Interview: Face-to-Face with FFXIV's Naoki Yoshida - Article on MMORPG website

[CaTi]

Well I mean is he wrong? You can have all the freedom to customise gear you like, ultimately it's going to boil down to one mathematical superior setup that everyone and their dog will follow. By expanding the amount of options out you just wind up making it harder for players to all keep up. Gear is the great equaliser in this game and it lets individual skill be more of a determining factor

[Shurrikhan]

Well I mean is he wrong? You can have all the freedom to customise gear you like, ultimately it's going to boil down to one mathematical superior setup that everyone and their dog will follow. By expanding the amount of options out you just wind up making it harder for players to all keep up. Gear is the great equaliser in this game and it lets individual skill be more of a determining factor

In my opinion, in a basically MOBA-esque level of design such as XIV's, customization is what you do as a last resort in order to broaden the attractiveness of a given class, (job), or role when all other options that do not include mutual exclusion will not suffice.

In a true RPG, on the other hand, (open) customization ought still to be less a way to define one's character than it is to portray the world, the underlying manipulable systems of physics, magic, etc., the schools or paths of training, mentorship, adaptation, and so forth.

In either case, these should be as intuitive as possible, and should not need rely on a seemingly separate game from the game's menus or loot tables or so forth to immerse or otherwise entertain players.

That said, how, when all portions of a skill set are essentially arbitrary and non-manipulable, should a player's knowing what stats or lateral gear choices ought to contribute most to their playstyle in their coming conditions be less evidence of player skill than, say, knowing their rotations or break-points? None of these were especially intuitive in the first place, nor can any be pieced together by without time spent in one's menus. If SE were simply to stop hiding the effects of their stats, it would be of no difference from surveying one's skill potencies and refresh rates.

[Alien_Gamer]

Glamour changes in 4.2....

Yoshi is such a tease. Also, I'm way more excited for this than I have any right to be.

[Casanters]

Well I mean is he wrong? You can have all the freedom to customise gear you like, ultimately it's going to boil down to one mathematical superior setup that everyone and their dog will follow. By expanding the amount of options out you just wind up making it harder for players to all keep up. Gear is the great equaliser in this game and it lets individual skill be more of a determining factor

Taking the RPG out of this game is what makes me move on to something else. Not everyone enjoys just copying a guide off some idiot on Reddit. Oversimplified classes and boring customization is a big part of why I dropped WoW and won't ever be going back.

[Shurrikhan]

Taking the RPG out of this game is what makes me move on to something else. Not everyone enjoys just copying a guide off some idiot on Reddit. Oversimplified classes and boring customization is a big part of why I dropped WoW and won't ever be going back.

Speaking as a long-time WoW player, myself, it's worth noting that default class complexity (baseline) and mutually exclusive complexity (e.g. talents) are very separate things, and that pre-combat choice can often come at cost of in-combat choice. Talents, for instance, can be made such as to newly allow or disallow baseline toolkit options. Unless the removal of any given part of the toolkit allows new things to be done with the remainder (think Decimation or Demon Blades) that are more attactive than the greater spread of original options (because of a greater number of new derivative options), then that ends up making customization one step forward and two steps back. There's a lot to get wrong, and often talent systems have taken the blame where that would more accurately fall on a gutting of baseline toolkits or a rebalancing of the individual abilities to make their use more obvious, but thereby narrowing the range of their use (e.g. AoEs that will never see ST use unless talented into, rather than crafting situations by which the key is still useful).

I don't really see your point? You used a lot of words to explain to me how Blizzard tends to poorly execute a lot of their systems? Sure, I know. That's why I don't play their games..

Not remotely. Here:

Basically,

Out-of-combat choices (i.e. in customization) are siphoned from would-be in-combat choices.

Fundamentally,

Character combat-related customization is limitation. It is, definitionally, denying assets already made unless you have selected all the relevant choices.

Effectively,

A particular class will still see only a given amount of complexity as per developer goals and time-budget. You can have that complexity available at all times, or split up such that only certain glimpses each are given through customization. Adding customization does not increase total complexity, but it may reduce effective complexity (sometimes for the better, sometimes not).

Stl;sdr:

Customization =/=> Complexity.
Instead, sometimes there's just enough, or even too much otherwise, complexity to pare it back via customization.

[Casanters]

A lot of words

I don't really see your point? You used a lot of words to explain to me how Blizzard tends to poorly execute a lot of their systems? Sure, I know. That's why I don't play their games.
Axing player choice entirely and making everything linear choice with outdated vertical progression models (straight out of Cataclysm, even), don't make a compelling game. And none of Yoshi-P's reasoning for why is anything that makes me even slightly confident that this is a game worth my time or money. I'm holding out for Eureka, but honestly, my expectations are extremely low and 4.2 will probably be the last time I bother with this game at all.

[CaTi]

Taking the RPG out of this game is what makes me move on to something else. Not everyone enjoys just copying a guide off some idiot on Reddit. Oversimplified classes and boring customization is a big part of why I dropped WoW and won't ever be going back.

It's a fair point. I'm with you on that. But as I said when someone works out the best thing, everything else becomes so much fluff ( especially with the obsession over 1% faster clears in this game). From a dev perspective they have to balance idealism with reality. And the reality is that in this day and age a lot of people want quick and easy access to the hardest content and the best gear, especially if they've been out of circulation for a while. This system lets you do that on a minimal time investment and I'd bet they'd lose more subs than they'd gain changing it.