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.

[KisaiTenshi]

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.

*deep breath*

This is a MMO, the underlying mechanics are that of a turn-based MMORPG in "server ticks" of about 3 seconds. Because of latency in North America, you can have players anywhere from 6ms in California to 500ms in Australia and Russia. Only the underlying turned-based mechanics allow such players to play together and not have the person with the fastest connection wipe the floor with everyone else. This is why action MMORPG's just do not work in North America and Europe, they only work in Japan and Korea.

Now, for Blitzball, or any other sport game, requires a real-time mechanic that can't be cheesed by the person with the fastest connection. So you would literately have players pointing to places on the field and pick "move,dribble, pass (to player), shoot (goal)" etc, and you would need whatever number of people are required to play the game. In FFX there were also stat boost/debuffs. Realistically FFX's Blitzball was also just turn-based. It was not in any way like the other sports games.

So the closest you will get to anything would be slower than the PvP games, and not as a fun as a result unless it was "solo", a la the squadrons. So between actions, you'd be allowed to move, but as soon as someone has the ball, or tries to intercept it, there would have to be some QTE for the success/fail action.

Like I don't realistically see any way of pulling this off and it being fun, regardless of what you think the value of Blitzball is itself. Look at the Triple Triad, Lord of Verminion and the Chocobo Racing. They are completely abandoned except when the tournaments happen, and even then people just throw them to get the rewards.

The "call a play" coach mechanic is easier to pull off, and not requiring assembling enough players to play, it could be done as 1-on-1, so whoever has the ball, you get a QTE of "pass/shoot/dribble" and that pretty much makes it work like it did in FFX. But that's not really much fun either. Ideally you get to pick other players who signed up (eg the duty queue), they get their team bathing suit, the players pick a number, and then those actual players initially get dropped into random teams until those with the highest skill get moved to an actual tournament ladder. If the players withdraw from the duty finder, they just get replaced by someone else in the same bracket.

But this is going to be something that takes a long time, you're not going to play a match and then logoff. If your "team" never logs on again, then what? Start over? What if your new team sucks? What if you get d/c'd?

Like "Venture" systems just result in you having nothing to actually do with the underlying game, and it's the easiest thing the developers can put in (like the squadron missions) and just RNG the result. But that's an entirely RNG based gameplay, it's not skill.

Hence, my point of I don't see any kind of "realtime" sport being viable here. It would have to be all single-rounds, not tournaments, and if you just PUG it, you stand no chance of actually getting anywhere since people could form "static" teams.

Anyway. I digress, I don't think Yoshi-P wants to spend development time on a full sports game within a MMORPG that people already barely play the PvP part of, and doesn't operate on game mechanics already in the game. So any implementation of it would likely end up more like the Squadron missions than anything else.

[kikix12]

*deep breath*

Well, now I have what to specifically discuss. So here goes.

This is a MMO, the underlying mechanics are that of a turn-based MMORPG in "server ticks" of about 3 seconds. Because of latency in North America, you can have players anywhere from 6ms in California to 500ms in Australia and Russia. Only the underlying turned-based mechanics allow such players to play together and not have the person with the fastest connection wipe the floor with everyone else.

This is an issue that all multiplayer games have. Yet playing multiplayer, not necessarily with your neighbors only, is exactly how sport games are played the most. The latency doesn't affect them?! I'm sure it does.

I'm also afraid that turn-based or action-heavy in term of latency means almost nothing. Almost, because so long as the cooldown of abilities is above the latency or if its client-sided there is no difference. Only in games where cooldown is below latency AND server based (like Blade and Soul) is there a difference because low-latency players can spam more abilities in the same time.
"Turn-based" style, or rather, active ATB style, is no different in how much it hurts players with high latency. The fact that I can use abilities every 2.5sec instead of every 0.5sec doesn't change the fact that when I see fast attacks markings (like Titan's wrath of the land or whatever it's called), it is often too late for me to move out of them before server will register a hit, because the time the information travels to me and then back to the server is about as long as the charge of the attack on worse days.
The cooldowns that are long are there to reduce the necessary physical and mental ability to make fast decisions and quickly use varying buttons. Nothing more, nothing less. It's got nothing to do with latency. Or at least...it does nothing for latency.

Now, for Blitzball, or any other sport game, requires a real-time mechanic that can't be cheesed by the person with the fastest connection. So you would literately have players pointing to places on the field and pick "move,dribble, pass (to player), shoot (goal)" etc, and you would need whatever number of people are required to play the game. In FFX there were also stat boost/debuffs. Realistically FFX's Blitzball was also just turn-based. It was not in any way like the other sports games.

Wrong. Again, you are assuming that a sport game requires something that it does not. As you said yourself, original blitzball was not entirely real-time (it was not turn-based either, though). It had "battles" which were basically a rock-paper-scissors matches, but the movement was real-time. And that's actually not entirely uncommon. I do agree though that developers would need to work on minimizing the latency issue for it especially, but some degree would not be gamebreaking as you make it believe.
As for however many players...it's anywhere from 1 player to a number of players equal to the amount of characters on the field. Unless developers will decide to give it specific number. That's the whole point of computer games. To provide AI for whatever characters there are no players for.

So the closest you will get to anything would be slower than the PvP games, and not as a fun as a result unless it was "solo", a la the squadrons.

PvP suffers from latency as well, and yet there are fans, despite many people considering its design rather poor. Why would blitzball require perfect solution to latency issues when nothing else (other sport games, other activities in FFXIV etc.) does? It's too bad, but that's how MMO's go. High latency=sucky gameplay. It's unavoidable and it affects EVERYTHING in EVERY MMO game. People like that have to deal with it somehow or...change game. And I'm saying that while I myself suffer from high latency.

So between actions, you'd be allowed to move, but as soon as someone has the ball, or tries to intercept it, there would have to be some QTE for the success/fail action.

And...what's the problem with that?! It was like this in the original blitzball and it still did garner some fans. It's all about how the game as a whole will be designed. This game flow itself in no way is unfun.

Like I don't realistically see any way of pulling this off and it being fun, regardless of what you think the value of Blitzball is itself.

There is no value in blitzball in and off itself. It's all about how it will be made. I just in general like "combat" sports where there are actual super-attacks and such, despite disliking sports in general. So it is something I may be interested in depending on how it will be implemented.

Look at the Triple Triad, Lord of Verminion and the Chocobo Racing.

Lord of Verminion is a poorly-made strategy game. Something I said in this very thread is a horrible idea. A strategy game NEVER should be made as a mini-game in anything due to how specific they are in their target audience. And even as a strategy game, its implementation is truly horrid. I order the minions to ATTACK a monster, yet they pass it, taking that order to attack as an order to move to where that monster was at the moment of the click. This is not how strategy games work for a reason. If I order to move, they should move. If I order to attack, they should attack, following the target till one side dies or I change the order.

Triple Triad isn't half-bad when you feel like burning some time on something, especially since you can cancel it (when going against NPC's at least). It suffers for multiple reasons though.
1) NPC's cheat. They have no limit to how many cards of what rank they can use at all. That makes the game lose value. No one likes playing against cheaters. Rules being equal for all are EXTREMELY important in a card game.
2) The deck setup is locked behind achievements. That means that you will completely suck until after you put forth quite a fair deal of effort. This however, together with the above cheating issue, means that the early stages of the game are horribly unfun all the while that stage is unavoidable. As a game done in spare time, that's unacceptable.
3) Triple Triad obviously doesn't allow you to 'progress' in the context of the game itself. At the same time, it's impossible to play the game outside of very few designated areas. That means that players, when they have a bit of spare time waiting for someone to come back after going to open the door for example, simply cannot play it. Why, I'd be more than happy to play triple triad in dungeon while waiting for someone disconnected to log back in, or waiting for someone to return after having to go do something etc. But I can't. And I can't do it in any other situation where I would want to, either. Either my progression needs to suffer (aka. I need to stop doing everything else and go to specific places to play it) or I can only play against cheating AI...which requires me to go to specific places as well, obviously.

Chocobo races?! Well, they are just too simple. And too RPG'ish for races. The chocobos don't react to orders properly, some chocobos can be vastly faster etc. It just cannot be fun as a multiplayer game due to that.

The "call a play" coach mechanic is easier to pull off, and not requiring assembling enough players to play, it could be done as 1-on-1, so whoever has the ball, you get a QTE of "pass/shoot/dribble" and that pretty much makes it work like it did in FFX.

Player amount never was an issue. It's no different from FIFA and other sport games. And those sport games certainly are no couch-based games. Yes, giving commands is one way to play it. I don't dismiss it either so long as it does have actual active elements to it. So long as I see the players as they flow by, they react to my commands etc. It's just a bit different control scheme there and it does not turn into strategy game either. But you seem to be misunderstanding what a sport game needs.

But this is going to be something that takes a long time, you're not going to play a match and then logoff. If your "team" never logs on again, then what? Start over? What if your new team sucks? What if you get d/c'd?

Again, you are assuming that this game will need more than one player per team, while there is no reason to believe that being the case. Player would just control any one character while being able to give commands of sorts to all character, even those they do not control at the time. And all problems are solved. You will always be logged on when you log on clearly, and that's all you need for ranking. Of course, it is possible for the game to permit multiple players per team. Then it turns into something akin to any other PvP. Why would it need to be given special treatment?! You got disconnected...so what?! You can get disconnected in PvP and suffer for it too. Too bad. It sucks, but can't be helped. At least the game can replace your character with AI if it is multi-player game, or "pause" it if its not, with an auto-surrender if you do not log in within a minute or so (unless there are other players on your team that will just have to take the burden if they don't want to surrender).

Hence, my point of I don't see any kind of "realtime" sport being viable here. It would have to be all single-rounds, not tournaments, and if you just PUG it, you stand no chance of actually getting anywhere since people could form "static" teams.

No wonder you don't see it if you just assumed it would be in a very specific way, while completely ignoring the fact that nothing is set in stone. Now, it would be a bit more reasonable if you assumed it would be a faithful representation of blitzball from FFX, but no. Your idea of how it would HAVE to work have nothing in common with it but the name and swimming in a dome, all the while assuming all the worse case scenarios. Sorry, but you are simply overlooking way too many things in the very limited view of sport games you seem to have.
1) There is no reason why it could be played with one person per team.
2) There is no reason why it couldn't have "time stops" for battles, to give few seconds to make decisions.
3) There is no reason why, if there would be teams, it wouldn't depend on those teams logging in. That's how statics work after all.