Realm Reborn = downgrade?

[Caedeia]

Don't put PS2 Limitations in "", it was limited by a piece of 1999 hardware, something your Ipad is far superior to. It stinks of nothing other than making this MMO fit in with the rest of the MMOs on the market.

It wasn't in quotes to be sarcastic, I'm aware the PS2 was limited. It was in quotes because it was the standard line fed to us by XI devs that didn't want to do something the community requested. That's where the options should come in, if I want to tax my system a bit more for more detailed animations, I should be able to - and totally would.

[Elexia]

Sadly I doubt we'd even get the option. Idk though, seems they take a few steps forward and a step backwards (making it fit in) in almost everything.

[lololink]

It was the one thing going for it, now it will be painfully hard for XIV to stand out when it's just a prettier generic MMORPG lol. Why choose XIV when you can choose a vast library of 120+ MMORPGs from 1996 - 2011 and get the same gameplay?

we are talking about gameplay or animation ?

[Zumi]

Character movement in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM6bi4RP25o
just looks very stiff and unrealistic.. and yes, awkward. (Watch specifically at 0:26 - 0:29, he's kind of slide-walking sideways and backwards). I really really hope this is not what it's going to look like in 2.0. They have to improve this, right? >.>

I was really looking forward to 2.0, but honestly, for me my CHARACTER is the most important thing in game for me, (second being storyline, and third how the world looks.)
If something isn't right about my character, how they move, look, feel.. I just don't play the game. It's as simple as that.
This is actually a game breaking thing to me. It looks really bad. I'm disappointed and worried.

The backpedaling, sideways-walking, and slide-walking is such an eye-sore.

I would gladly wait an extra month (hell, or two) to play the game if they would make character movement look as nice as it does in the current game.

It's called strafing not sidwasys walking, its in most mmos and third and first person shooters. So what now you people are against strafing which is in so many different types of games?

[Elexia]

It's called strafing not sidwasys walking, its in most mmos and third and first person shooters. So what now you people are against strafing which is in so many different types of games?

It looks tacky as fuck with the route they're going for the graphics.

[Neptune]

Sounds like we're out of ideas 'round these parts!

How about we include the old animations and make them trigger if you've been running for x amount of seconds? And make backpedaling a toggle and put in the inertia in the case that it's toggled off?

Or perhaps like someone said have a passive mode animation set and an active mode set? Like in Zelda, how you strafe and backstep when you're "locked on" but can move freely outside of battle? Can we consider that route?

[Xmbei]

As much as this will continuously be debated I will say one thing me and my friends play a Final Fantasy for is the story and the epic storywriters. The graphics/animation came second or third the story is what FF is known for not that. Seriously what was most of the complaints for original 14 and 13 it was " that story and gameplay were meh." nothing about how character runs or looks. Again I am for anything that is a little extra spice to the mix but I think most of you forgot what it was that made ff great it was content and a wonderful story. If you think its just about making something look pretty you have lost your path. I would take nes-ps1 ff's over current gen because i loved the story I could careless how it looked or how my character moved not realustic. It is kind of petty to hate and possibly quit a ff because they don't gave an animation we want. I have no doubt the quests and stories will keep me expertly inthralled in this game for years to come.

(now I must apologize if that was hard to read. Wrote it up on my phone, if you want clarification please ask i will respond when I can. Got a long day at uni so... Have fun guys also congrats Nemy you finally got an answer though I know it wasnt the one we were hoping for)

[Gramul]

i still don't understand why people wants to have too much realistic games , it's a game it's not real it will always seems fake because it is !
If you want realistic there is your real life ...

It's not so much about realism as much as it is about stylistic continuity. And I'm not so much mad about the animation (but I am mad) as I am with how quickly people come to the defense of the old vague "We want to focus on <thing you like more>" excuse instead of standing up for quality entertainment.

[Preypacer]

It was the one thing going for it, now it will be painfully hard for XIV to stand out when it's just a prettier generic MMORPG lol. Why choose XIV when you can choose a vast library of 120+ MMORPGs from 1996 - 2011 and get the same gameplay?

Hate to say it, but to me, the animation is just another in a growing list of things they're doing/changing/adding to make it look more like "just another MMORPG on the market".

I hope I'm wrong - and only time will tell if I am -but they seem to be falling into the same pattern of other MMO developers out there... "look at what other popular MMOs are doing and copy ideas from them. Those games are popular, so obviously the people must like what they do!". Only as we all know, most MMOs that are designed with that approach seldom ever do very well. A number of them end up going the "F2P" route to try and save the game. Others get shut down altogether.

I know it's considered taboo to bring up XI on these forums... I don't care. I'm going to use XI to make a point regardless. Deal with it.

XI managed to maintain ~500k players even well into WoW's wildly successful "career", while other MMOs that tried to cop Blizzard's blueprint fell way short time and again, managing to keep maybe 200-300k players, if that.

I think SE managed to do this, in part, because of one major thing: FFXI was, in many ways, nothing like anything else on the market. According to "experts" on "what a modern MMORPG must have to be successful", XI did pretty much everything wrong. And yet it thrived (~500k players was quite healthy in the pre-WoW world - and still is, really).

While other developers (notably SOE) were falling all over themselves changing their games around to be more WoW-like, and copying everything Blizzard did, Square-Enix stayed the course with XI and kept going the way they were (pre-Abyssea). Why? Because they understood that XI attracted a different kind of player - the kind that either wouldn't be "pulled away" by a game like WoW, or was otherwise not interested in playing it at all. They found a good niche of players, they catered to that niche, and they were rewarded with a lively and healthy population well into 7 years in service - something almost unheard of for a MMORPG from XI's "era", nevermind one as idiosyncratic as XI.

Now, I'm sure some of you are, at this point, ready to rip my head off and feed it to Jormy (yes, another XI reference... deal with it . But, here's the thing. If what you think I'm getting at here is that "SE should just copy XI and they'll be successful", you're wrong. That should be a relief to you. You can breathe now.

I don't think it would be successful. I think it would bury the game faster than 1.0 did. While XI maintained a healthy population well into its service, it also enjoyed the benefit of having a sort of "head start", launching during a time when MMOs were still mostly unheard of in the mainstream. Times have changed, tastes have changed and demands have changed (I won't say evolved... as I don't think that's necessarily the case). XI was the right kind of MMO for the time. It wouldn't be now, not as it was at launch. My opinion.

The take-away, to me, is that SE can do things differently to make their game unique without flat out lifting elements from other games... and still be successful. It's about lifting the right things and implementing them in a way that is unique to their game and fits within the gameplay/setting/etc, rather than feeling arbitrary and "tacked-on because all the other MMOs have it". Part of why other MMOs feel like "clones of other MMOs" is that the developers do very little to distinguish themselves from those other games in terms of gameplay mechanics, or implementation of game systems.

Now it could well be that that's precisely what they're doing. I'm not predicting anything and I'm not claiming to know what the situation is. Just like everyone else, I have to wait and see how they actually do it before I can give a fair or accurate assessment. Unlike some others around here (and we all know who they are), I don't claim to be able to see the future.

I will say that, while the animation thing isn't a deal breaker for me (though I do consider it a "down-grade" based on what we know per the dev post), as time goes on and we learn more of the direction SE is going in, red flags are starting to rise up and I feel my optimism becoming more and more tempered by caution.

[lololink]

Yeah you are right they should do it the best way they can BUT they are not deciding , if you want to whine write to the people that want the money , not the devs ...
I forgive the dev , not these others people