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I have a hard time believing it's just "unnecessary strain" when every freaking MMO - even one almost ten years old - has this feature. This is not some innovative bit of technology here. If you don't want them, you can always toggle them off.

I hope this doesn't come across as snide, but if you don't understand the strain it's because you don't understand programming and resource management nightmare when it comes to dealing with screen rendering, memory, and well a slew of hardware configurations that you have no control over. ie They have to hit the lowest common denominator. Comparing older games to new ones is also a bad comparison especially if you just are trying to compare one feature. You have to look at the whole picture. How different are the games you trying to compare. Are the graphics more intense, can they render the same amount of glyphs on the screen, sounds, textures, animations, events, etc..

The "unnecessary" part is simple because it's not something that is required to play the game. /shrug It's not as simple as I'll just add this new feature to the game, it will be perfect and not effect anything else that's already in the game. I mean don't get me wrong I'd love to see development get to the point where hardware can just provide oodles of resources to play with, sadly we're not there. There is also creative direction to keep in mind, which tends to get pushed aside a lot of times. FFXIV was built with speech bubbles not included in their original design. Will it come in the future? Maybe, maybe not, who knows. But currently the demand for something like this is so low that it doesn't even register on their radars.

For the role playing folks out there, I get it. But in all honesty, speech bubbles isn't how I'd like to RP. I'd rather just have voice integration at that point. And well we all know what type of topic that is.

Out of curiosity, can you provide me a list of MMO's that have speech bubbles? I'd like to do some research and see what they look like, in perfect conditions (low usage) and in the worst conditions (high usage).

Trying to find this speech bubble standard in other MMO's and came across this:
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=415849

It's like the same topic we are having here. XD

[Naunet]

Out of curiosity, can you provide me a list of MMO's that have speech bubbles?

I can give you the names of the ones I've played. Obviously it's not all MMOs, as there's no way in hell I'll ever play all MMOs out there. However, MMOs that I know have them as I have played them (and they in no way affected performance): WoW, Rift, Aion, LotRO, and TERA. There are two MMOs currently under NDA that I can't remember if they have it or not, but I think they did.

[edit] Thank you, Ildur!

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I can give you the names of the ones I've played. Obviously it's not all MMOs, as there's no way in hell I'll ever play all MMOs out there. However, MMOs that I know have them as I have played them (and they in no way affected performance): WoW, Rift, Aion, LotRO, and TERA.

Thanks for the list, not exact what I was expecting after you mentioned that almost every freaking MMO has them. :/ I'm poking around these now and seeing what they look like. I'd like you to reconsider your last statement though, saying that a graphical element has no way affected performance is a blank statement with no substance, and quite frankly not true. Every single UI element, effect, model has an effect on performance. If a game has speech bubbles then it means that the engine was designed to handle that element rendering. It's how that's balanced that matters, it could be that FFXIV is specifically designed to not support speech bubbles because that want other things to render on the screen. It doesn't mean they can't add them in the future, but when they do they'll likely update the UI performance in general.

Funny enough I came across an older FFXIV thread about the same topic:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...bbles-Thoughts