Collection of FFXIV News from Media Sources

[Hyan]

It still has a good chance of being a better source of income than any offline title they could be working on. Maybe people should let them figure out what needs to be done.

http://www.square-enix.com/eng/news/pdf/11q4slides.pdf

New info, quoting

Strategic Pillar: #2 -Becoming "Network Centric" -Revitalize our major MMO titles

Maybe next time.

[Kurokikaze]

^ agreed. Lets see what the game looks like in September and decide from there people. They can still turn the boat around.

[Tomino]

It's still so weird to have 2 online games (supposedly P2P) that looks so much similiar.

At least Tanaka's original vision about 14 was trying to be unique, but now both titles (Abyssea, Yoshida's FF14) are being inspired by the WoW model.


Must be the nostalgic side in me, but really I'd had cried tears of joy for a FFXI HD with renewed, 2011 game mechanics instead of two games each sporting its own perks.

[CrstyCptSteveWitherspoon]

Must be the nostalgic side in me, but really I'd had cried tears of joy for a FFXI HD with renewed, 2011 game mechanics instead of two games each sporting its own perks.

Same feeling here. I mean I don't have the time to grind like I did way back, but I was hoping they'd remove a lot of that. And they did sorta with leves. If you get an 8 man party that abandons leves so you keep the best ones(dunes/rain/levin/inferno/light) it's an easy 120+k sp per leve reset. It's not perfect by a long shot with anima costs and wtf do you do with leveling other classes(grind?) but it keeps me from having 8 hour grind session and only getting one rank, at least this early in the game. I'm just hoping this battle update is a good one. The spam system we have now just sucks. I hate playing thm at NMs and watching the melee sit there for 5s+ while they que up and execute a BR. It just looks dumb people standing around doing nothing. Not to mention I'd take part by throwing a nuke out to MB but I can't afford the time spent sitting in que while my tank gets killed because I can't heal him. A lot is riding on this patch and I doubt it'll be a miracle patch, but honestly how much worse could it really be compared to what we have now? <-- prepared to eat those words in a month.

Edit: Oh yea. How about removing ranged attacks from like every mob in game. Haven't brought that up in a while.

[ringthree]

It's still so weird to have 2 online games (supposedly P2P) that looks so much similiar.

At least Tanaka's original vision about 14 was trying to be unique, but now both titles (Abyssea, Yoshida's FF14) are being inspired by the WoW model.


Must be the nostalgic side in me, but really I'd had cried tears of joy for a FFXI HD with renewed, 2011 game mechanics instead of two games each sporting its own perks.

Tanaka showed for years that he was unwilling to make the most simple changes to improve the game for players. Even when it was completely obvious that FFXIV was going to be a disaster, he didn't make any major changes or listened to the beta testing information. If improving the games is the "WoW model" then they need to follow that model even more.

[Lucavi]

It's still so weird to have 2 online games (supposedly P2P) that looks so much similiar.

At least Tanaka's original vision about 14 was trying to be unique, but now both titles (Abyssea, Yoshida's FF14) are being inspired by the WoW model.


Must be the nostalgic side in me, but really I'd had cried tears of joy for a FFXI HD with renewed, 2011 game mechanics instead of two games each sporting its own perks.

Graphics-wise, XIV is FFXI-HD. What were you looking for in your HD game? Same jobs? Same leveling system? Same inability to solo? Same "run here >> CS >> wait for JP midnight >> run here >> CS >> repeat" quest/mission progression? Or were you looking for the same timetable of trickle-down updates as XI?

I mean, if they had kept the ball rolling and just landed while running, then yeah, I could see a FFXI-II-HD Remix: Ultimate Edition Accell version of XI, but SE hasn't really shown the ability to take the improvements from the end of one experience and directly apply it to the new experience. They seem to take each project they work on as its own individual thing, which means ultimately making the same mistakes with each project because they look straight ahead instead of laterally when designing and maintaining each game.

But yes: you give me the staff that's working on XI right now, with all this Abbysea stuff, have them basically make a brand new version of the game with all the lessons they've learned, splash a bit more "modern MMO" in there by means of a real UI, PC support, voice-chat, meaningful PVP, instanced and world content, lore that's actually in-game instead of on a monthly e-magazine, and frequent communication by the devs, and yes, I think we have something very very good on our hands.

Edit: There was so much in XI that I'd love to see fleshed out with more detail and better graphics; namely the whole Raogrimm/Shadowlord thing, and of course, the fucking Ark Angels. I could live with an entire expansion devoted solely to the Ark Angels tearing up the world and you having to figure out what the fuck their deal is, and eventually either take them on in an epic battle, or "redeem" them or something. The plot (and fights!) back then was good enough for me to dream up so much extra lore about what was going on. I honestly miss those days in XI, even after thinking about all of the shitty job imbalance that my main job had, the HNM drama, shitty droprates, long grinds and everything else.

[Tomino]

Let me break down my idea a little better. When I wrote about FFXI HD I was mostly referring to certain key ideas:

- Keep the world going and feed us lore lovers some more Vanadiel. I'm more interested to discover more about my fav world than restart again into another one that shares so much in common with the first. There was so much already in place that could had lead to new stories, instead of ending up rearshing the 3 nations I represented for like 6 years.

- Same goes for the races. Why do I have to reboot myself to level 1 to be the same looking character?

- Job system was one key feature of FFXI. Sure it got old especially in 2010 when many other games had improved its basics, but I'd had appreciated a "2011 design restyle" instead of being presented with new basic classes sharing so much with the old ones and just lacking feeling.

- Again, why going and reinvent the same wheel when you could had spent the same energies into breathing new life into an old yet valuable system. They had FoV, they had parties, campaign, besieged, dominion, etc and instead of growing from there they just went back to square one.

- Finally, what was the main reason behind FF14?
I mean, GW2 first improved one of the weakest point of GW, that being the absence of a nice persistent, MMO like, world. So the main point of GW2 was indeed to be a better GW.
Can this be said of FF14? Did they really need a whole world, assets and all just to add Leves and make "all classes use all skills" mechanics?

[miokomioko]

Square Enix takes pride in trying to "reinvent the RPG" with every Final Fantasy title. It's just what they do (regardless if they succeed or not) and explains most of your points/questions. Also, they have given very straight-forward explanations as to why they kept the general race character design.

[Hyan]

Eorzea feels nothing like Vana'diel. Surprising considering the similarities in art style, but somehow they pulled it off.

I don't wanna go further because it would be messy and the topic turned into total crap already.

[Tomino]

But an MMO and a standard single player RPG can't be put on the exact same plane.
Past FF titles are like books/movies from the same author : each different, yet somehow close. But an MMO is more like those comics or tv shows you keep following for years, growing attached to the cast and such. At least in my opinion.
MMOs build themselves on their same shoulders, year after year they grow more solid and make their story becoming part of their pros. I think one should be particurally carefull when "reinventing" something like that because you're gonna lose a lot in the process. Unless you make that feel like a transition to something better, and again my mention goes to GW2. Which is actually set in the same world as GW, too.

As for their reason to keep races the same, I consider it valid to a certain extent. It's a bit stretchy, but not the key point here anyway.


But lore discussions aside, I'd really like to ask you people what do you consider being the main point behind FF14, as a project. We still have until next week before somethings happen so it might still worth a chat.
This, or we can keep bitching

[Lucavi]

Square Enix takes pride in trying to "reinvent the RPG" with every Final Fantasy title. It's just what they do (regardless if they succeed or not) and explains most of your points/questions. Also, they have given very straight-forward explanations as to why they kept the general race character design.

They like to think they're the opposite of DQ in that they honestly try to reinvent the wheel. Sadly, they are completely wrong. Every FF (since Nomura) has had an array of zippers, belts, angst, big swords, shirtless skinny boys (where's the fucking Yang and Josef from the good ol' days?!) with brooding protagonists that feel the need to mope for 9/10th's of the plot before finally getting whatever they need (in Tidus' case, a piece of ass and some control over his own life, even if it was simply realization of the truth) to wake up, shape up, look up off the ground and finally get to savin 'what needs savin'.

I haven't even touch the actual combat, layout or over-reliance on CGI to tell the story for the player, instead of the player finding it out himself.

Yes, FFXII was a nice departure from the norm in terms of combat, and for that, I loved the game. XIII departed in the sense that now you can switch styles on the fly, but Final Fantasy is always going to be Final Fantasy. This doesn't somehow equal a negative, though; it simply means that they aren't as "innovative" as they like to think.

[Hyan]

To generate long-term revenue and increase the demographic that plays SE's online titles. New game is better than a remake of an old game. There's less of a stigma and it is more appealing as well. If it was the same universe but a different location people might feel like they're missing out on things because they didn't play the "prequel". If it was the same location we'd be stuck in vanilla XI once again, which sounds lame as hell.

The only thing they don't try to reinvent are the characters and the story. You can't say with a straight face that FFX, XI, XII and XIII are anything like each other. X has more in common with XIII due to the same devs, yet its still not that similar at all. Let's not even go into the spin-offs. XIII is like versus XIII is like Type-0, amirite?

[Kenshiin]

http://kotaku.com/5805355/final-fant...-besides-ffxiv

In a financial meeting, Square Enix president Yoichi Wada said the company was working on a big MMO in addition to Final Fantasy XIV. "I think we will reveal it sometime this year," said Wada. [株式会社スクウェア・エニックス・

[Meko]

DragonQuest? Time will tell but I hope they are using FF14 as a learning barometer.

[Kuya]

Learning? lol

[Kaylia]

SquareEnix's employee are perfectionists, they simply want to take the time to learn everything properly and make a great game.

It's not like they are repeating the same mistakes twice, far from it, they are repeating the same experiment instead to validate their data. That's science. You can't argue against science.

[Hyan]

I can see that both XI and XIV are being ran exactly the same as they were pre-september.

So LOLlearning indeed.

But if they haven't realized that the way western devs create MMO's is shit they need another lesson to learn from. Wouldn't be surprised if Eidos is working on it or something.

[Lucavi]

You have to respect that scientific approach to it, Kaylia.

Oh Hyan; you trollin', although AoC did officially announce that its going F2P. Another "failure" in the kitty.

[Kaylia]

Hyan, why do waste so much energy on your crusade to convince the world that "western developper" are at fault? If you had half a brain, you would realize the current markets suffer from multiples issues ranging from over-saturation to plain bad games.

[Kuya]

Wait, what was hyan's point?