6 months to create ONE equipment set!?

[giftforce]

My point was the process in which it is made. As for length of time, not a single mmo has been nearly as detailed as this game to date. I love scrolling in and being able to see seems and lines of thread in the woven cloth. You can't do that in any other mmo I know of.

That's true. I still can't get over some pieces of equipment. I think 6 months is worth it.

[kukurumei]

Try this...
1) Conceptual design ( artist sketch on paper/ hand draw ) for all races = 3 weeks
2) Model that concept design with simple wire frame/few texture for ALL RACES = 3-4 weeks
3) Detailed sculpture for 3D model for all race = 2 months
4) Texture creation and lightning = 2 Months ( can start after #3 finish for 1 month )
5) Apply armor physic and touch up = 2 months

I think it's reasonable timeframe for their design effort. I'm not sure what is the real development lifecycle for make new gear is but I'm sure for 1 things.... there are 8 races to make and that's why it take time a lot.

Try imagine above work yourself before complain....

That's how it works if you're an idiot. Case in point the term "idiot" is asking someone to not streamline. Like having to look in a library without an indexing system.

This isn't some independent one off project. This is an MMO.

Half if not all those are more or less streamlined and assembly with "tools". Basically if you make one or two, you might as well do it the old fashion way, but if you're doing 100 you build yourself a process to speed it up.

Developer may not make tools for some games and projects given that once it goes live, there's no reusability, but MMOs would spent ample time making tools to erase half of the process if not more, given how often they have to repeat the process.

Otherwise you have idiot managers that should be fired for not thinking ahead....which maybe true given how badly FF14 was handled...but that's digressing.

I expect the equipment set with proper tools can be whittle down to 1-3 weeks, give or take how close to the templates they do it, and how much "copy and pasting", aka reusing and manipulating assets, equations, etc.

Some of those should already be in crystal tools if they haven't. It's more then stupid to not have some of them even if it's not yet fine-tuned, considering they have 2 other projects working on the same engine. (Somebody in the company must have already rigged up a few tools with similar designs)

I have never heard of any sane developer or person in general that won't streamline their jobs if they're expected to do it over and over again in bulk.

[Dreamer]

There are 17+ unique models as of today. No vanilla MMO has had much more than that, of the same quality.

Everquest 2 has more than twice that number. Then again, they seem to have the same problem as FFXIV when it comes to gear variety....

[viion]

My point was the process in which it is made. As for length of time, not a single mmo has been nearly as detailed as this game to date. I love scrolling in and being able to see seems and lines of thread in the woven cloth. You can't do that in any other mmo I know of.

hmm Strange, I can see it, just the same as in other mmos, tera, even aion lol. Maybe a lot of mmos dont go into insane detail because of large populated optimization, which something XIV lacks badly!

[MattyWS]

6 months? that's pretty fast. So how long does it take any of you to draw up a load of concepts of full sets of armour on hume male and female, galka, mithra, taru, then even the hume males have to have a larger set. Then after you are done drawing these concepts and colouring them (presuming you dont have a manager to tell you it's not good enough and you need to start again or change things), you have to draw each of these races/gender drawings from multiple angles in order for the artist (3d modeller) to model it from, which for me takes time, as I'm an Artist and Animator. For the quality of the armor sets in SE, I think it would take me maybe up to a week to model or more, then you have to put it into sculpting (Mudbox, Zbrush) and sculpt in the tiny details, in SE's case this is most of the detail. This makes the normal map. For me the sculpting process can take longer than modelling, however, you have to UVmap it before sculpting on it, which takes longer than the model it's self for me, hate UVmapping. Try doing that for all the races and genders, then all sculptin for all the races/genders. For me alone, up the sculpting process could take me a very long time. After sculpting, you create the normals, which is a simple click of a button, then, and this is the fun part; you have to skin and rig it (maybe not rig it, depending on how their system works) that for me takes a little time, but there are ways to get round doing it over and over for each race/gender from scratch if you have the right tools, but even then it requires tweaking.

All of this for one piece of armour could take me 6 months to do, maybe more. But then what about the details? You have to organise everything (notice things in-game have colour varieties? what, you think that just happens on it's own?) they need to separate each part for their own qualities. Belt buckles, shoulder armour, different pieces of cloth, everything! Now this is probably all done during the modelling process, but that would also mean it would take longer.

The factors, you need to get all the work approved as you go by your lead artist, you need to make sure you test it in-game to make sure there are no glitches or bugs with the armour. The armour stats and level are already worked out, otherwise you wouldn't be making them. The programmer needs to be in on this too, you see, their are physics, and other properties that need to be implimented.

For myself, a designer and a dev, then a bug tester, this process on such a grand scale, for all races/genders, for all varieties of the same armour to be even possible, then finally approved by the producers or whoever is in charge, if there were no major or minor glitches or bugs found that would make me have to redo it all, this can take me and my team of four up to 6 months, but if there are bugs (and there will be) it can take longer. Even then I can openly admit that I am nowhere near as talented as the people at SE and my work would not be of the same quality that they put out.

So STFU complaining that a small team within the studio would take so long for so much work to be done, when they have hundreds of people in that studio that can work at the same time to create a lot of content within that 6 months. Seriously, even I can openly say, I don't know how they work, and it's probably a different process to the one I explained, but still, if you aren't even in the industry you have nothing to argue about, you have no idea.

[Vahzl]

I hear lady parts flapping in the wind!

[Petdo]

yawn.. seem like I started some drama here haha

[TirionCrey]

I'm tired of recolored gear, I dont even want to do the dungeons because the rewards itself just look like crap imo. It's ridiculous that there are maybe 10 different sets of gear across all the classes and everything else is recolor or reskin from those. FFXIV has the least gear options I've seen since XI was released in 2002.

Without Deflection you won't last long on the R50 dungeon anyway...

[Sephr]

Guys, just because it takes 6 months to create a piece of armour doesn't mean it's the only thing that gets done by those particular staff members. Think about your own work (if you do), rarely do I find myself not juggling various different projects. It might take 6 months to complete whilst also carrying out various other things.

That's why these things get planned months in advance, I believe we saw the concept for that awesome black mage armour in January (?) and it's only appeared in the .dats as of 1.18.

Can't wait till we start getting all these kick ass armour sets though, my lancer is going to look like such a boss if he gets anything as good as that dark knight-y armour set.

[Preypacer]

Everquest 2 has more than twice that number. Then again, they seem to have the same problem as FFXIV when it comes to gear variety....

They may have more than twice that much now. However, in vanilla EQ2 (ie. after launch), which the post you replied to references, it didn't.

In fact, gear variety was one of the things that people complained about for a while in that game. I remember being pretty underwhelmed by it when I played as well. Several high end armor sets were literally reused models from a lower level set - not even re-skinned in some cases. People complained of being a level 50 character looking like a level 10.

Their armor was also not nearly as well detailed as FFXIV's nor was it nearly as modular.