Johan: I believe it entirely depends on what kind of player you are and how you play V Rising. In general (no speedrunning!) I believe the PvE only experience offers between 30-60 hours of gameplay for new players. We had players clocking 80 hours on PvE servers during the closed beta, still hungry for more. I recommend enjoying V Rising like a fine dinner (+a glass of V blood) and slowly digesting it. It will be a different experience for the castle decorator, the social roleplayer, the explorer, and the blood-thirsty raider.
Dungeon Souls - Beta V1.3 Game Hack
For those interested in creating randomizers, you can listen to the Making a Randomizer panel from Awesome Games Done Quick 2019 explaining the process in detail. ROMHacking.net is also a great resource with plenty of technical information and tools for hacking video games in general. Frameworks such as randomtools-js and Simple Randomizer Maker may also help for development purposes.
You'll find plenty of visual similarities between Diablo 3 and Shadows: Awakening. It's a dark fantasy dungeon crawler that lets you swap between four playable characters on the fly, instead of just being confined to one of them. This opens up many possibilities and variations for gameplay that don't necessarily require replays.
One game that came close to taking the crown from Diablo 2 was Titan Quest, released back in 2006. That's because its developers introduced a two-class combination system that shook theory-crafting and min-maxing in ARPGs to their core. Beyond that, it was the standard hack-and-slash dungeon crawler with an open-world format.
In that sense, it's a lot closer to Diablo 3 in terms of atmosphere, though it's certainly more mature and grungy. The gameplay might also be a little slow for people who were used to the fast-paced combat of Diablo games, but it's pretty much the same hack-and-slash looter that we all came to love.
If you want a hack-and-slash ARPG that brings something new and exciting to the table, then Book of Demons might satiate your need for novelty. It's a hybrid between a dueling card game and a dungeon crawler ARPG. It's an odd pairing, but Book of Demons somehow made it work seamlessly.
It's mostly the first game you'll want to play, since the sequels are less ambitious. The first Sacred was somewhat ahead of its time, and included a sandbox open-world where exploration is actually rewarding compared to most other aRPGs and dungeon crawlers. Give it a try if you can withstand the graphics; if not, then there are the sequels.
In short, calling Hades a fast-paced, rouge-like, dungeon-crawling masterpiece of a game would not do it justice. With stunning visuals, a killer soundtrack, an immersive story, and memorable voice acting, Hades is an experience to remember.
What's the longest you've ever waited for a video game sequel? Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers was released all the way back in 1997 on the Sega Saturn, a first-person dungeon crawler JRPG made by developer Atlus. Four console generations later we finally have a sequel - Soul Hackers 2 - though it's really a standalone game with mostly thematic connections to the original. 25 years is a long time in computer graphics, and Soul Hackers 2 has a wide variety of tech it could potentially use - but early footage didn't exactly impress. There's little here to suggest that the current wave of consoles are being taxed by this Persona-lite release - and the knock-on effect of that seems to be that the last-gen machines get some shocking ports, especially the vanilla Xbox One.
It's safe to say I'm not thrilled with the rendering makeup of Soul Hackers 2. But there's an even more conspicuous problem with the visuals in my opinion. Soul Hackers 2 has very basic environmental artwork for the most part. Dungeons consist of samey-looking corridors in barren, industrial-style environments, like shipyards and subway terminals. There's little to distinguish one room from the next with copy-and-paste corridors and flat lighting. Each dungeon might have a small handful of room designs and hallway features, which are repeated ad nauseum over the course of hours and hours of gameplay.
Thankfully there's a mini-map you can access while exploring - otherwise, it would be extremely easy to get lost. The game's city areas do look decent however. These zones are admittedly pretty small, and the rendering foibles still annoy. But if the dungeons had something closer to this level of care and attention to detail, there would be a lot less to complain about.
The graphics, however, are simply well below par. The rendering tech is primitive in just about every respect, though it's something that can be mostly overlooked once you get used to it. Even so, the dungeon assets are offensively basic, with ugly copy-pasted corridors all over the game's combat sections. The game has some troubling performance issues on many of its supported console platforms, with the Xbox One S in particular exhibiting some of the worst frame-rates I've seen in recent times. As a contemporary full-price release Soul Hackers 2 falls below just about every technical standard. But if you're otherwise interested in this title, it is worth playing - as long as you keep technological expectations in check.
The monkey motivator is an unused unique pickaxe variant that was planned for the Jungle Awakens DLC that would have featured a banana on the end of a stick. It can be obtained with hacks but causes the game to crash when clicked.
The Totem of soul protection, known internally as the totem of spirit, is an unused artifact that would have the ability to fully revive all heroes in a square area upon death, similar to the original game's Totem of Undying. It was actually showcased in the Minecraft Dungeons Diaries episode Meet The Team, where it would produce an aqua-colored square area, but hasn't been mentioned since. The artifact's death-cheating function returned to the game in the form of new enchantments called life boost and death barter, released in the Howling Peaks patch. It can be obtained using hacks with a rare chance of the game not crashing and does function fully as seen in this video.
Once Briar and Lute are on the move, Soulstice instantly feels like a classic mid to late-2000s hack and slash game updated to the standards of the modern day. As you explore, the camera will pan and automatically follow Briar in order to better establish the scope and scale of the environment, but when proper combat begins, it zooms in on the action and grants the player directional input over it to better suit the visibility of the enemies.
New to the 3DS release is the ability to 'hack' certain aspects of the game using the GUMP. With a pleasantly meta tap of the touchscreen, you can raise or lower the difficulty, enable a super-automap hack that shows the entire level layout from the get-go, set the game to ignore demon alignments when building your team, or even show a full analysis of enemy techniques, strengths, and weaknesses in battles right off the bat. Soul Hackers is regarded as one of the easier Shin Megami Tensei games, but it's still difficult, and these optional hacks are welcome additions that help make the game more accessible to new players drawn in by the cyberpunk style.
The 3DS-exclusive hacks are in addition to the COMP programs present in the Saturn original, installable modules that let you customize your game in lots of different ways. Programs include useful features like the ability to save anywhere in dungeons (largely mitigating any frustration from puzzle backtracking) or to regain HP as you walk, modules to translate unintelligible demon ramblings or improve conversational skills with certain types of monsters, and several totally superficial extras like a Jack Frost menu skin and a clock that shows the system time. These programs take up either one or two of your GUMP's five memory blocks each, and picking out a perfect combination is a fun way to tailor the game to your play style.
Visually, Soul Hackers is very much a product of its time. The pre-rendered backdrops and cutscenes are fantastically 32-bit, and anyone who lived through the golden age of RayDream Studio will feel right at home. The thing is though, apart from some substantial compression artefacts in the videos, it actually works quite well as a modern experience; dungeon crawlers haven't advanced as much as you'd think since the Saturn days, and Soul Hackers holds up remarkably well against this year's Unchained Blades, for instance. Characters are represented by high quality portraits in the foreground and stylized pixelated likenesses in the background, and while demons are strictly sparsely animated sprites, they look fantastic. It's not exactly pushing the hardware, but it feels like a period piece rather than a dated game.
I still haven't picked up Etrian Odyssey IV which I know is 100+ hours it might be a while before I get Soul hackers or even etrian Odyssey as i'm going through Monster Hunter 3d right now. All of them look great! So many good games coming to 3DS right now
In a game like Etrian Odyssey, dungeons are the sole purpose of the game. The thin threads of the story tie them together - barely - but it's really about exploring dungeons. Soul Hackers is something else, much like Persona 4. Here, the story is paramount, and the maps traversed exist to keep players interested in the story. 2ff7e9595c
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