{Curiosity} Where did the original concepts end and new begin?

[MageBlack]

1.0 was a drastically different game. It was more world less game. Very focused on selling you the world and giving you a sense of belonging and realism.

Chances are the original concept would be spinning in its grave from things like lockouts, mounts other than chocobos, cash shop, glamors, glowing weapons, unweighted animations, combat speed, heavy instanced content focus...

All in all 2.0 pretty much went the opposite direction for a good amount of content design focusing heavy on the endgame and leaving the start and mid game to mostly rot.

I agree with you on some of those things. Things like "lock outs" and "Cash Shop" arent what I'm talking about though. Those are parts of content gating that I will happily take over the Fatigue system. I was more curious to know if the amount of dungeons we have were part of the initial concepts, were we still supposed to have gotten Jobs or what that going to be something separate, was the golden saucer something they were thinking of, was Housing (in general) part of the concept, I think Free Companies were part of that but to what extent, etc.

[NefarioCall]

I read all the dev stuff going back before 1.0 launch. As i understand it, the concept was a player built world. Those vast empty zones were meant to be filled with player created structures, kinda like the current housing, but on a more full scale level. In that sense, housing and the airship stuff is really the main design carry over from 1.0 except it is now secondary. The reason the core concepts were not ready at launch was because the game was forced out before it was ready. I still credit tanaka for his vision and ambition though. Woulda been a hell of a game.

[Felis]

The job system and Gold Saucer were never part of the original concepts.

[elreed]

I agree with you on some of those things. Things like "lock outs" and "Cash Shop" arent what I'm talking about though. Those are parts of content gating that I will happily take over the Fatigue system. I was more curious to know if the amount of dungeons we have were part of the initial concepts, were we still supposed to have gotten Jobs or what that going to be something separate, was the golden saucer something they were thinking of, was Housing (in general) part of the concept, I think Free Companies were part of that but to what extent, etc.

Well, the 2.0 version went to a different direction than what we had in 1.0, for example the job system and armoury system are very different, in a few words you could make pseudo jobs combining all the class skills, like red mage grabbing gladiator class and putting some conjurer and thm skills, remember that thm was very different it had a darker approach with siphon magic and debuffs, so every class could be played in very different ways according to the skills you equipped, it was very common to be asked which skills you had and not which rotation.

But people got mad because it didn't feel like a FF, so they added jobs to keep people playing and added combos, I would say that most of the gameplay core was meant on how skilled the player was and not on boss mechanics like the ones we have now, it was more about knowing the skills of the NM's or boss and crippling them (Incapacitation system) which changed how hard the fight could be done and one of my favorite you could get drops from that parts to get weapons and gear, so crafting was a lot more important and involved in all the game.

Crafting classes a lot more complex, if you wanted to do a leather body piece, you had to prepare the leather squares, the iron bolts to attached it, if it had scales well those too, if it had some cloth the squares of cloth,etc so to make one piece you had to level several crafting classes, lets say it had a very realistic approach as how this things should be done. So that answer the cake and ship question.

It was a good game with lots of good ideas, but with the worst implementation.