My Eureka Concept

[KaldeaSahaline]

Would there be a way to receive this "weapon experience" / light in a later-transferable item form for those who want to enter and get something out of Eureka but haven't yet gotten their Relics to the appropriate stage / haven't decided which Relic to spend the resource on?

The way I envisioned it is that you accrue Weapon experience strictly 100% based on which job you enter in as (Treat it as if it was a dungeon you cannot switch jobs inside).

That said, I would not be opposed to having items that drop in there that can be "spent" on any other weapon.

This content was designed on the statement Yoshi made that Eureka was designed specifically for the Relics. I have no issues shifting this design paradigm out of "relic weapon" territory.

Why Creation Tomes, directly, rather than Creation Tome-purchasable items that can still be made or gathered in some other way?

I chose tomestones because I am currently capped on every possible type of tomestone and have been for months. I felt like having a dump was good.

The reason I chose to not have purchasable items is because honestly, I think FF14 overuses this concept FAR too much. My inventory is beyond saddled with all kinds of nonsensical currencies.

It seems that there's been no attempt to include gatherers in this version. Not that I'd likely disagree, but I wonder what is your reasoning behind this, as better integrated gathering (and perhaps even crafting) seems like it could otherwise add a lot to the gameform, especially now that no penalties are paid for job-swapping.

2 specific reasons I am in no way shape or form an expert on crafting/gathering. I am an expert on battle content. Instead of half-assing adding them in, I left them out.

The second and significantly larger goal was simply because this game lacks good repeatable engaging/challenging content. My design for Eureka was specifically to cater to:

1) The low skill playerbase that strictly sticks to DF/Side Content. In this vein, their experience will feel like a randomized dungeon and will providing meaningful experience and loot to their character progression.

2) The Midcore playerbase is very lacking on content. This would give them content to build parties for, get good loot, be engaged, make friends, and give fresh new experiences every time.

3) The skilled playerbase has raids, but raids only come every 6 months. Only the best of the best can attempt ultimate so it's nice to have some repeatable content for those that can't where they can challenge and push themselves.

Why the decision to pare down the content from en masse to a single full party?

I don't like zerg content and with huge # of people I fail to see how you can make meaningful large party content that isn't just a zerg. I find that small party content is my favorite personally so I designed the content to accommodate that. It's hard enough recruiting for 8 people in this game, and honestly coordinating 24 people (or more) in FF14 is an absolute nightmare, not even accounting for the inability to segregate players based on skill/gear (because FF14 has everyone at a close ilvl gap).

If I had my way I would have SQEX devote some resources to transforming the 24m raid bosses into 8m EX's. Easy art assets and minor work for a lot more boss content for the midcore population. I absolutely abhor the 24 man experience in its entirety. Let the lower skilled people keep their 24 man raids, and give people who hate everything about 24m, but maybe only like EX Primals more content.

I went back and forth numerous times over 4m or 8m, and found that 8m just offered a much better experience for what I was going for. Given the existing constraints of the combat engine I just cannot see anyway to make a 4 player adventure fun for tanks in the context of the content I designed.

At a glance:
- On paper alone, I can't see anything particularly exciting about this, but...
- Rewarding freeform-ish open world content will usually have me grinding the shit out of it, regardless, and without complaint (that said, current Diadem, or even former Dino Island Diadem, certainly was not that).

Interesting. Procedurally generated layouts, mobs, and mechanics that scale doesn't excite you? What would then? With constraints of the current existing design schema. We've discussed at length the things we wish we could change

[Shurrikhan]

To the reply as a whole:

Very reasonable answers, and just the thought-context I was looking for. Thanks.

Interesting. Procedurally generated layouts, mobs, and mechanics that scale doesn't excite you? What would then? With constraints of the current existing design schema. We've discussed at length the things we wish we could change

It's hard to say, because I'm just having trouble envisioning it. Rather, I can envision some really good possibilities for it, but simultaneously, XIV has kind of forced me to build up a tactic of imagining the shallowest way possible to meet the "on paper" descriptions. I don't know what it would look like, what kind of tile sets would pop up; what, if any, environmental mechanics would come into play; how one can mitigate against annoyances that pop up in being dropped into a truly randomly generated area vs. an overly-scripted seeding pattern removing from that sense of a new experience each time, etc., etc. I'm all for the concept of the house, so to speak, but I'd at least like to see at least one picture of the house before I say I'm in. And since we have no actual pictures available, that's probably going to take many more illustrations from words alone. I need a way to better imagine the moving to and fro, or why this would be taking place in an open area, rather than these scalars and modifiers appearing in something like a dungeon or a deep dungeon (shudder).

Put simply, precedent design for AGC in XIV is Palace of the Dead. It's really tainted the image of my one of my would-be favorite concepts.

Bit-by-bit:

I chose tomestones because I am currently capped on every possible type of tomestone and have been for months. I felt like having a dump was good.

The reason I chose to not have purchasable items is because honestly, I think FF14 overuses this concept FAR too much. My inventory is beyond saddled with all kinds of nonsensical currencies.

I agree that at this point a dump might well be a good thing, but consider:
- A dump means that to at least some degree, people need to do other things. Is that intended, or not accounted for / simply negligible?
- Dumping directly from tomestones means no items can be handed off, allowing for dump-trade, which further leaves Creation Tomes themselves with low (monetary) value.
- You can have the best of both worlds by consuming said item, if available, and tomes directly if not, rather than furthering the causes of bloat unnecessarily -- which I agree has gotten out of hand.

2 specific reasons. I am in no way shape or form an expert on crafting/gathering. I am an expert on battle content. Instead of half-assing adding them in, I left them out.

The second and significantly larger goal was simply because this game lacks good repeatable engaging/challenging content. My design for Eureka was specifically to cater to:

A diagnostic question for you then. If,
(1) someone else could produce a means of integrating in gathering and crafting without it coming at any significant cost to the quality of (even if perhaps to some of the time spent upon) the combat experience, and
(2) there was already a system for creating repeatable engaging/challenging content (e.g. we got our own Mythic+ dungeons or dungeon mash-ups or augmentations)

would you then still be opposed to crafting/gathering in Eureka?

I don't like zerg content and with huge # of people I fail to see how you can make meaningful large party content that isn't just a zerg. I find that small party content is my favorite personally so I designed the content to accommodate that. It's hard enough recruiting for 8 people in this game, and honestly coordinating 24 people (or more) in FF14 is an absolute nightmare, not even accounting for the inability to segregate players based on skill/gear (because FF14 has everyone at a close ilvl gap).

In present design, I have to agree completely. That said, I personally think there are places for certain kinds of zerg content, although Diadem and anything ever made like it or to replace it -- certainly what you've described of Eureka -- are not likely among those places.

Aside: I believe there is something to be said for content chaotic enough for delegation to be necessary -- such that people break into teams in order to best cope with that chaos -- but that goal, while applicable to zerg content in its basic sense, probably would not then be called "zerg" content. I see 24-mans or large-scale (including flexible-member-count) content, conceptually, as actually having an incredible ability to reward skill, tactics, strategy (though less so than tactics), responsibility, awareness, etc. One would just have no reason to think as much from XIV, where it's been used solely for casual content.

8-man sounds good. The world would be a little player-sparse, perhaps, in some people's eyes, but that's a lot better than losing key mobs to other parties or the overall experience feeling like a zerg when it's supposed to be this sublime frontier.

The way I envisioned it is that you accrue Weapon experience strictly 100% based on which job you enter in as (Treat it as if it was a dungeon you cannot switch jobs inside).

That said, I would not be opposed to having items that drop in there that can be "spent" on any other weapon.

This content was designed on the statement Yoshi made that Eureka was designed specifically for the Relics. I have no issues shifting this design paradigm out of "relic weapon" territory.

I have to say, not being able to swap jobs during a basically open world gameform is a bit of a turn-off to me. I like being able to change around as needed, and would generally like to see more of that even in dungeon/raid content, rather than job locks pushing into open-style content, too.

I feel like if something like this were truly weapon "experience", then (apart from the necessary and long-awaited separation of job experience from the same class in the case of SCH and SMN) one would need merely to swap jobs and it would just start accruing on the new one instead. At that point, one might complain that they'd rather be able to work towards a job different from the one they're actually using (none too reasonable, given how Light worked), but it wouldn't feel like we're facing interlocking restrictions in design.


EDIT: Do you think this could potentially work as flexible content, allowing the scalers to work on a by-role level, so that you could take anywhere from 4 to 8 people and, within reason, whatever roles for those people you want?

And before I forget again: the only other auto-generative content idea I'd seen before—or at least that I can remember:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...urneys-Concept