Hiring NPC to support in party will be fun?

[xenowind]

Hi, everyone. Dev team is trying hard to improve the game interface and other systems to make it more playable and user-friendly. What about share some of your unique ideas to make FF14 alot more interesting? Here is my thought after I read YoshiP's post on Japan Forum.

How about adding a mercenary system? Each city will have its own mercenary guild.
Each players can hire only 1 NPC for supporing battle leves or even in craft or collection leves.

Benefits

1. Players spend gils for hiring different ranks of NPC, help to balance the game economy.
2. It would be fun for solo play, like the Airu in Monster Hunter.
3. Players can join the mercenary guild and sign contract with another friend to become his/her mercenary guardian.

• Players can earn exp during offline, since your friend is bring your character as a party member everywhere. Good for casual players.
• 4 Players with 4 mercenary can group as a full party instead of light party
• When NPC mercenary died, the body will return to the camp crystal or node after a short time. Players can resummon them back at the aethereal locations. (You can either make them like Donald and Goofy in Kingdom hearts, automatically revive after a period of time, or like the vehicle rental system in Metal Max RPG, 50% of NPC's equipment broken ends the contract and NPC will back to the guild. Until you resign with your online friend again, or you can sign with other friends online.)
• Mercenary guild will charge gils from each contract based on rank of the NPC job, and collecting percentage of service fee from completed leve rewards. In return, When players relogin, the equipments will be repired by the mercenary guild to 100%.

Disadvantages

1. Take time to implement.
2. Good NPC AI are hard to create, but we can have it as the partnar in the main quest, not very clever, but still usefull.

Another tought is about the 2:30 recovering time after dead. Can we add some mini game to reduce the recovering time? Like the squat Cloud always do in FF7, same spot and set some QTE will do it. Or mini musical sychonization QTE for party maybe. Just wish the game can be a bit more interactive.

Feel free to share your ideas and opinions!

P.S. Any Australian players keep disconnect from the game these 2 days?I have already wasted 4 leves, is it ISP issue or game server issue? never happened before

[Xeak]

I don't mind having to pay for an NPC to party with, but I would like it to be more like the NPC from FFXI with how you can level it, choose its role, and do quests specifically for it. If it loses a certain amount of durability and then returns to the guild and you have to buy a new one then I wouldn't be bothered to use it unless I absolutely have to. Maybe if it dies and you have to pay a resurrection fee wouldn't be bad (a fee dependent on the mercenary's level) but if you're not able to level it at least and give it new equipment then it doesn't sound like a lot of fun.

Also, you mention Cloud's squat motion. I was actually thinking the other day (maybe a week or so ago) that it would be cool to have that as an emote. And it would also be pretty cool to have the motions that characters did in past FF games as emotes too (I always wanted to do the sword spin that Cloud and Zack do lol).

[xenowind]

I don't mind having to pay for an NPC to party with, but I would like it to be more like the NPC from FFXI with how you can level it, choose its role, and do quests specifically for it. If it loses a certain amount of durability and then returns to the guild and you have to buy a new one then I wouldn't be bothered to use it unless I absolutely have to. Maybe if it dies and you have to pay a resurrection fee wouldn't be bad (a fee dependent on the mercenary's level) but if you're not able to level it at least and give it new equipment then it doesn't sound like a lot of fun.

Also, you mention Cloud's squat motion. I was actually thinking the other day (maybe a week or so ago) that it would be cool to have that as an emote. And it would also be pretty cool to have the motions that characters did in past FF games as emotes too (I always wanted to do the sword spin that Cloud and Zack do lol).

Yes, I agreed with you. I was alsoo thinking about some kind of leving up for NPCs, like relationships with the player.
If the game has a good AI control system like Gambit in FF12, you can have minimum control at the begining, only allows to select AI to perform Attacks or Support. With higher rank of relationship, you may even control AI to do details work, like using which skill under what condition. However, it's a lot data, would be unrealistic for SE to implement in short time, and also will need alot budget on it. Let's just hope it would come ture. XD

[Irana]

Sounds good but I would much rather have the option to bring my companion with me when im soloing....its stupid that the companion is only part of short cutscene filled quests.