Thread: Yoshida on 3.35 and Beyond - Translation of Interview Highlights    

I think the lack of gear for increasing abilities and actions just hurts the game's equipment system and sense of growth. I (here we go, I know...) liked how FFXI was designed around gear to increase abilities and weaponskills and that made pieces across different types of content desirable. In FFXIV, gear is all about vitality and <primary stat>. It would be cool if one MNK ws was heavily powered by DEX and you could switch in special MNK gear with DEX stats on it to increase damage. Heck, even a ring to increase 'Howling Fist" damage by 10% for example. I recognize this is not the direction Yoshi wants to go with FFXIV but it does solve some of the ilvl problem if some of the lower ilevel gear can still buff an ability to be better than a bland current ilevel piece of gear....

the reason i see this wont work is because theyve tried very hard to make sure the games mechanics suit the duty finder.. which pretty much reduces each class to 1 stat, being the ilevel. too must specialization in itemization pretty much breaks down such a system - and if you consider that the best gear for certain builds wont be at the forefront of ilvl, you'll end up with a lot of people who can properly utilize the DF.

the primary stat thing is a problem too.. we shouldnt even be allowed to pump the primary stat, since everyone gets it. give us points to customize our jobs accordingly.

I have not played WOW past 20 but could someone explain how raids work in that game? They have multiple ones and levels of difficulty right? What makes their rewards unique so that people would do several a week?

Originally Posted by Elcura

What?

I really need to know what you're defining this with because it's NOTHING like this. Different != lesser unless you're just being obtuse or difficult. You can repeat the same things over and over again but that doesn't change what we have or what we're getting for now.

And the way to "fix" these problems is just to inundate the game with features that have proven problems or issues. Like I said, lot of "this game just for me" going around.

There really isn't a less complex way of stating it? ffxiv 2.0 was essentially a lesser version than most modern day mmos released at the time. People gave them the benefit of doubt because it was newly released. The problem is that most of these items were addressed in just about every mmo years before 14's release.

This was most notable in ui designs. We still lack the option to even mail things between characters something games have been able to do for awhile now. Glamour should have been in the game at start. This was addressed in damn near every mmo by 2010. To top it off, The version we have now would be considered a lesser version compared to the options in their competition. There are plenty of things that we lacked that should have been in the game at start.

This isn't different. This is lesser. I'm still in the standing that 3.0 is still a lesser version than other mmos at one expansion in.

Originally Posted by Toth

I have not played WOW past 20 but could someone explain how raids work in that game? They have multiple ones and levels of difficulty right? What makes their rewards unique so that people would do several a week?

Allow me

There are 4 difficulties:
Looking For Raid - 25 members, lowest tier reward
Normal Flex - between 10 and 30 members are allowed, bosses/mechanics will scale to the amount of people in the raid
Hard Flex - between 10 and 30 members are allowed, bosses/mechanics will scale to the amount of people in the raid
Mythic - fixed 20 members, cutting edge

I guess the uniqueness here is that a raid is essentially one big ass dungeon with multiple bosses (6~12 depending on which), not a mini dungeon with a boss like FFXIV has. Hence, to practice/do the last boss for example, one has to clear everything again unlike FFXIV where you can just jump straight to it. Also, while you can save your progress, most groups would opt not to because of loot.
For Normal, Hard, Mythic, it's not uncommon for a lot of groups to spend a while clearing it. Even the first and second bosses can make the group struggle for a week (of raiding 2 nights a week for 3 hours). Except in LFR. It seems maybe in FFXIV that people clear shit regardless until they hit a roadblock (i.e. Savage Alex 3). And they hit the roadblock fast.



RE: Gear sets... it's in the game already, but utilised extremely poorly. 2 piece GC (Ul'dahn Soldier's Overcoat) set gives you an extra PLUS THREEE DETERMINATION for example!!! omg!!! lol

I wonder exactly how much of ARR was new code and not just hammering out the piece of garbage that was 1.0.

Yoshida said 2.0 was built from the ground up on a new engine including the 1.x content (as seen with stuff like Cutter's Cry), so the only legacy code if anything was data that doesn't necessarily prevent new features or standardized features since 2005 from being in the game.

People were just in the honeymoon phase with the game. It's not a bad MMO, but it's clear they're just "content" rather than doing more.

Originally Posted by Lyall

To my limited understanding, that's not a lot of time to put together instanced housing AND open world content AND meaningful endgame AND all of the bells and whistles people want because it was in another game.

TBH, we barely have any those things now. I mean, we just got the option to hide quests functional after... 2 years? Even the ability to hide quests is more convoluted than it should be compared to it's peers.

I'm not asking for bells and whistles just that, if a new player went from wow/swtor/rift/etc to ffxiv it shouldn't be missing essential items that the other games have had forever and those items are not so functionally different such that their easily transitioned into.

It's like they actively try to make a worst version of things that already exist for the sake of being different.

The easiest argument for this is the gearing system and weekly caps. Which, actively works against their armory system. Yes, you can play all jobs on one character. But your successive jobs are going to be weaker than your main, unless you use an alt and circumvent that entirely. At that point, why not just build in separate caps per job? I can't be the only one that cringes when JSE gear comes out as the new tome gear.

This is all just a lesser version of one character/one job, the job system in FFXI, and the soul system in Rift.

Just because it's different and you don't like it doesn't make it less than it's counter parts.

Different is taking something and innovating on it in a way that handles the same objective in a more efficient or viewing it in a new way. Different is great. FFX's sphere grid vs FFXII's square grid is different. FFIX's skill equip vs FFIII's GF skill equip is different. Lesser is taking something pre-established and either removing efficiencies, usability, adding unnecessary steps, or simply downgrading a product. Adding a third step to hide quests, 1.0 retainers, 2.0 retainer banking, 3.3 Auction board search functions.

Originally Posted by The Stig

I guess the uniqueness here is that a raid is essentially one big ass dungeon with multiple bosses (6~12 depending on which), not a mini dungeon with a boss like FFXIV has. Hence, to practice/do the last boss for example, one has to clear everything again unlike FFXIV where you can just jump straight to it. Also, while you can save your progress, most groups would opt not to because of loot.
For Normal, Hard, Mythic, it's not uncommon for a lot of groups to spend a while clearing it. Even the first and second bosses can make the group struggle for a week (of raiding 2 nights a week for 3 hours). Except in LFR. It seems maybe in FFXIV that people clear shit regardless until they hit a roadblock (i.e. Savage Alex 3). And they hit the roadblock fast.

I feel like you're mixing things up and leaving things out.

• You can't just jump straight to any boss in XIV's actual raid mode (Savage). It has to be cleared sequentially. You can only skip (which forfeits loot) if someone in the group has reached that boss, which you could do in WoW too when I raided.
• XIV's normal mode allows you to go into whatever floor you want, but that's not much different than WoW's LFR (XIV normal equivalent) as LFR mode sections the raid in separate, queueable parts.
• People don't "clear shit regardless" in XIV any more than they do in WoW. In my experience, plenty of groups struggle on the early fights in both games, and the raids get cleared relatively quickly by world first groups in both games. It's hard for me to compare due to the multiple difficulty settings in WoW and the way their PTR works for raids, though.

The main and most important difference for me is the scale: XIV tiers have 4 bosses (5 if you count the raid patch primal) while WoW tiers have 7-12 bosses, like you mentioned. In WoW this allows for a longer progression period, a much smoother difficulty curve, and way more boss variety and loot, which tends to make the raiding experience feel much, much better. Add the multiple difficulty settings on top of that, and it's a lot of content for a lot of different types of raiders (although personally past a certain point I stop seeing multiple difficulties as a good thing, screw progressing through the same boss multiple times).

Originally Posted by Toth

What makes their rewards unique so that people would do several a week?

In terms of rewards, I never found WoW items interesting except for trinkets, set bonuses, and some weapons.

However, a big difference is that raid rewards aren't handed out and invalidated as quickly as in this game, which makes raiding feel more rewarding: in WoW the ilevel reward from the casual content doesn't match the ilevel reward from the higher raid difficulties, lockouts are never removed from the raids, and raid mounts/vanity rewards see their droprates significantly lowered once the tier ends.

Originally Posted by The Stig

Allow me

There are 4 difficulties:
Looking For Raid - 25 members, lowest tier reward
Normal Flex - between 10 and 30 members are allowed, bosses/mechanics will scale to the amount of people in the raid
Hard Flex - between 10 and 30 members are allowed, bosses/mechanics will scale to the amount of people in the raid
Mythic - fixed 20 members, cutting edge

I guess the uniqueness here is that a raid is essentially one big ass dungeon with multiple bosses (6~12 depending on which), not a mini dungeon with a boss like FFXIV has. Hence, to practice/do the last boss for example, one has to clear everything again unlike FFXIV where you can just jump straight to it. Also, while you can save your progress, most groups would opt not to because of loot.
For Normal, Hard, Mythic, it's not uncommon for a lot of groups to spend a while clearing it. Even the first and second bosses can make the group struggle for a week (of raiding 2 nights a week for 3 hours). Except in LFR. It seems maybe in FFXIV that people clear shit regardless until they hit a roadblock (i.e. Savage Alex 3). And they hit the roadblock fast.



RE: Gear sets... it's in the game already, but utilised extremely poorly. 2 piece GC (Ul'dahn Soldier's Overcoat) set gives you an extra PLUS THREEE DETERMINATION for example!!! omg!!! lol

Thanks! I suppose SE figures that Alexander normal and Alexander savage constitute two difficulty modes, with appropriate gear. Yet, there are multiple raids in WOW per patch, no? I feel a variety of raids is really lacking in the game.

tbh FFXIV is surprisingly slow with some of the more obvious QoL type of adjustments, or just plain clunky with its implementation.. and this is after the lessons learnt from the horrible 1.0 UI experience. the quest log customization is a good example.. but really the market board search hits the nail on the head - why do we need to toggle the partial search on? who the fuck ONLY searches things starting with the whole first word of an item? it should be the only option.

I get the feeling a lot of the issues we see being raised are less actual problem with content but the user experience. XIV is so incredibly stubborn that it puts XI to shame.
Duty Finder to me is the worst offender - for starters it's basically the most anti-social mechanism in the game. and once upon a time you couldn't even queue on DF with a friend or two for roulettes.

repetitive content is commonplace in MMOs, but its a lot more bearable when players can do it their own way. the unidentified stage of the Anima quest is so much more well received than pretty much every other stage of relic/anima because of how it gives players the freedom to choose which content they wish to repeat - and becomes that much more bearable. players don't feel as forced to do the repeat old-content treadmill, and see less fault in it

what irks me the most now is that the game seems to like to force people to play their way - even for old content. I hate to keep referring to FFXI but one of the great draws of it was that you could go back to old content and pretty much own it whichever way you choose - i.e. there is value in being able to overpower content (and some people prefer to enjoy content that way), and still get something from it. It makes people want to do it more. Since 3.0 this is possible for a good portion of DF content.. but it is ridiculously inconvenient

like, how is it that theres a minimum ilv setting in DF, but not unsynced (and not undersized)? how many people do you know WANT to do it at minimum ilevel? why not address the demand for unsynced duty finder? some people are fine with staying at cap, but theres also enough people that don't, for rewards that the game has cycled into old content (orchestrion rolls / ponies / etc). it makes no sense to me that such people have no choice but to PF it.

Originally Posted by Spira

like, how is it that theres a minimum ilv setting in DF, but not unsynced (and not undersized)? how many people do you know WANT to do it at minimum ilevel? why not address the demand for unsynced duty finder? some people are fine with staying at cap, but theres also enough people that don't, for rewards that the game has cycled into old content (orchestrion rolls / ponies / etc). it makes no sense to me that such people have no choice but to PF it.

There isn't a "minimum ilevel" setting for DF-formed duties. It only works for premade parties, just like "undersized" mode.

The main thing I want from Undersized mode is for it to be available for all duties - not just old ones. I really shouldn't have to get 8 people to enter things like Alexander Midas/Gordias normal when I could just lowman it. Same thing with the 24mans.