An Important Announcement for FINAL FANTASY XIV Fans

[Lucavi]

XIV is supposed to be next-gen. I'd have expected "some" of that. Something out of the leves other than:

A) Read this and accept that.
B) Walk here.
C) Kill this.
D) Collect reward.

Where's the search and rescue leves? The defend this NPC leves? The CS leves where you run into a burning village and follow the NPC town guard or NPC adventurers and uncover some huge plot or something.

I mean, seriously. I hate bringing up the "2010", but is what we have here really what constitutes "immersion" simply because you can fight enemies with friends and craft items for and receive items from friends? You can do that in just about any game with swords and shields. I just expected better, that's all.

[Hyan]

XIV is supposed to be next-gen. I'd have expected "some" of that. Something out of the leves other than.

Every game is supposed to be. Hardly any game is.

[Lucavi]

Hardly any game is.. is... this, however.

I wasn't expecting things like this 6 months ago. I hoped not, for sure.

http://jin115.com/archives/51736680.html

[Elrina]

Lucavi pretty much hit the nail on the head as far as immersion, I've got to say, and the fact that it's obviously lacking.

Immersion from playing with other people is fine and well, but it would be even better if the world actually lived outside of your group of friends as well. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

[Hyan]

Seems to be.

[Lucavi]

Not really, Hyan, considering other MMOs nail it. Now if only they had the pretty graphics and delicious weapon models like XIV.

[solracht]

Hardly any game is.. is... this, however.

I wasn't expecting things like this 6 months ago. I hoped not, for sure.

http://jin115.com/archives/51736680.html

Link to the actual poll: http://pixelapocalypse.com/pixel-apo...rd-award-2010/

Funnier than the picture.

[Hyan]

FFXIII is on there? Fucking seriously?

If they wanted to hide the troll factor, should have removed that game.

[Lucavi]

XIII isn't a bad game, but not anything like what they hyped it up to be. I'd say it deserves to be on the list. Gran Turismo as well, despite myself enjoying many a part of it.

All of those games were hyped to shit, and all of them failed to deliver on one or more aspects more than other games. XIII absolutely deserves to be on the list, despite being solid at the end. I remember everyone being excited about the combat system when seeing the trailer of Lightning jumping on all the walls and twirling around everywhere. Imagine our consternation when we saw it was just, in fact, a CS (back then you couldn't really tell which was which when everything released was a trailer and not in-game) and the main combat was the same stuff we've been seeing since 12.

[sruon]

GT5, MoH and Black Ops are missing on that list.

[Hyan]

Maybe you have a different view of what a "turd" is, then, as I wouldn't consider a good, yet overhyped game a "turd" in any way. A disappointment of the year, sure.

Not exactly surprised you would defend this poll. I bet there's a link to sankakucomplex somewhere in there. Certainly looks like the poll was meant for one company and one company only. I can almost cut the bias with my knife!

[Lucavi]

GT5, MoH and Black Ops are missing on that list.

Agreed, Sruon. Some of the comments reflect that.

Hyan, the polished turd award IS FOR overhyped disappointments. That's exactly what the list is about, haha. GT5, despite being good, is a disappointment. XIII is a disappointment. XIV is a disappointment.

We're off-topic, though.

[Manako]

I believe LoTR also had this sort of immersion, I tried the trial but couldn't get into it because I found the player base to be fairly insular when I joined, that I might as well have been playing a 1 player game. Honestly I think single-player games do a much better job at feeling immersive, but I suppose if that is what you look for in your MMOs then FF doesn't really feature that. For me I do want the game to be designed in a way that promotes player interaction, and I think that the intended design of FFXIV tried to highlight that, while the implementation is lacking. Its too early to say the direction FFXIV would take for player involvment, but that has already been hinted at with the hamlet battles. In FFXI you could consider conquest, beseiged and campaign to be elements of player imersion within the world, especially later in campaign it was very clear to see how your involvment changed the environmental state of the game. These cases are very closed systems, your nation has enough influence, X happens; which means there is little to no unintended behavior.

The type of imersion you are drawn to is difficult to implement if it isn't considered a large focus of the game. The main issue is how do you address the multiple points of view, and allow for replayablity? If you are looking specifically at unsupervised AI, such as with wolves bandits etc then the issue becomes how do you test to insure that these are not working in unintended ways? Oblivion and Red Dead Redemption are both full of fun anecdotes of AI gone Awry. FFXIV does have the groundwork for running a bunch of instanced areas, if they ever decide to go in that direction is anyone's guess.

[SayomiSassaki]

WoW has pretty much everything he mentions on his post, including cutscenes now. I don't know when you tried that game, but most of it has been there since the start too.

I played WoW maybe 6 month and it was last year, but I was bored to do everything alone and everyone I knew IRL stop playing so. I remember that you could swim, see fish but only if your in the water meaning that if you cant swim you cant see them, dont remember being able to drink it, you could walk in it but it's normal since you could swim in it. After that I dont remember being able to "climb" on a rock, I remember that you could jump on small one, and you couldnt strumble against it. I never saw a battle between an humanoid and an animal who are both my enemy. I never saw an animation that you interract with an object like pusing a rock, maybe I didnt do enough quest or its the cutscenes you're talking about... So in conclusion a lot of them can be resume as being able to swim and jump... I can understand that its nice to swim and jump but in the same time if WoW didn't have those it wouldnt change a thing exept for exploring with no reason or some little quest who was in the water, and I agree that I liked to fly has a Druid

~~~~

For GT5, I was disapointed when I saw it. I dont play it but my BF do and I though there would be more change then that... And the effect of accident isnt like I assume it would be since they always said "We never implanted accident effect but when we will it would be the best effect ever", you could do smoker now but well you need to stop and try to do them, it's not like you would see that in the race lol but they are suppose to do a lot of patch for it so...

And I was also disapointed by FFXIII I think I only play like 5h and my BF maybe 10h

[Lazytowner]

Agreed, Sruon. Some of the comments reflect that.

Hyan, the polished turd award IS FOR overhyped disappointments. That's exactly what the list is about, haha. GT5, despite being good, is a disappointment. XIII is a disappointment. XIV is a disappointment.

We're off-topic, though.

Well for people with a troubling lack of taste Final Fantasy XIV is a decent game. If some of us think this MMO is an improvement or even at the standards of common immersion, then they might want to try logging off of their grinding simulator for a bit and play something other than an MMO.

Hint: Single player games with great immersion have much more than collect X and kill Y.

Don't give me any of that mmo limitations bullshit either -- its 2010, it can and will be done.

.....but apparently not yet in Japan.

[The Q]

Speaking of immersion, one thing I sorely miss from XI that I've yet to find in this game are any sorts of points of interest or landmarks out in the world. In XI every zone had different things here and there as well as an overall feel that really gave each zone personality. Every zone I went to I can think back on and remember many different things that were interesting in that zone. In XIV I can't name anything. The zones outside of Ul'Dah and LL are big open landscapes but dull and monotonous. No landmarks, few if any points of interest. The area surrounding Grid, while a series of tubes, has some atmosphere to it but that might be a personal bias since I like forest type zones.

The towns themselves don't even feel like towns. In XI I could enter peoples' homes, explore side streets, do favors for people and learn more about their lives and that of the city. In XIV I'm shuffled down strict paths to and past specific locations: shops and guilds. There are people on the street but talking to them is pointless. They have a short quip and nothing more to add to the world. Most shops are just stands by the sides of these paths whose wears I have no interest in checking because their offerings are so poor. These cities look HUGE from the outside, but once inside it is revealed that most of what was seen is off limits.

It's really disheartening.

[Elcura]

its 2010

For people having trouble remembering what year it is.

[Hyan]

Don't give me any of that mmo limitations bullshit either -- its 2010, it can and will be done.

More like budget limitations.. but why would we care about that, right? We live in the world of unlimited budgets, indeed.

Everything can and will be done, as long as we ignore the irrelevant factors.

[Souljacker]

I remember everyone being excited about the combat system when seeing the trailer of Lightning jumping on all the walls and twirling around everywhere. Imagine our consternation when we saw it was just, in fact, a CS (back then you couldn't really tell which was which when everything released was a trailer and not in-game) and the main combat was the same stuff we've been seeing since 12.

Well, some of us had the same expectations of this game as well. I was at least expecting good voice acting throughout the game since games from 5 years ago have it and this is supposed to be next-gen.

I agree with the others in here who argue that the game isn't at all immersive. I got over the "read this text to find out what to do next" style of RPG the second I sat down with Elder Scrolls IV. Every NPC actually speaking to me changed my entire outlook on what an immersive gaming experience is - and I was expecting that level of quality from Square Enix with this game. It's not like they don't have the tools to make it happen. Instead, the entire thing feels like a crippled XI with an updated graphics engine and extremely lazy design.

[Alkar]

All FF games are overhyped and it's the fanbase that's in the wrong really. I see people setting extremely high expectations every single time a FF game is announced and then get extremely disappointed as a result. FFXIII is no different.
FFXIV is a completely different thing but I think we should go past this and focus on the future and how they can fix this. We all know the game was rushed and even SE acknowledged it. Time to move on and bring useful suggestions instead of the same old bashing.