Discussion for Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XX

[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.