General gaming discussion

30 best PlayStation games as voted by famitsu readers:

It's the biggest selling PS1 game of all time there. And there was a massive gap between 6 and 7. There's also the demographics to consider. FFX came out around the same time and is one of the weakest FF games but that's the kind of demograph that's shaping perceptions of old games at the moment, the ones that grew up with FFX and dq7 as kids.

So I sort of rolled the credits on Wizardry Variants Daphne. Despite the fact that it's a mobile Gacha style game with all the nonsense that ensues its actually a fantastic game.

First the bad. You roll for characters and there's some legendaries to get with low chances to get them. Just like any gacha game. However the legendaries are only marginally more powerful and I've been rolling with a group of scrubs that have handled themselves well. It's actually quite generous in this regard.

And as a gacha game it's a bit too complicated for what it is. Equipment comes thick and fast and the upgrade routes aren't easy to get your head around. You can upgrade with money and ores to a certain level but then you have to 'unify' equipment by sacrificing a number of the same type of equipment to raise that limit. There's other upgrade routes but there is one nice feature. If you wish to change to a new weapon you can inherit your old weapon's upgrade level so you don't have to level it up from scratch.

The other thing you can do is sacrifice any gacha characters to give and upgrade an other characters abilities.

To be fair it's not so bad once you wrap your head around it. What is annoying when you are starting off is that you get no warning if you accidentally try to sacrifice a piece of equipment that you are using, or worse still, a party member. This is something I did with a level 5 fighter and had to get a replacement levelled up. You can activate a lock icon on characters and equipment to avoid this happening.

Now to the good stuff.

Wizardry Variants Daphne is just a damn fine game. If it was a paid for game with Gacha elements removed it would be regarded as a minor classic.

It stays remarkably close to the wizardry series. The dungeon crawling is excellent. There's a lot of modernisation. Battles aren't random but initiated with enemies that walk around the environment that you might see if a party member passes a perception check. The battle system is excellent. There's a lot of skills to exploit and stuff like elemental weaknesses and buffs/debuffs that are pretty much essential to use. The game is also very difficult and can do a dark souls thing were it will let you wander into areas you are under levelled for (but will warn you). Apparently the developers took the game systems from the very well regarded PS2 game Wizardry the Forsaken Land and built the game around it.

And while the game is difficult there's also nice quality of life features. If you die that game will let you resurrection 3 times. You can lose party members permanently like in the original wizardry but the stat that dictates this replenishes over time so if you don't want to chance it just leave the game off until it's full. When I died at a particularly nasty boss the game told me to level up and what type of armour was expected.

And then there's how the game presents itself which is my favourite thing about it. It's all from the first person and it really feels like it's you leading your band into dungeons. The way your party interacts with you after battles really makes you feel attached to them. Graphically it's impressive for a mobile game, probably about PS3 level on the highest settings.

I've gotten 12 hours out of the game and not needed or felt the need to spend a penny. I'm hoping that this game is kind of like Warframe, where you don't need the micro transactions but if you like the developer then throw them some money which I probably will do considering I've gotten more out of this than some Sony/ubi games

Some screenshots I took:

Only played the first -part of Italy. Definitely reminds me of Riddick with a bit more immersive sims. Felt like a genius when I found the hidden area and hoping there's more like this. Always good to have a game with some actual level design.

Might be able to replace the joystick with a hall effect one like you can do on switch.

Kind scummy that Sony have cheaper out on joysticks without hall effect as this is an issue that was solved with the Sega Saturn analogue pad, the first one released during the 32bit era. Same goes for Nintendo. They charge so much for joypads now yet cheap out on parts.

Have to say the ID tech engine is incredible and puts to shame the likes of Unreal. I've a 6900xt and everything is on ultra other than shadows that I turned down to high and I'm getting 60 fps with no hitches. 6900xt is pretty weak when it comes to raytracing but handles the RT global GI in this perfectly. Also nice to have 16GB of VRAM. Apparently performance really suffers and you have you have to turn down settings on cards with low VRAM. NVidia cheaping out on VRAM is starting to hurt them.

Also there's no shader compilation issues and no even shader recompilation stage. It's just handled through some good coding that doesn't rely on a stop gap that just throws all the compilation on to the CPU.