Gamescom 2012 "A Realm Reborn" Screenshots.Follow

Is it my imagination or is that lvl50 xp bar moving? Looks as though it's gone from 0/550000 in the first screenshot to 57/550000 in the jumping chocobos one. Are we getting a cap increase that I don't know about?

Would be awesome if you could exp on challenging monsters in a way that was worth your time. Plowing through easy prey is pretty boring... at least in XI they've set up exp to be minimally painful. I'm not really up for a long grind on easy prey and boring quest spamming. I didn't even make it to 20 in WoW because of that. (Well now I have a max capped char cause someone used a scroll of resurrection on me, lol, speaking of "starting from level cap" - I still don't have any interest in playing though)

Again, this gets to the fundamental semantic problem of "grinding". What makes a mob trash? You're defining it as anything that isn't a boss, and that's fine. The discussion we're having is about whether trash mobs should be treated as trash... whether they should be challenging, or if it's fine that they're easy.

People toss these terms around without understanding the interaction between design elements and the psychology of having fun that they address. A trash mob is not an objectively definable thing that designers put in. Whether or not a mob is trash is an indication of the general player value of that mob. When you say that something is trash, you're implying that it is something you can do without-- not a valuable, core part of the gaming experience. In a game like Monster Hunter, where half of the combat is repetition of "boss fights," does that make those fights trash as well? One could certainly argue that it is, but that's the majority of what makes the game fun. Just because you're fighting the same monsters over and over doesn't necessarily diminish the fun, because those monsters are challenging and each battle tests your skills.

So if every trash mob in FFXI tested your skills, how meaningful is it to call it trash? When the game was early in its release and parties insisted on fighting only Incredibly Tough monsters, even though it would take five minutes to earn 200 xp, those mobs didn't feel like trash, even if they were designed to be. The challenge of a boss, afterall, is not determined by some special "boss" flag that hides in the programming, or what loot they drop, but by how challenging they are and how high they scale according to the party's level. Erego, anything can be just as challenging as a boss if you attempt it at a low enough level. If a battle takes me five minutes to win and I stand a real risk of losing, I don't consider that trash, or a trash mob.

But there has to be an appropriate challenge for a game to be fun--that's psych 101. The problem with FFXI was that SE fixed the reward without allowing for fluidity of challenge, so there was a poor interplay between task value and challenge. Players could not pick the level of challenge that matched their skills while being appropriately rewarded for doing so. Had they made all of those "trash mobs" an appropriate challenge, they wouldn't have felt like trash. Five minutes against a crab for 200xp makes it feel like trash. Five minutes against a crab for 5000xp probably would not. Terms like trash mob and grind are inherently subjective for this reason.

Now granted, it was another poor but separate design decision which kept players in the same camps like Crawler's Nest for weeks and weeks.

double post ;_;

Edited, Aug 17th 2012 6:29pm by kainsilv

Any monster that is not the boss of the stage in monster hunter is trash, do you disagree ? Also trash mobs in XI where still trash mobs, and required little to no skills, in fact very little fights in XI required very skillful play, if you where to compare them to other MMO Fights, what SE did was have trash mobs with tons of HP so that a fight that should have ended in 20-30 seconds, takes you a minute, and a party in most ocassions, they where not hard because you where required to be at your toes 100% of the time or you wiped, they where hard because you could not solo them, and required a party in order to progress, that is artificial difficulty, did it work for XI ? Sure!!! XI came right after EQ! So the transition was great, will it work now ? Hell No!! There are tons of better ways to progress than mindlessly killing the same critter over and over and over and over and it taking lots and lots of time and effort, just for the sake of it.

Yes, I disagree. Actually, I disagree with a lot of this.

I'm not sure when you played FFXI, but in the first 2-3 years of the game, the average XP battle required skillful play. XP parties died ALL THE TIME solely due to an inability to cooperate and perform skillfully. You did have to be on your toes all the time.

Of course, FFXI is different now and has been for years.

I have no rose-colored glasses about FFXI. It was a deeply flawed game right from the beginning. However, taking on challenging mobs with poor gear DID require skill. It required good teamwork. Was that as true for a job like MNK that whiffed until it got TP as for a class with a more diverse skill set? No. But it was overall a challenge of coordinating enmity to survive what a single tank could not, coordinating magic bursts, avoiding links, and smart pulling, to name a few things. It was in many ways as challenging as many of FFXI's boss fights. Contrast this to the average modern MMO, and no such challenge exists.

Skill only exists in these games in relation to statistics. If you go at a challenge with poor gear and choose over-leveled prey, then that requires combat skill even if it's not smart play. Most any recent MMO has relied too heavily on single-player skills which could easily fall into simple rotation and could be played optimally with little forethought. FFXI is one of few that required full group-play dynamics early on. Had they capitalized on those qualities, they would have had a game that sucked on the same level as every nearly other game in most departments, and really shone in one of the most important ones. Even though most of these games require little genuine novel strategy, they often require a refinement in execution, which when coupled with group play, presents exponentially scaling possibilities for challenge.

Try taking on a monster 20 levels above you in a game like WoW or SWTOR. Whether or not you win or lose-- and you will probably lose-- depends primarily on the RNG. The same is true of FFXI, but in FFXI you wouldn't be solo to begin with. Managing that same feat with a party in FFXI is potentially doable with skillful execution. No one would try because 200 xp wouldn't be worth it.

So I must stand emphatically by my earlier statements.

I lol'd.

I'd agree that there were ways to coordinate your group to take down mobs more quickly or efficiently, but XI never required a whole lot of communication. Nearly everything was reactive like stated before; healing when someone takes damage, provoking when someone else takes aggro, stunning when you see a cast from an enemy and things like that weren't really challenging.

Any of the fights that did require team skill were all automated by chat assisted macros. TP notices or tells for stun order don't really qualify as coordination or skill in my opinion.


Levels are supposed to be a measure of capability. In WoW, you're not supposed to be able to down mobs that are so far ahead of you. I can't speak for SWtoR, but this honestly makes sense. Like I said before, you know something is wrong with your scaling when a mob that checks 'easy prey' sends you running to the zone after you barely make a scratch in it's health. In WoW, at least you know that you can defeat a mob around your level.

RNG? In WoW at least you understood exactly how much hit you needed to land your abilities all of the time. In XI, you could walk outside of the gate to Ronfaure and whiff a bunny 80 levels below you on three consecutive swings.

Um.. so yeah I see large portions of my future spent in Eorzea.

What legue ? The tank & Spank boss fights one ? Seriously ?

The only people that "Think" XI was harder are morons and XI players, the two are often times one and only in reality, the only part that you got right was leveling, and since when is leveling supposed to be hard ? if we compare the two way's both MMO'S treat leveling none of them is harder than the other, grinding mindlessly mob after mob for a billion times is not a challenge is a time sink, and grinding quest is basically the same thing, now on the subjects of fights.... Please please XI was a joke as far as boss fights mechanics where concerned, more often than not, the hardest part was beating the RGN gods and getting the drops required to access said bosses... That does not requires SKILLS it required TIME!

When you can name me 10 fights in XI harder than mirmiron hard mode of wow, then maybe you have a case, until then you have none....

Oh and i know you are gonna mention those 2 horribly design bosses that required 10-18-24 hours to beat.... Yeah if Blizzard released The Lich King as he was in Wrath of the lich King on release, nobody would have beaten him for 6 years either...... Kinda absurd to claim a boss is hard, when the tools to even stand a chance againts him are 50 updates down the road :/

How many years have you played WoW?

Way more days than Filth was able to invest in FFXIV.

Good enough?

Well you only really needed one day in XIV to know that killing dodos was all there was to the game at release..... Now on wow it was a different story so.....

Why, because you can jump over a fence and have a useful mount? Other than that, nothing in that video was anything like WoW. The scale, art style, music style, combat, animations, classes, and yes even the UI is different from WoW. It's SE's take on an MMO. MMO's have certain elements that always work and removing them just ruins the flow of our experience. Do you prefer a UI that you can't customize? A whistle with charges on it for your mount that you have to recharge? Did you enjoy having to run around a shin-high rock? What exactly do people have against standard conveniences in a game? It doesn't make the boss fights any easier. Maybe I'm forgetting that some of FFXI's community always thought tedium equalled challenge.

You have next to no solid proof that this game will be anything near a WoW clone.

I remember prior to XIV 1.0 release when the forums were buzzing with WoW players tired of their game and thinking about switching to XIV when its released.

At the time you could clearly witness of two sides: XI players that were like "we want a XI-2, xp in groups onry, also we love our mature community so WoW kiddos" etc, and the other side was said WoW players that were posting many suggestions, and also complaining because well, XIV wasn't basically WoW 2. One of these complaints was that you couldn't jump in XIV! (don't even get me started on how ridiculous I think it is).

Anyway, seeing the gameplay footage and how much the characters are non-stop jumping arround like retards makes me seriously wonder if it's not a hint to WoW players, or "new schools" mmorpg players in general, to really make sure everyone understands you can now jump! (weee!)

Because World of Warcraft did not lauch with 15 Dungeons across levels 1-50 nor did it contain around 2k quest's... Nor did it release with an end game RAID....

Yes lets compare XIV with WOW lol

~~ You warned him? And now you let me have it by... comparing one remark about WoW to your countless and utterly repetitive posts in where you trash SE and the entire FF franchise?

You're making me laugh. Hell... maybe

Judging from the years of the very animated jump / no-jump debate...

Yes, I believe it's that simple.

On FFXIV Vs WOW ? Nope not one at all, on XI vs WOW ? Yes that argument can be made, and i would concede XI Quests >>> Wow Quests.

My point was that party skill was required in FFXI from week 2. WoW leveling is predominantly a solo venture. The point that follows is that had FFXI made a very simple adjustment in the way that rewards were scaled, every fight in FFXI could have been a hardmode fight. I am not saying that FFXI was better or required more skill in this regard... I am saying that in the early days of the game when effective leveling strategies fell second-place to the natural inclination to tackle challenging prey, one could see how had FFXI capitalized on a simple tweak in the XP algorithm, the game would have been much better-- not only than it is, but better than any game currently on the market. Assuming, of course, that it wasn't copied.

This is all very basic game psychology that any qualified motivational psychologist could point out, not my own radical interpretation of oddball game design theory.

@Viertel; easy on the nerd rage. I can't be bothered to care about what you think if you come across like a total tool, which you did. So, not only tl;dr, but "too rude, ignorant, sad, and annoying... didn't read."

Maybe if you want to try disagreeing with me a bit more respectfully, troll can has cookie.

In WoW I started running RFC around level 10. In XI I started looking for groups in the dunes at the same level. Whether or not you grouped up for leveling was your own choice.

I kinda see your point though. Had XI beaten WoW to the punch on efficient and effective leveling, we might be here wondering what game would be the next 'XI killer' instead...

Unlikely. The whole cutesy no blood anime friendship approach of FFXI, as much as I personally liked it, would possibly not have caught the attention of the general dwarves-elves-and-barbarians MMO audience in the west. And there wasn't even a trace of sex in it. Blasphemy.

Ha! Got me. I forgot about the Mithra character creation loop. Rawrrrr!
But I guess you understand what I mean: WoW just perfectly fit the
"general western taste", presumed such a thing exists. Orks, many
RL-references, Dwarves, booby women. Beer. Sportscars. Arguably
more so than FFXI, although of course you may find traces of all the
things named above in there, too.

FF has many fans in the west, but there, it is overshadowed by a lot of
beardy competition. For some, in the west, it is a bit too "pansy".

Cid Highwind does not have breast hair. I just looked up the first three results for "Cid Highwind Nude" on google images.
For real. Give it a shot. ;)
And if you're talking about our Cid pansy in FFXIV - that's just barbie's testosterone experiement gone horribly wrong.

When I look at all the gameplay and the only complaints that I see on the boards is "OMG Jumping I hate Jumping," "Eww 2D Grass!?" and "That menu looks like Tera" I am filled with confidence in the quality of 2.0.


But seriously, stop complaining about jumping, unless you speak German or Japanese. They weren't mindlessly jumping, Yoshi-P was hyping the crowd about new features and showing them off.


And the menu looks flipping amazing. Did you see how it didn't take 3 seconds to access? That's all the matters. Drag and drop items and abilities to the hot bar, EASY customization, and a sleak look that goes with the soon-to-be magitek future.

About Sliding during weapon skills....

If you aren't a current player, this may looks like a negative to you, so I'll explain. Currently the HARDEST part of big fights is Animation lock. Fighting Ifrit, if you ws at the wrong time, you are locked in position and will die to an eruption.

Maybe they will make it look better (probably) but right now, I don't care.

Function >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Form