Patch 2.5 Notes

[Ophannus]

Yeah I know they sacrificed it to speed up combat, but now it combat is so flashy and weightless because every 2-2.5 seconds your jumping and spinning and twirling around with flashy animations whereas in 1.0 it was slightly more realistic. Almost feels like FFXIV is a fighting game than an MMO because we're using abilities and skills so often in combinations and in sequences, it's like street fighter. And I noticed I catch myself starring at my hotkey bar to watch GCD's like 80% in combat(other 20% focused on my HP bar and for orange circles/cones around the mob for AOE that it's hard to stop and appreciate the 'look' of the battle and what other party members are doing.

Coming from FFXI where even while spamming WS in max haste gear, it was still slower combat than ARR whereas you still could watch and what other DPS were etc. Just an observation. Since I playb DRG, most of my time is dedicated to watching my hotbar to see which abilities are up because of the crazy 20+ complicated rotation we have. I sorely hope the new abilities added in 3.0 from 51-60 make rotations less complex and button mashy for all jobs. FFXI still required some skill and knowing when to use certain abilities but was far less button mashy as FFXIV, and I think that's one of the flaws people polint out about ARR is that it's following the WoW model of making a light weight, jumpy, button mashy, soulless MMO.

I also hope in the future new and different stats come out. I find myself not 'hyped' or 'impressed' when I get new armor because it just has the same 3 stats that a DPS cares about...STR/Acc/Crit/Skill speed/Determination. Other MMO have other stats on gear, gear that enhances a job/class's unique abilities. Gear just seems to follow a horizontal progression model within every ilvl and content is gated behind ilvl caps. It's just so odd to me there's little variation is gear choice. Again, in FFXI for example, you had stats like Haste, Store TP, Double Attack, Triple Attack, Critical Hit Rate, attack, accuracy, counter, Damage Taken-%, Weapon Skill Damage+%, then gear that enhanced special abilities like Jump Damage+X, etc. FFXIV all gear 1-135 has the same type of stats just in higher numbers and even shit like Skill Speed is in a weird 0.0001x modifier so even when you have hundreds of nearly thousands of skill speed, your actual GCD is only like 0.3seconds faster and striving for a new piece of gear with more skill speed will only serve to add a reduction of another 0.005 seconds...faster than human reaction time...yay!

[Elcura]

This is why most skills in XI used the same base then built off of it.

Also: Draw your weapon and look at the new idle stances they added. You know how much time that took for something you can't even see in actual battle? Time is a moot point when they waste time doing shit like that no problem.

Most WS in XI simply used the Auto Attack animations with some special effects. For the most part it wasn't until 60+ that you got actual unique WS and even then a lot of them were just AA with flashy effects. XIV has none of that, every animation is unique to the ability used.

And there is a huge difference to the amount of time needed to make IDLE animations and actual battle animations. One is definitely more difficult than the other, but the point you seem to have missed is that if you want to add more animations it helps if you don't have to spend time being creative for every single race and gender.

[Ophannus]

Well you can tell merit ws were motion captured, they're too fluid.

[Shenrien]

I wanna meet the guy that did Tachi: Shoha irl, and Blade: Shun.

[Taint]

I wanna meet the guy that did Tachi: Shoha irl, and Blade: Shun.

http://www.sevendaysvt.com/imager/b/...?cb=1418448114

[Prothescar]

Mithra Resolution/Stardiver

[Kaisha]

Didn't XI's models lack enough bones to allow for the level of articulation/nuance that you'd budget the use of mocap for? With how old the game is it'd have probably been cheaper to hand animate everything.

[Shenrien]

Animations by hand would probably be the way they handled most if not all of them. You can take a look at the work that community on neko-sentai did back at the height of the games popularity and some of the things that.. mushi or mooshi(name probably wrong I'm sorry) did, although most of his were mods to weapons and certain animations and even gave us glowing weapons before the gave developers even through of doing something like that.

[Edelweiss]

I find myself not 'hyped' or 'impressed' when I get new armor

Well, it only lasts six months. So you get to be disappointed twice a year.

[Destinye]

Didn't XI's models lack enough bones to allow for the level of articulation/nuance that you'd budget the use of mocap for? With how old the game is it'd have probably been cheaper to hand animate everything.

The newer ones were Mocapped, like XIV 1.x's were all Mocapped too. Both takes equal amounts of work since translating mocap data varies based on..well, the game it's going into. You can tell by the 'desync" in the animations/sounds that it had translated data versus the older ones which were more in sync which is a lot easier to do hand making it.

[Deader2818]

Im always amazed at the lengths people go to nit pick.

[Stef]

People are pissed off and are speaking without thinking. Anyone seriously talking about the team not caring about details is as foolish as they are emotional. This thread, and XIV threads in general, have become so much more hostile since the XI announcements. The salt spray reminds me of my fishing trips on a headboat in the bay.

Im always amazed at the lengths people go to nit pick.

This is so true. There is so much cynicism in the FFXIV community sometimes it blows my mind. Look, it's fine if you don't like something; you can suggest improvements or make requests to the devs like everyone else. But most criticism I see comes from a lack of understanding of game development in general and FFXIV's in particular.

There are so many myths that get perpetuated that can easily be refuted with a little bit of brain power put into it. No we don't get less unique endgame content than any other game. Crafting and gil are not pointless in the game. The devs do care about detail, they do care about PvP, etc etc. The PS3 is not a limiting factor in the way people think it is. It's not as easy to foresee or prevent exploits as some seem to think it is. And raiding does require skill.

Seriously, the amount of time some people spend complaining about the game you'd think they'd spend their time doing something they actually enjoy instead. Nobody likes a heckler when the rest of us are just trying to enjoy the show.

[Cutriss]

You wanna talk about PS3 limitations? Go look at Destiny.

[Kirbyprime]

Didn't destiny recently release an inventory update and directly pointed towards the PS3 / XBox versions being smaller with features removed because of console limitations.

[Niiro]

Didn't destiny recently release an inventory update and directly pointed towards the PS3 / XBox versions being smaller with features removed because of console limitations.

Hey, you heard the random guy 2 posts up, PS3 limitations are just an illusion!

Even when the devs say something isn't done because of PS3 limitations, they're just using it as an excuse to not do something!

Oh, those lovable scamps.

[Stef]

It's not so much that I don't believe the PS3 has limitations, I just don't think the game would be very different right now if they didn't support the PS3 at all.

There are 3 main reasons:

• They've been continuously adding things that the PS3 doesn't handle very well or can't handle at all. The PS3 is steadily being left in the dust and the devs don't seem too afraid of this. Examples are large-scale FATEs like Odin, S-rank hunts, 72-man frontlines, UI settings like displaying 100 inventory slots at once, focus target wasn't initially available on the PS3, etc. More is coming in the expansion too: 'massive' zones, flying mounts with 3x the current speed even though Yoshi-P has said there will be graphical pop-in on the PS3, DX11 for PC, mods in patch 3.1, etc. The PS3 is holding back the PS3 version, but the game itself is growing anyway.
  
• The dev team had 2.5 years to redesign the world for 2.0. 1.0 was heavily criticized for having a large world with virtually nothing of interest in it - not to mention all the copy/pasted terrain. Yoshi-P stated very clearly in this interview (question #9) that his priority with 2.0 was always to create an interesting world rather than a large one:

Yoshida: By removing the seamlessness, you can make each area be that much more dynamic and add that much more content to it, and so that's the exchange that we're offering the players. Yes we're going to be moving to this zone type of system, but each area is going to be that much more original and that much more dynamic.

This approach seems to be changing a little bit with the promise of 'massive' zones in Heavensward. We're getting bigger, more seamless zones despite the PS3 still being supported.

• Finally, Yoshi-P has said time and time again that the game was designed in such a way as to allow scaling for different consoles and PCs. From an interiew with Yoshi-P - http://blog.us.playstation.com/2014/...playstation-2/

PSB: FFXIV is one of the few MMOs to exist on PC and console simultaneously. Is it challenging to keep updates consistent across three platforms?

Yoshida: Actually, there aren’t that many challenges, because this is how the game was planned from the beginning. We have our graphics engine, which will work on low-end and high-end machines, so we don’t have to think “Okay, we can implement this but because we have to implement it on PS3 we won’t implement it here.” We don’t need to think about that because it’s been in our plan from the beginning to be able to make something that will work on all of these systems. Now, there are things like, the PS3 has less memory so not as many characters can be displayed on-screen at the same time, but we don’t let that control how we make each patch so we don’t think of it as a challenge.

Open-world games like Red Dead Redemption and Skyrim did fine on the PS3. Things like GTA V and Assassin's Creed are large-scale, detailed games with online components of varying complexity that are designed to work both on the current and previous generation of consoles. The PS3 obviously has limitations, but it's possible to build around that to make detailed games that work on multiple consoles and PC while sacrificing graphics and features on the past gen versions.

It all comes down to priorities and development time. Things take time to design and code - it's the reason why MMOs tend to take over 5 years to develop. Look at Wildstar that was in development for 7+ years and was still buggy and incomplete when it released. Was that also due to console limitations? The FFXIV team had to redesign the server infrastruture, the gameplay, the UI, the story, the battle system, etc etc in 2.5 years while maintaining and adding content to the 1.0 version. Not to mention the fact that they add a ton of content and QoL changes on a regular basis. Larger zones are coming. UI mods are coming. DX11 is coming. It'll just take them a bit longer.

In the end I think the largest limiting factors are development time and server technology. We already know that there is a limit to how much character data can be written to the servers. This is something they are actively working on improving. There are also a ton of changes we'll be seeing in the expansion given the fact that the devs have had more time to flesh things out. Ultimately, the game will grow and develop by continuously adding things that the PS3 can't handle very well until they reach a point where the PS3 version differs too much from the others, at which point they will drop it. The PS3 is holding back the PS3 version, not the game as a whole.

Yoshi-P has never explicitly said that the PS3 version is holding the game back. Even Hiroshi Minagawa, the UI lead, says they can implement different UI elements on PC and PS3 and that UI overload is a factor for low-end machines in general, not just the PS3. The devs always cite server data writing limitations and development time as limiting factors on what they can implement (they even sometimes say that they don't want to overwhelm players with information or clutter the UI, which is the reason Yoshi-P gave for not showing party member's TP even though it is saved in memory). Some UI elements existed in beta, like additional quest tracker features, that were dropped for design reasons rather than technical ones. Here's another interview where Yoshi-P says that if they eventually have to cut things out because of the PS3 they will drop its support:

According to Yoshida, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn’s first expansion pack will be available in its entirety for PlayStation 3, but as far as the later ones go, he is still uncertain.

The reason for this is because Square Enix feel that in order to compete against other products in the MMORPG market, they must continuously “renew” Final Fantasy XIV, and this could mean that they might eventually go over the capacities of the PlayStation 3.

Yoshida says if they end up having to “trim things out for the sake of the PS3,” he’ll have some big decisions to make.

Read more at http://www.siliconera.com/2014/02/21...zPIfEfOwCvM.99

[Sho]

This is so true. There is so much cynicism in the FFXIV community sometimes it blows my mind. Look, it's fine if you don't like something; you can suggest improvements or make requests to the devs like everyone else. But most criticism I see comes from a lack of understanding of game development in general and FFXIV's in particular.

There are so many myths that get perpetuated that can easily be refuted with a little bit of brain power put into it. No we don't get less unique endgame content than any other game. Crafting and gil are not pointless in the game. The devs do care about detail, they do care about PvP, etc etc. The PS3 is not a limiting factor in the way people think it is. It's not as easy to foresee or prevent exploits as some seem to think it is. And raiding does require skill.

Seriously, the amount of time some people spend complaining about the game you'd think they'd spend their time doing something they actually enjoy instead. Nobody likes a heckler when the rest of us are just trying to enjoy the show.

It's far worse on the Official Forums. People talk without thinking at all, it's a typical thing for MMOs. You'd think with all that Yoshi-P has pulled off so far and continuing to do so (with his most recent success being Gold Saucer) that people would be optimistic with future endeavors. Nah, it's better to complain about god damn everything then move on to the next complaint of the month when the problem gets fixed/changed.

If PS3 creates a limitation by way of creating new content, they'll drop it like a bad habit as soon as possible. Not sure why people think this is still Tanaka era of dev politics.

[Niiro]

It's far worse on the Official Forums. People talk without thinking at all, it's a typical thing for MMOs. You'd think with all that Yoshi-P has pulled off so far and continuing to do so (with his most recent success being Gold Saucer) that people would be optimistic with future endeavors.

See, it's comments like these that make it hard to tell if you're posting sarcastically.

[Stef]

See, it's comments like these that make it hard to tell if you're posting sarcastically.

The majority of your comments seem to be very negative towards the game and its players. I'm genuinely curious as to why you play the game if you find so much wrong with it. It's fine to dislike something or criticize it, but is it really worth it when you seem so committed to finding fault in what has and will be delivered? To each their own I guess, it's just a bit of a drag on people that legitimately want to enjoy discussing the game.

[Fhloston]

The majority of your comments seem to be very negative towards the game and its players. I'm genuinely curious as to why you play the game if you find so much wrong with it. It's fine to dislike something or criticize it, but is it really worth it when you seem so committed to finding fault in what has and will be delivered? To each their own I guess, it's just a bit of a drag on people that legitimately want to enjoy discussing the game.

Welcome to BG. They do this with everything here, basically.