Interview: Face-to-Face with FFXIV's Naoki Yoshida - Article on MMORPG website

[Teraluna]

And a link to the article:

http://www.mmorpg.com/final-fantasy-...ida-1000012236

[Genz]

Even if players see they have the freedom to set their own gear [in terms of stats and effects], they will try to find the most efficient combination, so the best-in-slot will be set by someone and others will just follow them. In order to give people interesting and fun content, we made the gear system as simple as possible.

Players aren't stupid. Those who want to try a new build will try, other will follow a guide, and amongst those who follow a guide, they may modify it a little and find something new.
Also, he says the current "system" allows for players to easily get back into the game after a break, and then says that, with customisation, players may blindly follow a guide. Make the link between the 2 statements : players' guides precisely allows other players to easily get back in the game.

Finally, the goal, the motivation of making a RPG in the first place is customisation. In FFXIV, the RPG aesthetic (numbers to increase, gauges to fill, etc.) only serves to build massive walls of chore, and then makes the players feel good with "quality of life" updates that makes the chores a little easier to deal with (and, in worst case, it gives the devs an excuse to sell the jump potion, a.k.a "You can pay us, the devs, to skip the boring part of the game we have built"

PS : On the interview itself, I really appreciate that they have added a summary before the interview.

[Ghastly]

Thank you for sharing!
Just want to thank Yoshida and the devs for all the dedication and for not making FFXIV like other mmos where progression is for the few. Can't wait for Eureka and new glamour system.

They said they're looking for ways to give the overworld some new challenges, we should give them ideas I guess the hard part is the rewards part, hmmm I'll have to think of something.

[BillyKaplan]

We don’t really see the [power] level of jobs as being in disparity, but in terms of their compatibility with content.

It worries me he doesn't see the problem with this statement. It was an interesting read otherwise, and I'm really looking forward to the kind of things they can add with the lesser focus on dungeons, at least in odd numbered patches. My only complaint about the Lakshmi fight is that it's not repeatable.

[CaTi]

Well I mean is he wrong? You can have all the freedom to customise gear you like, ultimately it's going to boil down to one mathematical superior setup that everyone and their dog will follow. By expanding the amount of options out you just wind up making it harder for players to all keep up. Gear is the great equaliser in this game and it lets individual skill be more of a determining factor

[Lewtskie]

Wonky builds and "imaginative setups" were a product of crudely designed and unoptimized mechanics of older MMOs, where things were all over the place and so you sometimes had to think outside the box when it came to engaging a certain enemy. Most of the time this wasn't wholly intended, the developers wouldn't have some grand design, they just put together what sounded cool. The old raid bosses in WoW where you had to equip low level gear for the elemental resistances comes to mind.

Doing this now in a game that is very controlled and planned ahead would then need to start designing content specifically for these mechanics. And intentionally trying to design wonky is a lot more effort that just doing what you do.

Finally, the goal, the motivation of making a RPG in the first place is customisation.

A subset of RPGs are all about numbers and fiddling, most primarily make a RPG to tell a story first and foremost. Even with the ones designed with customization in mind, there will always be the optimal build, and everything below subpar, just to varying degrees.

[Ryutamashiisan]

"We have three jobs — Paladin, Dark Knight and Warrior — and these all give a different and unique experience while they work as a tank. Any job can be played as a main tank or off-tank, and now, with the changes to Warrior’s Shake It Off” — previously an obsolete self-cleanse, now a buff that protects the party — “we think they are all on the same level and that the balance is very good.”


Yoshi has lost his mind.

[DarkDedede]

That sweeping changes to glamour system ‘that would take an hour to explain’ will come in patch 4.2

When is the next Live Letter? I'll listen to an entire hour explanation, if that is the topic. Sweep away!

“Another example is the glamour system, which is going to receive a huge revamp in 4.2. Players may not notice because it is not battle related, but ..."

"The changes are so gigantic that it would probably take an hour to explain everything. If we were to discuss it even partially, it would just be the tip of the iceberg anyway ... We’re hoping to discuss this in the Letter from the Producer Live if people can wait for that."

Oh you tease!

[Shurrikhan]

We don’t really see the [power] level of jobs as being in disparity, but in terms of their compatibility with content.

It worries me he doesn't see the problem with this statement. It was an interesting read otherwise, and I'm really looking forward to the kind of things they can add with the lesser focus on dungeons, at least in odd numbered patches. My only complaint about the Lakshmi fight is that it's not repeatable.

Alternatively, it makes the distinction, that a lot of hype-tracking players do not: balance is not a general concept; it shifts with every mechanic that may favor even a single significant ability in even a single viable meta (that may become first-tier as a result).

On the other hand:

Even if players see they have the freedom to set their own gear [in terms of stats and effects], they will try to find the most efficient combination, so the best-in-slot will be set by someone and others will just follow them. In order to give people interesting and fun content, we made the gear system as simple as possible.

Falls a lot on pretense itself. Gearing has often been used by creative players to create setups optimal for their situation that are regularly called garbage or muddled in their distinction from theory-crafted "generally optimal" setups, yet outperform them.

The problem with these customization has been overwhelmingly a community issue. That's not to say it isn't damn easy to get wrong, and many a customization option has been dead on arrival -- but that is due to implementation, not the concept itself.

Personally, I'd actually be fine with moving into an even simpler set of stats, so long as each can be better balanced AND more impactful, such that there's more breadth of player choice and feeling thereof. Short of adding a Mastery-style mechanic (with an effect drawing towards the distinct advantages of any given job -- and notoriously hard to balance satisfactorily against multiple compositions and surrounding playstyles), there are only three real secondary stat dynamics -- damage floor, damage ceiling, damage rate. This can be given in many shades if given unto resource stats (such as crit chance being finely stackable -- its rate of acquisition or effectiveness thereof affected by stats -- and consumed at will, rather than by RNG alone), but otherwise it's just those three.

And that's the part that perturbs me here, and has with a lot of Yoshida interviews in the past, though I didn't even wholly notice why this nagging feeling was forming again until seeing the second thread reply:

"It's not what some would call a modern online game, with the developers mindset clearly focused on long term strategies."

That definitely seems the case. For whatever design philosophy to which Yoshida might affix himself, his game's implementation of that concept really is muddled. If stats should be granted as simply as possible, why would you siphon the effectiveness of Critical Strike to feed into a fourth, redundant stat, Direct Hit? Worse still, the scaling of these stats has not been fixed. Direct Hit's scaling makes it the most powerful choice for non-crit-based offensive classes (Monk and Bard) until x point, at which time the quadratic gains of Critical Strike again leave everything else behind. Skill Speed still encounters massive indirect scaling issues through disproportionate (non-scaled) resource consumption and animation locks. That's not simplicity, whereby theorycrafting isn't rewarding enough to make stats unintuitive. That's just leaving something unfinished (not scaling appropriately with the stats' obvious impacts) for fear of it seeming to someone, somewhere, that it's not that simple. But comprehensive design on the developers part is what is most able to make the experience feel intuitive to the player. Accounting for certain impacts and not for others is what makes things complicated on the player's end. A job left unfinished is what complicates things, not the comprehensiveness of adjustments (e.g. appropriate and future-proofed scaling).

And be it skill acquisition or use, the way side-content works, underlying combat systems, or whatever else, I keep getting that feeling from the game's designs, as if obvious and broadly standard QoL features could be refused for fear of babying the player or convoluted design could be excused under the guise of difficulty or distinction in the same paragraph by which skill pruning is described as paring away artificial difficulty. For every design concept broached, there are handful of in-game implementations made within that shift of design goal that contradict its alleged intent. For almost every explanation of a given design, there's a vital way in which that goal given for that design is also harmed... by that same design. It just feels so piecework at times. And I get that half-measures are at times a necessity of development combined with deadlines, but I really do wish they'd spend some more time occasionally to actually meet, not just approach, their alleged goals, and double down their (would-be) oversights.

tl;dr: You know, I really wish they would put in more long-term thought instead of just continuing to toss out more of whatever gives them the extra step, as poorly as that step may lead. Luckily, we're seeing systemic revisions to fix past oversights, but it would be awesome to not have to wait an expansion just to see fixes to problems that were obviously going to occur solved. These shouldn't be seen; part of creating the given content should be not leave glaring holes in its design, even if they may take a some time to be fully felt.

[Shurrikhan]

Well I mean is he wrong? You can have all the freedom to customise gear you like, ultimately it's going to boil down to one mathematical superior setup that everyone and their dog will follow. By expanding the amount of options out you just wind up making it harder for players to all keep up. Gear is the great equaliser in this game and it lets individual skill be more of a determining factor

In my opinion, in a basically MOBA-esque level of design such as XIV's, customization is what you do as a last resort in order to broaden the attractiveness of a given class, (job), or role when all other options that do not include mutual exclusion will not suffice.

In a true RPG, on the other hand, (open) customization ought still to be less a way to define one's character than it is to portray the world, the underlying manipulable systems of physics, magic, etc., the schools or paths of training, mentorship, adaptation, and so forth.

In either case, these should be as intuitive as possible, and should not need rely on a seemingly separate game from the game's menus or loot tables or so forth to immerse or otherwise entertain players.

That said, how, when all portions of a skill set are essentially arbitrary and non-manipulable, should a player's knowing what stats or lateral gear choices ought to contribute most to their playstyle in their coming conditions be less evidence of player skill than, say, knowing their rotations or break-points? None of these were especially intuitive in the first place, nor can any be pieced together by without time spent in one's menus. If SE were simply to stop hiding the effects of their stats, it would be of no difference from surveying one's skill potencies and refresh rates.