Your thoughts on the direction of this game?

[StarDrake]

ARR would have been a failure like any other WoW 'clone' if it didn't have the benefit of 1.x content. If it launched with only ARR content, we'd only now be getting stuff that existed in 1.0-1.23.

This view has always seemed backwards to me.



To me, it's been clear for a while now that the opposite is true: 1.23 was Not Too Bad because it had a fair bit of ARR content in it. That is, the development team took content intended for ARR (some of the later NMs, or Garuda & Mog, neither of whom were in the original slate for Primals, or Castrum Novum, which made use of assets intended, or designed to do double duty with, CM/Praetorium in ARR) and retrofitted some of it onto 1.2x to give customers something to do while they waited for ARR. Ifrit vs. Garuda is a really good example of this, in my mind: the Ifrit fight in 1.0 was substantially different despite using a few similar assets, because it was designed with 1.0 in mind; the ARR fight is somewhat similar, but it's substantially different in a lot of ways to account for system differences in ARR and general refinement. Garuda, meanwhile, is basically the same fight across both versions - because it was designed first for ARR, and then more or less plopped into 1.22 wholesale with minimal alterations.

Things like the chocobo barding or dungeons like Aurum Vale are similar - they were, at "best", done with an eye toward being usable in both versions, if not primarily made for ARR and then put into the 1.2x series of patches because the assets were ready. They weren't really "1.2x content" because they were always being made with an eye toward ARR - keeping 1.x going was, frankly, more of an afterthought. Remember, work on ARR began almost as soon as Yoshida was made producer-director.

So I don't think it's really accurate to think of it almost anything as "1.x" content - because the huge majority of the content seems to have been produced with 2.0 in mind beginning around 1.18 or 1.19.

Not that I expect this to sway anyone's mind because this thread is a pit and people are dead-set on convincing themselves that 1.x was somehow a superior game, but.

[IgnisFatuus]

So I don't think it's really accurate to think of it almost anything as "1.x" content - because the huge majority of the content seems to have been produced with 2.0 in mind beginning around 1.18 or 1.19.

Not that I expect this to sway anyone's mind because this thread is a pit and people are dead-set on convincing themselves that 1.x was somehow a superior game, but.

I saw that gdc postmortem where he basically said that 1.x was a beta testfield for content with paying customers. but he also sees ARR as an ever-evolving piece (or chocobo kid or whatever analogy he made about it), so that's not much different, especially in hindsight with the balance trainwreck that is hunts as the prime example.

sadly, I never got the chance to play 1.x so I can only go by records of other people. it certainly seemed to have some interesting ideas and some pretty terrible ones too - but the battle system seemed to be much better.

[Roris]

They weren't really "1.2x content" because they were always being made with an eye toward ARR - keeping 1.x going was, frankly, more of an afterthought. Remember, work on ARR began almost as soon as Yoshida was made producer-director. So I don't think it's really accurate to think of it almost anything as "1.x" content - because the huge majority of the content seems to have been produced with 2.0 in mind beginning around 1.18 or 1.19.

A lot of the assets for Aurum Vale and the rest of the other dungeons were already in the game pretty much since release with some of them close to being finished, they were even intended to be non instanced, they merely finished them or rearranged them as the game went along. There were also other dungeons like The Fesse, Hengr’s Crucible, The Ayerie and Peacegarden Croft that were never implemented but instead their assets were used to make Dzemael and Totorak.

Ifrit was probably also planned to be implemented closely after release alongside Titan, you can even catch a glimpse of Titan in action in the very first XIV E3 trailer, which indicates primal fights were far enough into development in some way or another. It does however align with what you mention about the Garuda fight being developed closer with ARR in mind seeing how Garuda was introduced well into the Meteor storyline and that was all Yoshida's idea, although a Garuda lookalike is featured in the original CE and she was mentioned in one of the original main storyline quests.

Stuff like Hamlet was also planned since release, you can look back in the old Lodestone and see it being listed as a promised feature before the team reshuffle. A lot of the stuff implemented up until 1.23 was most likely stuff that was halfway done or close to finished before ARR was even imagined, remember 1.0 was in development for about 4 to 5 years but got heavily rushed to compete with Cataclysm, they were just given enough time to polish it and implement it while working on ARR behind the scenes. Makes more sense to use existing concepts, code and assets intended for an existing engine and finish them than backporting assets and code from the new engine to the old one, especially considering the old assets had higher polygon counts and overall more quality and got downscaled for ARR.