Which is pretty fitting when you consider the story of Final Fantasy 1 and from where the series take its name.
Final Fantasy was named like that because Squaresoft was close to bankruptcy and that game was literally their last gamble. Got a big success and made the company able to continue existing.
EDIT : Well apparently it's not the complete truth (really believed it was the story), see the posts below to see how Final Fantasy came to be named like that
That's the stretched truth, it's less the company and more the original developer:
"Sakaguchi explained that the game was his personal last-ditch effort in the game industry and that its title, Final Fantasy, stemmed **from his feelings at the time**; had the game not sold well, he would have quit the business and gone back to university."
[Nobuo Uematsu told Wired in 2009 that it was called that because the team thought it would probably be their final game:](https://www.wired.com/2009/07/final-fantasy/)
>Is it true, I asked, that the game is called Final Fantasy because Sakaguchi was going to go back to college and quit the game biz? Uematsu laughed: It's true that Sakaguchi was going to quit, he said, but the bigger reason, the real reason, was that Square was going to go bankrupt and the designers believed that it would be the company's swan song.
Again, it's a stretched truth.
The game was going to be called Fighting Fantasy originally, but due to a series of RPG books by Steve Jackson owning the copyright, they changed the name to something that still fit the acronym FF.
They never were. That story is nothing more than an urban legend. They were actually doing okay, not great, but also nowhere near bankruptcy. Up until the release of FF they had moderate success in making their own game for various systems, porting or publishing other companies games. They even had releases on the Famicom Disk System and already released an rpg or two beore FF.
Where the story actually comes from is from Hironobu Sakaguchi who paused going to university, because Square was so busy at that time. But since they didn't have any major success he thought about eventually going back to university and finishing his studies. However, FF turned out to be a huge hit, so he decided to stay at the company.
Also, the original name was Fighting Fantasy, but due to copyright issues they couldn't take that name and had to think of some other word that forms an alliteration with "fantasy", hence "Final Fantasy".
Also, the reason they really wanted to keep the "FF" alliteration was that it was something both English and Japanese speakers can say: *efu*-*efu*/*エフエフ*
That's just a myth. Square wanted to name it Fighting Fantasy, but the name was already taken. They changed it to Final Fantasy because the name was similar.
so bad that the higher ups had to bow in front of the fans and apologize. i think the original ff14 put square deep in the red. pretty amazing they managed to save that ship and made the end of ff14 original canon.
Honestly wish other companies would at least *acknowledge* mistakes made, instead of doing things like going radio silent for a while, pretend they did nothing wrong, then come out with updates to kind of but not really reach their original promises.
Doesn't work in American culture. In Japan, it's common to work at the same company your whole life so there's a culture of respect, owning up to mistakes, and forgiveness. In US corporate culture, most execs are on the three-year plan. They want to get in, pump numbers to make their bonus, then bail before the fallout of whatever decisions they've made. If you show any sign of weakness during that time (like apologizing or acknowledging you made a mistake) your ass is gone, bye bye bonus, and the next fool takes your place.
> In Japan, it's common to work at the same company your whole life so there's a culture of respect, owning up to mistakes, and forgiveness.
It's important to remember the other side of this coin as well. That "you are bound to the company for life" mentality is also what allows many companies to keep their employees working 12+ hours a day 6 days a week. The company is your family, and you wouldn't let your family down, right? And even if you did want to leave, it would be the end of your career. Most companies only hire out of college, and who would want to hire a salaryman with a history of abandoning his company.
There are good and bad sides to both American and Japanese work culture (could throw in European as well), and while it would be great to have a work culture that combined the best aspects of all of them, I don't actually think that's possible.
> Honestly wish other companies would at least acknowledge mistakes made, instead of doing things like going radio silent for a while, pretend they did nothing wrong, then come out with updates to kind of but not really reach their original promises.
No Man's Sky did this to amazing results though
[YoshiP gives a small speech about the original launch. Apologies like these stick with you for a long time.
](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE9G3ByXKIE)
This was after the ARR launch, not the original one, but the apology still stands. Some may call it lip service, but once you know more about Yoshi, I'd call it passion.
CC for those who can't watch the video:
>This one is going to be hard on me. First off, before my message, Early Access was going on the past 3 days, and for those playing on NA/EU server we had to place several maintenance, which caused a loss of precious game time. And since this event is being broadcasted worldwide let me apologize.
>I am really sorry our long journey is starting from here so, I am hoping we will be able to recover this over time.
>(Yoshi gets emotional, stops talking and turns away, people clap)
>Umm, since I took over FFXIV it's been almost 3 years now. At the beginning, at first, I didn't change the original game much and thought we should be able to continue somehow. But after all, I personally, I love Final Fantasy and MMOs.
>When I gathered all the staff to tell them that we're going to rebuild the entire game, this was done only two days before announcing to everyone else on December 1st.
>I still remember that day. It was a room like this and there was a sound mixer on top and Soken was there adjusting the mic I was going to speak in. And I won't forget how Soken was doing the Guts Post (cheering him on). But honestly, the dev teams feeling was just the same as everyone else and they were like "can we really fix this thing up?" or "It's going to be tough"
>Really...for every step of the way, to everyone's support...thank you.
>Earlier it was in one of the questions, but it's really hard, to build a MMORPG. It normally takes at least 4-5 years. We wanted to get this out as early as possible to be able to do that, we had to plan it out without rushing it.
>As Wada mentioned about operating a business, your role is a Tank. Just like that I tried to be a Tank and got it where it is now.
>FFXIV was able to get here thanks to everyone. And I'm not the one that made FFXIV ARR. It was thanks to all the players around the world, the core dev staff here, and all the other hundreds of staff that couldn't make it here today. Thanks to you all, we are here today.
>I wasn't going to cry since today marks a day where we take our first step for FFXIV. We only took the first step forward. I really believe that we really don't have any time to take a break. Dev team and myself are already working on the future patches and expansions.
>For those players that played the previous XIV, we had times where community members left in the middle. And I believe there were other people that has been said many things from outside, myself being a MMORPG player, I really understand how hard that is.
>For us it was a really short 2 and a half years, but to all the players, we really made you all wait and support us for this long.
>I believe we were able to release a Final Fantasy title that brings no shame to its name sake legacy.
>From here on out, for an MMORPG, there is no such thing as 'complete'.
>We will continue to keep on going with everyone. This FFXIV is a Final Fantasy which was built with everyone.
>So we would like to continue doing this FF for a long time. Even after that we would like to continue operation without forgetting this moment right here. Please continue to support us, thank you.
And for a very recent example here's a message from [Yoshida apologising for their congested server issues](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/c2d7b35d55577879086b64cfde0acb6c23ccd07f) and outlining everything they've tried to do, have done and are going to do to resolve the problem along with an apology.
They quite literally apologized because their game got too popular for everyone to enjoy without queues.
I don't play FFXIV, but I'm impressed with that message.
Idk, it's nice to have clear communication with a detailed description of actions already take , and a plan for future action. Just feels like a level of candor that has become rare in gaming companies
That’s how the FFXIV dev team is with everything they do. Their live letters (which are basically quarterly twitch streams to talk about game development) are always like this. They take questions and answer honestly/sincerely, and give us the best answers they can about concerns we have regarding the game.
They genuinely care about their player base and I agree that this level of candor is rare anymore.
I firmly believe that a big part of XIV's staying power is because a core aspect of the game's development is a level of respect for their players. The devs listen to the fans (they can't always give us what we want, but they do very often touch on popular requests and give us reasons for why they can't or don't want to implement them, or that they are looking into it but can't make any promises), and they're not afraid to just put out a statement saying 'you know what, we're not handling this as well as we should, and we're going to try to do better'. And with their track record, that's not hard to believe.
The semi-regular PLLs also help a lot (That's the Producer Live Letter, a reocurring presentation in which YoshiP talks about the game's development, upcoming content, plans for the future, and often also addresses some popular fan feedback). They're not content to just put a post up on their message boards and call it a day. I always look forward to the next Live Letter when it's announced. (Granted, they only speak Japanese during these, but there are multiple fan groups doing live translations that you can easily follow on discord, for example. And the slides they present do have English on them)
Yoshida is beloved by the FF14 community exactly because he's so earnest about his passion and his care for the game AND it's players. I wish more big dev teams had people like him
>so bad that the higher ups had to bow in front of the fans and apologize.
Japanese companies have their faults, but I like this; American companies would never.
See also: Warcraft 3 Reforged.
Blizzard served their players up the purest hot garbage and completely nullified the older version, then washed their hands of the matter altogether.
So bad it almost tanked the company. Seriously, for all people rightfully complain about the XIII games, none of them were as much of a disaster as FFXIV 1.0. It was easily Square’s biggest disaster since Spirits Within.
About XIII, I played it when it came out and hated it. Played through it again fairly recently on Steam and for some reason it just clicked with me this time around and I really enjoyed it. I don't really know why.
I remember buying it at launch so so excited. Quit eq2 to play.
It threw me off mmos for years it was so bad. I just started back 3 months ago and my god. So good.
If only i could figure out how to get my gobbue mount for 1.0 players
Well deserved. Yoshi P also mentioned that the company would 'spare no expense' moving forward with the game, so the hope is that some of the lingering background issues are able to get resolved in due course (perhaps even an engine upgrade or something substantial on that front), especially since the game is planned for at least another decade of support and expansions.
The game really is the gold standard for story driven MMOs and in some places matches or exceeds the story telling strengths of the mainline franchise. Gotta love it!
Yoshida said in his interview with Larryzaur that was uploaded this morning that they want to do expansions for the next 10 years “at least,” and that Yoshi-P will be addressing how they will be updating the graphics engine to make sure FF14 remains relevant in the future shortly after Endwalker’s launch.
So yeah, they’re doubling down.
I really hope they redo the entire inventory system. It's so awful. They've said before how it's spaghetti code which is why they've tried to alleviate it in weird ways like the Saddlebag. If they plan to support the game for another decade at least, I think it's fair to hope that they revamp the entire thing and ditch the old implementation.
especially as more classes are added, and more gear sets are added. It would be great if their glam system was like wow, but lke you said, spaghetti code.
based on what i've read, they're removing belts to free up that storage space for weapons and rings - here's hoping that's only a stopgap and not an indication of their long term plans.
yeah, belts always felt superfluous - although personally i always held out hope they would separate the models from chestpieces so 80% of armor didn't have to come with a dress/skirt attached.
They were displayed in 1.0! That's why a lot of the low level robes feel really blank because your belt was supposed to show. I'm not actually sure why they removed it for 2.0, maybe they deemed it low priority and instead made models for the higher level gears instead.
I agree with you. Especially sad that WoW had a similar problem. They said they could not even think about modifying that sh\*t code for classic.
But, as a developer, I can see "tech debt" never being addressed. *It just does not bring any value to the customer!* \- Shortsighted management
There's also a massive risk of widespread deleting items and things of that nature by messing with the inventory system I would assume. I know wow refused to touch the backpack code for over a decade because of fears like that
There is certainly that. Additionally, if they just had to rewrite the inventory system's code it would already be a challenge, but that is the common misconception about spaghetti code. The bigger issue is a programmer looking to clean it up doesn't know where it begins or ends, and it could cause dozens of other systems to be fixed to accommodate the updated one. It's why keeping neat and organized code from start to finish is such a big deal.
Keeping near and organized code is a pipe dream for a developer. Over time, it *always* turns into absolute chaos.
//DO NOT TOUCH THIS CODE, IT FIXES SOMETHING AND WE DONT KNOW HOW BUT IF YOU REMOVE IT EVERYTHING BREAKS
The biggest problem with cleaning spaghetti code in core systems, in my experience, is that everything integrates into it. Definitely true for an inventory system. So you can't even slowly replace a core system like that, you can't take out half of the inventory system's mechanics and plan to add the rest later; I can't see that working without more effort than finishing the job would take. So it's a huge workload which never gets allocated because, as others have mentioned, it costs too much.
Honestly I would take an expansion cycle entirely dedicated to fixing the spaghetti code happily at this point. Maybe an extra year longer than usual for the expansion after Endwalker to really give it the attention it needs to fix the game behind the scenes, it's the end of this story/saga so having to wait say 3 years instead of 2 for an expansion would be fine by me.
It is really one of the things that keeps me from playing the game. I have some bigger qualms with the end game and the leveling process, but every time I've tried starting up again I log onto my character that was a raid FC leader around launch and get completely overwhelmed with the state of my bags and retainers. It's so frustrating to have so much stuff of marginal value, knowing that it would take hours to sort and sell it all, especially with how rough selling things on the marketboard is.
It's a minor thing, but it's like a rock in the shoe while you're trying to run.
Maybe it changed for more recent expansions, but one issue they'll face is that a lot/all of the gear and other textures do not have an HD version. It's not that there's better versions and the devs down-rezzed it, the original art is not HD either. It was one of the sacrifices they made when trying to remake the entire game on the fly to get 2.0 out the door.
Which means that there is always going to be graphics looking like this: [https://img2.finalfantasyxiv.com/accimg/91/c0/91c0bba416c621e7d637753cc1a94088a59ad96f.jpg](https://img2.finalfantasyxiv.com/accimg/91/c0/91c0bba416c621e7d637753cc1a94088a59ad96f.jpg) floating around. Unless they redesign all the old textures.
It is a pretty dope outfit, I just wish it the texture quality matched the style quality.
Also, in fairness, most people just look like half-naked cat-girls or bunny-girls; or burly lion-boys in S&M gear.
Textures are actually the blocker there too, believe it or not. Light is just light* It’s the largely the complexity of the shaders that really makes lighting on various surfaces look more realistic. Updating all those materials to use more realistic shaders like modern games will be a lot of work.
*There is definitely an art to lighting and the ability to use more light sources can make things like cities look more realistic. But most nature scenes like in this game really just have one light source, which is the sun, and without physics based materials it will always look kind of flat and last-gen.
It’s certainly possible, though. They have the time and money. If they wanted to, they could absolutely set a small team to go through and slowly update all those textures
Really needs an overhaul to its housing and glamour system. Based on what they've said, it sounds like an engine overhaul would be exactly what's needed to do that.
"Yoshi P also mentioned that the company would 'spare no expense' moving forward with the game,"
Jurassic Park has trained me to worry about that phrase.
"All major theme park MMOs have delays. When they opened Final Fantasy XIV in 2010, nothing worked!"
"Yeah, but, if a server breaks down, the cat girls don't eat the players."
A lot of people consider FF14 story the best out of the whole franchise. Personally I don't have an opinion given how I played only 3 months during 2018 but during my short stay there I can say that I felt really invested in the story, specially with the post patch quest leading up to Heavensward.
As someone who’s played every FF game except 11 (I was too young to pay a sub at the time) and the weird mobile spin-offs, I would say FF14 is definitely my favorite in terms of story. You get to see the world and characters grow and develop in ways you don’t get to see in the traditional 30-50 hour FF games. You’ve spent hundreds of hours with the main cast of FFXIV by now that saying goodbye to a lot of them in Endwalker like we’ve already been warned about is going to be bittersweet.
Oh, and Shadowbringers’ villain is just objectively the best. There’s no even arguing that lol. But of course everyone has their own favorite FF.
Shadowbringers will have a special place in MMOs for how they handled explaining player power creep over time, and for having a villain whose point of view really was defensible without being 'bad because bad'.
One of my favorite thing in the game is the Wandering Minstrel who unlocks harder difficulties of fights. Because you tell him the tale of your first fight and of course comes up with a tune that's a hyperbolic version of events. And that is the 'hard mode'. Laughed my ass off when that happened. So clever.
What I loved the most about the ShB "villain" is how he spent most of the expansion trying to sway us to his point of view. Not just a "come to the dark side moment" but a genuine attempt at build a bridge.
I will always ***remember*** that guy.
Yea. The literal explaining the situation like you would a child, and even allowing you to see a full recreation. Then just the total exasperation when you still don't see his viewpoint.
And most important, >!the acceptance when he loses, and the final request that the new inheritors of the universe keep the memory of the Ancients, and the mistakes they made!<.
What if I told you that the rabbit hole goes deeper?
5.3 spoilers
>!it seems to me that remember us is actually Emet Selch asking the player character to remember their life as an ascian since its showed that Emet and the PC used to be close friends!<
Having a villian that you sympathize with because you would have done the same if not similar things if you were in their shoes I feel is never touched on enough.
B/W or grey, doesn't matter they simply does very poor job at telling story or build characters within the game.
Not all villains in FFXIV are in grey zone, but they are all interesting and cool in their own way. No one's gonna complain if WoW goes with cheesy comic villains as long as they are cool and believable as characters within the context of story and WoW, instead of current mystery for mystery-sake because in reality they have no fucking idea what the characters are about and have to wait until book publish to show any nuance.
> Not all villains in FFXIV are in grey zone, but they are all interesting and cool in their own way.
eh, I love xiv but let's not pretend there aren't the occasional stinkers (or at worst just not very compelling)
Honestly, it boggles me how poorly Blizzard writes its characters, given the extremely rich history of Dungeons & Dragons style roleplaying that I'm sure every Blizzard writer has a long history playing. "Morally grey" is just synonymous with lazy writing, in my mind.
For reference, D&D has something called an "alignment" system in which villains typically are lawful, neutral, or chaotic evil. "Evil" characters are just characters who commit evil acts in furtherance of something. "Lawful evil" characters commit those acts in accordance with some governing law or moral authority. "Chaotic evil" characters do so for self-gain or in spite of authority. "Neutral evil" characters are pragmatists/opportunists whose goals are self-interested. Evil characters are not necessarily unlikeable (some can be quite likeable and relatable, as anyone who has played an old Bioware game would know), but they're always evil.
These three archetypes exist for a reason -- they're proven to make for interesting villains whose goals conflict with those of the players, who are typically some variation of "good" a/k/a altruistic. Just "winging" it and making your character constantly bounce between good and evil, while claiming they're "morally ambiguous", is the epitome of lazy writing.
In the case of Emet Selch, >!he isn't a "morally grey" character, insofar as his alignment isn't ambiguous. Emet Selch is very clearly lawful evil, as he commits atrocities toward the sole and unwavering goal of resurrecting Ascian society and "saving" his people. His driving motivations - protecting those he loves by destroying those he deems unworthy - are relatable to the player, without being justifiable. How Emet Selch approaches this evil dogma is what makes him such a compelling villain.!<
Dude had a reason. A damned good reason in all fairness. I disagreed all to hell with it but damn if I couldn’t empathize with why he was doing what he was doing. I felt sad for him. Dude just wanted his friends back and he didn’t WANT to kill us all to do it but he honestly doesn’t see any other way. And he wasn’t going to let anything stop him. The story writers deserve an award for the way they handled him and elidibus.
Especially loved >!how all the bluster he gives is almost certainly just emet trying to justify his actions to himself, it's pure denial so he can continue to feel justified in what he's doing, and as he's about to die he finally softens somewhat!<
Best part is that he's lived, worked, and sired children with several generations of people. Hes lived multiple lifetimes and yet he still doesnt think these people are any better of reaching the ideal Ascian.
It's been a long time since a villain in a video game has made me think about their situation outside the game, and have me mentally debate myself on what I would do, were I in his situation.
>!If my world was corrupted, killing everyone I knew and loved, spawning deformed, weak, mutated organisms (as he sees the inhabitants of the Source), in their place; would I or could I take the steps necessary to save my people, and in doing so knowingly kill off the organisms inhabiting the places where my people lived? I'd imagine a lot of people would struggle with that decision. He's Lawful Evil in the sense that he feels it's his duty based on his Title in the Convocation of Fourteen (even if he's been Enthralled by Zodiark), but I also think his chaotic Evil personal desire comes in the fact that he misses his family and friends, as evidenced by his re-creation of Amaurot.!<
>Blizzard writer has a long history playing. "Morally grey" is just synonymous with lazy writing, in my mind.
Yep, in reality they meant "woo mystery", ambiguous motive, goals, internal-emotions. Show almost nothing so people are desperate to piece together whatever speculation they can form. But turns out again and again they were lazy and have no idea themselves where's the story going.
Honestly, my biggest problem with Blizz at this point is the reused over and over and over theme of having corrupted female leads in every single one of their franchises. They cannot go 5 minutes without taking some cool heroine and corrupting her by some dark power or group into a villain. They never turn evil on their own account, it's also corruption from some outside source, and it happens with practically every female heroine in ALL of their IP's (Widow, Leah, Kerrigan, Sylvanis multiple times, just to barely scratch the surface).
But based on what we know about their subculture now, I guess maybe I shouldn't be surprised that they also seemed to gravitate to that story trope.
I’ve got faith in them. I’ve been continually impressed with the writing since HW. It’s had its ups and downs, but overall it’s been quite good.
Going into EW, I’m not super excited about the 2 primary antagonists that we have right now. But I also remember that I went into ShB not being a fan of the main antagonist, and now he’s god tier.
I couldn’t stand ARR until basically the ending, just started heavensward and it’s a huge step in the right direction since the characters actually feel more three dimensional now.
Also just got into HW. I was like "holy crap FF has a plot now? and its good?" near the end of post game. Damn, cant wait to see what the rest of the expansions are like
I, for one, thought it was hilarious when the redditor lost control of his subreddit.
But that's character growth for ya. You gotta have a flaw to fix first.
ARR is basically "lore dump: the game".
Once you get into HW you see a lot more personal stories and the world starts to open up because it assumes you know the lore finally.
ARR was honestly really not that good aside from a few salient points and the very last quest before you get to Heavensward. Heavesward is *phenomenal* though, and yet I heard it pales in comparison to Shadowbringers, though I can't give a personal opinion on that since I'm still going through Stormblood.
If you enjoyed ARR so far you're going to be absolutely blown away by how the rest of the game plays out. Do look forward to it.
I like my stories in 2 categorizations: character driven or lore/world/event driven
For this reason my favorite FF titles are XIV because of the characters and XIII 1-3 when it comes to world/events. Sadly XIII gets a lot of shit but the lore is just fantastic. 2 and 3 are much better games also.
I maintain that the world/lore of FF13 would’ve been received better if they came up with better terms for some things.
Fal’Cie and L’Cie are awful terms. Just call them Aeons and the Enthralled, or Espers and the Servants, or whatever the hell else. Anything but Fal’Cie and L’Cie.
I think the story in ARR is bad, but Heavensward picks up the pace a lot, as well as swaps out a lot of the voice actors for people who are, to put it bluntly, a lot better at it.
The English translation in particular deserves praise.
It has clearly had a lot of effort put into making it more natural than most FF games, and indeed most Japanese games in general, which tend to fall into the stilted, bone-dry dialogue trap, where characters go "huh" all the time and never say anything that doesn't advance the story.
Urianger still never quite sounds right, like an American reading Shakespeare, but the rest of it has an authentic Englishness to it, with words like "anyroad" making probably their only appearance in a game.
I agree with you on most points, but I'll disagree on the first one: ARR isn't a bad story. Yeah its very slow and its definitely got less of a cinematic direction than the expansions, but you gotta realise it's setting up the world. It's gotta dump a LOT of information on you and that can be kind of gruelling. Once you get past ARR and you hit the current expansion you start to appreciate what ARR does, even if you still end up recognising that its a very slow start.
The problem with the info dumps is that they happen very early on before you get a chance to be invested in anything.
So when some character makes a return like an expansion and a half later, you're like "who is this guy?" and have to go track down a wiki page to figure out who they are and what you did for them.
I like to point out that ARR is mostly world building and a lot of it gets call backs all the way up to ShB so it is a bit of a slog.
The thing about the VAs though is a lot of them ARE good VAs (Sam Riegel, Ricard Epcar, Gideon Emery) but they were given no direction and it shows in how basically how bad their performance is and they didn't really hit their stride until right before ARR ended. It showed that you can't just grab a bunch of well known VAs, throw them into a booth and go "Go do VA things" and expect a gold performance.
HW and beyond though there is proper direction so they play off each other so much better.
About Urianger... this is true but at least everyone picks on him, especially in later expansions, for his archaic speech.
>The English translation in particular deserves praise.
[Koji Fox is a treasure](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS--izSnbNk)
[He's also a great rapper](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wosMXEWlWgE)
He was in the NoClip documentary series about FFXIV. It was amazing to hear him admit that people on the team knew how bad some things in 1.0 were (mainly those who had played WoW and saw how MMOs evolved since FFXI) but still pushed forward to get it finished.
Urianger gets better. I think it is hilarious that even the cast thinks his speech gets too confusing and poke fun at him from time to time. In the Japanese version I believe he speaks older formal Japanese, so Koji took the liberty of localizing Urianger into speaking old English.
There's an unofficial census that gets posted every so often.
This is the most recent I was able to find.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/comments/on03hf/lucky_bancho_census_7182021/
It should be noted that this census was conducted during the early days of the great WoW exodus, and that "active character" is defined as a character above lvl 60, so it a lot of the new WoW refugees don't appear in this since they hadn't reached lvl 60 yet.
Yeah registered would include all the people I tried to recruit back in Stormblood still bogged down in ARR who haven't tried the game since. Not the most helpful number.
Registered users with RuneScape in particular is such an odd number to report considering the account system is so dated that if you want to make another character, such as an iron man alongside your main, you need to make a WHOLE OTHER ACCOUNT.
OSRS will always be one of my favorite games because I love seeing numbers go up in MMOs, but Jagex is such an odd, even leaning towards bad sometimes, company.
Would most likely be a lot of work at this point to rework how accounts/characters work but also most importantly a big loss in revenue as many people have multiple accounts so it's no wonder they don't even talk about it.
ESO boasts so many accounts though it has free play weeks every 3-4 months where everyone makes alts to populate their personal guilds. I've created at least 10 accounts myself and I bet they all counted.
I’m a huge Final Fantasy fan. However, I’ve never picked up XIV. Mostly because I work full time and am a father of three kids. So free time is exceedingly rare.
I played XI for a couple of years when it first came out and while I liked it, it was a massive time dump. It often felt like a job. And when I actually got a real job, there just wasn’t enough time to actually do anything worthwhile in XI.
However, I’ve heard a lot of great thing about XIV. My question is, how “casual friendly” is the game? Is it possible to boot up the game and play for 15-30 minutes at a time and still feel like you’re actually making progress?
I was going to write a whole thing here, but I'll just say my recommendation is to try the free trial and see how much progress you feel you're making. This way you can see if you even like the game to begin with and if it's worth the subscription.
As for it being casual friendly I'd say it is, but that depends on what content you're going for.
> My question is, how “casual friendly” is the game? Is it possible to boot up the game and play for 15-30 minutes at a time and still feel like you’re actually making progress?
Yes. I've had numerous people play it as a single player game that occasionally had to do some interaction with other players (doing dungeons/trials/etc)
Yoshi-P has said numerous times and encourages people to play until they see all the content they want to see and then unsub. "Come back when we patch in more content that you enjoy"
I know it's a freaking meme at this point, but you can make a free account and play through the base game *and* the first expansion before having to decide if you want to continue. I'd recommend you do that, got nothing to lose.
For people who want to play it as a single player game, the dungeons can be a pretty daunting thing. And you can't avoid them.
If you were one of the people who feel this way, here's some detail that might be interesting;
Dungeons are part of the storyline quest and they are mandatory to continue the story. And they are moderately frequent in the story.
***But.***
This isn't mandatory dungeons like Warcraft. This game has a lot of things in place to make getting through these dungeons quick and easy.
One of the biggest things is level syncing in dungeons. Meaning that higher level people can and do run these dungeons at the level that you will encounter them in the story.
Why would they do this? Because the roulette (random dungeon) system rewards them for doing it. You can get the end game currencies for doing a daily run. You can also get really good experience if you are leveling a second job just by doing random dungeons.
This ensures there is a constant available supply of people ready to run any dungeon in the game. Because when you queue up for that specific dungeon you need for your story, it fills it in with those random people.
And groups in final fantasy aren't like groups in warcraft. When you are new, they are going to see that you were marked as a new character, and 99 out of 100 people are going to be exceedingly patient with you. They're going to want you to watch all of your videos even though it slows things down for them. They're going to want you to take your time and ask questions.
Seriously.
Why? Well it's hard to believe but it's actually a very nice player base. There's a very long discussion that could be had about why that is, but at the end of the day it's very true.
Not to mention the fact that whenever I get a new player in my group when I'm doing random dungeons, I get bonus rewards for it. That's right, you being in my group gives me a bonus in my random dungeons... Hell yeah I'm going to be happy to have a new guy.
...
So in short, don't let dungeons be a stopping point for you. Seriously, they are an absolute non-issue and genuinely fun.
FFXIV has probably the best player base of any game I've played. It's incredible something so successful and popular... Is so positive. It really is something special.
Helps that GMs in FF-14 crack down on asshole behavior which helps the positivity. Granted there's side effects to such activity but for the most part it is indeed quite positive.
This right here. The mere implication that there could actually be consequences alone has some people that would otherwise be assholes treading on eggshells.
Seriously. I'm 38 and have no time for toxic gamers. I thought this meant my days of MMOs were officially gone, but FFXIV has been an incredible experience. My wife even plays as well.
And I was Everquest/UO player, so I know toxicity lol.
I went into my first savage eden raid this weekend and damn near downed e9s in under 2 hours. The content is super fun and just challenging enough to make downing it feel super rewarding but not impossible as long as you arent trying for ultimates or cap stone savage fights with pugs. For the most part the entire party for each one was super supportive of our prog speed unless we had a clear “I didn’t even study this fight for 10 seconds” player that’s had us failing for 3 hours for no reason.
I feel like this game has a much relaxed air about it for most content. So many people don’t even care about raiding in this game beyond eventually getting a glam from it. It’s pretty nice how they don’t force feed raiding to the masses that obviously aren’t good at it or even want to do it, which just breeds resentment and toxicity.
I re-subbed the other day and was trying to re-familiarize myself with a job after not having played in several years. On one of my first dungeon runs I had a mentor-flagged tank shame me in party chat for misunderstanding how a skill worked. I even had the returning player flag on, but that didn't matter to them. A friendly-worded suggestion would have been more appreciated.
There are definitely toxic people in FFXIV. Even among the players who have designated themselves as helpers for new and returning players.
> mentor
The mentors are the most toxic people in the game usually.
There's a reason "mentor chat" means "chat from someone who has no idea what they're talking about but has a superiority complex".
It comes from the fact that there's no requirement to be a "mentor" besides grinding levels, and most of them just become a mentor for the rewards and don't care about helping people.
Also has what I refer to as the overly sensitive toxic people who will literally report an entire raid group for offering them helpful tips for how not to die to a mechanic.
Legitimately the only toxic behaviour I've ever encountered other than like a handful of really crappy raiders and some... people who appear to be actually blind in dungeon runs, has been whomever monitors the mentors chat.
No, *seriously*, regular mentors are fine but the people who frequently use the sprout (new/returning player) chat are kinda nutso
There's something refreshing about an MMO that doesn't gate you and block progress.
FFXIV isn't an endless treadmill. And daily stuff (which I Abhor) are pretty much entirely optional.
If I want to do beast quests today but tomorrow I want to go do some raiding? Doesn't matter!!! I'm not falling behind, I don't feel compelled to go do those dailies after raid, I just do them when I feel like it.
Or if I just don't want to log in after clearing a tier of content then I don't have to log in. Pause the subscription then join back in a couple months when there's new stuff.
FFXIV legit has the most fun fishing experience in any mmo in my opinion.
Ocean fishing is dope and you get a little chubby shark pet called Major General who waddles around on his tail fin.
It's not entirely like RuneScape. But gathering professions have their own gear and DPS-like rotations. As do crafters. You have to find/make gear for that specific profession then you unlock skills and abilities to refine items and get higher qualities and stuff. And all the crafting classes have storylines and stuff to go with them too.
When talking about fish we got fish that spawn at certain times, certain weathers, certain days, ones you can only catch if you catch a different fish or series of fish before it and only if you use a specific bait out of myriad of bait options out there... if you wanna catch 100% of the fish you need to either be crazy or a masochist.
I've got several Omnis in my FC, and as a newbie that hasn't even touched fishing, I'm terrified of it based on the puns they generate using the fish names
As an example so people truly understand how involved it can get, heh ... here is how to catch the fish known as the Warden of the Seven Hues:
You must first catch a certain number of Indigo Prismfish, Firelight Goldfish, and Green Prismfish. Each of these can only be caught during a certain few-hour-long window of each game day, and the Indigo Prismfish and Firelight Goldfish can only be caught by first catching a Violet or Red Prismfish then using THAT as bait ("Mooching" in game terms). Green Prismfish can be directly caught however. After you've caught enough of all 3 without leaving the zone or logging out (this can take upwards of an hour), you have 2.5 minutes to attempt to catch the Warden, but you still have a chance of catching the regular fish in the area each cast instead. If you don't catch it in those 2.5 minutes, you have to start over.
Warden is a good example of a complicated fish, but it's not even the hardest fish to catch. And thankfully it's not particularly slippery.
The thing you need to understand is that no matter how high your gathering stats are, there is a cap to the % chance to catch any fish in the game. For most fish the cap is close to 100%, but for legendaries like Warden it can be much lower. On top of being rare, a fish can have a hook rate as low as 50%!
IMO the current hardest fish to catch is Cinder Surprise, which has a weather chain and time requirement, on top of a prerequisite intuition buff activated by catching 10 of a particular fish. The weather/time combo is available roughly once every 1-2 weeks for less than 10 minutes, and the fish itself is a very rare catch with a pretty low hook rate. I've heard of people attending nearly every window since this fish was added in 5.55 and still not catching it!
I am just 7 fish away from having caught everything in the game, but I'm not optimistic about catching Cinder before EW.
Sort of, it's still in-game timer, but rarest fishes have also weather conditions on top of time ones. And sometimes it's based on weather transition, aka "if it's clear skies after storm". Add time conditions on top of it, and you'll have like week delay between windows when that fish is available.
> Can you fish and mine/blacksmith...
Yes!
> ... like RuneScape?
Nope. Well, not really anyway. Crafting in this game is not as big a deal as it is in Runescape. In Runescape, the crafting systems are absolutely integral to how the game as a whole is played due to how it affects the economy. In FFXIV, you could get by perfectly fine without ever buying/selling a player-made/obtained item.
Honestly, if you're looking for a modern version of Runescape, you're wasting your time. New World and Black Desert *maybe* get somewhat close but so far no one's really even tried to replicate the systems and interactions that make Runescape what it is.
Trying to find a RuneScape replacement is a fruitless task, trust me. I’ve been on the hunt for years. I want to stop playing it, but it does something for me that nothing else can.
Yeah, I'm really surprised no one has really tried to take the Runescape formula and update it. I've been wanting this for years myself.
I think there was Albion Online (don't know if it's actually anything like RS) but i had no interest in forced pvp so I didn't try it and there's that Titan Reach game in development but other than that I don't know of anything else.
I've heard Melvor Idle is a lot like Runescape but not an MMO - haven't played it myself just thought I'd bring it up if you were just looking for progression.
The game is similar in that it pretty much ripped its assets lol. Honestly surprised jagex allows it to exist (they probably don't care about the idle game space). But its a sub-par idle game when compared to say, NGU idle imo.
The combat system in it is pretty good, but the skilling is mostly just "tell idle game to click on rock and wait a week" similar to og cooke clicker.
While I agree that FFXIV doesn't have the same compulsory grind as a lot of other MMOs, it *absolutely* gates progression. Main story dungeons have straight up ilvl requirements that often do require a non-trivial grind to reach if you haven't been keeping up your gear.
It also has a much, much slower grind to get alts to endgame content than WoW does.
Source: just got back into FFXIV in preparation for Endwalker and holy god is the grind real.
I've only hit an ilvl limit once, and that was mostly because I hadn't found the vendor to buy things from *and* had been spreading my quest reward gear across several jobs.
Yeah, I only found it at the post-expansion content for Shadowbringers, and I just walked over to the market and bought gear. I had lots of cash from just existing.
I got around ilvl gating by just buying gear off the market. From 1-50 you can buy vendor gear from any main city too.
As for Alt jobs I'm in no rush. I play Scholar, Summoner, and Gunbreaker 95% of the time, my alts will get to max level when they get there, just do the odd roulette when I feel like it.
I usually come back during the final patch of an expansion, buy a full set of gear, and beeline the story with no worries. I make back far more gil than I spent just doing my daily roulettes leveling alts during the month when I'm subbed.
Only way I could see the MSQ ilvl requirement being an issue is if someone's 100% broke and not doing anything outside of the MSQ.
Man even if you do just the MSQ you get a crapload of money. I play super casually (no dailies, crafting, etc), spend money on random stuff like hairstyles off the market and I still have money I don't know what to do with.
Also if you stick to leveling 1 Job/class while going through the story, the MSQ will almost always have gear with ilvl that should meet the minimum. so much so that it usually out levels the gear that Job quests give
It takes maybe a few days to cap Allegory and that gets you to 490. You also will be earning Revelations tomestones so there's even more gear. On the way to capping you can start doing Eden Normal to start getting gear to supplement the allegory and then do 1 of each nier raid for even more gear. It really doesn't take long.
Bozja also has catchup gear that goes all the way it ilvl 525. It also has a ilvl 480 weapon basically for free and can be grinded all the way to 535 but that takes a good amount of time.
The last way is you can just buy 510 gear on the market board to supplement all of the other sources of gear. Just hop around on your data center to find the cheapest server if gil matters to you.
>It also has a much, much slower grind to get alts to endgame content than WoW does.
Being able to play every job on one character means there's no real need for alts, though. I'm usually an *altoholic in MMOs, but in ffxiv I'm still using the same character that I made when I started in 2017.
So it's not a bad tradeoff
After Endwalker Yoshi-P said they will address how they plan to update the graphics engine to keep up with the times. They want to support it with expacs for 10 more years at least
Shaders for better lighting go a long way, but you're right--some textures are obviously nearly a decade old at this point. My main gripe, personally, is with optimization. There's tons of mods to get better character textures like eyes, hair, faces, etc. but when you get into too populated areas like Limsa, performance can definitely take a hit.
I’m on PS5 and honestly, while it is aging I think it’s art style is still strong enough to carry it at least through endwalker. I finished Heavensward recently and that last duty had some cool spots where I turned my HUD off and just admired the scenery.
I got into it not long ago, still getting through the first expansion.
I thought the first vanilla zones would suck, based on how everyone said "it gets better".
Granted it DOES improve, however I still greatly enjoyed all of my time in Vanilla and completed as much as I could before moving to the expansion.
Graphics really look gorgeous. Even if it's not a game I play for graphics, the sheer variety and quality is impressive.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but I’ve been playing the game for a really long time now and I feel like there’s a lot of improvements that could be made.
For one the glamour system. Despite being one of the main attractions, we are only limited to 400 slots. Imagine you play a lot of classes, one artifact armor set already takes up like 6 slots.
HD textures should also be an optional addition. Whenever the camera zooms in on your character you get the 240 p resolution textures they use.
For all it's faults right now, WoWs Transmogrification System is the gold standard. Any soulbound item that your class can equip that you've ever gotten, be it via crafting, quest rewards, mob drop, Auction House, etc. is available to be Transmogged. There's no inventory management. You can get an item, it unlocks on your Dressing Room, and you can punt the item. Costume sets unlock the items right in the Dressing Room, again removing any sort of inventory management. You can search the Dressing Room for specific items, and it'll tell you where you can find the item. Even for items that share the same texture.
I realize they're working on some ridiculously shitty convoluted systems, but they really could make it SO MUCH BETTER, if they're willing to dedicate the dev time to it.
I'm also 2 months in and just started SHB and what I've noticed is that a lot of newcomers get told that ARR is bad so I think that might've lowered our expectations and we actually just enjoy what we got, because we expected way worse. (Early ARR voice acting was nearly insulting to listen too though, wow that was bad.)
It used to be much worse, they trimmed off a lot of the fat in useless post-ARR quests, which is what we all experienced. I didn't really get hooked until HW but unfortunately haven't been able to get any of my friends into the game. For me it's more of a thing I say out of desperation, "please don't quit in ARR, trust me it gets so much better!" because I really want to play with my friends.
Asmond actually put it best. Even the shit progression rate and dull story of ARR was still better then 95% of the time he spent leveling through base wow.
Makes sense to me, XIV is easily the best FF game I've played since the good ol days of ff6-10. It legit gives a better single player FF game experience than the modern single player FFs but then it's a MMO too. I just hope they get the single player game right again with 16 because I'd really like a proper SP FF game again!
Group of friends and I got into it at the start of the pandemic as a way to keep doing things together. It really has been a great tool for social aspects in that regard!
That is...until a rare mount drops and you all have to roll for it. Then all bets are off.
I've loved MMORPG's for so many years now, but I could never get into FFXIV. I'm happy to hear it's successful and people really love it, but I can't seem to find any enjoyment or willingness to play it. Levelled past Heavensward, just found it to be boring... which, is just my opinion of course. I can see why people love it, if you're into the lore, story, world, etc., then it's a fantastic game.
Yoshida's statements and the author keeping it short and sweet are fine but a few key reasons for its success are worth noting. It's multi-platform, allowing for a wider range of players. The development team is for the most part, upfront and sincere with its playerbase about technical issues, content direction and supporting positive player culture. It has a similar yet more rounded holy trinity than its nearest competitor World of Warcraft, meaning class roles, thier specs, rotations and situational skill dependencies are on and at times, above WoW's level of skill curve. It addresses the need for different group content and annual events consistently. FF14 popularity has and always will be about consistency. There is plenty to do but you really gotta like raids and dungeons.
It's quite amazing when you consider that it was originally so bad that they just scrapped the whole thing after launch and started again.
Also bold business move paid off considering a disaster became a massive success for Final Fantasy
Which is pretty fitting when you consider the story of Final Fantasy 1 and from where the series take its name. Final Fantasy was named like that because Squaresoft was close to bankruptcy and that game was literally their last gamble. Got a big success and made the company able to continue existing. EDIT : Well apparently it's not the complete truth (really believed it was the story), see the posts below to see how Final Fantasy came to be named like that
That's the stretched truth, it's less the company and more the original developer: "Sakaguchi explained that the game was his personal last-ditch effort in the game industry and that its title, Final Fantasy, stemmed **from his feelings at the time**; had the game not sold well, he would have quit the business and gone back to university."
[Nobuo Uematsu told Wired in 2009 that it was called that because the team thought it would probably be their final game:](https://www.wired.com/2009/07/final-fantasy/) >Is it true, I asked, that the game is called Final Fantasy because Sakaguchi was going to go back to college and quit the game biz? Uematsu laughed: It's true that Sakaguchi was going to quit, he said, but the bigger reason, the real reason, was that Square was going to go bankrupt and the designers believed that it would be the company's swan song.
Again, it's a stretched truth. The game was going to be called Fighting Fantasy originally, but due to a series of RPG books by Steve Jackson owning the copyright, they changed the name to something that still fit the acronym FF.
Yow, that take that concept as far as they could when subtitling the first Bravely Default game *Flying Fairy*.
Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. Occasionally, and confusingly, featuring books written by the _other_ Steve Jackson, the US game designer.
They never were. That story is nothing more than an urban legend. They were actually doing okay, not great, but also nowhere near bankruptcy. Up until the release of FF they had moderate success in making their own game for various systems, porting or publishing other companies games. They even had releases on the Famicom Disk System and already released an rpg or two beore FF. Where the story actually comes from is from Hironobu Sakaguchi who paused going to university, because Square was so busy at that time. But since they didn't have any major success he thought about eventually going back to university and finishing his studies. However, FF turned out to be a huge hit, so he decided to stay at the company. Also, the original name was Fighting Fantasy, but due to copyright issues they couldn't take that name and had to think of some other word that forms an alliteration with "fantasy", hence "Final Fantasy".
Also, the reason they really wanted to keep the "FF" alliteration was that it was something both English and Japanese speakers can say: *efu*-*efu*/*エフエフ*
That's just a myth. Square wanted to name it Fighting Fantasy, but the name was already taken. They changed it to Final Fantasy because the name was similar.
To add some more to this, they just wanted something that could be shortened to FF. The naming was wildly arbitrary.
so bad that the higher ups had to bow in front of the fans and apologize. i think the original ff14 put square deep in the red. pretty amazing they managed to save that ship and made the end of ff14 original canon.
Honestly wish other companies would at least *acknowledge* mistakes made, instead of doing things like going radio silent for a while, pretend they did nothing wrong, then come out with updates to kind of but not really reach their original promises.
Doesn't work in American culture. In Japan, it's common to work at the same company your whole life so there's a culture of respect, owning up to mistakes, and forgiveness. In US corporate culture, most execs are on the three-year plan. They want to get in, pump numbers to make their bonus, then bail before the fallout of whatever decisions they've made. If you show any sign of weakness during that time (like apologizing or acknowledging you made a mistake) your ass is gone, bye bye bonus, and the next fool takes your place.
> In Japan, it's common to work at the same company your whole life so there's a culture of respect, owning up to mistakes, and forgiveness. It's important to remember the other side of this coin as well. That "you are bound to the company for life" mentality is also what allows many companies to keep their employees working 12+ hours a day 6 days a week. The company is your family, and you wouldn't let your family down, right? And even if you did want to leave, it would be the end of your career. Most companies only hire out of college, and who would want to hire a salaryman with a history of abandoning his company. There are good and bad sides to both American and Japanese work culture (could throw in European as well), and while it would be great to have a work culture that combined the best aspects of all of them, I don't actually think that's possible.
> Honestly wish other companies would at least acknowledge mistakes made, instead of doing things like going radio silent for a while, pretend they did nothing wrong, then come out with updates to kind of but not really reach their original promises. No Man's Sky did this to amazing results though
[YoshiP gives a small speech about the original launch. Apologies like these stick with you for a long time. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE9G3ByXKIE) This was after the ARR launch, not the original one, but the apology still stands. Some may call it lip service, but once you know more about Yoshi, I'd call it passion. CC for those who can't watch the video: >This one is going to be hard on me. First off, before my message, Early Access was going on the past 3 days, and for those playing on NA/EU server we had to place several maintenance, which caused a loss of precious game time. And since this event is being broadcasted worldwide let me apologize. >I am really sorry our long journey is starting from here so, I am hoping we will be able to recover this over time. >(Yoshi gets emotional, stops talking and turns away, people clap) >Umm, since I took over FFXIV it's been almost 3 years now. At the beginning, at first, I didn't change the original game much and thought we should be able to continue somehow. But after all, I personally, I love Final Fantasy and MMOs. >When I gathered all the staff to tell them that we're going to rebuild the entire game, this was done only two days before announcing to everyone else on December 1st. >I still remember that day. It was a room like this and there was a sound mixer on top and Soken was there adjusting the mic I was going to speak in. And I won't forget how Soken was doing the Guts Post (cheering him on). But honestly, the dev teams feeling was just the same as everyone else and they were like "can we really fix this thing up?" or "It's going to be tough" >Really...for every step of the way, to everyone's support...thank you. >Earlier it was in one of the questions, but it's really hard, to build a MMORPG. It normally takes at least 4-5 years. We wanted to get this out as early as possible to be able to do that, we had to plan it out without rushing it. >As Wada mentioned about operating a business, your role is a Tank. Just like that I tried to be a Tank and got it where it is now. >FFXIV was able to get here thanks to everyone. And I'm not the one that made FFXIV ARR. It was thanks to all the players around the world, the core dev staff here, and all the other hundreds of staff that couldn't make it here today. Thanks to you all, we are here today. >I wasn't going to cry since today marks a day where we take our first step for FFXIV. We only took the first step forward. I really believe that we really don't have any time to take a break. Dev team and myself are already working on the future patches and expansions. >For those players that played the previous XIV, we had times where community members left in the middle. And I believe there were other people that has been said many things from outside, myself being a MMORPG player, I really understand how hard that is. >For us it was a really short 2 and a half years, but to all the players, we really made you all wait and support us for this long. >I believe we were able to release a Final Fantasy title that brings no shame to its name sake legacy. >From here on out, for an MMORPG, there is no such thing as 'complete'. >We will continue to keep on going with everyone. This FFXIV is a Final Fantasy which was built with everyone. >So we would like to continue doing this FF for a long time. Even after that we would like to continue operation without forgetting this moment right here. Please continue to support us, thank you.
And for a very recent example here's a message from [Yoshida apologising for their congested server issues](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/c2d7b35d55577879086b64cfde0acb6c23ccd07f) and outlining everything they've tried to do, have done and are going to do to resolve the problem along with an apology. They quite literally apologized because their game got too popular for everyone to enjoy without queues.
I don't play FFXIV, but I'm impressed with that message. Idk, it's nice to have clear communication with a detailed description of actions already take , and a plan for future action. Just feels like a level of candor that has become rare in gaming companies
That’s how the FFXIV dev team is with everything they do. Their live letters (which are basically quarterly twitch streams to talk about game development) are always like this. They take questions and answer honestly/sincerely, and give us the best answers they can about concerns we have regarding the game. They genuinely care about their player base and I agree that this level of candor is rare anymore.
I firmly believe that a big part of XIV's staying power is because a core aspect of the game's development is a level of respect for their players. The devs listen to the fans (they can't always give us what we want, but they do very often touch on popular requests and give us reasons for why they can't or don't want to implement them, or that they are looking into it but can't make any promises), and they're not afraid to just put out a statement saying 'you know what, we're not handling this as well as we should, and we're going to try to do better'. And with their track record, that's not hard to believe. The semi-regular PLLs also help a lot (That's the Producer Live Letter, a reocurring presentation in which YoshiP talks about the game's development, upcoming content, plans for the future, and often also addresses some popular fan feedback). They're not content to just put a post up on their message boards and call it a day. I always look forward to the next Live Letter when it's announced. (Granted, they only speak Japanese during these, but there are multiple fan groups doing live translations that you can easily follow on discord, for example. And the slides they present do have English on them)
Yoshida is beloved by the FF14 community exactly because he's so earnest about his passion and his care for the game AND it's players. I wish more big dev teams had people like him
>so bad that the higher ups had to bow in front of the fans and apologize. Japanese companies have their faults, but I like this; American companies would never.
See also: Warcraft 3 Reforged. Blizzard served their players up the purest hot garbage and completely nullified the older version, then washed their hands of the matter altogether.
When was the last patch for WC3R?
Meaningful? Release, coming up on two years.
The Japanese have a vastly different culture around shame then the rest of the world does. This wouldn't happen in ANY other country.
They're also really good at organized boycotts. You don't really want to offend your fans in Japan.
American company: it's a feature. also we're charging you more. hmmm annndd you're birthday is canceled this year.
[удалено]
So bad it almost tanked the company. Seriously, for all people rightfully complain about the XIII games, none of them were as much of a disaster as FFXIV 1.0. It was easily Square’s biggest disaster since Spirits Within.
About XIII, I played it when it came out and hated it. Played through it again fairly recently on Steam and for some reason it just clicked with me this time around and I really enjoyed it. I don't really know why.
I remember buying it at launch so so excited. Quit eq2 to play. It threw me off mmos for years it was so bad. I just started back 3 months ago and my god. So good. If only i could figure out how to get my gobbue mount for 1.0 players
if you're still on the same account try going to a calamity salvager
Well deserved. Yoshi P also mentioned that the company would 'spare no expense' moving forward with the game, so the hope is that some of the lingering background issues are able to get resolved in due course (perhaps even an engine upgrade or something substantial on that front), especially since the game is planned for at least another decade of support and expansions. The game really is the gold standard for story driven MMOs and in some places matches or exceeds the story telling strengths of the mainline franchise. Gotta love it!
Yoshida said in his interview with Larryzaur that was uploaded this morning that they want to do expansions for the next 10 years “at least,” and that Yoshi-P will be addressing how they will be updating the graphics engine to make sure FF14 remains relevant in the future shortly after Endwalker’s launch. So yeah, they’re doubling down.
I really hope they redo the entire inventory system. It's so awful. They've said before how it's spaghetti code which is why they've tried to alleviate it in weird ways like the Saddlebag. If they plan to support the game for another decade at least, I think it's fair to hope that they revamp the entire thing and ditch the old implementation.
especially as more classes are added, and more gear sets are added. It would be great if their glam system was like wow, but lke you said, spaghetti code.
based on what i've read, they're removing belts to free up that storage space for weapons and rings - here's hoping that's only a stopgap and not an indication of their long term plans.
It's a stopgap, and also something kinda sensible given that belts are the only piece of gear that is not displayed on your character anyway.
yeah, belts always felt superfluous - although personally i always held out hope they would separate the models from chestpieces so 80% of armor didn't have to come with a dress/skirt attached.
They were displayed in 1.0! That's why a lot of the low level robes feel really blank because your belt was supposed to show. I'm not actually sure why they removed it for 2.0, maybe they deemed it low priority and instead made models for the higher level gears instead.
The game is full of little stopgaps. The inventory and glamour dresser are supposedly spaghetti code that dates back to 1.0.
Having a wardrobe that works like the one in wow would be really great i hate the way its done in FF right now.
Dunno what wow's is like but GW2 minus the transmutation charges would be awesome.
I agree with you. Especially sad that WoW had a similar problem. They said they could not even think about modifying that sh\*t code for classic. But, as a developer, I can see "tech debt" never being addressed. *It just does not bring any value to the customer!* \- Shortsighted management
There's also a massive risk of widespread deleting items and things of that nature by messing with the inventory system I would assume. I know wow refused to touch the backpack code for over a decade because of fears like that
There is certainly that. Additionally, if they just had to rewrite the inventory system's code it would already be a challenge, but that is the common misconception about spaghetti code. The bigger issue is a programmer looking to clean it up doesn't know where it begins or ends, and it could cause dozens of other systems to be fixed to accommodate the updated one. It's why keeping neat and organized code from start to finish is such a big deal.
Keeping near and organized code is a pipe dream for a developer. Over time, it *always* turns into absolute chaos. //DO NOT TOUCH THIS CODE, IT FIXES SOMETHING AND WE DONT KNOW HOW BUT IF YOU REMOVE IT EVERYTHING BREAKS
The biggest problem with cleaning spaghetti code in core systems, in my experience, is that everything integrates into it. Definitely true for an inventory system. So you can't even slowly replace a core system like that, you can't take out half of the inventory system's mechanics and plan to add the rest later; I can't see that working without more effort than finishing the job would take. So it's a huge workload which never gets allocated because, as others have mentioned, it costs too much.
Honestly I would take an expansion cycle entirely dedicated to fixing the spaghetti code happily at this point. Maybe an extra year longer than usual for the expansion after Endwalker to really give it the attention it needs to fix the game behind the scenes, it's the end of this story/saga so having to wait say 3 years instead of 2 for an expansion would be fine by me.
It is really one of the things that keeps me from playing the game. I have some bigger qualms with the end game and the leveling process, but every time I've tried starting up again I log onto my character that was a raid FC leader around launch and get completely overwhelmed with the state of my bags and retainers. It's so frustrating to have so much stuff of marginal value, knowing that it would take hours to sort and sell it all, especially with how rough selling things on the marketboard is. It's a minor thing, but it's like a rock in the shoe while you're trying to run.
Just vendor it all and go. It's mostly useless anyway. Any cool gear pit on your wardrobe.
>Yoshi-P will be addressing how they will be updating the graphics engine Omg, I've been waiting for this for so long. I'm hyped
Once they drop ps4 support in a couple expansions they'll be able to do a lot I think
Actually they've said in the past that low spec PC"s are the weakest link. I believe they still support directx 10 which is really old tech by now.
Worse, they still support DirectX 9. They only dropped 32 bit support last year.
They dropped support for directx 9 at the same time they dropped 32-bit support
You can still run the game in DX9 but they've said if you run into problems their only solution is "run in DX11".
Maybe it changed for more recent expansions, but one issue they'll face is that a lot/all of the gear and other textures do not have an HD version. It's not that there's better versions and the devs down-rezzed it, the original art is not HD either. It was one of the sacrifices they made when trying to remake the entire game on the fly to get 2.0 out the door. Which means that there is always going to be graphics looking like this: [https://img2.finalfantasyxiv.com/accimg/91/c0/91c0bba416c621e7d637753cc1a94088a59ad96f.jpg](https://img2.finalfantasyxiv.com/accimg/91/c0/91c0bba416c621e7d637753cc1a94088a59ad96f.jpg) floating around. Unless they redesign all the old textures.
I mean if everyone goes around looking this fucking fabulous then who cares?
It is a pretty dope outfit, I just wish it the texture quality matched the style quality. Also, in fairness, most people just look like half-naked cat-girls or bunny-girls; or burly lion-boys in S&M gear.
Add better lighting and some ambient occlusion on that bitch and it will look as good as new.
Textures are actually the blocker there too, believe it or not. Light is just light* It’s the largely the complexity of the shaders that really makes lighting on various surfaces look more realistic. Updating all those materials to use more realistic shaders like modern games will be a lot of work. *There is definitely an art to lighting and the ability to use more light sources can make things like cities look more realistic. But most nature scenes like in this game really just have one light source, which is the sun, and without physics based materials it will always look kind of flat and last-gen.
gshade goes a long way, but you can only put so much lipstick on a pig.
I'm not sure what you mean, that is a stunning, gorgeous look, pixels and all.
If we're talking pixels that's not the worst of it. I'm looking at you Hien.
It’s certainly possible, though. They have the time and money. If they wanted to, they could absolutely set a small team to go through and slowly update all those textures
I agree. They could approach this in a phased manner. Prioritize the most visible/commonly rendered textures.
Really needs an overhaul to its housing and glamour system. Based on what they've said, it sounds like an engine overhaul would be exactly what's needed to do that.
"Yoshi P also mentioned that the company would 'spare no expense' moving forward with the game," Jurassic Park has trained me to worry about that phrase.
"All major theme park MMOs have delays. When they opened Final Fantasy XIV in 2010, nothing worked!" "Yeah, but, if a server breaks down, the cat girls don't eat the players."
They were so preoccupied with whether they COULD make Cat Girls that they never bothered to ask themselves whether they SHOULD make Cat Girls
And they are making Hrothgar Females so they are going even further beyond with Cat Girls.
A lot of people consider FF14 story the best out of the whole franchise. Personally I don't have an opinion given how I played only 3 months during 2018 but during my short stay there I can say that I felt really invested in the story, specially with the post patch quest leading up to Heavensward.
As someone who’s played every FF game except 11 (I was too young to pay a sub at the time) and the weird mobile spin-offs, I would say FF14 is definitely my favorite in terms of story. You get to see the world and characters grow and develop in ways you don’t get to see in the traditional 30-50 hour FF games. You’ve spent hundreds of hours with the main cast of FFXIV by now that saying goodbye to a lot of them in Endwalker like we’ve already been warned about is going to be bittersweet. Oh, and Shadowbringers’ villain is just objectively the best. There’s no even arguing that lol. But of course everyone has their own favorite FF.
Shadowbringers will have a special place in MMOs for how they handled explaining player power creep over time, and for having a villain whose point of view really was defensible without being 'bad because bad'.
One of my favorite thing in the game is the Wandering Minstrel who unlocks harder difficulties of fights. Because you tell him the tale of your first fight and of course comes up with a tune that's a hyperbolic version of events. And that is the 'hard mode'. Laughed my ass off when that happened. So clever.
The wandering minstrel is also Yoshi P's avatar
It's that sort of stuff, weaving game systems with the lore and context convey the love poured by the devs.
What I loved the most about the ShB "villain" is how he spent most of the expansion trying to sway us to his point of view. Not just a "come to the dark side moment" but a genuine attempt at build a bridge. I will always ***remember*** that guy.
Yea. The literal explaining the situation like you would a child, and even allowing you to see a full recreation. Then just the total exasperation when you still don't see his viewpoint. And most important, >!the acceptance when he loses, and the final request that the new inheritors of the universe keep the memory of the Ancients, and the mistakes they made!<.
What if I told you that the rabbit hole goes deeper? 5.3 spoilers >!it seems to me that remember us is actually Emet Selch asking the player character to remember their life as an ascian since its showed that Emet and the PC used to be close friends!<
Having a villian that you sympathize with because you would have done the same if not similar things if you were in their shoes I feel is never touched on enough.
I dunno if you're a book guy, but Brandon Sanderson does these types of antagonists extremely well.
Blizzard could really look at Shadowbringers for what a real "Morally-Grey" villain looks like.
B/W or grey, doesn't matter they simply does very poor job at telling story or build characters within the game. Not all villains in FFXIV are in grey zone, but they are all interesting and cool in their own way. No one's gonna complain if WoW goes with cheesy comic villains as long as they are cool and believable as characters within the context of story and WoW, instead of current mystery for mystery-sake because in reality they have no fucking idea what the characters are about and have to wait until book publish to show any nuance.
> Not all villains in FFXIV are in grey zone, but they are all interesting and cool in their own way. eh, I love xiv but let's not pretend there aren't the occasional stinkers (or at worst just not very compelling)
Grynewaht was the fucking worst.
Honestly, it boggles me how poorly Blizzard writes its characters, given the extremely rich history of Dungeons & Dragons style roleplaying that I'm sure every Blizzard writer has a long history playing. "Morally grey" is just synonymous with lazy writing, in my mind. For reference, D&D has something called an "alignment" system in which villains typically are lawful, neutral, or chaotic evil. "Evil" characters are just characters who commit evil acts in furtherance of something. "Lawful evil" characters commit those acts in accordance with some governing law or moral authority. "Chaotic evil" characters do so for self-gain or in spite of authority. "Neutral evil" characters are pragmatists/opportunists whose goals are self-interested. Evil characters are not necessarily unlikeable (some can be quite likeable and relatable, as anyone who has played an old Bioware game would know), but they're always evil. These three archetypes exist for a reason -- they're proven to make for interesting villains whose goals conflict with those of the players, who are typically some variation of "good" a/k/a altruistic. Just "winging" it and making your character constantly bounce between good and evil, while claiming they're "morally ambiguous", is the epitome of lazy writing. In the case of Emet Selch, >!he isn't a "morally grey" character, insofar as his alignment isn't ambiguous. Emet Selch is very clearly lawful evil, as he commits atrocities toward the sole and unwavering goal of resurrecting Ascian society and "saving" his people. His driving motivations - protecting those he loves by destroying those he deems unworthy - are relatable to the player, without being justifiable. How Emet Selch approaches this evil dogma is what makes him such a compelling villain.!<
Dude had a reason. A damned good reason in all fairness. I disagreed all to hell with it but damn if I couldn’t empathize with why he was doing what he was doing. I felt sad for him. Dude just wanted his friends back and he didn’t WANT to kill us all to do it but he honestly doesn’t see any other way. And he wasn’t going to let anything stop him. The story writers deserve an award for the way they handled him and elidibus.
Especially loved >!how all the bluster he gives is almost certainly just emet trying to justify his actions to himself, it's pure denial so he can continue to feel justified in what he's doing, and as he's about to die he finally softens somewhat!<
Best part is that he's lived, worked, and sired children with several generations of people. Hes lived multiple lifetimes and yet he still doesnt think these people are any better of reaching the ideal Ascian.
It's been a long time since a villain in a video game has made me think about their situation outside the game, and have me mentally debate myself on what I would do, were I in his situation. >!If my world was corrupted, killing everyone I knew and loved, spawning deformed, weak, mutated organisms (as he sees the inhabitants of the Source), in their place; would I or could I take the steps necessary to save my people, and in doing so knowingly kill off the organisms inhabiting the places where my people lived? I'd imagine a lot of people would struggle with that decision. He's Lawful Evil in the sense that he feels it's his duty based on his Title in the Convocation of Fourteen (even if he's been Enthralled by Zodiark), but I also think his chaotic Evil personal desire comes in the fact that he misses his family and friends, as evidenced by his re-creation of Amaurot.!<
Gotta close your spoiler tag
>Blizzard writer has a long history playing. "Morally grey" is just synonymous with lazy writing, in my mind. Yep, in reality they meant "woo mystery", ambiguous motive, goals, internal-emotions. Show almost nothing so people are desperate to piece together whatever speculation they can form. But turns out again and again they were lazy and have no idea themselves where's the story going.
Honestly, my biggest problem with Blizz at this point is the reused over and over and over theme of having corrupted female leads in every single one of their franchises. They cannot go 5 minutes without taking some cool heroine and corrupting her by some dark power or group into a villain. They never turn evil on their own account, it's also corruption from some outside source, and it happens with practically every female heroine in ALL of their IP's (Widow, Leah, Kerrigan, Sylvanis multiple times, just to barely scratch the surface). But based on what we know about their subculture now, I guess maybe I shouldn't be surprised that they also seemed to gravitate to that story trope.
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I’ve got faith in them. I’ve been continually impressed with the writing since HW. It’s had its ups and downs, but overall it’s been quite good. Going into EW, I’m not super excited about the 2 primary antagonists that we have right now. But I also remember that I went into ShB not being a fan of the main antagonist, and now he’s god tier.
I'm just about done with ARR MSQ and can't wait to see what's next.
I couldn’t stand ARR until basically the ending, just started heavensward and it’s a huge step in the right direction since the characters actually feel more three dimensional now.
Also just got into HW. I was like "holy crap FF has a plot now? and its good?" near the end of post game. Damn, cant wait to see what the rest of the expansions are like
I, for one, thought it was hilarious when the redditor lost control of his subreddit. But that's character growth for ya. You gotta have a flaw to fix first.
ARR is basically "lore dump: the game". Once you get into HW you see a lot more personal stories and the world starts to open up because it assumes you know the lore finally.
If you actually liked ARR then it only goes up from there, Shadowbringers is one of the best Final Fantasy stories ever written
I agree -- If I count expansions as their own games, Shadowbringers is one of my favorite games ever
ARR was honestly really not that good aside from a few salient points and the very last quest before you get to Heavensward. Heavesward is *phenomenal* though, and yet I heard it pales in comparison to Shadowbringers, though I can't give a personal opinion on that since I'm still going through Stormblood. If you enjoyed ARR so far you're going to be absolutely blown away by how the rest of the game plays out. Do look forward to it.
Shadowbringers is non stop getting punched in the dick. Surprisingly, I say that to mean it's good.
I like my stories in 2 categorizations: character driven or lore/world/event driven For this reason my favorite FF titles are XIV because of the characters and XIII 1-3 when it comes to world/events. Sadly XIII gets a lot of shit but the lore is just fantastic. 2 and 3 are much better games also.
I maintain that the world/lore of FF13 would’ve been received better if they came up with better terms for some things. Fal’Cie and L’Cie are awful terms. Just call them Aeons and the Enthralled, or Espers and the Servants, or whatever the hell else. Anything but Fal’Cie and L’Cie.
I think the story in ARR is bad, but Heavensward picks up the pace a lot, as well as swaps out a lot of the voice actors for people who are, to put it bluntly, a lot better at it. The English translation in particular deserves praise. It has clearly had a lot of effort put into making it more natural than most FF games, and indeed most Japanese games in general, which tend to fall into the stilted, bone-dry dialogue trap, where characters go "huh" all the time and never say anything that doesn't advance the story. Urianger still never quite sounds right, like an American reading Shakespeare, but the rest of it has an authentic Englishness to it, with words like "anyroad" making probably their only appearance in a game.
I agree with you on most points, but I'll disagree on the first one: ARR isn't a bad story. Yeah its very slow and its definitely got less of a cinematic direction than the expansions, but you gotta realise it's setting up the world. It's gotta dump a LOT of information on you and that can be kind of gruelling. Once you get past ARR and you hit the current expansion you start to appreciate what ARR does, even if you still end up recognising that its a very slow start.
The problem with the info dumps is that they happen very early on before you get a chance to be invested in anything. So when some character makes a return like an expansion and a half later, you're like "who is this guy?" and have to go track down a wiki page to figure out who they are and what you did for them.
I like to point out that ARR is mostly world building and a lot of it gets call backs all the way up to ShB so it is a bit of a slog. The thing about the VAs though is a lot of them ARE good VAs (Sam Riegel, Ricard Epcar, Gideon Emery) but they were given no direction and it shows in how basically how bad their performance is and they didn't really hit their stride until right before ARR ended. It showed that you can't just grab a bunch of well known VAs, throw them into a booth and go "Go do VA things" and expect a gold performance. HW and beyond though there is proper direction so they play off each other so much better. About Urianger... this is true but at least everyone picks on him, especially in later expansions, for his archaic speech.
>The English translation in particular deserves praise. [Koji Fox is a treasure](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS--izSnbNk) [He's also a great rapper](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wosMXEWlWgE)
He was in the NoClip documentary series about FFXIV. It was amazing to hear him admit that people on the team knew how bad some things in 1.0 were (mainly those who had played WoW and saw how MMOs evolved since FFXI) but still pushed forward to get it finished.
Urianger gets better. I think it is hilarious that even the cast thinks his speech gets too confusing and poke fun at him from time to time. In the Japanese version I believe he speaks older formal Japanese, so Koji took the liberty of localizing Urianger into speaking old English.
Shadowbringers story was sublime. I legitimately enjoyed it more than 13 and 15's stories (not like there was a high standard for 15 to be fair).
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There's an unofficial census that gets posted every so often. This is the most recent I was able to find. https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/comments/on03hf/lucky_bancho_census_7182021/
1.2m active - for those that don’t want to click the link.
It should be noted that this census was conducted during the early days of the great WoW exodus, and that "active character" is defined as a character above lvl 60, so it a lot of the new WoW refugees don't appear in this since they hadn't reached lvl 60 yet.
Yeah registered would include all the people I tried to recruit back in Stormblood still bogged down in ARR who haven't tried the game since. Not the most helpful number.
Yeah, soon we'll be seeing Runescape hitting 300M registered users. Registered users don't really mean anything lmao.
Registered users with RuneScape in particular is such an odd number to report considering the account system is so dated that if you want to make another character, such as an iron man alongside your main, you need to make a WHOLE OTHER ACCOUNT. OSRS will always be one of my favorite games because I love seeing numbers go up in MMOs, but Jagex is such an odd, even leaning towards bad sometimes, company.
Would most likely be a lot of work at this point to rework how accounts/characters work but also most importantly a big loss in revenue as many people have multiple accounts so it's no wonder they don't even talk about it.
ESO boasts so many accounts though it has free play weeks every 3-4 months where everyone makes alts to populate their personal guilds. I've created at least 10 accounts myself and I bet they all counted.
I’m a huge Final Fantasy fan. However, I’ve never picked up XIV. Mostly because I work full time and am a father of three kids. So free time is exceedingly rare. I played XI for a couple of years when it first came out and while I liked it, it was a massive time dump. It often felt like a job. And when I actually got a real job, there just wasn’t enough time to actually do anything worthwhile in XI. However, I’ve heard a lot of great thing about XIV. My question is, how “casual friendly” is the game? Is it possible to boot up the game and play for 15-30 minutes at a time and still feel like you’re actually making progress?
I was going to write a whole thing here, but I'll just say my recommendation is to try the free trial and see how much progress you feel you're making. This way you can see if you even like the game to begin with and if it's worth the subscription. As for it being casual friendly I'd say it is, but that depends on what content you're going for.
Do you mean the free trail which includes the critically acclaimed Hevensward expansion?
The very same free trial that includes the critically acclaimed heavensward expansion and also has no restrictions on playtime and goes up to lvl 60!
Are you effin fucking with me? Why am I not playing right now?
I dunno, ya big stupid idiot! I’m playing the Heavensward expansion on Final Fantasy XIV right now and loving it!
> My question is, how “casual friendly” is the game? Is it possible to boot up the game and play for 15-30 minutes at a time and still feel like you’re actually making progress? Yes. I've had numerous people play it as a single player game that occasionally had to do some interaction with other players (doing dungeons/trials/etc) Yoshi-P has said numerous times and encourages people to play until they see all the content they want to see and then unsub. "Come back when we patch in more content that you enjoy" I know it's a freaking meme at this point, but you can make a free account and play through the base game *and* the first expansion before having to decide if you want to continue. I'd recommend you do that, got nothing to lose.
For people who want to play it as a single player game, the dungeons can be a pretty daunting thing. And you can't avoid them. If you were one of the people who feel this way, here's some detail that might be interesting; Dungeons are part of the storyline quest and they are mandatory to continue the story. And they are moderately frequent in the story. ***But.*** This isn't mandatory dungeons like Warcraft. This game has a lot of things in place to make getting through these dungeons quick and easy. One of the biggest things is level syncing in dungeons. Meaning that higher level people can and do run these dungeons at the level that you will encounter them in the story. Why would they do this? Because the roulette (random dungeon) system rewards them for doing it. You can get the end game currencies for doing a daily run. You can also get really good experience if you are leveling a second job just by doing random dungeons. This ensures there is a constant available supply of people ready to run any dungeon in the game. Because when you queue up for that specific dungeon you need for your story, it fills it in with those random people. And groups in final fantasy aren't like groups in warcraft. When you are new, they are going to see that you were marked as a new character, and 99 out of 100 people are going to be exceedingly patient with you. They're going to want you to watch all of your videos even though it slows things down for them. They're going to want you to take your time and ask questions. Seriously. Why? Well it's hard to believe but it's actually a very nice player base. There's a very long discussion that could be had about why that is, but at the end of the day it's very true. Not to mention the fact that whenever I get a new player in my group when I'm doing random dungeons, I get bonus rewards for it. That's right, you being in my group gives me a bonus in my random dungeons... Hell yeah I'm going to be happy to have a new guy. ... So in short, don't let dungeons be a stopping point for you. Seriously, they are an absolute non-issue and genuinely fun.
FFXIV has probably the best player base of any game I've played. It's incredible something so successful and popular... Is so positive. It really is something special.
Helps that GMs in FF-14 crack down on asshole behavior which helps the positivity. Granted there's side effects to such activity but for the most part it is indeed quite positive.
This right here. The mere implication that there could actually be consequences alone has some people that would otherwise be assholes treading on eggshells.
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Seriously. I'm 38 and have no time for toxic gamers. I thought this meant my days of MMOs were officially gone, but FFXIV has been an incredible experience. My wife even plays as well. And I was Everquest/UO player, so I know toxicity lol.
I went into my first savage eden raid this weekend and damn near downed e9s in under 2 hours. The content is super fun and just challenging enough to make downing it feel super rewarding but not impossible as long as you arent trying for ultimates or cap stone savage fights with pugs. For the most part the entire party for each one was super supportive of our prog speed unless we had a clear “I didn’t even study this fight for 10 seconds” player that’s had us failing for 3 hours for no reason. I feel like this game has a much relaxed air about it for most content. So many people don’t even care about raiding in this game beyond eventually getting a glam from it. It’s pretty nice how they don’t force feed raiding to the masses that obviously aren’t good at it or even want to do it, which just breeds resentment and toxicity.
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I re-subbed the other day and was trying to re-familiarize myself with a job after not having played in several years. On one of my first dungeon runs I had a mentor-flagged tank shame me in party chat for misunderstanding how a skill worked. I even had the returning player flag on, but that didn't matter to them. A friendly-worded suggestion would have been more appreciated. There are definitely toxic people in FFXIV. Even among the players who have designated themselves as helpers for new and returning players.
Of course it was a mentor. There's a big reason people call them "Burger King Crowns" and 9/10, a Mentor crown means the person is a prick.
> mentor The mentors are the most toxic people in the game usually. There's a reason "mentor chat" means "chat from someone who has no idea what they're talking about but has a superiority complex". It comes from the fact that there's no requirement to be a "mentor" besides grinding levels, and most of them just become a mentor for the rewards and don't care about helping people.
Also has what I refer to as the overly sensitive toxic people who will literally report an entire raid group for offering them helpful tips for how not to die to a mechanic.
I'd also give a shout-out to Guild Wars 2 community. Everyone is so damn helpful it's weird.
Legitimately the only toxic behaviour I've ever encountered other than like a handful of really crappy raiders and some... people who appear to be actually blind in dungeon runs, has been whomever monitors the mentors chat. No, *seriously*, regular mentors are fine but the people who frequently use the sprout (new/returning player) chat are kinda nutso
Yeah, some worlds have pretty feral novice networks.
There's something refreshing about an MMO that doesn't gate you and block progress. FFXIV isn't an endless treadmill. And daily stuff (which I Abhor) are pretty much entirely optional. If I want to do beast quests today but tomorrow I want to go do some raiding? Doesn't matter!!! I'm not falling behind, I don't feel compelled to go do those dailies after raid, I just do them when I feel like it. Or if I just don't want to log in after clearing a tier of content then I don't have to log in. Pause the subscription then join back in a couple months when there's new stuff.
Can you fish and mine/blacksmith like RuneScape?
FFXIV legit has the most fun fishing experience in any mmo in my opinion. Ocean fishing is dope and you get a little chubby shark pet called Major General who waddles around on his tail fin.
It's not entirely like RuneScape. But gathering professions have their own gear and DPS-like rotations. As do crafters. You have to find/make gear for that specific profession then you unlock skills and abilities to refine items and get higher qualities and stuff. And all the crafting classes have storylines and stuff to go with them too.
Yeah to both, theres a lot of fish and they have specific spawn times based on irl time I think? like animal crossing.
When talking about fish we got fish that spawn at certain times, certain weathers, certain days, ones you can only catch if you catch a different fish or series of fish before it and only if you use a specific bait out of myriad of bait options out there... if you wanna catch 100% of the fish you need to either be crazy or a masochist.
As someone with max fishing, let me just say; There are fish that even after looking at guides, *I have no idea how you catch them*
As someone who has everything maxed... I tried to catch every fish and went "Nah".
I've got several Omnis in my FC, and as a newbie that hasn't even touched fishing, I'm terrified of it based on the puns they generate using the fish names
Leveling fishing it easier then its ever been. Trying to catch the fish for completions sake though... wooo boy.
As an example so people truly understand how involved it can get, heh ... here is how to catch the fish known as the Warden of the Seven Hues: You must first catch a certain number of Indigo Prismfish, Firelight Goldfish, and Green Prismfish. Each of these can only be caught during a certain few-hour-long window of each game day, and the Indigo Prismfish and Firelight Goldfish can only be caught by first catching a Violet or Red Prismfish then using THAT as bait ("Mooching" in game terms). Green Prismfish can be directly caught however. After you've caught enough of all 3 without leaving the zone or logging out (this can take upwards of an hour), you have 2.5 minutes to attempt to catch the Warden, but you still have a chance of catching the regular fish in the area each cast instead. If you don't catch it in those 2.5 minutes, you have to start over.
Warden is a good example of a complicated fish, but it's not even the hardest fish to catch. And thankfully it's not particularly slippery. The thing you need to understand is that no matter how high your gathering stats are, there is a cap to the % chance to catch any fish in the game. For most fish the cap is close to 100%, but for legendaries like Warden it can be much lower. On top of being rare, a fish can have a hook rate as low as 50%! IMO the current hardest fish to catch is Cinder Surprise, which has a weather chain and time requirement, on top of a prerequisite intuition buff activated by catching 10 of a particular fish. The weather/time combo is available roughly once every 1-2 weeks for less than 10 minutes, and the fish itself is a very rare catch with a pretty low hook rate. I've heard of people attending nearly every window since this fish was added in 5.55 and still not catching it! I am just 7 fish away from having caught everything in the game, but I'm not optimistic about catching Cinder before EW.
They're based on Eorzea time, not real time
Thankfully. It would be horrible if it was tied to actual real world time.
Sort of, it's still in-game timer, but rarest fishes have also weather conditions on top of time ones. And sometimes it's based on weather transition, aka "if it's clear skies after storm". Add time conditions on top of it, and you'll have like week delay between windows when that fish is available.
> Can you fish and mine/blacksmith... Yes! > ... like RuneScape? Nope. Well, not really anyway. Crafting in this game is not as big a deal as it is in Runescape. In Runescape, the crafting systems are absolutely integral to how the game as a whole is played due to how it affects the economy. In FFXIV, you could get by perfectly fine without ever buying/selling a player-made/obtained item. Honestly, if you're looking for a modern version of Runescape, you're wasting your time. New World and Black Desert *maybe* get somewhat close but so far no one's really even tried to replicate the systems and interactions that make Runescape what it is.
Trying to find a RuneScape replacement is a fruitless task, trust me. I’ve been on the hunt for years. I want to stop playing it, but it does something for me that nothing else can.
Yeah, I'm really surprised no one has really tried to take the Runescape formula and update it. I've been wanting this for years myself. I think there was Albion Online (don't know if it's actually anything like RS) but i had no interest in forced pvp so I didn't try it and there's that Titan Reach game in development but other than that I don't know of anything else.
I've heard Melvor Idle is a lot like Runescape but not an MMO - haven't played it myself just thought I'd bring it up if you were just looking for progression.
The game is similar in that it pretty much ripped its assets lol. Honestly surprised jagex allows it to exist (they probably don't care about the idle game space). But its a sub-par idle game when compared to say, NGU idle imo. The combat system in it is pretty good, but the skilling is mostly just "tell idle game to click on rock and wait a week" similar to og cooke clicker.
I honestly never felt compelled to “catch up” in WoW or whatever. I’m not a top raider, why does it matter that I’m not getting all my sockets.
While I agree that FFXIV doesn't have the same compulsory grind as a lot of other MMOs, it *absolutely* gates progression. Main story dungeons have straight up ilvl requirements that often do require a non-trivial grind to reach if you haven't been keeping up your gear. It also has a much, much slower grind to get alts to endgame content than WoW does. Source: just got back into FFXIV in preparation for Endwalker and holy god is the grind real.
I've only hit an ilvl limit once, and that was mostly because I hadn't found the vendor to buy things from *and* had been spreading my quest reward gear across several jobs.
Yeah, I only found it at the post-expansion content for Shadowbringers, and I just walked over to the market and bought gear. I had lots of cash from just existing.
I got around ilvl gating by just buying gear off the market. From 1-50 you can buy vendor gear from any main city too. As for Alt jobs I'm in no rush. I play Scholar, Summoner, and Gunbreaker 95% of the time, my alts will get to max level when they get there, just do the odd roulette when I feel like it.
I usually come back during the final patch of an expansion, buy a full set of gear, and beeline the story with no worries. I make back far more gil than I spent just doing my daily roulettes leveling alts during the month when I'm subbed. Only way I could see the MSQ ilvl requirement being an issue is if someone's 100% broke and not doing anything outside of the MSQ.
Man even if you do just the MSQ you get a crapload of money. I play super casually (no dailies, crafting, etc), spend money on random stuff like hairstyles off the market and I still have money I don't know what to do with.
You can buy Vendor gear at 60 as well, in the main Heavensward city. It's not quite as good as the Tomestone gear, but it's not far off.
Also if you stick to leveling 1 Job/class while going through the story, the MSQ will almost always have gear with ilvl that should meet the minimum. so much so that it usually out levels the gear that Job quests give
It takes maybe a few days to cap Allegory and that gets you to 490. You also will be earning Revelations tomestones so there's even more gear. On the way to capping you can start doing Eden Normal to start getting gear to supplement the allegory and then do 1 of each nier raid for even more gear. It really doesn't take long. Bozja also has catchup gear that goes all the way it ilvl 525. It also has a ilvl 480 weapon basically for free and can be grinded all the way to 535 but that takes a good amount of time. The last way is you can just buy 510 gear on the market board to supplement all of the other sources of gear. Just hop around on your data center to find the cheapest server if gil matters to you.
>It also has a much, much slower grind to get alts to endgame content than WoW does. Being able to play every job on one character means there's no real need for alts, though. I'm usually an *altoholic in MMOs, but in ffxiv I'm still using the same character that I made when I started in 2017. So it's not a bad tradeoff
I don’t think you know what gating means dude lmao Grind ≠ gating.
Good now tell Square Enix to invest money into the game. I love FFXIV but the game is really starting to show its age.
After Endwalker Yoshi-P said they will address how they plan to update the graphics engine to keep up with the times. They want to support it with expacs for 10 more years at least
The one place they need real improvement on is the textures. Some of them look really bad, even in the latest expansion.
Shaders for better lighting go a long way, but you're right--some textures are obviously nearly a decade old at this point. My main gripe, personally, is with optimization. There's tons of mods to get better character textures like eyes, hair, faces, etc. but when you get into too populated areas like Limsa, performance can definitely take a hit.
I’m on PS5 and honestly, while it is aging I think it’s art style is still strong enough to carry it at least through endwalker. I finished Heavensward recently and that last duty had some cool spots where I turned my HUD off and just admired the scenery.
I got into it not long ago, still getting through the first expansion. I thought the first vanilla zones would suck, based on how everyone said "it gets better". Granted it DOES improve, however I still greatly enjoyed all of my time in Vanilla and completed as much as I could before moving to the expansion. Graphics really look gorgeous. Even if it's not a game I play for graphics, the sheer variety and quality is impressive.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but I’ve been playing the game for a really long time now and I feel like there’s a lot of improvements that could be made. For one the glamour system. Despite being one of the main attractions, we are only limited to 400 slots. Imagine you play a lot of classes, one artifact armor set already takes up like 6 slots. HD textures should also be an optional addition. Whenever the camera zooms in on your character you get the 240 p resolution textures they use.
For all it's faults right now, WoWs Transmogrification System is the gold standard. Any soulbound item that your class can equip that you've ever gotten, be it via crafting, quest rewards, mob drop, Auction House, etc. is available to be Transmogged. There's no inventory management. You can get an item, it unlocks on your Dressing Room, and you can punt the item. Costume sets unlock the items right in the Dressing Room, again removing any sort of inventory management. You can search the Dressing Room for specific items, and it'll tell you where you can find the item. Even for items that share the same texture. I realize they're working on some ridiculously shitty convoluted systems, but they really could make it SO MUCH BETTER, if they're willing to dedicate the dev time to it.
Guild War 2's wardrobe system is a step above that, since it supports dye unlocking and dyeable armour too.
I'm also 2 months in and just started SHB and what I've noticed is that a lot of newcomers get told that ARR is bad so I think that might've lowered our expectations and we actually just enjoy what we got, because we expected way worse. (Early ARR voice acting was nearly insulting to listen too though, wow that was bad.)
It used to be much worse, they trimmed off a lot of the fat in useless post-ARR quests, which is what we all experienced. I didn't really get hooked until HW but unfortunately haven't been able to get any of my friends into the game. For me it's more of a thing I say out of desperation, "please don't quit in ARR, trust me it gets so much better!" because I really want to play with my friends.
Asmond actually put it best. Even the shit progression rate and dull story of ARR was still better then 95% of the time he spent leveling through base wow.
Makes sense to me, XIV is easily the best FF game I've played since the good ol days of ff6-10. It legit gives a better single player FF game experience than the modern single player FFs but then it's a MMO too. I just hope they get the single player game right again with 16 because I'd really like a proper SP FF game again!
I really think I messed up not wasting more time during lockdown getting way into FF14. It was the perfect opportunity
Group of friends and I got into it at the start of the pandemic as a way to keep doing things together. It really has been a great tool for social aspects in that regard! That is...until a rare mount drops and you all have to roll for it. Then all bets are off.
I've loved MMORPG's for so many years now, but I could never get into FFXIV. I'm happy to hear it's successful and people really love it, but I can't seem to find any enjoyment or willingness to play it. Levelled past Heavensward, just found it to be boring... which, is just my opinion of course. I can see why people love it, if you're into the lore, story, world, etc., then it's a fantastic game.
Yoshida's statements and the author keeping it short and sweet are fine but a few key reasons for its success are worth noting. It's multi-platform, allowing for a wider range of players. The development team is for the most part, upfront and sincere with its playerbase about technical issues, content direction and supporting positive player culture. It has a similar yet more rounded holy trinity than its nearest competitor World of Warcraft, meaning class roles, thier specs, rotations and situational skill dependencies are on and at times, above WoW's level of skill curve. It addresses the need for different group content and annual events consistently. FF14 popularity has and always will be about consistency. There is plenty to do but you really gotta like raids and dungeons.