Gonna rant about FFXIV since I'm bored. You've been warned.So I had a think about the state of FFXIV at the moment, and I decided that I'm actually sort of angry about it. I'm actually not angry about the game being crappy though, I'm angry about Square Enix themselves and the way they've been dealing with it. Specifically how god damn long it's taking them.
I was a pretty strong advocate for SE's chance to turn this game around at the start of this year, I knew it was a big task but I was certain they could slowly fix things as time went on. But recently even I can't support them anymore. The big problem here is
speed. This is what I can't get my head around. I've tried to think it over again and again but I simply cannot imagine what the hell is taking them so long to fix and add tiny things that would improve the game several times over.
The last "real" patch was 1.17, back in April. It's now June. That's
2 months since anything of any substance whatsoever was added to the game. It wasn't even that substantial as I recall, a bunch of mid-range NMs and a few more sidequests. Unless this magical "mid-June patch" is something completely amazing, introducing all the different things they've teased in the past few months (new battle system, auto attack, job system, materia system, dungeon/raid system, companies)
all at once (and I really doubt we'll see half of that stuff in this upcoming patch). It's simply going to be
too little too late.
I don't understand how they can spend months with an entire dev team programming something I'm certain I could implement all by myself in under a week. This so called "battle system overhaul" we're supposedly waiting for is really just a bunch of tweaks to the system plus one major mechanics change which is auto attack.
That major change though, I could add to the game myself in under a week seriously. Attacks by the client are already commanded by the server after you make the request by prssing "1". All you need is a timer on the server that sends that "swing sword" to you automatically every X seconds based upon the weapon, as well as performing the damage calculations it would be doing anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if this could be implemented in a day.
The rest of the battle system changes are just tweaks to the numbers and algorithsm that go on invisibly behind the scenes. For the most part it's just changing numbers or a few conditional statements. Here, allow me to fix the battle system by making it more like FFXI:
- Make abilities send their usage request to the server without bothering to check stamina: 10 minute job.
- Change the server to not bother checking how much stamina someone has: 5 minute job.
- Hide the stamina bar on the client since it's not needed any more: 5-10 minute job.
- Decrease TP given by attacks. Add a negative multiplier somewhere: 10 minute job.
- Make TP moves stronger to compensate. Again, could be done with a configurable multiplier. Or you could change the base damage number on each ability manually: 5-30 minute job.
And there, just one programmer made a major fix to the battle system in barely a single day's work.
There's so much stuff in this game that could be fixed by tweaking a bunch of numbers and algorithms on the server, yet is somehow taking months to fix, it's quite stupid. The
hard parts are already done: network communication, server-side clustering and load balancing, server-side battle processing engine, enemy AI routines, client 3d rendering engine, etc. They have a fully working game engine here, the hard part is done.
I appreciate that creating 3d models and art assets, motion capture, cutscene creation, translation and localization, new zones and things like that takes time. That said, I'm pretty certain a single art guy could be pumping out a big NM or a new armor set every week, and then consider they're likely to have a whole team of them. Although the lack of content is a real problem with this game right now it's just not what I'm most annoyed about. I'm annoyed about all the small things in this game that could be patched up quickly to help get the game going more smoothly. Here's just a few I can think of:
- Chocobos. Why exactly is this taking so long? Because they think chocobos should have some other purpose that they didn't even think about yet? Who cares, just put them in the game and add your new fangled gimmick later. They already have animations and 3d models for this, they literally just need to add a "Chocobo" status effect that makes you run 100% faster and have the client render anybody with this status effect on top of a chocobo. Why exactly does this need to wait over 9 months to be added!? It would take a couple of days to get working together with the art assets with a couple people, maybe a few more days to add renting NPCs and localizing them and stuff.
- Full-screen alt-tab. Why is this still broken? It's not some kind of anti-cheating thing like they tried to pass it off as in FFXI, because they let us play windowed. I've written this kind of code myself. It's a bunch of API calls to DirectX to make it prepare the video card for rendering to, and admittedly it can get pretty complex. But you know what? You'll already have this stuff already written into a function that's called when your game is first started! All the game needs to do is call the function again once it gets focus again. This isn't rocket science. Instead of killing the game if the DirectX handle is lost, you simply disable all graphics rendering until Windows sends you focus again, at which point you call the API function and then re-enable rendering. This is seriously an hour or two fix at most.
- Linkshell management. Where is it? Why is it not here? Why can't we set a message of the day and why can't we break pearls of people not online? I could understand slightly somewhat if they simply don't have the time to design and implement a new UI window for the linkshell menu. So why exactly can't it just be some text commands!? Nobody is going to begrudge the game if you have to type a text command to break someone's offline pearl. This shit would take an hour to add, I cant believe this still isn't in the game after 9 months. And why can't you talk on multiple pearls even though you can equip them!? The chat channels are already numbered, why the hell can't we just type /1 /2 /3 instead of /L to type a message on a particular channel!?
- Player searching. The server already knows where every single person on the server is, what jobs they're on, and what they're doing. I appreciate this one would take longer due to the UI that would need to go with it, but would this seriously take so long to implement? Just copy the text command parsing code you used for FFXI's /sea function, and have it dump the results into a scrollable list like the one that appears on the item search counter. A programmer or two could have this added in a week surely. Add another player state "looking for party" like in FFXI, just re-use the already existing /afk code, and you've got yourself a workable grouping system.
- The armory system. Honestly I blame most of this problem on the two "basically the same" mage classes, and I know they've come up with the "job system" for this. But it shouldn't have taken so long to get here. You want to stop people levelling all the jobs just for their good abilities and making everyone a bunch of self-sufficient identical hybrids? You make it cost 2 or 3 times more action points to equip abilities that don't belong to your class. That way you have to really think hard about whether it's worth using another classes ability. How long would it take to implement something like this? About 5 minutes.
- Content. I didn't want to touch on this too much, because things like new zones/dungeons etc do take a hell of a lot of time and resources, which is why this stuff is usually kept for expansion packs and stuff. But come on, it wouldn't be that difficult to add a bunch of "end-game" stuff, anything, to keep people occupied with while they wait. Add a bunch of HNMs on top of the first three you added 6 months ago. A small art/3d team could come up with one every week or two surely? Then another team can make some new armor and weapon models for them to drop. You could even reuse, resize, and recolor models for a lot of them. Just so you could add something to the game instead of months of nothing to do except exping.
This stuff shouldn't take 9 months. Not with a development team of 100 people, seriously, internal re-structure or not. This is my main gripe, how long it's taking. I could deal with the game being crappy. Like a lot of us here, we've dealt with it for almost a year now if you include beta. But they've been so slow and barely adding or fixing anything, and staying radio silent for so long that even an advocate like me just can't put up with them anymore.
It's infuriating to hear about them "planning" "examining" and "looking into" stuff still. They had time to do that stuff back in December/January! Seeing a forum post detailing what they're "
planning to do with the battle system" 5 months later is deciding to join the party after everyone already went home. We all complained about "Tanaka's Vision", but at least he had one. I worry here that the new producer lacks it and that's why everything is taking so long to implement. I imagine they must be spending half of their time each week just arguing on how they think they should do things and then backtracking on it and restarting from scratch after reading all the confusing misaligned opinions all over the official forum.
And then there's this recent radio silence. What's going on here? Why so quiet? Outside of some terrible Q&A on their forum, and a bunch of roleplaying lore foreshadowing nonsense that ultimately amounted to nothing, we've heard almost nothing from them. If they had anything interesting to show off they'd be showing it off and talking about it. Once upon a time I used to refresh the Lodestone every day at work at 10AM because that's when they'd post new topics on upcoming news and features for the latest patches.
But recently we've had barely anything. At first I thought they might be holding out for some kind of big E3 reveal, but that's come and gone. Either the patch isn't close to being done yet or they've got nothing worth showing. No sane person could possibly think their radio silence strategy is a good idea. People are getting fed up and leaving due to having no content for months (and practically nothing to do but EXP for 9 months), so they should be trying to hype people to keep them interested, but we're not seeing that and people are slowly drifting away.
I actually want to be wrong. If the new patch turns out amazing I'll quite happily come back here and ridicule myself. But if this patch they've made people wait months for is anything short of amazing it'll be the end of them.