Interview with Yoshida (Famitsu)Follow

I wish they'd name that something else. Every time I hear "jump potion" I picture a potion that makes you jump higher.



I remember at one point SE saying that the PS3 did impose limitations specifically on the UI. Like it could only display so many UI elements at one time.



That's unfortunate. This is in direct contradiction to what they said when HW launched about how they'd handle future expansions. It creates an even bigger barrier to entry for new players. Even right now people are reluctant to pick the game up because the trip through ARR content takes so long to do. The way FFXI handled expansion stories was really much better. Each one was just a standalone story that could be completed when you wanted to complete it, but it never gated you out of another expansion.

Really just wish they'd make the open world more relevant and exciting. That's what drew me to MMOs in the first place. Seems like everything these days is just standing around in town and queuing up for things.

Rediculous, the only reason we now have "zones" instead of the expansive open areas (and tunnels and what not) of 1.0 is mainly because of the playstation in the first place... As much as they like to deny this. They tuned down the graphics significantly too.

Cant agree with a jump potion either. It's not because i grinded all my jobs to 60 the hard way. I mean, not entirely atleast. It's that people wont appreciate their jobs if they can just start at endgame. This isnt WoW. Characters arent disposable things to re-create on a whim. You start out somewhere low and slowly build up your character. Makes you feel involved in the world and your class/jobs. The long road of story quests and what not isnt an excuse, since apparently you need to finish 3.5 regardless before you can progress on to 4.0. Which means having to do all the story dungeons regardless, may as well run them a few times and level a job to 60 through it. Even one leveling roulette a day would mean it would be done and over with in 30 days, if you focus and just spam a few dungeons it wont even take that long at all... A week at most.

The more i hear about this expansion, the less enthuisiastic i am about it.

Only things that might change my feelings towards this would be removing the armoury system entirely. Letting you wear a multitude of weapons regardless of job/class like XI. Or making the game/dungeons open-world again like 1.0. Or what about subjobs?

Your trolling aside, that's the direction the game is moving in already. The armory system is a relic of 1.0 and it's absolutely holding the game back.

Honestly I'm waiting for an expansion where the combat classes simply go away and are replaced entirely by jobs, and now your job crystal determines what you are instead of your equipped weapon. Not Stormblood obviously, but I do think this is the direction we're moving in.

I actually agree with Duo - Yoshida has said quite a few times things would be "too complicated/complex/confusing" if they added a layer of depth to this game. He said the reason itemization was changed (aside easier balance) from 1.x is because it would be "too confusing to know what I should be using", which is also a reason they're contemplating getting rid of more stats (it'll very likely fall into natural stats like accuracy being a tertiary effect of (insert main stat.)

I don't think the armory system is holding the game back because they can do A LOT with it. A LOT. It takes a simple look at the item structure of the current game, while most normal players can't/won't do that (since well shouldn't lol) it shows they can do so much.

Wonderous Tails actually prove that there's the ability to add a guaranteed 5 slots for materia to everything, which means they could easily retool the way materia worked for an expansion (you're supposed to do bigger/better things for an expansion) and use that as a form of horizontal growth for the people who want to progress in that fashion.

Remember - yoshida is the same dude who said the only thing holding them back from WANTING to go a different itemization route is the imaginary problem of players "requiring x gear or you can't do this content" when people already push away players who haven't cleared x content within the first 2-5 hours of an update, so absolutely nothing would change.

Funnily enough, XIV 1.0 the armory system only mattered in what your disciple was - you built your class around the skills you mixed and matched and the additional skills you chose to buy to further specialize - for example a Conjurer was initially a BLM, slap on some Absorb spells and you had a pseudo Dark Knight. This is why I still find XIV 1.x superior to 2.x simply because the sky was the limit with 1.x, they just had no chance to finish it. 2.x we already reached the limit, because Yoshida doesn't want to go out of the comfort zone, which is fine but I don't think established players will fall for another 3.0...at least none of the players tossing their money at the game now saying there's SO MUCH content to do because they choose not to do the content until it's obsolete.

Also:



More specifically - he stated people wouldn't allow x job because they don't have the tool kit to target the monster weakness. Which falls into the problem of creating a rotation for BLM where Fire is your DPS spells, Thunder is your DoT and Ice is restorative. He mentioned they could easily create elemental weapons and such to deal with it or give us a use for elemental materia beyond outdated relics, but then it would be, again, "I don't have that weapon guys!"

So..them "pruning" for 4.0 is a sign sadly the game is only going to get easier and more homogonized rather than more complex. It doesn't have to be complex for the sake of it, but even the ********* F2P has more gameplay depth than this game does and that shouldn't be the case, at all, SE has far too many talented devs (that they didnt fire in the past 4 years) that they could be doing so much more.

I am not keen about the "Jump Potion". It has nothing to do with leveling pace (people are already leveling quite fast); going through the 2.0/3.0 content with reasonable pace is a complete package of the game (doesn't going through this still only takes 2-4 weeks? it is not long for a MMO commitment). If you give the chance the people to skim content and skip details by too much overpowering, they will and many that do so will get "bored" quickly because the skimming will make them fail to appreciate the story, lore and world of the FFXIV. Sometimes devs do have to enforce their vision onto the customers (as Jobs said "Show customer what you have made so they know that is what they really want"), and not to hand out excessive short-term instant gratification.

You sure they aren't asking for a re-tuned version for new level cap, say a Lv60 Sastasha?

Or do they really want to stomp around in Lv15 Sastasha with Lv60 characters?

I could understand the former (going from 10+ abilities down to 2-3 is really boring), but the latter is kinda "eeeeh" as you already said.


Edited, Dec 5th 2016 11:57am by Lyrailis

I can't say I entirely blame the people who want to roflstomp old dungeons.

You take a Lv60 character, he's got all kinds of different toys to use. Stick him in a Lv15 level sync party and now he's got 1-2 abilities to use. I know early-level healers and tanks are very boring. Cure Cure Cure Cure Cure Cure the whole dungeon and.... that's it. Maybe, if a real real real bad situation happens, you MIGHT need a Medica. Maybe. Or Esuna, rarely.

Or, tank... Fast Blade, Savage Blade, Fast Blade, Savage Blade, Fast Blade, Savage Blade with Shield Toss for pulling.

/yaaaaaaaaaaawn

Can't blame the high level players for not enjoying low level sync content.

I always thought being forced level down is a good practice of fundamentals. Kind of like even Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky still need basic physical training and practices. It keeps you honest. My experience is that some players get overconfident; tanks overpull, and black mages forgetting the sleep spell actually exists for emergencies.

Anyway, I guess it is a preference. I always prefer some risk of wiping to keep you honest, and you should never get too coc*y. It makes life more interesting :3.

Oops double post

Edited, Dec 8th 2016 4:47am by scchan

I don't really see taking abilities/power they've earned away from players as keeping them honest. Running with Cal's example, a Sleep spells is a sleep spell regardless of what level you're going to use it at. The conditions of why you would want to use it do not change even if players eventually feel strong enough to not bother with it. Though, I am of the mind over-pulling tends to be a problem in any dungeon spammer MMO, usually because trash is deliberately kept worth minimizing time spent on. And if it can be skipped, well, we saw what Amdapor did back in the day here.

That said, some games at least have the decency where, even if they do have level caps, abilities just get scaled down instead of eliminated entirely. Largely being a RDM main in XI, I would've killed for something like that since the job pre-40 is pretty miserable to play, and honestly didn't feel "good" until 75 with the gear that followed. And not so surprisingly, the way one could play RDM at the earlier levels differed from what people expected of it at cap. So, this implied honesty can also lead to some mixed signals. In fact, caps are exactly why I played another job to get through CoP.

IMO, I couldn't stand RDM until they added Composure, lol.

Self-buffs were way too expensive for all the meager duration they lasted (2-3 minutes). I felt I was doing nothing but constantly re-casting buffs. Never could understand why they felt said buffs that everybody is going to insist upon having up fulltime should cost so much, take so long to cast, and last so little.

But hey, at least we have Apururu (UC) now.

Best trust in the game I've found by far, for the healer role.

Some people also think being whipped or otherwise tortured is fun, doesn't mean it's true for the vast majority of people.

And yes, when I see games like XIV doing important buffs almost passively (casting Protect + Shell once per 30 minutes and regaining the MP back almost instantly...), I look back at XI and ask myself "....why are they still doing it that way?"

XI made huge QoL changes... surely they could do a few things like modify Protect and Shell? Would that really break the game, if they cut the MP cost and casting time of those and some other buffs that people want? Or extend Haste's natural duration to, say, 10 minutes?

It would certainly remove a LOT of annoyance without any heavy back-end coding required. Yeah, I get the people running XI are starved on resources... but surely tweaking a few values to remove some annoyances shouldn't be that difficult to do?

Not like 10min Haste is going to break the game, at any rate.

And then you got job abilities which is another pet peeve of mine. They give you this job ability (and of course, one of the few Merit/Job options is to buff said ability by a tiny margin) that has a 5 minute recast that only gives you 10-20 seconds of joy. Really?

I open up my Merit Points and it's "Buff this JA, buff that JA" and I'm like "I rarely ever use those, though. They're up <5% of my total time in combat...."




Edited, Dec 16th 2016 9:45am by Lyrailis