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September 26 Update (Patreon)

Published:
2021-09-26 22:47:52
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

TLS 0.58.0 was a divisive update. My responses are buried among the many comments on the previous thread, so I figured I'd lay out my general plans for the .1 version. Abstract discussion can go here, specific bugs/reports or new feedback should go in the other thread.

1) I intend to add a more obvious easy path through the update for those who don't enjoy the fundamental content. The Incubus King Sword will remain only on the hard path, which I intend to polish as much as possible without removing the interesting parts of the difficulty.

2) You'll be able to run away from all enemies in the .1 version.

3) There will be a skill that lets you retreat to the healing circle instantly, as well as a few additional save/heal points to reduce backtracking.

4) Simon will talk to himself more, providing a certain degree of guidance and making clear a few things that were apparently ambiguous.

5) The last House of Mystery puzzle was sadly broken, with many possible solutions the code doesn't check for. Unless someone knows a way to make RPG Maker check for whether anything is occupying a tile, I will be using color coding to make the intended solution clear.

6) There are unfortunately some unknowns. Some people report that enemies in the fire/ice areas deal no damage even under conditions where they should, and I don't know why this might happen. Enemies hitting through the Blind status effect is a random outcome that can be tweaked, but I'm not sure about reports of Blind having zero effect for either side.

7) These are the design changes. Obviously I intend to tweak many specific stats to smooth difficulty, reduce RNG, or otherwise try to improve things.

Normally I might have ran myself ragged to get out an update by today, but I don't think I have that in me right now. Instead, I hope to make the .1 release a significant step forward on all fronts. There will be more information about that in the future.

Comments

Jeffrey Lebowski

When you say you'll be adding an easier path through, do you mean that the section will guide you more for all players, or that there will be an option to opt in to an easier path (like a shortcut or sacrificing more abstract rewards like the IK sword and shining sword)? I ask because I personally enjoyed not being guided and having to wander around and experiment, and I think it really adds to the tone that no one is *supposed* to survive here so why would the environment help you.

Edward Culham

Alright that is good to hear. I do hope for the Simon talks that there also will be more flavor text as well, something that shows that his sanity is eroding. That was one thing that I noticed that was several talks when going back to the circle in the beginning at certain number of times though does stop altogether at 15 I believe.

ADragonDreaming

I'm very much in favor of giving people the option to skip past, since there's a fair number of people that won't want to deal with what this sequence is. For the rest of the changes, I think they are all good ideas, though I've seen some people strongly saying that it shouldn't be "Reduce RNG" it should be "remove RNG" - but then, a bit of RNG is what RPG Maker is. All said, I look forward to the update and seeing what's changed!

Lord Forte Games

As far as the puzzle goes, you could potentially set a check in each of the boulders on move scrips to say if it's on any of the tiles and, if so, increment a variable for number of tiles filled/decrement it if the boulders is moved off the tile. Might be a little complex, but should be doable if you'd really rather not color code it. Also, you had some issues with the stun state on different enemies. You run YanFly's "Buff and State" script, right? If so, you can use a notetag to fix that by making a state last longer on a certain enemy. Look under the "Enemy Notetags" section of the comments in that script, or just use the [state x turn: +y] notetag except with angle brackets instead of []. Also, sorry I haven't posted in forever XD I've still been playing off and on, just... effing hells this year :X Still working my way through this update, it's definitely pretty challenging in a way I can't decide if I like or not, but I wanna finish it once before it's improved regardless

WaxerRed

Sounds like you have a lot on your plate, here's a silly video to lighten any stress! This is how I imagine things would have gone for Simon had he not been given aid from his new friend. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDeDhRG7bbg

ADragonDreaming

A bit of feedback I just thought of: Megail's armor is rather lackluster for the trouble you have to go through to get it. Stun immunity didn't seem to matter anywhere (probably it comes up in the Final Gauntlet?), but moreover Janine's Helmet does the exact same thing, and is both easier to get and gives better stat boosts. The extra health from Meg's armor is nice, but there are other ways to get more, and for the most part, the Ice armor and the fire armor are what you actually want. I'd suggest buffing it in some fashion - as is, it's annoying to get and doesn't really seem to give much return on the investment.

sierralee

The easier path will be something like a piece of equipment that lets you either push through the three bosses or dominate the standard enemies as you prefer, but loses a chance at the permanent rewards. Combined with increased clarity in the merchants, I hope it will be a fairly clean system. I'm less certain about how exactly I'll give tips via Simon. For one example I have in mind, some players who entered the snake cave took off the Feather before later battles and had a bad experience dying to snakes. I intend to add a line after the first snake where Simon observes that there are likely to be many more snakes ahead. Potentially also tips when the player escapes from a boss battle.

sierralee

It stops at 25, but yeah, I'll probably add some more.

sierralee

I'm aware that some people argue for removing RNG entirely, but that is not what I intend to do in most cases.

sierralee

Hey, good to hear from you! Glad you're still doing okay. Good idea about having the boulders check themselves on movement. In theory it would just require modifying the solution code in a couple ways, then copying it to every boulder. I will have to consider this. I was not aware of that notetag! I haven't tested it yet, but based on the documentation that seems like it should handle the issue nicely.

sierralee

This one surprises me, though I'll still take it seriously. In my test runs, I usually bought it first thing and wondered if it was too strong, since it let me breeze through a lot of the third area. It was my main armor for the final gauntlet, too. But if it's widely regarded as not worth it, I'll consider a buff. You didn't mention Orilise's robes at all, but their total stats are pretty similar. They were meant to be the final armors outside of specialized situations. Also for the sake of balance, can you be specific about the fire/ice armor you mention, so I'm sure I'm not misunderstanding?

Quiet Stranger

I found that Stun Immunity was essential for fighting the Pornucopia.

Quiet Stranger

Perhaps the item could be a coil of Wendis, a tentacle, fang, or claw, that slips through the breach before her message is cut off by their jailor. Choosing to reach out and wield a sliver of her power could make it substantially easier to escape the prison, but would inflict collateral damage that'd destroy anything else he was hoping to gain. And one could otherwise choose to let the fragment return to Wendis, tough things out the hard way. Maybe even gain +1 Cohesion by doing so.

Grim8P

Thanks for writing this up. It is cool to see what you took from the feedback you received and your ideas or priorities on resolving them. Simon talking more to himself will be welcome on my end. I was kind of sad to see that it stopped before I left the first area. Of everything here I'm most interested in your thoughts on tuning RNG in this section. Is this something you can expand on? I saw a comment about not removing it entirely. I think we might be thinking about things in a different way so gaining some understanding would be interesting when you have time.

ADragonDreaming

Orilise's robes have the nice property of not being SX-gated. With the SX rebalance, Meg's armor might be more worth it, come to think of it. So I guess, either buff, or make it more accessible. Ice armor: "Winter Cloak" - boosts some def, more mdf, agility, luck. A mainstay for most of my run, when I didn't need to focus on def or a stat immunity. Fire armor: Flashfire Armor - boosts def, some mdf, and agiility, and also immunes you to blind. When I wasn't wearing winter cloak, I was wearing this. After I got heretic's robes, yes, replaced both in most cases. I still used Winter Cloak against the lamia, mind, and the flashfire armor when needing blind defense. The thing about the Golden armor is that for most of the run you really are wanting more MAG than ATK, and Neranda's Wall gives you the most DEF and MDF of any one item, so the Heretic's Robes are a better general choice than the Golden Armor. On my run, I got Heretic's robes very late, and relied heavily on Winter Cloak and Flashfire Armor over everything else.

Zaq Reman

I wasn't able to even buy Megail's armor. I've got Eustrin final so Neranda's shield only cost 1000, but I must have missed something because in the rest of the area I only found another 1143. Looking at the stats and effects it didn't look like I missed much, Janine's helmet and Orilise's robes got me dang near all the benefit I think it would've given.

Quiet Stranger

I find myself divided on whether to replay this section for 58.1; I am a sucker for extra Simon dialogue, but my first playthrough already took me through a hundred saves and two hundred deaths. By the time I got to area two, it felt more like I was playing Atreyan than I was Simon. But you know, speaking of, it's been a while since I last played Ouroboros. I really ought to give it another spin. Such a great story.

Lord Forte Games

Glad to be of help. Clearly if you ever need to summon me, the way to do it is posing RPG Maker logic questions, even though I haven't worked on my own projects in forever, trying to figure out how to do weird effects is one of my favorite things XD

ADragonDreaming

In regards to stun immunity: there's only two enemies that inflict it, and in both cases you're better relying on something other than the armor slot for stun immunity. Pornucopia, you want stun immunity in the helm, so that you can use flashfire armor to be immune to blind. Heart of Lust, you're best off having Trin's pin. Stun resistance on the armors isn't much of a bonus in the end, and so it comes down to which stat-ups are more useful overall. *In my opinion,* the Golden Armor loses out in that regard. With knowing that it's meant to mirror the Heretic's robes, then what *I* would do is lower the difficulty of acquisition.

sierralee

The apparent shortfall in Sx may have significantly impacted how this felt, but I do see how most players will likely only be able to get it at the very end. I don't know if I'll increase its defensive stats significantly, but I'll play around with secondary benefits.

sierralee

I believe that most comments about RNG are primarily about status/debuff resistances. The strongest argument for 0% resistance, in my opinion, is that players experimenting with weaknesses get false negatives. I still haven't decided what type of hints will feel right, but reducing brute force testing by hinting weaknesses would be good. Almost any RPG involves experimenting to see what works, but you don't want too much and people seem to find this one frustrating. The primary reason I don't want to eliminate it entirely is that, again in my opinion, deterministic RPG Maker combat is less interesting. If you never have an action fail, or a surprise attack get through, then winning is often extremely simple. I think RPGs are more interesting when you need to adjust strategy sometimes. For example, if Nyst is 100% vulnerable to debuffs, then the player will shut him down in the first few rounds and the fight will be trivial. However, a 50% chance means that 12.5% of attempts will get bad luck and be impossible to win - this didn't happen to me, but in retrospect I realize it's too probable. At 85% vulnerability, three unlucky turns in a row will be quite rare, but the player will still need to adjust strategy occasionally instead of following a simple script. But as it happens, the new Nyst isn't supposed to be a real challenge, so I've just removed his offensive resistances entirely. One thing that hasn't been commented on is that I specifically removed almost all critical hits and evasion from this section. I felt that those would be a negative form of RNG because it involves hoping for random luck instead of occasionally having to deal with bad luck. However, in cases where the current game works like this (mosquitos, bears, etc) I intend to try to reduce it.

sierralee

It's up to you. The flavor dialogue will be mainly accessible by walking over the save point repeatedly, while the rest is likely to be more mechanistic.

Adison

Yea just started playing the 58.0 and Something I noticed is the Mooks is it really feels like random chance of experimenting to find what helps and it takes about four to five deaths per mook. This isn't even someone boss feeling just the regular guys and its a lot of back and forth trying to level up or find that right item. For future runs I probably wait until there is a walkthrough update. That's the end of the bad. So far I am loving the environmental feel and it does a great job of making him feel imprisoned in such a way to drain his sanity. The little clips of each person he has a connection with has been awesome.

Grim8P

I appreciate the explanation, thank you. I guess it comes down to whether or not you think combat is more fun or interesting with the chance of failure after you understand the solution. I think there is just always going to be a problem with RPG Maker combat being limited in how deep and interesting it can be. While I don't usually find it fun to fail to execute a solution once I understand how to do so, you could be right in that making it simpler might be worse. The 2x Bear fight might have triggered me more than anything else. I don't think RNG was oppressive or anything, just frustrating when I thought I had the right solution. However at almost certainly more than 100 fights I think everyone is going to get RNG screwed at least a few times. I certainly think it was a good idea to remove critical hits and evasion and I don't think I consciously recognized it until you mentioned it. Thank you. I think I would have had a significantly worse time with this section if that decision wasn't made. Adison, I posted a walkthrough on the forums but I didn't start taking notes until the third section so it only really covers the third section with some very limited notes on the previous sections. You're welcome to post there if you need any clarification though and I'll do my best to help out when I have time. I've edited the post to specifically call this out but the walkthrough I wrote is specific to 0.58.0. A better, more thorough walkthrough will be created and posted on the wiki after the final 0.58 version is released. If you want to wait for a much better walkthrough you probably still want to wait but just in case this helps I thought I'd link it. https://thelastsovereign.flarum.cloud/d/78-the-incubus-prison-0580

Jeffrey Lebowski

I did notice the total lack of crits, but wasn't sure if that was fully intentional or a random emergent property like the blindness bug. Though I do remember actively thinking it kinda added to the atmosphere because, for one, having actively good luck would have seemed out of place in this dungeon and the random chance be at best "merciful" felt appropriate; and two, since Simon is explicitly stated to barely be able to fight normally (when learning Varia's power) I felt lucky that he was able to land respectable normal hits, much less exceptional crits

Jeffrey Lebowski

To the above suggestion: Lol, make it a tentacle whip. "Oooh, eldritch!" I think some problems like taking off the feather too early and dying to snakes will actually be solved by the ability to flee from all enemies since they can exit and reapply the feather as soon as they see a snake. Some more guiding lines would probably still be useful, but I think the ability to scope out enemy formations would somewhat mitigate the need for excessive forewarning. I'm always in favor of more flavor text though.

Anonymous

Maybe Simon can wipe his bloody palm on a volleyball and start talking to it. :)

Quiet Stranger

Oh! That's even more doable. Thank you!

Rachnera

Yeah, the issue at the moment is that Orilise's robe + Neranda's shield (that also raises HP, a very critical attribute) is better than Megail's armor + any other shield (that does not) for most of the third section. Megail's armor is likely better for Nyx and the optional gauntlet, since at that point your strategy has switched to using Fheliel/Aka/Ulrissa boons. But until you reach that point, a highly defensive magical build is just so much more easy-going: Less likely to die in one big hit, you heal yourself better, have high magical DPS against a lot of enemies, can abuse Carina's boon to push your resistance high enough to do bosses in a "non-intended order" (which might the reason why your perception is different than ours actually). When there will be enough money in the game to buy both, sure, I'll take Megail's armor in top of the shield over Dream Potions and the like... But for now the Gheldaron-Eustrin alliance rules over all.

Decanter

Sad to say, but what RPG Maker is, in many cases, is a bundle of dated bad design choices that they haven't updated since RPG Maker 1995.

Affliction

This is my first time trying an early build of TLS, along with making a post, so bear with me please. First of all, I just wanted to say I really enjoyed the atmosphere and vibe this update gave off. It's quite possibly my favorite section of the game so far, which is why the frustration I had over playing through some parts of it felt so, well, frustrating lol. I think everything you've laid out here covers all the problems I was going through, so I'm very happy. One thing I haven't seen people mention is, once I finished all of the content (minus the IK gauntlet, couldn't figure that one out), I was backtracking through all of the areas and noticed what I can only presume is a bug. When I went back to the very beginning section's blindness cave, after leaving it my game had a permanent darkness filter over it, and saving and loading didn't fix it either. Equipping the lantern removed the blindness debuff I had, but nothing about the dimmer game. Only way I could fix it was by going to a previous save. That's all, thanks for the update!

Seriathus

That's a RPGMaker issue, I'm afraid. IT happens when you exit an area with a dim light filter by teleporting. To solve it, you have to enter the cave and come out from the entrance instead of the teleport pentagram

sierralee

>The 2x Bear fight might have triggered me more than anything else. I don't think RNG was oppressive or anything, just frustrating when I thought I had the right solution. However at almost certainly more than 100 fights I think everyone is going to get RNG screwed at least a few times. For the record, the original numbers were 50% chance to blind and 40% chance to hit through blind. In response to reports I changed it to 90% chance to blind and 20% chance to hit.

sierralee

You can fix it for now by re-entering the cave, but in the upcoming .1 version teleporting will also reset the darkness filter.

DukeLeto7

I noticed that but forgot to report it...

Nightscout

This is my first time not waiting for the public release, I have it on Steam and normally just play it there. I seem to be running into an issue though, I get an error when it try to start stating "RPGVXAce RTP is required to run this game" I did some google and saw that in the past a different link was the solution to this. Is there anything else I can do to fix this issue?

Succusmurf

Can understand why it needs tweaking. I enjoyed that it was difficult though; felt appropriate for the situation but I love difficult games so not a reliable viewpoint. That aside I think it's one of the best sections of the game it changes the atmosphere and gameplay up. It's also interesting to see Simon essentially lose everything and survive using his own internal resources with very few external ones except those he can scrounge or fight for. Really enjoyed it overall.

Nightscout

Ah, these are both very helpful comments, but I ended up editing the files and removing where it checks for that. Playing it now and haven't seen any issues

sierralee

You just made the game run without the RTP? If it works, that's fine I guess, but there's a chance that maps that use those default resources won't load correctly.

sierralee

Thanks for giving your feedback! I'm glad that you enjoyed it overall.

sierralee

Thanks for notifying me. I've edited that into the last couple blog posts, so in theory when I copy paste new ones, it'll stay updated.

Nightscout

Not run without, but run without the check that stops it from starting the game. I have the steam version so I know that it runs fine typically, I just needed to edit the files and delete the instance of it checking as that was failing. At the house of mystery so far and only graphic glitch, and I think that was from where the save started

sierralee

The Steam version has the RTP files built into it, unlike the one in the previous post. Because TLS uses a lot of custom assets and modified versions of many defaults, it may not fall apart, but I wouldn't recommend going without it. I would guess (haven't tested) that when you start certain battles, the game will just crash.

logan80

For me personally, this latest update has one more aspect. I don't know if it was intended by Sierra but it turned out to be a good lesson in humility - partly for Simon and the harem, but mostly for the player. I cannot be the only one who started to think that we are one of the main players in the TLS world - we killed three powerful Incubus Kings, defeated the Empress, we manipulate the politics and economy of several countries, no opponent has been any major challenge for a long time - the world will soon be at ours feet! So I stand so proud of myself and suddenly someone taps my shoulder, I turn around and BOOM - bitch slap and I lie on the ground. Frightened, I look up and see only the numbers - 0.58. A moment later I hear a mocking voice - "look everyone, the little boy thought he was so important and so powerful. Let me show you what REAL power is and where your place is in all of this ''

sierralee

Simon and company are a major player in the world, but you're right, I wanted this update to have a major impact as the final players are introduced. Version 0.59.0 will finish establishing this while also setting the stage for the path to the end.

Nightscout

Completed the content fine without any crashes, but yeah when it goes public I'm gonna have steam replace the files I modified. Sorry to bother you with this issue :D

Seriathus

I think these are all good ideas. Personally, I think that the grinding could also stand to be reduced a bit - it's a REAL annoyance to need to clear out the various places one or two fights at the time before running back to the healing circle - at least until you get Qum's skill, then it's like four or five fights. I appreciate the sense of isolation, but in my experience in the 0.58.0 version it quickly wore off and was replaced by the tedium of grinding and trial and error.

Jeffrey Lebowski

This is a just a lore/tone comment not a balance comment but I've been thinking about the update and I have a bad habit of going full stream of consciousness every time an update comes out so… One thing I think this section did really well was act as a final juxtaposition between Simon and the last of the "traditional" Incubus Kings (I'm including Nyst, since without Xerces all he has going for him is his shard). Nearly every Incubus King in the game, including Esthera, has taunted, mocked, or been baffled by Simon's refusal to lean too heavily on his incubus powers or overdevelop them. But once all incubus power is stripped away, Simon is immediately ready to find other ways to survive. Others also mock Simon for being too dependent on his companions (and their absence does deeply weaken him), but even before he arms himself with their memories, the first things he can pick up are *random scraps of whatever he can find*. The Dream King was truly pathetic and could be relatively easily killed by a truly weak Simon. But even though Nyst somehow managed to retain a very reasonably powerful Incubus power, it was *literally the only attack he had* and thus was able to be defeated by Simon, who has much wider experience to draw from. The only person able to survive better than Simon was Tanurak, who also doesn't lean very heavily at all on his Incubus power, has more intimate knowledge of Tower mechanisms than Simon, and who also seems to draw his knowledge and power from a wide array of sources. Simon's adaptability and deliberate roundedness is what kept him alive as a slave in the OE and it's what kept him alive in this death pit.

sierralee

This is one of the issues I'm not sure I have a planned fix for, since I don't want to radically change the number of enemies. I'll keep it in mind, though.

sierralee

Hey, glad to see that Patreon stopped eating your comment. I don't have a lot to add, but I think you'll be interested by some of the information in the next update. ^-^

Jeffrey Lebowski

Haha I know right, I was just about to accept that my comment was chosen as a sacrifice to the Old Ones when it finally worked XD. And obviously I am really looking forward to seeing more of the bigger picture next update!

Seil

Overall i think these are good changes. One of the biggest things in original 0.58 was that you couldn't make informed decisions. So far, most of the game was about making decisions, accepting trade-offs and moving forward. There was no "correct" or "incorrect" decision. Like yes, with bad decisions you would make a lot of variables worse, but the game won't stop progressing. In the 0.58 incorrect decisions lead to one and only outcome. The Game Over screen. Also to add to this from the narrative angle. Simon is good to adapting to situation. Here suddenly he sees an overwhelming force and just accepts his death, instead of you know retreating and rethinking his available options. =)

Q-Riff

The biggest disappointment I find is you can't collect every thing. Even if I never used Dari's potion I still felt the need to collect it. Megail's armor and Nerada's shield are too expensive you can only afford one or the other. Dari's potion and Trin's pin are missable Dari's potion is in a temporary area and if you push the button before you collect it Trin's Pin is lost.

Affliction

From what I could tell from reading comments, you need eustrin final to afford both items, as it lowers the cost of Neranda's Will to 1000. As for Trin's Pin, I believe that was stated to be a bug, not 100% certain.

BleBle

Hello Sierra how are you doing this week? I hope it is okay. My day is a bit nasty. People comes to the hospital because of traffic accidents, poor people. But that's how things are. Have a nice day!!

sierralee

You need Eustrin Final, but the upcoming version will also have more Sx. And yes, the button was bugged.

sierralee

Yes, I'm doing okay. This was the first week in a while that I worked normal hours, so I've actually had some time off in the evenings. I hope that you get through your nasty day without too much fatigue!

Sesquame

Yeah Simon is a major world power, but it kinda threw me off how Simon started talking once chapter 5 started like he was already World Emperor and everyone else just didn't know it yet. Like I really didn't call him just out and out saying "I'm going to go full Highlander on the other incubus kings and be the sole ruler of the world" in the second gathering climax. I was like 'uh buddy, that's something the player is supposed to be saying, not *you*' Simon really did need to be taken down a peg at this point in preparation for the final conflict, he was starting to feel like taking over the world was an inevitability and something the world owed him.

Q-Riff

Even with Eustin final and not spending any other sx you still can't afford both though (almost but not quite). So you can't collect them all without cheating.

FenyxSCPlayer

I think you can if you dont buy anything else. For example I blew up about 400 in the sword plus the dream potions and that is why im not able to buy the armor