"Oh btw, FFXIV Online in 2010"

[koro]

It'd be interesting to someday hear the story of what really went wrong with this game.  They did a decent job with their first MMO. It's like nobody making FFXIV ever even played it.

The amazing thing is when you consider that almost all the staff on FFXIV were the exact same people who made FFXI.

It's almost a City of Heroes > Champions parallel. Cryptic left CoH to NCSoft's tender mercies and the team that stayed behind busted ass to fix it up and make it better, while Cryptic proper went on to make the pretty, soulless, puddle-shallow Champions. The original FFXI team went on to work on FFXIV, and the team that was brought in to keep FFXI in maintenance went above and beyond to radically change FFXI largely for the better and remove a lot of the suck from it to make it more accessible while keeping the more or less forced group socializing core intact. And of course, we know what the FFXIV team went on to do.

[Simond]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
Happens all the time.

[Margalis]

Pretty sure that was exactly it.  They farmed it out and didn't bother having people check their work.

No.

[Lantyssa]

Then it's a great example of people getting lucky and not understanding why.  Which is a shame, because FFXI was very close to being an amazing game.

[Quinton]

It is a pity.  Deeply broken in some ways.  Profoundly awesome in others.  Doing the full mission line for the CoP expansion with a group of friends over a series of Saturday mornings was massively enjoyable.

I had hoped that what they seemed to be learning in the later days of FFXI would be rolled into FFXIV, but clearly that didn't happen.

[Draegan]

Wait, how close was FFXI from being an amazing game?

[Ingmar]

It'd be interesting to someday hear the story of what really went wrong with this game.  They did a decent job with their first MMO. It's like nobody making FFXIV ever even played it.

The amazing thing is when you consider that almost all the staff on FFXIV were the exact same people who made FFXI.

It's almost a City of Heroes > Champions parallel. Cryptic left CoH to NCSoft's tender mercies and the team that stayed behind busted ass to fix it up and make it better, while Cryptic proper went on to make the pretty, soulless, puddle-shallow Champions. The original FFXI team went on to work on FFXIV, and the team that was brought in to keep FFXI in maintenance went above and beyond to radically change FFXI largely for the better and remove a lot of the suck from it to make it more accessible while keeping the more or less forced group socializing core intact. And of course, we know what the FFXIV team went on to do.

A lot of pretty important people stayed on at Paragon, IMO. Basically anyone with any sense.

[Rasix]

Wait, how close was FFXI from being an amazing game?

Depending on where you're standing, pretty far.  Brutal grind.  Group to kill bunnies and crabs.  Awful UI.

Great execution of the setting is about the best I can say for it.  It hit the "this shit is not fun" wall pretty fast for me.

[01101010]

Wait, how close was FFXI from being an amazing game?

Depending on where you're standing, pretty far.  Brutal grind.  Group to kill bunnies and crabs.  Awful UI.

Great execution of the setting is about the best I can say for it.  It hit the "this shit is not fun" wall pretty fast for me.

The game was about the story and the grind. If you kept that in mind and enjoy doing that stuff, the game rocked. Broke my MMORPG cherry and will always have a special place with me. That said, I am well aware of how fucking retarded the UI was and the mechanics among other things.

Sadly, many thought FFXIV would be FFXI without the shit parts. That didn't happen, at all.

[Dren]

Wait, how close was FFXI from being an amazing game?

Depending on where you're standing, pretty far.  Brutal grind.  Group to kill bunnies and crabs.  Awful UI.

Great execution of the setting is about the best I can say for it.  It hit the "this shit is not fun" wall pretty fast for me.

Really though, if they had not made it so group-centric and grindy, it was a great game with fantastic elements.  The player housing system was amazing and innovative.  Nobody else has given buffs based on how well you organize and place your furniture.  The AH system was very good.  The use of the FF jobs system was great.  Coordinated attacks within the group to get bonus buffs and damage.  Etc...  I guess I wouldn't say turning down the difficulty of killing random bunnies  is "far from an amazing game."  Just taking what they had and tweaking things like letting everyone be able to ride Chocobo's from level 1 would have helped.  Even on a Chocobo the world was huge anyway....running it took FOREVER (and you'd get killed by random turtles/crabs/bunnies.)

The art, the animation/flow, the effects... Yeah, they almost had it.  I quit at around level 25 and never looked back, but it was the only time I felt like I wanted to work harder at liking the game, but just couldn't get through the grind.  Sad.

[Kitsune]

I still pay $12/month for FFXI.  I haven't gone out to buy a $15 copy of FFXIV to play for free.  For people who bailed on XI because of the grind, steps were taken about a year ago to alleviate it considerably.  The experience for monster-killing was doubled across the board and there are now floating tomes in zones that give out mini-quests to kill certain monsters for experience, gil, and buffs.  It makes soloing now a doable prospect for when you can't find a party.  They also have City of Heroes-ish level syncing to allow a higher-level person to delevel down to match a lower person's level so that they can still gain experience while smacking bunnies.

[Reg]

Do the cockblock quests that you have to do to level past a certain point still exist? That's what killed the game for me last time I returned.

[01101010]

Do the cockblock quests that you have to do to level past a certain point still exist? That's what killed the game for me last time I returned.

I was none too happy with the community being ultraselective about certain classes in groups when you HAD to group to level. Good luck getting a group as a DRG back in the day for CN or the Tree or etc etc etc. That had a ton to do with how SQUARE handled the classes and their combinations... but still, waiting for a group for 4+hours because your fav class was gimped and shunned really left a bad taste in my mouth. And I should add, I was a RDM/BLM at the time with an alt class of PLD/WAR. That was my first foray into community governed group composition. Ugh.

The thing that broke me was Maat. Not the Maat fight itself, getting that god damn testimony was a nightmare. Oh and if you fucked up your Maat fight, you needed another one. Piss on that.

[Kitsune]

Oh yeah, limit break quests are still around.  In fact there are more of them, as the levels are now up to 95 with another hike to 99 coming in a few months.

[Margalis]

FFXI quests were really out of whack for what you got out of them vs what they gave you, and most things tended to be overly complicated. Like if you wanted to do the Pokemon battling stuff you had to get a special item, use it, go to some location and do some currency swapping, etc. It feels like in both FFXI and in FFXIV what should be a one or two step process is 5 or 6.

I remember playing Inifnite Undiscovery and there are 3 pages of explanation on how to interact with a treasure chest. In most games you would walk up, a button prompt would appear, you would press the button, the end. A lot of simple stuff is just over-designed.

[Kitsune]

Oh we have that too now.  The new super-high-level content is in Abyssea, a parallel dimension where things are crappier.  Chests drop from the monsters, which have one of three separate unlocking minigames.  Which nobody ever spends time on, instead buying piles of keys to bypass the locks entirely.  Normal locked chests on the other hand have a simple number guessing game that I actually enjoy.

[koro]

The thing that broke me was Maat. Not the Maat fight itself, getting that god damn testimony was a nightmare. Oh and if you fucked up your Maat fight, you needed another one. Piss on that.

Heh, be glad you didn't play some of the later classes. When I came back to FFXI in 2008 or so and started over from scratch, I decided to make my character a Scholar/Red Mage. The Scholar version of the Maat fight (and isn't against Maat) was apparently designed for a player who's had the game for years and had multiple jobs at the level cap, because it was fucking brutal.

You had to fight two enemies at once, and one of them was a floating book like the grimoires that Scholars use. The guy you had to beat second would cast a series of buffs on himself and the book before running in to melee you. You had to get a bunch of certain pieces of gear to boost your spellcasting as well as some food consumables to buff with, and get your Testimony (which wasn't terribly hard, thankfully). You then had to quickly nuke down the book, dispel the boss, then nuke HIM down before he killed you with hard melee hits.

The only problem is that the book has a random element to it; if it's Fire, for instance, hitting it with Fire attacks would heal it, but hitting it with Water would hurt it for a bunch. The biggest problem with this is that you don't know what element the book is in until you see it cast its first nuke, and by then it's too late, so you have to go in with a set sequence of attacks and execute them. Due to the max level you can do the fight at if you actually need it to unlock your final level cap, your most powerful nuke is Stone IV; this means that if the book is Earth element, you instantly lose. Get a new testimony, get some more consumables, and try again. If the book is Dark element, you also instantly lose because the spell it casts is Drain, which you cannot put out damage at a fast enough rate to beat.

It took me twelve attempts to finish that fight, with at least 1-3 hours of preparation per attempt and about 50,000-75,000 gil (a nontrivial sum) in consumables for each try. It was the most nerve-wracking thing I'd ever done in an MMO, and my guild/linkshell essentially held its collective breath every time I attempted because it'd become such a tense drama. About 2/3 of the time I'd fail due to having the wrong book element (either Dark or Earth immediately, or I'd do Stone and then immediately find out it was immune to the next spell as I finished casting it, thus wasting just enough MP to cause me to not make it through), and the rest due to human error or panicking when a spell got resisted or I mistimed a cast and got an interrupt and I flailed around trying to figure out what to try next. After attempt 11 I was totally broken and demoralized and nearly quit the game, but instead spent a couple weeks playing another job combo to get my mind off of it.

Attempt 12 went flawlessly; an absolute perfect execution that nearly beat the server record set by someone five levels higher.

[Margalis]

Sounds kind of like the low level summoner battles. Those were quite fun and tense. You had to use exactly the right consumables and have proper positioning and such.

[Kitsune]

Yeah, beating the solo summoning battles is still one of my proudest achievements in any game.

[Margalis]

Those were battles that felt like they took legitimate skill. Not "grind for better items" skill or "learn the different phases of the boss and what to do in each phase" skill but actual skill. They were also very well balanced, I remember beating at least a couple of them with an auto-attack when their next attack would have killed me, and from reading forums that was not uncommon.

[Kitsune]

FFXI believes in being harrowing and not in a "don't stand in the fire during the boss fight" way.  It also unfortunately believes in Japanese-style grinding for everything, but that's lightened up a bit lately.

[Draegan]

Wait, how close was FFXI from being an amazing game?

Depending on where you're standing, pretty far.  Brutal grind.  Group to kill bunnies and crabs.  Awful UI.

Great execution of the setting is about the best I can say for it.  It hit the "this shit is not fun" wall pretty fast for me.

My "This shit is not fun" was at account creation and login screen.

[Rendakor]

I think I made it into combat with a monster before giving up on FFXI, although my most memorable experience was that even canceling my account and uninstalling was overly complex and time consuming.

[Shatter]

I think I win, I never played it or even wanted to

[waffel]

My friend quit when he got downlevered. I saw so much weird shit in that game I've never seen before in an MMO.

Once saw a level 50 guy pickpocketing a rare level 10 worm, because I guess you could get a piece of gold off it. So he stood there for probably hours pickpocketing it over and over (I ran by the area a few separate times) When I finally killed it, he got pissed and said something to me in Japanese and ran off.

First time I went to a main hub town I saw at least 100 people lined up, in a perfect line, up and down the street all with their shops open. They even had proper spacing between eachother. The fuck?

[luckton]

FFXI drew heavy inspiration from vanilla EQ's gameplay mechanics, and then cranked the retard factor to the point that made EQ vanilla look like WoW in comparison. 

I'm in the same boat as most here...the PlayOnline console-on-a-PC UI was  , the absurd combat was double , and the topping on the cake was the de-leveling and forced grouping, in a game released during the time we were starting to grow out of the vanilla EQ nonsense. 

FFXIV just re-solidified everyone's belief that SquareEnix listens to the 1% of it's user base that has no life, an absurd amount of money from their parents and nothing but time to kill.  It just did it with fancier, modern-day graphics and a fresh coat of paint.

[Velorath]

Apparently they're going to start charging sub fees again sometime by the end of the year.  Kinda odd, since going by Square's planned schedule shown in that article, they don't plan to have version 2.0 of the game ready for testing for another year, and won't launch the PS3 version until 2013.  If they're that far away from their new vision of what this game should be, I can't see how they can justify charging for it now.

[luckton]

I say again, they should scrap FFXIV, fix and make everything into a single-player off-line game, and call it FFXV 

[Margalis]

Apparently they're going to start charging sub fees again sometime by the end of the year.  Kinda odd, since going by Square's planned schedule shown in that article, they don't plan to have version 2.0 of the game ready for testing for another year, and won't launch the PS3 version until 2013.  If they're that far away from their new vision of what this game should be, I can't see how they can justify charging for it now.

They way they announced this is really bad. It's basically "we know this version is bad but we're going to start charging for it. Also we're making an awesome new version!" Methinks leading with the good news would have been a bit better.

[Velorath]

Apparently they're going to start charging sub fees again sometime by the end of the year.  Kinda odd, since going by Square's planned schedule shown in that article, they don't plan to have version 2.0 of the game ready for testing for another year, and won't launch the PS3 version until 2013.  If they're that far away from their new vision of what this game should be, I can't see how they can justify charging for it now.

They way they announced this is really bad. It's basically "we know this version is bad but we're going to start charging for it. Also we're making an awesome new version!" Methinks leading with the good news would have been a bit better.

To be fair though I do see that they have a bit more info here.  It's not entirely as specific as I'd like, and seems more concerned with how they're going to improve the game on a technical level rather than how they're going to make it more fun.  But yeah, they still don't really articulate why now is the time they feel they can start charging for subs.  They kinda needed something major to bridge the game between the current version and 2.0, or at least some sort of marketing campaign to show us what has changed, and why the game is worth our money now beyond the fact that the need it.

[luckton]

I read over the docs...ver2.0 not out 'till late 2012?  Fuck that shit.  I'm done here.

[Kageru]

I guess they figure the only ones still playing are hard core fanatics with major time invested who will probably keep playing regardless.

[Margalis]

I guess they figure the only ones still playing are hard core fanatics with major time invested who will probably keep playing regardless.

That's probably not a terrible assumption really.

[Shatter]

Going to work for them must be the equivalent of building your own coffin

[Velorath]

I guess they figure the only ones still playing are hard core fanatics with major time invested who will probably keep playing regardless.

That's probably not a terrible assumption really.

The problem is that they're making some of their design changes with that in mind also.  For instance, patch 1.21 which is due around Feb. introduces some of the iconic FF jobs (Dragoon, Black and White Mages, Monk, Warrior, Bard, Paladin, and there might be one or two more, I don't remember).  I think one of their big mistakes had been taking these iconic classes and turning them into more the generic versions they ended up with, so to me this sounds like a nice addition.  The problem is that they don't wan't to invalidate the work people have already put into their characters, so they're planning on making the new jobs unlockable by getting up to a certain level in the current classes and then doing a quest.  The example they're using is that to unlock Paladin you would need to level Gladiator (or possibly Gladiator and Marauder) to 30.  I know you had to unlock jobs in FFXI too, but at least the ones your started out as were still iconic FF classes.

I guess I don't see the point of trying to rework the game to appeal to a bigger audience just to make changes that only benefit people who have been playing this whole time.