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I was hoping someone could clarify this topic. I saw that Sqeenix is planing to allow addons in heavensward. I'm wondering if these will be player developed like other MMOS or developed only by SE? I'm hoping for player developed ones since it will allow more variety and customization. But I'm unsure how this may affect play station users? I personally play on PC and have no idea about anything involving play station. Perhaps someone else can comment? Thank you!
SE has been promising an addon API for developers since before ARR launched.
At this point I'll believe it when I see it.
Last I read they are redesigning it because it had some serious flaws that could allow for abuse, so they are scaling it back.
Probably won't be available for the launch of 3.0.
There has been absolutely no information released or demonstration of any possible future add on API to date. If they had an API for creating and modifying the UI, they would have used it to build and maintain the existing UI. But the UI appears to be incredibly rigid and hard to update, making it difficult for the development team to make changes to existing UI elements.
Any type of addon UI appears to be a pipe dream at the moment. And I don't expect we'll see one anytime soon.
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/ff-.../1100-6425730/
The silence was broken. SE acknowledged addons again. The end times are upon us.
Hmmm I thought it was announced that addons were confirmed for 3.1? Maybe I made that up.
I really don't see a benefit for addons apart from maybe an aggro meter for newer tanks, just a personal opinion.
The benefit is in letting players display information the way they want it displayed. For instance, maybe I'd like my hotbars to be a shape other than straight lines. Perhaps a 3x4 box would be more useful to me. Perhaps I'd like a hotbar that only displayed 3 buttons instead of all 12. Perhaps I'd like that hotbar to be click-through. These are all highly specific preferences and not worth adding to the base UI. That's where addons come in.
In LOTRO I use an add-on that adds collapsible, configurable hotbars (for instance, a vertical bar that lets me hover over my favorite mount to have a horizontal bar extend out showing other mounts, or hover over my Return Home skill to have a bar extend out showing all my instant travel skills, etc.) An equivalent would be just as useful here. I use another add-on that lets me keep track of the inventory held by all my other characters, as well as see what's in my Vault (think Retainer inventory for FFXIV equivalent) when I'm not there. That one may not have as wide-spread of an appeal here where fewer players have multiple characters, but it would still be useful for those of us who do. I've seen some that show hotbar skills/items only under the specific circumstances that make them useful (equivalent here would be, for example, a WHM who only has Esuna pop up on their hotbar when a teammate gets a debuf they should dispel). I wrote a plugin myself to let me allocate several currencies between my alts which the game itself treats as account-wide but I preferred to treat as belonging to specific characters. There doesn't seem to be any direct correlation to that here, except in the very broad sense that it allowed me to take a feature and present it differently than how the basic game presented it, making the game as a whole more customizable. There's all kinds of things you can do with them.
The only downside to add-ons in this game is the fact that it's cross-platform, and the add-ons would almost certainly be limited to PC-only. (The people trying to claim that PC beats any other platform you can play on would finally be right, and that's not a good thing for a cross-platform game.)
I personally would love an add-on that makes all of my UI disappear when I'm not engaged in battle. The game is breathtaking and beautiful and I feel like the UI is such terrible clutter to take it all in.