Questions and Feedback on the Future of FINAL FANTASY XIV

[Liniont]

Also wheres my Samurai Class? and please don't make the samurai a slow attacking class because the samurai sword isn't at all have or a slow swinging weapon like the 2 handed great sword.

[Bloodsol]

Starting from patch 1.20 leading up to version 2.0, can you speak on how much story content pertaining to the main story, or even side stories will be added and with current players having the first version of the game will they have to purchase version 2.0 upon it's release?

[NaniNaniX]

Thank you Square Enix for your hard work on this game.

My question:
Are there any plans to make the camera more lively in battles?
Like in Final Fantasy XIII, with the zoom in on the characters while they attack, for an example.

[Quanta]

Here are my questions:

1. Will physics be added to the world, specifically gravity? It seems kind of silly to have my character instantly teleport to the ground when I step off a cliff or something.

2. Right now, many areas are covered with aggressive monsters that can kill even level 50 characters in a couple of hits, which makes these areas almost impossible to access and explore. There also seems to be a strong preference for pigs in doing the killing, which I found bizarre; there's an aetherial node in Mor Dhona which is guarded by nothing but level 70 pigs, and the area around the exit to Thanalan is almost all Truffle Hogs (what is it with you guys and pigs?). Are there plans to open up more areas on the maps, like Crimson Bark, Riversmeet, Agelyss Wise, and the like before 2.0?

3. Related to the above question, I find that certain mobs are only encountered at levels that you couldn't possibly hope to defeat them. Morbols, for example, are all in the 60s or higher, which is disappointing as they're one of my all-time favourite Final Fantasy creatures. It'd be nice to be able to fight these mobs, even if it's just for a leve or two. Are there plans to make more mob types available for combat at lower levels?

4. When doing the storyline quests, I found it impossible to reach Crimson Bark before 50 since the entrance to the camp was always guarded by 1-2 Diremites in the high 50s that would kill my character in one or two shots; since they aggro to sound and The Black Shroud is all trenches, this made getting past them an exercise in futility. It's made all the more odd when you finally get to Mor Dhona along that path and the monsters on the other side are all in the 30s (though there's one 50+ Toxic Toad in a pond nearby, but he's adorable ignorable so not really an issue). Are there plans to make the trek to Mor Dhona less treacherous?

5. The selection of gear before the 30s seems a bit...sparse. Pants in particular are hard to come by. Will the new recipes coming next patch fill the gear gaps (or gear chasms, I should say) that are currently present at the lower levels?

6. I find the current strategy for Darkhold and Toto-Rak (don't actually fight anything and just run straight to the boss) kind of defeats the purpose of having a dungeon. Will this be addressed in the future?

7. I feel that the timer actually contributes to the "rush past everything" strategy because the rewards for fast completion are greater than those where you actually fight your way through. Are there plans to remove dungeon timers from the instances?

8. I find that, regardless of which class I'm playing, they tend to be pretty much the same; the melee classes build up TP and use their TP moves, while the mages spam nukes, and it's kind of boring. Contrast this with WoW, where each class, and even each spec of a class, has spells and abilities that make them distinct from each other not just superficially, but mechanically as well. Will the various classes be given more distinct playstyles than what they have currently?

9. Right now, the progression model for levelling is mostly grinding monsters for exp, whether you're solo or with a party; the instances and Ifrit, as well as the various quests that have been added, serve as little more than a diversion from that. What's the progression model for levelling going to be going forward; will it still be grinding, or will you adapt a quest progression model?

10. I see a lot of people on the forums heaping praise on FFXI's Chains of Promathia storyline, specifically the challenge it presented and what an accomplishment it was to have it done and have Sea access and everything, and they want similar content to be present in FFXIV. However, in my experience, people who completed CoP's missions once almost never wanted to do them again, even to help friends, which struck me as odd since you'd think that good content would make people trip over themselves to complete multiple times, and I suspect that CoP's legendary difficulty is to blame for this lack of interest after completion. Are there plans to incentivise players that have already completed such content to want to go back and do it again if it makes its way into FFXIV?

11. Odin sounds kind of like an HNM in that he will likely spawn in the world, but I'm worried that he'll encourage the same unhealthy behaviour I've seen people talk about regarding the ground kings of FFXI, where people would schedule their lives around the hunting of these monsters, not to mention horrible in-game behaviour (trying to train monsters onto people, using bots, being toxic to rival players, etc.). I'm hoping the dev team has a trick up its sleeve to foster competition between players for these monsters without letting any of the negatives to shine forth; I don't want to hear stories of players quitting their jobs or skipping school or dying at their computer desks to play this game, so I have to ask: How will Odin work?

12. Certain locations can be problematic to do leves in, particularly dungeons. Mun-Tuy Cellars, for instance, has lots of Poacher enemies that are in the high 30s free-roaming around the dungeon, and there are bats and other aggressive monsters which can pose issues to players attempting to do leves in these places. Is anything going to be done regarding where leve monsters spawn to avoid these enemies?

13. It seems that potions and other consumables see little use by the playerbase, whereas past Final Fantasies had you using potions, ethers, and other items liberally to recover between fights or to use as emergency aid. Will consumables be more important in the future?

14. In regards to PvP, Coliseum, by the name alone, sounds like it'll be similar to WoW's arena system where you'll compete against small teams of players (largest size a light party, maybe?) to earn rewards. I'm not sure what Frontlines could be though; since Yoshi-P is an admitted fan of Dark Age of Camelot, I'm hoping it's similar to Realm-Vs-Realm where you capture key points for your alliance in an open PvP area and it grants access to unique buffs and an open PvP bonus area. So how will Coliseum/Frontlines work?

15. I'd like to try something similar to the Magic Knight/Sorcerer job from FF5, where you'd enchant your weapon with spells you'd acquired (like the Red Mage En-spells from FFXI, only not crappy), changing your weapon's damage type to an element or letting your attacks poison or petrify your enemies. What kinds of new abilities and skills can we expect in the future?

16. It's really annoying to have to rely on 0-9 and the ALT and CTRL modifiers to use my skills; I'd like to be able to remap them to a position that's closer to my left hand for ease-of-use. I'd also like to be able to map abilities to the mousewheel and any extra mouse buttons like middle mouse and mouse button 4/5 on the side. Will keymappings be made more accessible before the UI overhaul in 2.0?

17. Previous FFs, including FFXI, always gave the impression that the summoner was never actually summoning a creature itself, but an avatar representing a portion of its power. I found it disappointing to hear that I'd not be able to have Ifrit or Bahamut or Shiva as a pet, which makes me curious what summoners in FFXIV will get to call upon. Why the choice to make Primals only summonable by Free Companies, and what will summoners summon instead?

18. Blizzard's Armory site for World of Warcraft has been one of the most useful tools players have had access to in that game's history. It provides detailed information on every character--their name, what guild they belong to, their class and level, their talent builds and glyph usage, and what gear they're wearing. It's handy for recruiting for raids when you don't know a person very well. Are there plans to expand Lodestone's functionality to offer services similar to WoW's Armory?

19. People spend years making game engines, and your own engineers seemingly spent at least 4-5 making Crystal Tools, making your timetable for FFXIV 2.0 highly suspect, as you're proposing to have v2.0 out by this time next year. How are you going to manage to develop a new game engine and server infrastructure in less than two years if you're not basing it off of Crystal Tools or Luminous? What parts of those engines/tools are going to be reused/refactored in the new engine to make this possible?

20. With a new engine, new client, new server infrastructure, and new everything on the way, it seems important to have those things tested thoroughly prior to live production lest problems arise; after all, you don't want problems with character data corruption or players falling through the world on your relaunch. Will there be a public beta test for v2.0 prior to its launch, and will non-paying account holders have access to it?

That's all for now. :3

[Reinheart]

http://lodestone.finalfantasyxiv.com...1327aea93cc041

How to Submit Questions

Please follow the official FFXIV Twitter account (@FF_XIV_EN) and send tweets containing the “#XIVLive” hashtag during the live broadcast, or submit questions ahead of time regarding the future of FINAL FANTASY XIV.

Hope this is just copy/paste from previous live interview... we have this thread going so we can ask questions for the live broadcast too, correct? Most likely it's not so should be safe but just putting this out there so it's not only questions via twitter that's going to be answered like last time...

and Yay it's midnight my time this time... I can watch it live for sure

[Baxter]

Question: You had mentioned before that player housing would correspond with free companies. Will there be any private housing, ala ffxi moghouse, for private citizens who are not enlisted into a free company?

Question: As we move into a more PC friendly mapping scheme with keyboard and mouse will players who are used to only keyboard also be taken into consideration?

[Shneibel]

Question : will there be new feature for character creation for the old character ?

[kensredemption]

Question: Will we ever get to see the return of the stamina bar? The battles are managable to do solo and all, but the pacing of the battle is far too slow now and I was looking to quicken my progression as a Lancer.

Question: There is some speculation at the moment about releasing Final Fantasy XI for the PlayStation Vita. Could we expect to see the same thing for XIV and implement a sort of in-game voice chat feature for communication instead of having to type in text on a touchpad keyboard?

Question: What does the future hold for class/job/discipline development? Will the progression still be based on levels? Or will there be some sort of new method for development which will be more solo-friendly?

[Orias]

Question: What do you have planned for Archer?

With the coming of patch 1.19, archer was severely weakened, almost beyond use. The nerfing of archer was across the board, whether it be the animation lock for light shot, or just general ineffectiveness of their weaponskills compared to other damage dealing classes (the defining ensured 500 damage of Bloodletter was even removed, making the weaponskill useless). Being as archer is my favorite class, I am quite bothered by this change! Archers also must expend more gil than other classes because they must purchase arrows.

Question: Do you plan on having more than one job per class? What a neat idea the job system would be if say an Archer could change into a Bard or Sniper, and a Gladiator could become a Paladin or Blue Mage (or whatever combination it would be!)

[Sortis]

So I have two questions, but I assume you need to choose just one, but i'll ask both anyway.

#1 Are we ever going to see an option as PC users to bind any action we want to any key. When I play games on the computer I usually have all of my abilities bound to the num pad and use Shift, Ctrl, and Alt to control each bars actions. While I use WASD to control my characters movement. Am I ever going to be able to do that? I ask just because this is the way I have played every MMO to date so i'm kinda stuck mentally on this setup. =)

#2 Are we ever going to see the inclusion of cloaks or capes for our characters? Traveling cloaks have kind of been a hallmark of fantasy adventures ever since the earliest fantasy books (The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings) I recognize some characters may not really look good in them like monks, but a paladin with a white and gold cloak would look amazing. Cecil Harvey anyone? ; )