Final Fantasy XIV 2.0 Leveling methods ?Follow

Strictly speaking, it's directed grinding. Contrast to the undirected grinding in FFXI. In XI, the players figured out what the best places to grind were. The advantage to directed grinding is content distribution. If you don't want your players to spend all their time in Crawler's Next killing caterpillars because it's "teh best", you can only give them the larger XP reward for say, 50 caterpillars. Then, you send them on their way to someplace else. That's its function in theory, at least.

It can also have the nasty side effect of making players feel like they're following the game's GPS, rather than exploring a living world, but that's more to do with your presentation of it (!'s everywhere, or make them find the quest-givers). Players do want some direction in finding game objectives, and don't want to feel like they're wasting their time just looking for them, but there's a balance that's needed besides smacking them in the face with an objective just for wandering into the area.

Personally I like a system (not unlike XI's) that forces you to listen to the NPC to actually know what and why you're doing a quest (even though a lot of XI's quests were frankly dumb). I'd like to see something like a journal system that lets you take hints when you need them rather than putting the entire game on rails. e.g., the NPC says something about a waterfall, linking your quest log to journal pages about waterfalls that you've already visited, maybe with a hint that "This place sounds/doesn't sound familiar" depending on whether you've previously been to the correct place. Preserve the open world exploration, please. Just because I don't like having to look up the answer online doesn't mean I need to be beat over the head with !'s.



Doesn't even necessarily have to be about quantity, as much as length. A single quest could be a checklist that tells you to kill 100 monsters. Then it's hardly so different from the old camp-and-grind of FFXI. I'm not saying this is the best system, but my point is this: I don't think anyone really feels that five separate quests that tell you to kill X number of Y mobs in the same area is some stroke of game design brilliance. They're MONSTERS. I don't need some half-baked narrative reason for killing each individual species. I already want them dead. That's why I bought your game.

So there are better things to do with your content designers and programmers than have them design these meaningless tasks just to increase your number of "quests". Like have them create real content.

XI was plenty mainstream. Maybe not as successful as Everquest at the time, but certainly successful and profitable in its own right. XIV is FAAAAAAAAAR from profitable right now.

I'd be surprised to see the exp grind completely removed since it's such a staple of the Final Fantasy series, but at the same time I doubt it would be the primary source of gameplay. I expect more focused, goal-oriented gameplay at this point from a new MMO.

While I really don't think that grinding out XP is a staple of the FF series, on the whole, it was a huge part of XI, for better or for worse.

I've grown to dislike XI for its grind for many reasons, but none other than the fact that the concept took people away from experiencing real content. Many other games have epic experiences that you can jump right into at just about any level, but if you think about it, everything I ever did in XI required planning, ideal setups and convincing people who'd already done it. Not only was setting up a group for anything like this difficult, but many experiences weren't particularly rewarding, they were just arbitrary milestones to open up a new scenario or area, (e.g. Sky, sea).

I really do think that an XI-style experience system would ruin 2.0 for many people, and the last thing SE needs right now is for the game to flop a second time.

Uhhh... I could be mistaken, but I think he's saying that he DOES NOT like those things about XI. And he makes some valid complaints. While I think there were positive elements to the cooperation and communication that XI required, those things can be strongly incentivized without being required, and XI required it without providing tools that might make such an experience less frustrating.

Sarcasm? Grind = Final Fantasy much like Breathing/Blood Flow = Staying Alive.

An "XI style grind" would only ruin ARR if SE's target is the WoW type audience. Otherwise, Quest based leveling is just as much of a grind because you WILL be repeating the same **** over and over.

No one can deny this, no one can say "SE will do it different!" No, no they won't.

Clearly communication was the only tool you needed or the game would have been unplayable. But for a game that required one to overcome so many obstacles to cooperation, it didn't give you many tools to do it easily. e.g., a linkshell billboard would have been a great tool at minimum. Most serious LSs took to making their own out of game websites with calendars and forum.

Yeah, honestly I couldn't even bother to read all that, because the process of building a party is roughly as boring as explaining the steps to it.

It wasn't a matter of knowing how to do it. Most people figured out how to effectively build a party pretty quickly. That didn't make it fun or even prevent it from being frustrating.

Ok, I understand were you coming from, but was that not the biggest aspect of Square Enix's mmo? The social aspect of Final Fantasy, which has always been a single player adventure, but now they created a world were you and your friends could enjoy these great adventures together.

Imagine a game were you logged on check your retainers for sells, clicked a few buttons, did a quests. Rinse repeat a few times. Since I've dropped from XI i've tested other mmos, and in many theres no need to be social. Don't get me wrong, irl, i have my close friends and thats all i need, so im not a social *****, but I do like being that supportive, silent team member tossing refreshes and cures were needed, dispelling etc. So I loved the teamwork aspect of it, it was like no other game ive played, except pso, or fps's, but this was final fantasy and in an mmo setting.

You take people finding their own groups out of the equation, you lose a lot of that. Force us to play together, force us to create a society.

Maybe I'm just nervous though, maybe it'll be close enough to xi to hold me, from what I've heard, seen and read.

Edited, Jan 27th 2013 5:10pm by Ishihara

I think most can appreciate the sentiment of encouraging players to play together. But I don't think that effectively prohibiting solo play is a solution, nor do I think that nearly forcing players to group together the way FFXI did is fun. There are answers in between. Will FFXIV find them? Probably not, but frankly, FFXIV will probably barely survive at best, and more likely be a failure. How they broach this issue will probably be irrelevant in the end.

If I'm wrong, then it's not difficult to encourage people to play together without making it a pain in the *** to do so.

Honestly... it sounds like you want to play FFXI. Why aren't you just doing that instead of worrying about this?

These should be different games. They aren't making FFXI-2 (I'd play that btw).

Yeah, I actually never officially left ffxi, i didnt have the internet for like a month after jr. college, only could use it on campus, then other things, but then abyssea came out, as I was waiting for income, and never really went back.

My friend recently payed for a month and he just didnt play it all b/c it was so diff. he told me that whitegate was a ghost town, which was a shock b/c the last i played white gate and the main towns that linked to Wings of the Goddess zones were the spots... he told me port jeuno is now the new spot, ive seen a few videos of this.

I will get it though, we plan to do bstmaster in the old zones, as weve always talked about duoing it. but see, although my friend feels the same way, he gives in a bit more to games and criticizes very rarely, and i know xiv will be his priority game, as hes played 1.0 to get legacy, etc. and i doubt ill find many people online who want to hangout in the old zones with a lvl 75nin/brd/rng/rdm and do old quests and missions >.> maybe, i wont know until i reactivate my char. but in a way im still looking forward to xiv, like i did pso2, then found out it was f2p



I just think square enix had something no other mmo had with xi, and they should've just capitalized on that and not try to reinvent the wheel, there are plenty of fast paced, speed level, jump in do something rq then log off after 10mins games out there, why make more, make a stand, just like they did with xi, critics bashed xi for all its uniqueness, i still remember adam sesslers review about the rabbit, but look at it compared to its competitor, no f2p in site,

Edited, Jan 28th 2013 12:47am by Ishihara

I see. So you're looking for a game that is essentially FFXI from 8 years ago?

Unfortunately I don't think you're going to be able to find that game. And no new game is going to look like that, for one very simple reason.. it won't sell.

I hate to be blunt about that, but it's the truth. That game wouldn't sell enough in today's market to sustain itself. FFXIV only survived as long as it did because SE decided they could give it another go, which was a super SUPER risky decision for them as far as financial investment.

As to your other points..


I'm not really sure that's true. SE had the Final Fantasy name, but the MMO mechanics they were using were normal enough by the standards of the time. Remember that at that time, their major competition and example was Everquest, a game based largely on the text-based MUDs that came before it. FFXI easily adapted some concepts from Everquest and improved some others. If they followed that same formula again it wouldn't work, because Everquest is no longer the example they have to work from.


You're implying here that the status quo needs to be protested. To a certain extent that's true. Making a clone of whatever successful MMO happens to be the standard of the time isn't a good idea and has really never worked. You have to improve upon design and implement fun and engaging gameplay so that people will actually want to play your game over the competition. The field looks VERY different than it did back in 2002. MMOs are no longer a niche genre, and it's much harder to find a place to fit a new product that isn't already sufficiently covered by existing offerings. In this case, the Final Fantasy name might be exactly what's needed, additionally the focus on console support helps shape a niche for SE to fill. But they can't ignore what's happened in the last 11 years. They tried that once and managed to launch the most spectacular failure in all of modern MMO gaming to date.

I'm sorry if you're looking for a game from nearly a decade ago. When it comes to MMOs, you generally just can't have that. And it is kind of sad that you can't since it's pretty much the only genre of game where that's the case.

Btw, critics of the time weren't bashing FFXI for its uniqueness. They bashed it because they didn't understand wtf it was. Most professional reviewers were aware of Everquest (in that, they knew it existed), but MMOs weren't really a genre then, and so they didn't really know how to judge it.

Also lolAdamSessler