII as a playable character will also be updating all of the final two chapters of the game along with it. Having all five characters playable is what gives them all of the important information about player teams, similar to the behind-the-scenes choices that get you alternate conversations in Chapter 14. All of this data about the version of the Boss battles that represents the actual peak of the design of their combat system, the statistics of player choice with individual characters, how well concurrent multi-team battles against gigantic enemies work, and giving players another reason to go back and revisit the ending of the game, are all directly related to things that they need to have in order build in the sequel. Right now, this work is literally the same as them doing work on the next game. This is why it's so obvious that it was initially designed to give them that information, and that the version exists now is still very incomplete from the end goal that they had in mind that they're working towards.

So, with all of that in mind, we have to look at the starting section of the chapter where things for the development team went from them spending all of the time they needed to get everything just right, and when they had to suddenly shift into the "just get it working" state of development. This is all centered around Red XIII, and now I'm gonna talk about QA things outside of boss battles that also all connect to these things. Since I played it again a few hours ago, you'll get videos to break up the wall of tl;dr you just finished and the one you're about to dive into, so it's finally time:

Spoiler: Let's Talk About the Introduction of Red XIII & The Drum

I broke my videos down into sections, and while they mostly run chronologically, they will skip through things later on as the important points get made, and lots of the the later things are just repeated examples of things that have happened already and don't need to be repeated.

Spoiler: The Drum 01 – The Start of Chapter 17

So, after the soft lock bug in the Vents & the audio bug with H0512, I'm on alert for weird things that don't feel fully QA'd, which brings us to the start of Chapter 17

As you stand up and the player is given control – Barret & Tifa both leave the active party. You're standing in a room with all 4 characters sitting around looking at you with a wide space for you to walk between them, but only Aerith has a Triangle-prompted dialogue. That's... very strange, but there's a chest here so at least there's a reason for you to be moving around rather than just transitioning directly into her exposition. The other thing is that the doorway here is soft-blocked, but doesn't trigger the "blocked" icon warning, but it pushes Cloud back so that you have to walk backwards away from it. That's pretty strange as well. If you poke around, you'll discover that all four characters in this room have two unique lines of dialogue for Cloud – and that's a huge red flag.

Throughout the game, we have been taught that player conversation where Cloud and another character are speaking directly to one another happens by pressing Triangle to initiate a conversation directly from that other character. Other lines of dialogue can get prompted via proximity, but these are used in two general cases – when there are NPCs that you're listening to nearby having a conversation that's not directly to you, or when it's part of a trigger that's encouraging the player to stay on the current track which can be done either passively or actively. All of these rules and mechanics are introduced to the player in the Opening Bombing mission:

• All dialogue with Wedge in the Opening Bombing mission – directly between him and Cloud, always uses Triangle. Most of the characters say multiple lines when spoken to this way, encouraging you to talk to characters like this multiple times.
• While pressing Triangle to talk to Wedge for the first time, you are moved close enough to overhear Biggs & Jessie chatting about Cloud, but not talking to him specifically.
• When Biggs opens his last door into the Reactor, if you go backwards to talk to him like you've been doing in all the other rooms to hear their dialogue, he never gets a triangle prompt. Instead as you start to move towards him instead of continuing forward like your character is meant to be doing, he has a single proximity dialogue that triggers telling you that he's got this and to keep going. Given that the player is backtracking within a pre-explored area, nothing stops you, and he only has the one line, so that you're not forced to trigger multiple pieces of dialogue like this, and you also learn that overhearing NPCs works the same way up on the Plate.
• When Cloud attempts explore a new area and go along the alternate pathway that the player will later learn that he and Jessie will use to escape, rather than move forward to the Reactor, you get an in-game proximity warning that pushes Cloud back that is also connected to a dialogue prompt from Jessie. While that happens, you also still have the ability to have a conversation with her directly with Triangle.

For the first time in the game – those rules get broken here. That's enough to tell you that the events that happen in this room aren't in a final version, but they're adjusted to be functional, based on some type of limitation that's preventing them from working as designed.

If you walk up and bump into to the three for long enough, you get these two pieces of dialogue:

Tifa: "Are you ok? Maybe you should rest a little longer." followed by "I don't want you to push yourself. We're all worried."
Barret: "Don't scare us like that, man." followed by "Not enough sleep?"
Red XIII: "I'm the one who carried you here." followed by "Don't thank me."

If you go up and press Triangle to talk to Aerith, she says both of her lines back-to-back (and yes the second has an ellipsis with no spaces, which is another little hint that this section isn't fully QA'd).

Aerith: "My mom and I stayed here, years ago when I was just a little girl." "The room...looks exactly the same."

Then she turns to face the wall, and the Triangle prompt returns. THIS initiates the historical explanation and the encounter with the Whispers, and there's a whole cutscene... but then we cut really oddly to facing the TVs with the camera locked, looking up at the static. This isn't a cutscene transition though. It's camera locked, and you can move.

You can proximity trigger a single line of dialogue from Barret about the Whispers that just awkwardly vanished, "Where'd those things fly off to now?" Aerith doesn't seem to have any, and if you get close enough to try and test Red XIII & Tifa, it pans up and triggers the cutscene with Wedge & Mayor Domino.

They show you an exit path with areas blocked off – one of which is the VR area that's not actually blocked off. Additionally, it foreshadows damaged areas of Hojo's Lab before you know that anything's happened to block them off. Then the camera pans back and Aerith & Tifa join your party & control returns to normal.

SO WHAT THE HELL IS ALL THIS?

Your party members get dropped to just Cloud, and you're presented with an open room where you're supposed to have Triangle-prompted dialogue with all of the other party members where they express worry about Cloud or tell him about what's going on. This layout's presentation and the interactive dialogue options are all designed so that you can have some generic dialogue that comes along with Cloud talking directly to the members, because this is where you're supposed to be able to choose people to join your party.

In the current version, party selection doesn't exist because Red XIII isn't playable. This means that the developers pulled out the Triangle prompts from all the characters in order to prevent players accidentally initiating something that's not present in the current build. They left the dialogue intact, and just changed the initiation type to be proximity-based to make it easier to rewire at a later date. However, Aerith still has hers there, because the player needs to talk to her to initiate the next sequence of events. So, they tied the action that ends the non-existent "party selection" phase, and then just move her character and have to press Triangle again to set off the cutscene. Since you're used to using Triangle multiple times for miscellaneous dialogue, it's really easy for players to never see these inconsistencies.

The next phase clearly has some things that are incomplete with the weird initiation to the static on the TVs coming directly out of the cutscene, but incomplete dialogue still lingering. This likely means that this phase is intended to be a post-team-selection option for the player to interact with the other characters, to gather data about the player's interest in interacting with the other two characters. Given that the things that can look at that data all involve Red XIII as a variable, and they just isolated him & Tifa, and proximity activate the cutscene, so that you're most likely to encounter it just by moving forward. Additionally, there is some possibility that there are unique dialogue strings based on your party that they are just walling off, and pulling directly into the cutscenes.

When it ends and normal gameplay actually returns – now the game as-is triggers something behind the scenes to set the active party of Tifa & Aerith, whereas you'd normally be venturing forward with the specific party of your choice... but where are you going?

Spoiler: The Drum 02 – One Party becomes Two Parties

You go into Hojo's Lab that's all wrecked – and Party A fights against the experiments while the other two as Party B work to clear the rubble in your path. The cutscene & dialogue between the two characters who clear the path here is going to be a variable that lets you see what the pairings of characters interacting together looks like. We actually already see one of these other possible interactions used later on, because the team knows that there are a ton of variables here, so you don't want to waste time animating things that don't get seen – this is also why Red XIII being playable also represents a massive amount of work to set up all the scenario variables.

For the setup that the game presents, we get:

1. Barret & Red XIII for the first section
2. Tifa & Aerith for the later section

(I'll come back and explain more about this when the other animation event occurs)

So, this information gives us a lot of information about the variables that the game is going to use in the upcoming section, which I'll break down now. There are two parties that have been established, and they're split up during The Drum based on the choice back in the room. As chosen in the room, the two groups are: <with Red XIII> and <without Red XIII> which are the only things that matter.

When you fall into The Drum: Cloud is first met by Red XIII. This means that both of them then have to rescue whoever the other party member from team <with Red XIII> is. Since we moving rubble scene was Barret & Red XIII, we have a team of Cloud, Barret, & Red XIII. If you intentionally pick Red XIII during the party selection, you'll get your specific team back. If not, you'll get separated from the two you pick when you fall into the Drum.



Now – Let me rewind just a little bit to before the fall happens. After you exit Aerith's old room with your current ideal team, they've fought one battle while the other two clear the rubble, now you have the pathway opened up the way to... well... some interesting adjustments to the game.


On your initial playthrough – the path here funnels you directly into the elevator with Hojo. There's no explanation of how long he's been gone for, the hallway to the VR area that was previously visible on the map but you couldn't get to at the end of Chapter 16 is now collapsed and blocked off – exactly like it's shown to be in the Avalanche escape prompt from Mayor Domino & Wedge.

However, on a post-game follow-up playthough: Chadley is there and the damaged pathway actually isn't blocked off at all, which means that you've got access to both the Shinra VR Room AND the Shinra Portable VR Headset before reaching the elevator to start off The Drum. This map inconsistency is one of those QA things that stands out like a sore thumb, especially becase post-game content is contradicting story content, and locking away the truth of Chadley's storyline behind a replay feels like an insane choice.

So it's clearly not designed this way. What happened?


In the end of Chapter 16, Red XIII chases after Hojo before he escapes into the elevator, and there's the whole scene of Red XIII going from being a crazed beast and being calmed by Aerith, so that he's friendly towards you. Then there's a whole scene of dialogue between them that Hojo got away and they're all teamed up now and debating whether or not they should actually continue to press forward. This is where Red XIII actually joins up you. This is ALSO where we're meant to have Chadley emerge from the closed doorway into the VR room off to the side, and talk to our now five-member party. We already know he's in the building, and we talked to him at the VR Room downstairs, so this matches with everything that we've learned about his character over the course of the game, and where his natural progression SHOULD occur.

Hojo getting away & meeting Chadley is meant to give us a window where we finally have some time to breathe with all five members of the party. From a narrative standpoint, at the end of the chapter, Cloud is about to fall unconscious for an unknown period of time as is – so this part of the game's story is MEANT to allow for a nebulous passage of time that flows naturally and doesn't interrupt the tension of the narrative.

This will give us plenty of time to learn more about Hojo's experiments, check out different team configurations, actually try out some preliminary combat with Red XIII, and potentially finish up the last of Chadley's research tasks. This provides the opportunity to learn about his deeper motivations and storyline – and get access to the Bahamut Materia during the main story. This would make it so that you're introduced to the tactics of fighting against Bahamut specifically before you encounter the Whisper Bahamut. That alone would let them crank up the difficulty of that phase of Whisper Harbinger's fight even more – because the game would already have given you an option to try it out on your own as much as you want, and become familiar with it since they know players will want that Materia before going forward.

None of that stuff is supposed to be locked into the flow limited to Post-Game events. You're meant to have plenty of time here at the end of Chapter 16 to test things out with Red XIII and get a feel for what the different party options are like to find something that you really like, since you literally just got access to a brand new character – and (unbeknownst to you as a first-time player) there are only two Chapters left in the game. All of those things will help you flesh out and improve your understanding of the different teams, but also not feel like you're hard committed to them quite yet. This gives the game a clear place to scrape a MASSIVE amount player data about how they're using the characters in combat, and which teams they're using to help them improve things in the next game. Additionally, when Chapter 17 starts, this means that when you wake up, and the game presents you with the option to choose your party – you know that it's a serious choice, you can make an informed decision on how to play them, and you've likely already got two sets of teams in mind to use. This not only means that the player would actually be prepared for a split team mission like they're about to encounter in The Drum, but it also means that this well-informed player choice data is more useful for checking against other data to help select who to have show up to fight with you against Sephiroth.


The issue here right now is again – those events in the VR Room and the combat & party options to all of these things don't actually exist properly without having Red XIII as a playable character. Because they're so closely interconnected to him, rewriting and redacting anything with them in this part of the game is just developers shooting themselves in the foot, because they're going to just have to hook it all back up again when they finish work on his character.

That's the reason that this content gets copied & pasted into Chapter 17 for people replaying the game. Not only can they rip out all of the variables related to Red XIII, but this easily fleshes out a stop-gap for post-game content that's not completed yet by letting players access it right from the start of Chapter 17. Putting it in what will also be a broken area of the map when the game is fixed means not only is there no risk in overlapping with the current work, but it also means that they can rip it all out again later when the proper version is fixed, and there's no risk of players activating it in a completed version of Chapter 17.

That's why it's suddenly visually inconsistent with the cutscene that has the map layout from Avalanche upon replay – the content gets trimmed and moved, because they're still working on completing these events where they belong as a part of the work connected to Red XIII. Additionally, this is also why Chadley being here is completely inconsistent with the "active attack on Shinra HQ" need to escape the building that you get thrown into in Chapter 17.

So for now – instead of triggering any of that series of events – the current game just fast tracks directly into the party's pursuit & knocking Cloud unconscious to end the chapter, so that the players can't actually explore the area at this stage of the game at all until this stuff is completed. What should happen is that Chadley helps you all out, and that he is the one who actually unlocks access to the elevator for you to be able to go after Hojo – especially since we learn all over the next chapter that Hojo controls access to elevators and all manor of other things here, and they don't happen before he wants them to. This fills out the purpose for Chadley's inclusion as a research assistance NPC who's hell bent on taking down Hojo and wrecking Shinra, and provides you with a ton of context about the mad scientist that belongs right at this point in the game's story, as well as preparing you for Hojo controlling the elevators all throughout The Drum.

Spoiler: The Drum 03 – The Teams With & Without Red XIII and Story Variables

So, this battle of rescuing the other character is meant to establish what the combat is like for your team, since it's Cloud + <with Red XIII>, even though there's a 50/50 chance that you'd've picked your ideal team as Cloud + <without Red III> back in Aerith's room.

The reason that you fight against the Unknown Entities here is a follow-up to what happened earlier, so that character dialogue still gets used.

The current game gives you Cloud + <without Red XIII> which means that Aerith & Tifa have dialogue about the enemies in the room. Whichever characters are assigned to <without Red XIII> will get this dialogue in Hojo's lab, so that whoever is on <with Red XIII> can have that dialogue during this rescue sequence, and all of the character voice acting gets used.

The only time that the game uses specific variables for talking about team <without Red XIII> is with the one character who's on <with Red XIII> that isn't Cloud or Red XIII. This means that Barret can use the line, "First, we find Tifa and Aerith. Then we head for the roof." because from this character, you have a guarantee of who the other two non-Cloud & non-Red XIII characters are for every configuration. The rest of the time, Red XIII & Cloud will refer to meeting up with, "The others" because this portion of the game isn't meant to be definitively scripted, it's meant to be variable.

This also means that there are two characters who will show up as the leader of <without Red XIII> and it's either Barret or Tifa, since they're the only characters who we see listed in the menu section of the story chart. The "Tifa & Aerith" will show up occasionally as a variable in the descriptors. This also means that we know that team <without Red XIII> has to include at least Barret or Tifa – and both of them are designed to be able to act as a party leader, which we learned in Chapter 13 with Barret in charge, and here with Tifa in Charge. This means that the workflow of which leader to talk to on the other team is always gonna be limited to mentioning Barret or Tifa, and that dialogue is easy to potentially establish elsewhere in the game and reuse if needed, and even if not, it limits it to two character variables in voice lines out of four. It also means that you can limit the number of things that the game needs to check to know to make the other dialogue tree fall under Tifa or under Barret. If it's both of them, I'm going to assume that it defaults to Tifa since Barret's already had a playable section of his own, but time will tell.

This is also why the main descriptions say, "The Others" but as specific event descriptions are triggered, it populates the variables in as it checks them. This is also the type of weird fluctuation between specific and vague that you'd never do if this area were meant to be done with a fixed party. There are other points where I'll check the Menu to verify this, but I wanted to get this bit of explaining why out of the way first.

Spoiler: The Drum 04 – Not Wasting Animation or Voice Work with Variables

When Red XIII crosses a gap the first time, Tifa & Aerith save him, and then high five, so it's time to revisit that thing I mentioned earlier when Barret & Red XIII were clearing away the rubble:

1. Barret & Red XIII for the first section
2. Tifa & Aerith for the later section

So, we know that this seems like another animation that would fit with successfully clearing the way, so we're looking at an early look at where we get some carefully planned animations that can be applied to multiple scenarios, and the player gets access to see all of them. However, clearing the rubble doesn't necessarily guarantee that that's who we see doing something after that first encounter, and this scene tells us that specifically.

The first animation we see is going to be the interaction of <with Red XIII> since this second animation of pushing down empty pods has to be done by <without Red XIII>. This means that we'll always see a cutscene specific to Red XIII before the fall, which means that we have a feeling about the relationship between him & the other teammate on <with Red XIII> before Cloud joins them regardless of whether or not you chose to start with him. This helps set emotional context for the events with the team that you're joining.

Finding anywhere possible to reuse animations like this is important, because there are six different team variables:

• Barret & Red XIII + Tifa & Aerith
• Aerith & Red XIII + Tifa & Barret
• Tifa & Red XIII + Barret & Aerith

With these two sections, we know that we're currently using 1/3rd of the animations that need to be done for it, so we'll have to keep eyes out for where else these events can be used. This is also why I think that there are opportunities for lots of random meetups of players designed in Destiny's Crossroads, so that they have some opportunity to utilize these additional animations and space them out a bit more naturally during the later bits of the game.

For example, with the conclusion of the fight against The Arsenal, since we can reasonably deduce know that team is meant to be Barret, Aerith, & Red XIII since Tifa is coming to rescue Cloud. If you look at the above list. Bold is what we get in The Drum, and Italics are the ones we might be able to have during that fight, so there are good ways to space out those animations without needing to worry too much about repetition. We also know that when Red XIII switches teams later on we get to see some of those animations used.

Speaking of animations...

Spoiler: The Drum 05 – Rough Animations & Planning-Stage Layouts

0:45 – Tifa ice skating up to the PHS.
4:04 – Aerith runs into a bar constantly as a part of a cutscene and only corrects after the camera moves.
7:32 – You can trigger Red XIII's traversal, but exit the interaction area during the animation to just leave him sitting and waiting around.

These types of awkward animation issues aren't an issue elsewhere in the game, and they're something that gets tested pretty rigorously when you get the the stage of polishing the game. Both Red XIII's traversal AND the PHS stations are unique animations to these areas, and they're clearly not as carefully adjusted as the other parts of the game. The PHS stations' interaction area is really awkward about the proximity where the Triangle prompt appears. Also, Red XIII's level-pulling animation is a little bit clunky even at a distance.

The other thing that happens here is that this whole area is functionally designed, and from a layout & traversal standpoint, it's still in the testing phase. There are tons of places where it's easy to overlook the lever you need before you swap teams, or to get to an area and then accidentally back track. The PHS stations, Save Points, & Controls are still placed in areas that are most helpful for testers, but they don't have a smooth flow when it comes to new player traversal.

Remember – this is supposed to be happening while Avalanche is attacking the building. There is a story reason that they want to hurry and escape this place, so you don't want the player to lose that momentum by getting lost when you've got a finished version of the layout.

• The Bridge Control Levers all face the center, so that you can check that the animation is working when they're triggered – however, there are several spots where there are other controls or a PHS station that the player encounters first, which makes it easy to accidentally swap parties before you need to.
  • From a design standpoint, there are several ways to prevent this: You can group those controls together, so that the player is next to the PHS and the new lever. You can ensure that there is a path where the player always encounters the necessary control before the new PHS. You can ensure that there's an animation where the characters call attention to it. You can have a prompt where when you attempt to swap teams before the next step is completed, the character says something hesitant to let the player know that the task isn't accomplished yet.
• There are tiny save points tucked away for convenience, but they're not easily noticeable to the player outside of using the minimap.
  • The Save rooms should feel like a place to refresh and should be obvious to the player. These are literally pockets in the wall with reused assets and literally just enough room to fit what's needed. Most of the time because of the layout I can't find them when I need them, and when I do find them it's always because of using the minimap.
• The whole area is still an endless sea of Press & Hold Triangle interactions.
  • This is because nothing is properly gated off into more tightly closed workflows yet. There's literally no reason to even be able to toggle the doorway to the wrong section. All that's doing is loading up a ton of assets that you can't actually reach – but it's still making the game do it as if you could. The hallways when you come into the nest locks the camera in place and slows Cloud down to walking speed, because the memory management here hasn't been finished and optimized into the intended player workflow paths yet.

Near the end of Chapter 16, it was telling that there was a bench right before H0512's boss fight, but there was another one immediately after it as well, because that's the sort of thing that's in place when QA is still doing regular testing. You see the same thing with them on either side of the Shinra Helipad. This happens, because at this stage, all of those areas are all being tested in segmented sections – they're not being tested as a full end-to-end workflow, all the way through. This is also why the flow of running through The Drum is so clunky. It hasn't been tested outside of just ensuring that the key segments at least work, and connect together, because not as much of this area can be cheated and stitched together the way that they do elsewhere.

The state of things here in The Drum will let you know why we don't actually follow the other four characters into the elevator on their escape to have some tension and buildup before The Arsenal arrives: You transition from the Tifa holding Cloud cutscene directly into the Elevator cutscene, because there isn't anything completed there. Normally you'd pad that out with some interactions with the characters in order to give them time to prepare any loadout changes naturally, and not need the emergency square Menu Option.

This is also why Chapter 18 consists solely of M.O.T.O.R., Save Point, Whisper Boss, Sephiroth and there's almost zero completed traversal areas at all. Most of the scene changes are handled through cutscenes, and the only traversabale areas that exist are the ones that are necessary just to have the bosses work the way that they currently do – with most of the effort being poured into making sure that the Sephiroth fight works. All of Destiny's Crossroads is just patchwork with zero regular enemies, and incomplete boss fights.

The two lone members of <with Red XIII> get unique dialogue, and also have their falling animations tied to the Swordipede boss fight initiation, whereas the two members of <without Red XIII> have their unique dialogue the first time you switch parties, and their falling animation is used for crossing the pipe that breaks. Speaking of which:

Spoiler: The Drum 06 – Camerawork (or lack thereof) & Animations

There are a lot of dialogue moments that the teams have throughout The Drum, but most of these lines get traded about, and adjusted as necessary. While the progression of the fights here has a bit uneven, what's worth looking at throughout this area is the camerawork – and most specifically in the area where you actually encounter Hojo.

Up until now, we get fully directed in-game cinematic cutscenes of any important moment with key characters, Finally having Hojo watching over the test subjects in combat, rather than the initial wander through the abandoned lab and dog kennels with the Zenene. However the second we finally encounter Hojo directly, it's dialogue at a wall from the Combat menu. The same thing happens with the next room. But the THIRD room is totally different from the split second that we walk into the chamber.

Cinematic zoom up to the windows, cutscenes between each of the characters who's talking. The camera follows all of the attacks, Red XIII gets frozen by the Brain Pod, and then it cuts back down to the battle. The reason that this gets preiliminary build-up is that the Brain Pod is a mini-boss, who's got a hard locked phase change at 50% HP. This scene is important to build that up, in the same way that cutscenes of the Swordipede attacking down the tunnel and Red XIII attacking the Swordipede are key to that boss fight.

These moments are completed because they're planned out and prioritized because of how they connect to important pieces of combat. The other work gets done as other layout elements and things get finalized about the gameplay flow through the area. They usually have most of the end-to-end testing done, so that the areas are all mapped out with the layout and lighting, so that the camerawork can utilize the existing environment. This is why all of these other transitional phases where we'd normally follow the super-cinematic presentation with the game suddenly disappear here.

We've seen all the examples where the game is relying on these key cutscene transitions to actually mask where there are missing sections of gameplay. Sephiroth specifically has them all over the place, and that's why so few of them are completed with the Whispers. Even back with H0512, the basic animations and setup are in place, but the sort of character dialogue we'd see for those things isn't there.

This is another result of the fact that this team would have been working SUPER hard on completing an immense amount of work to ensure that all of the variable workflows for the different team configurations worked. This part of the game would be churning up huge amounts of effort by everybody, and with the deadline approaching this is when the hard call that Red XIII was being left as a guest character dropped. All the teams had to focus on completing things for release, and massive amounts of effort had to get put on hold, and there are likely huge amounts of completed animation work for variable scenarios like this one that are done, but literally have no way to present them to the player at this stage.

You can't Chadley cheat them into the game, and these scenes are scripted and can't be reused elsewhere. Plus, they're tied to the party member changing... Which brings me to the final point here – something's still lingering here.

Spoiler: The Drum 07 – The Lingering Character Selection Options

Once you get reunited and it sets the party to the one that you exited Aerith's room with. For the game right now, that's Cloud, Aerith, & Tifa.

There's still a final warning about proceeding forward, and you're allowed to go back to the central terminal – even though there's basically no reason to, given how little actually exists in this area in its current state. There aren't any new fights or anything else worth doing here. However, if you DO backtrack to the elevator, you will run into the last and most important lingering trigger about team formation that's still set in place. Because the teams at this point aren't intended to be automagically scripted by the game, and it's treating the entire party as "active" – you're actually allowed to change off from the game's Cloud, Aerith, & Tifa team if you want to.

Like in Aerith's room, the characters all have a line of dialogue specific to your selection of picking them. What's important is that in this context it's them agreeing to stay behind. Red XIII's dialogue is auto-triggered before the menu is presented, so that you only have a single option to pick from to get a team of three.

However, in Aerith's room, this same piece of dialogue could just as easily have been the line where they'd be agreeing to join you. It's carefully ambiguous, so that it can potentially match party changing situations in either context. Within Aerith's room, this prompt would show up only after you already have a full party, and you talk to one of the other members, because the dialogue is "Who stays behind?" and it would be pulling up the names of your current other two party members.

Tifa: "Be careful."
Barret: "Hurry up."
Aerith: "Be right here."
Red XIII: "I'll do it."

Lastly, in addition to showing that intentional party formation does still exist in this section of the game, and hasn't been cut out entirely, this helps to reinforce that the player is allowed to change their selection before continuing forward into the next area. This is why I'm not 100% certain that Barret's non-death to Sephiroth is the only possibility, but it's clear that this is another checkpoint where the game is wanting to acquire additional data about player party choice before moving forward, since it will inform the Sephiroth fight.

So yes.

ALL of this is what I'm talking about when I am being really deeply critical of everything in the games final chapters – especially with the boss fights or things where player failure isn't linked to what the game has built up your skillset to handle. Additionally, this is also why I'm genuinely not mad about them at all, and why I really expect to see Red XIII as playable DLC connected to a massive update as soon as all of that work is actually as polished and completed as the rest of the game up until that point is.


Also, it might take me a bit to get the other two Boss breakdowns done, since this post alone represents something like... almost 10 hours of work to get it all re-tested, outlined, and actually written out.

Extra thanks again for reading my enormous ramblings!




X

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Also, thanks to everyone who's indulged me with actually reading all of this stuff so far <4

I've read every word, and it's been illuminating.

So, here's a question: since they delayed the game's release by five weeks yet still delivered the same build of the game that was ready for March 3 without any sort of day one-patch -- what went wrong there?

 

[Wol]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1253034967694704640

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1252249195978735616

Wow

X-soldier's insight spot-on

Bonus

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1251598362819903490

Thanks for Cloud_cr, who posted on mognet central first.

 

[Theozilla]

Guessing the 9th slot is a placeholder slot for Temporary characters like Sephiroth in the Nibelheim flashback and such.

 

[Wol]

Guessing the 9th slot is a placeholder slot for Temporary characters like Sephiroth in the Nibelheim flashback and such.

Sephiroth and possibly Zack lol

Goddamn controlling Sephiroth will be glorious (if!)

 

[oty]

So pretty much.....we are gonna get a bomb ass ending update that will make everything better? I assume the Covid situation is slowing things down, right?

 

[Odysseus]

Damn, and here I was a non believer. I hope we get a playable Red XIII Update then.

 

[Wol]

I really doubt it, because that would be backing down from their excuse, I guess?

We'll see, SQ still didnt comment about future updates or fixes, but I'm expecting something like GoW, no big DLC because they went straight to develop the sequel, just some adjustments, photo mode..

 

[Odysseus]

I suppose it could also just be that they're laying the groundwork for when he's fully playable next time.

 

[Eerie]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1251598362819903490

Spoiler: just in case

So then it means next playable character is supposed to be Cait Sith, then Cid, Yuffie and last Vincent? If they keep it that way, they're soooooo expanding on Wutai and they'll keep Yuffie for that moment. And we'd see Cid before that to be able to move around more freely, as I suspected too. Also Cait Sith would join very early, probably in Junon, or even before? Wow!

 

[X-SOLDIER]

I've read every word, and it's been illuminating.

So, here's a question: since they delayed the game's release by five weeks yet still delivered the same build of the game that was ready for March 3 without any sort of day one-patch -- what went wrong there?

Do we know if the version that released and the other one are precisely 1:1?

Five weeks in the world of software is two and a half sprints, which if you're looking at any actual coordination of stuff is really just two sprints of work making sure that you can implement whatever's necessary in the remaining time. Depending on what the things they're trying to tackle were (memory management with textures, general stability, scenario updates), they might have been able to get a couple of things in.

I think what they were ACTUALLY arguing for was the time they needed to actually complete the game that they WANTED to – especially given the prepared statement. There's no way to tackle all of the outstanding things that I mentioned in 5 weeks, and because so many of them are interconnected to that rats nest of work around team-selection and playable Red XIII – literally noting changed. I feel like it's most likely that any changes that they could make on the game as-is were things that were cost-effectively better spent working on the much larger, and still-unreleasable code branch that involves playable Red XIII – since keeping effort on something that's invisible will still put that version of the game 5 weeks closer in the grand scheme of things.

How & why that happens is a lot more involved:

I am more than certain now that from a development standpoint, them pulling the planned FFXV DLC was because back in November 2018, with the reported financial loss at SE, knowing how much work Remake needed to get done before the PS5 launch, and knowing just how tight that was getting – everything that involving Remake's launch got hard prioritized. November 2018 means that they likely their roadmap for most all of 2019 would be scoped for what had to be done in a year. At that point, they knew they needed assistance, and that taking time with it wasn't entirely an option because of having people who would know what plans for the PS5 release date were. This is stuff that you can see little bits and pieces of all over now.

Add in the optics of knowing what the cancelled FFXV DLC was like, and it's exactly why when they eventually knew that when something HAD to give, Red XIII is the obvious painful option. The Directors make that call, because it'll allow the game to be end-to-end playable. You handle talking about it preemptively, because you can come back from that just because you know fan reaction will give you a public response that you need to "change your mind and add it in" and buy good faith with your audience. Red XIII's connected to SO much extra work with branching character options, extra animations, etc. that if you can make him into at least a functional guest character, you can have a game that's launchable – even if it's not the game that you want, and that's what you have to plan for as the game's MVP version (minimum viable product), but you don't want to have to go with that option.

So you have that happening in the background because it's necessary – but you don't want to release that version, so you get the heads of everything to put their whole reputation on the line and try to pull literally every string they've got to get the extra space that they need to make the game complete for real. However, the issue is that you're not just shuffling by making ripples by doing this – you're compressing everything else against the monolithic wall of planning that everyone is accountable to... which is the PS5 launch. The Next Gen Consoles for Sony are connected to holding in line for competition with Microsoft for Xbox & all sorts of things like that who aren't people you can reach out to in order to help out your game company with its development deadline woes.

In my earlier post, I was talking about the sort of work that's involved with moving a release date: the quarterly financial reporting logistics, how many other releases it bumps into, and how many other entities would be in some way connected to that conversation because of those changes, etc. This means that you start having conversations with the other big game developers to try and plead your case – because they'll empathize with you, and they all want to have a close trust relationship with each other, because they're all in the same business and have the same passion for what they're doing, while also knowing that they're making a product that has to contend with these sorts of challenges. They all agree to adjust things on their end, and make those plans in the background to try and collectively convince the powers that be to get the Remake team the absolutely impossible amount of extra space that they need. It's a massive group effort of everybody's passion, reputations, and trust and everything else – and they manage to get... a 5 week delay.

A 5 week delay is still a huge difference here. It's pushing from Q1 into Q2, the logistic changes to everyone else's releases ripple and shuffle around, and Remake can't just act like it's more important than everyone else's needs. Their team is working with friends & trusted colleagues from all the other dev studios who all collectively have one another's backs – and the ripple effects are gonna hit everybody, but you look at what you get – and you still know that it's not enough to get the changes that they needed completed. However, they'd already done mountains of work, which require huge amounts of time, adjustment, agreements, and impact on the development of things around them in order to even get the greenlight for any move at all.

The issue then is – you can in no way turn down a 5 week delay even if it doesn't get you what you really need – because that is still a MASSIVE concession by so many other parties whose time & efforts you don't want to have wasted. This is why we got all of the matching public game release delay announcements coming out at the same time. It lets you know just how many other parties were involved in facilitating this, and that what they were trying to do to help out the Remake team took a STAGGERING amount of work. You roll from that, you make all of the other adjustments that come along with the shipping and pre-order and other challenges that exist because of everything now, and you just make the best of it that you can, while ensuring that you're beyond super grateful to everyone around you who helped coordinate everything.

Internally, you keep focused & keep working as hard as you possibly can, knowing that you and literally everyone else possible has done and is still doing literally everything in their power to complete the vision that they have – especially since a bunch of the FFXV devs will already be familiar with this feeling on multiple levels. It's why you release a ton of marketing stuff about the massive work done by the development team and how hard everyone worked, because you're gonna show off that work again when they DLC comes out, to emphasize just how much extra it's adding.

You take the hit of not getting what you need and soften that blow with the huge outpouring of support from the fans, and the from the collective development community around you who had and still has your backs – because they're likely gonna help you get a window for your huge DLC release when the time comes. You're already doing planning to make sure that you're not stepping on anybody's toes when it's finally done, because you owe them a shitton of gratitude. When possible you try to communicate all of the things about the game truthfully, while masking things in how you phrase them.

Just look at this interview, and I'll highlight a couple of lines in particular:

I answered a question about Red XIII while we were going around Europe talking to media, but there was a bigger response from fans than I had expected! I got a renewed sense of how much love there is out there for the characters in FINAL FANTASY VII.

To explain more about why we did not make Red XIII a playable character in this game, we felt that because he only joins the team during the latter stages, having him as a playable ally with full character growth potential would not be a satisfying experience for the player. So we decided to have him join for now, as a guest character instead.

However, the development team feel the same way that the fans do when it comes to seeing Red XIII as an important character, and we designed his gameplay in a special way to offset him not being playable in battle.

1. Bigger response from the fans than expected.
2. The development team feels the same way as the fans do about Red XIII.
3. They decided to have him join as a guest character instead, for now.

If you look really carefully at exactly HOW they talk about things like this, it is exactly what directors or product managers do when they have to very delicately navigate talking about roadmap cuts that they need to present a controlled and optimistic outlook for. There are all of the key little indicators in what they say surrounding that context to let you know that – like with literally everything else in the game – the team working on this game loves it exactly as much as the fans do.

Again, you can't in any way publicly communicate something that's even hints at, "Please buy the deadline-rushed version of our game" because you'll get destroyed for that financially, but you'll also ruin all of the relationships you had to rely on to get that 5 week delay, and you're in no way gonna do that – especially in Japan. It's their job to not only control their development, but to be able to publicly spin setbacks as plans, and only well after everything is complete and released as intended, is there even the possibility that you might ever confirm anything like that happened retroactively – but only if you actually manage to deliver on what you promised first.

This is why they're using the FFXV model of Character-specific DLC with huge updates as a way to market the improvements – because they can justify those things to their company financially since they have an established track record with them, and the game itself has released and they can use the sales figures to get everyone who would have been at their throats to finally relax. I wouldn't even be surprised if the end of Chapter 16 and The Drum gets significantly expanded explicitly to help add focus to his character beyond what they were already clearly going for.


Also, @Wol – Thanks for that fantastic confirmation information. I wonder if anyone's dug around in the code around where I mentioned, especially with the bits involving Chadley's C&P.




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[youffie]

Seeing all the names there makes me <3 My lovely idiots are almost all back!

Spoiler: just in case

So then it means next playable character is supposed to be Cait Sith, then Cid, Yuffie and last Vincent? If they keep it that way, they're soooooo expanding on Wutai and they'll keep Yuffie for that moment. And we'd see Cid before that to be able to move around more freely, as I suspected too. Also Cait Sith would join very early, probably in Junon, or even before? Wow!

Spoiler

Could be, though that is also the original canon order for when you get each character, considering that Yuffie and Vincent were optional and you could get them at any time. Maybe we'll have a Quina scenario where we can obtain both of them earlier/at different times, but they become mandatory after a certain point? Though I'm not sure how that would work with Vincent.

… Maybe we could move this thread somewhere where spoilers are safe?

 

[X-SOLDIER]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1251598362819903490

Spoiler: just in case

So then it means next playable character is supposed to be Cait Sith, then Cid, Yuffie and last Vincent? If they keep it that way, they're soooooo expanding on Wutai and they'll keep Yuffie for that moment. And we'd see Cid before that to be able to move around more freely, as I suspected too. Also Cait Sith would join very early, probably in Junon, or even before? Wow!

Just for reference, the order that the characters appear here just corresponds to their variables in code, and doesn't necessarily represent the order that they'll appear in during the game. It is nice to have more confirmation that, as I suspected, all of their code is allowing for them to maintain continuous development and maintain assets moving from one game to the next (as well as work to be optimizable for PS5).

While character variables like this usually get added as development work starts with them, which means that for the first 5, this is gonna correspond to where they show up in game, this isn't necessarily true for the sequel, because they're doing a lot of up-front work before diving into the specifics. I'd wager that the reason Cait Sith is top of the list is explicitly because – like Red XIII – he's the game's other non-human character, and his character is also two different entities acting as a single entity (Cait Sith on the Mog), it means that he's gonna require a ton of unique and very different work to complete compared to everyone else – even Vincent's Limit Breaks.

Given that Red XIII is the last character in Remake and his work is also all more difficult and still under way, I suspect that the team is alleviating those issues as early as possible by getting him done first, since following up with all the other human characters is gonna be way easier.

It doesn't mean that this isn't the order we'll encounter them in – as it very well could be, but it's also not a confirmation of that either.




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[The Twilight Mexican]

Do we know if the version that released and the other one are precisely 1:1?

Well, I think we only heard about it going gold the one time, so it doesn't sound like it was resubmitted for further approval.

I'd wager that the reason Cait Sith is top of the list is explicitly because – like Red XIII – he's the game's other non-human character, and his character is also two different entities acting as a single entity (Cait Sith on the Mog), it means that he's gonna require a ton of unique and very different work to complete compared to everyone else – even Vincent's Limit Breaks.

Could it also be as simple as ordering the remainder in alphabetical order?

 

[youffie]

Could it also be as simple as ordering the remainder in alphabetical order?

Us on every little thing: WHAT COULD THIS POSSIBLY MEAN
SE: absolutely nothing lol

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Us on every little thing: WHAT COULD THIS POSSIBLY MEAN
SE: absolutely nothing lol

Oh, wait, they had Yuffie ahead of Vincent in the order, so no to the alphabetical.

Still, I wonder if it could mean nothing, as you put it.

 

[Odysseus]

Would this be confirmation that the rest of the party will all be in by part 2, or is it still too early to say?

 

[JBedford]

I think the character name comments in the code were added by the person taking the image, not something actually in the code. They say there's "enough space" for those characters--they would more likely say that the space is allocated for the characters if they were actual dev comments.

 

[oty]

I really doubt it, because that would be backing down from their excuse, I guess?

We'll see, SQ still didnt comment about future updates or fixes, but I'm expecting something like GoW, no big DLC because they went straight to develop the sequel, just some adjustments, photo mode..

I think it will really help them out. As a company, your focus should be on the game you just released, because that right now is what giving you the money, and specifically for a sequel, it's what building your next income of money. Part 2 right now is probably at an early stage of development, so there is some staff ready to keep working on the Remake, and as we can see from the videos, the groundwork is very much there.

And I mean.....the reaction towards playable Red will be overwhelmingly positive probably. It's sufficient enough to give another rep boost from the game, which every company loves. I really think Square should do this.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

And they may as well, seeing as it's work they'll have to do for the next game anyway.

 

[Cannon_Fodder]

From a dev/marketing perspective, when would such a DLC release? I'm sure covid is impacting their dev cycle--it seems like Japan is starting to really feel effects of the pandemic now--but maybe that's not a problem? It seems to me it would be best to release such a DLC after the excitement over the remake does down, so people start talking about it again, maybe in the fall or late-summer. Is that a fair guess?

 

[X-SOLDIER]

Ok, so let's break down the two bosses that I mentioned from earlier on in the game, including the one that @Roger mentioned.

Spoiler: Breaking Down the Standard Enemies Turned Full-Blown Bosses

Spoiler: The HELL HOUSE!

The HELL HOUSE is the absolute pinnacle of Remake polish.

It has all of the insane build up and presentation that you could possibly want. It's doing something that's precisely what the fanbase has been talking about for years as the game was being developed as the crowning definition of FFVII's mix of the weird and the serious. It is the thing too crazy to include in a modern game, and the team leaned the hell in in literally every way imaginable.

You're lead to think that the final arena boss is going through the goofy thieves you met outside and then concluding against Chocobo Sam to completes the feel of things in the game's thematic story since you arrived in Wall Market – and they just string you along with one more thing. They build up to it until the, reveal, and presentation accentuates literally everything about that moment that you could ever hope for when it comes to lovingly embracing the most absolutely fucking bonkers madness of not only realizing this enemy – but shining the biggest POSSIBLE spotlight on it, so that there's absolutely no way that literally anyone can ignore how deep the developers' love of the game goes.

Scotch & Kotch have constant unique dialogue for this entire fight that isn't just during the huge cutscene introduction, but it changes with each phase of the fight. Not only that: They have unique announcer dialogue for if the player dies that happens on the Game Over screen, AND they have unique announcer dialogue for literally EVERY summon in the entire game – including ones that aren't yet accessible to you at this point in a first time playthrough. THIS is what Remake is like when the team has time to do literally everything that they want, and realize the vision they have for the game.

This crazy shit is meant to keep the player on the ropes and accentuate as much attention as possible. It helps you learn a ton with Assess and that weaknesses/absorbed elements & other information that shift visually will also change in real time in the Assess Menu. This helps in planning and checking attacks, while the combat itself is also teaching some tactics we'll see again later, and ensuring that the player knows elemental counters.

Strategy:
When it shifts barriers, hit it with the opposing element, such as ice to fire or lightning to wind, to rapidly fills its stagger gauge. When God House Mode is active, attacks will be less effective at filling the gauge, but for a short time after this mode ends, it will be much easier to stagger.

Is starts out as a House with feet. This mode is all about just smacking it when you can, and exploiting the elemental weaknesses if/when you have them, and recognizing the visual cues. Chair Salvo lets you get used to bombing-type attacks that aren't as random or quick as the Scorpion Sentinel's are, but shows how you can run, dodge, or even use the angle of the arena walls as cover when it attacks from a vantage point. Additionally, when it goes out of the arena, you can use Aerith to hit it with spells, while keeping the focus safely on Cloud.

The next phase initiates at 75% with a big and insanely cinematic cutscene, and instantly starts the Summon gauge.

Now it's aggressive about diving on you and hurling its massive revealed robotic form around the arena. It controls space by sending out bombs around the arena, and it can vacuum in a player with Hospitality to make sure that you're swapping between Aerith & Cloud and just just sticking with a single character. This is all to teach you what its physical attacks are and get you used to dealing with those while it's still taking regular damage. It's also trying to encourage you to use your Summon while the it doesn't have any ability to absorb elemental damage.

At the 50% marks, we see it activate a barrier around itself to reduce damage, and the return of the Elemental modes comes back. The phase itself hasn't really changed too much, but now it's applying the initial lesson about Elemental counters to add to the new attack strategy. Because it's not a change, but it's just combining both things, there's no reason for a whole cinematic cutscene – and that's covered up because the player's summon is most likely to have been used to push it over the edge, so there will already be a type of cinematic moment happening right at that moment.

This is where the counters and response time by the player have to be REALLY quick in you're going to hit it before God Mode comes back. It's rewarding observation and counters, while letting you just slam against it as hard as you can when you don't have the necessary counters, even though it's vastly reduced effectiveness, the balance makes it feel difficult the whole time without being unnecessarily demoralizing (like having damage immunity does).

The 25% mark triggers another phase change with another big cutscene as it starts to fly around the arena and dropping bombs while counting down from Heavensward into Hellbound, so that you can get used to watching in the sky as it circles and planning when to dodge, and when to counter. These aren't super worrying, but they get you used to these two things, so that when you see them later on bosses like Eligor, Swordipede, & Bahamut you're already a bit familiar with those things. Also, like with all bosses, the final attack phase opens up the arms as individual targets to help damage the boss & keep that mechanic front-and-center.

Regardless of how many specific Magic counters you have in your loadout, or if you only had at most a couple of spells, you can find the openings you need to strategize for the openings, and muscle through and survive the other moments in this thrilling endurance test of a boss. I literally cannot heap enough praise on it, but the ending cinematic of Cloud & Aerith saving the audience and dealing the final blow before the crowd goes wild with praise is literally everything that Remake shows us its capable of when it can get the time it needs to be what they truly want to deliver.

Spoiler: Eligor

So, from a story standpoint, Eligor exists as the last thing blocking you off from reaching the Support Pillar that's gonna collapse the plate into the Sector 7 Slums. He's the final barrier between you and huge anxiety about what's happening to your friends and innocent people. Eligor is also why this is thematically a dark entity who's keep capturing and torturing innocent children that we've heard whispers about since we first arrived in the Slums. It builds off of Aerith's connection to the kids and feeling lost herself, so that we get even more context for her rescuing Marlene & being captured by Hojo.

Choosing to do this by elevating a classic enemy that has a weapon for Aerith, so the cinematic connection between the two of them gets built up as well is a really good choice for growing out some story content on the supernatural side of the world that gives us a way to lean in on the idea of souls and living people in the world that's not just limited to mako & ethereal Lifestream energy. The tone and cinematic sense throughout the Train Graveyard really builds this up on that. While the Ghoul is hostile but sympathetic in a sort of tortured soul way, Eligor is the thing we just want to flatten to move forward to what was motivating us through the Sewers.

Additionally, the ability that comes with The Bladed Staff here is the thing that gives Aerith the ATB Ability that's intended to use against The Arsenal that I talked about earlier. This is what makes it important to Assess, which not only tells you that you can steal that weapon for Aerith (which may give some players an immediate reason to restart the fight right off the bat), but it also has VERY specific strategic tips (unlike the annoying one I mentioned with Rufus).

When it is in the air, hit it with wind attacks to rapidly fill its stagger gauge. Unleash a leaping attack to knock it down to the ground.

So let's get to the actual battle itself. The arena size here and a few of the things here are meant to build off of the strategies that you've already done with the HELL HOUSE. The change here is that Eligor is a target that's significantly more agile and isn't quite as big, but it doesn't have as many defenses. In general, that's the approach to take when tackling this fight, because that's what it's building off of.

The initial phase functions basically like any other enemy. It's there to help you learn the attacks, and it doesn't do anything too fancy. This is very intentional, so that you can spend as much time as you need to until Luck will allow you to use Steal the new weapon for Aerith, before turning your attention to laying into the boss for real. As soon as you get the staff, it's pretty straightforward to hit and stagger Eligor, in order to trigger the phase where it actually starts up being more of a threat & challenge.

Eligor's first transition moves him into the air & throws shipping container drops into the center of the arena. This changes things up, so that you have a piece of reliable cover in the arena. This is because he's got a wide AoE Javelin attack, and you can either shield yourself from it, or you can outmaneuver it, as you learn how it works.

This means learning a balance of how it's a little harder to go about finding clear angles with line of sight as he’s circling overhead, but there's a balance to the safety that that offers from the way that it slows down your ability to build ATB. It's forcing you to slow down a little bit and think through your ATB usage a bit when the boss gives opportunities when you can't just force your own to occur. This is especially true for all 3 characters, because while it's tough to hit a fast flying opponent with close combat attacks.

While he has a clear weakness outlined by the Assessment, the use of Wind Magic vs. Flying enemies is something that you've been building off of starting way back with the Warehouse side quest in Sector 7, it's not one that you can exploit instantly. This is because Eligor uses Reflect (which slowly expires like it should) to prevent the player from immediately exploiting those weaknesses mindlessly. Additionally, it also means that Aerith’s standard attacks do no damage, which is a bit annoying as your only ranged character with her other magic attack not being viable, but this is to build up her ATB and make you plan out and time your attacks very specifically based on what the boss itself is doing.

This is why the Javelin Bolts is clearly telegraphed attack that leaves Eligor still in the air, it's got such a big AoE, and there's a shipping container in the arena. It gives you cover to be able to cast spells from safety. It also lets you out maneuver it by chasing him down, and then use strong attacks to stagger and knock him down into a stagger state and drop him out of the sky. This is also to make it intentionally difficult to keep up with the movement otherwise, so that you pay attention to where he is, how he's moving, and when he's launching an attack, in order to start to teach players to spend more time watching boss attacks, rather than muscling through them, so that eventual bosses like Rufus will have a bit more time to get used to doing those things.

This is difficult, because it's pushing against the player's want to just crush the boss and reach the pillar, and trying to temper that by making it harder to do that unless you're fighting tactically rather than aggressively. It's the reason that the Ghoul comes first, because its state changes force you to start to fight the boss at ITS pace, and not at YOUR pace, which means pushing the player to plan and attack with more emphasis on doing so effectively rather than quickly – until there's an exploitable opening.

Eligor's next phase transition requires him to go back up into the sky, so if you reach it from dealing damage in a Stagger state, he has a bit of an awkward period of damage immunity as he returns into the sky. It's a bit odd as the cutscene is where he drops down into his aggressive ground phase. This is one of those things, where the enemy location for cutscenes have to be loosely orchestrated, and Eligor goes into a flying phase & the state change is explicitly about moving to the ground, so this is one of those sort of necessary evils. With Aerith's attack having periods of ineffective damage, this can add to making it feel like the boss is taking a lot longer than normal even with the more steady and measured approach. During that transition event, the Shipping container is removed and he starts rampaging around.

The removal of the shipping container is because is because you need to focus just inside the arena for this phase, especially because while Eligor goes from circling overhead to circling very quickly inside the arena with you, and his attacks start sweeping in ways that are harder to just avoid outright.

This is because, like other later boss phases, he gets more targets to exploit in his final phase – you can now target his wheels and his body. This is where things take a bit of understanding of the additional targets from previous boss fights. While his HP is low, and the wheels' HP seems large, you know that exploiting additional targets provides circumstantial vulnerabilities, and that individual parts have less total HP to take down.

This is why he gets difficult to keep up with, and his attacks sweep the arena in a way that's difficult to dodge or get cover from, but his movement around the arena is very regular. You're trying to put yourself in place to use attacks to hit his wheels during openings, or be close enough to him when he attacks to do the same. He’s got a sweeping laser that can cover the arena, so there's a difficult-to-avoid punishment that is a big threat the longer his mobility remains a factor. As soon as you even cripple one of his wheels, it stops his movement exactly like you’d expect it to with one wheel jammed. As soon as that happens, you can just descend on him and he absolutely melts.

This is also why nailing down the balance of the later bosses is important because otherwise those lessons start to fade away if you can just ATB spam your way through any opponents, and then suddenly Rufus shows up as a hard counter out of nowhere. When the others are refined, he'll feel a lot more consistent with the rest of the game.

Also, @Cannon_Fodder – This sort of thing is wholly dependent on how much work it's gonna take them to finish what they need, and then they're gonna figure out the best window once they have an understanding on when that work will be completed. I'd guess that there's pretty much zero possibility that it's soon. Not only do you want to let the game exist for a bit and let players tackle everything that's there now, DLC of this scope is meant to pull players BACK into a game after things have died down.

The only things that I can tell you is that it's very unlikely to come anywhere that could even more remotely perceived as stepping on CDProjekt Red's toes, since they moved their launch date for Cyberpunk 2077 out from under Remake's bumped April launch, and shifted their game into mid-September. It's also not going to happen too close to the PS5 launch, because you don't want to conflate it as being PS5-specific.

Ideally you want to be able to talk about the next-gen-upgrades that the game will get simply by existing on the PS5 platform. You also want to be able to get that done on the version of the game that you're wholly satisfied with. This means that you want to get that big update out first, but given the situation with the pandemic, it's nearly impossible to know how much whose development is being impacted on what where, which is gonna be making any attempt at guessing release dates basically just as accurate as throwing darts with your eyes closed for the time being.



X

 

[ForceStealer]

(I am very curious if you use Inverted Y-Axis or not)

(I do not, just to answer your question. I only use inverted in a flight sim situation)

 

[X-SOLDIER]

(I do not, just to answer your question. I only use inverted in a flight sim situation)

(Thank you! I anecdotally suspect that this is likely a factor of some of my issues with that fight, given that my brain is unfortunately hard-programmed to only operate in "flight simulator mode" at all times and in all games).





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