i'm very concerned that FFXIV will be too easy

[grunion]

i've been in the alpha for a couple weeks and i know it's an alpha (1% of total content?) but the gameplay and design make me very worried that this will ultimately be too casual

the main reasons i liked FFXI (until i got banned in 2006) and didn't play WoW and every other MMO were that you only played one character (instead of 1 character per job) and that it was brutally hard - it took a long time to level up, it took a good job combination to have a successful XP party, the gameplay (at least for the mage classes i played) was complex with a long and steep learning curve, etc. just a few simple examples:

to get anywhere important took a combination of coordinating WHM teleports, chocobo rentals, sneak and invis magic, sneak and invis items, evading true-sight enemies, navigating certain complex maze-like paths, etc.

some events like hakutaku or bomb queen required dozens of people for hours, all playing correct roles at certain levels of skill

being a good bard (for example) required upwards of 20 macro scripts, each with multiple lines of commands, to swap gear, communicate with party members, and perform job actions, along with having to move to certain locations and be ready for emergencies like tank w/ red HP or links/adds

i could go on but you get the point - it was not a game for idiots or little kids or casuals. if you were good at FFXI you had to a right to be proud of yourself for mastering a difficult game.

everything i've seen in FFXIV so far, and again i am aware it is an alpha but there is evidence even at these early stages of this, points to a totally new game experience - simple, easy, effortless, fast. any class can teleport to anywhere instantly. you can run out of aggro range of anything and explore the entire world as a level 1 character without dying a single time. you can win most battles simply by spamming one button.

i think i heard when i was playing XI that the game actually was out in japan for a long time (months or a year?) before it was released to the NA audience. maybe that's why it was such a rich/deep game even at launch. if that was the case then that helps explain why XIV is about to enter beta and is still so far behind what i expected from the developers of XI.

i'm hoping someone can reply here and allay my fears that XIV isn't going to be super easy casualware designed to steal the playerbase from WoW while ignoring the ex-XI players who expect something more challenging.

[mintyice]

they'll have stuff that caters to the average player and stuff that caters to the hardcore player. you'll be fine.

[Shuichi]

Yeah. It's been mentioned in various interviews that there will be content that will be challenging for the hardcore players. So look forward to that HD version of AV and PW. I'm sure Tanaka has some evil mob he wants to put in the game that will confound players for years on end.

[Destinye]

Have you seen Tanaka give a genuine smile that still didn't seem like a smirk?


....


Exactly.

[Hyan]

The director of this game is fucking nobuaki komoto.

The guy directed CoP.

There's no way he'll just let us breeze through everything. I don't believe it. He's a sadist.

The moment you lose your focus he'll throw 20 mammets and 5 omegas at you.

[Kuya]

Does taking a long time to do things equal legitimate difficulty?

[superzombie23]

As long as the hardcore rewards are much better than the casual ones, I'm fine with both types of players being targeted for this game. I don't want to see welfare going out that makes it so eventually, the casual players end up getting the same items.

Kind of pulling out the WoW card here. In WoW, there's one 25-man raid (VoA) you can do once every week that potentially can give you the best tier gear for your legs and hands slots, and you get "emblems" every day for just doing a daily quest to get more of the best items. And on the other way, it only takes 4 boss kills (then ninja in a pick-up group) in the other 25-man raid (ICC) to get another chance of getting the best tier gear. Once you get all that gear, you'd be ready to do beat the Lich King in a short amount of time depending on who your friends are. MY POINT is is that ANY player can get the gear. Casual or not. I don't like that wide availability, and I hope I don't see a 20% buff bullcrap in FF 14 to help please frustrated players. Plus it's pointless to put all that effort in because in a year or two, new stuff comes out that completely makes it worthless. Best thing about FFXI was the hardest items to get were always and are still the hardest items to get. I have to admit though the heroic 25-man ICC gear looks very tough to get in WoW, but it's not that much different from the normal version for me to care like I should.

[grunion]

Does taking a long time to do things equal legitimate difficulty?

that is one way something can be difficult. plus for me it adds a lot to the game when you have to spend time traveling. it could be monotonous but it had an emotional/immersive effect on the player that is lost when you can just teleport somewhere.

that 15 minutes i spent getting from jeuno to sky a hundred times was always full of anticipation, planning, a little excitement, and talking to my LS friends about my day. it wasn't a waste of time to me by any means.

[Eaglestrike]

Does taking a long time to do things equal legitimate difficulty?

No.

Regular 5-man instances in WoW are as involved as the hardest things in FFXI with maybe one or two exceptions.

The difference is that in one style of game you're allowed to have a life. In the other you're not. Now I don't have a life, but I sure like having the option of one. Fuck massive time consumption.

Edit: You're romanticizing this shit. Most other people while going to sky were going "FUCK I HAVE TO GO TO SKY TONIGHT"

[Kuya]

If taking a long time to construct a functional xp party or taking unreasonable amounts of time to travel anywhere equals legitimate hardcore gaming, then i welcome our casual gods.

[Hyan]

I liked Nyzul more than Sky.

I must be casual.

[Agito]

The only thing that changes is that there's more content and more things accessible for casual players and players that don't have a whole lot of time to play. There's going to be those party versus enemy party encounters that require a bunch ton of skill, strategy and coordination. There's going to be an endgame that requires massive amount of skill, strategy and coordination also. BTW Hakutaku or Bomb Queen didn't require dozens of people, i 4 manned that shit. And FFXI wasn't really a difficult game player skill wise, it was just incredibly difficult to obtain stuff, get claims on the HNM, make gil and all that crap. In my opinion FFXIV will blow FFXI out the water and do without some of the difficulty crap that exists in FFXI such as an absolutely destroyed economy that will never get better. Killing HNM in FFXI only required minimal effort, meaning that it was extremely easy as long as you had people that knew how to play their jobs. Dynamis only required good leadership, people that know how to play their jobs and a good puller.

[Kaludneisucks]

Dude sky was sick. I have literally slept-walked to ulli...

[omegaB]

i've been in the alpha for a couple weeks and i know it's an alpha (1% of total content?) but the gameplay and design make me very worried that this will ultimately be too casual

the main reasons i liked FFXI (until i got banned in 2006) and didn't play WoW and every other MMO were that you only played one character (instead of 1 character per job) and that it was brutally hard - it took a long time to level up, it took a good job combination to have a successful XP party, the gameplay (at least for the mage classes i played) was complex with a long and steep learning curve, etc. just a few simple examples:

to get anywhere important took a combination of coordinating WHM teleports, chocobo rentals, sneak and invis magic, sneak and invis items, evading true-sight enemies, navigating certain complex maze-like paths, etc.

some events like hakutaku or bomb queen required dozens of people for hours, all playing correct roles at certain levels of skill

being a good bard (for example) required upwards of 20 macro scripts, each with multiple lines of commands, to swap gear, communicate with party members, and perform job actions, along with having to move to certain locations and be ready for emergencies like tank w/ red HP or links/adds

i could go on but you get the point - it was not a game for idiots or little kids or casuals. if you were good at FFXI you had to a right to be proud of yourself for mastering a difficult game.

everything i've seen in FFXIV so far, and again i am aware it is an alpha but there is evidence even at these early stages of this, points to a totally new game experience - simple, easy, effortless, fast. any class can teleport to anywhere instantly. you can run out of aggro range of anything and explore the entire world as a level 1 character without dying a single time. you can win most battles simply by spamming one button.

i think i heard when i was playing XI that the game actually was out in japan for a long time (months or a year?) before it was released to the NA audience. maybe that's why it was such a rich/deep game even at launch. if that was the case then that helps explain why XIV is about to enter beta and is still so far behind what i expected from the developers of XI.

i'm hoping someone can reply here and allay my fears that XIV isn't going to be super easy casualware designed to steal the playerbase from WoW while ignoring the ex-XI players who expect something more challenging.

ehhh no offense, and i do like some of these features, but a lot of it was bad game design, the gear and macro changes to teh level it became was never meant to be, some of the things are made more convienet in beta, i rem reading earlier that the first teleports were free, but later ones would not be, in beta they said we 'd have access to more teleporting than usual i believe, at very least it will probably be a skill or require an item to teleport after your intial tele. but honestly having to travel for 30 minutes to get to the place you wanted to kill stuff was frequently more annoying than rewarding, especially after you ve done it 1000 times already.

far as agro, they said that if you want to explore, now is the time because mobs wouldnt lose agro as easily, in fact the mob ai seems way more varied and different, and with so many positional factors i think that adds another layer of strategy, some of the mobs that follow in alpha will prolly link outside of alpha, like the billy goats to the nanny, and maybe the opopos, and mobs wont lose agro as easily. got to realize the alpha is basically for testing purposes, and things they wanted to test werent involved with transport or linking etc. also the tp move behavior and range is even more deep in this game, some tp moves you can dodge in real time by going behind or running away, heck you can even get a back attack while solo in some cases, mobs will run away to try to range you, or run up close to mess up your ranged game, or try to spread out when you do aoe moves, it definately has a deep strategic position battle system in mind.

multi hour battles? poor scaling and planning something doesnt have to take two hours to be challenging, at teh very least it shouldn't be designed that in an optimal setup, it took you 2 hours to kill something.

requiring 18+ people to do something? ehhhh sounds good in theory but gathering 18+ people and deciding how to reward them consistently for drops, as well as trying to cooridinate them, usually failed, you often had some set stock plan that involved the majority of people applying only token efforts, or people being like we need 1 tank and 18 blm as the accepted strategy. that said they do have the alliance system i think, or something for a legion of players, so it is likely that some of that huge number of people required elements may return.

honestly they should try to have something for everyone, and teh building blocks of a highly skilled/ strategic/ tactical system are there

[Meko]

Time does not equal difficulty. I used to think that it did as well, but it doesn't. Also, I feel like leveling should be something you can do on your own and also with a group (without being penalized). With that being said, I'm liking what I'm hearing so far.

I just worry that crafting will be too much like FFXI. I hope that "unique" items can't be broken and lost while crafting something, ie the venomous claw.

[Lucavi]

i've been in the alpha for a couple weeks and i know it's an alpha (1% of total content?) but the gameplay and design make me very worried that this will ultimately be too casual

the main reasons i liked FFXI (until i got banned in 2006) and didn't play WoW and every other MMO were that you only played one character (instead of 1 character per job) and that it was brutally hard - it took a long time to level up, it took a good job combination to have a successful XP party, the gameplay (at least for the mage classes i played) was complex with a long and steep learning curve, etc. just a few simple examples:

to get anywhere important took a combination of coordinating WHM teleports, chocobo rentals, sneak and invis magic, sneak and invis items, evading true-sight enemies, navigating certain complex maze-like paths, etc.

some events like hakutaku or bomb queen required dozens of people for hours, all playing correct roles at certain levels of skill

being a good bard (for example) required upwards of 20 macro scripts, each with multiple lines of commands, to swap gear, communicate with party members, and perform job actions, along with having to move to certain locations and be ready for emergencies like tank w/ red HP or links/adds

i could go on but you get the point - it was not a game for idiots or little kids or casuals. if you were good at FFXI you had to a right to be proud of yourself for mastering a difficult game.

everything i've seen in FFXIV so far, and again i am aware it is an alpha but there is evidence even at these early stages of this, points to a totally new game experience - simple, easy, effortless, fast. any class can teleport to anywhere instantly. you can run out of aggro range of anything and explore the entire world as a level 1 character without dying a single time. you can win most battles simply by spamming one button.

i think i heard when i was playing XI that the game actually was out in japan for a long time (months or a year?) before it was released to the NA audience. maybe that's why it was such a rich/deep game even at launch. if that was the case then that helps explain why XIV is about to enter beta and is still so far behind what i expected from the developers of XI.

i'm hoping someone can reply here and allay my fears that XIV isn't going to be super easy casualware designed to steal the playerbase from WoW while ignoring the ex-XI players who expect something more challenging.

Solo all of your guildelves at rank 5 if you want "brutally hard". SE wants money - they want subscriptions, and they're willing to allow people to actually play the game instead of camp the aery in order to get those subscriptions.

[Destinye]

Time does not equal difficulty. I used to think that it did as well, but it doesn't. Also, I feel like leveling should be something you can do on your own and also with a group (without being penalized). With that being said, I'm liking what I'm hearing so far.

I just worry that crafting will be too much like FFXI. I hope that "unique" items can't be broken and lost while crafting something, ie the venomous claw.

So in other words....

Everything has to be successful, nothing can go wrong?

[Cephius]

Are you the real grunion? The hexastrike, holier-than-thou, boris-from-goldeneye-lookalike grunion? If so, woohoo!

if not, 10/10 trolling.

[omegaB]

So in other words....

Everything has to be successful, nothing can go wrong?

it looks like crafting will be slightly mini gamish, but will still have possibilities of failure, however by knowing what your doing you can lower the chances, which i think is a pretty good idea, also it seems like you level up faster, and the provide you with some level up materials for free, though your not gonna speed level a craft just off of leves.

[Meko]

So in other words....

Everything has to be successful, nothing can go wrong?

Successful always? No. Have 100 +3 skill and break a level 80 craft and lose "unqiue" item, FAIL. While I don't mind losing mats of some kind, losing something that it took 6-18 players to obtain is retarded especially when you have, or should have, the skill/proficiency to craft it successfully. I look at it like this, if my skill is HIGHER than the item being crafted, I should be successful 100% of the time and then I should have a chance to make something high quality as well.