i think SE should steal a few ideasFollow

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/05/28/5-reasons-disillusioned-mmo-fans-should-believe-in-wildstar


I like how the Raids and Artifact weapons parts sound.. sure SE seems to be doing the later with relic/zodiac only thing is why do all that work for a weapon thats not gonna be the best you can get?

I prefer to think of it as a test case. There are WoW players who've been screaming for 40 man raids ever since Blizzard stopped doing them.

So let's see if a casual-unfriendly endgame can sustain itself.

My money's on no.

People can hardly get a group of 8 going with a static for Coil, I can't even imagine how this is going to go. You essentially end up catering to people who work 9-5, Monday-Friday, with no kids, no significant other and no other hobbies beyond the game. It's a great way to limit your audience.

It's also why I've been taking a break from XIV, I want to do the end game stuff and enjoy the challenge. Issue is, I can't consistently log on X night of the week with a static. This in turn leads to PF which gives you one good group out of 20 tries and a whole lot of wasted time. Your other option is to consistently refresh and find that group that's just short the one static member, but those go fast if you're not quick enough to join. Hell, even Leviathan was fine with PUGs for the first couple weeks, and now it's almost impossible to finish for some reason. Guess all the hardcores got their items and high tailed outta there.

Just wish they would introduce 4 man content with the same challenge, that way you could coordinate events on different nights of the week. Or start doing 12-16 man content where a static is tough and you constantly need extra people. The 8 man content, until people are geared or have echo buff is too punishing to have a weak link, so you can't risk having a dunce in your party for a while. Least on the positive side, as the months go, more and more groups need reps and that's when I manage to get things done with Coil and I'm hoping it'll be the same for the second turn.

edit: And completely agree with Catwho on this one!

Edited, May 28th 2014 11:56am by Montsegurnephcreep

So basically they are making a super hardcore game that is not all that casual friendly. Man, if it was 2003 I'd be all over this. Now? I think I'll pass. Nothing in that entire article seemed remotely interesting to me other than Warplots, and again... that's just a hardcore epeen-fest as well, or at least that's how it seems.

They're also hyping the interactive environments, and yeah that's kind of nice, but it wasn't as great as I had hoped it would be. Not like Minecraft levels of interactive. It was a notch above what you can do in XIV (in that there were random things lying around you could pick up freely) but it wasn't the major selling point they promised.

I miss the random treasure chests just lying out in the open from 1.0

Edited, May 28th 2014 2:05pm by Catwho

Just a little note on this comment, I believe they said Novus will be item level 110 and can be somewhat customized. Novus isn't even the finished Zodiac weapon, so it is likely that Zodiac will be at the very least on par with the best as of its release.

I don't see how it's casual unfriendly. There are still normal instances for smaller groups, but there is no LFG/DF tool for large raids. Personally, I don't feel the words 'casual' and '40-man' belong in the same sentence. I think the developers realize that this type of content is not going to be something that everyone will participate in, but I also don't think they're putting all of their resources into it. Seems it's just an added attraction at the theme park to them.



Edited, May 28th 2014 6:47pm by FilthMcNasty

Raiding is something on top of everything else yeah. They have said they want raiding to be hardcore and they are re-introducing attunements as well. In general instances are a lot harder than what most games have nowadays (at all levels), but so far I haven't seen anyone who tried them be turned off by them because of it.

Combat is different, some might not like it, but it makes a lot more room for skill to matter and the "aiming" combat combined with extensive use of what they call telegraphs (markers for enemy attacks, a bit like in XIV) makes for some pretty sick scenarios. Short video. Raids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLyXZnHFAE4

I don't think they are shooting themselves in the foot because while content like this might be aiming more for the more hardcore crowd there is plenty of content for everyone. A great example would be what they call Adventures. Basically they are instanced versions of a zone for smaller parties where you go on an adventure. Maybe you need to do an escort quest through the whole zone and you decide which out of the many paths you want to take which will then greatly effect how events unfold. I am bad at explaining but this short video gives a good idea of what it is. Adventures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jzcUU3vOlo

They also seem to want to actually use the world they have created, aside from jumping puzzles etc that they have the first patch they are adding a month or so after release is a whole new zone made for endgame type content that isn't raiding.

Now, I sound like I love this game, which I don't. I won't even play it, but it definitely has its good points, some worth stealing for sure. If nothing else I think it is a very good thing that we start getting some variation in the mmo market, it is long overdue. I don't think the biggest issue for decent success is about having or not having 40-man raids, it will be other things along with what Catwho said about UI (and other) bugs because during beta it really was not good enough.

Edited, May 28th 2014 8:19pm by Belcrono

Edited, May 28th 2014 8:20pm by Belcrono

I agree, but I think a lot of people see the word 'random' as a dirty word.

I love what D3 has done post RoS. The main reason it works though is that you don't have to be Sir Cookiecutter, wise wizard of the spreadsheet. You can number-crunch and theorycraft if you want to pull out the most optimal damage build, but there are at least a dozen viable builds that can farm just as effectively. You can play any class you want, select specific abilities you like and customize your gear to suit your play style. That whips the pants off of the typical MMO.

The random elements of dungeons you refer to here, this is exactly what MMM should have been in FFXI. I thought they were on to something there and I still think they just failed in execution, but we essentially had the ability to randomize content using that system. I had always hoped that would be one of the things they borrowed from themselves to improve upon for ARR.

*blink*

I agree... with.. the entirety of that post...

A lot of that should apply in FFXIV. I beleive that endgame should consist of multiple viable endgame sets from different endgame sources. And that the true 'Best in Slot' for the number crunchers actually is composed of pieces form each. I beleive that the gear paths could, and possibly should be intersecting, like to address the 'no endgame crafting gear* issue could be address by having crafting components that are U/U that build into their own, endgame tier set.

This concept of 'one hardest content' , 'one best equipment' system really does limit the scope of what this game could offer. They can vary it. I don't expect such things to ever happen quickly, because this is SE, because I do understand limitations of man-hours and facilities and profit margins, and all that business logistics crap. But I do think this sort of thing, this wider endgame incorporating multiple components, including what was listed above, would be a good ideal for the game to try to achieve.

A Tower, endgame, rather than a Pyramid endgame.


I actually read that differently. I read that only for boss mechanics. There was nothing really about the Raid being randomized. His complaint in large was that he did not want victory to fall to luck, rather than practice and skill. This can still be addressed while allowing a singular piece of content to be variable within itself.

Edited, May 28th 2014 8:40pm by Hyrist

This is a good point. Please look at how the Opo-opo minion has turned out. People go crazy over it. I think it was selling for 600k last time I checked.

And it's just a minion! With a lower drop rate than most other things we've seen in the game so far.

I imagine many of the dungeons would be much more fun to wade through if there were a prospect of phat lewtz or at least something neat. I know it would make it a lot more fun for me. I liked collecting some of the dungeon loot in WoW, for instance, even if it wasn't something particularly special. I feel like this is how darklight is now...except a little too late.

I always liked the idea of multiple sources of endgame gear with multiple paths. It's what made FFXI stand out so much for me as my first MMO. Hitting 75 and then realizing there were a plethora of options for how to gear. You could do sky, sea, dynamis, limbus, salvage, nyzul isle, HNMs, crafted gear, etc etc down the list, and you could either get mostly full sets from one of those avenues, or mix and match for the absolute best in slot stuff. I realize that this all didn't happen overnight, and it was actually years and years of building content, but it's what I truly strive to find in an MMO again, and it's one of the things I find lacking in XIV.

On the D3 note, I've never actually played it because I heard such awful things on release, but I've always been super interested in trying it out. I don't mean to hijack the thread or anything, but if anyone has any opinions they'd like to share, I'd love to get a PM about it. I'd like to make an informed decision before I decide to buy if possible, a lesson I learned from FFXIV 1.0!

They did a random dungeon thing in XI with Nyzul Isle (and later neo Nyzul Isle, henceforth known as NNI.) There were 100 floors in a section of a tower you were exploring, and each floor could follow one of a nearly infinite arrangement of patterns based on moving walls, with either randomly placed monsters and some sort of random killing objective (a "kill-all" floor, a "kill the unmarked NM" floor, "kill all of this one family", etc) or an objective that involved lighting lamps, either in a specific order or one by the entire team. Sometimes you would get free floors.

Normal mode involved climbing floors one at a time, and saving every five levels. NNI let you jump multiple floors, in a range from 2-11, but you only had one 30 minute session to try to reach floor 100.

Every 20 floors was a standard boss floor, and the bosses could try gear, or KIs in NNI that could be turned in for gear.

Anyway, if they could do it in XI, they could do it in XIV. They've been doing procedurally generated dungeons since the PS1 (Chocobo Dungeon series.)

They just don't want to.

Edited, May 29th 2014 9:08am by Catwho