Comments from the Devs

[Patriarch]

Everytime I try to post of the forums, I go to log in and get the:

"You are forced to be logged off. Please be logged in again".

I am in the beta now, i don't know why I can't post. I just want to bump my old thread lol

[Lucavi]

What thread was that? If its good, someone can bump it for you?

It wasn't that "we need to bring back HNM drama and botting!" thread, was it?

[Elcura]

Early levels of ARR are repetitive but (and this is only a theory) I think it's that way to drill the job role and how to play into the player. When I first looked at my level 50 MNK skills I didn't what the fuck to do, all I remembered was the repetition I had from the week before playing PGL. Because you've done combo x so many times, used WS or ability x/y in this situation so many times, eventually it becomes instinctual so later on when more stuff gets added and more options open up, you can deal with it because you have your established routines that you know work.

Using MNK again, they teach you early on that Bootshine > True Strike > Snap Punch is your bread and butter combo. But then they add Twin Snakes so you start alternating between Twin Snakes and True Strike, the difference being that Twin Snakes gives a damage boost to everything else so naturally buffing your attack with it before doing True Strike means you do better damage. This pretty much continues, gradually adding more WS and abilities at a reasonable (I guess, feels slow to me) pace for newbies. The point is, by level 50 everyone should have a solid understanding of what their job can do and how, most experienced players can figure it out around 30 so I think it's kind of a problem for them.

Most MMOs employ this kind of repetition, just effective in learning how to do your job without really knowing why or how. You do it just because. For me personally, I found the lower levels utterly PAINFUL to play compared to higher levels just because of how much more interesting combat gets, even against simple/weak enemies.

PLD tanking in 1.0 was definitely interesting, it just lacked a sense of control for the most part. I think that was my problem with the game overall, I never really felt like I was much in control. You moved to do something, you pressed a button and suddenly you turned into a lead anchor.

Movement felt heavy, attacks were often inaccurate and for the most part I was waiting to do the same combos overall but with a longer gap between them. Between needing to move around a lot to attack and then stopping suddenly when you do attack (then needing to attack again) the game just felt horrible. The repetition in 1.0 wasn't cleverly disguised for anything other than PLD or WHM, the main difference in all FF MMOs being the battle pace. 11 was slowest, 1.0 was middle ground, 2.0 is fastest. All jobs had their rotations, combo 1 > combo 2 > combo 3 > repeat. You build TP slowly and use abilities to better enhance the damage of a certain attack or combo, but for the most part you stick to the rotation.

It's a matter of preference really, but 1.0 never had the spine to support the system that was later introduced. The battle pacing was just simply...off. Moments of action (not even really intense, since you couldn't react you just had to watch for a while) followed by lulls of inactivity, frustration at waiting due to mistakes outside of your control. 2.0 could have removed a lot of this, but people simply don't realise how limiting a system that relies on positioning of enemies to actually attack coupled with movement for combat. The one thing that made the 1.0 combo system interesting is the one thing that made it horribly frustrating to use. I dunno, I look at 1.0's combat system and I'm just confused. How do you design enemies and events with such a contradictory, sloppy and slapped together system? Darnus I think was the best but I would be lying if I said that wasn't their limit for 1.0.

Not saying that 2.0 system is the right way to go (though I do think simple and fast is the best method overall for new and old players) from 1.0, but the 1.0 system -- from start to finish -- was doomed for failure. There was just nothing really logical about it. The pacing might have been ideal for you, but the battle system itself was still a broken mess, even conceptually you can see it was thrown together. I think Yoshi even stated that?

[Patriarch]

What thread was that? If its good, someone can bump it for you?

It wasn't that "we need to bring back HNM drama and botting!" thread, was it?

Nah it was just a thread a friend posted a few days ago. I'll just need to reach out to support I guess, don't know why i can't log in all of a sudden. beta works fine for me

And hey now! Don't be that guy, that thread didn't want drama and botting. imo the OP paints a pretty nice picture, and in total it was just a collaboration of suggestions.

/e didn't notice the link was still in my sig lol

[Jamison]

Was this posted yet?



Wish more people would stop saying Levee instead of Leve.

So yeah, I was fucking up a lot of pronunciations. Ugh. It's never been my strong suit to begin with.

ROEGADYN: Rue-gee-din
ELEZEN: El-la-zen
DZEMAEL: ze-male (d is silent)
LEVEQUEST: Leave-quest

[Rionel]

I always thought Roegadyn was Row-gah-din and Elezen was El-ah-zin...

Final Fantasy always manages to make words sound completely different from what I actually read. I used to read Leviathan as lee-vee-ah-thin rather than le-vai-ah-thin. Ul-tee-ma instead of ul-te-ma, I-frit instead of E-frit

But anyways! >~>

I mostly fooled around on my legacy dude and did the story missions and a lot of exploration. There are definitely a lot of places of interest I'd love to know more about. So many visually phenomenal places... it saddens me that I don't have the proper computer to really give it justice at max settings. Maybe someday!

[Niiro]

Not saying that 2.0 system is the right way to go (though I do think simple and fast is the best method overall for new and old players) from 1.0, but the 1.0 system -- from start to finish -- was doomed for failure. There was just nothing really logical about it. The pacing might have been ideal for you, but the battle system itself was still a broken mess, even conceptually you can see it was thrown together. I think Yoshi even stated that?

My issue is almost entirely about the pacing, not so much the overall design. Stuff like the extremely long animation lock and required directional attacks; things like that were definitely poorly conceived and implemented along with the sluggish interface as a whole.

The best way I can describe my distaste for the simple and fast style is basically feeling like instead of weapon skills you're just perpetually repeating a manual input auto-attack. Watching someone fight in ARR you'd be surprised to find there even was an auto attack, it's practically just a DoT that gets applied when your weapon is drawn. It's drowned out among the frenzy of skills that don't feel special or significant, I spent 90% of my time in phase 3 on MRD and I couldn't tell you what any of the animations look like because it all just melted together in a frenzy of button mashing and particle effects, it didn't help that I was staring at the hotbar watching the GCD so often.

I'll probably wind up making macros with /waits for all of the primary combos, if anything it'll clean up the cross bar quite a bit and I won't wear out my controller in a week. I don't find it fun to repeat the same cycle with such rote frequency and so little gratification in terms of seeing or appreciating the effects of your actions in combat. To go back to my previous example, when you used SW on PLD you saw it, you heard it, it had a solid and easily identifiable animation and sound effect that everyone could identify and know what it meant. I can't say the same thing for skills in XIV because they lack that "weight", you're using skills so often it's just another flash and number amidst the spam. No one in your party is likely to notice unless they read the text next to your name and they don't care anyway because you just used that skill 7 seconds ago.

How good the mechanics are is fairly secondary to the dislike I have with the pacing (the combat in ARR may be very well balanced, I haven't seen or done enough to comment), but it just seems to me that with such a rapid pacing they're limited in the amount of depth they can add to the combat aside from "run out of the red circle".

[Lucavi]

So what's your sweet spot in terms of using weapon skills? How many, how fast? What kind of recast timers? What do you do when you aren't using weapon skills? How much should white damage contribute to a fight?

[solracht]

So what's your sweet spot in terms of using weapon skills? How many, how fast? What kind of recast timers? What do you do when you aren't using weapon skills? How much should white damage contribute to a fight?

The actual pace of combat in the latter parts of 1.0 in terms of how often you used skills was pretty close to ideal imo for some jobs.

Probably this? I don't really agree but I thought he was very clear in stating what he wants.

I'd look at the DPS classes before bringing up the "button mashing" words. By design, tanks seem to have shorter and simpler combos (so they can focus on defensive skills and avoiding damage? who knows).

[Niiro]

In my previous post I described 1.0 PLD as being as close to ideal as I could think. There was enough going on to require your attention but skills were spaced far enough apart and had a significant enough effect that you could appreciate them while being able to cohesively follow the "dialogue" of the fight.

It's hard to put a number on it precisely, since combat is ideally more than just numbers as far as the player experience goes. It all boils down to how the combat feels when you're actually playing.

It can't be so slow and that it's dull and lifeless (XI) but badgering you with arbitrary input demands every 3 seconds is just as lifeless.

[Elcura]

I totally get what you mean, but that is the essence of all things that go the action route, which is why I think any further than this would have been a mistake because even as it is the pacing is too fast for most FF fans. (Not specifically lumping you in with that statement Niiro, since your reasons are different.) In essence action games are all about small actions leading to big ones for satisfying results or a constant test of reflexes and situational awareness to beat out a foe (or both). To put it bluntly it's to whittle down an opponent then fuck them up when they're vulnerable or you're in a position to do something big.

Generally the big damage and satisfaction come from stocking up on energy/power/whatever and launching a massive attack that consumes those resources or just setting up for a string of potent actions in a short time-frame. It's a different type of combat satisfaction than what those are aren't so used to action games are accustomed to; performing well against an enemy and taking little to no damage while taking it down with a string of attacks potentially leading to something big (or just with something big). Most action games do this well and make you feel godly after winning, ARR doesn't have much of that currently, limit breaks were supposed to fill that gap but I don't think they do yet (or maybe they do at level 3?) While personally I thought it was awesome using a level 2 limit as a BLM, the mechanic is too infrequent to really prove to be a satisfying reward for building up to it.

Of course, the particles and shit are a separate issue and definitely need to be fixed, just because the clarity of animation is lost underneath all the WAZZATSPARKLES. If you look at the animations, they're really fucking good and unique. I think I said earlier that I expected similar animations for abilities of a similar nature, but they were different and fun to look at. Of course, I never noticed any of this in battle because as you said, you're focused on the GCD and when you aren't you're looking at positions and what the enemy is doing or what you're doing. 1.0 was good for seeing what your character was doing and making a big deal out of it (SPOTLIGHTS), but that's really because all you could do during that moment was stare at the screen and watch. I will say that 2.0 does a much better job at keeping you engaged and busy during combat, but does a bad job of making you feel like what you're doing is important or has much impact.

Could just be an issue of numbers and impact, increasing mob HP, making attacks look, sound and be bigger etc.

[Lucavi]

Ugh, the attacks are big enough. I wish there was an option to cut DOWN on the colors and lightshows at this point. Running toto-rak with just a Glad and Monk up front and when you have to zoom in because of tight walls its like seizure city. I'm still mad that so many nice looking animations get drowned out by all these colors and particle effects. Give an option to cut it just in half and I'd be happy.

I want to SEE my monk, not a bevvy of lights surrounding him whenever he raises his foot or fist.

[Jamison]

I'm curious, what would be the negative implications be of doubling both weaponskill damage and TP cost? (I'm well aware we haven't seen combat at 50 yet.)

[Cichy]

Ugh, the attacks are big enough. I wish there was an option to cut DOWN on the colors and lightshows at this point. Running toto-rak with just a Glad and Monk up front and when you have to zoom in because of tight walls its like seizure city. I'm still mad that so many nice looking animations get drowned out by all these colors and particle effects. Give an option to cut it just in half and I'd be happy.

I want to SEE my monk, not a bevvy of lights surrounding him whenever he raises his foot or fist.

I think they said in the notes they working on decreasing the flashy effects but yeah it's fucking ridiculous. I was in a FATE where like 30 ppl fought a boss and you couldnt see him at all in the flashes

[Lucavi]

TP becomes an issue around the 30's during longer fights, especially for classes that require a constantly flow of attacks to maintain their optimum damage, like Pug. Of the few times I became TP-starved in dungeons, I was able to keep my GL up, but I had to resort to a sub-optimal rotation to ensure that both of my damage buffs remained.

They'd have to increase TP generation to account for that, or completely re-redesign a few classes again, like pug, if they started doubling TP cost. WSes already do more than auto attack anyway; that's where the potency comes into play, and, more specifically, where potency bonuses come into play for positioning or combos.

If people simply want to slow down the number of "things you have to click", that's one thing, but trying to further distance auto attacks from WSes just leads to people auto attacking for 15 seconds before firing a single WS that does 10 times the damage again.

@Cichy: I know most of it is just that japan loves fucking bright colors (cue obligatory moving colorful "action" background for any anime ever), but you've built some beautiful-ass attacks in this game. Let me SEE them.

[Niiro]

I know most of it is just that japan loves fucking bright colors (cue obligatory moving colorful "action" background for any anime ever)

I think that's just to save money on animation (unrelated).

[Sigmakan]

I'm curious, what would be the negative implications be of doubling both weaponskill damage and TP cost? (I'm well aware we haven't seen combat at 50 yet.)

I think you'd get some really uneven fights. Would start out fast and fun, but once you are out of TP it'll get extremely slow.

[Charismatic]

I think that's just to save money on animation (unrelated).

It 100% is.
Now that more stuff is being computer generated and whatnot... you see a lot less of those backgrounds.
Anyway, I hardly mind the particle effects because I'm honestly never really looking at the enemy much (usually looking at the bars near the top). But that's just me.

Its sad how many hours I've sunk into the beta and I have absolutely no idea how bad the particle effects are... I guess its off to youtube to see if I can find some NDA breakers for examples.

[Mabubeezareel]

I think they said in the notes they working on decreasing the flashy effects but yeah it's fucking ridiculous. I was in a FATE where like 30 ppl fought a boss and you couldnt see him at all in the flashes

Um, you guys do know that there's an option to filter out the sparklies, right? They added it for phase 3, and it allows you to filter out None, Some, or All for both yourself, party members, and others.

[Elcura]

I don't think the animations are necessarily being covered up, since you could turn them off completely, it's just that there's no balance between what you see the characters do and what shows up around them. I think the animations are great so far and even though they lack the time needed to really smooth them out they are keyed amazingly well. The animations read nicely and look cool, you have no idea how many times I popped Fists of Wind/Earth/Fire just because of how badass even those animations are. But again, too many particles covering up animation not really through necessity, but I think it just...is.

Edit: Actually, were you talking about anime in general? If so you're totally right and you can disregard what I wrote.