Final Fantasy XIV

[nu_11]

Can we stop equating hours grinding to FFXI.

Thanks.

(See what I did there?)

[Pyros]

Originally Posted by Draegan

Can we please stop equating challenge to hours grinding?

Thanks.

Pretty sure FFXI was actually challenging on top of being grindish. Probably somewhat like original EQ was. Because there's grinding doesn't mean there's not challenge too, in fact FFXI pushed the grinding to an art with the improved xp as you kept pulling non stop. I think it was a pretty nice game, even though I couldn't play it again due to how fucking slow the gameplay is and how clunky the interface is, especially after playing so many years of wow.

[DeBo]

Originally Posted by Dumar

i kinda feel that way too, but in this trash industry, where companies dumb down to hell, outright lie, rush dev, release crap, and hype to oblivion, gotta be skeptical.

I'd agree with you if it was any other game. The issues people had with FFXI didn't come down to bugs or content for once. Shit always worked and there was TONS of content to eat up. Though they are dumbing shit down a bit now, it's still nothing close to what WoW does.

[column]

NIGGER GOT TO JUMP YO!

[DeBo]

Originally Posted by Pyros

Pretty sure FFXI was actually challenging on top of being grindish. Probably somewhat like original EQ was. Because there's grinding doesn't mean there's not challenge too, in fact FFXI pushed the grinding to an art with the improved xp as you kept pulling non stop. I think it was a pretty nice game, even though I couldn't play it again due to how fucking slow the gameplay is and how clunky the interface is, especially after playing so many years of wow.

I agree with you on the interface, but I doubt I'd play another game again that lets modding take over the game.

[Vinen]

Originally Posted by Darus Grey

Things I want:

-Corsair in-game at launch, Gambler is my all time favorite FF job.

-Warrior as a viable tanking job(*along* with Paladin, and others, into endgame), I like the vanilla warrior, but in FFXI it was always putting a square peg in a round-hole, you could make it work, but why bother?

-I know people will disagree with me, but I'd prefer multi-national servers like FFXI. JPs won't have a head-start, and frankly being forced into contact with so many cultures was one of the things I hated at first, but really liked looking back at my time in the game. Over 5~ years I made many friends in Europe, Japan, and Korea that lasted out-side the game. It would be nice if some of the servers were physically located in the US and Europe, but I'd prefer they weren't forcefully segregated ala WoW.

-Keep the slow combat pace with a lot of options.

-Horizontal advancement, I'd like to see more vertical this time...but not anything close to WOW level vertical. Horizontal along with 20 jobs , to me, was more exciting.

- Fuck Corsair, make Red Mage a viable melee job. Higher levels of Enspells probably could have done this...
- Agree
- Agree
- Agree, combat pace needs to stay slow. WoW is too lol wham head on keyboard dps happens.
- Fuck no, it should have vertical advancement but nowhere like WoWs. I think I had about 20 side grades for each piece of gear in FFXI by the time I quit.

[Pyros]

Originally Posted by DeBo

I agree with you on the interface, but I doubt I'd play another game again that lets modding take over the game.

I guess you could argue endlessly that wow actually doesn't play itself like many people claim, but whatever, I'm fine with just interface mods. Everything needs to be moddable though, with a real language to code it in so you can do decent stuff, like vertical healthbars if you want to. Most of the MMOs that aren't wow say they want to limit interface modding because they don't want to be wow with shit tellilng you your aggro, boss timers and what not, but they also lock completely basic shit like being able to change the way the raid is displayed, or tooltips, or quest text and stuff like that. Everything cosmetic should be able to be changed in my opinion. However because this game is probably gonna be a console release, I doubt anything can be changed, so the point is moot.

[Dumar]

Originally Posted by DeBo

I agree with you on the interface, but I doubt I'd play another game again that lets modding take over the game.

i definitely agree with this.

modding the appearance is okay, but it absolutely shouldn't go beyond that--no exceptions.

[Ham n Cheese]

^ this

Modding UIs itself are great, loved them in EQ, I like my stuff to have a minimalist look. But to have encounters now designed around allowable UI addons is retarded.

[Vinen]

Originally Posted by Dumar

i definitely agree with this.

modding the appearance is okay, but it absolutely shouldn't go beyond that--no exceptions.

6/03/2009

Let it be remembered as the day Dumar said something intelligent.

[Grave]

For me, I just want a few things:

Better UI and controls, and some actual effort put into the PC side of it. Playing FFXI with the keyboard was the most awkward thing ever until you got used to it, which didn't take me long but was a very large factor in making some of my friends not give it enough of a shot. PC version needs full WoW-style mouse control and WASD movement. I didn't care so much that the UI was ugly, but it was slow and annoying to use as well, even on the console.

Better crafting. While I like the idea of the crystals being used, and especially the fact that they become a standard that all levels of players can get to make money, the crafting was just boring and time-consuming. UI limitations had a lot to do with the design of the crafting though, I believe.

XP from quests. Hardly even worth mentioning since its 99% guaranteed that the game will be quest-based. As Flight said before FFXI was sort of S-E's EQ, and this will be their WoW. The quests in FFXI were actually fairly decent, but it bugged me that I was only doing them for Fame and not XP.

Honestly not sure how they'll handle questing though if it does become the main source of XP. As I've often argued when discussing the job system, it becomes much more difficult to do in a game where you aren't just endlessly grinding mobs. You basically have to let the player complete the same quests for each job, or have enough quests in the world that they can level each job on them (impossible). I guess the former is the solution they'll go with, but it might seem strange unless they are written to be like dailies, where it's an ongoing effort that needs their assistance multiple times. One cool example of this would be those monster hunting missions in FF12 where you got the target from the bulletin board and then went to hunt it. I could see that as being something that would be decently fun each day, especially if there were various rewards you earned for doing it so often.

I'm interested to see the solution, whatever it is.

[Grave]

Quoting this from a couple of pages back.

Originally Posted by HailToTheChimp

Im positive that the battle on the boat, during the storm, in the trailer is an in game cinematic. The character textures arent as glorious in that scene as the rest of the trailer -- the exact same thing goes for the environment textures. The mast of the ship also looks poorly rendered in terms of regular CG animation -- therefore the conclusion is that it has to be in game. The graphics don't match up with that scene and the rest of the trailer.

I watched the trailer again and paused it during some of these scenes, and I've decided you're absolutely right. That is in-game.

Looks like its running on the Unreal 3 engine too. If you look closely at the jelly-fish things they have that tell-tale glossiness that so many games have this gen that are running on Unreal.

[Dumar]

i would rather have quests than grind. but i'd rather grind than do dailies. dailies were the 2nd worst idea in wow next to arenas.

oh vinen, you must've been gone for many a day.

[Draegan]

Originally Posted by nu_11

Can we stop equating hours grinding to FFXI.

Thanks.

(See what I did there?)

So there wasn't a steep leveling curve with mostly mob grinding to level?

[Grave]

Originally Posted by Dumar

i would rather have quests than grind. but i'd rather grind than do dailies. dailies were the 2nd worst idea in wow next to arenas.

oh vinen, you must've been gone for many a day.

Well, while the monster hunting example would be like a WoW daily quest, at least it wouldn't be the EXACT same task each time. You might get a completely random monster each time, and as you advanced you could unlock rarer monsters and cooler rewards. Almost like its own mini-game. When it's like that, a daily quest is not so bad.

As for the other quests, all I meant was that the story was set up like a daily, not that you actually had to do it each day. This just means its something that makes sense to do multiple times.

To better explain that, one simple quest might be to stop an invasion of orcs that are approaching the city walls. You go through it on your Warrior and complete it, all fine and good. Then when you come back on your Paladin, its simply implied that the orcs are attacking again. There could even be a little character flag that lets the game know you've done it before, so the NPC suggests that they need your help "again". This doesn't break anything because it makes plenty of sense.

The issue is that it might prevent you from doing more interesting quests. You obviously cant do a quest where you kill some notable NPC on your warrior and then again on your paladin, unless you just don't care about the lore at all.

They could still have their "Missions" from FFXI that had the real meat of the story, and I'd be fine with that, but I think I'd want some interesting quests to do while leveling too.