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Voidspire Tactics

Ninjerk

Arcane
Joined
Jul 10, 2013
Messages
14,323
The Krakenslayer is kinda like a lightning-flavored Ignis Knight, which means a lot of AoE and a bit of zone control. It has some weirdly shaped AoEs, like an X-shaped weapon attack, which I find fun.

Here's a few of the abilities (the FX are WIP)
kslay-abil-preview-1.gif
He doesn't heal himself with the static?
 

Eldiran

Rad Codex
Developer
Joined
Nov 10, 2015
Messages
130
Nah. It damages adjacent targets and puts Static Fields in unoccupied tiles. So you can use it as an attack while keeping your flanks protected, or just use it to control space.
 

lightbane

Arcane
Joined
Dec 27, 2008
Messages
10,156
Why was this moved to the JRPG forum? It has nothing JRPeish about it, not even waifus! I swear it was in the CRPG subforum before.
 

passerby

Arcane
Joined
Nov 16, 2016
Messages
2,788
The Krakenslayer is kinda like a lightning-flavored Ignis Knight, which means a lot of AoE and a bit of zone control. It has some weirdly shaped AoEs, like an X-shaped weapon attack, which I find fun.

Here's a few of the abilities (the FX are WIP)
kslay-abil-preview-1.gif

You can throw spells only in cardinal directions ?

meh...
 

Biscotti

Arbiter
Patron
Joined
Nov 24, 2015
Messages
561
Location
Belgium
It probably got moved because it's heavily inspired by Japanese TRPGs. Any game that takes design cues from that genre ends up here, regardless of what part of the world it's from. I personally don't really care tbh, it's just semantics as usual.
 

CryptRat

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Sep 10, 2014
Messages
3,548
People who argue jRPG means "from Japan" can fuck off and die.
1. They're right.
2. So to you JRPGs means full party creation, light story, sandbox gameplay and very interactive environments and tactical turn-based combat taking place directly on the map? I'd like to play all these JRPGs you're thinking about.
 

V_K

Arcane
Joined
Nov 3, 2013
Messages
7,714
Location
at a Nowhere near you
It probably got moved because it's heavily inspired by Japanese TRPGs. Any game that takes design cues from that genre ends up here, regardless of what part of the world it's from. I personally don't really care tbh, it's just semantics as usual.
It's also - even more - heavily inspired by Ultima.
 

Zanzoken

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
3,559
Eldiran, congrats on the game, looking forward to purchasing and playing it once my backlog gets cleared out a bit.

Would you mind talking a little more about your development process? Like what kind of tools you used, how long it took you, etc.

Also what are your plans for the art style on your new game? It looks like Voidspire has some great systems and content but the art is pretty basic. I don't mean this in a shitty way, just wondering if better art assets might get your next game some more attention.

So I finally got around to purchasing Voidspire in the last sale, and I have to say that I am really enjoying it.

Also I want to apologize for my comment from 3 1/2 years ago -- quoted above -- about the production values of Voidspire. Honestly I feel like the art gets about as much mileage out of 16-bit graphics as is humanly possible, and now after seeing more of the character models, environments, animations, etc -- my opinion is that the game looks pretty damn cool.

Overall the game is a fantastic achievement for a single developer, and once I've finished Voidspire I can't wait to take a crack at Alvora and whatever else Rad Codex publishes in the future.
 

glass blackbird

Learned
Patron
Joined
Apr 9, 2015
Messages
664
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
I think the art definitely is "basic" like you said, but it benefits from being consistent and always very legible. You can always tell what stuff is and nothing sticks out or seems out of place. Obviously with enough money and time you could have more detailed sprites, but it's functional and never detracts from the game, which is good enough.

I'm definitely looking forward to this boat thing. It's looking good!
 

Zanzoken

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
3,559
Not actually much of a spoiler, just shows the ending victory screen.

OU5kkUa.png
A few minor gripes aside, I enjoyed pretty much everything about the game.

I give it a :5/5::4/5: = highly recommend!
 

Darth Canoli

Arcane
Joined
Jun 8, 2018
Messages
5,687
Location
Perched on a tree
Played Voidspire for a few days, waiting for Horizon's Gate to be in its final state to play it.

I tried to play it a couple of years back but for some reason, i didn't like it enough or more likely i found something more appealing to play.
The fact is the beginning is underwhelming but this time i persevered, mostly because of Horizon's Gate and the game slowly grew on me.
According to the saves, i'm already 14h49 in.

The game is slightly too sandboxy for me but the few cut-scenes really improved the game experience, along with the optional huge monsters.

The giant spider, the worms colony, the huge worm chasing you, that part was probably the highlight of the game for me, so far, also being nuked while walking down the wall was really fun ...

It doesn't feel like i'm close to the end but maybe i am.

A few questions though :
- Where can i find the material the engineer requests ? He says it's in the mine and i mined 30 fragments of something but is it what he's asking for, apparently, he doesn't care much about it.
- A villager is asking for 30 bird feathers but whenever i kill one, they flee or something, no body, no feathers ...
- In the Engineer area, have no idea how to open the closed hatch but i'll try to figure this one by myself for now.

JRPG ?
About that jrpg thing, the class system is highly inspired from the job systems from tactical jrpg like FFT but i agree, besides that, it's a full fledge western crpg.

Review :5/5::4/5:
+ Very good combat system
+ Good encounter design
+ The class system is quite well made, easy to switch, it's a lot of micro-management though, specially when you only play by short sessions and have to check what you were tryign to do all the time
+ Interesting story bits and the few cutscenes are really good (The worm encounter is amazing)
+ Good itemization system
+ Interesting crafting system, didn't use it yet but i'm about to and i know how it works
+ No legendary weapons in garbage bins, really liked how you can find good weapons on huge monsters lairs. Incline!
+ Love how you can use spells / abilities and equipment to go through obstacles or create your own shortcut, M&M III like. INCLINE!

= Class system could use a kind of automatic switch, like i want to go to 500 xp in that class and then auto-switch to this class

- Could use a bit more scripted events
 
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4249

I stalk the night
Patron
Joined
Nov 19, 2014
Messages
1,216
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Divinity: Original Sin 2
Finally dove into the Voidspire and finished it today. Such an amazingly focused experience. I got quite weary of Kingmaker (the character system was fun but jesus christ it feels like a chore simulator with awful RTWP combat) and thought I'd give this a try since I've had it in my library for a while and boy did it pay out. This one was to the point, amazing systems-, combat- and exploration-wise and actually really fun to play! The story worked well enough too and I liked that it was not shoved down your throat. Even the length felt just right for a single playthrough, took me ~17 hours to finish.

Need to grab and jump into Alvora and Horizon's Gate at some point since this was such a positive experience :bro:

edit: Some more thoughts that came to my mind over the night. The music was spot on with the atmosphere most times. The more quirkier and groovier tunes worked great for me as well. Even noticed myself humming to them multiple times.

I would've maybe liked if the journal was even more extended. Especially for monsters. At the start I used study a couple of times, but after a while it was just easier to check which spell is going to do the most damage than trying to remember weaknesses. Would've been nice if they and other monster stats would've been written in the journal on study or partially on defeat. Increased window size for the journal and a proper index would've been nice as well. But the whole look an journal was fun for me as well, especially since it at times provided some very vital info or just to the backstory.
 
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Jack Dandy

Arcane
Joined
Feb 10, 2013
Messages
3,039
Location
Israel
Divinity: Original Sin 2
The battle themes were completely fucking awesome! Give them a listen, people.
Apparently the developer purchased them from kind of a 'music track market'. The composer is super talented, I'd love if he teamed up with the dev for future titles, or to hear more from him.


 

Kaivokz

Arcane
Joined
Feb 10, 2015
Messages
1,499
The first song is (a version of) Battle #1 by Kevin Phetsomphou.


The second song is Battle #2 by Kevin Phetsomphou.


I think both are free use?
 

Jack Dandy

Arcane
Joined
Feb 10, 2013
Messages
3,039
Location
Israel
Divinity: Original Sin 2
Woah!
Apparently he also worked on the OST of Megaman Unlimited, which was bomb-as-fuck on it's own

 

Strange Fellow

Peculiar
Patron
Joined
Jun 21, 2018
Messages
4,013
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I've lost the boat, fellas. In the wine sea. It's stuck in a corner where there's an area transition, so I can't reach it. Am I screwed?
 

Strange Fellow

Peculiar
Patron
Joined
Jun 21, 2018
Messages
4,013
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Finally finished this. The reason it took me so long is because I didn't feel like playing, because I didn't like it very much. Beyond the initial thrill of being exposed to the gimmicks (zelda/metroidvania/whateveryoucallit world design and exploration, out of combat spell/weapon/item use, Ultima-like interactivity) there's not much that is particularly interesting about this game.

My main problem was with the class/skill system, which felt consistently undercooked. Some classes are all right, mainly the no-nonsense ones that focus on physical abilities or direct damage such as the bog-standard knight, the mage, or the archer (Sharpshooter or whatever), but the further out you get the shittier the skills become, for the most part. Mostly I felt I'd have been better served with just sticking to the base or base-adjacent classes, which seems to completely defeat the purpose of the system. Why should I spread my precious XP across half a dozen classes in order to unlock the shadowtechnoblademancersage, when it's a total crapshoot whether it will have any useful abilities for my character at all, let alone an increase in base power which should come with it considering how much XP I have to waste in intermediary classes to get there, and how much my character suffers in combat effectiveness while transitioning? I shouldn't, but of course there's no way of knowing that before it's too late, so it ends up being a lovely "fuck you" moment.

But disparity of power is one thing, the worst bit is that it's all anaemic and boring. Everything seems to be designed to let you dish out about 20-30 damage per round, give or take, or less than that but also applying a status effect. Unfortunately, all the effects pale in comparison to one: Dead, which is applied by just piling on the single-target damage. Poison and Blind is nice against HP bags, but that's it. Everything else that isn't a single-target damage attack is Balanced to hell and back, either by making it piteously weak and ineffectual or by giving it an exorbitant casting time.
Like the Mechanist. Great class concept, neutered to shit. Think the turret sounds cool? Well, all you can realistically use it for is to throw it out where it catches an enemy who doesn't move before it, doing 20-30 single-target damage. After that it's mostly useless, since enemies are smart enough to stay out of its line of fire. The bombs take two turns from deployment to activation, giving enemies all the time in the world to move away from the AoE, or just position themselves on top of it so it can't be activated at all. Occasionally you'll catch one (or if you're lucky even two), doing what? 20-30 damage per target, for a two-turn investment, where you're far from guaranteed to hit anything at all. Could've just whacked them instead of going to all the trouble, which is how I felt whenever I tried to do anything besides whacking.

I had one single "aha" moment throughout the entire game, which was when my archer who had the "30% ricochet damage to adjacent enemies" feat took a multishot at one of those huge worms, every single hit of which ricocheted in both directions along the body and basically took the thing down in a single turn. That was fun. The rest of it? "Why am I not just whacking people and applying Dead on them." And that's to say nothing of the skill upgrades, each and every one of which is either "increase range by 1 tile" or "extend duration of [irrelevant status effect] by [next to nothing]". Zzzzzzzz.

Granted, tactical battles against hand-crafted encounters with all the usual positioning and range manipulation and whatnot isn't exactly a horrible deal, and the game isn't long enough for them to get really boring, but I don't see the hype for the systems at all. Cool in theory is about as much as I can give them.

Don't really have much to comment on beyond that. Exploration was decent enough throughout, even though there wasn't much of the "repair the bridge by collecting planks" stuff beyond the initial areas, which was a bummer. I probably missed some stuff though. In any case, some more involved puzzles along the critical path would've been nice. Story and characters and all that jazz was endearing. Oh, and the music was kickass, full marks there. But yeah, it's mostly a combat gallery and it didn't deliver for me.

That turned out a bit of a rant. TLDR: I was expecting something better.
 
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CryptRat

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Sep 10, 2014
Messages
3,548
Sad to hear.

Especially that you didn't use the late classes, checking the classes which were in the game and trying to remember my experience in the process I think passives like the one which grants back MP were already in the game and this one is game changing.

there wasn't much of the "repair the bridge by collecting planks" stuff beyond the initial areas, which was a bummer. I probably missed some stuff though.
I guess a good way to know is to count how many hidden big bosses you fought, although' I'm not the best to tell how many there are now because I played the game before some of them were added.

In my opinion the reason why some players are unsatisfied with the game is how easy the game is in default (and Expert) settings.

I explain. There's something irritating about the difficulty in those games and it is what makes the game less impressive than other combat games such as Blackguard and Dungeon rats, to compare with other games with similar number ranges and encounter scales. In Expert difficulty, the game is from significantly easier than those other games to trivial depending on how you rely on pre-combat buffs, note that I think that playing in Expert difficulty without relying on pre-combat buffs makes for a fun experience anyway but I get how it can feel unsatisfying, you end up winning without really thinking about the system nor even optimizing your moves during fights, unlocking classes you eventually don't use at all in the process. Now the thing is I would not recommend the two highest difficulty settings, leave alone that the last one is not unlocked, to new time players, because if you don't know the game and won't stack damage/spell power buffs as much as possible and as quickly as possible, the game will be hard, doable, but also very boring because of low damage compared to enemie's hps, for example you can fight the spiders in the cave by equipping crossbows to all your characters and getting out of range but it takes hours and there's nothing fun about this anyway. Now playing in Ruin difficulty, throwing away any weapon which would trigger a counter attack, stacking damage buffs, unlocking these MP regaigning passive and all the guard, halo and other buff spells and unlocking the high classes you want, and only those you want, just for one passive, crafting the strong items as soon as possible, to afford the challenge is satisfying.

To summarize there's expert difficulty where you don't have to care enough about the system and Ruin where you need to already have masterized it for the experience not to be boring, while many games like those I've mentioned have a default difficulty which is somewhere in-between.

I always claim a game, especially with its own unique system, is well balanced if it is challenging in default difficulty for a new time player uncovering the system, in this regard the game is not perfectly balanced, it's easy, and I understand how it can be frustrating. I'm sure we agree on the fact that the game having ways to get really strong when masterizing the system is, indepdendantly of everything else, a good thing, it's just that it's less important than the first playthrough on default difficulty being challenging enough.

That said, I love the game anyway because I think non-linearity and interactions with environement totally make up for this, there's the maybe subjective world=big dungeon thing, I love these things and very few games come close to this one when it comes to these things. I also think the difficulty at least stay constant up to the end unlike, say, Divinity : Original Sin, where the second half of the game consists in slaughtering poor harmless enemies, which is fun too but not as fun.

Now, given your personal frustrating experience, maybe the ablity to see every classes' skills from the get go or not should be a checkable option so you can just determine at the beginning that you think the last classes are simply not worth it to you.
 

HansDampf

Arcane
Joined
Dec 15, 2015
Messages
1,471
To summarize there's expert difficulty where you don't have to care enough about the system and Ruin where you need to already have masterized it for the experience not to be boring, while many games like those I've mentioned have a default difficulty which is somewhere in-between.

Intense != Ruin?
I just started playing this game yesterday on Expert. That seemed about right, because Intense is for "players who know what they're doing", which I interpreted as "players who've played the game before and have meta-knowledge". I'm not that far into the game, just entered the mines and fought a couple of Spides. I've had a few rough battles at the beginning, mostly because I was still getting used to the UI and mechanics. But now it feels like I'm almost outclassing enemies. Can I safely switch to Intense? It wouldn't be too late. And I don't mind losing a couple of battles and trying better strategies. And how does AI skill affect difficulty? I've set it to Thoughtful.

Anyway, I thought it was funny to play a tactical jRPG with KB+M, inventory autism, and creating a party of 4 blank slate chars. There is more c than j in this RPG.
 

CryptRat

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Sep 10, 2014
Messages
3,548
Intense != Ruin?
Ruin is unlocked only after you beat the game, it's special as it's not only stat buffs but enemies also gain more abilities (the spiders would have the counterattack passive).
But now it feels like I'm almost outclassing enemies. Can I safely switch to Intense? It wouldn't be too late.
The world is very open and there are hidden bosses and such, hard to know if it'll be a cakewalk or not, but unless I'm remembering wrong you can always switch back to expert so there's no problem trying if you think it'll be better.
And how does AI skill affect difficulty? I've set it to Thoughtful.
I'm not sure it really makes a difference in practice, the AI is fine anyway.
 

V_K

Arcane
Joined
Nov 3, 2013
Messages
7,714
Location
at a Nowhere near you
Anyway, I thought it was funny to play a tactical jRPG with KB+M, inventory autism, and creating a party of 4 blank slate chars. There is more c than j in this RPG.
Yep. The only J thing about this series is the graphics, and the thread was in General RPG for months if not years until something got into Infi and he moved it here. And now he's too stubborn to renege on that.
 

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