FFXIV 6.0: Endwalker (December 7, 2021)

[Prothescar]

Enbiggened TBN! And the SMN does some kind of weirdo Ifrit charge.

I also actually like the male Viera. If they could wear hats I might've changed.

[Cantih]

The L90 AF
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme..._coming_in_60/

[Kaisha]

I also actually like the male Viera.

I just hope the ear textures aren't as atrociously low-rez looking on release as it was when YoshiP was showing it off in the character creator. It was pretty laughable for me. Guess we'll see in another day when the benchmark lands.

[Gokulo]

At a quick glance on the phone, can't say any of my jobs look great - SCH, RDM, DNC - but I'll need to take a closer look on my PC later. I did like how WHM looks though

[Cantih]

I briefly joined the reddit XIV discord server to get at the unofficial Q&A translations. Here's the pertinent stuff.
If you want stuff without my bias excluding stuff, you'll need to go over there yourself. Anything in (parentheses) is my own paraphrasing or comment.

Gameplay
Q - Will Reaper, the new job, be a synergy based job? If so, will it be like Dancer, or like Monk, that is leaned towards support?
A - We will reveal its details on September.

Q - Since healers be separated into pure healing and barrier healing in EW, will tanks have difference in MT and OT?
A - Nope, no plans on that

(Q - Stat Squish & Deep Dungeon)
(A - grumbles & headaches)

Q - Can we sync our dummy to level 70? I'd like to use them to practice for Ultimate
A - Ahhhh...I see.....I mean you can't use level 80 skills on a level 70 Ultimate content...I mean it's true that whenever we release new expansions and our rotation will change drastically....uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ummmmmmmm....I mean, it's not impossible.....but I need to bring this to Yokozawa for discussion first....Let me look into this.

Q - Will there be jobs where it's been changed drastically in how they are played? If so, what job would that be?
A - We cannot answer this. While there ARE, we cannot tell you which job it is. Please look forward to the next PLL.
(Someone is getting a major shakeup)


Glamour/Fluff
Q - Will there be a release for Lyse's costume (from Stormblood), as well as additional Viera hairstyles?
A - As seen today, you saw additional hairstyles on Viera so yes there will be, In the future, in order to ensure we can easily add more hairstyles to both Viera and Hrothgars, we are actually changing the specification on them right now, so it's underway. It will take sometime for that to happen so please be patient.

As for demand for Derplander's stubble that was in high demand, we are actually experimenting on various methods of implementation right now, and it's quite a forceful...but we are indeed testing out various methods right now so please stay tuned for further updates. As for Lyse's costume, because of it's different specification we felt that her costume is not properly tuned for combat so the character team will have to adjust them further before we can think of whether to release them.

Q - Will the Papaga emote be implemented in the future? I'll buy it!
A - Ah that one. It is indeed cute...even Matsuno went "Yoshida?" at me so....I think it'll be implemented, the one who work on the emotes will be happy. But we'll not state whether it's purchasable or anything because we are not confirmed on that yet. Once there's details we'll let you know.

Q - Will there be Shadowbringer NPC costumes be available for Mogstation?
A - For now we don't have plans on that but when it comes to request....we did plan on Ryne so if there's a release in the future Ryne would come first....and oh! Gaia...if there's Gaia she'll be there too but it'll take some cost for that to happen.
(he also mention the Chai couple, in a blue sky manner)

Q - Will Dancer and Gunbreaker receive the Cactuar weapons?
A - For now no, but we can relay the request to the team. Due to the great amount of resources will be implemented in the future it won't be now but it'll be in the future.

Q - There are alot of equipment in the game but it feels such a waste where it's either we use them or glamour them. Is there another way for these equipment to be utilized like the glamour catalogue? By the way, my glamour dresser is almost full
A - This stabs YoshiP hard because of the old idea OOF. Ouch they're bringing back the old idea of glamour log and what not. I mean, we wanted to do so! We even had the text and all ready! .........We cannot include them all because it's too full and the save data CANNOT handle it....I mean if we can somehow make it recorded it'd be nice but....we're definitely out of space to save such data....we want to realize it one day but....ouch....Sorry.

(in good news though)

Q - The Glamour Dresser feature feels a bit not user friendly due to how hard to obtain coloring and how I can apply the color to my glamour dresser, will there be update on the glamour dresser to address the clunkiness?
A - Yeaaaaahhh...the glamour dresser is quite a feature implemented very later in the game....hmmmmmmm....we will have to look into this...yeah a lot of mumbles and pondering from Yoshida

Do note that YoshiP agree with the feature being a bit unfriendly.
(Dresser may get a QoL pass)

Q - Will we see implementation of housing items such as the ones we see in Azim Steppe?
A - That's not an issue, we'll look into this.

[Hellfury]

I'm a little confused by the part about "too full and save data can't handle it".

Is he referring to the glamour dresser itself, or that there's too much gear for such a catalogue to hold? Anyone know how they store the information that makes such a catalogue impossibru? I know there is a large amount of gear in the game, I just can't figure out where the bottleneck is

[Corrderio]

If I had to take a stab I'm guessing not enough memory to check what pieces of armor you've obtained since if you include everything that is a hell of a list.

[Uzor]

I mean, World of Warcraft handles it just fine, although that might not be every gear piece.

[Lucavi]

World of Warcraft was also built for a PC, not a PS3. The foundation of both games are entirely different, which will eternally be frustrating to me as someone who enjoys the core game of XIV.

You would not have this problem if the game was built for PC first, and simply downscaled for console.

[Cantih]

I think they mean the server side database storage capacity allotted to each character.
A system that could contain a yes/no for every piece of gear released (and to be released) in the game, would take more bytes than they are willing to commit to.

EDIT:
As the eternal defender to Lucavi's console complaints, I do not think it should be a user side storage/architecture issue. The game, user side, inherently has all the visual data for every piece of gear in the game, so adding a yes/no for each would be only a fraction of the space already taken (though how much shoehorning that would take is unknown, but it is NOT a fundamental console hardware capability or design issue, but a software design one).

As for sending data between user and server (again, NOT a console issue, it's an internet/server overload issue), you never trust the user, so you can't let people set glamours just based on user side data.
But using the glamour plate system, you can do a verification check upon setting and applying (user says they have this, server database for user confirms, glamour valid), so you don't constantly have to stream all the ownership status.
This is probably largely how verification works for decks in things like MtG, Hearthstone, etc. So it's not new ground in design.

[Lucavi]

I'm still wondering about just doing WoW"s glamour system, where its image data for the items and not holding a physical copy of said item. What is it about this janky Japanese system that mandates that you have to physically possess the item to glamour the image of it?

So many of the problems of the game just come down to memory concerns on their end.

[Cantih]

Remember, WoW's transmog system was implemented when they were king of the hill. "We're rolling in cash, we are unto gods, we can do whatever we want."
And while it's Acti not Blizz, look at CoD space issues. The do not give a shit about user data bloat, and that mindset means that they probably expect the same thing their side, so something like a huge ownership database is just met with "ok, yeah, makes sense"

XIV is not confirmed king, (we're seeing it, we know it's gonna happen, but the fat lady isn't singing yet) and S-E is a bit more cautious with their money ever since Spirits Within.

[Scythiroth]

I wonder how many people are paying for extra retainers for more glamour storage space and SE doesn't want to lose out on that money by implementing WoW's glamour system.

[Lucavi]

Its possible. We'll never know, but we can speculate. They certainly invented the problem and sold the solution, janky as it is.

[Cantih]

True, there's that as well.
I forget/don't think about it because financially it's flat out not an option for me.

[Lucavi]

I would NEVER suggest (honestly!) that they intentionally under-developed inventory as a way to invent a "fix" that they could monetize. I just feel that the initial 1.0 team failed to consider inventory at all, much less everything else they failed at (glad the morons are stuck in mobile development hell) and the 2.0 team, when ripping the guts out of the 1.0 house that Tanaka built, realized that foundation limitations of the game itself really doesn't allow for major memory expansions. They then invented retainers as a way to offset the struggles with applying massive inventories on a single character (which seems to be one of the real issues), instead splitting inventories up across lots of NPCs that are rarely actually in the game world and, thus, don't tax the rickety server infrastructure nearly as hard as giving every player that actual space themselves.

As for the glamor issue? I have no fucking idea. I suspect if we actually got to see the code this game runs off of, we'd be amazed at how it even runs at all, which, in fairness, is true of many, MANY great games. I remember looking at the guts of Command and Conquer 3 and holy shit, lololol.

Edit: I don't care about it for this game, because what's done is done. Just keep the fucking Tanaka and Sundi idiots away from the initial development of the next one. It should start out modern, not have to be rebuilt to get there eventually.

[arus2001]

I think what gets me is a full True/False table of equipment acquisition would maybe take a couple kilobytes tops. Saving things like color selection should be a non-issue until applied to character glam plates, and if we're being honest, dyes should be more like GW2 in that once you get one and use it, you have the color option forever. If their concern is that routine character saves would bog down the servers, then I'd say registering new items should be restricted to your inn/house and those routine saves avoid touching that data at all. To say this is some PC Master Race deal is folly, when it comes off more as their backend being retarded and have even admitted to such in the past because lolTanaka.

[Kaisha]

I think what gets me is a full True/False table of equipment acquisition would maybe take a couple kilobytes tops.

And we already have the Armoire which is just a giant bitfield list so it's not like they'd have to invent a 'new' system on their storage backend when they can just make a copy of that to read from.

So some quick napkin math which I'm sure is wrong in spots....

We currently got the glamour chest with 400 gimped versions of inventory slots.

• Current item id range fits comfortably in an unsigned two-byte range, assuming they're saving it to the database like that and not budgeting a uint64 for (extreme) future-proofing, even though it probably resides in system memory like that
• Dye is also saved to that, so another byte (120 dyes in the game atm unless you'd want to budget for beyond 255 of 'em.).

1.2kb at minimum (9600 bits) for the current dresser, but that's ignoring database overhead such as row keys, and however each item in the glamor inventory is tied to the character id.

Currently visible-gear count (excludes belts, but including 1.0 dated & aetherial) is 19,983 entries unless I messed something up, which would require 2.5kb to fit into a bitfield, and there's an expansion looming so you'd probably want to bump that to 3kb or 4kb to have a healthy buffer.

The main thing they probably like about the dresser is it allows future-item storage without any changes on their back end, and just slaps the burden on the end-user to organize things when you're a packrat and hoard too much shit to hit the 400 item limit.

[Uzor]

I’m hoping, since 6.0 is the end of the story thwy’ve been building since 2.0 launched, that they’ll do a larger system, graphics, ui/ux and infrastructure overhaul for 7.0, as well as drop PS3 support. They could improve the game so much by redesigning some of those things.

I can understand a lot of those things (infrastructure and battle system especially) were left intact between 1.0 and 2.0 as they might not have wanted to overcommit on a (at the time) failing game, but now that the game has been successful for years and is still gaining traction, it makes sense to modernize some of those systems.

[Shenrien]

Benchmark is up, post your scores.