"Oh btw, FFXIV Online in 2010"

[Mrbloodworth]

Well, this is one thing that they made relatively simple. You buy a tool associated with the class (starter tools are available from various vendors) and equip it and that's it, your class is changed.

Of course, just equipping an item requires navigation through something like three different menus but that's another story.

Also hope it's not a profession that uses an item in the off hand.

Yeah, I didn't understand that requirement, at all. There is nothing instant about class switching, but it seems thats OK, because there is a macro system. 

[01101010]

Yes it is instant to change classes. Just equip whatever weapon you want and you are that class. What? You think SE is going to hold hand and actually equip your armor and set up your action bars too? 

You want far too much from Square... far too much.

[tmp]

Also hope it's not a profession that uses an item in the off hand.

Uhmm does that make a difference? As far as i can tell you can use just primary tool or just secondary, and only one is needed to trigger the profession change; exactly which tool you use only seems to affect a little what exactly attributes you get while crafting items, but that's it?

[Lantyssa]

If you intend to go around harvesting different types of nodes, it makes a difference since they require one tool or the other.  Or say you want to be a gladiator.  Not equipping a shield is silly.

[Rendakor]

Yes it is instant to change classes. Just equip whatever weapon you want and you are that class. What? You think SE is going to hold hand and actually equip your armor and set up your action bars too? 

You want far too much from Square... far too much.

Equipping whatever weapon you want takes navigation through 3 menus and several clicks, with lag every step of the way. Definitions of instant may vary.

[Falconeer]

The lag, the lag. I want to insult people at Square Enix, dammit. Why did they ruin my Final Fantasy XIV?

[tmp]

Nice thing about using macros to switch classes... the macro system only supports 10 lines of text. That'll get fun at higher levels

[Nija]

Nice thing about using macros to switch classes... the macro system only supports 10 lines of text. That'll get fun at higher levels

Autohotkey to the rescue.

[Ard]

My god, I just had a revelation about this game this morning while watching my wife play Rune Factory Frontier.  This is basically Rune Factory Online, especially if they add the shepherd class that was in the datamined class list.  I feel like such a girl now for playing this.

[Rendakor]

If this was Rune Factory Online I'd play the shit out of it.

[Shatter]

My god, I just had a revelation about this game this morning while watching my wife play Rune Factory Frontier.  This is basically Rune Factory Online, especially if they add the shepherd class that was in the datamined class list.  I feel like such a girl now for playing this.

Nothing a little Football can't fix

[Mrbloodworth]

I'm just going to leave this here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La9nLBfH44c

[tmp]

Ehh, it's pretty obvious just looking at the minimap. The "small rock with road going one way and incomplete road on the other side of it" is all over the place.

Next thing you know, someone will notice buildings in MMOs kinda look similar. Madness.

[Mrbloodworth]

Reuse of static assets is a given. This is a rather extreme example however, and its the terrain we are talking about, and "just over the hill" at that..

[tmp]

Yeah it is rather drastic case, I wonder if it's done this way to cope with memory limits in the console version given number of other things the game draws.

[Draegan]

Here are some pics

[Mrbloodworth]

Yeah it is rather drastic case, I wonder if it's done this way to cope with memory limits in the console version given number of other things the game draws.

I don't believe they use any kind of streaming or LOD on the terrain. Its all one big static mesh. So the stitching I believe was done pre-engine, given that some copy-paste have been blended or stitched with others. They down sample textures and such, but I'm not even sure its spalting. I have no proof, just what I noticed in game, I tend to notice such things, even the best crafted ones.

If it was some sort of chunking, I could maybe understand, but those are some tiny TINY chunks, like really tiny... Smallest I have ever seen.

Console or not, PS3 is a beast (yay locked hardware) and can handle some very expansive environments. This is like... Diablo or Dungeon Runners level of modular set work, for no seaming reason.

[LK]

Wow. Did they do this in 11? Wow.

[Velorath]

Sad thing is, if they had just cut out all that copy/pasted shit, the zones would have felt a lot more focused.  Instead these sprawling zones made me feel like I even if hit level 30, I'd still be grinding in what essentially is the starter zone.

[palmer_eldritch]

This game has too many rabbits, mice and moles to kill, even once you've gained a few levels. In Final Fantasy XIII your first fight was against a giant robot scorpion as I recall, which was more fun.

I've really tried to like this game as I'm a big final fantasy fan and have no qualms about plugging my joypad into the PC, but it's not happening.

[tmp]

I don't believe they use any kind of streaming or LOD on the terrain. Its all one big static mesh. So the stitching I believe was done pre-engine, given that some copy-paste have been blended or stitched with others. They down sample textures and such, but I'm not even sure its spalting. I have no proof, just what I noticed in game, I tend to notice such things, even the best crafted ones.

If it was some sort of chunking, I could maybe understand, but those are some tiny TINY chunks, like really tiny... Smallest I have ever seen.

I think there's some streaming for the character gear at least. And well, if the terrain was treated as 'static' mesh rather than streamed then it'd make more sense it's made of small chunks i think -- you can then utilize drawing of instanced copies both for performance gain and lesser memory usage. When i mentioned consoles it's not that i think they couldn't handle the terrain alone, but when it gets combined with everything else they draw i'd imagine the amount of stuff can get the PS3 pretty hot under the collar when it comes just to storing that -- it has what, 256 mb + 256 mb memory total?

[Nightblade]

This game has too many rabbits, mice and moles to kill, even once you've gained a few levels. In Final Fantasy XIII your first fight was against a giant robot scorpion as I recall, which was more fun.

I've really tried to like this game as I'm a big final fantasy fan and have no qualms about plugging my joypad into the PC, but it's not happening.

Sadly, this was the same case with 11. At level 75 you got to fight different colored crabs (if the devs were feeling FRISKY!) and slightly different small rodents. Maybe you got to fight a demon; or a giant dragon if you didn't mind camping in one spot for 3 hours rapid firing your taunt button.

[Mrbloodworth]

http://www.ffxivcore.com/topic/17035-final-fantasy-xiv-pre-launch-event-coverage/


All in like, less than a week, what could go wrong! They are touching on some of my major complaints though.

As for mobs, I like the leave system, as no one but your group can see the targets.

[tmp]

http://www.ffxivcore.com/topic/17035-final-fantasy-xiv-pre-launch-event-coverage/

# Notorious Monsters
Soon, there will be NM's even in the world of FFXIV. These will look very different from most of the other normal monsters. We're planning to introduce NM's that are so huge they make a Malboro look small. The tranquil era is about to end! We're going to torment adventurers with these powered up, aesthetically varied NM's which we've prepared "episodes" for.

[Ard]

The FFXIVcore translation is as usual pretty shitty.  Here's the official translation:

http://jp.finalfantasyxiv.com/event/prelive/report_en.html

[Rendakor]

Miracle Patch!

[Ard]

I don't think it's fair to call it a miracle patch when the beta was never the full game to begin with.

That said, the game might still be fubar on launch since they're being really wishy washy about explaining how you'll be able to buy and sell stuff to other players.  The market wards as they were in beta are worthless.  If they add a search interface similar to anarchy online's player store one, it'll at least be usuable.  I'm not holding out hope on this though, since they haven't seemed to figure out exactly how critical this is to the game as a whole yet.  Finished goods take an obscene amount of subcomponents to make from many other crafting jobs, and with no easy way to get them, finished goods don't get made.  This means adventurers eventually just give up, especially if they also can't easily track down equipment.

We won't know exactly how big a mess this game is until next week.  I still stand by my statement that they're trying to make Rune Factory Online though.

[Mrbloodworth]

I have never seen a game that has 90% of its content not in open beta survive, hell I have seen games that have 90% of its content in open beta, NOT survive.

Its 2010.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I have never seen a game that has 90% of its content not in open beta survive, hell I have seen games that have 90% of its content in open beta, NOT survive.

Its 2010.

Survive is a relative term but I'll say in three months it won't be over 500k subs and that's being generous.

[tmp]

The market wards as they were in beta are worthless.

I was able to make ~100k a day selling crafted stuff to people so it's not entirely broken, but... yeah

[Ard]

I have never seen a game that has 90% of its content not in open beta survive, hell I have seen games that have 90% of its content in open beta, NOT survive.

Its 2010.

How about games that had 0% of their content available to the public without any sort of open beta?  Because that was Final Fantasy XI, which was the number two MMO for a long time, depending on who's numbers you trust and how you count them.  Yes, it's 2010, but that doesn't mean they're doing something wrong.  They're just doing it different, and from a different cultural perspective. 

Survive is a relative term but I'll say in three months it won't be over 500k subs and that's being generous.

Seriously, in what universe is a 500k subscriber base doing poorly?  Last time I checked Eve is doing fine on less.  WoW skewed the numbers way high into money hats territory, but I'd hardly call that a bad number.


I'm going to quote myself from pages back here:

The game that releases might not be the game you or I personally want, but I'll be surprised if it releases as broken or as light on content as Aion or Warhammer.  Keep in mind the vast majority of the game the beta players are seeing isn't the reality of the game.  It's a very very limited stress test.  That said, prepare for disappointment if you didn't like FFXI, because it's almost certainly going to be more of the same, seeing as how it's mostly the same developers.

If you don't like what you saw in open beta, or what's being said by the developers, or have any fears at all about the direction of the game, DO NOT BUY IT.  Nobody is forcing anyone to do this.  But doomcasting a game because it's something that you personally don't like does not mean it's going to do poorly.  The last thing I'm ever going to do is recommend anyone buy this game.  It's about as niche as you can get, despite bearing the Final Fantasy name.  I personally like where it's going, but it's currently a pretty muddled mess, and no one from outside Square really knows what it's going to be like come launch next week.

[Velorath]

How about games that had 0% of their content available to the public without any sort of open beta?  Because that was Final Fantasy XI, which was the number two MMO for a long time, depending on who's numbers you trust and how you count them.  Yes, it's 2010, but that doesn't mean they're doing something wrong.  They're just doing it different, and from a different cultural perspective.

From what I remember of the U.S. beta for FFXI, it had quite a bit of content available.

[Ard]

From what I remember of the U.S. beta for FFXI, it had quite a bit of content available.

The US betas were all post launch betas.  As far as I can find, the Japanese launch didn't have an open beta attached to it.  Ours came after the first expansion.

[Velorath]

From what I remember of the U.S. beta for FFXI, it had quite a bit of content available.

The US betas were all post launch betas.  As far as I can find, the Japanese launch didn't have an open beta attached to it.  Ours came after the first expansion.

I'm aware that U.S. beta was post-JP launch, but the way you wrote your post made it sound like they just weren't showing off any content before release.  Also the Japanese version did have an open beta IIRC, but I don't know how much content was available.

[tmp]

Yes, it's 2010, but that doesn't mean they're doing something wrong.

Considering the difference in MMO landscape between then and now, and what the players have become used to in the meantime it may well mean they are doing something wrong.