Mobile Games, Gacha, Android/IOS games

[Manny V]

@Val the Moofia Boss have you tried Where Winds Meet?

he was deepthroating it in some other thread

maybe i mixed him up with some other weeb, me aporogisu

[Val the Moofia Boss]

@Val the Moofia Boss have you tried Where Winds Meet?

Yes, but I dropped it after a few hours. I found it very enjoyable to fiddle around with the character creator and the FF14-esque adventurer plate scenes, trying out the different poses and backgrounds and miscellaneous decorations. Like Finarfin, I picked the character preset with the blonde hair and the feather coat, but was then disappointed when I loaded into the actual game world with black hair and no feather coat, and then found out that the blonde hair and the feather coat were each sold separately and that the feather coat costed $45. That would not have been too much of a deal breaker if I had enjoyed the actual moment to moment game experience, but I did not. A lot of the features were walled off by account level and main story progression. I did not find the main story to be interesting, nor the characters, and the gameplay felt meh. I did not feel powerful, and it seemed that there wouldn't be much in the way of combat customization to look forward to. And then I just didn't want to do the Genshin treadmill thing again of constantly farming materials for level upgrades and farming equipment upgrades while the world level is increasing every so often and always feeling like I am behind.

Excellent review but I still cannot be persuaded to try gacha unless it literally sucks me off to completion while the game is downloading

Most of the bigger Gachas dont really push the gacha in your face, they dont need to.
I would recommend you check out Wuthering waves, reverse 1999, Chaos Zero Nightmare, Where Winds meet, to a lesser extent HSR.

Where Winds Meet mildly annoyed me because you pick a character preset at character creation like the blonde guy wearing the feather coat, and then you get spat out into the world with black hair and then find out you have to spend $45 to get the feather coat and blonde hair.

[DemoGraph]

Here there is a big gas giant in the background.

The gas giant is too big. It would've probably tore that moon apart if we're pretending the game to be sci-fi, not sci-fa.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Here there is a big gas giant in the background.

The gas giant is too big. It would've probably tore that moon apart if we're pretending the game to be sci-fi, not sci-fa.

I asked Gemini about the closest possible distance an Earth like world could orbit Jupiter and not be destroyed. Gemini said that the Roche Limit (the point at which a moon would be shredded into a ring) was 70,000 kilometer. However, because the diameter of Jupiter is 143,000 km, positioning a world at the Roche Limit would position it within the surface of Jupiter (radius of 71.5k km), so Gemini suggested a safe distance of 150,000 km from the center of Jupiter. From that position, Jupiter would take up 50 to 60 degrees of the sky. Our moon takes up 0.5 degrees of the sky. Gemini created an image showing what Jupiter would look like from an earth like world positioned at the Roche limit:




I then asked what combination of size of a gas giant size and distance from it would result in a gas giant that appear to be the largest in size while allowing an earth like world to safely orbit it. Gemini took into other factors - not just the Roche limit, but also heating and orbital stability - and this time Gemini said the gas giant would have to be almost big enough to be a star with a radius of 140,000 km at a distance of 700,000 km, it would appear to be 23 degrees in size. The earth like moon would be sufficiently habitable but have massive tidal waves and volcanic activity. For a totally safe distance at 1.4 million km away, the gas giant would appear 11.5 degrees in size, still 23x larger than our moon.

Edit: this is what Nano Bannana pro says it would look like from the totally safe 1.4 million km distance.

[DemoGraph]

Edit: this is what Nano Bannana pro says it would look like from the totally safe 1.4 million km distance.

This is not 20 times larger than the moon and definitely not 11'.


It's closer to 30'. [edit: probably? it's hard to estimate what the width of the image is supposed to represent. If it's human view range, then this planet is closer to 60'.]
And even this image is smaller than the one in original game.

It's an old problem. Almost any game has absolutely unsustainable gas giants in the sky.

[DemoGraph]

I've decided to grok it out.
tl;dw Even 30' planet should probably be no larger than 25% of the horizontal side of your monitor.

► Show Spoiler

That half-screen gas giant is science fantasy.

EDit: Thanks! I wanted to make this excercise for a long time, but kept delaying it.

[Stack of Turtles]

Gemini created an image showing what Jupiter would look like from an earth like world positioned at the Roche limit:
[...]
Edit: this is what Nano Bannana pro says it would look like from the totally safe 1.4 million km distance.

LLMs have no function for calculating this so you'll just get generic slop based on generic space fantasy art people have made.

[Valter]

The linezipping is very metrosexual, I'm outside my comfort zone

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Why does Lifeng have what appears to be a steel wire tail? Was his original tail amputated, and this is a robotic replacement? Or is his original tail stuffed into a protective casing?

[Valter]

Why does Lifeng have what appears to be a steel wire tail? Was his original tail amputated, and this is a robotic replacement? Or is his original tail stuffed into a protective casing?

Stupid ****** was my first SSR. Fuckin' ******* *** in your hole dole! I see dragon horns so he might be some kind of reptile? Those have hard tails don't they? This one's just really thin, as physically unfeasable as it is.

[Lhynn]

@Val the Moofia Boss

Nice breakdown on sunday.

[Lhynn]

@Val the Moofia Boss
550 millions yearly and over 5 million players daily at the bare minimum. Probably quite a bit more than that.
Told you they were making bank

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Nexon got raided by the South Korean police again, this time about item probabilities in MapleStory (first time was last year when the old Blue Archive director sabotaged the game before leaving).

[Norfleet]

It's an old problem. Almost any game has absolutely unsustainable gas giants in the sky.

People struggle with the concept of how big space is.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

It'll be interesting to see how much the revenue drops off after the initial wave of interest subsides.

[rusty_shackleford]

@Val the Moofia Boss
550 billions yearly and over 5 million players daily at the bare minimum. Probably quite a bit more than that.
Told you they were making bank

billion and million are different things

[DecadeRiptide]

It'll be interesting to see how much the revenue drops off after the initial wave of interest subsides.

Is it a gacha game?

[DecadeRiptide]

Why does Lifeng have what appears to be a steel wire tail? Was his original tail amputated, and this is a robotic replacement? Or is his original tail stuffed into a protective casing?

They're a cyborgy.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

It'll be interesting to see how much the revenue drops off after the initial wave of interest subsides.

Is it a gacha game?

Yes. Arknights Endfield is the long awaited high production value sequel to the original Arknights. I have been working on an Arknights artpost for the art thread (there is a LOT of art to upload and sort in order, also a lot of great portraits with transparencies that need to be preserved when uploading to imgur, so that means I need to spend a lot of time resizing them and then reuploading them to imgur so they aren't converted from a PNG and lose transparency). In that artpost I go into the history and significance of the Arknights franchise. The TLDR is that it was started by Lowlight, one of the biggest Pixiv Fantasia artists, who went on to found his own company Hypergryph and make Arknights, which is huge in Asia, and then used the money from that to make this game, Endfield.

The problem is that Endfield has come out six years after Genshin Impact released and 3 years after Honkai Star Rail released, both of which appear to have saturated the market, each making over one billion USD per year. Genshin's herculean revenue then caused 20 other high production value 3D gacha games to enter development being made by armies of Chinese developers. It's the WoW clone craze again. Now those games are finally starting to come out. Unfortunately, the next two major big budget gacha game releases, Wuthering Waves and Zenless Zone Zero, only appear to make a fraction of as much money as Genshin and HSR (though as you can see from a few posts above, still a ton of money). Two gachas so far have announced that they are trying to back out of this seemingly saturated market (ANANTA and Duet Night Abyss). We'll see how these other gachas fare. Ofcourse, Arknights is huge, so Endfield had no chance of dying, but these are time consuming games, and the audience can't play them all.

Out of the current high production value 3D gacha games, Arknights leans the most towards being a regular JRPG. There is no open world like in Genshin. The levels are more linear. Your other party members appear on the field with you, etc. However, you still have the Genshin-isms of each character only having two abilities (their skill and their ultimate), the weird levelling system, having to farm a lot of mats to upgrade, etc.

[Tangerine]

billion and million are different things

He means billions in moon currency.

[Valter]

Do you say Zee Zee Zee or Zee Three? Funny name!

[Finarfin]

I tend to say Zenless.

[Acrux]

I don't talk about it at all.

[Valter]

I don't talk about it at all.

Answer the question, Thomas.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Do you say Zee Zee Zee or Zee Three? Funny name!

Zee zee zee

[Lhynn]

I don't talk about it at all.

This, the only reason i even remembered this was a game this month is because all the pedobait they are putting out.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

HSR's 4.0 expansion has launched!

Honkai Star Rail and Arknights: Endfield are giving 5 star characters away for free.

The Endfield one lets you pick a standard banner character and only requires that you finish the tutorial prologue (basically just beat the first two bosses and meet the Owl guy).

The HSR one lets you pick from Jing Yuan, Kafka, Sparkle, Acheron, Dan Heng - Imbibitor Lunae, Black Swan, and Aventurine. You only have to log in to claim it. Don't let the Arbiter General down!








Also, free Ruan Mei skin for logging in (you can pick her from one of the two free standard banner select tickets that you get for going through the game, if you haven't used them already).

[yangg]

I gave up managing resources and upgrading one team in Endfield: I spread all my resources in 3 teams, even 4. I don't care about strategy over long time, wanna have fun combat with a team so I tested multiple variants (physical team is broken even at level 60, with the Russian vanguard being OP with 200% ultimate efficacy gain spamming ultimate like crazy). As of now, with Umbral monument challenge released, I find the agony difficulty a bit hard to manage (Last rite is the only fully build DPS I have), but at least I've started leveling up the panda and going to make him a broken dps over time

[Vergil]

I started playing Warhammer 40k Tacticus. It's okay. Actually not too hard to unlock stuff but they constantly try to get you to buy like 30 dollar packages for things that take like 3 days of normal gameplay to unlock lmao

[Val the Moofia Boss]

HSR's new 4.0 Planarcadia expansion story has released, and I am now caught up on it.

► Show Spoiler

The plot is that the Astral Express goes to Himeko's homeworld, where the Phantasmoon Games are being hosted (a battle royale between 7 competitors who don magic masks). It occurs once every 15 years, and the winner might be able to become an Aeon. In the aftermath of the Amphoreus arc directly preceding this one, the powers that be are gearing up for a greater multi-galactic war against the Destruction and the four gods, so obviously having more firepower on their side would be appreciated.

Right now it feels fine. It does not feel like a slog like how Amphoreus 3.X started. Xianzhou and Penacony had more appealing settings, and Xianzhou had the more interesting hook with you being secretly asked by intergalactic terrorists to help jailbreak one of their members, but the tension in Xianzhou and Penacony evaporated quickly.

Most importantly, the actual moment to moment dialogues have become sane. In the last three arcs (especially in Penacony and Amphoreus), there was way too much speaking in riddles and trying to be "poetic" in every single line in every scene. Here people just talk normally and are direct about what they mean or what they are getting at.

The story bounces between POVs pretty often. No POV lasts long enough to start becoming stale. There are a lot of funny moments.








Planarcadia's setting does feel like a diluted retread of Penacony, though. They are both artificially constructed worlds where space travelers stumbled upon some sort of localized phenomena in space where their desires can reshape the matter there into whatever they want. So more and more people come and it builds up into a megapolis and a intergalactic tourist destination, and then catches the eye of the Interastral Peace Corporation who come in to annex it. And most of the major characters of the arc are not native inhabitants of the world, but characters from the rest of the universe. Planarcadia even has an expy of Dr. Edward (the stationary living kiosk) with a living cat photobooth called Black Cat Instacam. Both take you - the customer - to a fantasy location of your desires where you can see characters you have encountered before act out ridiculous skits.






The main difference is that the creatures/beings dreamt up by the people are now much more prominent from the get go, whereas in Penacony the talking monsters were relegated to the bartending event added in a patch.








Penacony however had the more charming aesthetic with the "always nighttime lavish, upscale art deco space Las Vegas" feel, whereas Planarcadia seems to be just generic modern Asia urbanity and emoticons, graffiti, streamers, comicbooks, etc.

After having joined the Astral Express crew two expansions ago and then being condemned to just play the piano in the party cab for a year, Sunday is finally getting to get off the train and walk around and do stuff along with the rest of us. He also dons one of the seven masks (besides the MC), so perhaps he will be the one to make it to the end of the competition.






It sucks that Dan Heng and March 7th have lost their Amphoreus forms and returned to their default appearances. I really liked older Dan Heng's look with the thick dragon tail and the horns and his white longcoat.


The card game event was neat, though the story was whatever. It is nice to see that the Belobog cast finally managed to some space transportation and get off their planet and show up elsewhere in the HSR universe. I guess Amphoreus is the only cast that will now be left behind forever unless their world gets resurrected in a future arc.






The MC finally gets his first ever new outfit. It is just a recolor of his default outfit, but at least the T-shirt has been replaced by a button up shirt. I like slightly less like a bum now. Wish it could have been tucked in, though, and the hoodie part of the model removed and replaced with a collar. Look more professional like Dan Heng, Welt, Blade, Phainon, etc.




Ashveil's animations look neat.




Social assassins... now there is something to think about.




You get to become the boss of a tabloid run by raccoons.