Thread: Things from 1.0 era that could return

Originally Posted by _Pigzig

How bad was it really

You know how, in some movies or TV programs, someone will take someone's shirt in their fists and pull them close, giving them an intense look that communicates just how vital -- how much a matter of life-or-death -- what they're about to say is? Imagine me doing that, right now, as I reply "Very. Bad."

More seriously, the issues with 1.x were honestly not that the game was bad per se, but that a lot of the systems were really interesting in abstract concept, but in implementation -- and taken all together -- they added up to what could be an almost comically horrible experience.

As an example, the anima system for aetheryte teleports was interesting; the idea that each time you used the aetherytes it depleted this internal store of aether works, lore-wise. And it meant that teleports weren't something to be done lightly; when you ran out of anima, you couldn't teleport again (safely, in lore, or at all, mechanically) until that anima was replenished over time. That meant that walking from point-to-point in the world was, often, a better choice than just teleporting. In abstract, that sounds cool! But in actuality, it ran into scenarios like...

Okay, so in 1.x you had to walk to dungeons and physically enter them. Fine, that's cool. But there was a point where I wanted to run a dungeon with some friends that happened to be in the Black Shroud. A combination of some world mobs that could hit very hard, the Black Shroud map in 1.x being a tangled labyrinthine nightmare of copy-pasted trees, and the anima restrictions on aetheryte teleportation keeping some folks from teleporting to somewhere near the dungeon meant through a comedy of errors we absolutely and entirely failed to get the entire party to the dungeon at all that night, so could not run it.

Similarly, take the character animations in 1.x. I don't think anyone will dispute that 1.x had far better character animations, either in the game world itself or in cutscenes. (Honestly, the cutscenes in 1.x were amazing in some ways.) Characters in current-FFXIV feel a little bit 'floaty' when they move, while in 1.x they had a palpable weight to them that's hard to describe. (I half-suspect the 1.x characters used root animations -- which is insane for an MMO -- rather than in-place as we do now.) Which was great, right up until you discovered that in combat, if you tried to change direction too quickly, you'd take another step or two (because inertia!) and then engage in a carefully-animated turn to face your new direction... which meant you could easily walk right into the edge of an AoE, stay there, and get hit before you actually started moving in the direction you'd turned to move.

So my overall summary would be that 1.x was a whole bunch of ways in which systems like that -- many of which sounded fine in abstract and on their own -- could combine to become an incredibly frustrating experience, to the point it could get in the way of enjoying the game as a whole. And while many of the issues had ways you could work around them -- or get used to the limitations and more or less train yourself into circumventing them -- there's a point at which the effort entailed there can become greater than the enjoyment you get from the game overall.

The fact that the game engine itself was a collection of janky code and strange optimization choices (see: the infamous flower-pot) only exacerbated it.

But I think the "this system was interesting taken on its own" part of all that does mean that there are parts of the system we can be nostalgic for... even if I suspect we're more nostalgic for the potential of those pieces of 1.x rather than the actual, often incredibly frustrating, experience of interacting with them.