KickStarter Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark - Final Fantasy Tactics-like RPG

[Jimmious]

My god the guy that is playing.....

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

My god the guy that is playing.....

"It has lots of dialogue, so you know that it is deep..."
I lasted almost 7 minutes before I had to shut it down.

 

[Jimmious]

My god the guy that is playing.....

"It has lots of dialogue, so you know that it is deep..."
I lasted almost 7 minutes before I had to shut it down.

The game however looks like an interesting FFT "clone" for PC. The animations are not complete mobile game quality and seems to have all the systems necessary. I shall follow

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/tactics-rpg...k-shows-tons-of-promise-even-in-early-access/

Tactics RPG Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark shows tons of promise, even in Early Access
But it's worth waiting to play until 2019, unless you really, really need a dose of Final Fantasy Tactics-style combat now.

I picked up Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark right where I left off at the end of the Kickstarter Backers’ build, guiding my team of fantasy sheriffs on a globetrotting adventure to root out the corruption in their order of peacekeepers. Now, in Early Access, I’m hunting down a cure for one of my suddenly indisposed party members (the cliffhanger from the Kickstarter build) and kicking a party of amateur temple crashers in the pants.

I don’t want to spoil the details of what's happening in Fell Seal, because its story has so far been inventive, and its characters as serious and interesting as the ones in Final Fantasy Tactics, its main inspiration. So far it's perfectly playable in Early Access—but I don't think you should play it yet. I've had no issues with crashing or game-stopping bugs, but playing Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark now, with its story unfinished, would feel a little bit like peeking at your presents.

Brave new world map
Since the build released to Kickstarter backers in March, Fell Seal has been expanded significantly. The campaign has doubled in length, with yet more to come. New animations and sound effects have made it feel far more complete. My favorite addition is the new world map, which doubles down on the painterly look of the previous version—so much so that I had to flip back through my older screenshots to remind myself what the map had looked like before. Not that different, it turns out, but the animated props and sketchier style give it so much more personality. I’ve rarely had such strong feelings about a map, but here we are.

There are more story missions, which means there's also higher level equipment and new classes with new skills. I eagerly dumped my cash into new gear for my favorite characters. There aren’t a plethora of available options yet, but just enough to get my imagination working.

The best investment I’ve made so far is a cape for my wizard (his name is Barrow, thank you for asking) that boosts his fire resistance to 100 percent. It’s likely overpowered, but it allowed me to take Barrow into a crowd of enemies and have him drop a Fire II spell on his own head. He’s immune, but the bandits around him were boiled in their boots.

I haven't tried the same play with other elements, but there are also capes for 100% resistance to water, earth, and lightning damage, and I imagine they’ll work the same. It’s a move that I’ve used to get into plenty of trouble. I've yet to perfect the part where I get back out again.

The “in” crowd
I now have a mixture of story characters and custom units that I like to take into battle. My wizard Barrow, for instance, and my knight Thane are both custom characters that I’ve taken a shine to for no reason other than that I made them myself. They have no involvement in the story, though you can see their sprites hanging about camp during cutscenes as if they might have some hidden personality of their own, if only they had the chance to speak up.

I ended up neglecting about half of my troops throughout the new round of missions. Characters only earn experience by participating in fights, so I now inevitably have a handful of level four and five characters hanging about with my otherwise level eight to twelve crew. I’m supposed to be encouraged to spread my attention evenly by leaving injured characters, those who were downed in the previous encounter, at camp. I can jog around to map to take on random encounters and rack up experience, which also kills time and lets a character recover from an injury. The further back my neglected units fall from the main party though, the less likely it is I’ll bother taking them on a non-story mission to catch them up.

Characters being injured and forced to sit out a fight (or suffer a penalty) is a welcome alternative to the permadeath of Final Fantasy Tactics or Fire Emblem, but it's also caused this big gap between by A team and B team fighters. One of the main three protagonists, the mercenary Reiner, has even begun to fall behind my other characters in level. It’s now difficult to bring him along without saddling him with another injury and thus another missed fight and more unclaimed experience.

With so many classes to try out, it feels like I’ll fall into bad habits unless all party members, present in the fight or not, earn the same experience. Otherwise, I imagine any new class I’d like to try I’ll need to spend the gold to recruit a high level custom character.

The higher level you want to recruit, the more gold you’ll spend, and that's not even including the gear you'll want to buy for them. It’s a pricey venture, but I’ve never been one to tolerate random battle grinding without story beats to prop it up. In the significantly shorter Kickstarter demo, it was easy to sweep level disparity under the rug. Now it looks like the power imbalance will only grow as I play more.

Don’t spoil your supper
Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark has grown significantly since the first time I played, but its developers plan to add many more missions before its story is finished. Pleasantly, they have added mod support, which is great for those who’d like to tweak skills and classes. But unless you’re an avid modder with a thirst for tactical RPGs, or an absolute devotee to the genre who wants to have their voice heard during the planned six months of Early Access, you’re better off giving it a few more months. There’s plenty of polish yet to be done, as with any game in Early Access.

Fell Seal is a singleplayer game with a story you may only want to play through once. And because that story so far has been enjoyable, my gut says hold off playing until the final version. Fell Seal is planned for release in early 2019, which isn’t too long a wait to see the game at its best.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

https://www.fellseal.com/single-post/2018/09/14/Fell-Friday-58---New-EA-Build-lots-of-new-stuff

Fell Friday #58 - New EA Build, lots of new stuff!
September 14, 2018

|

Pierre Leclerc

We just uploaded our first big content update on our Steam Early Access build. It's loaded with a LOT of new stuff. You can see the full change notes right here!





Progress Report:



We've mostly been working on getting the newest build ready this week, so: bug fixing, testing, wrapping up new systems, etc.
We added a 2nd set of Key mappings for Keyboard/Mouse users, redid the way the gamepad/keyboard system works (you can now switch input sources on the fly), added new individual volume sliders for UI/Ambient sounds and redid the way the music dims during spell effects to be a lot smoother.

We wrapped up a new system to show treasures/gatherables available on a map. Here's how it looks:

Our artist has been working on a new map, new spells and on adding visual customizations to the Bzil races w/r to which class they are using. Something like so:

Lastly, we have a secret class in the works that should be available fairly soon. Their spells will be quite impressive! Here's what you can expect from them:

That's it for this week!

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[agris]

Call me odd, but I think the flat version looks better? Looks less like computer graphics and more like hand-drawn animation.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

That's pretty damn impressive for a husband/wife team.

 

[Siveon]

Call me odd, but I think the flat version looks better? Looks less like computer graphics and more like hand-drawn animation.

You're odd. Although I do see the appeal, I prefer the polished look. You want that kind of detail if you're looking at static sprites. Plus I just really like that flex for the startup animation. It's real good.

 

[SirSingAlot]

the game looks actually very promising.
i hate EA, but if its already in a good state, might as well.

 

[Darth Canoli]

You're not going to play it for the dialogs, obviously but the tactical battles are interesting, specially at the end of the demo, when you're fighting a bunch of monsters in the wild, it was tough enough to require some thinking, not tough enough to kill any party member though but still.

I've read some kids complaining about the difficulty, i wouldn't go that far, seems well balanced with an average difficulty.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Interview, starts around 26 minute mark.

 

[SirSingAlot]

actually bought it. i aint sure how many updates i will wait to start playing, but i read the devs do actually patch and rebalance/add a lot.

i am a sucker for FFT/ Fire Enblem clones and this looks super good as of now.

 

[Harry Easter]

Found this one today and really curious.

So how is the writing so far? I read that the dialogues are kind of meh, but the combat is really good?

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[SirSingAlot]

alright, so even tho its still in EA which i avoid like crowded shopping centers, i went ahead and gave it a try.

turns out, the game is fuckin awesome already!

i am totally in love with the deep character progression/class system.
plenty of room for individualisation and different approaches are viable.


the game is slightly hard (playing on veteran) which i dont mind and people on the codex prolly will like too.
but if some casual is testing this game for the first time and gets his ass turned inside out during the first mission, well....developers dont fuck around with plebs as it seems.

the art (especially the portraits) is gorgeous!
music is decent.
dialogues are kinda mediocre, but tbh i dont give a dime on dialogues anyways.

if you like games like Breath of Fire, Final Fantasy Tactics ect, you should check this game out.
it has been years since i enjoyed a similar game like this one.


totally recommend to try this one

 

[Polydeuces]

Only thing I wish there were more are abilities, but otherwise it's a great game.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

https://www.fellseal.com/single-post/2018/12/21/Fell-Friday-72---Consoles-are-looking-good

Fell Friday #72 - Consoles are looking good!
December 22, 2018

|

Pierre Leclerc

This week's been spent mostly working on our Xbox One and Ps4 builds. Both are finished, minus any issues Certification might find with them when the time comes. This includes the achievements system as well, which means it'll be easy to port it to Steam when we get to it.



Otherwise, bug fixes, new spells and new portraits were added to the latest build. The build notes can be found right here.



Handling the whole PS4 build and creating the achievements on Xbox One within a week made for a pretty intense week! But we're happy it's done now and we'll be glad to move back to focusing on new content and balance from now on!



No snazzy images this week, sorry!

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Abu Antar]

Fell Friday #74 - Localization is done, new effects!

January 12, 2019
Pierre Leclerc

This week, we have our localization done!

We're adding French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and German to the game. Everything should be done except for the in-game manual and some rare newer abilities/changes which will show in English.
There shouldn't be too many of those and they should be taken care of before the actual release, but with about 95% of the game translated, we thought it would be great to finally share it with everyone.

For this week's build full change log, you can check this page right here.


Progress Report:

We updated to Unity 2018.3 this week and it's by far the most trouble we've had with updating Unity so far. Strange changes to the XML serialization broke our save files and some of our data and performance in the editor seems degraded. We had to update to this new version for consoles, but all in all, not a very welcome update.

This week has been fairly hectic for us as we had to submit our current console builds for a big QA pass before we can send them to 1st parties. And there were a few surprise requirements we'd missed.

And of course, there were surprises from adding all those languages, especially centered around some them having very very long words where English has short and compact words, haha.

We didn't get as much time spent on preparing next week's content as we would have liked, truth be told, so it's going to be a very busy week next week to make sure we get all the features we want in next big update.

Here's a preview of Ippokampos, an effect we just wrapped up this week:

And here's an effect we're still working on that's part of an optional event that isn't fully done yet:

 

[Doktor Best]

Does it have level scaling?

 

[Abu Antar]

Fell Friday #75 - Big content update!

January 18, 2019
Pierre Leclerc

Today, we're pushing our big monthly update!

The first big chunk we're adding is the story character events. We're adding 6 of them, which is about half of the events we have planned. The other ones are all written, but not scripted yet. They should be in the next big update.

The events are represented by an exclamation mark on nodes on the world map. Just walk to it, activate the node and you'll see an "event" option in the list of possible actions.
Please note that 2 of the events added stop being available after a certain point in the story, so you might not be able to see those in your current save file. They are fairly early in the story though, so it should be easy to check them out.

The next big chunk we're adding is 4 more story battles. Just like our last big build, those should be fairly challenging and we might need to be toned down. We'll be awaiting your feedback on this topic!


Progress Report:

The current build should speak for itself in terms of progress. We've been busy with character events and the new encounters.

We managed to squeeze in a few balance tweaks from comments from the forums, especially centered around the AI, but it's just scratching the surface of all the updates we want to put in. Our priority is to get all the content in first though, to make sure QA can run through all the levels of the game.
Then we should have a full month left dedicated to balance and tweaks before release. And of course, we'll be able to put more balance updates after release too, if needed.

We had a first big pass of QA last week, so starting next week, our first order of business will be to go through the issues that were found and fix them all, so we're ready for our next big QA pass.

The only remaining big tickets are our credits section and game ending, so we're starting work on those to make sure whatever text we add to those can be localized in time for release.

Everything is on schedule for now, but we'll be extremely busy in the coming months, that's for sure!

Thanks again for the great support, everyone!