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 Post subject: Reasons to play FFXIV A Realm Reborn
PostPosted: Wed Aug 07, 2013 10:31 am 
Onionhead
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For players of V1.0 who were turned off by the game:

⁍ The user interface is now fully customizable
Menus no longer lag, and they are much more intuitive, using drag-and-drop a lot
⁍ There are now NA and EU based servers, reducing the lag further
Terrain: has been completely remade, it much more beautiful, no more copy/paste of land, Black Shroud is no longer linear tunnels, a lot more unique areas, fun to explore, more NPC life, lots of small towns that really feel like towns
⁍ The marketplace is no longer a mall of retainers selling random stuff, and is now like the auction house from FFXI
⁍ You can jump, if you're into that kind of thing
Duty-finder will match you up with other adventurers in order to do dungeon runs, missions, and other quests, you can duty-find to fill that last spot in your alliance, and you can duty-find if you are solo and bored. And the dungeons are really fun.
⁍ There are live action events across the world, called FATEs (Full Active Time Events), where you battle enemies with other players that you don't even have to party with. Roaming notorious monsters are now included in FATEs, but also mini quests too.
⁍ They implemented a hunting log for each class, it's just something to do when you're running around the world and stumble across a monster on your log.
Quests seem to make a lot more sense than they did in V1.0. No more parleying!
⁍ New class (arcanist) and jobs (summoner and scholar) coming out; on top of all the classic Final Fantasy jobs that they released near the end of V1.0 like Dragoon, Paladin, Bard, etc.
⁍ There are a lot more FF-themed things in this game than there were at V1.0 launch. Chocobos, moogles, Bahamut, Titan, Ifrit, Garuda, you can ride airships, etc.
PvP coming out, supposedly in beta 4, and it's going to include team based play, and most likely free-for-alls eventually.
⁍ You now can have your pet chocobo battle alongside you (healing you, or fighting the monsters)
Free companies are the new linkshell, and they are going to be very customizable, you can purchase a guild house and decorate it with your trophies and flags and other guilds can visit, you can give custom titles and responsibilities to members, and you can even boot inactive players.
⁍ They did away with punishments like exp fatigue and teleport anima, now you can just teleport using your gil.
Gathering and crafting have been completely redone. For instance now gathering has usable skills and a TP-like skill point system, and once you've successfully gathered for instance a log from a certain type of tree, you can now choose to gather that item and ignore all the other items from that tree. It's really nice. Crafting is WAY faster too. Way faster. And the recipes are simpler. And the recipes are listed on your menu, organized by level, even ones you haven't performed yet.
⁍ Gear doesn't degrade nearly as fast as it used to. And it's real easy to see which items need repair, there's a colored meter bar.
⁍ The playerbase is coming back. The beta alone got over a million registrants.
⁍ It's proven that this development team gives a shit. They've proven they will fix things.

For players of FFXI considering trying FFXIV A Realm Reborn:


⁍ To start with, see all the notes above
⁍ The graphics are so much better, they really put FFXI to shame.
⁍ You can change jobs on the fly. No more running to a mog house.
⁍ The days of sitting around with a LFG flag are over, this game pairs you up quickly.
⁍ Face it, abyssea was kinda fun but it ruined FFXI. It's not the game it used to be.
⁍ The future of Final Fantasy online games is FFXIV. Not FFXI.
⁍ The new expansion Seekers of Adoulin...sucked.
⁍ Try something new. FFXI is so old it would be starting puberty if it were a human.

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 Post subject: Re: Reasons to play FFXIV A Realm Reborn
PostPosted: Wed Aug 07, 2013 10:38 am 
Onionhead
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omg lists

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 Post subject: Re: Reasons to play FFXIV A Realm Reborn
PostPosted: Wed Aug 07, 2013 10:53 am 
Crumpet
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Whisp wrote:
It's proven that this development team gives a shit. They've proven they will fix things.

While everything on the list is great, I feel this is an underrated point that really needs highlighting.

Since Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) took over it's a brand new side of Japanese development we never get to see. He and his team are very transparent about what they're doing, connect with the community often, and even do live events where they just answer our questions.

If you played FFXI, you'll remember that they were basically 100% silent about everything, always. Outside of patch notes they never spoke to us, ever. They did what they wanted and the player base was forced to just live with it. The community could be in an uproar about anything, but you wouldn't get even a peep out of SE, not even an "ok, we've heard you." Hell, they didn't even talk to the Japanese players. The only time anybody got to ask them anything were at some of those anniversary events in Japan. And even then, they'd give nothing but extremely vague answers that didn't answer anything. It made living with the game's shortcomings a very frustrating experience, and left you with a feeling that this stuff just wasn't ever going to get fixed.

On the other hand, Yoshi and his dev team post on the forums themselves and talk with the players. They've held polls asking players for ideas on the direction of the game. They post feedback summary threads where they give a quick answer to basically every question and request that came through beta. Sure, we generally have to wait for a translation before we can read it, but you can't expect the Japanese dev team to be fluent in English. They do a decent job of posting translated versions of dev posts within a day or two.

Even if you don't agree with some of his choices or methods, Yoshi articulates his points very well to the point where you respect his decision even if you don't agree with it. He even went out of his way to explain the dreaded "AoE lag problem" and explained exactly why it happens and what they're doing to try and address it.

Just go read any interview article from Yoshi-P, you'll come away pretty impressed. The recent one where he defends keeping the game subscription based and why it won't ever be free to play is a great read. Might go find it and link it.

This is such a massive breath of fresh air after coming from FFXI and the original 1.0 Tanaka team, and I feel one of the big reasons this game will do well. At the very least, it definitely deserves to. Yoshi's done a great job of turning both the game and SE's image around.


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 Post subject: Re: Reasons to play FFXIV A Realm Reborn
PostPosted: Wed Aug 07, 2013 10:59 am 
Crumpet
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Found it:

http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/17/final ... exclusive/

Naoki Yoshida wrote:
There are many different types of MMOs. There are two big types or groups that we see. You have one group with games like your Rift or your Star Wars, which are very large-scale MMOs with established IP. Then you have your smaller MMOs, which are maybe new IPs that don’t need as big a user base to be successful. So we can start off with the big group, the large-scale MMO group, with your Rift, your Star Wars, your Guild Wars, your Age of Conan and The Lord of the Rings. These games all started out on a subscription model, or were planning for a subscription model when they were in development. Then, partway through, they switched to free-to-play.

Then again, you have games like Rift and Star Wars. Even though people have been saying that yes, there is this change in the market, everything’s moving to free-to-play, they still – up until recently – were developing a system that would be subscription-based. Even though everyone is saying the industry is going free-to-play, they still were developing these huge games with subscriptions in mind. Again, we’re not saying that one is better than the other, that free-to-play is better than subscription or subscription is better than free-to-play. But for a large game on that scale, what’s most important – more important than making a lot of money – is making a stable income, a stable amount of money over a long period of time. And so to develop a large-scale MMO like this, you need to spend a lot of time with a lot of resources and a lot of staff to make this game.

To do that, you need a lot of money, and to get a lot of money to do that, you usually need investors to invest in your game. Because you’ve spent a lot of money on getting this game ready and borrowed a lot of money from these investors, when you release the game, the investors expect to see returns. If your game gets a lot of users and a lot of subscriptions right away, your investors will be happy and you can pay them. But what happens if you don’t hit that number right away? You have a bunch of staff members waiting to get paid. You have a bunch of investors waiting to get paid. You have a bunch of contents that needs to get made because you have to have updates, but you can’t do it because you don’t have enough money, because you didn’t hit that number you were aiming for. And so what do you have to do? One option to get instant money is free-to-play, or selling these items. To get that money so you can pay off your staff, pay off your investors, and start making new content, switching to free-to-play, selling items, and using that money is one way to do it.

So why didn’t Rift or EA with Star Wars do this from the beginning? Why didn’t they start with free-to-play? There’s a reason behind that. With free-to-play, because you’re selling these items, you’ll have months where you sell a bunch of stuff and you make a lot of money in that one month. But it’s all about what happens during that month. Next month, the person who maybe bought $100 worth of items in the last month could purchase nothing at all. You don’t know what you’re going to be getting, and because you don’t know what you’re going to be getting, you can’t plan ahead. You don’t know how much money is coming in. If you can’t plan ahead, then you can’t keep staff, because you don’t know if you’ll have enough money to pay the staff next month.

With a subscription base, if you get maybe 400,000 members, you know that you’re going to have the money from that monthly subscription for the next month. You also know that you’re going to have 400,000 this month, and it’s not going to go down to 200,000 users next month. That type of jump really doesn’t happen with a subscription model. So you know that you’re going to have a steady income. Because you have a steady income, you can plan ahead further. You can make sure you have staff members to create that new content. By creating new content, you’re making the players happy. If they know this game is going to keep creating new content, they’ll continue to pay their monthly subscription fees. So rather than going for the huge $100-million-a-month hit that you might get with the free-to-play model, having that steady income allows us to provide a better product to the players.

Now, you have Blizzard and you have Square Enix. We’re the only two companies in the industry, basically, that are making MMOs with our own money. That gives us an advantage, because where other companies have to get money from investors and have to pay that back, we don’t have a lot of time to build slowly and be able to pay that back. Investors want their returns right away. With Square Enix and Blizzard, because we’re putting our own money into it, we don’t have those investors to worry about, and that means we can release something and maybe take a little bit of a hit at the beginning, but as long as we’re increasing the amount of people we have, then we’ll get that money and make the players happy. We’ll get into that cycle I talked about before, where we’re creating good content and have that steady income to keep the cycle going.

With version 1.0, even though we call it a failure, we still had a user base. During the time that we were developing this game, 2.0, we were able to increase the amount of subscribers threefold as well. Again, it takes time. It takes showing the users that we’re really into this and giving them that new content. But we’re able to see a rise there. That’s what we’re looking for in this. Again, we’re not saying—The market didn’t change. It’s that there are two different types of models. Choosing the model that’s right for your product and being successful with that is what’s important. We believe that the bigger the game, the larger the scale of the MMO, it’s going to be better for the game if it’s on a subscription model.

That’s why you see a lot of companies that chose the subscription model, that wanted to do what we were doing, but were forced to free-to-play. They didn’t go to free-to-play by choice, because if that was the case, they would have gone free-to-play at the beginning. They’d develop it for free-to-play, not full subscription, instead of being forced to go free-to-play. We hear a lot of people saying, “Star Wars is free-to-play now, it’s great!” But then you ask them if they’re playing free-to-play Star Wars and they say, “No, not really playing it.” Everyone talks about how great it is that it went free-to-play, but then you ask around and really, there aren’t that many people who are playing it since it’s gone free-to-play. If you spend all that money on a game ,release it, and it’s filled with bugs and you don’t have enough time to do your updates, people will leave. Players need that new content. Not being able to provide it is fatal. If they were able to produce as much content as players wanted, then people would have stayed there. We don’t really believe it’s a problem with the business model. It’s how that’s handled.

The rest of his interview is here:

http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/17/the-f ... interview/

He's quite happy to pick out the problems with 1.0 and his own game. Glad this guy's in charge.


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 Post subject: Re: Reasons to play FFXIV A Realm Reborn
PostPosted: Wed Aug 07, 2013 11:18 am 
Onionhead
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From the player perspective, I personally would only play a subscription-based game. I've tried some of the free-to-play cash-shop games like Dream of Mirror, Flyff, Ronan, Order & Chaos, Diablo 3. They are only fun for a few weeks, until you reach the point where you need to start forking out money in order to advance. And there is no upper limit on how much money you need to pay. If you pay $20 for an item, it might get you so far, but then you'll need to pay more. And you'll need to pay for little things like exp scrolls, potions, cosmetics, and it really adds up. That model SUCKS from the player perspective.

But yet, I hear people arguing FOR that model from the player perspective. It's people who don't have much time, but do have a lot of money to waste. They want to play for 3 hours a week but throw their money at the game and miraculously be superior to players who invest more time. That makes sense from their perspective, but those kind of players ruin the game for the rest of us. I don't want to even be in the same game as them, ever.

So that's a huge selling point for me for FFXIV. It's a beacon of stability in an otherwise crumbling gaming world. I mean heck look at the iPhone games, there used to be lots of fun games to pick from, and now 99% of them are free-to-suck / pay-to-win games that I hate.

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 Post subject: Re: Reasons to play FFXIV A Realm Reborn
PostPosted: Wed Aug 07, 2013 11:27 am 
Crumpet
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Free to play games, not necessarily MMOs, annoy me a lot because there's no way to just pay $60 and get everything. Getting all of the content in many "free" to play games will easily run you hundreds of dollars, and that's before you throw in all the "pay to win", or worse, "pay to play for more than a couple minutes" consumables. I don't mind games where all the micro-transactions are nothing but vanity gear and costumes and stuff, but those games are very far and few between.

Having a subscription is also handy as a way to help keep the riff raff out.

Free to play games are notorious for being littered with children who can't actually use credit cards, and assholes who do nothing but grief other people because there's no repercussions for doing so (just make a new account once you get banned).

I was glad when Everquest Next got announced. All the people whining about this game not being free to play can just go play that instead now.


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 Post subject: Re: Reasons to play FFXIV A Realm Reborn
PostPosted: Wed Aug 07, 2013 11:43 am 
Onionhead
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Ketrebu wrote:
Having a subscription is also handy as a way to help keep the riff raff out.


quoted for truth

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 Post subject: Re: Reasons to play FFXIV A Realm Reborn
PostPosted: Thu Aug 08, 2013 12:06 am 
Onionhead
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from the devs (source)
Quote:
in Beta 4, we'll be adding a feature that will allow you to continuously craft a set number of times as long as it’s an item you have crafted previously and you have enough materials

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 Post subject: Re: Reasons to play FFXIV A Realm Reborn
PostPosted: Thu Aug 08, 2013 9:26 am 
Youre a Crappy HNM like Roc or something
Youre a Crappy HNM like Roc or something
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Whisp wrote:
from the devs (source)
Quote:
in Beta 4, we'll be adding a feature that will allow you to continuously craft a set number of times as long as it’s an item you have crafted previously and you have enough materials



I may now take up crafting for real. Nice.

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 Post subject: Re: Reasons to play FFXIV A Realm Reborn
PostPosted: Thu Aug 08, 2013 7:23 pm 
Youre a Crappy HNM like Roc or something
Youre a Crappy HNM like Roc or something
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Whisp wrote:
Ketrebu wrote:
Having a subscription is also handy as a way to help keep the riff raff out.


quoted for truth



It's clearly not 100% effective though

viewtopic.php?f=61&t=14107


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 Post subject: Re: Reasons to play FFXIV A Realm Reborn
PostPosted: Thu Aug 08, 2013 10:03 pm 
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 Post subject: Re: Reasons to play FFXIV A Realm Reborn
PostPosted: Thu Aug 08, 2013 10:11 pm 
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