[FE8] Fire Emblem: Lengths of Time [22-Oct-21, v.01 - 7 chapters] [Canceled]

[familyplayer]

Ok so I should not I played pre-hotfix so if some stuff is fixed I apologize for repetition.

So I wrote a list so this may be a long post but I’ll do bullet points and it will go from the beginning to chapter 9 since that’s as far as I played. (I didn’t realize they were untested chapters yet lol.) Most of it will be written frankly so don’t read a necessarily bad tone with too much of this.

• The intro with the food stuff while funny cause reference is still like 20 textboxes about food that makes me turn my brain off as I mash the A button until I get to some dialogue.
• It seems the chapter 1 even with Norsu and Jurgen saying why they aren’t fighting is bugged though that maybe have been part of the hotfix.
• Imo 3 bandit recruits in a row is kinda repetitive in terms of feel.
• Also may be in hot fix but I couldn’t access the armory in preps immediately in chapter 2? Kinda awkward to have no cash for the chapter 4 armory/vendor cause I thought it may not be a thing in preps. (RIP having steels)
• Speaking of chapter 4, I think some of the last reinforcements are a bit unnecessary but it’s not a huge deal.
• Also speaking of 4, the dialogue before and after the chapter drag on a long time. Not the end of the world, but might want to cut down a bit? Same for chapter 4x’s post battle dialogue scene.
• Speaking of chapter 4x, possible hotfixed but it had a [ClearMidRight] showing in said post battle dialogue.
• Again maybe hotfixed, but chapter 5 has a black screen you have to press start on when the map starts.
• Again again maybe hotfixed, but chapter 5 and 6 have some portraits be wrong in cutscenes for two enemy characters. The tactician in 5 showed as Siomay in the intro, while the monk staying in the castle in 6 showed as Ballard.

Here on is non-tested stuff but regardless,

• Chapter 7 has a ending glitch where the background goes all weird while getting the Chief Bow in your inventory (specifically I had my inventory full and had to send something to convoy). Nothing gamebreaking though.
• Chapter 8 pre-preps stuff kinda just jumps ahead to past meeting Sterling which almost comes off unintentional.
• Also chapter 8 only ends once all enemies are routed which is very odd when the objective is to destroy supplies
• This is a more general thing and not just non-playtested chapters but the heretic lance has a messed up weapon rank and is usable by everyone (hotfix mention here). Also various mages throughout the game have heal staves for no reason whatsoever.

As for general gameplay things, I overall mostly liked it? The only really noticable things I wanted to note was how I think it’s odd that thunder is C rank in this game with only 1 might more than fire, as well as no healing forecast.

This was much longer than I wanted it to be but oh well lol. Hope things go well in the future for hack. I can’t say I’m a fan of VQ1 very much but I can tell this is an improvement at least so far.

[alexgalaxy335]

Another hack? Oh Boy!

[Colo]

DAMN YOU BUILDER IT WAS A GOOD MOMENT

[grymoire]

so awesome. I want to playtest but also dont want to spoil it

clearly this is supposed to be different from VQ, so maybe ignore me: but one thing i’ve noticed trying a good few romhacks is that if they give you a lot of characters for iron man kinda gameplay, w/o even 1 personal + a class skill or 2 per character, it becomes really hard to differentiate them & more reliably apparent who is better.

not sure how any of that mixes with capture, i’m not really familiar with that but it sounds interesting, maybe thats a no go.

I felt the amount of skills in VQ was totally not intrusive and creates a lot more potential gameplay scenarios that also humanizes the characters. Not suggesting just porting over VQ skills would work with this new concept though

[Pandan]

Thanks FP and Colo for finding these - I’ll make sure they are fixed when I update next. Weapon rank stuff and relative power I’ll have a better sense of as I get deeper into the hack and start using these items more regularly.

@ grymoire - yeah I went back and forth about adding skills again. Having worked w/ them in VQ, I kept paring them down more and more because they were hard to balance well. Like the early 2018 demos had 2 class skills and a personal, and it was too much given how hard enemies hit already.

For this, I wanted gameplay to be simple, which is why I only use capture, steal, locktouch, shove, and canto+. I’ll probably add some more item related skills (like Miles’ prf) down the road, but I made a conscious decision to not do personal skills this go around.

[LilacSolstice]

Hey! First off, as someone who really enjoyed Vision Quest, this early iteration of this game was a ton of fun to play through! I really did want to leave a bit of feedback in order to help this game be the best it can be! I’m new to this site, so I’m gonna try to format this into sections so it’s easier for people to scroll past but if I fail miserably at that, sorry. I should also note that I downloaded before the hotfix patch, so some of what I say may have been fixed? I’m also avoiding what others have already said to avoid redundancy. And I played on hard mode, for reference. I hope this isn’t too long, I just really wanted to give my thoughts and I’ll try my best to be concise because I could probably go on for way longer than I will.

General Thoughts & Chapter Thoughts

I really really do like the experimental aspects of gameplay here. I enjoy Thracia’s gameplay and I think the Thracia mechanics included here work really well. I definitely see how this has been built with fatigue in mind, and I think it would add to the experience, though I agree having it be a toggle-able option is best for those who don’t wish to have it. I will say that I noticed what felt like a bit of a step up in difficulty from chapter 9 onwards. (On that note, did I miss a gaiden? I played through chapter 13 which wasn’t mentioned in the original post, and only found chapters 4x and 10x for gaidens.) Specifically, 9, 10, 10x, and 12 felt like a step up in difficulty from any of the other chapters. I wonder how difficult these may be in an iron man setting with fatigue, which is definitely how I would choose to play a final release of this game. Part of the only thing carrying me through these chapters was two characters that could actually double things by that point in the game, and with experience spread more thin, I may not have anyone quite to that point. In particular I’d like to note that 10x did not seem so ironman friendly to me. It seemed like it had a decently high enemy density, which especially with the fog of war is hard to play around. Add to this the lessened avoid formula of this game and it certainly felt like it created scenarios that were hard for me to plan around when playing blind. This is not really something I felt with any other fog of war chapter in this game, or any chapter for that matter. In other chapters, I recognized that when I made a mistake it could have been avoided with planning, but specifically in 10x, it didn’t feel that way to me. That was really the only chapter I played that I would consider to have been frustrating. Outside of that one, I really liked the chapters, and I’m glad to see the good map design from Vision Quest is back.

"Weird Reinforcements?

I noticed a couple reinforcements I found weird. In chapter 2, the thief in the bottom left ran away immediately on the enemy phase after spawning. I still hadn’t opened the chest so I’m not exactly sure why. Additionally, the second thief in the top right corner of I think chapter 8 (the one where you get Wulandari) seemed unnecessary? I’d already cleared out that corner and dealt with the first thief, so by the time that second one spawned it just ran away the next turn since there was nothing left for that thief to do. I also found the amount of pegasus reinforcements in chapter 4 a bit much. It just resulted in having Maslo and Falkner sit in the same spot for like 5 turns in a row, one shotting pegasus after pegasus. Those in particular just didn’t make for the most engaging gameplay.

Character-Specific Thoughts

There are some really unique characters that stood out and I really appreciated their inclusion. Coriander being an unpromoted horse mage is something I wish I saw more often, Ballard being that sort of unpromoted unit that’s plays more like a promoted unit is a type of character I really enjoy using, Norsu coming in as a Bishop prepromote with A staves in chapter 4 had me super excited, and my man Miller being Ronan on a wyvern rounds out the highlights of fun characters that felt really unique. It’s definitely good having the unique characters, since I do think that the high doubling threshold combined with the low exp gain made characters a bit less distinguishable than normal in the early game. A character like Chiasa struggles with this in particular, having her usual role as a doubling myrmidon mean less when she hits once just like everyone else. Even her Killing Edge isn’t a big deal when she has half the amount of chances to crit compared to most other myrmidons. I will admit, she was one of my only two units doubling by later in this patch, so I really appreciated her later on, but it did take a while to get her going for that payoff. Niklas stands out from the crowd as the least distinguishable character - at least Miles comes with a very useful PRF and Falkner has the niche of effective damage vs fliers. Niklas has basically nothing in the first chapter and I found he was the easiest character to drop once I could. I also noticed there seemed to be a long period of chapters with no fliers in the middle, causing me to end up dropping Falkner and Malso when Wulandari gave me basically all the bow utility I needed. The last character I’d like to mention is Joop. Without those bases and growths, I never would have picked up an anima mage when I had Coriander, but you did an excellent job of making him look appealing to use upon joining. Him and Chiasa were my only two who could double a decent amount of enemies by the end. Don’t change a thing about this man, please - what an instant favorite he became. I long for a portrait of him to gaze upon the absolute beauty of Joop.

Small Bugs

• A previous commenter said they got a black screen at the start of chapter 5, which I didn’t. I did get black screens at the start of 4x and 10, however.
• Miller seems to be lacking a the mini-portrait, and I’m not sure if this is just a result of not yet having one, or if it just mistakenly wasn’t included yet.
• In Ch. 10, one specific horse (I forget which) doesn’t include a background to the text when it escapes. Every other horse (at least of the ones I saved) did have a background to the escape text.
• Yambusame poisons despite not mentioning this. Miles’ PRF doesn’t mention the +3 luck, but I’m guessing there isn’t room in the description for it so that one’s not as big of a deal.
• The village in Ch. 11 isn’t set to close after being visited, so I could repeatedly visit it for continuous rewards if I really wanted to.
• The Ch. 11 Wyvern lord is quite glitchy. Her portrait when viewing her stat screen causes a visual glitch when she blinks. Her lance animation instead shows a glitchy version of the throwing axe animation, and her standard axe animation seems to have some of the axe sounds coming in too early. Her portait is also replaced by Tethys’ portrait in the Ch. 11 outro.
• Kalea repeats a line in the Chapter 12 intro “Chieftess may I ask you a question” - the first time being before she is supposed to say it.
• In Ch. 12, a Steel Longbow armor’s animation was glitchy when they took a shot at Duck.
• The Ch. 12 boss’s Flame Sword animation was also glitchy. When I also attacked him with the Wyvern Lord’s glitchy lance animations (hoping for a boss convo) this combination of glitchiness caused the game to softlock in the battle screen. This didn’t happen against anyone else.
• In Ch. 13, I found out that Horseslayer is effective against wall. Wall is best horse, tbh.

Overall I had a really enjoyable time with this! It definitely felt more challenging than when I played Vision Quest, (which I did a normal mode iron man of, as normal was supposed to be the hard mode equivalent) but I don’t think this is a bad thing, as outside of the chapter I mentioned, it always felt quite fair to me. I really appreciate the stuff you’re experimenting with here, and I hope to see more of this game in the at least not ridiculously distant future. I hope this was helpful and that I didn’t go on for too long. After enjoying Vision Quest quite a bit, I really do want this hack to be good and I’m happy to get the chance to try and help this way, at least. I will certainly be keeping a watch on this project for any updates that come out!

[Pandan]

Thanks for sharing! Really appreciate your feedback and glad you enjoyed the patch. The level of detail here is appreciated, so don’t worry. All useful stuff.

As you can tell, a lot is still WIP, but I’m glad to hear the general flow of the game was fun for you. Pretty much everything after ch6 was not tested extensively, and there are things I need to sort out w/ more playtesting. This feedback will be useful for later.

Yeah, Niklas I struggled with for a while and will prob go back and rework him. In earlier dev versions, Ballard was a pirate, so Niklas was almost entirely outclassed since Duck and Kalea also exist and offer more utility/stats.

Miles was outclassed badly by Chiasa early on, too, which is why I gave him a prf. I’ve kicked around the idea of doing something similar for Niklas.

In general, I was pretty inspired by the early game of gaiden (especially the villagers) which is why the units may feel less distinct upfront and have more payoff later on as you get more weapons and stats. Originally, I considered making most of the starting cast gaiden-style villagers, but opted against this since I felt it would be tricky to balance. I kept a lot of the early joiners fairly vanilla, but have scoped funkier units to add later on.

I was worried a bit about Joop vs. Coriander since she can be super good in my practice runs. Joop has a mug but no frames yet. I did the concept and Levin cleaned it up. Here’s a WIP version:

Joop WIP

Thanks again for playing and sharing your feedback.

[LilacSolstice]

Ayy it’s Joop! You made my day with that, thanks lol. Definitely really liked this guy - I used both him and Coriander through the whole hack and they were both pretty good but I’d definitely say Joop was the better of the two for me. Looking forward to seeing what else this game has in store!

[Honest_Joe]

I’m so excited to hearing about this! The ending of VQ made me want a sequel.
I’d offer to help playtest but I’m a college student, so free time is rare. I wish you luck for what it’s worth! (That part about trs party split has me interested since the hack I’m thinking the story about would use that)

[BladerDj]

I’ve yet to play TRS but are aware of the split parties element (which was used in RD part 4 too). I have no idea how it was implemented in TRS, but 1 thing I’d definitly wished in RD was to know where the path leads everyone before selecting the army. For example “They go to desert” (player knows - cavalry sucks there) or “theae Nomads are known for their strong archers” (player knows - Fliers need to be careful but I wanna bring them anyway because they’re good).

Providing an optimal way for fair descision making might be difficult/downright impossible without the knowledge of what is coming at you. Fully knowing only is possible when you played the game once - But a few hints (maybe through village conversations and such) would be desireable for the first playthrough.

[Pandan]

Yeah I agree w/ you here. If and when I get to this part of the game, I want to make it clear what type of terrain you’ll be dealing with. Unlike TRS though, I plan for the routes to be roughly equal in terms of difficulty.

In an ideal world, you’ll be able to send whomever you like on either side and you won’t get “punished” for sending a unit to the “wrong” side.

[Roltair]

Hello! I just recently finished VQ on Hard (Did first playthrough on hard and got all recruits/gaiden chapters. Not a fan of iron man style so I did a lot of resetting which is not at all a complaint by the way. I thoroughly enjoyed the entirety of VQ!)

And just started LoT on hard. I’ve gotten through the first 6 chapters. I’m aware VQ was balanced around normal and LoT around hard, but how do you feel the 2 hard modes should compare?

LoT feels like there is less pressure whereas I felt pressure at every turn from the very start of VQ (which I actually loved that I constantly had to make use of my entire deployed cast). Won’t say the game should be harder based on my account alone or only the first several chapters but just stating the differences I’m noticing between the 2 games. (Actually just now remembering you’d like to introduce fatigue later so maybe that’ll be where LoT’s difficulty comes in)

I do think the speed and exp changes make it easier use more units and vastly improves the green units but I wonder how it’ll help to differentiate characters of the same class or weapon type if generally most units won’t double, and especially with you wanting to cut back on skills. But perhaps it’s a judgment later reserved for down the line as it seems you have ideas in mind.

I think Miles prf is a nice support addition but I don’t think it makes me want to use him over Chiasa as a combat unit.

Think that sorts out my thoughts thus far. I know past the 7th chapter things aren’t yet thoroughly tested but I’ll continue to keep you updated with my thoughts, and if there is anything else I can do to help I’d be happy to assist!

[Pandan]

Thanks for playing and sharing your thoughts.

To your first question - yes, the two hard modes should be vastly different. When I built VQ, I didn’t know what I was doing, and balanced around normal difficulty, then scaled up levels for HM and added HM bonuses for enemy joiners like FE6. I consider hard mode in VQ more like an optional challenge for people who have played VQ already or found normal mode too easy, but it was never intended as the “true” difficulty.

Conversely, LoT hard mode is intended. Towards the end of VQ dev, I learned that it was better to balance at the hardest difficulty and scale down autolevels for easier modes to help ensure that the hardest difficulty was beatable. Because I am not good at FE, LoT hard mode is probably a lot more akin to VQ normal than it is to VQ hard.

In summary, VQ was built w/ personal bases on enemies and scaled up autolevels for hard mode, while LoT was built w/o personal bases on enemies and scaled down autolevels for normal mode. LoT hard mode should be easier than VQ hard and roughly on par w/ VQ normal, if not slightly more difficult. I predict LoT normal mode will be easier than VQ normal and that LoT easy mode will be easier than VQ easy, as well. A little too soon to tell though.

I definitely made an effort to ease the player into things in LoT because mechanically and numerically the game deviates from vanilla. The AS formula is different, the amount of doubling is reduced at the start, the weapon triangle is beefed up, there’s 1 RN, and other changes from vanilla that make ramping up into LoT probably a bigger adjustment than booting up VQ (in addition to capture!).

Because I am assuming the player needs to get up to speed on the mechanics, I chose to ease the player into it by allowing them to experiment more up front. This is why so many of the enemies early on use weaker bronze weapons and why timing on some things is more lenient. Because VQ sat so much more squarely in the realm of vanilla, I felt more empowered to build off that immediately vs. setting a baseline here. Not only for the player, but for myself to gauge “does this even work?”

As for Chiasa/Miles, Miles was widely regarded by the playtest team as the worst unit in the early game until he got a prf. A lot of the units early will feel kinda similar but should branch out as time goes on and new weapons are added. I predict fatigue will help w/ rotations as well, in addition to supports when they are implemented.

For differentiation, I was inspired by gaiden villagers and how they start out all functionally the same and grow into different units. Additionally, I want the player to be able to play past mistakes and comfortably rotate w/ fatigue, so I suspect early on units will feel “samey” and that it will branch out more over time. I have funkier unit builds planned later which should help spice things up, but we’ll see how it works in practice.

Hope that’s helpful!

[Roltair]

Yes that helps, thanks for the reply! I look forward to seeing how things progress!

[Silver-Star]

Seems like I have get used to the Fatigue mechanic. Probably start with Thracia 776 or Sun God’s Wrath.

[BladerDj]

I liked what atmosphere was given to Thracia 776 overall with the fatigue. What messes the system up in this game is that the order how characters are placed at the beginning of a chapter is affected by it. In Vanilla Thracia you can’t change the position of characters in the list which is really bad considering how important good start positioning is in the late game maps with party splits in the beginning and all.

If you can’t make it right with these mechanics - don’t design your game around it. It would’ve been fine if not 90% of all chapters split up your party later on. Planning is possible but shouldn’t be nessecary to this ammount. Luckily we have QoL patches nowadays.

[HouseHawk]

Ayyyyyye yeah yeah! Congrats on the sequel @Pandan !

[Hello72207]

It appears that trying to capture using a mage doesn’t halve magic.

[Pandan]

Thanks for calling this out - I wonder if it is an issue w/ the old skillsys I am using here. I’ll investigate down the road, thanks.

[pembuatonar]

Lord PANDAN is unstoppable!!
i am your liege