[Megathread] Final Fantasy XIV

[Kaelwryn]

Question as a new player free trialing. I know when you switch jobs to level it up you get the weapon, do they give you the level 1 armor when you switch? I just remember the shit show that was FFXI with the gear there.

No, you'll need to save level 1 gear, or buy stuff from a vendor. The only jobs that give you gear upon unlocking them is the expansion jobs.

[lawow74]

No, the job quests don't initially give you armor, just the starter weapon for the job. My advice is not to worry too much and just do the Hall of the Novice when you get up to 15 so you can get all those sets for them.

[StrawberryZebra]

Unfortunately, this is the real world, where SE isn't going to spend more money on an issue than they have to. I'd bet money it was easier to hotfix 'cannot skip cutscenes ever' than 'can only skip cutscenes under these circumstances' which is why it is how it is now.

So, they can spent countless millions and years developing mediocre titles like FF13 and 15, yet don't have the time or the money to fix what is going to be a growing issue in one of their more interesting and successful titles going forwards? One that brings them that oh-so desired recouring revenue stream?

They've got the time and the resources to fix it if they wish to. It's just Squenix being Squenix and doing Squenix things.

Saying someone should be fired and thrown out over it is a little ridiculous.

It breaks nearly every established best practice for online gaming. I basically equate it to being a case of gross incomptance ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

[lawow74]

They've got the time and the resources to fix it if they wish to. It's just Squenix being Squenix and doing Squenix things.

More like they're going 'Will this cost us more money than it would take to change things? No? Then we don't change things.' That's not just an SE thing, that's a flat-out business thing. I guarantee fewer people will unsub because they're forced to watch cutscenes in a couple old dungeons than people will unsub over having their story experience ruined by people rushing the capstone dungeons of the 2.0 MSQ.

And so, the Live Letter confirms things we'd been suspecting for a while: 4.3 brings in the Namazu as the Crafting (and Gathering?) Beast Tribe, and Heaven-on-High as the next Deep Dungeon. Also announced for 4.35 are Eureka Pagos, an ice-themed zone, and more Hildibrand stuff.

[Berethos08]

It breaks nearly every established best practice for online gaming. I basically equate it to being a case of gross incomptance ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Doing it the way you don't like is gross incompetence?

My my, don't we have a big ego.

[StrawberryZebra]

Doing it the way you don't like is gross incompetence?

Consider every other multiplayer game. Everything from competative games like League of Legends, Tekken and Hearthstone to cooperative ones like Warframe, WoW and even Divnity Original Sin. They've all got commonalities despite their differing genres and intended audiences.

There are certain times where the developers intentionally take control away from the players.

• Before the game has started, usually with a short introductary cutscene of sorts.
• When the game has ended, usually with a short outro cutscene or some victory/defeat fanfare to accompany it.
• On the end of game scoreboard, where the game is already over and players are free to chat amongst themselves, check out their performance and so on.
• When it's not your turn.

To illustrate this, think of a game of Street Fighter. You have the short introduction, where characters play their opening lines and show off a few moves at each other before the players take over to play the game. At the end of the match, you have a short "You win!/Lose" screen followed by 1-2 lines of diolog from the winner and a scoreboard telling you how well you performed.

Warframe is similar, you get an introduction where you fly to the mission in your ship before the player takes over. You then have a short outro at the end of the mission where you get back into your ship and fly off before being presented with the results of your mission on the bridge of your ship.

This isn't something new either. Way back in 1999 Unreal Tournament used to open matches with a short pan of the camera zooming over the map before letting the players take over. At the end, you'd get a short outro of the winner spamming taunts at everyone before the scoreboard opened up.

The odd one out here, of course, is when it's no longer your turn. That's an intentional game mechanic, one that doesn't remove the player from the experience. It's not developers wresting control from you, it's a built in part of the game. It will be the other players turn however, so total control still remains in the hands of the players unlike the other times where no one has any control.

Even FF14 followed this pattern with its dungeons. You get an introductory cutscene at the beginning and one at the end, followed by a victory screen. Then they decided to break that rule for the last dungeon.

It's not a case of me just not liking it, what Squenix have done here is, objectively, wrong. Notice that developers have never intentionally taken control away from all players during the middle of the game? There's a reason for that. It creates a very disjoined experience, especially when the trigger for that removal is potentially not in your hands. Imagine if LoL paused the game to show you a replay every time a kill happened? It would be awful for everyone involved.

They've disregarded over 20 years of industry experience and best practices and transplanted the ending of a single player game into an MMO. Were you to do that in any other field, chances are you'd be considered out of touch at best, and incompetant at worse. You are expected to keep up with developments in your field, especially in a fields as rapidly changing as Game design and Coding. The result is either an incohsesive mess, or a disjointed stop/start zergfest. There is no situation in which this model can keep everyone happy, so they can't pass it off as being an "artistic choice" even ironically.

You don't see anyone complaining about the usual structure because it's barely noticable. You just expect that you're going to get an intro to your game while it's loading. You just expect that you're going to see a scoreboard at the end. It's never interfering with play. Had Squenix stuck to their own dungeon formula then we'd not be having this conversation.

[Melsiren]

It breaks nearly every established best practice for online gaming. I basically equate it to being a case of gross incomptance ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

1.0 was gross incompetence, the change to the MSQ dungeons was a band-aid fix.

We pretty much all agree it could have been handled better, no reason to be overly dramatic because you were inconvenienced.

[lawow74]

We pretty much all agree it could have been handled better, no reason to be overly dramatic because you were inconvenienced.

Well, no, I don't dispute someone's right to bitch, cos it's hypocritical when I get mad about something in the game and do the same thing. I just feel it's important to keep in mind why it was changed and why it was changed this particular way. That doesn't change wanting to pimpslap someone at SE for what you feel is a moronic design decision (see how people are reacting to the announcement of Alliance Raids being Greed-only on loot in future).

[Melsiren]

Well, no, I don't dispute someone's right to bitch, cos it's hypocritical when I get mad about something in the game and do the same thing. I just feel it's important to keep in mind why it was changed and why it was changed this particular way. That doesn't change wanting to pimpslap someone at SE for what you feel is a moronic design decision (see how people are reacting to the announcement of Alliance Raids being Greed-only on loot in future).

Interestingly enough I feel the way people are reacting to that is much more justified.

The MSQ is about preserving the story experience for new players. This loot change seems to be under some odd idea that Square should champion people who refuse to gear up their "alt" jobs.

The only silver lining I see (as far as I can tell) we will still be loot locked. So hopefully Allied raids will not turn into everyone greeding for the sake of greeding.

I also think I should clarify, I have no issue with people bitching. It's rather the way said complaints are delivered that tends to matter more. I actually don't disagree with most of what Mr. Zebra had to say.

[lawow74]

I don't raid so I don't have a stake in that argument, but I can see the dispute of fighting over gear vs. allowing people to play what they want instead of feeling forced to heal/tank/DPS in order to roll on stuff.

[Granyala]

Greed only on 24man loot is such a dumb change.
Glad that I never need gear from them.

[Kazgrel]

Don't think anyone's denying that the MSQ dungeon design is fine; it's evident from the replies here alone that we all have our own ideas on what's wrong with it and how it could be better. The whole "no cutscene skip", while I agree that it's dumb, isn't so egregious that someone needs to be fired for it. Whoever made that decision was already having to deal with being an one legged person in an ass kicking contest (aka the whole thing's hilariously fucked up with the piles of cutscenes in the middle of the dungeon). Look on the bright side: There hasn't been any sort of dungeon like Castrum and Praetorium ever since, nor will there ever be. The devs know they fucked up with those.

The alliance raid loot thing is...confusing. If it's only for the ones in the roulette...eh, whatever. If most of that gear ends up having craftable versions come along (that are also dyeable), then I doubt many folks will care. If it also includes the current alliance raid, whether it's the new lighthouse in 4.3 or whatever later on, that's kinda lame. I ran Rabanastre throughout 4.1 as WHM so I could 1. keep my healing skills relatively rust-free and 2. to catch it up on gear (since I went with dps then tank gear with tomes). I'm still trying to make sense of such a decision. Granted, any gear at ilvl 350 nowadays is more than enough to do anything in the game right now.

[dope_danny]

Man that raid shit is gonna get hotfixed and reverted fast. Theres too many headaches to leave it like that. As for the mobile app thats gross. SE is pushing more and more microtransactions and 'optional paid extras' in a buy to play game with a subscription. I love the game but they keep pushing and its getting greedier and greasier as time goes on.

[Melsiren]

As for the mobile app thats gross. SE is pushing more and more microtransactions and 'optional paid extras' in a buy to play game with a subscription. I love the game but they keep pushing and its getting greedier and greasier as time goes on.

If it's any consolation we know from an interview with Yoshida that he disagrees with micro transactions, he also said it's not his choice what mounts and features go on the cash shop.

It's becoming pretty clear FF14 is by far their biggest cash cow at the moment.

Don't think anyone's denying that the MSQ dungeon design is fine; it's evident from the replies here alone that we all have our own ideas on what's wrong with it and how it could be better. The whole "no cutscene skip", while I agree that it's dumb, isn't so egregious that someone needs to be fired for it. Whoever made that decision was already having to deal with being an one legged person in an ass kicking contest (aka the whole thing's hilariously fucked up with the piles of cutscenes in the middle of the dungeon). Look on the bright side: There hasn't been any sort of dungeon like Castrum and Praetorium ever since, nor will there ever be. The devs know they fucked up with those.

Pretty much my feelings on the matter, though I don't fully disagree with the argument that SE has the resources to do a real fix if they wanted to.

However it's also pretty clear at this point the FF14 design team is currently working on some major hidden feature. Since it's pretty clear in recent info that Eureka was not that massive secret feature they have been working on.

[Kazgrel]

If it's any consolation we know from an interview with Yoshida that he disagrees with micro transactions, he also said it's not his choice what mounts and features go on the cash shop.

It's becoming pretty clear FF14 is by far their biggest cash cow at the moment.



Pretty much my feelings on the matter, though I don't fully disagree with the argument that SE has the resources to do a real fix if they wanted to.

However it's also pretty clear at this point the FF14 design team is currently working on some major hidden feature. Since it's pretty clear in recent info that Eureka was not that massive secret feature they have been working on.

I agree that they have the resources to go back and revamp those dungeons to make the experience better. Seems that those resources are already allocated to other things, though, whether it’s some secret project or otherwise.

[lawow74]

I don't consider the mobile app an issue 'right now'. I doubt they ever would put a player power increase into such a thing, but if they do, that'll shoot them in the foot pretty good. Like a lot of such things they're hoping it'll let them take advantage of people with more money than sense who simply HAVE to win at the Gil-making aspect of the game.

[dope_danny]

If it's any consolation we know from an interview with Yoshida that he disagrees with micro transactions, he also said it's not his choice what mounts and features go on the cash shop.

It's becoming pretty clear FF14 is by far their biggest cash cow at the moment.

Yeah i ramble on it more here: https://theeorzeanfrontier.blogspot....nder-pale.html but i think part of the outcry is probably because of all the recent articles talking about Yoshi only having one or two expansions left before he leaves and someone new takes over. Maybe that new person is more into the konami line of thinking than Yoshi and sees 'funpay minibuys' as a perfect addition to a money farm? not my opinion but i can see the worry being there.

As for profitability i would be interested. While it has some fans the ridiculous milking of FFXV is leading to some very vocal brand fatigue and outside the honestly fantastic FFTCG i dont know what else with the FF brand is making consistent money for them right now.

[Graeham]

Yeah, they've been pretty shameless about milking FFXV. The game changed considerably during development, ended up being delayed and then the base game was fairly bare bones. It wasn't without redeeming qualities but it's clear by how much new content has been added since that they needed to work hard to fill in the gaps and flesh out the story. Compare it to, say, Persona 5 which had everything it in from the get go or Witcher 3 which had a solid base game and then two exceptionally meaty expansions and it shows that Square Enix are slipping.

There's also some dubious aspects related to advertisements and promotions. How much of FFXV being based in a 'modern' setting is due to a desire to shoehorn real world products into the game for advertising/meme purposes? I genuinely worry that we won't see another mainstream 'old school' Final Fantasy game ever again because they won't be able to inject advertising deals easily into such a game.

FFXV has also had a lot of crossover events and promotions. Tekken 7 adding Noctis as a playable character is the most prominent example. This is less jarring, though, since such moves have been done in the past.

Another issue I have is that some of FFXV's DLC is devoted to 'what if endings'. A large part of the charm of FFXV for me was how dark it ended up getting. It was a neat throwback to FF6 which was also very dark.

Moving back to FFXIV, I do worry about the future of the game once Yoshi-P moves on. I kind of want FFXIV to be my main MMO for the foreseeable future and since WoW and FFXIV are the only MMO's to capture my interest for more than a few months then I'm not sure where I'd go if FFXIV takes a sudden, sharp fall.

[dope_danny]

I think more and more nowadays you see people leaving mmorpgs for 'games as a service' type games. Games where you can play for 20 minutes a night and stay competitive or just straight up fuck around like warframe and just end up progressing even if you have no idea why or what you are progressing too. I love FFXIV but i also loved WoW which i will play for maybe 2 months a year nowadays but once upon a time i played it just about every day. One day it changed so much i just didn't anymore. It would be a shame if it happened with XIV someday but there aint much in videogames sadder than turning into that bitter guy that sticks with a game they no longer like out of some self enforced sense of obligation or something.

[lawow74]

Makes me think of a story bit from The Magicians, concerning a deity of architecture who in the ancient past designed this elaborate prison to lock away a dangerous creature. And in the modern era owns a company that makes addictive mobile games. Different world, different kind of prison...

But I digress, there are a number of gamers nowadays who simply lack the time to invest in what an MMO traditionally demands, so you see them either leaving the genre or playing ones that allow you to buy your way to relevancy, the old time v. money dilemma. I have a feeling one of these days FF14 will go down that road, likely after Yoshi is no longer lead dev.