Final Fantasy XIV 1.23b - Would you Play it if Available?

[KisaiTenshi]

o_o The overworld map in 1.X was copypasta'ed over and over again. Everything looked the SAME and it was very boring to look at. There are a lot of pretty zones in ARR/Heavensward. I like exploring and looking around the world while I gather/do hunts/do FATEs.

Pretty much everyone caught onto the copypasta maps. The cities weren't bad but the areas immediately outside the city was like "haven't I seen this clearing before?" That might have worked for Gridania's maze, but La Noscea and Thanalan were even more copy-pasta'd. In fact if you go look at some places in V1.0 and in V2.0, the only places that actually resemble each other at all are the cities, and even then, they've been scaled down quite a bit.

One of these days I need to do a comparison between V1.x and V2.x map by map for scale, but that will have to wait until either SE creates a legit way to play V1.0, or other efforts more resemble a game and not just an empty void.

I did this a while back (it's probably somewhere else in this thread)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_QK_zkEZPU
I could probably do comparisons of other jobs, but for that I need to complete all of them to 50, and footage of everything isn't available.

One thing I also need to point out (which was only apparent if you finished ARR) is that 5 minutes into the opening cutscene of V1.0, is where Midgardsomr takes down the Garlean airship, and that is what becomes the "keeper of the lake" dungeon. If you actually got to explore this area in V1.0 you'd see that is is absolutely huge. https://youtu.be/EKUynGGV7Dk

[Kathryn]

I would play 1.0 again sadly during the time of 1.0 I was mostly in hospital for treatment so I was unable to play luckily my bf logged me in and paid my sub fee for me to get my legacy status during my illness period.

[Yahallo]

Honestly, I kind of want to experience the 1.x story. Maybe do something similar to what Blizzard did with Diablo 1 in Diablo 3; just bring it back for a limited time as a seasonal thing like during the game's anniversary.

An alternative option would to recreate 1.0 within the current game, basically the areas and stuff, while keeping the current system and let people explore the pre-calamity world as a seasonal event. Justify it as the echo letting us interact with the past, but not to the point of changing it. I remember they said in game it was possible to interact with an echo session; you just couldn't change the events. Pretty sure we interacted with the past in one as well.

[Dzian]

To be honest I still prefer the combat system that was in place in 1.23. Just felt it had more weight and depth to it.

Right down the how powerful skills felt. And the added depth of things like incapacitations. Do you use this skill cos it's more potent. Or that one to break chimeras tail for example.

Seems fairly common on here that people say all ever loom at in a fight is there timers and action bars. Combat is pretty bland as a result and nothing carries any weight

[LalaRu]

Would you play it?

No,
for a very simple reason: I am not one of the 1/1000 lucky players that have a gaming rig powerful enough to run that game.

[Cabalabob]

I ignore the people who say it was garbage with no follow up, chances are they didn't even play it and are just jumping on the "it sucked" bandwagon.

That's not to say it wasn't bad, it was, but it did some good things that I thought worked well, it was just one of those games that for every good decision there were 10 poor ones.

I played 1.0 when it came out but I didn't stick around, even when it was free it just wasn't engaging enough to take my attention away from ffxi. I came back once for 1.23 to see how it had changed, but that was literally for about 5 mins, I did a quest and then logged out, so most of my experience is of the game at launch.

Story:
I never got that far in the story, it had that old MMO feel of not telling you what you needed to do next and expecting you to just figure it out. But it had a few interesting features like the path companion who was your custom built partner in some story segments who basically acted as your voice and would fight alongside you at some points. Another was NPC linkpearls, where NPCs like Momodi would contact you while you were out doing other things and let you know that something was happening. It made the NPCs feel more alive, particularly Momodi, who in 2.0 just feels like a generic NPC you forget about after the first 15 mins, in 1.0 she felt more like your go to source for information.

Combat:
The main thing I loved about 1.0 was the class system. There was so much freedom to make your own build. The class you chose didn't determine your job, just the weapon you had equipped and the skills you'd be learning. For the rest, you could set almost any skill you'd learned on another class and there were far less restrictions than in 2.0.

You had a number of set points based on your level and you had to set skills you'd learned from any class, so as a level 10 gladiator you'd have say 20 set points, you had 1 or 2 basic skills that were built in to the weapon (for gla it was light slash and stab) that you'd use to build tp, it was basically your auto attack. Every other skill, spell or ability you had to set, either from your class or another class. So you could set red lotus, circle slash and phalanx from gla which cost 9 action points. Then with the remaining 11 you could set skills from other classes, like cure and stoneskin from cnj to make yourself a makeshift PLD, or drain and blood rite from thm to be a makeshift DRK, or ferocity from lancer to be more like a fighter.

If you played BLU in ffxi this may sound very familiar to you because it was basically the blue magic system from there, but expanded to be the entire basis of the class system.

I loved the openness this system brought and it's one of the main things I feel was a big loss going into 2.0.

There was also the battle regimen system, essentially like skillchains in ffxi, you'd perform a skill, then someone else would perform a skill and they would combine to make an additional effect like lowering the enemies defence. I never really got to make use of this as I played solo, but it seemed to add a team based element to party play that has been missing in 2.0.

Sadly the combat system itself was fairly clunky because the game was so poorly optimised, you'd press a skill, your character would stand there for 5 seconds doing nothing, then perform the skill. It felt slower than ffxi somehow. Skills were also a lot less interesting to look at, for the most part the animations had to be generic because the skills needed to work on any weapon, however they had a certain weight to them that's missing in 2.0.

Equipment:
I have mixed feelings about how they managed equipment. They made it so you could wear anything. This was great for finding the right stats for the skill you wanted, so you could equip something with strength for a weapon skill or mind for a cure spell. The problem was, it also meant you had no idea what stats you needed and the game didn't tell you. For example, in 2.0 if you go archer, you can wear archer gear, you see that archer gear has DEX, so DEX must be your stat. In 1.0, you could wear anything, as an archer do I want STR? Is that doing anything for me? Do I want DEX? What the hell is a piety? It was very confusing for new players.

System:
This is where I think the game flopped the hardest. There were so many baffling choices here. No player search function, you couldn't find people to play with so if you didn't play with friends you were playing alone. I think there was a party finder type deal but I had no idea how to use it and no idea what to use it for, which I'll get into in a minute.

No auction house or market board, instead they had the market ward where EVERYONE put their retainers and you had to go in there and search through all of them manually to find what you were looking for, I'd often go in looking for a new shirt or a new weapon and come out with everything except what I went in for, it made gearing a real pain.

World:
The world was completely empty. There was nothing to do, you could do the story, but you'd come across points where it stops and they tell you to go do other things and they'll call you on the NPC linkpearl when they have news. So what else was there to do? Grind levels. That's all. You could either go out and fight monsters in the wild, or do leves. There was no other content.

The world itself was empty, particularly thanalan, flat desert as far as they eye could see, you'd go out and walk for miles, occasionally you'd see a squirrel you could kill for exp, or a giant snake that was 40 levels higher than you and would instantly kill you. The only reason to go out was to reach new outposts like camp drybone so you could get the aetheryte there so you could teleport there to do your leves.

Leves were actually more interesting in my opinion. You went to town, took the leve from the adventurers guild, went to the outpost and actually talked to the person that issued the leve then craft whatever they wanted or kill the targets. It felt more real than 2.0 where you just take the leve go do the thing then go back. But this still wasn't engaging enough to make it the only content in the game. It basically replaced questing and in that regard it actually made the world feel emptier rather than more alive.

For grinding, I could never figure it out, I tried joining that party finder type thing I mentioned before, but when I got to the place, I was way underlevelled for the group I'd joined, I couldn't even hit the monsters they were fighting, but I didn't know where the level appropriate camps were so there wasn't much I could do about that, like make my own group.

This reeked of old MMOs like ffxi and while I liked that type of style, combined with the lack of a search function it made it very difficult to find a party. In ffxi new players could just put up their looking for party flag and people who were looking to make a party would search for them and send them a tell and teach them where to go and what to do and then they'd be able to make their own group next time. 1.0 turned this around so new players who had no idea what they're doing had to look for groups, rather than groups who knew what they're doing looking for new people.

TL;DR: 2.0 fixed a lot of what was wrong in 1.0, but it also took a lot of what was good away with it.

[Moxas]

I would play it for an hour or 2 for nostalgia purposes.

I wanna see the ship bay in Limsa, I wanna go back to the old Coerthas (not the current snowy one) that was my favorite area and it was massive, and explore Mor Dhona again, it was waaaaay bigger, also i want to fight the in deepest parts of the maps, with level 99 mobs.

I also loved the seamless world, the world was realllly reeeeeally huge, even if it was copy and paste, it felt like an actual world, i think we might reach that size in stormblood? with PS3 support gone, they might start getting serious, idk, the loading check points will still kinda ruin the immersion.

[Nexxus]

They just have to give FFXI (not the XIV) a graphical enhancement (with no loading screen between zones) similar to FFXIV 1.0 to have a great game like 1.23b.

[Orrias]

Hello!

Today I come to pose a question I'm not sure has been discussed here before.
Because my computer back in 2010 was unable to run Final Fantasy XIV, I waited for the PS3 version that never came. I started playing ARR on September of 2013, and despite loving it, I always came across comments from friends or people online, who'd say that the original version was actually pretty good during its final months, and I even found some people who said they liked it more than ARR... so I've always just been wondering about that game, and what would it feel to play it. Not be told what it was to play it, but actually experience it.

So here's my question:

If Square made it possible to play FF XIV on it's 1.23b version... would you play it? Would you pay for it, even if it was a one-time payment?

I know for SE this idea would be 100% pointless. But just as a question...

Would you play it?

As an Alphatester for 1.0, a resounding no.

The game was designed w/o any care or thought for the MMO market, at the time. The directors and producers (who were also D/Ps for FF11) basically gave the world FFXI 2.0. SE learned their lesson and FFXIV:ARR-SB is doing exactly what it needs to do - understand the market and listen to the playerbase/engage more. For those unaware, you could typically go many, many months (and in some cases, years) w/o any real feedback from devs, for MMOs. The premise of the MMO (at the time), was that to 'progress', you grinded and paided your sub for that privelage. Many systems in MMOs (inc. FFXIV 1.x) included game systems which stratified and straight up gated/hindered progressing your character - presumably to prolong subscriptions, in reality.

[ReplicaX]

I ignore the people who say it was garbage with no follow up, chances are they didn't even play it and are just jumping on the "it sucked" bandwagon.

I played 1.0 when it came out but I didn't stick around, even when it was free it just wasn't engaging enough to take my attention away from ffxi. I came back once for 1.23 to see how it had changed, but that was literally for about 5 mins, I did a quest and then logged out, so most of my experience is of the game at launch.

I never got that far in the story

I'm not going to read paragraphs of someone who literally played 1.0 for maybe 2 weeks, a month tops and touched 1.23 for 5 mins.

I have years of posts on here going into detail of why the game failed regardless of Yoshi's efforts and unlike you. I played from 1.0 Alpha to 1.23b final, finishing all of the story, dungeons, Ifrit, Garuda, and Darnus.

There is no bandwagon, the sheer numbers and facts prove otherwise.