Inter-Worlds research.. ???Follow

Was looking at an interview with Yoshi-P today on Jeux Online and Google Translate spit this out:

Q: Would it be possible to group the sparsely populated servers?

Y: In patch 3.5, we introduce the research of inter-worlds team. You can discuss and realize content with other players worlds. Final Fantasy XIV is approaching a game without servers, but we want to keep this division into worlds to facilitate certain items such as housing. If players from lower population servers always feel this problem, we will take into account again.


I'm still not up on everything that was covered during Fan Fest, but does anyone know what Yoshi is talking about here?

Cross world party finder essentially - Considering the other features they took from WoW (for ease of conversation) that ended up being...less than stellar, I wouldn't expect it to be anything outside of a party finder kind of system. Since this was brought up during fan fest about world merging, which sadly even though it's extremely necessary..once again the housing system causes a problem ;p

In Japanese it sounds more like "we've introduced the findings of our new inter-world team, starting with the cross-world party finder."

They already tried "multiple zones" as the game innately supports it so something similar to WoW could theoretically work, it didn't work out too well. Think back to Heavensward 3.0 when hunts were popular and the fun we all had trying to get to the same zone as our friends, since even in a party it didn't work well lol. So yeah, it's the cross-world party finder they talked about before.

Edited, Oct 19th 2016 7:45am by Theonehio

Thanks that's much clearer.

The idea of a cross-realm party finder is probably a good one especially for the lower population servers where people just can't accomplish things.

When you're talking about it being a less than stellar thing from WoW, I think you might be confusing it with WoW's LFD system where the automated matchmaker puts you into parties with people drawn from other realms. We have this already, it's the duty finder.

The ideal would be WoW's connected realms feature. The servers are basically merged, but certain features keeps separated.

Either way, when fluff gets in the way of gameplay, I think it's time to stop and reconsider. Doing instances is fine and all, but what about overworld stuff? Market Boards? Etc...

Just found another interesting comment from a 2013 interview.

G: The design documents shared about a year ago mentioned “A Server System Built to Support a Worldless Model”. Does that mean that, down the line, there are chances for the borders between servers to be further blurred beyond the initial cross-server content finder? I’m thinking about the ability to freely travel between servers to meet your friends, for instance, that is being implemented in other games like The Elder Scrolls Online.

NY: Our server is designed in such way that it will be able to support those “worldless structures” down the line, but we don’t intend to make it available in the beginning. There are certain elements that make MMOs interesting: having borders gives a sense of having a home, the ability for rankings among different worlds, PvP battles between the top players of each world, etc. For that reason, down the line, there are chances for the borders between servers to be further blurred but for the immediate future it will be operated on a per server basis.


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So when he says XIV is approaching being a game without servers -- and when he said in the past the game's server structure has this technology, with intentions to use that technology later on -- I have to wonder if this could be one of the big reveals for 4.0. I'm assuming this would only lead to worldless structures within data centers.

Edited, Oct 21st 2016 9:37am by Thayos