Legacy 1.23b story

[Canadane]

Which is exactly the point, I want to experience those events, even if I have to pay extra for it.
The only reason I didn't play 1.0 is because I couldn't- my PC at the time had less horsepower than my toaster.

Unfortunately, it's over. A past event.

[Vhailor]

SE would never do that, because that would allow players to create their own FFXIV V1.0 game. Yoshi-P's response kinda means that SE would really have no recourse to take down any V1.x server emulator, since he basically said "we threw it away". That said any working server emulator would run afoul of copyright laws, and has been tested with WoW and previously Battle.net itself. It's not the server emulator itself that is really the problem, it's the fact that you'd need people to commit copyright infringement to acquire the 1.x client, since as everyone knows, you had to pay money for the game client. It was never free.

I wasn't commenting on how likely this is to happen. Just because something can or arguably should happen, doesn't mean it will.

I was commenting about which path would be the simplest to take from SE's perspective, in regards to offering players the chance to experience the 1.x storyline. If they did it internally, there's a big effort around it, there's a risk to corporate reputation if people rip it to shreds or SE overcharges for it or makes changes people don't like. Server resources. All that good stuff.

If they release it for modders, it's... well, have fun, we'll enjoy seeing what people do with it.

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Also, out of curiosity, you do realize that other games have allowed modders, right? All of the legal challenges are very solvable; it's been done for over 25 years. Typically there's permission to use the available assets and tools in any way desired, but with the caveat that users aren't allowed to charge for it (basically a Creative Commons license of sorts).

The only barrier here is SE's willingness to be open with their content and release some version of the 1.x assets and toolkits used to develop them. And it IS a large barrier, and you are right in that SE probably will never take this course of action - but the additional 'challenges' you've mentioned are pure nonsense.

[polyhedral]

One of the main reasons I even began playing this game, was the promise of practically creating your own class to play with the cross skills. I loved playing as THM with second wind and many forms of self healing. I loved all of the absorb spells and elemental spells it offered.

Now we seem to be all shoehorned into very specific roles that bring no varying difference from player to player. It's easy for the devs to balance, but very bland to the players.

I would love to go back and have challenging solo field content like we had back then.

[Pastahnak]

Let bad games die, if you really need to know what happened there are YouTube channels that talk all about 1.x to 2.0 and even one that has a full play through of the game.

[KisaiTenshi]

Also, out of curiosity, you do realize that other games have allowed modders, right? All of the legal challenges are very solvable; it's been done for over 25 years. Typically there's permission to use the available assets and tools in any way desired, but with the caveat that users aren't allowed to charge for it (basically a Creative Commons license of sorts).

The only barrier here is SE's willingness to be open with their content and release some version of the 1.x assets and toolkits used to develop them. And it IS a large barrier, and you are right in that SE probably will never take this course of action - but the additional 'challenges' you've mentioned are pure nonsense.

That is the point. Square-Enix has generally sued people out of existence for even announcing that they were thinking of making any unofficial sequel or prequel. They are as bad as Nintendo for this kind of thing.

Unauthorized modding usually comes with the caveat that the project may disappear at any time, and usually charging money or trying to crowdfund development of it is a guaranteed way to have the project die.

Authorized modding of certain games by certain publishers has to be done either with the blessing of the company who owns the copyright and trademarks, or the original developers release the source code to the game engine, but not the assets, which still requires you use your legally purchased game discs.

The original source code to games like Simcity (Micropolis), and a port of Star Control 2 (The Ur-Quan Masters) were basically done that way. They created new assets for those games so they work with what was essentially the source code to the original game.

The game engine used by FFXIV V1.0 is the Crystal Tools engine. In order to "open source" FFXIV V1.0, they would be need to open source the tools they used to build FFXIII, FFXIII-2, Lightning Returns, FFXIV v1.0, Dragon Quest X. So open sourcing the client is unlikely not something that SE would do since it would allow modding of those games as well.

Likewise you'll see a lot of references to middleware when developers talk about Crystal Tools, so it's very likely that the client and server share significant amounts of code, so open sourcing that is probably not something that can be reasonably done without developers from SE putting significant effort into making what they release not rely on anything proprietary that they can't release, or do not have the license to release.

As much as I would like to play 1.x again on something that is capable of playing it, it's just not going to be possible without SE giving their blessing to do it, and providing at least the netcode and LUA scripts to work from. That means someone has to spend time and money figuring that out, and as we've seen before, SE would rather just repackage a bad port than ever consider releasing the source code.

With XIV V1.0 there is nothing for SE to lose except some PR embarrassment. The 1.x game is not better. People are not going to prefer to play 1.23b over SB. This is not a "WoW Classic" kind of situation. At worst SE would gain subs from the players who are interested in the storyline and pick up the 1.x story and want to continue it into the present client. At best, players who played 2.x would go back and play 1.x to fill in the story like it was a prequel.

But ultimately Japanese developers don't really get "open source". Often what you get are really dense license agreements that prohibit you from doing anything meaningful that wouldn't be equal to a doujin (fan) game that you can't charge money for.

[MageBlack]

Echo

[Final-Fantasy]

They (SE) should have kept one 1.0 world active, but wiped clean of all characters at the end of service for 1.0 (or even just a fresh empty world), and let anyone with an active 2.0+ subscription have access to the 1.0 1.23b server so they could experience the world and its changes, it could work like FFXI's Official Test Server maybe?


Seems such a waste to have thrown it all away, a part of SE history.

[Felis]

so they could experience the world and its changes, it could work like FFXI's Official Test Server maybe?

but it will be not a changing world, but a static world. Frozen at the last days of the 6th astral era. The changes happened with patches.
And it also would not work as a test servers. 1.0 is too different to ARR and especially to SB. They could test out ideas, but not finished content