FFXIV: ARR becoming TORtanic

[seekerofpower]

The main story attempts to do this. A lot of the grind in the first half of the game is, in fact, a-ok. A lot of Final Fantasy games found one running around in circles on the overworld map, beating up monsters a bit more often than was strictly necessary, because you WANTED a few more levels and more gil and to build up more points on this, or get that job up some, etc, etc, etc.
But you were never forced to. I can't think of a single Final Fantasy game where I was ever once forced to run around in circles and mindlessly farm random encounters to get to and beat the end boss. I also can't think of a Final Fantasy wherein which I didn't want to do every farking thing there was, because it was all neat.

This is the only part I want to reply to. This tells me you have never played a FF game.

You are pretty much forced to grind in order to beat the game in every FF that has ever released.

If you want 1 specific example, the original version of FFIV, before it was nerfed for the US. I remember spending 3-4 hours running around in circles right outside the first town so I could hit level 10. If you tried to do the very first dungeon in that game below level 10, your chances of survival were around 10%. You had to stay outside the first town, because Tents were so expensive, it was cheaper to: 1. fight 1 or 2 battles 2. run into town to use the inn 3. repeat.

You were REQUIRED to run in circles killing stuff to advance the game. Grinding has NEVER been optional in FF games.

[Chrysania]

This is the only part I want to reply to. This tells me you have never played a FF game.

<irrelevant words saying nothing that ever mattered>.

First town in FFIV is Baron. You had to grind to survive in the mist cave?

Wat?

I can't take you seriously. You might have spent hours running laps around Baron, but you really wouldn't have had to. Your estimation of survival chances is ...I don't even know how you factored that.

I can only conclude that you're just very bad at battle management and...leave you to it? Yeah. Definitely going to leave you to it.

Edit: Buy potions. Use them. They make the mist dragon fight super easy.

Edit 2: I still have my original SNES cartridge of FF2, from waaaay back when, before I knew it was actually 4! Lovely game. I was rather impressed with the PSP remake, though the After Years pseudo-sequel...eh. It missed something. Wouldn't you agree, mon peche?

[Rainsford]

*snip*

Help me understand your complaint. An MMO requires subs, so you need people to be logging in to do stuff every few days. You hate gear treadmills, and don't want to have to "grind to beat the boss". So, if you had YoshiP's ear, what would you tell him to do? Have the main story quest give you fully materia'd i90 items and put you up against Bahamut? Then, after no reward for beating him, you can do what you do in every FF game and watch a cutscene before turning it off? If you had to pitch that to SE shareholders as a reliable option for a sub-based game (or any game that requires servers), how do you think that would go?

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your complaint, though.

[Chrysania]

Help me understand your complaint. An MMO requires subs, so you need people to be logging in to do stuff every few days. You hate gear treadmills, and don't want to have to "grind to beat the boss". So, if you had YoshiP's ear, what would you tell him to do? Have the main story quest give you fully materia'd i90 items and put you up against Bahamut? Then, after no reward for beating him, you can do what you do in every FF game and watch a cutscene before turning it off? If you had to pitch that to SE shareholders as a reliable option for a sub-based game (or any game that requires servers), how do you think that would go?

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your complaint, though.

I'd tell him to put a focus on cooperative story-driven activities, not filler. Every game has grind in it, but the best games will leave you feeling like they had no grind at all. How do they do it?

They make their grind fun, with 'fun' being a notion strongly tailored to the milieu or genre of the game at hand.

Gear treadmills put the emphasis on ever-better gear. The whole point of the game funnels into the gear treadmills. The story; the only thing that could possibly set ARR apart from every other gear treadmill game out there; is presently a disjointed, ricepaper-thin thing that YoshiP should be tailoring his game to richly and warmly invite everyone into, and never stop.

Right now, it stops at level 15, 16 and 17. Three back to back dungeons you are forced into if you want to not only continue on the main storyline, but even be able to do regional quests. You are grounded until you do those chores...er, I mean...stuck until you do those dungeons. Yeah, I was just as apt the first time.

Anyway, that's the first, but not the last, example of what needs to go. The main story should be pure Final Fantasy; a gripping tale in which you're the big gorram hero, and you sally forth and do stuff. The main story should walk you by your pretty little nose from questing zone to questing zone, and each questing zone should have numerous local quests in it for you to do. Why should it do that? Because nobody has fun not having a clue what they're 'supposed to be doing now'. While 'supposed to be doing' is a very flexible notion in the context, it should not be in the core leveling game. You're supposed to be where the main story has taken you, and you're supposed to be doing this cunningly crafted, unraveling skein of regional storylines while you're there.

Fates don't suck; they just need more context and relevance. They frequently just...happen on random timers, most of them. Some of them have to be touched off by specific activities, even if that's no more than clicking on a person.

That should be the other way around, and the idea should be expanded upon immensely. A fate should not be a boring-arse not-actually-random event that happens in the same place every 10 minutes in exactly the same way no matter what. A fate should be a reactive event.

Reactive to what? Some player somewhere doing something, even if its no more than clicking on an NPC. Or it could be a lot more. Certain fates could go off all around the entrance of a cave dungeon every 5th time the final boss in it croaks, and a nearby town might pop up with a fate in which they need fishermen to help thin the local waterways of HORRIBLE STILL-LIVING PIECES OF <boss that died> that, incidentally, the dodos seem to love eating.

More thought needs to be put into these things, in short. They need to be crafted into something that flows with a coherence that supports the main story. It is all about that story.

The whole game is about that story. Final Fantasy's keystone is its story. Without that, you have nothing worth writing home about. Look at every Final Fantasy ever. Subtract the story and just look at the games themselves. Some were pretty awful, ya? Clunky, unnecessarily complicated sometimes; changing things just so it'd be different from the last game sometimes; great sometimes?

For most Final Fantasy fans, and RPG fans on the whole, those elements are secondary to the story. Its all a vehicle for the story.

So, how do you make story something viable to the needs of an MMO? MMO's need their hamsterwheels between content releases, right? Yes! Yes they do!

STORY THOSE EFFING THINGS. Don't just put a thin, sad scent of story excuse on a dungeon we'll be herded into and forced to run hundreds of times just so we can run the next dungeon hundreds of times.

You want to make us run a single dungeon a whole lot? Put some effing effort into it. Make that dungeon FUN, first off. Don't make it tedious. Throw some wildcard elements into that sucker; throw some fate-like events into that dang thing. Come up with 15 different bosses, only 3 of which will ever appear on a given run, each with their own mechanics and storied reasons for being there.

Random Dungeon Generators. Look into this technology for content you want to make hamsterwheels out of. How much more fun would people be having with these placeholder group-focused affairs if they truly didn't know quite what to expect every time they set foot into Magical Dungeon'o'Doom?

This last run, it looked like a sewer and was poorly lit and was full of undead. Now its purple-illuminated, slightly foggy castle halls and we've got weird mutant beasties all over.

Splatter random events throughout. A random event could be a door that makes the party answer a riddle before letting them pass (and spawning monsters each time they get it wrong), spontaneous quests (One of the hostages you just rescued is a fellow adventurer that wants to tag along and help you defeat the boss that imprisoned her! Bonus rewards at the end if he survives to the end!) to do with the thing and general encouragement to do more exploring and less racing to nowhere.

You set up gear treadmills and all you encourage people to do is get on them as fast as they can reach them, then race on them until they're exhausted. Why not? The only thing that matters in a gear treadmill game, according to the game itself, is its conclusion; the gear treadmill. Its a very poetic nicety to observe that 'the journey is the point', but lets face it; that's not true in a gear treadmill MMO.

It might be sage advice to preserve one's own sanity with despite the point gear-treadmill games establish, but its always despite them, in defiance of their inexorable downward spiral into treadmill hell.

Don't go there. There's no need. Not when nobody in the entire industry is even trying to engage its playerbase at 'endgame' intervals with anything exploration-oriented. Gear can be part of it. Vanity can be a huge chunk of it.

YoshiP, take a note from one of the smartest things Guild Wars 2 did; don't make top-stat gear all that hard to get. Make awesome appearances and customization options the chief carrot on most of your sticks.

Then, take a note from one of the best things WoW's ever done; make the crafting of a relic akin to the crafting of a legendary in WoW - practically a community ordeal requiring the concerted efforts of many. Don't make legendaries do obscenely greater damage per hit than anything else; make them bloody AWESOME to behold, and give them a gimmicky special power that's either flashy or, indeed, just plain useful. Most importantly, Final Fantasy the hell out of this process. Make the quests for it appropriately epic for all involved, give crafters their own contributory quests (Let several player crafters of different sorts have their Cid-crafting-Excalibur style moments).

Then, take a note from FINAL FANTASY and don't make it a giant PITA to level; make leveling combat classes a Final-Fantasy-Fun experience.

It'll be more work, avoiding the treadmills. Treadmills are so easy every idiot game out there's been doing them forever.

It'll be work that's worth it when you craft a method of 'endgame' that keeps people busy without putting the entire emphasis of your game on gear when it should be on the story.

And that's the summary of what I'd tell Yoshi; he has to make the 'endgame' of his game support the game itself. Nobody looks forward to being max level so they won't have anything to do anymore, after all. They often want to be max level 'because that's when the real game starts'.

The real game should start at level 1. 'Endgame' should not be a gear treadmill, but an activity and community-building endeavor.

Here's an idea: lead up to major content releases with community activities. Don't just drop a new expansion; have our gatherers and crafters do grand company quests making things and contributing materials to build ...lets say airships...so we can oh...fly the army to <place> and kick the next expansion off.

Mundane stuff? Sure. But its the sort of concept a server's entire community can rally behind. Incentive to do it? Make it a bit of a competition between servers, with the top 3 getting a month-long <Yay BuffNameGoesHere> buff of some sort for the whole server to enjoy while bamfing around the new content.

And then have some epic bossfights or invasion events or whatever-might-contextually-fit-a-theoretical-expansion's-theme so people can go charging around blowing crap up in the days leading up to said expansion.

See, while I'm sure none of these ideas are perfect, and all of them would take more work than the same tired old crap, can anyone here see how the work might damn well be worth it?

Who here would like their 'endgame dungeons' to be well-crafted randomly generated affairs with spontaneous events that'd sometimes go off inside, different bosses you might never see twice and fun/weird things with nothing to do with combat sometimes spontaneously being generated therein (like a door asking riddles, or an optional, randomly-generated puzzle; solve it for a treasure box and tokens or something!)

Wouldn't it be a lot more interesting if, via intelligent preparation, 'endgame' never really happened? What if incremental content releases built the story up between major releases, and each major release was presaged by in-game events that gradually scaled up to release day, wherewith...BAM! THE EPIC CONCLUSION of <Stuff that was built up over the last 4 months> and...a new season begins!

YoshiP, look at it more like producing an ongoing television series and less like an MMO, in that respect. Tell an amazing story. Let us feel like we're part of it while you hide the grind in Final Fantasy story up to our ears.

Give that a whack. Nobody's doing THAT these days, much as they probably should.

[Keneblerz]

TLDR

Can we have a shorter one?

I shall sing it to you in the language of your people: harparp derp derrrrrp herperp.

This made me laugh so hard LOL.

[Chrysania]

Can we have a shorter one?

I shall sing it to you in the language of your people: harparp derp derrrrrp herperp.

[Akaasha]

I shall sing it to you in the language of your people: harparp derp derrrrrp herperp.

Made me laugh

[Arriverderci]

I shall sing it to you in the language of your people: harparp derp derrrrrp herperp.

Post of the year.

[GilbertLapine]

I shall sing it to you in the language of your people: harparp derp derrrrrp herperp.

Chrysania, we're destined to be friends! Expect a /tell in your future!

[Yoko_Kurama]

Lots of great ideas I'd tell Yoshi if I could whisper in his ears while he dreamed

Also get rid of the map system, don't show glowing dots on the map pointing to your destination. The way the system is now you focus more on your map than your actual screen. Make finding destinations something you actually have to...find. Make Fates appear at random locations, the same fate should not appear in the same place twice and it should NOT show on your map that a fate is even happening. It should be something you accidently found, make fates possibly drop ultra rare items for that level of fate so that fate hunters will have reason to explore every nook and cranny of your lands hoping to run into a fate. Make fates scale, if you are by yourself and run into a level 50 fate, it should be challenging for 1 person level 50, the moment more people come in that fate should scale ever so much for each person joining.