Final Fantasy IX - Work In Progress!

So, as those of you in Discord may know, @Kjata has begun work on a new Final Fantasy IX mod. Right now it's kind of a brainchild, but we hope to have something out within a few months. Since I don't start work for a few weeks, I'll be helping him out with some of the legwork.

Some ideas we've already been looking at:

• Rework damage curve
• Rework level curve
• Rework passive skills
• Remove fixed damage abilities

If you've got any ideas, feel free to post them in this thread! Though we may not use everything, we will take it into consideration if we feel it's a good idea!

What "theme" or "idea" are you going for?

simple rebalance? making the game finally good? total conversion? BNW 9.0? meme overload?

5 minutes ago, praetarius5018 said:

What "theme" or "idea" are you going for?

simple rebalance? making the game finally good? total conversion? BNW 9.0? meme overload?

Right now we're focusing on a simple rebalance. We'll delve into the rest once we've got that handled.

Some things to consider:

1) FF9 has a lot more variance in its output damage than its two sister titles, 7 and 8. This will make rebalancing tougher unless you can find a way to adjust the formula and reduce the range of variance (which I recommend you do, it's not very popular). If you're reworking the damage curve then keep this in mind. An example of the modifier that's attached to damage is shown below (for enemy attacks, player attacks vary per weapon but usually have /8 instead):

Bonus = Str + Rnd MOD ([(Lvl + Str) / 4] + 1)

2) Replacement characters like Marcus, etc. gain stats when they level up but these bonuses are transferred to later characters in addition to their own bonuses which can make them OP. If Marcus is leveled high in the swinging cage area, then Eiko will later join with superior stats to your other characters. I'd recommend finding a fix for this, or making it so that EXP or levels aren't available for temporary characters.

3) The game uses % modifiers for damage bonuses & penalties from abilities. While this tends to be manageable early on, it'll get more difficult later on toward end-game. If you can, try and adjust the actual value of bonuses/penalties of things like X Killer, Protect/Shell, Elemental, Back Row, etc. And keep an eye on Reflect too; a full party with Reflect can bounce a multi-target spell at an enemy 4 times without the spread penalty being applied and I think it gains a 2x bonus damage when reflected as well.

Replace Tetra Master with Triple Triad

1 hour ago, Sega Chief said:

Some things to consider:

1) FF9 has a lot more variance in its output damage than its two sister titles, 7 and 8. This will make rebalancing tougher unless you can find a way to adjust the formula and reduce the range of variance (which I recommend you do, it's not very popular). If you're reworking the damage curve then keep this in mind. An example of the modifier that's attached to damage is shown below (for enemy attacks, player attacks vary per weapon but usually have /8 instead):

Bonus = Str + Rnd MOD ([(Lvl + Str) / 4] + 1)

...

3) The game uses % modifiers for damage bonuses & penalties from abilities. While this tends to be manageable early on, it'll get more difficult later on toward end-game. If you can, try and adjust the actual value of bonuses/penalties of things like X Killer, Protect/Shell, Elemental, Back Row, etc. And keep an eye on Reflect too; a full party with Reflect can bounce a multi-target spell at an enemy 4 times without the spread penalty being applied and I think it gains a 2x bonus damage when reflected as well.

@Xifanie Me love you long time? <3

1 hour ago, Emmy said:

Replace Tetra Master with Triple Triad

Let's keep the suggestions remotely feasible. Not that I don't agree, but for now we're not touching that monstrosity. 

1 hour ago, Kyrios said:

Let's keep the suggestions remotely feasible. Not that I don't agree, but for now we're not touching that monstrosity. 

Is it feasible to speed battles up? IIRC, FFIX's battles took forever because it took so long to load and because each animation took its sweet time animating.

FF9 PC battles run faster as far as I know.

My no.1 suggestion is: MODIFY buff expiration timer!!! you don't even realize you used protect on an ally that the buff is already faded out.

About tetra master... when you realize how it actually works(which means knowing what happens when your card has AX3B as value), it suddenly becomes quite interesting to play.

what it actually needs is to give him an in-game usefulness to it: in FF8 you can transform cards into stuff, in FF9 they have no use... here a quick brainstorm on

what could improve it: 

 - events bound to cards(give a card to a certain NPC in exchange of item, key item, passing through a gate? ; same as before but after defeating the NPC in a card duel)

 - something similar to throw command for cards, but more in a blue magic fashion, like... burn 1 goblin card to cast Goblin Punch(or was it shot?); burn 1 elixir card to use 1 elixir;

      burn 1 shiva card to cast Diamond dust... stuff like that.

3 hours ago, Tenkarider said:

My no.1 suggestion is: MODIFY buff expiration timer!!! you don't even realize you used protect on an ally that the buff is already faded out.

Not to dismiss this suggestion, but I feel like this is one of those "get gud" recommendations.

Regarding Eiko inheriting stat bonuses from Marcus, unless one grinds 25 or more level ups with him, the gains will be offset by the stat loss that occurs from level averaging when a new character joins for the first time.  Playing normally, Eiko and Amarant join at substantially higher levels than the rest of the cast.  It takes grinding a lot of levels with Marcus and artificially keeping party levels low to really exploit this.  It's a tedious task just for one character to have better stats.

  Could really go for status effects (and other indirect stuff like Steiner's Breaks) being more worthwhile.  Because level differences affect status spell accuracy and the player will usually be lower leveled than the enemies they're facing, I often felt it wasn't worth the turn to use them.  With effective 30-50% status accuracy in many cases, straight bashing seemed more appealing

  As a side thought, having an enemy that always appears with another have extreme defenses but low HP would provide incentive to use the Trouble status.  It never felt worth the effort in the unmodded game.

Having a better spread of sources to learn Action abilities sounds quite nice.  Equipping a crummy weapon because it's the only source for an ability felt stupid.  And I like the idea of having more abilities available sooner; I have that feeling that people who would play the mod have already been through the original.

Idk if all of these suggestions fit in the scope of what you are doing right now but they are my main gripes with FF9:

1)Rebalance difficulty. The party can just do way too much damage and then laugh with regen. I'd prefer a more balanced difficulty, not a hard type.

2)Speed up battles. They are way too slow. If I remember right battles are default at 15 FPS? I've used Memoria Engine to modify the battle speed and I think 24 FPS was about what I preferred for battles(didn't look silly how fast they were moving but it wasn't too slow).

3)nATB from FF6 BNW and make speed matter. I hate ATB that doesn't stop when actions are being taken. They figured this out with Chrono Trigger for Christ's sake.

4)Differentiate Eiko and Garnet(Dagger). The idea I had was to make Eiko a Red Mage(she already has the clothes for it really) and less focused on Summons(nerf her last summon). I'd also like for summon power to be separated from gems and just function like a normal spell. Also default as fastest cast animation. Also make healing more necessary(this would go along with increased difficulty).

5)Rework how Quina learns Blue Magic. I love Blue Magic in games but I always feel like its way too annoying to get the spells. Just make it easier I guess. This might just be personal preference lol.

6)Remove stats from leveling being based on equipment/remove stat growth entirely(each character has base stats, then just gets stats from equipment). I'd prefer the first but that seems like it would be difficult.

I'm sure a lot of these would be more for future plans haha.

First of all, NOTHING is going to be done with Tetra Master. I'm not even going to fix the Rank bug. The most work im going to put into it is changing treasure chests that give you cards into something better.

As for Quina, I'm giving Vivi Scan so that when you get Quina you can see the hp values, which should make it easier to work out Eat. Cook can also be used on full health enemies, so Quina going into trance means no more fucking around.

As for differentiating between Eiko and Garnet, I have a few ideas for this. The very basic idea is to make Eiko very much a support character, like "uses rackets for damage" level of support. Basically the anti-Vivi, as Vivi doesnt do anything but fuck up the enemies, Eiko doesn't do anything but bolster the party. I'll have to look into what all can be done with abilities, but Dagger should basically be the middle ground between the other two.

Are you modding the PSX emulated version or the PC version?

Because for the former, some of the things you want to do can be hard to mod (Rework passive skills, change the damage outputs...). It goes to MIPS assembly modding. For the later, these things are a bit easier because it's compiled C# that can be un-compiled then re-compiled after the tweaks.

The pc versipn, unless someone has a legit reason to not mod that one.

Remove the 50% increased Fire damage on Robe armor, shit's dumb yo. Make sure to remove the Charge! ability unless you want me to spank Ozma again . If you intend to balanced endgame around lvl 99, make it relatively easy to grind.

And tbh, most changes LandonRay made in his hack, like removing the main stats from armor and  removing to ability to absorb elements.

I don't undestand what everyone's deal with the level up stat items is.

On 8/23/2017 at 11:18 PM, Kyrios said:

Not to dismiss this suggestion, but I feel like this is one of those "get gud" recommendations.

Early game has a ton of moments where buffs are useless because of how short they are. Garnet could literally spend an entire battle spamming protect on people and never actually manage to have the full party have it.  Which is ridiculously stupid. I mean, it doesn't need to last like... FF8 long (forever), but it could last a bit longer. 

2 minutes ago, Augestein said:

Early game has a ton of moments where buffs are useless because of how short they are. Garnet could literally spend an entire battle spamming protect on people and never actually manage to have the full party have it.  Which is ridiculously stupid. I mean, it doesn't need to last like... FF8 long (forever), but it could last a bit longer. 

Buffs are typically going to be party wide, for this reason. I once tried putting Shell on my party during the BW2 fight, the first one ran out while I was casting the third. I went "fuck it" and left Garnet on standby ready to sling a cure.

Just now, Kjata said:

Buffs are typically going to be party wide, for this reason. I once tried putting Shell on my party during the BW2 fight, the first one ran out while I was casting the third. I went "fuck it" and left Garnet on standby ready to sling a cure.

Good shit. I approve. 

1 hour ago, Kjata said:

I don't undestand what everyone's deal with the level up stat items is.

It's a mixture of people not wanting to micromanage their stat level ups while they level(even if it's unnecessary, perfectionist tendencies in gaming haha) and wanting stats to be meaningful. I'd personally be all for completely removing stat gains based on levels and just having it attached to gear instead of the other way around, more customization for stats later on. I don't know which way would be easier though. I'd just go with the easier option.

It's just bad game design really.

Also I like your Eiko idea as well. They are just almost the exact same currently. Move Holy to Garnet, nerf Madeen and go from there adding support abilities.

28 minutes ago, ManaKhe said:

It's a mixture of people not wanting to micromanage their stat level ups while they level(even if it's unnecessary, perfectionist tendencies in gaming haha) and wanting stats to be meaningful. I'd personally be all for completely removing stat gains based on levels and just having it attached to gear instead of the other way around, more customization for stats later on. I don't know which way would be easier though. I'd just go with the easier option.

 

It's just bad game design really.

 

Also I like your Eiko idea as well. They are just almost the exact same currently. Move Holy to Garnet, nerf Madeen and go from there adding support abilities.

Catering to completionists who min max unnecessarily isn't something I'm inclined to do. The "making stats actually meaningful" line intrigues me though, dare to elaborate?

1 hour ago, Augestein said:

Early game has a ton of moments where buffs are useless because of how short they are. Garnet could literally spend an entire battle spamming protect on people and never actually manage to have the full party have it.  Which is ridiculously stupid. I mean, it doesn't need to last like... FF8 long (forever), but it could last a bit longer. 

Okay, this is fair. What about raising Spirit across the board? What else does that affect? I mean I know it affects a lot of different things, I'm more wondering about problematic stuff.

1 minute ago, Kyrios said:

Okay, this is fair. What about raising Spirit across the board? What else does that affect? I mean I know it affects a lot of different things, I'm more wondering about problematic stuff.

Damage on some weapons for starters. It also affects Zidane's steal rate (thank all that is good in the world). 

2 minutes ago, Kyrios said:

Okay, this is fair. What about raising Spirit across the board? What else does that affect? I mean I know it affects a lot of different things, I'm more wondering about problematic stuff.

I think having party wide buffs that quickly expire is a better direction than having buffs last longer.

56 minutes ago, Kjata said:

I think having party wide buffs that quickly expire is a better direction than having buffs last longer.

My only problem with this is that it kind of nullifies characters having self-buffs. I feel it removes a layer of depth.

Just now, Kyrios said:

My only problem with this is that it kind of nullifies characters having self-buffs. I feel it removes a layer of depth.

Not when buffs dont really overlap, or if self buffs give more statuses or also heal hp.

Just now, Kjata said:

Not when buffs dont really overlap, or if self buffs give more statuses or also heal hp.

It still makes them worth less by default, and it makes it way easier to fully buff up the entire party, which in a way diminishes the effect of stuff like Trance Aura and Mighty Guard, not to mention Rei's Wind.

In short, I feel like that causes more problems then it fixes. Raising spirit across the board at this point in time I feel like is a better solution.

Mighty Guard does both, Trance Aura does both as well as reraise, and Reis's wind does more or less the same thing (gives a defensive buff to the party).

I guess I should state I am specifically talking about Protect/Shell, since my brain is stuck in disc 1 mode right now.

The reason to not have all buffs be party-wide is related to character sinergy.

For these things you have to consider that you play with a full party, each one fulfilling different roles. Zidane, for example excels at speed, which makes him useful for quick reactions to different situations. When your party is pushed, he can quickly recover the team with item spamming.

Then you have to consider that in FFIX, you have two basic acts in a battle: You either deal damage to be closer to ending the battle, or you heal or buff or debuff the enemy, to gain tempo to theb do the former. Every action fits in one of those two categories. Considering that the White Mages in this game are not really White Mages, but Red Mages (because they can fulfill every role that is not tanking: Damage, Healing, Buff and Debuff to an extent), then having party-wide buffs offsets their role, makes them too powerful. The balance of a jack-of-all-trades cones when each action loses power. Also, garnet is crazy fast. Even more powerful.

My solution? Keep Dagger as is, lower her damage. Lower slightly her HP. Lower slightly her speed. Consolidate her as a Red Mage

Have Eiko be equipped with party wide spells. Protectga, Hastega, Shellga, and so on. Make her really squishy. Make her really slow. Consolidate her as a pure White Mage.

In conclusion, whenever you're discussing a certain character design in a RPG, you always have ti consider its role in a battle. Vanilla FFIX did it wrong, where they made two identical characters with the same role. Which is terrible if yoy consider the richest thing about FFIX is that it forces you to play with vastly different clases.

Is it possible to allow the player to shift the class's focus?

E.g. your white mage has default access to the basic spells cure1, protect, etc.
And the play has then to somehow choose what he wants to primarily advance, e.g. via mutually exclusive items you can get either Cure2/3,Life OR Protectga, Hastega, Shellga.

Just now, praetarius5018 said:

Is it possible to allow the player to shift the class's focus?

E.g. your white mage has default access to the basic spells cure1, protect, etc.
And the play has then to somehow choose what he wants to primarily advance, e.g. via mutually exclusive items you can get either Cure2/3,Life OR Protectga, Hastega, Shellga.

To be perfectly honest with you, I doubt it would go in that direction even if the option presented itself.

But at this point in time, no.

15 hours ago, Kjata said:

I don't undestand what everyone's deal with the level up stat items is.

Because the late-game is incredibly easier if you avoid leveling up in the early-game. Or worse, if you level up mid/late-game with bad equipment, your stats will suck. This mean that every time you level you have to make sure you have the right items equipped. This doesn't really matter in vanilla but it creates a lot of variance in higher difficulty settings. 

Also on topic of buffs duration, it's indeed annoying but unless you force Active ATB it's a necessary evil. If you just buff the duration, you can still artificially increase it even more by going in the menus with the Wait ATB option. 

i think interesting things can be done with stat bonuses. Turning them off completely seems like a waste. Changing them so there aren't bad items to level up in might be a better option.

20 hours ago, Kyrios said:

Raising spirit across the board at this point in time I feel like is a better solution.

there's a problem: spirit makes Trance last longer

I like the idea of standardizing stat bonuses.  Say, for instance, all body armor gives +2 bonus stats for levelup but that which stats are raised varies by type and even by specific equip.  That way, the player will have growth even if they don't understand how the system works.  Also, more knowledgeable players can customize which stats they want to favor.  Stack Magic boosts for higher Magic growth, more Strength for strength growth, etc...  I'm thinking +2 on weapons, +1 for headgear, +1 for arm gear, +3 for body armor, and +1 (at most) for the Add-on slot but specific numbers can be tweaked at will with an equipment editor.

This opens up the possibility of equipment designated for higher or lower growth as desired.  Just as an example, I'd have the Tin Armor gives 0 stat growth as a drawback to its strengths.

One consequence is that characters that join at higher levels will miss out on growth opportunity.  Though this could also be intentionally invoked to penalize early overleveling.  I'm more in favor of raising the base stats of the late joiners a bit to account for a higher join level.  (something Square didn't do)

Enemies can be scaled as desired to compensate for the expected higher stats.  No need to stick to 10 Def. + 10 Mag. Def. all the time, among other ideas.

And LCM comes in with an excellent post about why "turn off stat growths" is a bad suggestion. It's lazy, it's boring, and doesn't help anyone except people who need perfect stats.

Stuff like penalizing early leveling and ending up with characters with slightly below pat stats is very deep balance talk, and probably not something me or kyrios want to worry about at this stage. But it is something to keep in mind, I suppose.

On 8/25/2017 at 8:45 AM, Hart-Hunt said:

The reason to not have all buffs be party-wide is related to character sinergy.

For these things you have to consider that you play with a full party, each one fulfilling different roles. Zidane, for example excels at speed, which makes him useful for quick reactions to different situations. When your party is pushed, he can quickly recover the team with item spamming.

Then you have to consider that in FFIX, you have two basic acts in a battle: You either deal damage to be closer to ending the battle, or you heal or buff or debuff the enemy, to gain tempo to theb do the former. Every action fits in one of those two categories. Considering that the White Mages in this game are not really White Mages, but Red Mages (because they can fulfill every role that is not tanking: Damage, Healing, Buff and Debuff to an extent), then having party-wide buffs offsets their role, makes them too powerful. The balance of a jack-of-all-trades cones when each action loses power. Also, garnet is crazy fast. Even more powerful.

My solution? Keep Dagger as is, lower her damage. Lower slightly her HP. Lower slightly her speed. Consolidate her as a Red Mage

Have Eiko be equipped with party wide spells. Protectga, Hastega, Shellga, and so on. Make her really squishy. Make her really slow. Consolidate her as a pure White Mage.

In conclusion, whenever you're discussing a certain character design in a RPG, you always have ti consider its role in a battle. Vanilla FFIX did it wrong, where they made two identical characters with the same role. Which is terrible if yoy consider the richest thing about FFIX is that it forces you to play with vastly different clases.

Sort of? 

I mean, there's nothing that says that Garnet and *has* to be using both Protect AoE and Shell AoE. You could do things to mix them up. For instance, in Chrono Trigger, not all of the buffs were placed on one person, instead, you could have Garnet have Protect and then have Eiko have Shell. This means that to get both protect and shell on a party you need both, OR a Quina that knew Mighty Guard. Which means that it becomes MP costs versus party effectiveness (if one of the girls falls, you can still have buffs etc). 

True, but there's also a third one that doesn't see much use as well, but you can still use it. Damage Negation. Stuff like having Cover on characters or using things like "Long Range" passives are some of them, which just flat out lower damage or negate damage from others -- IE, having a frontlining Freya be covered by Zidane with Protect Girls on while he's in the backrow. Garnet in general needs help more than Eiko, because Garnet's best attribute is something that is more of an exploit of the engine itself than her actually being good. IE, during trance, just have her stand there and do nothing so she keeps getting free damage, and can be ready to heal. Eiko's damage is pretty much always better than Garnet's at any given point, and her summons are better too on the account that Carbunkle has AoE buffs of potentially 3 of Garnet's moves (you can't use all of them in combat at once, but it still stands), and some she can't do like Haste ever, and she doesn't get Holy or anything useful outside of the basic skills. The issue with FFIX classes is that there's already a ton of overlap. 

The solution for Garnet is just to flat out fix her. Because realistically, the best thing you can do for her is get a ton of Leviathan stones and pump at 9999 damage with it. Screw ark, screw Bahamut. It's all about Leviathan for most of the game. Garnet's damage is already bad. The only person she consistently out damages is... Quina, who is a utility monster and still has cheap things like Auto-Life -> Limit Glove or Frog Drop. And by the end game, healing isn't even *that* much of a boon because the animations are so slow that the best form of healing is literally auto-haste + auto-regen. Heck, I'd go so far as to make some of Garnet's summons function off of physical attacks so she can have an excuse to actually be more versatile. Change up enemy stats with some having really good resistance to magic or physical attacks, and Garnet could be a true Jack-of-All trades. Maybe give her access to Knives early game, and then eventually swords for Disc 3 so she can either be some sort of strange Physical unit with healing spells and AoE physical elemental attacks -- a property NO ONE has in the game in Vanilla. At least then, there'd be something to differentiate her a bit more with that. Plus, if you did keep stat growth on weapons, it'd at least have good potential for making Garnet one of the more interesting "growth" characters in that regard.  

Garnet and Eiko aren't supposed to be the same role sadly. Garnet just sucks because they didn't do things very well and is a prime demonstration that more abilities doesn't make you better. 

Me and Kyrios are planning to have a pow-wow tomorrow and hammer out what the characters should look like. We would appreciate any suggestions or input you for the characters beforehand.

Whatever you do please speed up the battle load speed, and the battle speed in general! 

Would this be for a PSX ISO or the steam version?

I believe reworking trance mechanics to remove the frustration of triggering it in the last turn of a random battle would be for the best.

They said it'll be the Steam version.

For my own mod, I plan to make the following change about Trance. See if you want to use the same kind or if it gives you an idea:

I'll give Zidane a skill that can bring any single ally to trance provided that its trance gauge is already 50% filled. That way, you can choose the timing of trance most of the time while still having to fulfill some "stack the attacks on yourself" condition beforehand (and not being able to abuse trance transformation). I would probably give that skill as a reward for winning the Hunt with Zidane (and on a weapon in case you miss it). Since Zidane is quite always in the party, except in the Desert Palace and possibly in Memoria, it's enough for him to have a skill in order to change the trance mechanics.

while I don't have any idea how I would go about doing such a thing, the way I'd like to handle trance would be instead if the gauge emptying totally at the end of a battle it would empty by half. So if you got a trance at the very end and never even used it, then you would still have half a bar.

On 8/29/2017 at 0:15 AM, Kjata said:

while I don't have any idea how I would go about doing such a thing, the way I'd like to handle trance would be instead if the gauge emptying totally at the end of a battle it would empty by half. So if you got a trance at the very end and never even used it, then you would still have half a bar.

Instead of doing that, perhaps it might actually be easier to use that as "High Tide" As it stands, High Tide in and of itself wasn't particularly great in the original. Just because you wouldn't have to make it a generalized mechanic and instead a special passive that already does Trance manipulation. 

I suggest modifying the VIRUS status. I can understand if you're KOed or petrified, but to get no EXPs and APs cause I feel sick? That's absurd.

It also nullifies EVASION wich actually makes sense, you are sick you feel heavy therefore can't dodge.

Instead of no exp/ap, it could work as the MP version of poison, cause being sick drains your energy. What do you think?