Today’s selection marks the 1,000th game I’ve played this year. One sodding thousand. Admittedly it’s a meaningless number but it might give some hope to those of you who are worried that games are going downhill or it’s been a bad year. It really hasn’t.
There are loads and loads of great games out there. Sure, there’s some rubbish too, but this column alone has sifted through a thousand in a mere 8 months, and that’s after> discarding the big names, the stuff Fraser or Dominic have poached, the shovelware, and the inevitable daily idiot-milking dreck about PUTIN JONG BITCOIN HA HA HA. And that’s just on Steam!
Things are good, my brave Unknowanauts. Whatever our complaints about Steam? The games, they are good. We are very lucky to be here, now. Long may it continue. Onwards then, to another round of Unknown Pleasures.
Poking the squinty eye of Gary Naysayer this week: capitalist ambitions, parental responsibilities, and racial tensions. (more…)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, a turn-based RPG being developed by 6 Eyes, is in Early Access now. After its successful Kickstarter, our writer Lauren Morton checked out how it was coming along back in March. She said, "Fell Seal's current demo includes 11 story missions and the option to replay most of the maps as random encounters. In true JRPG style, it also features fantasy monsters, bumbling henchmen, and a haughty antagonist with a terrible haircut. The protagonists, by way of contrast, stray a good deal from the plucky heroes of the coming-of-age tale I expected to find."
Since then it's been added to, and if you pick up the current version you'll get 21 story encounters and 30 optional encounters to play through, and you'll have access to over 25 playable classes and 200 abilities.
Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Dominic Tarason)
There are some who feel the strategy RPG genre peaked with Final Fantasy Tactics back in 1997, and I struggle to find a solid counter-argument. 6 Eyes Studio must feel the same way, as they’re happy to call their own entry into the genre – Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark – a spiritual successor. It’s an impressive-looking game, and, after a successful run on Kickstarter, seems to have caught the eye of Russian publisher 1C Company, who are bringing it to retail. The first early access version of Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark is out now on Steam, but you can find an older demo here on Itch.
we will be attending Gamescom this year and we would love to see you there. We can play the game, chat and maybe take a selfie together?
We also have a lot of swag ready for you guys so don’t be a stranger :)
You can find us at Hall 10.1., booth D92!
And now, for this week's dev log:
We spent most of the week preparing for our Early Access launch, by adding polish to the game and fixing last minute bugs. It's been a very busy week indeed!
On the programming side, other than getting everything ready for the EA, I've wrapped up our next story map events and fixed a few issues that were found from thoroughly testing our worm boss battle. That one is now truly and fully finished at last (it took at least a full week to get the custom AI, custom abilities and special visuals just right!). Here's what it looks like:
Otherwise, our artist has been working mostly on polish as well, but we do have a few new spells to show this week, mostly focusing on weapon skills:
We most likely won't be putting up a devlog next week as we'll be at Gamescom, but we'll gather some pictures of the events for the next update!
it is finally happening! After your support through our Kickstarter campaign and months of hard work we are ready to start a new chapter in the development of Fell Seal! Early Access!
Ever since our Kickstarter, we've had solid lines of communication with you guys and your comments/suggestions have been invaluable to us. That feedback and communication is the main reason we're here in Early Access after all!
Our official position is always to try to answer all fan inquiries and comments, wherever they are posted. That being said, with all the various social platforms out there, it's easy to miss some. So, we're going to focus our efforts and attention in one main location primarily, which is going to be the Steam forums. Thus, we'd like to encourage everyone to post their comments and feedback right here, on Steam. We'll be able to get to it more easily and quickly, and it should foster more conversation, which ultimately should lead to even better feedback and suggestions and thus, to a better Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark!
The EA version is in a great state currently and pretty much all of the games systems and mechanics are already in place.
There are 21 Story encounters in the current version and around 30 optional non-story encounters. There are over 25 playable classes, 200 abilities and a crafting system. We have the ability for players to use custom portraits, to mod the game to add abilities, classes, languages and even customize core systems via a simple (but very large) customization file.
If we're looking at what's missing, it would be more story battles, about 50% of the sound effects, a Hard Mode and optional story-characters events. And, of course, your feedback! The above systems are all created and in game, but we're very eager to get your feedback to tune and improve them!
With all that being said, the most important thing in the end is that you enjoy the game :)
We've been running a devlog on our website for a bit now and we're already up to weekly update 54!
We recently had a fan discover our site through our Steam page and mention they felt a little sad they'd been missing out on all our devlogs previously and suggested we bring them to Steam as well.
Thus, starting this week, we'll be bringing our weekly devlog to Steam to showcase the progress we're making every week on Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark.
Progress Report:
We're still hard at work adding polish to the current build. We've been adding ambient sprites and sounds to most maps, updating items, maps and classes descriptions, fine tuning abilities and revamping dialogues. It's really shaping up!
We've also added a new UI element to our main menu, which puts an icon next to any character that has enough banked AP to purchase new abilities. The quick visual indicator should cut down on the amount of menu-ing the player has to do in between battles to make sure their troops are "up-to-date". It's a small addition, but we think the quality-of-life improvement it brings is actually pretty awesome.
We're also wrapping up the last of the secret classes and we expect to be done with those come the week-end. It will bring our playable classes to: 20 normal classes, 6 secret classes and 4 story classes, for a grand total of 30. That's a lot of classes!
Now, unto the new and exciting art!
We have another new map ready. A good old-fashioned "arena" map. Really, one can't have a proper RPG without one of those I say!
And we already have our next map in the works, in the form of a basic sketch. Here's the general looks of it:
And finally, we have some new story characters completed. I think they look absolutely great!
Hmmm, yes. Not ominous in the slightest, friend.
And once again, a big thank you to our Discord community for their continued incredible feedback and support! You guys really rock! :)
We just released the next Beta Backer Build. This one is a little different in that there is no added maps this month. We've been focusing solely on new assets, polish and balance.
Added a lot of small animated props to most maps to make them more lively.
Here are the full details: Version 0.2.7
New Content:
Adding a lot of new sound effects to the game. We're just getting started!
Redid the items list of all stores, from the very start of the game. Balance should be better. "Shoes" accessories have been removed from early stores and are now primarily crafted (or purchased later).
Created proper crafting ingredients and crafting recipes.
Created the content of all chests and created proper drops for all maps and enemies.
To go with the above, resetting all treasure chests (so they are all flagged as not obtained yet and you can get them again).
Created proper StealTable and PoachTable for all game content.
Adding a bunch of ambient props and effects to maps. Everything should look more lively now :)
Adding parallax effect to the BG of many maps.
Adding proper merchant sprites and portraits to stores.
Updates:
A great many tweaks left and right. A big thank you to our Discord community for the feedback!
Fixed a hack in our main shader on OpenGL/Metal based setups. Should increase performance, but realistically, probably won't be noticeable. Still, if anything is weird on Mac or Linux, please let us know!
Updating save default slot to favor the last slot used (saved or loaded) rather than 'last loaded'.
Removing chest tutorials in first forest map if player has tutorials disabled.
Changing poaching so it replaces the potential regular drop, rather than add to it.
Adding a lot more options/flexibility to poaching/stealing tables.
Rebalanced many items as part of the crafting/components update.
Lowering Warmage Burst abilities damage a bit (1.25x to 1.15x).
Made Highlands encounter easier by lowering the level of enemies by 1 and increasing the level of a guest by 2.
Updated patrols descriptions.
Bug Fixes:
Fixing thorns on target still doing damage even if target is dead.
Fixing absorption numbers showing over the target rather than the caster if the target is punted into water and dies.
Removing the floating status on characters during cutscenes.
Fixing issue where weapons were drawn under the main cursor on the battle map.
Fixing many entries in encounters.txt having a typo that prevented patrols from having the correct level range.
Enabling patrols on Oldebzar map, as was intended.
Fixing help tooltips about buffs displaying the wrong one for affinity buffs.
Fixing visual issue when teleporting on water without the 'floating' status.
Fixing an issue with flying/teleporting units that broke their pathfinding if they were too far from anyone.
Fixed teleport/displacement actions sometimes giving 2x EXP to the caster.
Fixing the vangals in Ekhidna Falls spawning on hills of which they can't escape. They are meant to be a different enemy.
Fixing help tooltips being displayed at a weird location for many resolutions other than 1080.
Fixing information popups being really small in resolutions higher than 1080.
Fixing bug with Heal I spell sometimes using Mass Heal I selection.
Fixing rare issue with some lists being incorrect in resolutions higher than 1080.
Fixing projectiles having wrong starting and ending point in higher resolutions than 1080.
Fixing map scrolling too fast at higher resolutions than 1080.
Fixing issue where some spells would act weirdly when used with Infused Edge.
Fixing issue with Gadgets not showing as "acquired" in the menus (but still working in combat).
Fixed an issue with equipped items duplicating for story characters joining your ranks.
Quick highlights: - The Bzil race has been added to the game, including a recruitable character. - 3 new story maps - 5 new patrols - New recruits now start with some AP already.
Here are the detailed notes:
Version 0.2.6
New Content:
Adding the Bzil race to the game (player usable).
Adding 3 new story battles.
Adding 5 new patrol battles.
Adding new shops.
Adding starting AP to 'new recruits', based on the amount of AP the 6 characters with the most AP have.
Adding new monsters to the game.
Adding color variations to the beards/new hair styles that were added last build.
Tweaking beards/hairs to remove layering oddities that were happening.
Adding system for a new map objective: reach the safe area within the turn limit.
Adding icons for Xbox One, Ps4 and Steam controllers. The game should show the correct one depending on your used controller. Using any other controller will show Xbox360 icons.
Updates:
Lowering Forceful Strike damage from 0.95 to 0.85
Lowering the amount the timebar starts filled at when you take no action during a turn from 25% to 20%
Changing sandpits teleportation behavior to be 'instant' rather than at the end of the turn.
Updating Vicarious bonus so it only applies to non-story/non-special classes.
Updating various monsters abilities to their correct version (rather than place holders) in terms of game mechanics. They still need their visuals created.
Lowering Blind Powder damage to 0.6 (from 0.8). Lowering Sleeping Powder damage to 0.5 (from 0.6).
Changing gunner Blinding Bullet to Slowing Bullet.
Updated Oasis cutscene to add fires left and right to highlight things are wrong.
Bug Fixes:
Fixing KB/mouse issues with selecting different pages in the gear select screen (and some other screens).
Fixing bug where "One for All" would trigger for all attacks, rather than only 'single target' attacks.
Fixing a nasty bug with Arpia's Skyjack that was introduced last build where it fails to check for terrain correctly when deciding where to drop target.
Fixed an issue with worldmap pathfinding where search could be very long, when it shouldn't. Also fixed an issue where paths not yet available would still be used if faster than the current path.
Preventing summoned enemies (zombies, etc) from being raisable in combat after they die.
Fixing a bug where when Dual Wielding a 2nd weapon with shorter range than the first would make the 2nd weapon have the same range under special circumstances.
Fix bug where cutscene actors dual wielding would start combat with both weapons shown after a cutscene.
Fixing some issues with gamepad icons when using more than 2 controllers at once.
Anadine's "punt" move should now correctly punt.
Fixing a bug where an enemy portrait could be shown when receiving loot from killing an enemy.
Fixing small visual oddities with some spells when receiving loot.
Fixing an issue that prevented some spells to show up in the doublecast list.
Fixed an issue where flying enemy could land on "blocked terrain" if their wanted destination was already covered by another unit.
Adding a story battle before the 2nd temple fight (which was the previous end of the demo). Savefiles will automatically have their progress moved to right before this battle.
Adding 4 new patrol battles.
Removed the old temporary world map and using the real world map. It's much bigger and looks a lot better!
Adding spell effects for 9 gadgets and 9 new spells.
Adding a large contingent of beards for male characters. There might be a few issue with beard layering right now, but we'll get it fixed asap.
Adding "Infused Edge" to AI possible actions.
Adding a new mouse cursor graphic.
Adding code to support "happens next turn" abilities, including mortar shots from the giant turret demon, the Aeoth.
Adding code to prevent generated cutscene actors to spawn with certain outfits/hats (mainly, special stuff).
Adding new ability shape: 'charge'. A charge will move the attacker right next to its target, regardless of distance, as long as there is a clear path to it.
Adding new buff "adaptive aegis", which protects the user from the last element they were attacked with by increasing their elemental resistance to it.
Adding multiple new enemies, including: Helhund, Bzzerk, Niwot and advanced forms of existing monsters.
Bug Fixes:
"Weird sprites" visuals that were happening on Mac should now be gone. Let us know if you spot anything weird!
Adding missing passives to Anatomist skill tree.
Many small bug fixes.
Pektites did not spawn with the correct stats (high RES, low DEF) before. Also lowered their speed.
Added story classes to class lists (melee, mages, etc) so the AI recognizes them properly.
Some Sorcerer portraits weren't showing on NPCs. Fixed.
Fixing descriptions in the Ability-Setup menu so they trigger the help screen correctly.
Fixing Counters description so they correctly trigger the help screen.
The battle cursor duplicating at times during battles should be fixed.
Fixed some (rare) spell visuals where effects where shown over targets when they should have been under.
Only showing 'counter debuff spell animation' if a debuff was applied (this was always intended, but a check was missing).
Updates:
Revamping Highlands map and removing a part of the map that was confusing.
Changed the way the shadows behave while jumping. Looks much better now.
Added new knobs to maps information to prevent characters from being shown over/under some terrain when they shouldn't.
Updated the directions characters "get out of the way" when allies "walk over their tile" as there were oddities in there.
Changed visuals for Defend skill.
Changed Thunder 1 to new spell visuals.
Redid most tutorials and added a few ones.
Changed the camera position during spells to show the target better.
Changed damage predictions to account for "bonus punt damage" on the main target where applicable. The secondary target still isn't shown since it isn't part of the "regular ability range".
Changing Poison spell damage from 0.8 to 0.9
Lowering Marked abilities damage from 1.0 to 0.95 for "hybrid damage" spells, as well as other hybrid spells.
Fixing enemy snorkel having weird frames.
Renamed many XML status effects/etc to be consistent with game terms.
Now showing map objective when 'pausing' the battle (by showing the options).
Adding an icon for the "natural weapon" of monsters in their equip list.
Enemies spawning with +HP gear will now have their current HP filled correctly at the start of the battle.
Characters with lower levels than the map average level will receive more MVP points.
Fixed the "start of battle" effect on the worldmap not centering correctly in 4:3 (and other resolutions).
