Question about FF14 Expansion

[Estevo]

So I've been looking around for news on what's going to come with the upcoming expansion, but there isn't much to see yet, at least until Final Fantasy Festival. What I'm wondering is, how much should our current classes and jobs change, in terms of tweaking gameplay, making changes etc. in the upcoming expansion.

http://www.playerattack.com/news/201...-realm-reborn/

-I finally found this article which has Yoshi P mention how they have expansion plans to change the leveling system and the main system (probably referring to stats) but it was hidden away beneath all the other articles regarding E3 and some of the things he mentions here never did come up at E3, at least as far as I know. I'm hoping this change is larger than just stats.

[Corfish]

No one knows.

[Felis]

Higher level cap and new skills

[Nutz]

They might change things drastically, but they might not. I know that they've mentioned a few times the 'inconvenience' of SMN/SCH sharing attribute points and how that's looking like a problem to them now if they were to release new jobs from existing classes. I think they're regretting a few of the inflexibilites of the current armoury system. Aside from that, there should be a 5-10 (I'd guess 10) level cap increase, new skills/ traits to go with it, I suppose 1 more cross class slot for jobs (and 2 for classes), a new egi or 3 for SMN, new areas -- likely Ishgard and surroundings, which I suppose would be more of Coerthas, maybe Ala Mihgo and surroundings. It's all speculative, of course, because as you said they haven't revealed much of anything yet.

[Rex]

They might change things drastically, but they might not. I know that they've mentioned a few times the 'inconvenience' of SMN/SCH sharing attribute points and how that's looking like a problem to them now if they were to release new jobs from existing classes. I think they're regretting a few of the inflexibilites of the current armoury system. Aside from that, there should be a 5-10 (I'd guess 10) level cap increase, new skills/ traits to go with it, I suppose 1 more cross class slot for jobs (and 2 for classes), a new egi or 3 for SMN, new areas -- likely Ishgard and surroundings, which I suppose would be more of Coerthas, maybe Ala Mihgo and surroundings. It's all speculative, of course, because as you said they haven't revealed much of anything yet.

If they follow in XI's footsteps in the level cap increases...it'll be a five level increase.

[Evenstar]

If they follow in XI's footsteps in the level cap increases...it'll be a five level increase.

FFXI did it with patches, not just expansions, so if they want to do it with just expansions 5 might be too low and they might want to go with 10, which means 5 expansions for 99, which sounds right.

[Wildsprite]

If they follow in XI's footsteps in the level cap increases...it'll be a five level increase.

with FFXI the cap was increased to 75 with Rise of the Zilart. because I didnt start till the official release of the PS2 version of the game in the US, I would venture to guess they did the actual increase in small patches starting with and after the expansion to help balance things out

[MageBlack]

I read that there might be some big changes to the Class/Job system. They want to make things more flexible for ease of new content releases and possibly doing away with the class/job entirely. He was pretty cryptic.

http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/122...edia-Interview


Last year when Scholar was introduced at E3, it was mentioned that it would branch off from the same class as Summoner, and this would be a mechanic that would be used more, but it has yet to happen for any other class. You haven’t announced anything yet, but are there any other plans to introduce anything like this? For example, another swordsman besides Paladin?

Well, we need to look into this and whether we want to keep that plan, it’s something we have to consider as we add new jobs and classes. One of the more difficult things with the system is that when a job is derived from a class, it's tied to the class's actions. Also, when we make multiple jobs from one class, the weakness with having multiple jobs branch out of one class without being able to freely switch stats around is exposed. This wasn’t a problem initially because both of those jobs were simultaneously added and it was planned from the start, but now we have to carefully think about this. One thing we could consider, for example, is a hybrid job derived from more than one class, but it may change depending on what we want to add. The number of jobs will increase even further with 3.0 (the expansion pack), and at that point we might decide on an entirely new mechanism, so please hang on for further details.

Do you think the current armory system is limiting some interesting design choice for future jobs? What kind of improvement would you like to see?

[Kaethra]

FFXI did it with patches, not just expansions, so if they want to do it with just expansions 5 might be too low and they might want to go with 10, which means 5 expansions for 99, which sounds right.

Not always true. Everquest commonly released content expansions that didn't raise the level cap. And in Everquest 2 they even started raising the level cap in 2 or 3 level increments with content expansions in between.

Other MMOs did 10 level increments and shot themselves in the foot for it. 10 levels of content is a lot of overworld questing that has to be put in. Those are large areas that have to be designed. When you limit the raise to 5 or lower, you can put more focus on 'end game' which is normally dungeons and such. In fact imagine if all the time they spent making 2.0 they spend on just content for level 50 characters. Look at how much content you would actually have?

I'm a big fan of low increment level caps for this reason. We get more to do in the long run. Because lets face it. Only a handful of players actually sit and enjoy the ride to the top. The top is where the game usually opens up. And because of this, when you play Everquest or Everquest 2.. you have dozens of dungeons per level range, rather than 2-3, or in FFXIV's case, just a single dungeon ever 3-4 levels.

[Laifon]

We don't know, please look forward to it.