Thread: You can bring back 2 features from 1.0 what would it be?

1: Springtime Coerthas. That was the most beautiful zone in the game and they completely destroyed it just to have an ice zone. They made the other areas looks so wonderful and dropped a big poo on Coerthas.

2: Overworld content that was more than fates. Like the original relics. They were complicated, they were difficult, they were not just handed out like Halloween candy. I am fine with making the questline a little easier, but everything in the overworld is just fates and it's frankly boring. Bozja and Eureka both had so much potential but they were reduced to just fate grinds. I would loved Bozja to be more like hamlet defense or the ffxi campaign that they were made out to be like. But nope, just fates with a different name and arbitrary rules like participant limits. They innovated so much during the course of version 1, but since relaunch its been corridor dungeons, arena mega bosses and fates. I mean, I know they want to cater to the casual crowd, but they can still be innovative while keeping things simple. /rantover

3: Path companions, the OG trusts.

4: buffs and debuffs, just dps and heals with strict rotations gets super boring

5: Notorious Monsters with decent respawns in general areas that dropped actually good loot

6: Shards and Crystals dropping from mobs.

7: Having to collect items to fight primals instead of just queueing at random.

8: The need to make friends because the world was dangerous and the content was easier (and a ton more fun) with friends.

9: Darker themes. Not every story needs a happy ending.

10: I would love the original zones to be expanded with new maps so we get more of what we lost back. We are missing at least 2/3 of mor dhona for instance. All zones are a fraction of what they were.

Originally Posted by MicahZerrshia

They innovated so much during the course of version 1, but since relaunch its been corridor dungeons, arena mega bosses and fates. I mean, I know they want to cater to the casual crowd, but they can still be innovative while keeping things simple. /rantover

To be fair, I don't think this one is entirely on SquareEnix, or even on 'casual' players. ARR had some dungeons where they were experimenting with multiple paths and whatnot, and in ARR (and even Heavensward), raids had more than just a single boss fight in a big arena. They were clearly willing to follow that path!

But people started optimizing. Why take the side paths in Haukke Manor, when you can just blow through to the end? Why go into the treasure rooms in Qarn? Why even bother to get the pieces to solve the puzzle? Forget about particular mob mechanics, just gather everything and pull it as far as you can, burn it all down at once.

Even now, when the devs do branch out to try something different—like the Great Hunt (Extreme), or the mechanics challenge in Bardam's Mettle—a vocal portion of the playerbase groans about it being weird or different or just plain inefficient to run compared to other content.

I mean, the playerbase demonstrated that if given dungeons that had multiple side areas to wander into, puzzles to solve, and whatnot... well, we'd treat it as a corridor dungeon and pull until a wall stopped us, ignoring every puzzle possible to ignore. So SquareEnix started giving us corridor dungeons where you pull until a wall stops you. I kinda feel like we as players bear some of the blame there.

(I do agree with all your points otherwise, though.)

Originally Posted by MicahZerrshia

The reason it's like this is because, like you said, the rewards do not match the effort. When it comes to innovating they also need to be a little more aware of the reward system. People treat things like corridor dungeons simply because there is no need not to. If SE tackled that issue and made effort more equal to reward, they could do a lot more in a variety of places. Dynamis in FFXI is the perfect example. You could go in there and skip packs as you go straight to the bosses and be in and out or you could farm the entire zone.

I agree, honestly. And CLL is a perfect example; you can blast through the middle section and ignore the prisoners OR you can try to save them and get extra rewards. People do the prisoners because the rewards are worth it... at least for now. (Though let's be honest, if you've got a healer with Essence of the Ordained and Lost Death, it's not really 'try to save them', it's usually just "click a button and move on.")

But the thing is, we also have a lot of people in the community who complain about effort entailed in getting things. And I won't even say they're 100% wrong; the overall MMO crowd's age has pushed older, and those of us who were playing MMOs in high school and over summer break and whatnot now have fewer hours to put towards them due to Life. Which can make some people less eager to tackle a longer effort to grind things than they would've once been willing to do.

If they had groups of dungeons where various side rooms had challenges where you could earn tokens that could be exchanged for glamour items or something? (Think Bozjan Clusters here.) Sure, people would be willing to do it! Some folks would want to run the dungeons over and over and get those tokens so they could farm all the glamour (or mounts, or whatever).

But there'd be some folks who were like "I want to do other things in this game than run the same three dungeons, that glamour should be accessible in the Mog Station as well." And there'd be folks like "This is terrible. I just want to get through and to the end when I get that dungeon, and all these people want to make it take longer by going in these side rooms."

And I wouldn't be terribly surprised if eight months down the road, we have people who have already upgraded all their Resistance gear groaning about people rushing to save all the prisoners in CLL when they don't have to bother doing it.

There's no decision that SquareEnix can make that will please everyone; that's true of any game, but it's particularly true with MMOs where your play experience is directly dependent on everyone else's. And it's not even like there's a wrong way and a right way to play; I might want an instance with more depth and branches where I can dig in deeply, and someone else might want a shorter one so they can log off afterwards and go do something non-computer related.

And neither preference is wrong, but they are in conflict.

And I think it's a sign of the original MMO crew getting older that the balance of player preference (or at least, vocal player preference) seems to have shifted since 1.0... and that SquareEnix has adapted accordingly. Even if there are parts of 1.0's design philosophy I miss. (Albeit maybe not always the 1.0 implementations of that philosophy.)

I'm tempted to go with Hamlet Defense as a knee-jerk answer, but it wasn't as innovative as I'd like to remember it below the surface. Sure, I suppose there were different compositions to do it, but like most things, there was a universal composition that most people seemed to do to the point that it became as predictable and routine as any ARR+ trial.

I see a lot of other nostalgic things people are listing off, but honestly most cannot be feasibly be brought into the current game. Square peg into round hole, etc. (tempted to point out why on each point, but no).

I think my two picks are 1) the Path Companion (or literally anything that's not a dancing ostrichicken covered in armor) and 2) The 1.0 dungeons; with multiple paths and bite to them. The first one is pretty self- explanatory, but the more difficult and rewarding dungeons obviously couldn't replace the minimum-competency "Expert" dungeons the devs are comfortable churning out.

Things like having bonus chests when you kill the final boss for fulfilling different criteria (I'd eliminate the speed-run chest though) were a good touch, and encouraged things like taking dead-end/branching paths to open chests (to unlock the 'all dungeon chests opened' bonus chest). Since speed was a factor back then, many times the group would just send one experienced person they'd trust not to die to grab a chest on their own. Palace of the Dead/Heaven on High somewhat scratches this itch, and Bozja's 1st Castrum has shades of this, but I'd like to see these types of dungeons added as a new form of content- could even remap older dungeons and call them "unreal' dungeons.

Originally Posted by Cidel

I'm tempted to go with Hamlet Defense as a knee-jerk answer, but it wasn't as innovative as I'd like to remember it below the surface.

I see a lot of other nostalgic things people are listing off, but honestly most cannot be feasibly be brought into the current game. Square peg into round hole, etc. (tempted to point out why on each point, but no).

I think this should be assumed that people are imagining the feature would be polished at the same time.

Like the animations before had the issue that you were animation locked on basically everything and I doubt the majority asking for animations are asking for the animation lock issue. So I think if you pointed out each one you'd probably miss that most people are asking for things to be taken and then also updated . Like hamlet defense, I assume would get polished and improved. Or such as the animations can be highly detailed and also have animation blending and canceling and still work, difficulties arise with massive amounts of characters doing advanced animations but that'd be where you'd likely have options (like how you can lower the quality of other people's spells that aren't in your party so if you prefer not to see all that noise / your computer can't handle it then you're still good).

Or at least I stated as much directly and reading others, and some I recognize from long ago, feel it natural and the safe assumption to think that they're not asking for all the issues along with it (or that it has to be a carbon copy as much as it is bringing the 'best' that feature had to offer).

Originally Posted by Shougun

I think this should be assumed that people are imagining the feature would be polished at the same time.

Some, sure. However asking for things like Notorious Monsters or to farm tokens (I assume by killing mobs in a given limited area, as in 1.0) for the ability to challenge a trial just once invites more problems and vitriol (that the devs actively try to avoid) than it solves. If you look at the current hunt drama (which is super-inclusive for most people involved, barring old ARR/HW that melt with just 1 to a few players), I can't imagine all the complaining if anything of value is on the line from something that everyone is searching for. I still remember when ARR B ranks had like a half-hour/hour respawn and everyone had the same one, then the devs found it necessary to make their respawns immediate and change the weekly mark to be independent for each player. That with the third-party tools people could detect and claim Notorious Monsters; it existed for hunts as well (and we've all seen the gilfarmers warping through the ground/floating/hacking), it's just not worth dealing with. And making tokens required to be farmed/collected for boss fight participation just looks and feels like an extra step just to be annoying that people for content like BA and Bozja- where it sort of exists- rather not even bother with it. We've already been spoiled by the lack of a system.