XVI and XIV implications

[Striker44]

Question? So how quickly does that sense of wonder and exploration fall out once you've done it multiple times to notice a pattern and it starts to be lackluster?

Because let me tell you, that only ever happens when the game is all magical and new to you but then reality kicks in and you start to develop your own endgame agenda and go about playing the game optimally.

Call me jaded but I'm pretty sure that sense of adventure is so easy to fall off in this day and age.

This x100. I still remember an awesome afternoon I had playing WoW back in the day on a PvP server in one of those lower-level contested zones, where a few of us on each side held a good hour-long spontaneous battle for a town. Part of why I still remember it so fondly is that in the 15 years or so I played WoW...that happened exactly once. My take is it's definitely rose-colored glasses acting like the sequence of events Shinkuno posted happens on anything resembling a regular basis, or that it can't likewise happen in FFXIV. (Heck, just this morning I was part of two very chatty A-hunt trains, the second of which spontaneously morphed into an S-hunt when one popped right near the end - tons of fun.)

Its clear that most people that defend this game at this point just want to watch a TV Show without looking like a "lazy person that just sits on their couch watching tv all day" so they pretend there is any gameplay left in this "game".

Strange. I played for a couple hours this morning doing a variety of activities and didn't even encounter a single cutscene. It was all active gameplay. Almost like your description of the game is intentionally dishonest and shaded by an unhealthy bitterness...

Feel free to continue to whiteknight and excuse for a company that couldnt care less about you. May as well go buy the next store item too. You are not jaded, you are just prime target for FF14. People that want to put in 0 thought, 0 effort, just sit there and watch badly animated cutscenes.

When you reach the point of personally attacking someone with pathetic insults because they're having fun, it's time to move on. For your own health.

[NanaWiloh]

They can. Not saying they will. We’ll find out in 20 days anyways. If they did, we would all benefit from it. If they added ray tracing and more recently Nvidia reflex to WoW which is an older game I don’t see why they couldn’t.

We really as whole need to stop settling for mediocrity. I just showed evidence of a game actively doing something like this and instead of agreeing it would be cool you continue questioning it.

The answer is it always depends on how much effort they put into things. Let’s hope for the best.

Keep smoking that mountain of hope and illusion.

[Katt_Felista]

This FF is pure Terminal end of RPG cancer at Square Enix. Don't know what they were thinking with the combat system including absolutely no mechanics or strategies from the huge lore of monsters, their abilities, magics, effects, status effects, no-thing, even the "rpg" elements are second class citizen afterthought, the plot is extremely boring and linear after the demo scene, u try not to snooze at the fake political drama that leads absolutely nowhere, the game tries to mix in elements of the cringe acting from Kingdom hearts with serious subject like slavery and then go into "with the power of friends" and some Twelve corpo plot with Joshua wearing the kingdom hearts style hoodie, "u won't touch my brothuuuur" and shouting the cringe "mega fire, giga fire" topping off the cringe , Cid's "disappearance" in the most undramatic sequence and music of a generic town, having the main character crying and moaning like a young teenager when he's well over his thirties.

This felt really embarassing because the producer didn't want to go "ALL IN" Adult themes, no he wanted to mix in prepubescent precoom adolescent cringe into the mix and have overrexagerated acted scenes that were facepalm worthy, not even wanting to talk about the half baked combat system because DMC V has it way way thousandfold way better then this.

What Yoshi P made is a conglomeration of every pop culture phenomenon he more or less liked into one game while committing to NONE of the themes more then 55 % for each of their mixed in parts, making a game that lacks not only identity, but character, yeah, it lacks "character" / personnality, it really does try to blend in Final fantasy XIV, Devil may cry, Azura's wrath, Attack on Titan, and game of thrones, without PUSHING in any direction, it's like you can make a star pattern of every single of these influences and the diamond formed by the schematics is just in the center, 50% of every influence but nothing stands out, nothing has been fleshed out more then the other, resulting in a blended soup that is barely "okay" and passable, that's what the game is, "mid" and unmemorable after u finish it. Nothing "STICKS" out, it's too smooth, too safe, it tried to be the EDGIEST it could be in the demo story ONLY , the rest of the game is FULL of platitudes and boring linearity and don't get me started on side quests.

SE really did sold this game on appearance and almost mostly falsehood with the demo, when the whole rest is insipid and bore you to death in useless zones and useless towns, even the chocobo is totally useless as you can just fast travel and has no special abilities other then stomping on monsters it cannot even kill.

[Katt_Felista]

Exit the mirror / reflect, triple, quadruple magic from monster, stealing monster abilities, paying attention to not use fire on fire ennemies, paying attention to not use ice on ice, or electricity on water with puddles under your feet, nothing "RPG" that made the fantastic and mythological library of monster and tactics from these monsters and mythological creatures that MADE and are part of the essence of Final Fantasy, into this game. Itemization is a joke and also an after thought, real customization of stats is non existant, Clive "ifrit trigger" and his medieval cosplay of Dante is even more cringeworthy when none of his character and personnality show outside of some combat, and even in combat he isn't that very vaindicative or pushing boundaries neither, it's funny to see such an erased, nodding and pacifist, barely "present" character being borderline so passive and acquiescing to everything he is asked to do, wearing a pale imitation of Dante's attire, it's a joke right ? Talk about a neutered / nullified character that is a clear reflection of the boredom of the entire game.

Yeah, and while i played it, enjoyed the combat for 5 minutes, u just end up spamming abilities in the end, u don't even need any normal hits anymore after u retrieve cid's one, combat system is a farce that doesn't make you think about anything, when everything is so '50%' baked and none of the systems try to be in your face and stands out, this game, this game has one of the worst stories in an FF, it is boring as hell, the demo sold a lie of a story that falls extremely flat after it. There is no "maintaining" any stakes of the premisces of the demo story and interest in any way, you very early suspect that one character is still alive, you do nothing to get a real revenge, nobody gives two shits about what really happenned, not even Joshua seem to care about the ultimate betrayal his brother's gone through. way too many plotholes, way too many things that could have had a human / deep and dark treatment, have been left on the table to rot under complacency and political correctness to make sure kids could play the game also, when it's clear they wanted, sometimes, to go the route of the witcher 3 for some of it. No, cVcked ambition, never going FULL into it, allways having that "but what if the kiiiids play the game, let's call back to kingdrom hearts power of friends" .

This was lame as fuck.

Playing FF1 to FF12 was like playing Chess vs the final fantasy mythological status ailment and magic tricks, but playing FF16 is like playing checkers without any opponent.

[Catwho]

Don't know what they were thinking with the combat system including absolutely no mechanics or strategies from the huge lore of monsters, their abilities, magics, effects, status effects, no-thing

You say this, but I definitely died from Doom to the very first C rank Ahriman hunt in FFXVI until I realized Doom was something I needed to dodge.

There is strategy involved in most of the harder fights if you don't want to take 4 hours of repeated dying to kill them, as someone said they did on one of the S ranks in one of my forums. I was shocked. That same fight took me roughly 10 minutes, but that's because I figured out pretty quickly how to play the game the way it was presented.

The bosses have ability cast bars just like XIV and once you realize that, it's pretty easy to figure out how to navigate them. You even get to do the chimeric do-si-do with red eyes / blue eyes. That is part of strategy.

I'm currently on my second play through in Final Fantasy mode, meaning I couldn't cheese the mobs like I did by overleveling on my first play through. Some of these fights are now rough.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Playing FF1 to FF12 was like playing Chess vs the final fantasy mythological status ailment and magic tricks, but playing FF16 is like playing checkers without any opponent.

For the record the first 3 FF games lacked any feasible strategy except for basic attack/haste buff and just hit them really, really hard. Strategies didn't start to get complex till FFIV and it was at its peak with FFV. Most of the other games afterwards had the difficulty be very exploitable, and or easy.

FFVI had press x to win button with Ultima, FFVIII had Limit Break spam, FFIX had auto-regen which made healers even more useless than in FFXIV.

FFXVI is nicely placed under this category of entries and that just leaves us with FFVII, FFX, FFXII, FFXIII that have actual semblance of strategy in the mainline entries.

So I call bullcorn on you saying playing FF1 to FF12 was like playing chess. You have no clue at all what you're talking about if you actually go take a step back and see what you're actually doing in the combat of those games.

[RitsukoSonoda]

For the record the first 3 FF games lacked any feasible strategy except for basic attack/haste buff and just hit them really, really hard. Strategies didn't start to get complex till FFIV and it was at its peak with FFV. Most of the other games afterwards had the difficulty be very exploitable, and or easy.

FFVI had press x to win button with Ultima, FFVIII had Limit Break spam, FFIX had auto-regen which made healers even more useless than in FFXIV.

FFXVI is nicely placed under this category of entries and that just leaves us with FFVII, FFX, FFXII, FFXIII that have actual semblance of strategy in the mainline entries.

So I call bullcorn on you saying playing FF1 to FF12 was like playing chess. You have no clue at all what you're talking about if you actually go take a step back and see what you're actually doing in the combat of those games.

Compared to 14 and 16 they are like playing chess. You had enemies that were super resistant to various types of physical damage or physical or magical damage as a whole. Enemies that were immune to or actually absorbed certain attack elements. Drain type spells and abilities actually worked backwards if you tried using them on undead. Status ailments actually having a meaningful effect in battle. 15 even accounted terrain where the battle is being fought to a small degree if you'd ever used thundaga or blizzaga while fighting in water.

As for FF6. Ultima was a spell many people never obtained unless they were following a game guide. The spell was basically the equivalent of character specific ultimate weapons in later titles. Though there was at least originally the bugged interaction of vanish + doom. FF8 simply had a combat system that turned out to be a poor design when put into practice. Spamming limit breaks wasn't the issue with it. It was easily broken by junctioning spells to boost stats while keeping your character level as low as possible. FF9 auto-regen eliminated the need for active healing against most fodder random enemy encounters. However on challenging side content or bosses that you didn't over gear and/or over level it didn't eliminate the need for active healing. You certainly weren't killing fire elementals with fire spells... though some games you could technically kill bombs with their element provided you could survive them self-destructing.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Yes and just how necessarily useful was a lot of those elements in battle? Has anyone ever actually used poison to their advantage? Lets also not forget the myriad of bugged status effects in the older FF games were many of them flat out didnt work or gave you the opposite of its effect. FF1's Focara spell and FFVI's blind status come to mind.

Oh and cant forget how abusive the instant death spells of Toad and Mini were in FF2 (spells that you easily acquire) were pretty much destroys any of the intended challenge the game had, even affecting the bosses. Also more into FFVI, even if not everyone gets Ultima, there still so many ways to cheat the game, that Ive seen people abuse (like the aforementioned vanish + doom combo)

Besides the issue here is the argument of hyping up the so called "chess" of the older games. I dont care that FFVIII had a Junction system, yeah actually THANK YOU for highlighting the problem with that game making spells that you never EVER use in battle instead being used to play stat numbers on a freaking menu. And yes, the whole combat system in FFVIII is still Aura/Squall's LBs. And also the issue with the auto-regen in FFIX, is actually more of an unintended technical limitation because the game's battle pacing is so slow that the auto healing still ticks in during long attack/spell animations. Its downright obscene how abusive auto-regen is in FFIX, which like I said makes actual healing useless. Now this isnt entirely game breaking mind you but lets also not pretend that anyone every actually plays "chess" with old FF combat.

You're being fooled into the illusion of complexity with previous FF's combat. This is not playing chess.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Also btw Im saying all of this as someone who actually prefers traditional turn-based combat, and older FF game's combat in general. Its because of my love for them that I can also call out bullcorn on people trying to say that older FF games were "SUPER COMPLEX OMG!!!! FFXVI IS TEH SUXXORZ"

[SieyaM]

For the record the first 3 FF games lacked any feasible strategy except for basic attack/haste buff and just hit them really, really hard. Strategies didn't start to get complex till FFIV and it was at its peak with FFV. Most of the other games afterwards had the difficulty be very exploitable, and or easy.

FFVI had press x to win button with Ultima, FFVIII had Limit Break spam, FFIX had auto-regen which made healers even more useless than in FFXIV.

FFXVI is nicely placed under this category of entries and that just leaves us with FFVII, FFX, FFXII, FFXIII that have actual semblance of strategy in the mainline entries.

So I call bullcorn on you saying playing FF1 to FF12 was like playing chess. You have no clue at all what you're talking about if you actually go take a step back and see what you're actually doing in the combat of those games.

I'm not sure I would call "dodge incoming attacks" a strategy. Auto-regen is a strategy. Utilizing buffs and debuffs is a strategy as well, even investing in attack heavy characters and building them up to be one hit killers is a strategy.