Colored gear with specific classes.

[Dreadnought]

Lol I did like that the armor was linked to the outfit, but their color system suckedddd

oh yeah, im not defending the actual look of the armour, just the idea behind the stats/clothes.

[DeadRiser]

oh yeah, im not defending the actual look of the armour, just the idea behind the stats/clothes.

Oh I know what your a talking about lol!

[Rubicon]

Saying "class = colour nonsense is bunk" is your opinion.

Let me point out:
1) Color defining classes / jobs / roles has a well established tradition in the Final Fantasy universe
2) There were many requests for classes to be more well defined

I don't think it is too difficult to put these two things together to see where the dev team got this idea from.

With this logic, let's ask a Level 50 THM what their unofficial "AF" is. A red hat, a purple robe, green gloves, blue pants, and white shoes? Sure if they want the best stats. Or they could try to wear the same color clothes (let's pretend that THMs are meant to be purple) and not have the best stats. Not having ultimate stats doesn't sound very AF-ish to me.

I wish people would quit referring to AF. I seriously doubt classes will even get an AF, as an AF's stats supports a specific role and classes aren't meant to perform one specific role, they can mix and match abilities. Jobs will get AF because players will know what role a job is meant to play and the gear's stats will support that role.

[Amineri]

With this logic, let's ask a Level 50 THM what their unofficial "AF" is. A red hat, a purple robe, green gloves, blue pants, and white shoes? Sure if they want the best stats. Or they could try to wear the same color clothes (let's pretend that THMs are meant to be purple) and not have the best stats. Not having ultimate stats doesn't sound very AF-ish to me.

I wish people would quit referring to AF. I seriously doubt classes will even get an AF, as an AF's stats supports a specific role and classes aren't meant to perform one specific role, they can mix and match abilities. Jobs will get AF because players will know what role a job is meant to play and the gear's stats will support that role.

I'm not trying to say that classes are getting artifact armor (whatever that is, I presume it's some FFXI reference, which I never played). I'm also not saying that this is an exact repeat of a previous system from a previous Final Fantasy title.

All I'm trying to say here, is this : color intrinsically has a meaning beyond aesthetics in at least some of the Final Fantasy universe. The development team is building upon this, creating a system in which colors are in some ways associated with stats.

There are many degrees of freedom here.

On one side there are games in which both the color and the appearance have NOTHING to do with stats of gear. In Aion you could wield a fish, or a giant fork, with complete effectiveness. The upcoming game The Secret World (a modern-day conspiracy-type game) completely divorces your gear appearance from your stats. Great. That is one option.

In the middle ground, the physical model of the gear is restricted (i.e. robes for mages, plate for tanks, leather for DD), but the color is completely unrestricted. Lots of people are used to this way of thinking, and so think that it is "right". It's not right per se, just one more option on the design spectrum.

On the other side, both physical model of gear AND color can be restricted. Final Fantasy has a tradition of doing this. It seems to go against the current trend of MMOs, but do all MMOs really have to be the same?

On a side note, SE has clearly made the following color-to-element associations within the game, from day one:

Purple : lightning
White/light blue : ice
Red : Fire
Green : Wind
Tan/Brown : Earth
Blue : Water

Color here DOES matter.

--------------------------------------------------------

On a side note, I hope that SE does expand on their selection of armors and colors available within the classes, simply by adding more recipes/options. Given the sheer size of the 1.19 patch, I'm not really surprised that the new recipe selection first released was a bit skimpy, and am looking forward to more gear coming in 1.20.

[Jynx]

Remember children Iron Armor has poor lightning resists...unless it's Purple.

[Firon]

People love playing dress up in mmo's and not the actual game

[EmeraldHill]

Lol I did like that the armor was linked to the outfit, but their color system suckedddd

They had a hue slider and you could have pretty much any color.

[Waaltar]

Clearly we need to get rid of stats and just have a color labels system. After all, we can't count on people to look at stats and have to color code things for them.

They even hyped the new flexibility in color choice for this patch WTF. This is a more flexible system in that there is now no flexibility oh ok that makes sense.

Seriously, this is probably the dumbest dev team choice in a game with a long list of dumb choices to choose from.

[Dreadnought]

They had a hue slider and you could have pretty much any color.

they did? i dont remember that!
thats something i always wanted in a game, considering you can get any color you want on metal and fabric in real life.

[Fensfield]

oh yeah, im not defending the actual look of the armour, just the idea behind the stats/clothes.

Well I liked most of the clothes they came up with >.>; Never had difficulty finding a look for my character that I liked in PSO or PSU.

Still, you're right, the way they disconnected stats almost entirely from aesthetics (the only place it showed was in the colour of the photon channels embroidered in the gear) is one of the things makes the online Phantasy Stars my favourite MMO games. In Phantasy Star Online 2, the units you choose to equip will also appear on your character model, but again, outfit proper has nothing to do with stats.

I cannot wait for that game to come out.. But yes, in my opinion games in this genre really are so much better when they try to get as close to having a system like that as possible. .. And this new bright idea from the dev's to colour code everyone (because of course, we're too daft to tell any other way) is even further from that than removing (rather than fixing) the optimal system. Good lord I hope there's this much vitriol and more being directed at the change in the other language forums.

... And yeah as someone else said, a lot of the character look was controlled by a hue slider. A great many outfits came in two-colour combination sets, but a lot of stuff - particularly for CASTs - was way more customisable.

Oh and Dreadnought, while I've a hope of nabbing your attention here I'll take chance to correct you on something: you misread my post on Mabinogi in the roleplay forum request thread. Try looking again. Much as I know you feel compelled to bash those of us who enjoy games that don't emphasize killing things, "this mobi game" isn't that like that - its combat system's reliance on realtime mechanics is in the middle ground between Final Fantasy XIV and Phantasy Star Online. It's arguably got more action - and even violence - in it than this game has.

Mabinogi also being a game that, by the by, had a very successful philosophy of not having limitations on what colours or indeed types of gear you could wear - it just whacked you with really inconvenient penalties if you, say, focused on magic while wearing full plate (since magic users could get a lot of benefit out of accessories and plate had no accessory slots. And a lot of the cloth gear had a hefty magic bonus on it anyway).

Hell I'd be playing it right now if the combat system's vulnerability to latency didn't mean I get region-locked away from playing with my friends. Well, that and the fact that the whole thing with the Milletians makes roleplaying on the kind of scale we have here a damn-sight harder.