FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn Opening Movie Now Live! (01/07/2013)

[Lucavi]

We are in dire need of new information

Naw. Don't rush SE; they're absolutely without flaw when it comes to their online FF series, so this pace is just fine. In fact, they should do it like XI and release even LESS information, at an even slower pace! I mean, we already have a timeline as to when beta starts: what else could you possibly want?

@Cichy: I don't want to in the slightest. I actually feel that 2.0. is a pretty good product so far.

[Gokulo]

Sadly I think info might be a little dry before beta comes ;<

[Cichy]

We will probably only get few blog entries

[Rakisho]

Has there been any info about strafing and animation lock?

[Lucavi]

Nothing officially released. NDA is still up, so that's a thing too.

[Yoli]

People clinging to FFXI are the ones that invested too much time into the game and do not want to let it go to "waste" by quitting, or stick around because of the group of people they play with.

I prefer a lot of the things XI did to other games, but I'm not still playing it and worried about my time being wasted. I've not played it for several years now (I quite a touch before they raised the level cap). ... For the second part of that, I don't see how sticking around to play with your friends is bad?

Hey I can bet those people are the ones that pretty much only played FFXI as their MMORPG, and when they tried WoW (or any other MMORPG) they "quit at 20 (or lower) because the game sucked!".

I pretty much played FFXI as my MMO, played wow to the cap on two or three jobs, did a bit of Ulduar and ICC, and ended up quitting because I didn't enjoy the leveling system, the raiding system, the animation style, the world itself, or the majority of people I bumped into. While not relevant to gameplay, I had a particular dislike of everyone being on random huge flaming mounts that clipped everyone else on screen. I came back again for cata/mop briefly and enjoyed leveling a bit more with a dungeon-finder system that was used, and let you sort of level up with other people. I still prefer XI's parties on a single server that stayed put for hours, rather than requing after a quick run through "instance x". The three difficulties for raids seem reasonable and well done, although there's something about having constant raids as the focus of endgame that I don't like (in any game).

I didn't play WoW as much as many people, but I feel I've certainly tossed enough time at it to understand how it's done and compares to XI or XIV. Wow does a lot of stuff well, and if people are into the world/animation style/collecting a ton of random mounts then they'll enjoy it a lot more than I did. But I still don't see how my thoughts on what I don't like in that game about it are misinformed.

[Rakisho]

I did not imply playing because of friends was bad, I'm saying the game was bad. Don't assume points were made.

Also you're obviously a casual player. FFXI did a "better" job keeping casuals with absolutely 0 interest in endgame occupied in the sense that most everything in that game took a long time to do.

[Hatedregret]

casual and long time to do anything don't go together mate.

[Rakisho]

casual and long time to do anything don't go together mate.

Yes it does. As long as that time is not spent in 1 sitting. Try again.

[Yoli]

Also you're obviously a casual player. FFXI did a "better" job keeping casuals with absolutely 0 interest in endgame occupied

Really? Back when I played XI I did sky/sea/ground/einherjar/limbus/kings/various dragons. I ended up with ace's helm/ares/homam to choose from as desired on my drg/whm (which I started as a joke), and pretty much HQ everything for my whm, which wasn't a joke. My server was far from the best, but I was in a bunch of world firsts on it at least. I invested far too much time in that game for my own good.

If I played 14 I'd be a casual player. But since this discussion is in the context of my XI experiences how, exactly, was I a casual player there? Does the fact that I enjoyed the story, it's presentation, and the world it was set in make me casual? Fine by me if so, but then who cares - every game should aim to have a good story, presentation, and world. (And, by the way, despite being quite occupied with the things it had to do at endgame I'm also a big fan of those other things that kept casual players having fun. Just because something is fun for casual players doesn't mean it takes away from the game... something fun for them is often fun for people much more invested as well.)

[Rakisho]

Really? Back when I played XI I did sky/sea/ground/einherjar/limbus/kings/various dragons. I ended up with ace's helm/ares/homam to choose from as desired on my drg/whm (which I started as a joke), and pretty much HQ everything for my whm, which wasn't a joke. My server was far from the best, but I was in a bunch of world firsts on it at least. I invested far too much time in that game for my own good.

If I played 14 I'd be a casual player. But since this discussion is in the context of my XI experiences how, exactly, was I a casual player there? Does the fact that I enjoyed the story, it's presentation, and the world it was set in make me casual? Fine by me if so, but then who cares - every game should aim to have a good story, presentation, and world. (And, by the way, despite being quite occupied with the things it had to do at endgame I'm also a big fan of those other things that kept casual players having fun.)

It was more about your WoW experiences. I always disliked calling FFXI players hardcore or whatever. Nowdays the term hardcore often revolves around that a player does somewhat difficult things quicker than most other people. Of the more popular MMORPGs, the hardcore players are those that spends many hours the first few days, clears the content quick, and if we calculate that into hours spent, they often spend only 1/50th of the time the casuals/lesser players take to clear the same content. You have obviously spent a lot of time in FFXI, and I am not totally sure how to label that. You have not done anything of significance difficulty wise, but you also played more than classic casuals.

[Grey Jorildyn]

XI players tend to forget the entire game only had one difficulty setting. The only way then to determine what "hardcore" was in that game was to clear content faster.

[Cichy]

Only way to increase difficulty was to do given even with less people

[Pikarya]

Tank naked. Only pussies use gear.

[Grey Jorildyn]

Only way to increase difficulty was to do given even with less people

True. But the real purpose of this was rarely to increase difficulty and rather to increase profits per player.

[Alkar]

True. But the real purpose of this was rarely to increase difficulty and rather to increase profits per player.

This was the one and only reason.

[Lucavi]

That's how EQ did it, so that's how SE was going to do it.

[Yoli]

True. But the real purpose of this was rarely to increase difficulty and rather to increase profits per player.

That's true, if you also extend "profits" beyond just sell/splitting to include getting all your friends set up as quickly as possible. One of the shell's I was in basically existed to make money low manning and selling herald's gaiters for awhile (and we'd low man other stuff too, but those shoes struck me as the easiest to sell off at stupidly inflated prices).

Just because that was the purpose of it didn't take away from the fun of it though. I had a great time low manning everything I got to, from random entirely unprofitable gods in sky to tiamat to stuff in al taieu to hydra to... whatever. It wasn't strictly harder, but everyone had to not make mistakes, which made it quite fun. It was also fun to have less tanks/healers/damage dealers around, everyone got to feel more special doing their random thing. And there was less competition in the shell between people for gear, so everyone got set up fairly quickly. I got lucky being in small and good shells for ~90% of my time or so. Beyond just getting money/gear, I probably would have found the game much less enjoyable if I'd been in a larger LS.

And just as an aside, a lot of people had fun soloing stuff to, on rdm or nin or thf or .... whatever. On drg/whm for me. Some stuff was soloed for money, but a lot of people had fun soloing random things just because they could/to see if they could. It's nice to have a lot of things you can play with that way.

I think this sort of parallels other games. The fight ends up harder because of either a harder mode or because you simply bring less people, and those who participate get better rewards (either in terms of more likely drops/person and more gil/person, or better gear/person). Would people in wow really continue to frequently run hard modes on full player settings after the first world clear if the rewards were the same as in a pick up instance? There's probably no way to know, but I suspect that many people would not.

That's how EQ did it, so that's how SE was going to do it.

I don't understand this, beyond the obvious jab at people pretending SE didn't steal ideas from EQ (who here's actually pretending that, though?)

WoW has a good system for WoW. If you're going to have tiers of gear that are constantly replacing themselves, and are going to "require" tiers of gear to do certain events, then having different tiers of difficulty that all reward different tiers of gear seems quite reasonable to me. If you want to set up a game that way, that seems like a good way to dole out rewards.

If you want to set up a game the way SE did though, where gear is hard to get (in terms of drop rates) but infrequently altogether replaced by a clearly better alternative, then low manning stuff for more profits/faster gear at the expense of making your fight harder seems like a good way to dole out rewards. I guess that was the case in EQ too? But what's the problem? Both systems reward people increasingly for harder fights, they both seem to work within their games to me.

Nowdays the term hardcore often revolves around that a player does somewhat difficult things quicker than most other people.

Ok, I see a point there. If the definition of hardcore is more or less that, and people want it to be that (which, it seems, most do), then WoW's structure of tiers and New Content, Race, Stop, Replace all Gear, New Content, Race, Stop, Replace all Gear, etc, etc is a sound structure that makes a ton of sense, since it lets everyone get in on fresh starts to "win" repeatedly, after a point where everyone (who wanted to) had ample time to clear the old content and get to equal footing for the new race. I find frequently having all of my gear cyclically outdated to be frustrating, but I'll accept that I'm in the minority here based on WoW's success compared to early-mid FFXI and its succession of parallel gear upgrades and minute stat increases.

[Churchill]

I'm glad that Yoshi thinks XI is a shit game and has generally ignored its fanboys other than lip service.

[Dakin]

I'm glad that Yoshi thinks XI is a shit game and has generally ignored its fanboys other than lip service.

True. Story.