Anyone who has played FFXI probably remembers the selbina-mhaura ferry, sea horror, and the pirate attack. There was also a similar ride on a barge through the Phanauet Channel with multiple pathways.
There's something fun about a zone where you're just on a vehicle, with random events happening during a trip. And it could be something unique and simple that makes FFXIV feel special and more memorable.
Since servers are more powerful now, it would be awesome to have a myriad of different random events and random paths for a boat to travel. Or to have something completely different like a train ride across the main continent.
Either way, FFXIV could really use some unique non-cookie-cutter content.
A moving/dynamic zone would be cool (e.g. a ship or train)
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07-29-2018, 12:22 PMAzurymberA moving/dynamic zone would be cool (e.g. a ship or train)
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07-29-2018, 12:42 PMFredco191
Ooh! That’d be fun!
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07-29-2018, 01:03 PMMwynnThey can't even add more Racial Features to the Character Creation.Quote:
Originally Posted by Azurymber
(Not thinking this is a bad idea, but you know.. Server Limitations) -
07-29-2018, 03:24 PMKisaiTenshiWe had that in V1.0, that was the only way to get to or from Limsa Lominsa. I'd like to see it return, but unless you can fish on it, it probably would get no use. There were also airship landing moors in V1.00 that I never saw get used.Quote:
Originally Posted by Azurymber
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07-29-2018, 03:28 PMAzurymberI don't remember either of those actually having a trip or zone associated with it?Quote:
Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi
There were airships & ships but weren't they just an instant transport?
I only remember there being an instanced ship during the limsa intro. -
07-29-2018, 03:38 PMEnkidoh
Airships have always been instantaneous transport in FFXIV, even in 1.0 it just had a scene of your character entering or exiting the dock and the airship taking off or landing. Only the Vesper Bay - Limsa ferry was an actual 'zone' you could sit in, and even that was brought in line with the airships in ARR, being changed to just be a cutscene of departure and arrival and just skips the journey in between.
The main reason it's instant is by having it as an actual zone it requires the ship to be on a set schedule, that, any FFXI player can tell you was horribly annoying having to wait ten real time minutes just for the next ship to arrive, having just missed the previous one by the skin of your teeth.
Here in FFXIV having airships and ferries instant is an acceptable break from reality that eliminates such annoyingly pointless gimmicks that only cause frustration and add to the game time for no benefit. -
07-29-2018, 04:01 PMShurrikhanThe ferry was instanced, yes, much like those in WoW, but with a long-running "in transit" instance as well. I remember players frequently requesting player-count-based random encounters and unique fishing types be made available over the in transit instance, but can't actually even recall if regular fishing was available therefrom.Quote:
Originally Posted by Azurymber
The city airships were indeed instant, and nothing was ever done with the gridanian airship landings. -
07-30-2018, 02:34 AMUsho
Sadly, I seriously doubt Yoshi-Pees is gonna add trains, boats and actual airships that aren't instanced in the game at this point. Even after homepoints allowed us to teleport to different zones in FFXI, airships and boats were still fun to take and it actually immersed you in the world more and allowed you to explore new areas and take a break while taking in the sights. The overworld was fun to explore, the caves, the deserts, the pirates randomly attacking you at sea and doing some fishing on the boat rides. Exploring the world of FFXI was a beautiful experience. FFXIV doesn't have that. Everything is instanced to hell and the overworld is just so shallow and artifical. It's pretty, but it's shallow. The monsters aren't threatening either and there's no sense of danger.
In early low levels like travelling to the Dunes in FFXI, you had to worry about goblins being on your ass during your trip or Malboros coming at you in Pashhow Marshlands on the first trip to Jeuno. FFXIV doesn't have this. If FFXIV had more exploration and not a "fast food" kind of feel to it, then the game would benefit from it alot. The background is pretty but that's it, which is sad by today's standards. Sadly 5.0+ will have the same artifical feel to areas and exploration cause the guys in charge left their quality kit at home.
/2 cents -
07-30-2018, 06:41 AMUsho
From @Enkidoh
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Here in FFXIV having airships and ferries instant is an acceptable break from reality that eliminates such annoyingly pointless gimmicks that only cause frustration and add to the game time for no benefit.
Frustration for whom exactly? Not having them instanced like everything else in the artifical feel of FFXIV would actually add more feeling and exploration to the game that it REALLY needs. The airships and the boats added to the surrealism of FFXI's world. Exploration was amazing in FFXI and the journeys felt more meaningful. Travelling in FF14 is like teleport, boom, done. Or Walk for a 1 min, then done. That's it. That's awful imo. Awful and lazy.
Granted, I think teleports were a good idea but to make basically EVERYTHING instanced was not. FFXIV, at least in it's current incarnation, is lazy in design, and lacks creativity with it's exploration aspect, which is actually something the majority of people actually LOVE TO DO! WOW! Shocking isn't it? Yeah, I bet it is. But this game lacks in exploration and the overworld feels like a artifical painting. Pretty to look at, but that's all it is. Mind as well call FFXIV the new "Sims but with a WoW aspect". This game doesn't deserve the Final Fantasy title. Unlike this game, the previous FF games actually INVOLVED explorating the world. What a concept right?
/2 cents -
07-30-2018, 07:12 AMCrystal_Raven
Honestly I agree with this.
I used to play a different game that handled travel really well. It had 2 types of travel.
First it was similar to FF14, you can teleport all over the place and most places are instanced, however. You had these daily quests to do that would generate some income, aka ingame money as we have here Gil. You had to travel pretty large distances to get this done.
You could either take the roads, or the scenic route that some players preferred. There were ships sailing rivers and oceans between places, they'd stop at certain locations and you just hop on and wait as you sail to the next place, then there were airships for those long-distance areas where there are no rivers. While on the boat or airship, players had a tendency to randomly start chatting about random things and making friends just like that. Also could look at the environment and world as you go through it.
Something similar would be pretty cool to see in FF14. -
07-30-2018, 07:21 AMKisaiTenshiYep, I remember running into one of the Gridanian airship landings during the beta for V1.0 an patiently waiting around to see if anything came. Nothing did. I did use the ferry several times however as I made beta characters on all starting cities so I could see the opening cutscenes and quests.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shurrikhan
When I later played Archeage I kinda wanted that kind of airship/taxi/ship system where there is just a piece of transport you can get on. However you also have to understand why these existed in Archeage. One of Archeage's core game concepts is trading materials. So you'd buy something from the guy in the desert city, and then sell it to the guy in the port city, and such. So the most direct way of doing this was via the airships, however the airships also moved through PvP areas, so the second you hit a PvP spot, the other players would kill everyone. Now I do want to point out something that is more funny about this. You could leverage the PvP against the other faction. So what you would do is hide in the airship docking area of the enemy faction and wait for someone with a backpack to wait for a ship to come. Wait for the ship to come, sneak onboard, and then once you're away from the dock, jack their stuff. Once you got something jacked, you also would likely have the ship to yourself. That's when you kill everyone who boards at the next stop, repeat until you get to the closest fixed route to an area you could sell the packs.
That is literately how that game was supposed to be played, though more emphasis was placed on ship warfare. Players didn't like losing their ships, so they'd unsummon them at first sight of the enemy.
Now that kind of stuff I always found a bit more interesting than the "open world pvp" aspect. Defend your deliveries from bandits (AI or PC) in transit. You can't just teleport with a package, you have to physically take it from NPC to NPC. I didn't stick around archeage long enough to see any parser wars that would have made sneaking impossible, but suffice it to say, I think this is still something that would justify these things existing in FFXIV.
Let's say that, the custom deliveries that already exist in the game was expanded to include taking crates or backpacks from one area to another. Because this game doesn't really have any kind of openworld PvP, there is no risk of player bandits. Basically we already have one version of this with Vase off. So to complete a delivery, you have to complete one of three things:
1) Deliver the small package, on foot, the slow and safest route, with only regular overworld mobs to deal with, being attacked drops the pack, and the pack can be picked up by other players should the player who initially picked it up, teleport, use a mount, board a chocobo taxi, or use any other variation of quick-travel (including the tri-city airships.) All mobs will attack players carrying specific things, and players must drop the pack to attack back. The best strategy is to bring at least a friend to take care of any mobs. Carrying a pack across a zone boundary change will lead to instanced fights, depending on the value of the item being taken.
2) Deliver the medium packages by cart (behaves like a mount), a faster means, but it will be targeted by bandits during zone-boundary changes. So in effect it adds instanced fights to zone boundary crossings that you can not solo. You need a party. Or you can try to solo and are gauranteed to lose some of your stuff. Zone boundary changes on a cart will sync to the cart/goods level.
3) Deliver the small, medium, or large packages by airship, ferry or caravan. This leans back to what the OP was asking. Where there would be fixed transportation on a schedule. So one of these routes would be from some place like Quarrymill, that you'd have to take on foot or cart to gridania, and then at the airship/ferry port you and X many other players in the port area would be transported to an alternate version of the airship, which is a larger cargo ship. So this ship would also behave a bit like "hamlet defense", where there would be waves of sea/sky pirates depending on the total value of goods on board. Between each wave, the ship can be repaired by DoH jobs. Players are free to not repair the ship, but if the ship's durability reaches zero, it crashes and all goods are lost. Where as pirates can just straight up steal goods if left undefended. Unlike other duties, failing these duties does not get a do-over.
The ideas above are partially inspiried by how this mechanic exists in archeage or mabinogi, but really those games had various issues that made those things a lot less fun than they should be:
- Archeage's Openworld PvP areas would pretty much guarantee you lost your cargo, because the flight mechanic allowed players to glide onto moving transport. There was no NPC based bandits.
- Mabinogi's version of this would feature AI bandits, and harder ones the higher level cargo you took. However since the bandits spawned in the regular areas of the game, having an entire party of strong players was the only practical way to do it, and it was a faceroll that way.
I'm sure this entire trading thing came from another game in a better way (probably from EVE) , but suffice it to say, it would give a reason for these areas to exist beyond just sight-seeing. -
07-30-2018, 01:31 PMShurrikhanSo much of this sounds like what 1.x was pushing towards, pre-Yoshida....Quote:
Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi
And yeah, I'd love to see stuff like that, so long as the open world, and its purpose to XIV, could be similarly beefed up. -
07-30-2018, 01:44 PMKaisha
I don't believe ARR has anything in place to handle physically attaching and moving a character to an object about outside of up/down in an elevator. Boats in XI/1.0 were just smoke and mirrors where the boat is completely stationary and it's just animating a zone model around the players.
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07-30-2018, 03:10 PMKisaiTenshiWell in V1.0, you never actually boarded the ferry, you just stood around in dock area and when the ferry docked, you were transported onboard. And when it got to the other side, you were transported off. It never worked like Archeage did where you physically had to move.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaisha
The thing I hate about Archeage's version was that they were closer to moving platforms (a la mario) , but had no physics to them, so you could ram them full speed with your glider and just hit it like it was a wall. You could jump off the airships to your death, or glide down. It was pretty tricky, but you could also bounce onto the top of the airship (thus providing another way to ninja onto a ship mid-flight. Archeage's ships however went through effectively seamless zones, which was somewhat better than FFXIV V1.0's handling via loading tunnels. Archeage actually has loading tunnels, but they take the form of "long valleys between maps", when you're in an airship, you actually see the scenery pop-out and back in as it crosses those zones. It's not terrible.
ARR zones would likely not pull this off just because they're too small. They would likely take "alternative" routes that only cross through one zone, and spend the rest of the time in the clouds. (See void ark storyline), and then arrive at their target zone. That at least makes it look like the ships exist to the outside (which currently is very static.)
If we're really going into the Garlemald region in 5.0, there is a huge desert to cross that we already saw a glimpse of in the cutscenes, and the garleans already lost one airship to the area. So that does tell us that there is an opportunity to here to put something in that isn't just another fast-travel shortcut, seeing as that significant time has to be spent to get there, just like with going to Kugane. -
07-31-2018, 02:00 AMElixirboyI remember camping land kings in XI, and if you didn't have someone with a claim bot, you had a zero percent chance to get some really useful gear pieces. Ever.Quote:
Originally Posted by Usho
I remember farming pop items in Sky, and watching RMT camp and claim Ullikummi, in an attempt to force people to buy the pop item if they wanted to fight Kirin. That was awesome.
Open world bosses had their pros and cons, instances have theirs. -
07-31-2018, 04:27 AMRemedi
Tbh they do have the technology ot make something like that
Remember the first part of sirensong sea? -
07-31-2018, 11:55 PMMwynnIt's an Illusion just like Bismarck, Dun Scaith or the Phantom Train Zone.Quote:
Originally Posted by Remedi
What is actually happening there is, the Object you stand on doesn't really move but the Zone itself loops infinitely, making it look like you would move.
The Sequence of moving to the Island in Dun Scaith is just a Illusion aswell, I'd be not surprised if they took the entire Island, shrunk it and basically let it grow so it seems like we would "Fly" to it with that Airship.
It's also used in the Praetorium Lift Sequence where you fight Gaius or the Ultima Fight.
At a certain Point, old seen Structures of the Zone will be loaded the moment it can loop and from that Moment, it'll clip and infinitely loop.
It's pretty much like looping Music or in the end, how Skyboxes work in Games, they do loop aswell.
Ever stood in Ultima Trial for 30 Minutes without triggering the Fight? Sure at a Point you'd reach the top but that's not the case in that scenario. -
08-01-2018, 12:06 AMRemediI know how it works, perhaps I misunderstood what ppl really wantedQuote:
Originally Posted by Mwynn
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08-01-2018, 12:35 AMZojhaAnd doing it any other way would likely look like the old ferries vanilla WoW used. Auberdine<->Teldrassil comes to mind, or the one that drove to Feathermoon Stronghold back when it was on Sardor Isle. I think the other ferries ended in a loading screen sometime after leaving shore, but those two had a complete loop where you could jump off any time (at your own risk).Quote:
Originally Posted by Mwynn
Not exactly advanced tech, considering it's like 14 years old now. But it requires the space you traverse through to actually exist. I could imagine that breaking through the invisible walls around Limsa into the water would just cause you to fall into nothingness until you hit some invisible failsafe floor down below, because the entire harbor is just smoke and mirrors. Or, fall into infinity, if there is no failsafe.
Personally, I don't see it happening in this game. Certainly not in the open world, because that'd be inconvenient and this game is HUGE on providing things conveniently. In an instance, maybe. But they'd just go for the illusion route and prevent you from jumping off via invisible walls. -
08-01-2018, 02:07 AMMelichoir
I feel like that the doom train fight is good and bad because it kinda embodies this a touch. They couldve gone farther with it (where the doom train slowly destroys the train your on, and if youre not fast enough, you run out of train.) Among other mechanics like needing to switch tracks or even trains possibly (havent done the Savage version, so if that is a thing on savage, woo. Gotta go do that then :3).
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08-01-2018, 04:01 AMBrightshadowphantom train is not doomtrain.Quote:
Originally Posted by Melichoir
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08-01-2018, 04:42 AMMelichoirDerp, it is not. Point still is the same, regardless.Quote:
Originally Posted by Brightshadow