Review: Xenoblade Chronicles X (Chapter 3: Character growth)

When you start out in Xenoblade Chronicles your character is very vulnerable and you need to hide away from most of the wildlife. As your characters develop their abilities this will gradually change, of course. This is a RPG, after all. The following lines will investigate the oddities of levelling and solve the question whether you can rely on your AI partners.

Review: Din´s Curse (+ add-on Demon War)

The current action-RPG genre looks like that: you have two gigantic mammoth trees called "Diablo 3" and "Path of Exile" that pretty much get all of the sun. And not much can grow below in the dark. Surprisingly enough, some strange but beautiful flowers still manage to blossom down here.

Improving Witcher 3 would be Witchcraft (6): Experience and Money

 
One last time we return to the world of Geralt to discuss the 2 fundamental gameplay features of gaining experience and money. Amassing experience and advancing in level is the most important aspect of character growth. It is a strong motivation for the player to keep on going. The same holds true for money.
In essence, they are both currencies, or numbers, that need to be adjusted by the game designer to prevent 2 things from happening: giving the player not enough of them leads to frustration and repetitive grinding. Giving them too much will sooner or later make the player too powerful and trivialize the content, leading to boredom. So how does Witcher 3 fare in this regard?

Improving Witcher 3 would be Witchcraft (5): Signs

Geralt´s magic arsenal consists of 5 different signs and each one of them has its own mechanics and purpose. This creates the favorable situation that no spell is entirely worthless as there is a niche for every spell and they don´t have to compete against each other that much due to their different functionality. The Quen damage shield is surely the most useful of them but figuring out nasty tricks with the other spells is totally possible. While the balance is okay for the most part, 2 particularly nasty spells and a few underwhelming talents do stand out.

An enemy falls flat on his ass after being hit with a shockwave from the Aard sign.

Improving Witcher 3 would be Witchcraft (4): Mutagens

Mutagens are organs and body parts of all different kinds of monsters that can be used by the Witcher to enhance his abilities. While this sounds rather gory, they are shown as little spiky spheres instead of hacked off limbs and entrails. So no butchering to enjoy here.

Any monster can drop mutagens.

Improving Witcher 3 would be Witchcraft (2): Alchemy Skill Tree

Note: The following suggestions mainly adress the complaints about the alchemy skill tree being unattractive and full of boring passive stat increases.

The alchemy makes a really weak first impression for a player that eagerly awaits to spend his first skill point. While the first tier in the other two skill trees is fairly straightforward (improve your favorite attack or spell), the alchemy skill tree starts out with talents that are confusing at best and useless at worst.

Wishlist for Lords of Xulima 2, Part 8

Lords of Xulima is far more difficult than your average RPG. Still, the difficulty fluctuations follow the most common pattern found in lengthy RPGs.
 

Selection of the oldschool-veteran difficulty setting.

Wishlist for Lords of Xulima 2, Part 6

Character creation is an important aspect of each respectable RPG. The degree of freedom can vary greatly between the games so we will take a deep dive into Lords of Xulima´s approach today.

Class selection screen during character creation in Lords of Xulima.

Experience Points

It is a bit ironic: twenty years ago, experience points were such a alien concept. They were so... Japanese. Especially here in Europe, we missed a great deal of cult classics, because RPGs and games with experience points seemed to be not in demand. Just think about how many games from the early Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series were never released to the Western audience.