Comments from the Devs

[Makwa]

I was eager to remake my roegadyn M, then I realized they fat-jump. :\
Now I'm torn between Manqo'te and Bufflander.
Although I might make a lala for the first time come retail, them fuckin' sideburns. And one of the laughs sounds sort of like Johnny Knoxville!

[Lucavi]

All sprints are inferior to Miqo'te M so yeah, stop talking. Ty. Uguu~

They're the Castanics of the game. Gotta respect the swagger. My dude's looking extremely brohan in P1.

[Coren]

I need a lalafel with a greatsword ... since popori slayer was so epic.

[Spider-Dan]

Manthra sprint doesn't look quite as awesome from the player perspective. Still, it is pretty boss.

[Reve]

My only complaint with the Male Miqo'te is that their idle stance looks a little too battle stance, like they are ready to grab their h2h weapon.

I also want a muscle slider for them too. I want to make my Male Miqo'te as slender, tiny, and bony as myself.

Final Fantasy XIV: Male Miqo'te Reborn

[Gokulo]

Yep, I also found their idle stance to be a little too... not idle

[Oreth]

Discuss / Argue / Insult for 5 pages... Go

[arus2001]

Would say there are a lot of things I can agree with on the vid, and also believe stronger user-generated content would help keep things fresh for everyone. I'm not sure Eve-scale grief-tastic wars are the answer specifically, but something like that can happen under the proper systems. Personally, my bigger gripe with the themepark genre at the moment is the unquestioned superiority of the raider game. I'm not sold on it entirely being WoW's fault, but rather the philosophy that the hardest content should be the only source of the best rewards. Yoshi also mentioning one dungeon's gear would be needed to work on the next kind of had me cringing a bit at the likelihood of XIV just repeating this blah that's usually best friendly to college kids or younger with limited RL obligations, and thus the ability to maintain raid schedules. So, on that end, there's also an ego problem that tends to get jimmies rustled if filthy casuals dare entertain the thought of being in the same league as the MMO pros by different methods. And that's not gonna go anywhere as long devs lack a backbone to upset an otherwise vocal minority with alternative progression paths of equal quality.

[Cutriss]

Absolutely meaningless I know.

Hello,

We have received new release date information related to your pre-ordered video game
in the order you placed on August 09, 2012 (Order# 11A2B). The release
date for the video game listed below has been changed by the publisher, and we want
to provide you with a new delivery estimate based on the new release date:

"Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn"
Estimated arrival date: January 07, 2014 - January 13, 2014

We will make every effort to get the delayed item(s) to you as soon as possible. If
there are other items in your order, they'll be shipped according to the delivery
estimates listed in the order details in Your Account (www.amazon.com/youraccount)
at no additional cost.

[Gokulo]

Why even post it then, idiots will just start spreading this stuff.

(also, when did I become Isladar, damn)

[Cutriss]

Duh. I wanted to be the first idiot.

[Enkidu]

Discuss / Argue / Insult for 5 pages... Go

Seems like his whole agenda is "hurr durr make more Eve's!" I've never really understood that though. Do people really love to play Eve or do they just love to read about what happens in Eve? Cause honestly I played the game for a few weeks and I expected thrilling space warfare and I got a tutorial in space mining. I think he, like many, is too focused on extremes. Eve is great, WoW is evil, therefore MOAR SANDBOX.

In reality I think a game that can encapsulate the best of both, somewhere in the middle of sandbox and themepark, is what I'd like to play.

[Eagleheart]

Seems like his whole agenda is "hurr durr make more Eve's!" I've never really understood that though. Do people really love to play Eve or do they just love to read about what happens in Eve? Cause honestly I played the game for a few weeks and I expected thrilling space warfare and I got a tutorial in space mining. I think he, like many, is too focused on extremes. Eve is great, WoW is evil, therefore MOAR SANDBOX.

In reality I think a game that can encapsulate the best of both, somewhere in the middle of sandbox and themepark, is what I'd like to play.

There is most certainly space for a game like that, but how exactly would it be executed?

(O.o) Never played EVE, but I get the distinct impression that this 'emergent gameplay' occurs because of PVP and not much else.

There's no overarching theme to it (o.O ) it's basically chaos. You cannot plan chaos, that's what makes it unpredictable.

Even the most open-ended of PVE claim-and-control systems still has to be rigorously planned, evented, scripted, and tested. You cannot simulate free thinking. o.- How is something like EVE's faction wars possible in a PVE environment?

Or is the commentator in that video merely speaking about PVP gaming, because, really now, they are two entirely different animals.


EDIT: Kinda wishing that PVP was open world in ARR at this point. I have a list of names from the official boards that I intend to hunt down whenever I have the opportunity in any PVP situation/area.

Would dearly love to drop a Dragonfire Dive on a few of these folks when least expected. -.-

[Lokus]

Sandbox won't really work too well with a PvE focused game, especially with FF. Need some form of competition to foster a sandbox environment and PvP is usually where that is found. Course, you can create a sandbox type of event in a PvE game (tournaments, hunts, speed kills, racing, etc.) but those usually don't take off cause the reward would have to be player funded more often than not. Maybe if they implement "Jagd" zones in XIV with some rewards or hidden treasures, alongside the rest of the PvE content, they mesh both current MMO models.

[Jamison]

I think he fell a little too much into "Theme Park = Game Type A" and "Sandbox = Game Type B" but what I read behind all that was that sandbox allowed for more variety. I think he'd rather 10 rather good MMO's exist, each excelling in a particular niche rather than making the assumption that the WoW way is the only way.

We've had some excellent single player gaming highlights over the past couple of years while the MMO market remains WoW, WoW-like and Eve. (Channeling his opinion here, not saying 100% that's mine). Bastion and Walking Dead have each broken new or creative ground in storytelling (while being two very different games). Mark of the Ninja may be the much needed revolution in stealth games. FTL introduced a lot of people into the rouge-likes category who otherwise wouldn't touch them with a 10-foot pole. I won't go on, but some single player games have -- with some risk involved of course -- broken pretty amazing new ground.

So that leaves the million dollar question: how would any company be willing to risk such a huge development budget on an MMO and not take the path of least resistance? I highly doubt that's possible, and the best chance there is is with the sandbox where the game can take off in unexpected directions. I'm speculating here, but maybe something like Destiny -- having a "new" type of online gameplay (Dark Souls says hi!) -- could start to allow for creativity and innovation without being a "traditional" MMO.

[Lordender]

Sandbox vs theme park argument is no different than the bickerfest between casual vs hardcore players. I highly disagree that Blizzard ruined anything with WoW, Blizzard took what already existed, improved upon it and slapped their spin on it in typical Blizzard fashion. What we have now is a genre that costs several hundreds of millions to make, high failure rates that lead to companies playing safe instead of taking chances to bring the MMO genre to the next level, post WoW.

Post WoW, we see the same MMO being rehashed over and over with a few twists but generally its the same game we've already played for years. A lot of these post WoW MMO's fail because the playerbase ends up either running dungeons, raids, dailies or falls into the pvp crowd, there isn't much outside of that. The model of raiding is old, most MMO companies completely fuck up PVP by not separating it from PVE(PvE builds/talents getting nerfed due to certain ability being abused in PvP)

Nothing groundbreaking has been introduced in a long time, people will bring up GW2, that game didn't keep many playing for long, like I said before, I knew people who hit level cap and quit in droves 2-3 weeks after because of how boring it was.

I look at MMO's these days and I ask, outside of the typical things, what is the game going to bring? If the game is all about raiding, pvp, dungeon, dailies, it will have very little sustaining power in a post WoW market. Nostalgia is a big reason why people continue to play WoW, even in its much declined state which is expected for a soon to be nine year old game in November. Initial sales don't mean a damn thing to me(as a player) when it comes to MMO's, what does the climate look like once that free trial wears, what is the climate in that window of post free trial to first content update? That initial time period after the trial wears to first content update defines the entire MMO, it sets the tone, that is where all these post WoW MMO's have completely failed by offering more of the same which people have done for years now.

More of the same isn't going to help anyone, especially when you're asking for a monthly fee. Once you get established, they better start throwing some curve balls.

[Manako]

My first impression is that I am left wondering who this guy is, he seems very shortsighted and naive. He states that we shouldn't expect MMO's to be big, expensive things and that by making them so large it makes them a problem, while ignoring smaller MMO and MMO-like experiences. The whole thing comes off as a love-letter to Eve Online, especially when he states that "people aren't really as mean as they say."

He also seems to forget that there were MMO's that predated WoW that have the same gameplay as WoW, and lumps everquest and starwars galaxies in the post-wow failure category. Because its relevant to this site, he also doesn't mention FFXI, which predates WoW as well. I also don't understand how he can act like Emergent gameplay is some special rare unicorn, many games incorporate it into their games, to a lesser degree that Eve. Ultima online is still up and running, I'm sure other "sandboxy" ones are as well.

The icing on the cake is what can only be perceived to be the failure of the World of Darkness MMO in favor of CCP developing Dust 514, there were massive layoffs at the company a while back and the game has been delayed for an indefinite amount of time. This really illustrates that a big-budget game can't be developed at this point in time that would have such large risks associated with it. Sandbox games are inherently risky because they are significantly harder to balance because of the fact that they do not have strict/predefined growth systems, and require more assets/resources to handle being "open world." Its really a shame, because WoD universe really did appeal to me, but that's the game industry for you.

[Sephiroth]

Absolutely meaningless I know.

I love how they're calling it a delay when no release date has ever been announced.

But most likely that's an automated e-mail because someone changed the release date field in the database because the original date they had set was obviously not going to happen.

A 2014 release date is so unlikely I'm surprised they chose that, but I would like to think Yoshi-p would be willing to hold the game back that long if that's what it takes to get out a polished product unlike that shitstick SE pushed out 2 years too early in 2010. SE shouldn't even think about announcing a release date until the conclusion of beta phase 3.

But yeah, there's nothing good to discuss so I am indeed commenting on your meaningless post.

[jwang]

I would love to see someone come up with something else other than raiding, dungeons, dailies, PVP contents for an MMO. As far as I can see, the main drawing point of any MMO nowadays is the "theme" behind it. Some people like fantasy, some people like sci-fi, some people like Wu Xia, so on and so forth. Some themes have better IPs behind them, but the overall gist of any MMO is a WoW/Everquest/whatever older MMO reskin with a new theme. After the players are drawn in, it's all up to the community of the game to keep them there. Half the reason why I couldn't get into Cataclysm was because I felt really detached from the guild I was in, whereas I stayed in XIV because I made some really good friends there, even if the game was absolute crap.

[Grey Jorildyn]

I don't think it's "all up to the community" of a game to keep players playing. I feel one of the great disconnects that exists in the current mmo market is developers don't know who they want to target as their audience. It use to be that we tried to attract a certain type of player to play a game, and nowadays mmos are casting a wider net. I think it hurts them. Think of any MMO out there right now, I'll use SW:TOR as an example, and ask yourself if they know what their target audience is. Define that as "the player this game typically tries to draw". With TOR, it drew a certain type of player. SW fanboys aside (because that is a player property separate from casual-midcore-hardcore), the game's development cycle did not appeal to hardcore players. Those players blew through content at what Bioware probably thought was an alarming rate (noob mmo devs hehe...). Bioware or whoever decided at some point they were going to settle into a pattern of patches and development of content, and the player that play the game today have that same expectation and play at the rate at which the game churns out content or a little faster (as opposed to lightning-speed faster which Bioware could not handle). Now SW:TOR knows who their target audience is. They're happy with that for what it's worth.

My point is that is isn't on the community or the developers, but a bit of both. There is a pace the devs set for a game in terms of how fast something comes out and how well it is done within that time (QA assures this, supposedly). If the players don't settle into that groove, the game hemorrhages those players. Rightfully so, they should since the game and player clearly weren't appropriately matches. You see sometimes these days a development team put out a statement, or make a roadmap to inform players of the pace at which the game will be run. It is then up to the player to decide if that's good enough. If it isn't and the game struggles, the developers try to pick up the pace a little. If it's good, then it will keep the community happy. It really is a give-and-take.

That aside, it has been an uphill battle for developers to come up with anything outside of the established norm. This doesn't just effect the MMO genre, but many others. How many "different" shooter games are there really? Shit, we use to have "action-adventure" (think old Zelda games), "role-playing games" (think Final Fantasy series), and "platformers" (sup Mario), and now we have games like Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, and Uncharted which are quite nearly all three to varying degrees. Sometimes you can smash some ideas together, but for MMOs there is a real challenge to innovate right now. Unless someone makes fundamental changes to the overall format of the game, we're just gonna see the same stuff over and over again. Make a character, level up, do end game, get gear, get bored, quit, move onto the next one. With how fast the gaming markets moves today, is there any real surprise that it's hard to retain players? Our world is about immediate gratification so games get easier and easier. Communities are tougher to keep together and good players are harder to come by in a sea of ever-growing "gamers". Another topic for another day though I suppose.