Discussion for Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XX

[Wildsprite]

Having just recently gone back to FFXI, some of their design decisions were absolutely baffling.
For example, when you start the game even now, you are just plopped down into a city with only the faintest hint of direction. You aren't really given any clues as to how to get around, and unless you look it up, you can get to your late 40s without even knowing Subjobs or Chocobo licenses even exist. The amount of effort you have to go through just for an explanation within the game is mindboggling. I've never used a wiki as much as I have for that game.
Further, some of the job unlock quests were so unintuitive it was baffling, in addition to the Limit break quests being bizarrely disjointed: to get to level 61, you had to do a quest that involved getting past much higher level Notorious Monsters. To get to 66, you had to give a bunch of guys semi-common loot that drops from the mobs you had to get past to get to lvl 61.
And that's before getting into the crap summoners had to go through to get their summons. Imagine if, in order to summon Ifrit-Egi, you either had to solo Ifrit Story Mode, or beat Ifrit HM. And you had to do this for all your egis. Oh, and you don't get any other class features until you do. And this is after a job unlock quest that depends heavily on RNG and seasons
Comes to the point you begin thinking "Why the hell did they keep it this way for 13+ years?!"
Then you realize. They changed it. For FFXIV.
FFXI is definitely challenging. But it's "being forced to climb up a staircase with a wheelchair all the while wondering why they don't just add a ramp" challenging.

this is the unfortunate result from the fact that Tanaka(the producer of XI for most of its life for those that don't know) didn't actually play the game. he had a character but only to show the game off(which for it's time were fairly decent graphics). had he actually played the game on the same level as the players we likely would have gotten an entirely different game. something a bit more intuitive like XIV became with ARR

[Archchancellor]

this is the unfortunate result from the fact that Tanaka(the producer of XI for most of its life for those that don't know) didn't actually play the game. he had a character but only to show the game off(which for it's time were fairly decent graphics). had he actually played the game on the same level as the players we likely would have gotten an entirely different game. something a bit more intuitive like XIV became with ARR

How do you know he did not play the game?

[Wildsprite]

How do you know he did not play the game?

he admitted it and you could see it in the game itself. he and his devs immensily difficult and mind boggling things without thinking the consequences through. like the non nerfed Absolute Virtue. players found an exploit to beat it before they nerfed it but nobody found the legit way to beat the non nerfed AV. there were other things but this came to mind because many players kept going non stop to try to beat it with no success and actually got sick over it.

[kyuven]

he admitted it and you could see it in the game itself. he and his devs immensily difficult and mind boggling things without thinking the consequences through. like the non nerfed Absolute Virtue. players found an exploit to beat it before they nerfed it but nobody found the legit way to beat the non nerfed AV. there were other things but this came to mind because many players kept going non stop to try to beat it with no success and actually got sick over it.

That explains so much.
Aside from boss encounters, a lot about the game feels like it was designed on paper and no one in testing was listened to, in addition to the developers clearly not having a fixed direction for content.
Say what you will about the idea of HW following directly from ARR and requiring it, at least you're told exactly where to go and have reason to be there.
In FFXI (and some older MMOs, like EQ1) expansion content is plopped down on top of the existing content, only really activating when you seek it out. During my recent return to FFXI, the only reason I even figured out how the WoG zones work was because I wanted to unlock Dancer, which requires it.
There are pluses and minuses to both, but the lack of direction in FFXI definitely says it was born in a committee meeting without thought to how it would feel.

[Wildsprite]

That explains so much.
Aside from boss encounters, a lot about the game feels like it was designed on paper and no one in testing was listened to, in addition to the developers clearly not having a fixed direction for content.
Say what you will about the idea of HW following directly from ARR and requiring it, at least you're told exactly where to go and have reason to be there.
In FFXI (and some older MMOs, like EQ1) expansion content is plopped down on top of the existing content, only really activating when you seek it out. During my recent return to FFXI, the only reason I even figured out how the WoG zones work was because I wanted to unlock Dancer, which requires it.
There are pluses and minuses to both, but the lack of direction in FFXI definitely says it was born in a committee meeting without thought to how it would feel.

anotherr fine example of things not thought out fully was the Colibri in the ToAU areas, most parties completely shunned Black mage because of these insidius little pain in the back side. even if one of the devs was sadistic enough to come up with something like that. the fact that it made it into the game as is shows it was not designed with the players using it to level up in mind. I'll give you a fine example of this. party has a PLD tank and a DRK in the DPS with me as healer. I warned the DRK not to use his magic damage spells against it but he did not listen. he cast one of the nastier spells a DRK can do. the Colibri then turned around and used that exact spell and killed the tank with it.

[KisaiTenshi]

I'd have preferred they start at 1 too. As for the class vs job semantics nonsense.. I don't care what you call them, they should've started at 1.

I think this has something to do with what was originally planned in V1.0 and it's ancestry in Ultima and Wizardy. In Wizardy, FF1 and pretty much all the Final Fantasy Games prior to 6, there was a class the character started as, and was later upgraded to a Job. The cross-classing comes from Wizardy.

To quickly refresh. The Knight in FF1 was basically the Paladin. The Thief upgrades to Ninja, The White Mage upgrades to White Wizard. etc There was no cross-classing. Cross-classing in Final Fantasy does exist (see FF6) and such, but it's something that originally came from the Wizardy games. Wizardry Online kept these but otherwise the mechanic for doing it in Wizardy requires leveling , and then going back to level 1 again taking as many skills from the previous class depending on what level you achieved. Wizardy isn't a babies game and is unforgiving.

In Final Fantasy XIV, I believe there may have been the intent of doing the Class -> Elite Classes like Wizardy, but with it's own Final Fantasy type of Jobs (See FF5 and FFX-2 for FF games with dynamic job changes) So you may start as one class, but you can pick a job with the Soul Crystal which reduces the cross-classing in favor of several new job-specific skills. Even though you are a SCH or a SMN, you are still leveling the base Arcanist class. What that unfortunately causes is the notion that "jobs" are superior than the base class they derive from. They aren't. You have 10 cross-class skills as the base class, only 5 as the Job, and you are limited only to cross-classes that are relevant to your Job. Some classes like the casters don't really benefit from the cross-classing since everyone just picks the CNJ's protect/stoneskin/cure set, thus not needing to rely on a healer. Since you can't cross-class the Job skills, you're stuck without some of the better skills as well.

What I expect from V3.0 is that you get a new Soul Crystal for those jobs, but they either require a specific base class, or they "add" skills to any base class like the Job's already do to their specific class.

That explains so much.
Aside from boss encounters, a lot about the game feels like it was designed on paper and no one in testing was listened to, in addition to the developers clearly not having a fixed direction for content.
Say what you will about the idea of HW following directly from ARR and requiring it, at least you're told exactly where to go and have reason to be there.
In FFXI (and some older MMOs, like EQ1) expansion content is plopped down on top of the existing content, only really activating when you seek it out. During my recent return to FFXI, the only reason I even figured out how the WoG zones work was because I wanted to unlock Dancer, which requires it.
There are pluses and minuses to both, but the lack of direction in FFXI definitely says it was born in a committee meeting without thought to how it would feel.

Square-Enix.... has a bad record of not listening to feedback. Even during the FFXIV V1.0 beta, all feedback was disregarded and those that could send feedback were just a tiny tiny fragment of the players who beta tested. I imagine that Square-Enix was probably told many things in FFXI and FFXIV were horrible by their testers and was also disregarded because of the sunk costs. Hence why FFXIV had to be re-done from scratch, not just incrementally patched over.

I think they started to listen to feedback once a lot of negative feedback about XIII came out, and tried to fix that with XIII-2 and wound up alienating those that liked FFXIII. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

With Final Fantasy, Square-Enix subscribes to the same model that Ultima subscribes to. Every game must be a DIFFERENT game. Not just an iteration of the last game.