Yoshi & Team need to man any future FF Onlines

[Duelle]

Yes and no. The term came from WoW where from 1 expansion to the other stats went up like 100x (as I recall stats went something like....)

original = 7k tank
1st expan = 15-20k tank
2nd expansion = 70-80k tank
3rd expansion = 150k tank
4th expansion = 700K tank

I corrected some of the numbers. Your point remains valid, though, as stat inflation went all sorts of ridiculous as the game progressed. My take on that is that they wanted to level the field between everyone once a new expansion hit, but making quested gear that entirely shat on raiding gear was not the way to go about it, IMO.

FFXIV there is no reason for our hp to increase more than 1-2k per tier for the foreseeable future. If they do something stupid like blizzard and make 3.0 HP values break 50k then meh.

The funny thing about this is that with the way stats scale, they can get away with putting more of the item budget on secondary stats without having to inflate health (the reason WoW went crazy with Stamina was because they had nothing else to put that item budget into without making everyone's DPS skyrocket). From what I'm told there are heavy diminishing returns in skillspeed and spellspeed's mileage varies depending on the job. Crit is just being figured out and even then vaslue per point isn't massive by any stretch of the imagination.

[Souljacker]

What would you do? You can't let raiding gear continue to be top content when an xpac hits. It just doesn't make sense. You start a new xpac fresh and everyone needs to be on a level playing field. It's no different than the very beginning of a game. No one gets to have an advantage just because they may have been a raider in a past expansion.

[Roris]

Ppl seem to forget LE production started in 2005, and had years of prior pre-planning. 9 months later it was changed to CT 1.0 as it was going to be used for titles other than XIII and for multiple platforms instead of just PS3. Rapture itself until officially announced as FFXIV had little to no info leaked, just that it was in development.

Also I stated Development Cycle, Start to Finish. Concept & design is part of a Development Cycle and lays the foundation of a game. Production cycle is one part of the overall Development Cycle. So again 5 years to Develop the game.

I am well aware of the history that was Crystal Tools.

Can't do much with an unfinished engine either way, like it's been said a good time of those 5 years was also preproduction, with actual work in game started around 2008 at best. Remember all that content 1.0 got until the very end? The grand majority was developed entirely before Yoshida took over, there was plenty of work done for 1.0 but left unused and they never got the chance to implement it.

The work the was closer to finished was refined into content for 1.0's updates, some mobs weren't even used until ARR like the Ziz, Dullahans and even Twinania's dragons, but they were developed for 1.0. If you're somehow implying the 1.0 team was lazy and didn't get much done during those 5 years, remember once again, the ARR team is almost the exact same team as 1.0.

[Zarzak]

What would you do? You can't let raiding gear continue to be top content when an xpac hits. It just doesn't make sense. You start a new xpac fresh and everyone needs to be on a level playing field. It's no different than the very beginning of a game. No one gets to have an advantage just because they may have been a raider in a past expansion.

This makes no sense. You aren't starting fresh. It is an EXPANSION. It EXPANDS content. it does not come by and wipe the slate clean. At that point you may as well release a whole new game.

[Rocco]

I just hope 3.0 goes more 'sandpark' rather than 'theme park'

[Delily]

Yes and no. The term came from WoW where from 1 expansion to the other stats went up like 100x (as I recall stats went something like....)

Padawan, you're cute. I know what MUDflation is, WoW was not my first one. I never played Ascheron's Call or Everquest because at the time, I was to busy farming Hell mode Meph and Baal runs. I started my MMO experience with Dark Age of Camelot, a small RvR MMO that was released during the reign of Everquest.

However, it's far older than WoW:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudflation.
As the name may imply, the origin came from MUDs, those ancient text based systems MMORPG's come from.
Specifically, it refers to anytime something in the game is introduced that devalues existing items. The worst offender to this was Dark Age of Camelot, when spell crafting was introduced which rendered ALL dropped item completely worthless. Then again, that was an RvR game, and not a PvE game (until Trials was released), so it was a different situation.

This makes no sense. You aren't starting fresh. It is an EXPANSION. It EXPANDS content. it does not come by and wipe the slate clean. At that point you may as well release a whole new game.

The name changes and we go from version 2.X to 3.0. There's also rumors of a reworking of the class/job system.
We get 10 more levels, 2 new classes, new regions, new monsters, new quests, new group content, and more story. That's content expansion right there.

Stat progression happens for a few reasons. The biggest reasons are technical. Sure the designers could sit there and come up with truly innovate encounters, but there's a huge host of technical challenges you have to solve in order to do that, most of which is not cost effective. So, they all pretty much stick to boosting a boss's health and damage, and adding in a few moves.

So, you release a new content pack, and you've got groups of players sitting around in max ilvl gear. You want to prevent most of them from speed running through the content, getting bored, and quitting. The quickest way to do that is force people to level, which means chaining them back to quests and regular trials and dungeons. Well, you still don't want the people to speed run through the first dungeon, so you immediately tune that boss to ilvl 110 or something like that. Now, you have the problem where the players who couldn't do the raids suddenly can't level anymore, and have to resort to running these raids just to gear to level. That's not something most people are willing to do while leveling, so now the quest rewards have to provide people with some basic gear, which will be ilvl 100 or so.

Your ideas have some merit, I'll agree, but the addition of the 10 levels does impact things.

I just hope 3.0 goes more 'sandpark' rather than 'theme park'

The designers have made it quite clear this is a theme park MMO. If you want sandbox, Eve, Darkfall Online, or Everquest Next may be more your style.

[ReplicaX]

If you're somehow implying the 1.0 team was lazy.

You keep using terms like "most likely" and "at best" "it's been said" in your statements. Show me, I'd like to know!

I blame the Company as a whole for what was 1.0.

• Team
• Leads
• Upper Management

They all contributed to the failure. They had 5 years of Development.

However, some ppl act like the leads had zero control over the project and blame everything else:

Can't do much with an unfinished engine either way

Crystal Tools version 1.0 was completed in September 2007 for the following target platforms: PC, PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii.

Adopted 3 titles:
Final Fantasy XIII (PS3/360)
Final Fantasy Versus XIII (Dropped for Luminous Studio and retitled)
Next generation MMORPG code-named Rapture (PC DX10 / PS3)
Source

Later addition:
Dragon Quest X (Wii) Project Yoshida was originally working on.

To back up Concept & Design for Crystal Tools prior to the announcement of it's completion:

April 2006: Hiromichi Tanaka, stated that developers were working to make Rapture a worldwide release for the PlayStation 3 and Windows Vista (DX10). Source

CT was their only engine in development to handle PC & DX10. XB360 version was dropped due to XBL policy on having their own servers aka no cross-platform.

You can gladly review Yoshida's slides from GDC as well: Behind the Realm

I'm sure the CEO & top executives made the command decision to put "1K polygons and 150 lines of shader code into a flowerpot."

[Tonkra]

FFXIV 1.0 was a steaming pile of crap. Yes they made it acceptable but it is still a fragment of what other major themeparks mmos are and extremely linear and limited in all aspects of the game.

for me version 1.0. wasnt crap.. i loved the openworld (although it hadnt these themepark objects in the landscapes).. it had a complete openworld map.
great atmosphere of a very realistiv world.. you could feel comfortable in that world.

the weather effects, the music.. the graphics.. have been quiet great if you ask me..









uldah time lapse and music

dont get me wrong.. many things in 1.0. werent good. such as lags, the mouse control, less content.
but it also had its moments..


but you say "themepark is too boring".. and then you say "1.0. was crappy"... because 1.0. wasnt like WoW it was bad?


in my opinion you are one of these crybabies or better to say "MMO" normads.. when you flamed enough at one MMO.. you move to the next one to continue flaming there..

oh man i loved that old Gridanian Intro by the way... too funny and to atmospheric

Gridania Intro FFXIV 1.0.

[Delily]

The other thing to keep in mind is that FFXIV has a very strong story element to it, and many players will want to see it. That means a good chunk of players are running content only because it has ties tonthe story, and not for the challenge or rewards.

[Roris]

So the engine was finished in 2007 and XIV was announced in 2009, was available to play live at Gamescom that same year and then finally entered worldwide alpha in 2010, so that's only 2 years of working with the finished engine itself to start producing in game content and for the game to reach a "playable" state, the rest of that time they were working with a half baked engine. Again, the rest of those 5 years you keep bringing up were also spent producing all the concepts such as lore, mobs, art direction, classes, the world itself, everything that's still used to this very day that was made by almost the exact same team we have now.

Some people like to act like a single person "saved" the game when the majority of the work creating almost everything about the world, systems, abilities, was already laid out by the previous team including yes, the previous director and producer. The truth is, had this very same team been given more time to flesh out all their concepts and actually finish them and implement all the stuff they already had prepared, the game wouldn't have needed saving. Some can chalk it all up to Tanaka being himself and getting too confident about patching the game later, and sure that might be the case and maybe could have even worked out like it did in XI if they had also kept the game in Japan until its first expansion. This time though, upper management mismanaging their resources not just for XIV but pretty much all their operations until the new CEO stepped in, and the final nail in wanting to rush the game to compete with a WoW expansion, had the bigger influence on 1.0s failure than directorial decisions.

The current lead does however a great job production wise and is good at managing resources. That's one of the main reasons we keep seeing repurposed assets every patch and minimal content stretched out as thin as it can be, that's resource saving at its best.