Why no Speech bubbles?

[Sebazy]

Back on topic...

I think this game lacks of speech bubbles. They would improve the conversations going on in the cities. When I see someone writing in chat, I have no clue where that guy/girl is standing.
Further speech bubbles would improve roleplaying and hanging around and socializing in the big cities.

This feature is for example already in gw2 and it makes socializing at random places really fun.

I agree, personally this is a feature I'd love to see implemented. It was a staple of classic 2D MMOs and online games such as Ultima Online and Graal and whilst I've never played GW2 extensively, it was a great addition to WoW. I never expected to like it but it was actually a really neat feature that felt like it added a bunch of extra life to hubs and gathering spots even if I didn't have any interest in what was being said.

However

I've always been under the impression that FFXIV's 'in world' text rendering was highly inefficient and surprisingly resource hungry, something that can quite clearly be demonstrated by toggling name plates in busy fates. Thus I think that whilst it'd be pretty straight forward to implement speech bubbles, I don't think it's quite that simple.

If I had to guess why we've not got them already... My first guess would be that it's simply a performance precaution for people on more basic hardware, adding it in could have the potential to nose dive people's performance even further beyond what we already see in busy areas whilst also potentially being open to abuse. My second guess is that it may even still be a hardcoded hangup from the almost comical UI limitations the old PS3's drastic lack of ram used to place upon this game. It's not been that long since SE were literally having to remove portions of the UI to add in party TP bars.

[Nedkel]

I am against this idea because i am always grumpy snowflake afraid of interactions with other people hur dur.

Btw always funny to see people creating a nonexistent arguments.
Bubbles affecting performance in a game with THIS high level of optimisation and today with how fast computers are, is this a trolling or what?
I
Bubbles were present in majority of mmorpg games, even the oldest had them, it takes almost no resources to render it, it is shown on clientside so it does not load any additional data to server and back. For real this is the stupidiest argument i ever heard xD
Going by this logic we should all play games on terminal CLI because graphics are unnecessary waste of resources!

[SoulEchelon]

A toggle would be fine I guess, but I would personally never use it. I like always having all information readily and immediately available in the corner instead of having to quickly look between speech bubbles strewn all over my screen. Then you gotta keep in mind how long the speech bubbles will be viewable, or what happens if someone speaks and they're not in your current field of view, and so on. Just...way too many ways of you missing something someone stated.

If there are people who can handle that mess, more power to em but personally I'm happy with just a chatbox.

[Sebazy]

Btw always funny to see people creating a nonexistent arguments.
Bubbles affecting performance in a game with THIS high level of optimisation and today with how fast computers are, is this a trolling or what?

Again I really can't stress this enough. It's really easy to test this yourself if you can find a jam packed hunt. Just get in the thick of it and toggle names on and off. It will impact your FPS quite substantially if you're hitting the max character limit. Consider testing this yourself rather than spouting nonsense please =(

Bubbles were present in majority of mmorpg games, even the oldest had them, it takes almost no resources to render it, it is shown on clientside so it does not load any additional data to server and back. For real this is the stupidiest argument i ever heard xD

Whilst the triangles from a bunch of letters might be a trivial amount by themselves, it can turn into a gargantuan amount of shading once you have thousands of triangles all with their own transparency mingling in-between a field of spell effects and player characters. Speech bubbles could easily dwarf that budget if abused. As for additional data to the server. What are you even talking about? What on earth does a bunch of rendering overhead have to do with the game servers? At least understand what you are spewing please.

Whilst yes, modern PCs are indeed tremendously powerful, you're absolutely kidding yourself if you think FFXIV is highly optimised. It most certainly isn't. MMOs in general just don't lend themselves to that.

Look at it this way. This is a thing that's already in the engine and has been forever. Speech bubbles have also been a staple of the FF series since the year dot. SE have also openly taken considerable amounts of inspiration from WoW, a game which makes great use of speech bubbles. Yet FFXIV doesn't let players use them. It's just too easy a feature to skip over without there being some technical barrier involved imho.

[monk-dps]

Again I really can't stress this enough. It's really easy to test this yourself if you're on a busy server or can find a jam packed hunt. Just get in the thick of it and toggle names on and off. It will impact your FPS quite substantially if you're hitting the max character limit.

Whilst yes, modern PCs are indeed tremendously powerful (My last commercial game was on the PS2), you're absolutely kidding yourself if you think FFXIV is highly optimised. It most certainly isn't. MMOs in general just don't lend themselves to that.

I second this as I've played this game on a few systems. When my last PS4 died I went over my friend's house and played on her high end rig. It's why I was questioning buying a laptop instead of a PS4 pro. But I went back to Pro. But even her insane rig had a few nits in XIV. I was shocked. But yeah, you wouldn't think simple things punch your performance but they very well can and will. Hell the difference between a PS4 and a PS4 pro is insane thinking about turning on the 4k mode on Pro. As THAT'll tank your FPS from a smooth 60 to 30 on just that setting along.

[Goji1639]

Arguing for an feature as optional doesnt by default make it worthwhile or worth the development time. If it gets added so be it, but I dont see the value in resources being used on it as opposed to elsewhere in the game. Nothing spiteful about it.

It's either spite or ignorance. Stuff like this doesn't divert resources from anything important; the developers who work on stuff like this aren't the same people that are handling important things like character balance and content creation. This could be implemented easily and would likely just give one of their menial developers something slightly more interesting than his usual routine busy work to do. These menial developers are literally sitting around doing nothing, waiting for little projects like this to pop up.

[Iscah]

Something that people might not realise, particularly in combination with the game's tendency to have features designed primarily with the Japanese playerbase in mind, is that there would be very little use for this on the Japanese servers. It's incredibly rare to have any conversations in public - let alone more than one going on at a time. Outside of maybe an FC get-together, it would be very rare to be in a situation where you can't keep track of who around you is talking.

If this is something that would take time and untangling-of-coding to implement, it's quite likely it wouldn't seem worth the effort.

I CONSTANTLY miss messages in chat when we're in the heat of a boss fight. My priorities are health bars, mechanics, CD's, cast bars, etc; all of which are in my immediate view. The chat box is rightfully out of the way. If a little text box with an "Over here!" or "Attack this" popped up in a relevant spot that would be far more noticable and make on the spot mechanic communication during a chaotic fight less annoying.

That's what waymarks and signs are for, though - a big <1> over the enemy's head conveys "attack this" well enough.

Also maybe look at which sound you have set for party chat notifications, and find the most attention-grabbing one.

(Side note on alert sounds: I discovered that they recently added an option to get alerts if someone directs an emote at you. It's fantastic for making sure you don't miss things.)

[GhostXO]

Chat bubbles is something I've been wanting ever since I started playing. I've noticed they tend to make players more sociable in other games, probably because it makes communication more interactive. Also, RPing in this game without chat bubbles is just awful.

[MitsukiKimura]

Ehhhhh no.. This brings back cringe moments of IMVU and I don't want that here filled with chat conversations of "UwU" I left balmung cause of the RP don't fester it above our heads.

[Reinha]

A toggle would be fine I guess, but I would personally never use it. I like always having all information readily and immediately available in the corner instead of having to quickly look between speech bubbles strewn all over my screen. Then you gotta keep in mind how long the speech bubbles will be viewable, or what happens if someone speaks and they're not in your current field of view, and so on. Just...way too many ways of you missing something someone stated.

If there are people who can handle that mess, more power to em but personally I'm happy with just a chatbox.

Chat bubbles are not a replacement for the chat log. They are an addition to it.