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The ENDLESS grind.
Tsujinson
Member Posts: 9
Things I hope change from FFXI to the new FFIV
Let me start by saying I LOVE FF. And I played FFXI from 06-08. Humbly, I have played and been apart of beta's for atleast 3/4 of every decent MMO made. FFXI was brilliant in their battle mechanics and group efforts. Every person in the team felt they were needed because they were. Simply amazing. And the gear was well designed. Grinding for the newest and best gear felt rewarding. But... here it comes, The game was such an ENDLESS grind. Their was nothing after each Lv that made me want to go do something else because I had reach a certain goal. It was just "well yeah for me, grind to the next now". Yes the crafting was okay and their were many choices to choose from. But their wasnt enough in-between to keep me. I hope this endless grind just to grind becomes better. Oh not to mention that FFXI is the most longest and hardest MMO to LV. I mean come on, each mob only gave couple hundred exp and needed a full group with lots of time. Dont get me wrong I had tons of fun hours on end playing trying not to fail College due to this addiction. But will they make more content or will it be a Shell make over? Thanks for taking the time to read my garbage lol.
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Comments
Huh and what the point here? you talk about FFXI on FFXIV forum....
Ill edit to make it more clear. But that is the point. Will it be the same with just new looks?
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For the little info we got no it will not be the same as FFXI, SE had said FFXIV will be more solo friendly.
I sure hope it's the same, but if you research a little you'll find out quests are easier to grab and you can solo efficiently. I just hope they make it so there is a reason to group. I don't mind the grind, it was getting into that grind that I hated. Last time I played FFXI I spent 2 hours in Jueno as a 55 WHM spamming LFG.... and I was a damn good WHM.
Don't have access to a link supporting the statement, but other diehards will be able to back it up:
FFXIV will build off of the concepts established in FFXI. It is targetted at the only audience that matters (internalized: the FFXI one) with concepts they hope to expand to non-loyalists of the franchise.
Seeing as you enjoyed FFXI vehemently (almost chosen for its double-meaning nonetheless!), you should subscribe to FFXIV apon launch. Knowing how the FF IP has been handled over its 2+ decade span, I wouldn't worry too much about it being done 'better this time'.
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc.
We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be.
So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away.
- MMO_Doubter
Solo friendly would be a huge diffrence.
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personally havent played any of the FF titles but looking at the little info....sure make me want to play at launch (knowing its a very proffesional handled title) can very well be the MMO breakig me unhealthy EQ2 habits.
for how long it takes depends how much time you got to throw into the electronic entertainment . its a choice, if you do not have alot of time and NEEED to be in the lead of the game, you properbly should drop MMOs over all.
I agree with just about everything written so far here. I just want to reiterate that FFXI was hugely successful, even if it wasn't accessible to a mass audience. FFXIV has an opportunity to keep that market by being the ONLY mmo released in years that isn't a solo rush to raiding endgame. If they don't cave to the trend, they are guaranteed a monopoly on this relatively large niche market. Otherwise, I think FFXIV will have a hard time standing out from the crowd, fading after the initial fan base loses interest.
(LFG was the biggest problem with FFXI, I'll admit. But once you found a well-oiled group, man it was fun/rewarding to crank through mobs.)
As SE tends to point out, guild Leeves are going to be a big part of the game. If i remeber correctly they even said they would be occasionally switching up what guild leeves you can do from time to time, so people don't just grind the same ones and that there is always a fresh batch of new ones to try. Now that they are trying to appeal to more then just the more hardcore, i can bet it will defnitly be toned down from FFXI, it just makes sense.
I played from 05-09 and it's by far the best MMO ive played next to EQ1. They seems to have learned a great deal from FFXI and still want to cater to them first and formost, so it's very unlikely this will be another WoW-like game. Since this is not a level based game i think its going to be a very diffrent experience to FFXI, but no so unfimilar that it pushes the loyal fanbase away.
To be honest a lot of FFXI fans (myself included) where actually more worried it would be too "questy" and WoW-like then it being too close to FFXI. I'd say we have to wait until Beta info starts rolling out before we can make any solid assumptions.
Also it's going to make it intresting how LFG itself will work. I'm guessing they will have to make it much deeper and give us a lot more info on the players becuase everything is skill based, and many people will have very diffrent set ups.
Well the game is old and even though ,it made a slowish leveling curve,people still try to race through levels.I think games in general make a big mistake in design,they are meant to be finished after a couple years.Trying to prolong MMORPG's the way they are designed becomes boring and nothing more than max level gear grinding.
The only way to keep a game constantly growing and busy is to have eventual death.I don't know the answer,maybe total hours played,some form of yearly aging,idk,but to have 99% of a server all sitting on level 75 players is ridiculous.
FFXIV will not have levels,so how they propose to keep players long term is really going to be interesting.Players are not going to hang around for years just to level their skills,so again it will be some form of gear grind.SO they may very well allow players to solo levels,witch is meaningless really,but to attain the top gear and skills,i am sure it will be VERY time consuming and not solo friendly,that is the only way i can see them prolonging subscriptions.
One thing i noticed about gaming over seas,is they really get into it with tournaments and such.We have heard Square talk about new unique game play,maybe they have some secret up their sleeve that will involve tournaments,maybe that is their secret for this game to keeping long term players.IDK just a thought.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Well the game is old and even though ,it made a slowish leveling curve,people still try to race through levels.I think games in general make a big mistake in design,they are meant to be finished after a couple years.Trying to prolong MMORPG's the way they are designed becomes boring and nothing more than max level gear grinding.
It took me 2 years to get to 55 (although I was logged off for about 6 months) but I play casually. FFXI seemed perfect though for me.
The only way to keep a game constantly growing and busy is to have eventual death.I don't know the answer,maybe total hours played,some form of yearly aging,idk,but to have 99% of a server all sitting on level 75 players is ridiculous.
I dunno, I think that would scare off alot of players... but I agree, thing is with FFXI they had that solved with subjobs and different job combos that you need to level up to succeed/have more fun.
FFXIV will not have levels,so how they propose to keep players long term is really going to be interesting.Players are not going to hang around for years just to level their skills,so again it will be some form of gear grind.SO they may very well allow players to solo levels,witch is meaningless really,but to attain the top gear and skills,i am sure it will be VERY time consuming and not solo friendly,that is the only way i can see them prolonging subscriptions.
My guess is that this "Armoury" thing is just a sneaky way of calling the jobs. Ok, so you switch weapons , it changes your job. Same thing will go with the weapons "levels" ... they'll be the "jobs" levels. The possibily of jobs is almost endless. How they are going to combine jobs is still a mystery to me. Maybe everyone can have a second weapon equipped?
One thing i noticed about gaming over seas,is they really get into it with tournaments and such.We have heard Square talk about new unique game play,maybe they have some secret up their sleeve that will involve tournaments,maybe that is their secret for this game to keeping long term players.IDK just a thought.
Good thought, live stuff/events going on always makes the game seem more alive.
What did you mean by "Since this is not a level based game" ?
LOTRO, GW, FFXI, RS, EVE, AION, AOC, WHO, FE,
i liked the fact that ffxi had a tough grind - it gave being high level more meaning. games that allow you to get to top level within a few months gives little value to being an end gamer.
i really hope they dont make ffxiv an easy level game.
@Tj
They technically have no "levels" this time around, its a skill based system. Though a lot of people have a feeling that there will be some sort of "level" marker like rank or somthing after you accuired so many skills/skill points. Not much has been said so far.
you miss the point, call it what you want ... level, an extent, a measure, a degree of intensity / achievement, whatever you want to call it - i just hope they dont make it too easy!
Not really relevant to the OP anymore...but I agree, and another thing that is going to make FFXIV incredibly successful is the amount of people who left FFXI after they realized they played almost all that could be played. There are alot of people like that-- saying they can't wait for FFXIV, following up with some nostalgic remark.
i was just letting him know, he posed the question "What did you mean by "Since this is not a level based game" ? on one of my quotes, so i was explaining to him what i ment. It was not pointed at what you had said (i think you were posting while i did).
and as for what you said, i fully agree, i don't want another WoW-like easy game where you see half the community cap out a class in the first month. I prefer the slow and group orientated grind of FFXI, i played it for 4 years and still occasionally go back. As long as the "grind" is not as streight forward as FFXI, and there is a good mix of questing, group grind, small group grind, a bit of solo (i don't want much, and i want grouping to be WAY more effective, so people do it) and maybe some pulic events to level with like FFXI's campaign battles (which were awesome) and Besiged.
If you can have that great mix it will feel a heck of a lot less of a grind, we are human, and we crave variety.
Someone is actualy asking for no grinding in a final fantasy game,that's quite new.
Well, I'm gonna make a few comments here because... well... there's a few things in your post regarding FFXI that I find issue with. As you base your question about FFXIV off of those statements, I think they should be cleared up a bit.
First... no game is a grind unless you treat it like one. I say this having played FFXI and Lineage 2 almost simultaneously for several years... so yes, I know what a "grind" would be
I played FFXI since its US launch on PC up to the present, with breaks and "vacations" along the way (so it hasn't been non-stop), and it's only ever felt like a grind to me on a few occasions. When it started to feel like a grind, it was because I'd been focusing solely on a single activity (crafting, leveling, etc). So, I took a break from that and found something else to do in the game. There is *plenty* you can do at just about any given level in FFXI. Aside from that, there is plenty else to do in FFXI aside from leveling... Harvesting, crafting, questing, nation missions, Einherjar, Assault, BCNMs... and on and on. There are something like 20+ individual different activities in FFXI, most of which are almost mini-games unto themselves. Since you played from 2006 and had all current expansions (except the mini-ones, perhaps) available, there is *lots* more you could have done besides leveling.
In a nutshell: If you felt like you were doing nothing but grinding levels, then it's because you chose to play that way. There was *plenty* else in FFXI you could have done instead to mix things up... at pretty much any level. I don't say that in a "shaking my finger at you" sort of way. I just think that many people (and I'm sure I'm guilty of it as well at times) tend to only look outward for a reason when they find issue with something, and don't look at how *they* approached the situation. As a great lyricist once wrote: "Blame is better to give than receive". Another cool quote I saw sums it up well: "When you're looking for faults, use a mirror, not a telescope".
Next... describing FFXI being group heavy as a negative is like describing a motorcycle having 2 wheels as a negative. It was designed, from the ground up, to be a group centric game. It is a FF game after all, and groups have been the focus of every numbered game in the series. So, if it was too group-centric for someone's personal taste, then fine. But to say a game designed around group mechanics (which even you, Tsujinson, noted your appreciation for in your post) requires too much grouping is... well.. odd to me. There wasn't a lot of soloing because FFXI wasn't designed to be a solo MMO.
And it goes even beyond it being "group-centric" by design. Square also is very keen on building and maintaining community. Seasonal events that require you to cooperate with other players, shared servers among all countries, auto-translator, and so forth... Along with grouping up for leveling or doing missions, etc. those other activities are all designed to build and maintain community (an almost unheard of concept these days, and something some people take to like vampires to sunlight).
It's no coincidence, I'm sure, that the MMOs with the most focus on grouping also tend to be described as having the strongest communities, while those described as more soloable (outside of end-game raids), are also described as having very weak communities. 1+1...
Are there problems with the game being group-centric? Sure. But, in my experience, they mostly come back to being people problems... not game design problems. A group-centric game assumes cooperation and a "team mentality"... which many people - especially these days - simply don't have. They're stuck on a "Me me me" mindset.
Now... that said...
Will FFXIV be less group-centric? Well they've stated that it will have more content that can be solo'd, content that can be done in a short amount of time and so forth. So it seems much more likely that FFXIV will be less focused on groups overall, but will still have a significant focus on them. Also, it won't be a job leveling system, but a skill-based system (with levels), so it's not going to be quite so "linear" as "I'm leveling Ninja right now... then I'll level Paladin...".
Keep in mind, even in FFXIV, if a player focuses solely on one or two activities all the time, ignoring most everything else available, and then burns out, calling it "a grind", then they need to take a step back and ask themselves why they didn't take a break from "Activity A" or "B" and do "C", "D", "E" or "F" for a while to break the monotony. The obvious answer is "they chose to". But again... many people would prefer to blame it on something else.
Also... I don't think SE is dumb enough to look to cannibalize their own playerbase.. They already have a healthy population in FFXI - it wouldn't make any sense to create a new MMO that *directly* competes with it. 'course, if people are going to leave XI, I'm sure they'd prefer they go to XIV instead of another game... so you could look at it that way too.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
Man what a wall of text but I read it all and agree. Like Mike said FFXI was a grind but it was what you did with your time to make it fun or seems less of a grind. In the early and mid time of my XI adventure I did alot of stuff to keep me going besides xping. I farmed, mined(other gathering to), crafted, raided, missions, and MPK cgfs til they added that patch that made the mob vanish and respawned. Thats the only thing I really hated that SE did to that game it made lvling my BST hard and couldn't mpk a cgf like you wanted to.
i also agree with what he said, too many people complain that they "have to group to level" which i find rediulous. Pre-WOW era every game was very much like that, it was what the genre was supposed to be...an MMO. For me FFXIV is pretty much my last hope for a quality "community/group" type MMO. Everything basically changed when one company started to make truckloads of money over more solo/quest heavy game that was rewarded you a lot quicker (as in quick leveling and such) Now every game wants to be that game, and the group based games are pretty much exinct.
I think they mean to have FFXI players change games. They did say that they were their first priority and it shows from things like including things like the same races. They also have nothing but regular content update left for FFXI, with no current plans for any sort of expansions (of course this could change at vana-fest) but i think they want people to eventually shift into a new game where they can bring all kinds of new things, and not have the limits that FFXI has atm (ps2 and 56k) They even shifted most of their FFXI dev team onto 14, which to me shows they really want 14 to be the main focus.
Oh come on. Even in early eq1 (the gold standard for tough love) there were classes that soloed very well.
Oh come on. Even in early eq1 (the gold standard for tough love) there were classes that soloed and classes that couldnt.
Oh come on. There were classes like that in FFXI, too. Exception makes the rule.
Well, I'm gonna make a few comments here because... well... there's a few things in your post regarding FFXI that I find issue with. As you base your question about FFXIV off of those statements, I think they should be cleared up a bit.
First... no game is a grind unless you treat it like one. I say this having played FFXI and Lineage 2 almost simultaneously for several years... so yes, I know what a "grind" would be
I played FFXI since its US launch on PC up to the present, with breaks and "vacations" along the way (so it hasn't been non-stop), and it's only ever felt like a grind to me on a few occasions. When it started to feel like a grind, it was because I'd been focusing solely on a single activity (crafting, leveling, etc). So, I took a break from that and found something else to do in the game. There is *plenty* you can do at just about any given level in FFXI. Aside from that, there is plenty else to do in FFXI aside from leveling... Harvesting, crafting, questing, nation missions, Einherjar, Assault, BCNMs... and on and on. There are something like 20+ individual different activities in FFXI, most of which are almost mini-games unto themselves. Since you played from 2006 and had all current expansions (except the mini-ones, perhaps) available, there is *lots* more you could have done besides leveling.
In a nutshell: If you felt like you were doing nothing but grinding levels, then it's because you chose to play that way. There was *plenty* else in FFXI you could have done instead to mix things up... at pretty much any level. I don't say that in a "shaking my finger at you" sort of way. I just think that many people (and I'm sure I'm guilty of it as well at times) tend to only look outward for a reason when they find issue with something, and don't look at how *they* approached the situation. As a great lyricist once wrote: "Blame is better to give than receive". Another cool quote I saw sums it up well: "When you're looking for faults, use a mirror, not a telescope".
Next... describing FFXI being group heavy as a negative is like describing a motorcycle having 2 wheels as a negative. It was designed, from the ground up, to be a group centric game. It is a FF game after all, and groups have been the focus of every numbered game in the series. So, if it was too group-centric for someone's personal taste, then fine. But to say a game designed around group mechanics (which even you, Tsujinson, noted your appreciation for in your post) requires too much grouping is... well.. odd to me. There wasn't a lot of soloing because FFXI wasn't designed to be a solo MMO.
And it goes even beyond it being "group-centric" by design. Square also is very keen on building and maintaining community. Seasonal events that require you to cooperate with other players, shared servers among all countries, auto-translator, and so forth... Along with grouping up for leveling or doing missions, etc. those other activities are all designed to build and maintain community (an almost unheard of concept these days, and something some people take to like vampires to sunlight).
It's no coincidence, I'm sure, that the MMOs with the most focus on grouping also tend to be described as having the strongest communities, while those described as more soloable (outside of end-game raids), are also described as having very weak communities. 1+1...
Are there problems with the game being group-centric? Sure. But, in my experience, they mostly come back to being people problems... not game design problems. A group-centric game assumes cooperation and a "team mentality"... which many people - especially these days - simply don't have. They're stuck on a "Me me me" mindset.
Now... that said...
Will FFXIV be less group-centric? Well they've stated that it will have more content that can be solo'd, content that can be done in a short amount of time and so forth. So it seems much more likely that FFXIV will be less focused on groups overall, but will still have a significant focus on them. Also, it won't be a job leveling system, but a skill-based system (with levels), so it's not going to be quite so "linear" as "I'm leveling Ninja right now... then I'll level Paladin...".
Keep in mind, even in FFXIV, if a player focuses solely on one or two activities all the time, ignoring most everything else available, and then burns out, calling it "a grind", then they need to take a step back and ask themselves why they didn't take a break from "Activity A" or "B" and do "C", "D", "E" or "F" for a while to break the monotony. The obvious answer is "they chose to". But again... many people would prefer to blame it on something else.
Also... I don't think SE is dumb enough to look to cannibalize their own playerbase.. They already have a healthy population in FFXI - it wouldn't make any sense to create a new MMO that *directly* competes with it. 'course, if people are going to leave XI, I'm sure they'd prefer they go to XIV instead of another game... so you could look at it that way too.
Haha well sir I have to admit I stopped reading your reply half way through. You have some great hatred for some reason. FIRST off you claimed I disliked the "groups" needed for exp. ? Hmmm thats why I praised it and called it Brilliant? Second I am glad YOU never felt it was a grind. Yes i grinded lv's, Spent days harvesting and crafting breaking those darn crystals on a failed attempt. But that is you. Do not carry the attitude that others are DUMB because it never felt like a grind to you. Obviously you have great pride in the game "which i do too" But you went and messed it up.
LOTRO, GW, FFXI, RS, EVE, AION, AOC, WHO, FE,
Don't let it bother you too much guys, this is Square-Enix we're talking about here.