I LOVE HUB AREAS‼️‼️‼️ Getting to hang out with your army and having a cozy rest area adds literally so much to the game and have improved FE greatly. Hating hub areas discredits atmosphere in video games and just makes it sound like you want a quick thing to rush through rather than a world to get involved with and love and I think that sounds very boring for a JRPG Hub areas are amazing and I hope they stay around forever :D
Saying people don’t like hubs because they want to rush through the game is 100% a bad faith argument. Past games did a perfectly good job with worldbuilding without needing hubs. The problem with the hubs in 3 houses and engage is that they’re more or less required, or else you’re leaving a ton of resources on the table, and they break the pacing for people who want to play the strategy part of a strategy RPG. If hubs are here to stay, then I think the best way to go about it would be to bring back tellius’ bases. They give you conversations between characters that give you items without having to run around to find everything, and players who want to get back to the combat can just pick the ones that give you useful items
I love interacting with the characters. I literally grinded out every support in FE7 despite it being a huge pain in the ass. And I absolutely DESPISE the modern FE Hub, especially the monastary. They DO NOT help with character development. They hurt it. Badly. The hub activities make the characters feel worse. You have a meal, the character puts out a worthless piece of dialog. Lost item? Generic boring dialog. Choir practice? Not helpful. Lectures? Trash. Sauna? Blah. Oh look, this one has a random generic quest that has no meaningful story attached. The characters are so shallow, they're willing to abandon their house just because they like Byleth's stats. You get these same activities on offer, every chapter. They all suck, hard. And if you skip them, you're missing out on gameplay benefits. You got a lot of added activities to do with your students, but none of them besides the supports were meaningful. Arranging my characters on a completed map in the GBA era and hitting end turn over and over again to grind supports was more fun than picking up and returning lost items in Three Houses. The Tales series tends to do a good job with skits sprinkled in as you play. The characters are well developed (to varying degrees depending on game) and the lack of hub area does nothing to hurt this. If anything, the lack of hub is helpful, because the skits involved are location dependent instead of being locked to the same environment for no good reason. Engage introduced a fresh explorable environment each time, but for some reason, decided to make the banish the player to the hub area after walking around instead of just using the after battle map to give a varied environment. Scrap the Somniel, have your army set up camp or loiter around town on the map or you just cleared. Watch your party members converse with the locals, and have the available activities (fishing, arena, mining, whatever) vary based on the map you're on. Engage was soooo close to getting it right, but fell short in this regard. But at least it wasn't quite the disaster that it was in Three Houses.
I do actually like the Hub Ares. HOWEVER one thing I dislike about Engage specifically is the amount of Loading Screens you have to sit through on every visit. Enter Hub. Loading screen. Go to Ring Chamber. Loading screen. Leave Ring Chamber. Loading screen. Enter Arena. Loading screen. Leave Arena. Loading screen. And these are just long anough to be annoying. I'd rather have one longer loading screen upon entering the Hub then the many MANY shorter ones.
It’s weird for me. Three Houses is part of the feeling, Fates was nice and quick, and Somniel was way too segmented. If we ever get this again, I hope it takes after Fates to keep the pace going nicely.
I love hub areas!! In any game really. I almost feel they're needed for fire emblem because it breaks up the constant pace of battles (which can sometimes feel exhausting) and gives the units a place to realistically have support conversations. Plus, as three houses showed, its absolutely great for worldbuilding since you can talk to units about whatever mission is coming up next and get their insight on certain things 😌 im 100% a story player so i do get it though if gameplay people hate it. But as for me, i hope its here to stay. I absolutely abhor engage but the somniel is so fun to be in, the vibes are pristine 😭
I think that hub worlds are great for characterization, especially when every character has dialogue that references recent story events or hints at future events. The Somniel dialogue was a big step backwards in that regard.
I do like them. I agree they're a natural progression of what the series should be these days, but I think Engage's Somniel hits the amount of activities juuuust right in order of what I want from a hub area. My Castle was okay for a first, but I felt Garreg Mach took it a bit too far in number of activities, and a lot of them were required to build up Supports (which is what I care for the most). I like the more "intimate" feel the Somniel has. It starts out fairly empty but I love how it starts to come to life as more characters join, adding a lot of details to it, like how a tent appears at night near the fishing lake after Fogado joins, or how the statue in the northeast corner starts to take shape as you progress and you find out it was Zelkov who sculpted it. I believe the devs were really going for a "big family" feel with Engage's cast, and the Somniel really helped with the achieving that.
As someone who enjoys hub areas, my only criticism about them is how tedious they are for multiple playthroughs. 3H being the biggest stand out here having you play through White Clouds 4 different times to see all of the content. While seeing each house interact with the current events of said chapter is nice, there's a glaring lack of difference between the cutscenes before a map for all of the White Clouds playthroughs. This makes the mandatory requirement of White Clouds feel dull because all of the students pretty much say the same things to each other in these cutscenes before Time Skip which diverges them off into their own separate stories. The hub areas themselves are fine, I really enjoy them alot, but 3H failed to take arguably the one good thing about Fates with the "Branch of Fate" option but for Time Skip. Though, I understand that a LOT of progression/items/skills/classes/supports would be missed if they did implement something like that. Overall, hub areas good, but being forced to replay White Clouds gets jarring and off-putting to the play by the 3rd playthrough imo.
I love hub area's as they help to flesh out the world and break up the exhaustion between chapter after chapter etc. HOWEVER, that said my major complaint with engage is that I wish there was a setting to skip the post battle map exploration, it's great the first time you do a new chapter as relevant characters have a little extra dialogue and what not but after a while it just becomes an extra loading screen to sit through.
I mostly like the hub areas in Fire Emblem, I like My Castle in Fates because everything can be accessed more quickly but the features here have very little feeling of interaction and exploration. In Engage I like how we can walk around the place we just finished fighting in each chapter. Even though the area is mostly empty, it's still cool to see the interior of the castle or walk through Jean's village. I like Somniel because the hub vibe is very cozy and the graphics are beautiful to look at. I hope that in future series the hub area will have more variations of fun minigames besides fishing and work out places, I would really like it if there were horse racing minigames 🤣
My issue is that it just got way to tedious above all else in the war arc. Also they could have done alot more to make the academy arc different between routes so replay value isn't gutted with the first 12 chapters being completely identical in all 3 routes
Personally, I like the hub areas, but none of them are perfect. My Castle was straight to the point, but it's terrible having to balance easiness for acessing the buildings and efectiveness for invasions, so I just change the design for the invasions and, later, back, which is pretty annoying. My pick with the monastery is just the old "cool at first, gets annoying later on", kinda like how the Persona games have poor replay value in the social sim half. The Somniel was probably my favorite, since the shops are all close and there's no invasions to worry about, but the loadings (especially the Arena one) do suck ass. I haven't played Three Hopes, but I *hope* it's good. (I forgot how it was on berwick saga but i remember getting lost with the side maps stuff)
I think my personal qualm with hub areas is that, at least in 3H's case is their location doesn't always make sense. I think the hub should move rather than just being one static place. Like if you're on a military campaign why are you constantly backtracking to Garreg Mach between battles?
"Given the opportunity, a player will optimize the fun out of a game" = Me fishing for 3 hrs to max out the professor lv I disagree in that it doesn't feel mandatory, specifically related to 3 houses. The professor levels are HUGE!! They give you extra actions and extra chances to play maps. Engage and Fates felt less mandatory, as the bonuses you get are not that huge.
Sure your opinion is controversional but by no mean it is the minority. Dont forget that we are in the switch era, the new generation want features like phoenix mod or hubs. And it seems that you diminish pretty highly the impact of "all" the bonuses you get from hubs. So yeah when we are playing the easiest difficulties we are totally able to ignore those steps. Point is you are talking about fun, and even if we are endangered species, alot of the older gen fans found their fun in a proper difficult mod. It really feels unfair that you blamed the players when most of the highest difficulties from the new entries are just some heavily overstated units because the devs are now impling that the players will use mecanics like hubs to compensate. And the nail in the coffin is the ressources allocated to hubs are increasing while some other areas might suffer from it. However, I dont think the hubs need to go, but the way you said it was a bit frustrating. New additions as "Hubs" brought huge changes to the franchise. The core of the game shifted pretty hard and denying it feel wrong for the ones who enjoyed the early titles. PS Gaiden is the one which introduced the world map
THEYRE GREAT AND IM TIRED OF PRETENDING THEYRE NOT!!!!!!!!
I LOVE HUB AREAS‼️‼️‼️
Getting to hang out with your army and having a cozy rest area adds literally so much to the game and have improved FE greatly. Hating hub areas discredits atmosphere in video games and just makes it sound like you want a quick thing to rush through rather than a world to get involved with and love and I think that sounds very boring for a JRPG
Hub areas are amazing and I hope they stay around forever :D
Saying people don’t like hubs because they want to rush through the game is 100% a bad faith argument. Past games did a perfectly good job with worldbuilding without needing hubs. The problem with the hubs in 3 houses and engage is that they’re more or less required, or else you’re leaving a ton of resources on the table, and they break the pacing for people who want to play the strategy part of a strategy RPG. If hubs are here to stay, then I think the best way to go about it would be to bring back tellius’ bases. They give you conversations between characters that give you items without having to run around to find everything, and players who want to get back to the combat can just pick the ones that give you useful items
I love interacting with the characters. I literally grinded out every support in FE7 despite it being a huge pain in the ass. And I absolutely DESPISE the modern FE Hub, especially the monastary. They DO NOT help with character development. They hurt it. Badly.
The hub activities make the characters feel worse. You have a meal, the character puts out a worthless piece of dialog. Lost item? Generic boring dialog. Choir practice? Not helpful. Lectures? Trash. Sauna? Blah. Oh look, this one has a random generic quest that has no meaningful story attached. The characters are so shallow, they're willing to abandon their house just because they like Byleth's stats.
You get these same activities on offer, every chapter. They all suck, hard. And if you skip them, you're missing out on gameplay benefits.
You got a lot of added activities to do with your students, but none of them besides the supports were meaningful.
Arranging my characters on a completed map in the GBA era and hitting end turn over and over again to grind supports was more fun than picking up and returning lost items in Three Houses.
The Tales series tends to do a good job with skits sprinkled in as you play. The characters are well developed (to varying degrees depending on game) and the lack of hub area does nothing to hurt this. If anything, the lack of hub is helpful, because the skits involved are location dependent instead of being locked to the same environment for no good reason.
Engage introduced a fresh explorable environment each time, but for some reason, decided to make the banish the player to the hub area after walking around instead of just using the after battle map to give a varied environment.
Scrap the Somniel, have your army set up camp or loiter around town on the map or you just cleared. Watch your party members converse with the locals, and have the available activities (fishing, arena, mining, whatever) vary based on the map you're on.
Engage was soooo close to getting it right, but fell short in this regard. But at least it wasn't quite the disaster that it was in Three Houses.
I do actually like the Hub Ares.
HOWEVER one thing I dislike about Engage specifically is the amount of Loading Screens you have to sit through on every visit. Enter Hub. Loading screen. Go to Ring Chamber. Loading
screen. Leave Ring Chamber. Loading screen. Enter Arena. Loading screen. Leave Arena. Loading screen. And these are just long anough to be annoying.
I'd rather have one longer loading screen upon entering the Hub then the many MANY shorter ones.
It’s weird for me. Three Houses is part of the feeling, Fates was nice and quick, and Somniel was way too segmented. If we ever get this again, I hope it takes after Fates to keep the pace going nicely.
I love hub areas!! In any game really. I almost feel they're needed for fire emblem because it breaks up the constant pace of battles (which can sometimes feel exhausting) and gives the units a place to realistically have support conversations. Plus, as three houses showed, its absolutely great for worldbuilding since you can talk to units about whatever mission is coming up next and get their insight on certain things 😌 im 100% a story player so i do get it though if gameplay people hate it. But as for me, i hope its here to stay. I absolutely abhor engage but the somniel is so fun to be in, the vibes are pristine 😭
I think that hub worlds are great for characterization, especially when every character has dialogue that references recent story events or hints at future events. The Somniel dialogue was a big step backwards in that regard.
I do like them. I agree they're a natural progression of what the series should be these days, but I think Engage's Somniel hits the amount of activities juuuust right in order of what I want from a hub area. My Castle was okay for a first, but I felt Garreg Mach took it a bit too far in number of activities, and a lot of them were required to build up Supports (which is what I care for the most).
I like the more "intimate" feel the Somniel has. It starts out fairly empty but I love how it starts to come to life as more characters join, adding a lot of details to it, like how a tent appears at night near the fishing lake after Fogado joins, or how the statue in the northeast corner starts to take shape as you progress and you find out it was Zelkov who sculpted it.
I believe the devs were really going for a "big family" feel with Engage's cast, and the Somniel really helped with the achieving that.
As someone who enjoys hub areas, my only criticism about them is how tedious they are for multiple playthroughs. 3H being the biggest stand out here having you play through White Clouds 4 different times to see all of the content. While seeing each house interact with the current events of said chapter is nice, there's a glaring lack of difference between the cutscenes before a map for all of the White Clouds playthroughs. This makes the mandatory requirement of White Clouds feel dull because all of the students pretty much say the same things to each other in these cutscenes before Time Skip which diverges them off into their own separate stories. The hub areas themselves are fine, I really enjoy them alot, but 3H failed to take arguably the one good thing about Fates with the "Branch of Fate" option but for Time Skip. Though, I understand that a LOT of progression/items/skills/classes/supports would be missed if they did implement something like that. Overall, hub areas good, but being forced to replay White Clouds gets jarring and off-putting to the play by the 3rd playthrough imo.
I love hub area's as they help to flesh out the world and break up the exhaustion between chapter after chapter etc.
HOWEVER, that said my major complaint with engage is that I wish there was a setting to skip the post battle map exploration, it's great the first time you do a new chapter as relevant characters have a little extra dialogue and what not but after a while it just becomes an extra loading screen to sit through.
1:14 That was GAIDEN! 😭
I mostly like the hub areas in Fire Emblem, I like My Castle in Fates because everything can be accessed more quickly but the features here have very little feeling of interaction and exploration. In Engage I like how we can walk around the place we just finished fighting in each chapter. Even though the area is mostly empty, it's still cool to see the interior of the castle or walk through Jean's village. I like Somniel because the hub vibe is very cozy and the graphics are beautiful to look at. I hope that in future series the hub area will have more variations of fun minigames besides fishing and work out places, I would really like it if there were horse racing minigames 🤣
I love the monastery in 3 houses
My issue is that it just got way to tedious above all else in the war arc.
Also they could have done alot more to make the academy arc different between routes so replay value isn't gutted with the first 12 chapters being completely identical in all 3 routes
I didn't like the somniel but the monastery is great idgaf what anyone else says
I loved monastery on my first run or two but after that it's a chore
Personally, I like the hub areas, but none of them are perfect. My Castle was straight to the point, but it's terrible having to balance easiness for acessing the buildings and efectiveness for invasions, so I just change the design for the invasions and, later, back, which is pretty annoying. My pick with the monastery is just the old "cool at first, gets annoying later on", kinda like how the Persona games have poor replay value in the social sim half. The Somniel was probably my favorite, since the shops are all close and there's no invasions to worry about, but the loadings (especially the Arena one) do suck ass. I haven't played Three Hopes, but I *hope* it's good. (I forgot how it was on berwick saga but i remember getting lost with the side maps stuff)
I think my personal qualm with hub areas is that, at least in 3H's case is their location doesn't always make sense. I think the hub should move rather than just being one static place. Like if you're on a military campaign why are you constantly backtracking to Garreg Mach between battles?
I hate all the superflous activities. Dev time utteryl wasted
"Given the opportunity, a player will optimize the fun out of a game" = Me fishing for 3 hrs to max out the professor lv
I disagree in that it doesn't feel mandatory, specifically related to 3 houses. The professor levels are HUGE!! They give you extra actions and extra chances to play maps. Engage and Fates felt less mandatory, as the bonuses you get are not that huge.
Sure your opinion is controversional but by no mean it is the minority. Dont forget that we are in the switch era, the new generation want features like phoenix mod or hubs.
And it seems that you diminish pretty highly the impact of "all" the bonuses you get from hubs.
So yeah when we are playing the easiest difficulties we are totally able to ignore those steps. Point is you are talking about fun, and even if we are endangered species, alot of the older gen fans found their fun in a proper difficult mod.
It really feels unfair that you blamed the players when most of the highest difficulties from the new entries are just some heavily overstated units because the devs are now impling that the players will use mecanics like hubs to compensate. And the nail in the coffin is the ressources allocated to hubs are increasing while some other areas might suffer from it.
However, I dont think the hubs need to go, but the way you said it was a bit frustrating. New additions as "Hubs" brought huge changes to the franchise. The core of the game shifted pretty hard and denying it feel wrong for the ones who enjoyed the early titles.
PS Gaiden is the one which introduced the world map