#Dev - Monolith Soft

[konnetwork]

An epic sendoff with strategy, soul, and scale — we unpack what makes Xenoblade Chronicles 3 a standout RPG experience on Nintendo Switch.

[anarchopuppy]

"Why did Tears of the Kingdom have a development cycle just as long as Breath of the Wild's even though it reused so many assets?" is a question that I think fundamentally misunderstands how modern game design works

It assumes that the team does something like all sit down, develop the physics engine, then they can move on to the overworld map, then they can move on to making the cutscenes, etc. and when you think about that for just a second it becomes obviously absurd. Developing a physics engine, writing dialogue, creating textures, designing puzzles, and so on are all different disciplines that different specialists work on in parallel and in cooperation

What probably actually happened is a lot of the artists, engine devs, and so on put a lot less time into the project, before/while working on a bunch of different projects at Nintendo (quite possibly including the engine and art for the next Zelda game), and they also probably didn't need to get Monolith Soft to help design the overworld. Meanwhile, the puzzle designers, writers, and a lot of the rest of the team have to do just as much work as they did for Breath of the Wild (or more!), and so it's not that surprising that it took just as long

(Disclaimer that I don't know for certain that this is how it happened internally at Nintendo, and short of interviewing the devs I don't think there's any way to find out. The credits won't help because close to all of the people who moved on to other teams either worked on TotK for part of the development and/or had their work ported over from BotW. This is just my understanding of how modern AAA game development works)

[viirium]

honestly i do rly hope that monolith soft decided to make A from Xenoblade 3: Future Redeemed canonically nonbinary just bc people wouldnt stop arguing about it with juniper in the base game, like the dev team was thinking 'fine if literally programming a characters nonbinaryness into the game wasnt enough for you bitches, we will make rex stare directly into the camera and tell you it this time, fuck you'

[cavenewstimestoday]

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Dev Used Procedural Generation To Manage 100,000 Different Assets

No, it’s not generative AI by Ollie Reynolds Yesterday, 5:45pm Image: Nintendo Xenoblade Chronicles 3 developer Monolith Soft has revealed that it used significant procedural generation to cope with the vast increase in assets required to build the world of the critically-acclaimed Switch RPG. As detailed by CG World (thanks, VGC), Monolith Soft’s map model designer Yoichi Akizuki, support…

[infernal-thorns]

The more I think about it. The more I realize that Senpai gets no respect, both in-universe and in a meta sense.

This is gonna be a long analysis, and a bit of disturbing imagery so it's gonna be under a "read more".

First, he dies, and is (apparently) canonically dead permanently after Week 6 (despite the fact he's a video game character, and can thus can technically respawn). Hell he even technically dies TWICE if you include the mini Darnell comic.

He's also canonically written to be a prejudiced asshole for...reasons. Like, the devs really want you to hate him. Which I get the idea, but it sucks given he has so much potential as a character (But then again when was FNF about character development?) and, to me at least, there's not really a NEED to make him that way. Granted, PhantomArcade was the one who said that stuff, and not Ninjamuffin, so of course take that "canonical" information with grains of salt. Obviously the prejudice stuff is straight up removed from my portrayal of Kenji. He is a trans pan dude who loves his ace-bi girlfriend and everyone regardless of creed or identity.

And in a meta sense, he has no merch aside from his OST LP record. Zero, zilch, nada. No stickers, no plushies, no shirts, no figurines, NONE. At least, not yet...

And with mods? Granted, he's not completely left out. He's in a bunch of mods, "But Bad", Doki Doki Takeover, X-Ray, etc. But for most of the mods he's slated to be in, they either get cancelled before his week, or they're still in development hell, making his fate unknown.

Minus? Cancelled. Elegant Night Dancin'? Cancelled. B3? Development hell. Neo? Development hell. Monday Dusk Monolith? Development hell. The ONLY major mods so far to release their Week 6's in full are D-Sides and Soft.

Of course I don't mean that as a means to bash the people behind the mods, they of course deserve to take their time and take breaks. It's just...PLEASE don't cancel before your Week 6's, I beg of you! /hj

And for a few mods, he was going to be in them, but got cut. You know Hit Single? The mod Silly Billy is from? Yeah, Senpai was going to be in it at one point! But they didn't know what to do with him, so he just got scraped, so all that exists is his concept art.

He was going to be in FNF: Mediocrity (The mod about No More Innocence), appearing in the song "Black Roses". But THAT got scrapped because the artist who was making that song got kicked of the team for their problematic actions (so I've heard...).

Which is a HUGE shame, not only because you know, Senpai. But also because Black Roses is fucking FIRE!

Good job artist! You've let both this banger of a track and Senpai go to waste!

Just...ugh...this hurts my soul as a Senpai lover...

[alpha00zero]

More Zelda games done by other dev teams or 3rd parties would be VERY welcomed tbf. They could provide fresh and strong experiences. Hell, Monolith Soft has been helping with both BotW and TotK, right?

Let them make a WHOLE Zelda game. Top to bottom. Let the writer(s) of Xenoblade get in on it. Give us meaningful story with emotional slaps to the face and bittersweet endings that makes you stop and reflect on the experience you just went thru playing a silly little ell fantasy game.

Let Capcom have a crack at it again. Mr. Itsuno's already amazing at understanding good action-based fantasy RPG with Dragon's Dogma and having directed most of the Devil May Cry series, a character action Zelda game would be insane! I would love to see him spin around the Zelda series into that direction while keeping it's exploring roots around. DD1 does it to some extend and deals with the themes of unending cycles.

I totally get what you mean. A lite version of the Soulslike formula mixed in Zelda would be pretty fun. With crypticly told lore so that people have something to chew on.

can't stop daydreaming about a soulslike zelda game yall i'm so normal about this

[purple-sage]

*vibrating out of my skin* I am being so normal about the xenoblade chronicles series right now.

[thelvadams]

XENOBLADE CHRONICLES 3 (2022) dev. Monolith Soft

[stolen-stardust]

i finished future redeemed today….. monolith soft is so powerful for blatantly confirming a nonbinary character AND it being not even questioned by anyone. genuinely it means so much to me that these devs aren’t afraid to have queer characters in their games and have it just be a thing that is totally normal and accepted by everyone. no misgendering, no weird comments, just, “[this character] is somewhere in between male and female,” and never uses ANY gendering pronouns even including they/them. literally none pronouns left monado. god i love xenoblade

[konnetwork]

Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition refines the original but is still held back by its ambitious design. Worth playing for fans of MMOs, but some design flaws hinder its full potential.

[askagamedev]

Candy Crush seems to me to be a wildly successful and profitable game that I don't see many people talking about NOW given how old it is. Do you have any other examples of such games?

Several major financial hit games like Candy Crush follow a very similar trajectory. These games tend to share a lot of qualities - they have a lot of players, they have been live for a very long time, they get frequent and regular content updates, and most of them are on the mobile platform. Several of the well-known top earners in this space are games like:

Clash of Clans (2012)

Puzzle and Dragons (2012)

Game of War: Fire Age (2013)

Fate: Grand Order (2015)

Honor of Kings (2015)

Pokemon Go (2016)

All of these games have earned multiple billions of dollars over their lifespans and all of them continue to earn at least a million dollars per month to this day. The stronger titles like Pokemon Go, Fate, and Clash of Clans, still earn tens of millions per month in multiple regions. Pokemon Go, for example, earned an estimated $54 million just this past February across both Android and iOS according to Sensor Tower.

One interesting side note is that what most see as a monolithic game (Candy Crush), there are actually several separate Candy Crush games that have been released at different intervals over the course of the franchise's lifetime:

Candy Crush Saga (2012)

Candy Crush Soda Saga (2014)

Candy Crush Jelly Saga (2015 soft launch, 2016 world wide)

Candy Crush Friends Saga (2018)

This actually makes Candy Crush more like a bi-annual franchise release than a single, long-running game like Pokemon Go. However, the original Candy Crush Saga remains the biggest earner of the franchise by far, nearly quadrupling its next closest sequel (~$79 million/month vs $23 million/month for Candy Crush Soda Saga).

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[crusherthedoctor]

I also think that everyone is forgetting an important detail: huge open world games aren't easy to make. It took Nintendo I believe 5 years of dev time, with a huge dev team, helped by another one (Monolith Soft) to make BOTW, and even then there were very obvious shortcuts to the dungeon, enemy and boss designs just to get the overworld working as well as it did. Sonic Team isn't that big, it doesn't have experience with this genre and I doubt SEGA would give them the proper budget

Don't forget that when done badly, they have the added risk of being aimless.

It's a shame, because the idea of an open-world Sonic is one that I've always been open to and think could work. But... well, I wouldn't do it like this.

[starboltprojects]

This is a new non-profit game guide for the Wii U game - Xenoblade Chronicles X. It concluded work a week or so ago, and most of the information inside is new to the internet. And I’m the author.

So, to anybody who knows me from university or elsewhere, my last five months after my Masters finished (more like mid-August to September, then late September to Mid-December, then mid-January to Present), have been spent in the darkest depths of a JRPG datamine, checking through hundreds of columns in tables like these.

Definitely not the natural environment of a perceived 3D artist, yet I’ve been attacking it with the same kind of fervor that created my first transformer.

Lots of underscores and numerical references in need of interpretation, which I was constantly hopping back and forth between tables for. Needless to say, I’ve learned a thing or too about dev commons cataloguing convention. I can imagine my programming lecturers back at Staffs can appreciate what it’s like going through these kinds of tables, and would probably chuckle when I say my head was down in these for about three full months.

Xenoblade Chronicles X (Wii U) - Monolith Soft, is the same game which my INFERNO Skell 3D piece came from. It’s a game I’m intimate with, and for a Wii U JRPG, it's renowned for being a technical marvel, fitting a seamless open world, larger than the one in Breath of the Wild and as dramatic as Avatar’s Pandora, onto the Wii U hardware.

It’s also dense, brimming with micro-management philosophy, augmentation for every possible battle tactic, and featuring over 100 different kinds of fantastic enemies to fight. But at the time of delving into this datamine, big pieces of information about the creatures’ capabilities were simply not covered. You couldn’t pick up a guide or the in-game enemy index and find anything useful about them to help you plan a fight. And without that intimate knowledge, battles just devolve into damage sinks. 

And this became the topic of my digging. I’ve played the game twice and run up against walls I couldn’t beat on both playthroughs. I refused to go to the effort of customising a build to beat tougher enemies without having all of the information I needed, and while plenty of guides exist on builds and gear, none exist for enemies, and the game’s in-built enemy index is functionally useless. I wanted to make my own enemy dex for Xenoblade, like the pokedex in Pokemon, so I could arm myself with that sense of knowledge and control. 

But it goes deeper than just personal peace of mind. There’s a let’s player I follow - Chuggaaconroy, who’s known for in-depth let’s plays of games covering everything a game offers, particular JRPGs, who loves Xenoblade Chronicles. I was anticipating, and had seen evidence of, a let’s play of Xenoblade Chronicles X being planned by him. I wanted to see him NAIL this game, expose it for all of its richness and, knowing his calibre and the herculean task it would be to apply it to XCX, I became an editor on the game’s wiki in 2018 and reached out to Emile (Chuggaaconroy), asking to help with any info I could get my hands on. He told me a let’s play, were it to happen, would be some way away, likely after a Switch port. In hindsight I’m thankful it hasn’t happened yet, since a Masters has occured in my life between starting and finishing this endeavor.

Back then I’d originally planned to just grab the base stats for every species when the game’s index only displays a range specific to level-bracket. I thought it was something I could achieve with my available resources. But then, when the datamine was shared with me, my list lengthened to include:

 - Arts – Attribute, Category, Hit No., Direction, Scaling, Cooldown, Effects - At least 3 of these per enemy, and increasing

- Appendages – Hardness, Skell Targetability and Exposure

- Battle Skills – Aura Effects, Tiers and Duration, Spike Scaling, Attribute, and Rate of Damage, and other invisible Skills and Enhancements

- Immunities & Resistances to Debuffs

- Size-Category

- Stats

& Drops – Armor, Weapons, Skell Armor, Skell Weapons, and Materials & their crafting use

For context on the quantity of information that amounts to, just add up the number of capitalised points on that list, multiply it by 110 or so, and then assume the time necessary to locate and translate the relevant information from the tables.

By May of 2018, I was organising the findings onto spreadsheets for the information, and translating it to a document guide. Then I started the Masters and it was put on hold, about a dozen species done, but some still with gaps and ?s that I hadn’t worked out from my digging. But in August of 2020, Emile teased a let’s play which had the potential to be Xenoblade Chronicles X, which spurred me to pick up the work while concluding my dissertation piece. It turned out to be a different Xenoblade, but then I was in the clear of the Masters and working in earnest, identifying everything I’d previously been unsure about and concluding first drafts of all 100+ entries going into December. The time since has been spent on a handful of further additions, then editing, until we come to February 2021, where everything is ready.

I did have some help from a collaborator by the online handle of Abarax for playtesting, and in the process of the digging I’ve also ended up building several more documents for look-up purposes. And I’ve produced a full set of clean portraits for the enemies which the wiki was previously lacking.

I know hundreds of players will be able to benefit from these guides. Truthfully, despite whatever preconceptions my portfolio pieces would have people believe, this project is just as in line with getting me closer to my dreams as building technically impressive transforming robots. My passion lies in JRPGS – Pokémon, Xenoblade, Final Fantasy, Persona, Kingdom Hearts. Getting to work with one during this project has been immensely fulfilling. 

In total, my findings have produced a little less than 200 pages of new and clear information. I’ve already shared them both with the game’s wiki and made proposals to have the information in them implemented in their pages. I’ll let the guides speak for the rest.

PRESENTING NEW GAME GUIDES

-       Xenoblade Chronicles X - Enemy Notes + Augment Crafting Guide

-       Xenoblade Chronicles X - Enemy Info Sheets

And I’ll add this response I got from one of the moderators after they’d looked through it.

And a poster -

[thelvadams]

XENOBLADE CHRONICLES: DEFINITIVE EDITION • dev. Monolith Soft

[darkarm66]

Further thoughts on Xenoblade 2

When reviewing Xenoblade Chronicles 2, I tried my best to avoid mentioning Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles X. Mainly because directly comparing sequels is always unfair. Any game should stand (or fall) on its own merits. Plus sequels aren't always the same game or mechanics, so any expectation of familiarity should fall only on the player (unless the devs explicity say 'this game is a direct sequel').

However, playing XC2 just really had me wishing I was playing the first or second game instead. And like I wrote in the review, XC2 lacked a lot of cohesion between its systems. Cohesion the past games nailed. One thing, the previous Xenoblade games had, in terms of cohesion, was a great environmental design. Xenoblade had the gimmick of living on the body of dormant mechgods, but the actual impressive part was how every area was interconnected. This lead to feelings that if the player wanted to push beyond the boundaries and see what they can explore or discover, only a gamer's patience (and some overleveled monsters) would stop them. Xenoblade X added verticality with the mechs, which always meant exploration had some surprises. Xenoblade 2....dispenses with most of that. In fact, much of the hidden stuff comes from warp gates locked by field skills, which may or may not be at the right level by the time. This leads to a lot of fetch questing and cat herding just to possibly level up that skill...which you need to access by increasing trust levels. By the time you have enough skill to unlock that warp gate, the player has to go back by fast traveling. I'm split on fast traveling as a game mechanic because I do love saving the player time but the disconnected nature of all the worlds take some of the joy of traveling away. It makes what should be a vibrant and unique world feel like an inefficient menu option with random bits of interactivity. It robs some of the worlds from having any lasting impact.

Another aspect was the handling of side quests because....let's face it, there's a shit ton of sidequests in all three games. And all three had a way to make it feel grueling. However, the first Xenoblade had the advantage of completing quests if you already had the stuff in your inventory...and you didnt have to go back to the quest giver. So much time saved. So much back tracking erased. This design advancement, all the way from 2010, is just missing in 2017. Xenoblade Chronicles X had this to some degree but this was mitigated due to many of the tougher quests being in the online portion and the post-story game turned into challenging grind for parts to unlock better Skells. In XC2, it just feels like a way to stretch out something a bit longer to pad for time. XC1 and XCX's quests didn't feel like chores to do because both games felt like they encouraged players to truly, truly play to their own style so players can unintentionally complete quests without needing to activate it. 

The amount of backtracking saved in the first two games had the bonus of the game world to truly feel unique and warm, as opposed to Xenoblade 2's worlds just feeling like checkmarks to add on a map and the problem, at least for me, is that when you no longer have to be in a place any more, it doesn't need to exist. This waste the environmental design and robs it of being a world and is not just: a game. While a game being a game feels like a weird criticism, but games that are collections of exhaustive chores are usually not the best games.

One thing to keep in mind between all three games is the Affinity System. It shows up differently in between all three games, but their functionality is essentially the same: nurture a link between the party and the game world. In the first game, it gated some quests and side stories by incentivizing the player to actually do things within an area to increase affinity. But the first Xenoblade gave better payouts, gameplay wise, for the player's time. Talking to NPCs and creating good links between them allowed players to obtain items that may have been needed for quests or better: the affinity between the party members. This is where Xenoblade actually justified its long, long playtime. Not only does the party members receive the character development the cutscenes don't, it allows the players to have specific passive bonuses in gameplay. And its not just for the specific member in combat, but it benefits the entire party. And for the combat, performing certain actions for members allowed a boost in critical hits and buffed other effects. This made pay attention to which relationships were truly worth developing as the talking during combat mattered and determined how well an effect could take hold. Best of all, the affinity helped mitigate what could've been a super grindy affair.

This is the case for XCX as well, as the combat got tweaked to build on top of the combat chatter as performing a specifically called for Art, increased Affinity between party members, but was also the way to keep stacking attacks and effects on enemies, especially important as the game started doling out tougher enemies. 

For Xenoblade 2, the Affinity system is the only thing that gets leveled up through quest completion, allowing the Driver to get specific bonuses and building the Trust between the equipped Blade. It's the interaction between Blade and Driver where the Affinity system gets smashed with sledgehammer. For the most part, it's similar to the first game where trust has to be built to unlock a skill node. Then, unlocking a specific skill requires specific tasks, tasks the player may have already done. Now add the fact that Rare Blades have specific unlock nodes and quests and they have to be present (or use the dreadful Merc Mission system) to keep unlocking. I could be misremembering the first two games, but Xenoblade 2 just made it feel like double the work for the same payoff. Stretched out for over 200 Blades. 

The only thing that's consistent between all three games: there's a lot in the mechanics they won't even bother to tell you how to get it working. In the first game, it's never clear how much affinity is being added from each action but there is a number that levels it up. In XCX, you need several online guides to find out where to find the parts for the high end Skells and the fact there's a specific scheme to connecting probes. XC2 does this a little better in certain aspects but the overall vagueness to collecting is still present.

So, I this isn't a 'for the next Xeno game, they should' article because the Shulk, Fiora and Elma showing up in Challenge Mode felt like a hint that Monolith Soft may be moving away from the franchise for the next upcoming games and probably wanted to give the fans a bit of fan service before moving on. Plus, there's no guarantee that circumstances of Monolith Soft losing half their staff to a different Nintendo franchise will repeat, which I believe benefited Breath of the Wild at the expense of a better Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Hopefully, whatever the next game from Monolith Soft becomes and hopefully it's an amazing RPG, that it retains all the great parts from the Xenoblade franchise.

[konnetwork]

Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition – Overview Trailer Revealed for Nintendo Switch

🌍⚔️ The Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition overview trailer is here! See how you'll explore Planet Mira, pilot Skells, and master combat before its March 20 launch on Nintendo Switch! #XenobladeChroniclesX #NintendoSwitch

The latest trailer for Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition has just landed, giving players a fresh look at what awaits on Planet Mira when the game launches on Nintendo Switch on March 20. As a BLADE recruit, you’ll explore the untamed landscapes of Mira, establish your home in New Los Angeles, and master the intricacies of Arts and Overdrives in combat. But the real game-changer?…