Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[TheDraco4011]

Calling it now. Blitzball will just be a pallet swap of squadrons.

[BillyKaplan]

Calling it now. Blitzball will just be a pallet swap of squadrons.

What if it IS your squad? e.e Selling your second in command some rubbish about how this'll be good to raise squad morale, build camaraderie and to diversify the physical activities of the squad.

[kikix12]

Instant-death mechanics are not needed. There are already debuffs that decrease the healing potency (Infirmity or something like that). There is nothing stopping them from adding debuffs that prevent healing over time completely. Then there's also HP debuff. Something that this game already have, but for whatever reason doesn't seem to use. The more health the characters have in comparison to damage, the greater the ease with powerful healing. On the contrary, the less HP the less relevant the healing potency, since it will need to be used frequently anyway.

There is so much that can be done with relative ease to increase difficulty, that instant death mechanics are absolutely unnecessary, especially since no one ever said that "difficulty" means "ability to finish it". What is a problem with a boss that you can do without wipes without flawless precision, so long as you just pay that basic bit of attention, but have it take significantly longer instead? Saving considerable amount of time is perfectly fine in promoting and rewarding skill in comparison to doing it half-assed, especially if there would be rewards tied to duration of the battle that would give access to a larger pool of rewards (like minions or crafting materials) only if the fight took less than X time, giving just the basics otherwise.

Instant-death should be used mostly for high-stake battles. Stuff like Ultimate, some extreme trials, a boss here or there in a raid. Not just about everything outside of standard dungeons, and even some of the standard dungeon bosses.


As for blitzball, I do not understand the worry that Yoshida have. Players will play it once and be done with it?! Then what he plans? We have Fifa and similar sport games that are released EVERY SINGLE YEAR for YEARS now. And those games sell FAST when they are released. The same people buy them time and again and spend hundreds of hours on them. And they are exactly what a blitzball would be. A team-based ball game. Only the rules are different.
Just make sure the play is smooth, the rules are clear, the characters are reasonably balanced and that there is a ranking of sorts, and there may be people playing nothing but blitzball whenever they log into the game. Heck, if they put actual effort into it, there could be people that would buy Final Fantasy XIV ONLY for blitzball. Seriously, sport games are the very first kind of multiplayer games in human history. It is the exact thing that is PERFECT for an MMO. And he worries that it's not suitable?!

[SaitoHikari]

As for blitzball, I do not understand the worry that Yoshida have. Players will play it once and be done with it?! Then what he plans? We have Fifa and similar sport games that are released EVERY SINGLE YEAR for YEARS now. And those games sell FAST when they are released. The same people buy them time and again and spend hundreds of hours on them. And they are exactly what a blitzball would be. A team-based ball game. Only the rules are different.
Just make sure the play is smooth, the rules are clear, the characters are reasonably balanced and that there is a ranking of sorts, and there may be people playing nothing but blitzball whenever they log into the game. Heck, if they put actual effort into it, there could be people that would buy Final Fantasy XIV ONLY for blitzball. Seriously, sport games are the very first kind of multiplayer games in human history. It is the exact thing that is PERFECT for an MMO. And he worries that it's not suitable?!

You are vastly over-estimating the amount of people that actually care about Blitzball. The FIFA comparison matters little when they're modeled after actual sports and teams, with the main appeal being creating fantasy teams/scenarios. There's virtually no overlap with the FF community there.

[kikix12]

You are vastly over-estimating the amount of people that actually care about Blitzball. The FIFA comparison matters little when they're modeled after actual sports and teams, with the main appeal being creating fantasy teams/scenarios. There's virtually no overlap with the FF community there.

I'm not over-estimating people that care about blitzball. I make no estimation after all.

You may or may not believe it, but people WILL be attracted to fantasy sports IF they are well made. And this is what I am saying. If they make a GOOD blitzball, it will have massive replay value like every single other sport game out there, from racing games, through fighting games all the way to...yeah...team sports like soccer or basketball. If they'll give it the mini-game treatment that is to be made and forgotten, aka. make it with linear advancement and little to no strategy, then it'll be dead on arrival. It's not blitzball itself that matters here. It's the idea of a ball game played in three dimensions with special moves attached. Heck, original blitzball was two-dimensional. BUT the special moves are what makes it.

You may not know it, but there are multiple LARGE franchises that just that. A small variation on sport games known to man with added super moves. Look at Technos games (Ike Ike! Nekketsu Hockey Bu: Subette Koronde Dairantō, Kunio-kun no Nekketsu Soccer League, Nekketsu Street Basket: Ganbare Dunk Heroes and some other), Inazuma Eleven franchise, Blood Bowl 1 and 2. Blitzball is the very same concept. Taking something that is well known (a team-based game where the goal is to put the ball inside a specific area, goalpost), with specific rules for handling it (only with legs, only with hands, only by dribbling etc., with or without contact allowed etc.) and adding a non-realistic element (violent or outright impossible attacks that would cause long-term damage or death in real life). The concept is both simple and fun. It's all in the design. It can be crap or "the new best thing". I'm a realist so I don't expect it to be more than a fun little time-waster here or there for most players in the best case scenario. But that doesn't mean that blitzball itself is an inherently flawed concept that cannot be popular. It can. It's just that it will not be nearly fleshed out enough to have the chance for that.

[Tridus]

I'm not over-estimating people that care about blitzball. I make no estimation after all.

You may or may not believe it, but people WILL be attracted to fantasy sports IF they are well made.

"Ultimate Static Manager" would be hilariously meta as an in game fantasy sport.

[KisaiTenshi]

You are vastly over-estimating the amount of people that actually care about Blitzball. The FIFA comparison matters little when they're modeled after actual sports and teams, with the main appeal being creating fantasy teams/scenarios. There's virtually no overlap with the FF community there.

Eh, it's more of a take-it-or-leave-it. If it's a really really good implementation, it would require doing things in a way that just doesn't work with a MMO setting.

Like the most obvious way to make it "fun" without it being just another "venture" like squadrons and retainers were, would be to take a page from the Chocobo racing mechanics and have a "separate" game space from which it's played and "broadcast" if you will. You don't get to play the actual players, you're more like the coach, calling specific plays from a playbook. Implementations more like that of FIFA/NHL/NBA games can not be done primarily because those are real-time games, and a real sports game takes a minimum of an hour to play. That is just too long for the 20-minutes tops we get with other content. Also MMO players are not that audience, and we don't want that kind of audience in a MMO game, because that creates the type of feature creep where the game client has code for something awesome and complex, but also is neglected by all but 100 people in the game after everyone tried it and got the trophy.

Nerfing healers simply is going to make it impossible to fix mistakes.

Some people believe that they are healers-only, thus without there being stakes to "doing nothing", healers end up becoming an extra DPS, and that is broken gameplay. That wiggle room should not exist, but it only exists because the gear stats-creep tends to mean 4 or 8 players need less healing, rather than the healer does more healing. Hence, the only solutions to making healing as intensive as tanking would require lowering the window for mistakes to be rectified, or be more reactive to circumstances, or nerfing gear to be pointless.

As pointed out in the -many- "to dps or not to dps" threads involving healers, healers do not have enough to do -always-. Even when content is new, that wiggle room exists, as it ages, players pick the most lazy and ineffective strategy (cast regen, do nothing else) because there is nothing else for that role to do, because the game makes no requirement to be reactive in anything but extreme/savage. It would be one thing if more content had "heal the idiot NPC" type of mechanics, it's another where "the DPS are taken out of the arena, and only the tank and healer can release them, simultaneously", and we just don't see mechanics that make the healer do anything but run away when targeted.

Like in a traditional RPG (eg pen and paper) your GM would adapt to idiotic and lazy gameplay. One way of making the Healer do more work is by attaching consequences to not paying attention. We see that with half dozen versions of Doom/Death. Some of the 24-player content is so busy that you can miss things, and I'd argue that the 24-player content is actually the best content in the game for healers, because it does not let you "do nothing", there is always going to be something that you can do because the mechanics often require paying attention to the field and other players. On the opposite side of this, most of the 8-player content has no balance once players have out-geared it, and it's a choreographed dance once you remember the how it goes. The 4-player content is a mixed bag, and as Yoshi-P stated, has no instant-death mechanics, so there is never any reason for a wipe other than people not paying attention.

[kikix12]

(...)it would require doing things in a way that just doesn't work with a MMO setting.

Go on. I'd like to know why it wouldn't work well with MMO setting. You seem to have the same idea as Yoshida in this respect, while I'm completely puzzled as to why, so go ahead and explain what part of a multiplayer game is not fit for an MMO game.

You don't get to play the actual players, you're more like the coach, calling specific plays from a playbook.

Strategy games are actually a really horrible implementation.
1) There is close to no interaction between players. This is as far from an MMO as a game can be. Even when playing against another player, you won't be able to tell the difference between them and an AI.
2) Strategy games have no "middle zone". Either players love them or hate them. And there are more players that do not like playing them than otherwise. Doubly so for all those "Tycoon" style of games. Games where players directly control the characters have a lot of middle zone. I really dislike sport games, including racing games, but I actually quite like a certain racing game, there is also a football game of which I played a demo a long time ago that I wish I'd have gotten it to play. I won't be touching a simulator. Ever.

Implementations more like that of FIFA/NHL/NBA games can not be done primarily because those are real-time games, and a real sports game takes a minimum of an hour to play. That is just too long for the 20-minutes tops we get with other content.

You know that this does have no sense, right?! Football/soccer takes 90 minutes of game time + breaks + extension...professionally. It takes what, 30 minutes at Physical Education in school?! And we're talking about a real life game playing in real life here. And blitzball is...well...it's yet to be even made. Isn't it painfully obvious that it could take even five minutes only if the developers decided that?! There is absolutely zero of anything that would make a "real-time game" take at least an hour or more.

By the way, you do realize that this very game is exactly that...A real-time game...right?! Basically, you say that this game is impossible to make as an MMO, even though...it is already here...Like many other in fact.


Also...there are instant-death mechanics in 4-man dungeons. Temple of Qarn on first boss (but one could argue the bees and wasps as well) and The Wanderers Palace last boss are examples off the top of my head. They are rarer and rather easy to deal with normally...though there were times I partied with people that CONSTANTLY died to the first boss of Qarn even after being told exactly what to do and when.

[Ayer2015]

I mean, they could limit in combat rezes and make healing more demanding.... just a thought.

I'm aware this will never happen, but one can dream

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I mean, they could limit in combat rezes and make healing more demanding.... just a thought.

I'm aware this will never happen, but one can dream

You could accomplish both through nerfing healing potency across the board. If MP was more of an issue, healers simply wouldn't have the mana to continuously raise.