What Icon Thinks is Going to Happen with FFXIV

Preface: The ideas of expressed in this post are solely those of Icon and not the patrons or staff of mmorpg.com (translation: no Blizzard butt love). Whether you agree or disagree about the contents of this post is truly irreverent since they are my personal thoughts into the matter. You are welcome to chime in with your own opinions; however you will not be changing my feeling without incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. I ask that you graciously respect my opinions as I respect yours even though I might not agree with them. While this post will have some hard fact there will be parts which are educated guesses which may or may not prove false at a later time. At no point in this post will purposefully or maliciously spread false information as hard fact. At this time I ask you to please acquire your beverage of choice and take your seats. Thank you and enjoy the ride.

Wow I really just feel like I just got introduced for some stage show or something. Okay I have been reading a lot of posts recently on the forums and I am seeing a lot of bickering back and forth between people. One person wants XP one person doesn’t. One person wants to play on a PS3 the other on a PC. One person wants donnybrook, everyone else wants to get him into a donnybrook and teach him want its true meaning is.

What is up people? Seriously. People are taking sides with a game that is not even out yet and just assuming everyone should have their thoughts on the game. Where we are in the process of this game if it were any other company other than say a Square-Enix or a Blizzard it could still be cancelled. Why are you arguing about which platforms to play on?

And honestly the answer is initially the PS3 would be the better choice solely on the fact that the specs of the game will undoubtedly be where the normal non-gaming PC will be able to play the game on the low-end and which more expensive rigs will be able to play the game on settings somewhere between “recommended” and “you have way too much fucking money.” The PS3’s capacity is greater than your standard non-gaming PC at the moment and will continue that way for a few years. There will be a point when the PC will be able to inexpensively surpass the PS3 at which time start arguing when the field is even.

If you have to come onto the forums and have to ask should you play on a PS3 or a PC, my guess is you already have a both or looking to either get a PS3 or upgrade your PC.

Lesson on human nature: You ask advice from people who will already side with your true intentions. Humans really don’t like to get shot down too often; it is not healthy for their psyche. If you are walking up to a friend to ask what color shirt you should ware – red or blue – you are going to react one of two ways to their answer: You are either going to agree with them or you are going to do the opposite. Your decision after the advice will show your true feelings on the subject. Could you have honestly been indecisive on the choice? Yes, but more times than not if you truly didn’t have an opinion of your own you wouldn’t have cared for anyone else’s opinion and not cared enough to ask in the first place.

Moral of the story: If you really want a PS3 and just looking for an excuse then go buy one because nothing a PC person is going to say is going to matter. If you really want to upgrade your PC then do so because nothing a PS3 person is going to say is going to matter. If you need to upgrade your PC and don’t have a PS3, I’d go with the PS3 as you will get more bang for your buck and when in (or coming out of) a recession you might want to think economical. If your true question is about concerns that they two platforms would play separately or if game play will be different, then ask that question. The answers are “No all players will play on the same servers” and “If they follow in the footsteps of their predecessor then game play will not be different since all platforms are based off the limitation of the lowest common denominator so one system doesn’t have an inherit advantage over another”

With regards to the arguments on what features you’d have – or more like what features you won’t play if they aren’t included. Bottom line is the game is going to be what the game is. If there is no jumping or swimming or if there is no cell shading or if there is no x or y … it all is really not your or my place to comment on, especially at this point in the development. If you refuse to play a game what doesn’t use WASD and a mouse and this game ends up not (and my thought it that it actually will although I like the FFXI better), that is your problem not the games. If you can’t get over your own arrogance and hang ups that you can’t enjoy a game then the game is not for you. For example: if you don’t like party systems or you don’t like slow play or you like having an action bar you mindlessly click then FFXI is not for you. I’m sorry, but that is how it is. No amount of bitching and chastising is going to change that fact that FFXI isn’t what you want.

In all honesty that is fine. If the game isn’t for you then it isn’t for you. But don’t come here and bitch and flame because it isn’t to the detail exactly how you want it. There is nothing more pathetic than someone who is a teenager to adult who cries like a little girl that the Barbie she got for Christmas has a blue dress and not a pink one. If you think a game must have exactly what you think it should have then by all means there are plenty of degree programs out there in the programming and games field. Go make it. Don’t come here and bitch that the trees are not green enough for your liking just because you are on the interwebs and no one can slap the shit out of you. There isn’t a single person who has played FFXI that doesn’t have some issue with some part of the game. If you can come here and be civil about problems you will find 20-30 people who would agree with you. If you come here and flame and troll you will get bitched out. Plain and simple. This is true on any forum or on website so try to grow up and come up with a good argument instead of typing hate in between wiping your tears away.

Put this in the grand scheme of things. If your hatred for a game or a company is based on the fact “space bar != jump” … you have serious issue and take them away from me.

As far as the world, it will be just that a world. It is not going to play much differently than FFXI does or even WoW were you have a massive open world where you can walk around with other players. It is extremely doubtful that it will be anything like Guild Wars or DDO where the outer zones are instanced and you need to invite people to your instance. Will there be instances? Yes. You saw them in FFXI in the form on Burning Circles (BCNMs) and in all honesty Mog Houses. What an instance allows you to do is give different people the same content at the same time.

I know EQ2 had instanced outer zones, but in their case they did it to limit the amount of people who were in the zone. So say 50 people wanted to collect berries: 25 might be in one instance and 25 might be in the other. The reason for doing this was so the resources of the zone (mobs, nodes, etc) were not stretched too thin due to over saturation of players. It also helps limit lag with too many people on screen at once. This could be a problem with popular zones. On Asura it was Lower Jeuno and then later on Whitegate near the AH that everyone would hang out at causing major lag. FFXI corrected this by not having everyone in the area visible to the player at the same time. FFXI does not use instances for non-BC fights and I don’t see why FFXIV would although I could imagine that you will see more people on screen at the same time.

You will be around other people. You will need to work together. You will need to group. Done end of story on that one. All y’all that are having a coronary about “making FFXIV like WoW” can just stop (or just die of the heart attack I really don’t care). What the goal is to make a game that is accessible to as many people as possible. From a company standpoint, do you think that is fair to try to get as many people as possible playing so you can make more money? Is everyone on the same page here? Does this mean you can get from 1 to 75 in 3 weeks? A) You can do that now in FFXI … There are no levels so why even bring it up.

There are people who are going to want to solo all the time. There are people who are going to want to party all the time. Why are the soloers bitching at the partiers and why are the partiers bitching at the soloers? You’re not going to freaking see each other. Think about it.

I know there are times when I want to just go out on my own and mindlessly hack and slash things while I’m waiting for something to happen. It is why I play WoW. It would be great in FFXI if I could LFP as one job and maybe farm some stuff up or maybe get some exp while I’m waiting. That isn’t too much to ask. I’d much rather be partying most of the time but if I happen to catch a day when I didn’t get an invite (which happened quite rarely to be honest with my 1337ness) it would be nice to be able to go do something in the mean time. The major problem a lot of people had with FFXI wasn’t the grind or the community or learning curve (all that could be hit or miss) if you surveyed people who played FFXI at one point I’d guess that their main gripe was the wait for a party. If you were going to take FFXI and try to improve on it for a successor the first thing you should do is fix the biggest gripe. This is doing just that.

Are you going to have people do nothing but solo? Sure. Is there going to be an effect on the world? Yes … but very minimal (I’ll go into a dissertation on the effect of players on a virtual world some other time … your welcome). So someone gets as farthest progressed as they can get solo. They will need to group at some point to get high-end gear (I’m assuming there will be an end game). So if they want to get to that point they will have to interact with people and they will be at a disadvantage socially. If they find it is too hard to get help to get high-end crap they will probably skip it. Just because someone has a play style that is different doesn’t mean it is wrong. So partiers go LFP forever, so soloers go try to find help forever; we all can get along.

Now: Character Progression. Okay so this is an RPG, thus there will be some sort of character progression. We know there is going to be jobs and there will be abilities but there has to be some way of progressing your character from point A to point B. Normally this is done by exp, but we all know that FFXIV will not have exp. What does that mean: all speculation at this point. There has been a Final Fantasy where there was no exp and that was Final Fantasy II. It was all skill based where you have bare character and based on if you use magic or a certain weapon your proficiency in that weapon will go up. Will FFXIV be like this? I really hope not. The problem with FFII is that everything is a little too random for my taste.

There has to be some kind of progression. It isn’t like you are going to be able to equip the best sword and shield in the game 3 hours into play and slay the boss. It won’t happen. There has to be some kind of way to making a correlation with the hierarchy of equipment. (Huh?) You can’t have a five-minute-old character equip a high-end sword and start swinging. My thought is you will have some sort of weapon proficiency system where the more you swing the more you skill. It would be sort of like in FFXI with gaining skill point in order to unlock more weapon skills. So basically it will be instead of at level 10 you upgrade form your wooden sword to your copper sword, you would be able to equip the copper sword at a sword skill of 100 or something like that. It seems like a good way to deal with weapon hierarchies.

The problem with it is what about armor? Again you could have some extremely shiney plate mail that has such a high DEF that nothing you would face for the first 50 hours of the game would be able to do 1 damage to you. There have been Final Fantasys in the past where you didn’t need to worry about buying armor (FFVIII, FFX, and maybe more), but in those game you had exp levels where your character is gaining defense as they ding. What about gaining abilities. For instance in FFXI the WAR job gets Provoke at 5 and Berserk at 15. Without levels how would you unlock abilities?

Here is what I think is really going to happen. You won’t have exp to level and such, but you will gain some kind of ability point and those ability points will be used to gain abilities. These abilities will be locked to certain weapons (and maybe armor). Then once the ability is unlocked it is imprinted on the character and that character will be able to use that ability after unequipping the weapon (current job pending).

It would be very similar to FFIX for anyone that has played that. For instance: I have my character that is just starting and I equip the Staff of Fire. The Staff of Fire will let me cast Fire while I have it equipped, but after 1000 AP I will have the Fire spell imprinted on me. Now I can do equip the Staff of Ice and I can enter the fight being able to cast Fire and Ice. If I would unequip the Staff of Ice and before I would get 1000 AP and equip the Staff of Thunder, I will cease to be able to cast Ice, but could cast Thunder and Fire. However I could go back and pick up the Staff of Ice where I left off.

You could do this with abilities and HP/MP/DEF upgrades as well, in a similar way to the HP/MP upgrades for limit point in FFXI. I did hear someone say Magicite on these forums once. If that were true (I have not confirmed) the Magicite could unlock the abilities and spells like in FF6.

If I had to take a guess on progression this would be it. You can’t have someone who just started be on the same level as someone who played for months. It wouldn’t be far to the person who put the time into the game.

As far as the beta. I think I will probably be starting about March like others on the forums have said. I think it is something we all kind of stuck to even before Square-Enix mentioned the game. The as for the game itself; I’d guess it would be out about November 2010 if everything goes well with the beta if there are problems and bugs that need to be fixed then I’d hope they would take time to fix and then polish on top of that. If it happens to get pushed back I’d assume April or May of 2011. April is the start of the new fiscal year in Japan so they might push it to the first fiscal quarter if the 2010 release becomes impossible.

Well this was a fun waste of 5 hours of work.

Post Script: Learned my lesson and typed all this in MS word then copy and pasted ... no more losing long posts for me! Do not quote my entire post. Seriously it is really long. If you want to quote a line or two for reference sake then that is fine, but you never have to quote and entire post from an OP when referencing the entire post. Be cool stay in school.