Legacy Chocobo Combat & Quest

[TwinMoon]

#1

I've been adventuring for a long time.


And my friend here, well he has been with me almost as long!




Is there anyway I can go on adventures with him again? Don't get me wrong, The Grand Company chocobos these days are nothing to sneeze at. They work hard and perform admirably, but how many fine fowls do you know would wait around 5 years in a treacherous place like Mor Dhona after an angry primal laid waste to it just to be at your side again when the rest of the bloody world forgot your face? Ok, maybe two people remembered before a certain event in 2.0, but still. You get my point. This bird had some serious dedication and determination.

The point is, I would like this bird at my side, tanking, healing, and attacking all manner of creatures as we adventure across the world. Whether it is as a set of barding, or maybe a separate green (but it otherwise uses the same pool of stats).

This chocobo doesn't even get jealous when you take that other chocobo out to face danger and doom! How is that for character?

I don't like pulling the "I've been around" card, but for this bird? He is worth it.

#2

I'd really like to learn about the adventures he was on for five years (albeit in a way that all players, legacy or not, can enjoy). Maybe the player ends up encountering another warrior of light, a retired veteran perhaps, and through assisting him/her and their own bird, the second generation of WoL can be exposed to the adventures through the echo. For legacy players, they would see the same story, though for their chocobo instead.

Perhaps we can learn why he has a mark of the twelve on his beak even though he didn't get brought along through time with you.

[TwinMoon]

Silly stuff aside, It would be great if we could use the legacy bo as our companion!

[Enkidoh]

I'm pretty sure that ship has long sailed - at one time the development team did plan to have other mounts like the legacy chocobo available as a companion fighter, but ultimately the plan was dropped - presumably due to balance issues and the fact that the company chocobo can equip barding and trying to balance that with other mounts would have been too complicated (the legacy chocobo for instance would have lost it's unique look if that was the case).

And given that we're going to be able to use our adventurer squadrons as npc fighters in dungeons and the like in Stormblood, it's even more telling this sadly will probably never happen I'm sorry to say.

[TwinMoon]

You never know. The devs have responded to user feedback/demand in the past. In 2.x there was a lot they had to do, and the same goes for 3.x. 4.x will be really busy as well, but they also get better and faster at what they do as time goes on.

I'm not a fan of the barding solution. Maybe it could be a single piece that takes over all 3 slots (like some player gear does), to prevent mixing and to maintain the uniqueness. From a technology perspective, I feel like barding would be the most simple solution and the quickest to implement. I actually don't like the idea of seeing a legacy chocobo in gold saucer racing. I have no particular reason for this, its just a feeling. It doesn't feel like your grand company chocobo (legacy or modern) would be bred or trained for racing. I'm certain another legacy player may feel differently.

A more complex/middle ground solution might be to have the barding be just the barding, without any of the unique physical traits of the legacy chocobo: feather color; mark on the beak; I'm not sure if the feet have special treatment. This could be the single piece or the normal three piece.

A third option, maybe even the easiest, they could have a command similar to /legacymark (hides or shows the mark on players). When this command is used, it could swap the model for the standard chocobo with that of the legacy chocobo. With this the only catch would be if the legacy chocobo needs separate rigging or animation if it can't reuse the standard chocobo's assets for some reason.

There are multiple ways this could be approached without developing a system to support multiple companions.

Even if none of that can be done, I still think learning of the chocobo's adventures would be a fun side quest. What was the the fantasy? What was the heartbreak?! We must know!

[Enkidoh]

Well, to be fair the mount guide description for it is mostly just flavour text with little actual basis in reality, as there are actually too many variables to a player's situation for it to really be the actual player's original chocobo (Legacy players who satisfied the requirements after all regain their actual chocobo anyway in ARR as well as the Legacy Chocobo, which is an entirely separate mount, and then there are 1.0 players like me who never actually had a chocobo in 1.0 in the first place - I never did the Seventh Umbral Era story in 1.0 so I never got a company chocobo until ARR... so... where did this one come from?).

Really, it's just handwaved away about the origins and backstory of the Legacy Chocobo, as it's whole purpose after all was incentive for 1.0 players to stick with 1.0 when SE needed it the most, which we did.

*And as for the 'heartbreak and fantasy', considering it's feathers are blackened and singed, it clearly had a close encounter with Bahamut and lived to tell the tale, so I think we can pretty much guess the rest*

[Masekase_Hurricane]

If they were to give us another companion then another chocobo would be the last thing I would ask for. I would rather have a different mount instead i.e the wolfs/dogs coming in Stormblood.

[Aveline]

+1 upvote for adventuring with our legacy 'bos! It feels so weird to me that we cannot have our old faithful friends with us for anything other than taxi service.

[Pence]

I think the best compromise would be Legacy barding. Have it give the tattoo and legacy tail feathers. Hells, make it a body piece only and change everything including he chocos colour (no head/legs). I feel like there's very minimal work involved.

It's a sad situation, your choco searched for you for 5 years...heartbreaking stories....and now we toss him aside. I wish we could get more stories about our choco during those 5 years, but it's not likely due to exclusive. Maybe change text....Legacy get a quest about their choco, ARR+ get a story of a legendary choco during that time.

[TwinMoon]

Thanks for the support!

If this were a single player game it probably would be trivial. The one thing I can't be certain about is how it would affect network traffic, making it not so trivial. For one person it may be no big deal, for every chocobo in the game / area, it would have to transmit that one extra piece of data that says "hey, render me like a legacy chocobo". If the data was feeling sassy it might say "draw me like your french girls". Add that up for every chocobo that any given data center sends information out, and it could become a larger strain than expected. I think they used the same reason for why one piece of gear can't contain multiple glamours or multiple color zones for dyes. For example, a tank body can't have glamour A for your Dark Knight and glamour B for your Paladin.

With the barding solution, it could be a server side setting, and the data could be transmitted using the existing barding slots, so the size of the network traffic wouldn't change, at the expense of a slightly larger burden on the server to look up the information in the first place.

There is another solution, but I'm also not a big fan of this one.

Back in 1.0, there was a command to hide/show your weapon. This was actually a big deal for some players when it was first introduced. It had a pretty big limitation though, it was client side only. Only you would see this change, and no one else could the effect of this. I don't remember if this changed in late 1.x or if it was in 2.x where everyone could see it, but a similar client side command may be another compromise.

[Xenosan]

Sorries, off-topic:

And given that we're going to be able to use our adventurer squadrons as npc fighters in dungeons and the like in Stormblood, it's even more telling this sadly will probably never happen I'm sorry to say.

I think so too, that this'll never happen. But an idea I like that may work: If running solo & equipped with the Signet buff, we get a second Limit-Break-esque gauge.

Essentially a solo LB gauge. The LB instead of being based on Player's Job, can be declared by a certain Squad config at GC HQ.

And instead of our characters executing the LB themselves, one of your Squadies just summons into frame (like how friendly NPCs are summoned in FATES), executes the LB for you, then is gone.

So if you're a DPS and need a Heal or dispel badly while solo, as long as one of your Squadies is a WHM, and you set that Squad NPC as your active Signet-LB'er, then the solo-LB will be a heal LB peformed by that NPC, opposed to a DPS LB done yourself.

Just a QoL, a mild LB feature for solo, with ability to pick/choose/customize, which fits with the Squadron game.