Alpha First Look: Video 3 - The Black Shroud

[Tupster]

Re: Small Trip Hazards

A game without jump that gets you stuck on a rock is broken because the level designer put those foot hazards there, not because you can't jump (FFXI doesn't have this problem). The solution wasn't full blown jumping, it was not letting a small rock get in your characters way.

Re: Going through instead of around

If you aren't supposed to go through, and instead go around, then a level designer is just going to put a tall fence or wall around it (if you can jump). The reason you couldn't jump down in v1.0 wasn't because you couldn't jump it was because the level designer didn't want you to go that way.

This is true no matter if you can jump or not: You can go where the level designer wanted you to go.

I think being able to jump over fences is nice, but making a 2 story leap off a ledge ... not so much.

Certainly there are still some invisible walls because some of the most beautiful places in FFXI had places you shouldn't be able to jump into (chasms, river beds, off the edge of a floating fortress, etc.). One big problem that jumping introduces now is that the invisible walls will seem out of place were before they were natural.

I'm also thinking of some zones like the Beaucidine Glacier where you were blocked by 2 story drops from getting through the zone quickly. To make this zone work in FFXIV you either have to introduce invisible walls or add walls of some kind that block the view.

Oh well, it is too late to change these consequences of jumping, but I do hope that at least somebody will see that from a game design standpoint, being able to jump is not as obvious as they think. There are lots of games were you cannot jump, even very popular ones, even ones with lots of action.