The Old Intros of Final Fantasy XIV ("1.0.") for those who just played ARR

[Atoli]

I was fine with 1.x, but that's because my tolerance level is just really high. I play MMOs for the people in it and how much I feel at home in that world, how many feelings of wonder I experience when exploring and stuff like that, and no amount of slow or repetitive combat can stop me - but that's not the regular type of player nowadays
Everything has to be fast and actionpacked now, just look at FF15 - it's a straight forward action RPG. And if you look at the players coming in from other MMOs into ARR, they already complain that ARR combat is waaaay too slow and sluggish when I find it annoyingly fast sometimes.

Hm. Maybe that's why I'm more and more switching over to strategy games and classic-style handheld JRPGs
I'm getting old

Anyway, no matter how enjoyable many 1.x things were, no one should forget what a horrible mess 1.0 was. Nearly all of the things that made 1.x great in the end were added AFTER Yoshi-P took over.
You know when the combat actually got somewhat enjoyable?
When we got rid of the stamina bar and combat became slightly closer to what we have nowadays. Most people just remember how the game was in 1.2x and completely forget that story was incredibly sarce, quests were non-existent and combat consisted of hitting the monster 3-4 times and then standing there for a full minute to regenerate Stamina even when your TP were full at the start of 1.0 and a few patches beyond.

Still there is one thing I can't forgive - what the dev team of ARR did with Gridania's forest
Why?
Just why?
It was a wonderful place, mythical, magical, reclusive, very fitting to the mind of the people living in Gridania who were extremely wary of others.
But now, it's this cheap-looking run-of-the-mill friendly flowery open-to-all-travelers forest >_>

[Tonkra]

Anyway, no matter how enjoyable many 1.x things were, no one should forget what a horrible mess 1.0 was. Nearly all of the things that made 1.x great in the end were added AFTER Yoshi-P took over.
You know when the combat actually got somewhat enjoyable?
When we got rid of the stamina bar and combat became slightly closer to what we have nowadays. Most people just remember how the game was in 1.2x and completely forget that story was incredibly sarce, quests were non-existent and combat consisted of hitting the monster 3-4 times and then standing there for a full minute to regenerate Stamina even when your TP were full at the start of 1.0 and a few patches beyond.

When i talk about "1.0." i also mean more what came afterwards.. when jobs have been introduced and the first (content) patches came in. im not saying the vanilla version was good, nor that the old version had no failures in it. Im just saying i would have loved it more if they just improved it. and at least kept the combat system (maybe in an improved form) in. and the quality of cutscenes, animations etc.

sometimes i wish some tanaka influence back then... what tanaka did too less .. yoshi P. had done too much (ripping off standard mechanics)

Still there is one thing I can't forgive - what the dev team of ARR did with Gridania's forest

Well in ARR/HW you less likely are going to visit the starter areas anyways.

[Seig345]

I loved watching these again, I love these FAR more than the boring wagon ride intro for ARR (with not a lick of voice acting I might add, unless you count the disembodied narrator's brief intro for each city). It's unfortunate, though, that the machine used to record the youtube videos seemed to struggle a bit, either with the rendering itself, or the combination of rendering and recording (I'm not savvy on the particulars there).

Nostalgia for something is easy once it's gone, but unfortunately the gameplay is where the game suffered most. MMORPGs don't need to revel in the cutting edge graphics that single player games employ, lest you limit the game's potential playerbase. At the same time though, graphically speaking, MMOs have come a long way from the early days. There's no reason to assume an MMO will never employ this level of animation and such again. Tech will always move forward so that the broader segment of the PC spectrum/consoles will be able to handle it eventually.

I still think Papalymo's voice -improved- from ARR onward. It's not quite as bad as I remember it in the Gridania opening, but still as annoying as grinding leves to get Cnj and Thm to 50 before jobs were even introduced. ;p

[KisaiTenshi]

I was fine with 1.x, but that's because my tolerance level is just really high. I play MMOs for the people in it and how much I feel at home in that world, how many feelings of wonder I experience when exploring and stuff like that, and no amount of slow or repetitive combat can stop me - but that's not the regular type of player nowadays
Everything has to be fast and actionpacked now, just look at FF15 - it's a straight forward action RPG. And if you look at the players coming in from other MMOs into ARR, they already complain that ARR combat is waaaay too slow and sluggish when I find it annoyingly fast sometimes.

Hm. Maybe that's why I'm more and more switching over to strategy games and classic-style handheld JRPGs
I'm getting old

Anyway, no matter how enjoyable many 1.x things were, no one should forget what a horrible mess 1.0 was. Nearly all of the things that made 1.x great in the end were added AFTER Yoshi-P took over.
You know when the combat actually got somewhat enjoyable?
When we got rid of the stamina bar and combat became slightly closer to what we have nowadays. Most people just remember how the game was in 1.2x and completely forget that story was incredibly sarce, quests were non-existent and combat consisted of hitting the monster 3-4 times and then standing there for a full minute to regenerate Stamina even when your TP were full at the start of 1.0 and a few patches beyond.

Still there is one thing I can't forgive - what the dev team of ARR did with Gridania's forest
Why?
Just why?
It was a wonderful place, mythical, magical, reclusive, very fitting to the mind of the people living in Gridania who were extremely wary of others.
But now, it's this cheap-looking run-of-the-mill friendly flowery open-to-all-travelers forest >_>

Every FF game since at least 6 has moved towards "Active Time Combat" and some other SE titles like Parasite Eve already had the "dodge AOE stuff" parts.

Like the #1 complaint with FFXIV 1.0 (aside from being incapable of running on ANY computer at any reasonable performance) was the copy-paste scenery AND copy-paste props. Had those two things never happened (and Yoshida not been a fan of WoW,) there would never have been a call to build an entirely new game.

Like the parts I miss the most from V1.0 are the far more cinematic cut scenes and the seamless transitions from town to overworld, and overworld to outdoor dungeons. While the Gridania area certainly was more of a hedge-maze in V1.0 was just as copy-paste bad as the rest of V1.0. V2.0 reduced the "maze" bits down to just the beast tribes area.

As V1.0 vs 1.23. Yeah the initial combat system was way way way too slow. https://youtu.be/YufDSf3cGQ4?t=71 , Like what should take 10 seconds takes 35 seconds.


Though ... in 2005 Take a close look at this scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgtZvn5c4e4 and you'll see something familiar from the FFXIV OP


At some point the locations were probably even larger. FFXIV essentially just suffered from "last minute" crunches and that's why the map is so full of copy-paste. Like you can get a feel of the development timeline by instead of looking at the map as "copy paste" as "placeholders that never got finished", there was likely another years worth of work required to finish all of that, and then the game wouldn't hit it's release date. But once you release a game, you can't really go backtrack and change half the content. As it is, just how much content was in V1.0 vs V2.0?

Going by the musical score. Garuda, Ifirit, and King Moggle Mog were in the game somewhere. http://news.mmosite.com/content/2011...dungeons.shtml , And only "The Thousand Maws of Totorak" (4-man) and "Dzemael Darkhold" (8-man) , which were added AFTER the battle system was changed. Yes, those were the raid dungeons.

The Music score in V1.0 is actually similar to V2.0, there are different tracks for day and night, for each zone. The tracks also changed depending on activity (eg harvesting, combat.) There's several tracks from V1.0 that aren't in V2.0 at all.

[myahele]

Amazing how much they've have planned for 2.0 while making adjustments for 1.XX

http://wdl.square-enix.com/ffxiv/dow...Outline_EN.pdf

Would have loved to see some of those concepts to have made it.

It's amazing how much they were able to accomplish in 2.0. I can never hate it 2.0 simply because it was fairly well-polished for a game that took ~2 years to make and had very low expectation of it being successful. It's relative rushed development can be seen in most of the 2.0 cutscenes, lack of mmorpg staples at launch like: esthetician, name change, purchasable fantasia. Heck, their mog station infrastructure was all kinda limited

[Atoli]

Yeah, about the cinematics, you can feel a big difference between the beginning of 2.0 MSQ and what we have now (2.55 and 3.0). It might not be on the same graphical level as 1.x cutscenes, but from a story perspective and also the angles, amount of voice acting, etc. has all improved a lot. You can really feel that ARR had a short development time and HW on the other hand went through a 'normal' development circle, not having to be created the non-standard way ARR was with the old version of the game still running and stuff like that

Every FF game since at least 6 has moved towards "Active Time Combat" and some other SE titles like Parasite Eve already had the "dodge AOE stuff" parts.

Yeah, that's basically what I said, with FFXV being the most prominent example in the main title series now because it's a complete ARPG. I'm not criticizing this urge to go faster and faster, it's just not my cup of tea so I would have been fine with the slower combat we had in the end of 1.x

Also, about this whole "1.x was pretty but didn't run smooth on any machine" deal...mine wasn't even that great and it ran just fine xD
I never understood what people's deal was :O
When I actually had to buy a new PC was when ARR came out and even on lowest settings I only got like 3-7 FPS. Never had that happen in 1.x... :3

Oh and don't missunderstand me about Gridania's forest:
While I didn't mind the maze, that's not what I miss. I miss the design direction of the forest in general. Dark, humid colors, a new little stream or pond or cave after every turn, little frogs coming out to croak when it rained, and standing tall over everything, the neverending darkgreen treetops of those giant trees that made it hard to tell if it was night or day on the mossy ground.
ARR's 'forest' is hardly a forest at all with like 6 cut-off tree trunks on the whole map and a few bushes in between under the bright sunny sky >_>

[KisaiTenshi]

Yeah, that's basically what I said, with FFXV being the most prominent example in the main title series now because it's a complete ARPG. I'm not criticizing this urge to go faster and faster, it's just not my cup of tea so I would have been fine with the slower combat we had in the end of 1.x

To that end, I actually prefer Action-RPG elements when it involves Storyline (since it moves with dramatic tension,) but this comes from playing games like Mabinogi and Wizardry Online which their skills were more Action-RPG weighted, but there are a great many flaws with Action-RPG's, one of them being the players patience. With the "turn based RNG" which is a staple of everything derived from adhering to D&D based game systems, the combat is meant to be "narrated", eg you see "You do 30 points of damage to the one-armed-man", "The one armed man raises his shield to block", your next move should be to heal, or wait for the shield to go down instead of hitting the shield and leaving yourself open to a counter-attack. This is why "bots" do so well in these games, then need only parse the combat log to react.

Action RPG's have their own tradeoffs though. Whoever has the least latency wins in PvP. Which is why PvP games all suck unless everyone lives within line of sight of each other and all have FiOS. They're also more susceptible to "aim proxies" because the client is only sending "you hit" or "you miss", since the entire 3D world only exists on the clients ends. The server's only role in Action MMORPG games is to keep score.

FFXIV's botting problems, in both V1.0 and V2.0 are a result of the entire "game" existing on the client end, and the server only being responsible for keeping score and rewarding players. So this would have happened regardless.

Also, about this whole "1.x was pretty but didn't run smooth on any machine" deal...mine wasn't even that great and it ran just fine xD
I never understood what people's deal was :O
When I actually had to buy a new PC was when ARR came out and even on lowest settings I only got like 3-7 FPS. Never had that happen in 1.x... :3

1.0 was slightly better at scaling performance, but only by virtue of the game engine being targeted at the PS3/Xbox360, in which the other Crystal Tools games (FFXIII) were actually run at 720p (PS3) and 576p(Xbox360).

Oh and don't missunderstand me about Gridania's forest:
While I didn't mind the maze, that's not what I miss. I miss the design direction of the forest in general. Dark, humid colors, a new little stream or pond or cave after every turn, little frogs coming out to croak when it rained, and standing tall over everything, the neverending darkgreen treetops of those giant trees that made it hard to tell if it was night or day on the mossy ground.
ARR's 'forest' is hardly a forest at all with like 6 cut-off tree trunks on the whole map and a few bushes in between under the bright sunny sky >_>

The thing I remember from V1.0 beta as how many bloody times I saw the exact same stream of water from the copy paste geography. Like when you watch the cutscenes with Yda and Papalymo, that actually could have been a dozen different places on the Black Shroud area.

Needless to say I was severely disappointed in how Yda and Papalymo were introduced in V2.0.

[reillyblair]

opening cinematic trailer i want that fire arrow mechanic for blm + bard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag2cRTU-Og8

[Tonkra]

opening cinematic trailer i want that fire arrow mechanic for blm + bard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag2cRTU-Og8

Could be something for a redmage also

"Enfire"

[Tinibou]

Reminds me some good memories... those cutscenes were a far better entrance point in FFXIV than the 2.0 beginnings... But well, even if the graphics quality was better in 1.0, I do not miss its very very wide and empty areas and its very very tiny and copied/pasted corridors like the whole shroud in Gridania... Maps in ARR were a lot better designed.

1.0 black shroud map