Thinking about 1.0

[Akibaws]

I remember gathering used the Gold Saucer minigame method and it was horrible.

[Larirawiel]

The biggest issue is corporate's decision to make their own game engine.

No, the game did not fail because they made a game engine for it. Making a game engine can be a good decision if you have some special needs for a game. At that time, there were no good game engines for MMORPGs with good graphics. Many MMORPGs at that time used the HeroEngine at this engine was really bad because it was very slow. With other engines, you could have good graphics and good performance but not in an open world environment etc.

And 1.0 was bad because the content was really bad. They copy&paste'ed content literary everywhere, the game was buggy, there was a hard limit how many EXP you could to a day etc.



Cheers

[ReynTime]

It's still sad how a lot of clueless XIV fans and people who parrot 'nightmare' without really knowing what they're talking about continue to crap on Hiromichi Tanaka to this day as if XIV undoes the decades he poured into a lot of Squaresoft's best projects dating as far back as the first Final Fantasy on the famicom.

And as if Yoichi "My fortune teller said we have to move our headquarters to a different building in a completely different address" Wada wasn't the real problem, considering it was under his leadership as CEO that they were having development problems across so many projects at Square Enix like the Fabula Nova Cristalis project, Final Fantasy XV, XIV, KH3, Crystal Bearers, etc...

[Vespar]

Anima was originally: you start at 100, but recharge limited to 4 per day, and it could cost either 6 or 8 to teleport to another city (though it would teleport your whole party.) It was pretty quickly changed to be less-terrible (costs were halved and I think you got anima more frequently) but it wouldn't be until Yoshida's team took over that it was made actually tolerable. People made alts *just* to teleport people.
Edit - Actually it might have been 3 anima recharging per day at launch, once every 8 hours? It's been so long but I do remember it being ungodly slow.

This ^. Thank you for clarifying. Its been ages since 1.x and I could only distinctly recall running out of charges and waiting AGES for resets. Getting around without them was no easy feat.

[Wildheaven182]

No, the game did not fail because they made a game engine for it. Making a game engine can be a good decision if you have some special needs for a game. At that time, there were no good game engines for MMORPGs with good graphics. Many MMORPGs at that time used the HeroEngine at this engine was really bad because it was very slow. With other engines, you could have good graphics and good performance but not in an open world environment etc.

And 1.0 was bad because the content was really bad. They copy&paste'ed content literary everywhere, the game was buggy, there was a hard limit how many EXP you could to a day etc.



Cheers

No, I think the game engine is pretty clearly a root of many problems. It's clear how difficult it was to work with crystal tools and they didnt replace Crystal Tools with Luminous engine for ARR because Crystal Tools was good.

I shouldnt be surprised every breath you take on the internet you have to explain the concept of nuance. No Im not saying the engine was the source of all problems, it wasnt. And I agree, bad design decisions were the root of the creative and gameplay problems.
The engine and their backend programming was based heavily on scripts, for everything. From what Im told scripts are useful for automating small repetitive tasks but far from ideal for any longer processes, causing heavy cpu load or something. Bad performance.

I didnt see mentioned yet, the fatigue system capped how much exp you can earn, literally incentivizing people to not play. 1.0 white knights defended it all though.
Never underestimate the blind loyalty of fanboys and their capacity to ruin their own favorite games.

[Powercow]

I didnt see mentioned yet, the fatigue system capped how much exp you can earn, literally incentivizing people to not play. 1.0 white knights defended it all though.
Never underestimate the blind loyalty of fanboys and their capacity to ruin their own favorite games.

I've never seen anyone defend the Surplus system, especially not during the 1.0 era. Many of us tried to explain or understand the reasoning, which was almost certainly to encourage people to play a wide variety of classes in order to gain various abilities, spells, and passives to make your own class from it all.

It was just really, really badly implemented. It was confusing (like why call it Surplus if there's no intent to do anything with it? Why have Surplus levels?), it was overly punishing if you wanted to play only one or two classes (you could hit Surplus' first tier in only a few minutes and it took a week to reset), and so many weaponskills and spells functioned more or less the same (especially early on) that any incentive to gather more options felt pointless (Feint being the only really notable exception weaponskill-wise, which just forced most everyone to level Lancer thus defeating the "make your own class" aspect).

[Shurrikhan]

I feel like the main idea of the Fatigue system was fine, and honestly better than Bonus EXP. The tuning was just off.

Ideally, the fatigue system would work kind of like a seasonal (but granular) pace-ceiling that would increase the game's density of players; rather than some getting straight to max level, extra play-time was forced towards breadth of leveling.

Note here though that back then Character Level was separate from Class Rank. Character Level determined the level of gear you could equip and, iirc, how many off-class skill slots you had access to. Class Rank, on the other hand, built bonus stat when using its weapon type and unlocked the weapon's skills.

Whereas Bonus EXP must be spent on your max level job for best effect (especially given the Armory Bonus you'd then extend to all beneath the lead's ceiling), Fatigue did the opposite: "Okay, now try any of the many other Hand, Land, War, or Magic Disciplines".

Smart system, just with too much advantage to early comers and consistent but mild play, and tapering off so sharply as to feel like a hard cap -- something an actual realm-wide fatigue or soft-ceiling system (instead of solely player-by-player), a just slightly more lenient EXP floor, and greater EXP rates in general (as to feel like "Bonus EXP" for each and every job separately) would have remedied.

[Fawkes]

I think the fatigue system just rubbed some people the wrong way, because there wasn't an endgame at launch so people saw it as an artificial slowdown to stretch out the leveling.

[Luluna]

I was a closed alpha tester and still to this day I had more fun in 1.0 than I do now. I do not care when all the none players always say "Nightmare" as I was there and I remember it clearly as if it was last year.

I began in Limsa I think I began as a Elezen because omg there where no cat girls :O they came later. I then began on a Lala then Hyur and I think and I bounced of each and every wall I fried a new power supply lol

I stuck with all the tests they did I died a good death with a Lalafell outside of Limsa and also a battle regiment routine with a lovely random conjurer and then we would get reset for the testing. When we where giving feedback it was not listened to as we now know and they where told about the issues from testers. I stayed with each update and then the game released it was like oh where is the content haha. But I had made a few friends here and there and the world was vast I do laugh at all the copy paste comments when we have the world now with great big dot barriers it is poor and empty lifeless to what it was.

I loved that you could ride on the ferry and go and sit inside. I made a lot of friends crossing over to Limsa on them. The characters had depth they changed character voices which I think is part of the reason I miss my old cat girl so much The world was vast with life and dangerous and no mounts no jumping it was great

The game gets so much shit from people who either logged in and hated it then left or by people who just jump on the bandwagon. The game was bad in part the UI the lag omg but the heart was there it was an a amazing experience. They where adding with each patch and it was great can you imagine players in the world in party? fighting big NM's like in FFXI. The battles where fun they where improving with time. I think what 16 years of updates would have been like if they had stayed the course.

On that note when we where asked to provide feedback on the game either let if die or let it carry on then I obviously said with others keep the game. I find it sad that so many call 1.0 without even experiencing it. I know my opinion could be opposite to another alpha tester one who was there and I respect that but for those who did not even play just remember that if we had not asked for the game to stay then maybe none of us would be here at all and FFXIV would have been another failed game.

I am old now though lmao >.< well feel it

[Aphex]

The game gets so much shit from people who either logged in and hated it then left or by people who just jump on the bandwagon. The game was bad in part the UI the lag omg but the heart was there it was an a amazing experience. They where adding with each patch and it was great can you imagine players in the world in party? fighting big NM's like in FFXI. The battles where fun they where improving with time. I think what 16 years of updates would have been like if they had stayed the course.

Yeah I had a similar experience as you, a lot of bandwagoners and a lot of people commenting on it that clearly didn’t even play it. I actually like what 1.0 was trying to do, and am a little disappointed in how the game is now. It’s not an MMO now, it’s an online RPG. There is no exploration and there is no challenge to the world.