New Game + as Time Capsule

[Sjol]

I feel like a lot of the cruft in the game that SE could fix is held up by needing to support existing things like class and job quests. Things like ARC serving double duty, the job stone system and the endless issues there. But people are often attached to those stories because a lot of them are very good.

So instead of just purging them from the game completely, they could be moved to New Game+ and activated if someone wanted to experience them now or in the future while still allowing SE to iterate on the early game. Storylines that just don't work *cough, cough PLD* could be removed so that the curious could still see them, but SE could take another pass at making compelling stories for those jobs.

Some benefits would be that we ditch the class/job distinction that is just kind of confusing in a modern version of the game. No more worrying about job stones being equipped because they wouldn't be a physical item.

I would just love for SE to actually be able to iterate more freely on the early game without stripping beloved stories forever. This or a similar mechanism could hopefully solve that problem.

[Boa-Noah]

This is just making a burden on the team for less than 0 reward, you're literally asking for the devs to basically just delete a majority of the early game so a tiny miniscule fraction of players that don't want to play with a job stone will be forced to use a job stone, further what is the benefit of players not being able to experience that early game of being a gladiator or an archer or something? Like yeah you could lock it to New Game + but why? Do you seriously think the devs are going to remake and fill that newly made void with fresh content? They don't have the time to build tail holes into armor anymore and you expect them to do all this somehow? We're way way way past the dev team sitting down for 6 months to make a 'better' introduction to Paladin because some sprouts don't get the memo about using a job stone.

[Sjol]

This is just making a burden on the team for less than 0 reward, you're literally asking for the devs to basically just delete a majority of the early game so a tiny miniscule fraction of players that don't want to play with a job stone will be forced to use a job stone, further what is the benefit of players not being able to experience that early game of being a gladiator or an archer or something? Like yeah you could lock it to New Game + but why? Do you seriously think the devs are going to remake and fill that newly made void with fresh content? They don't have the time to build tail holes into armor anymore and you expect them to do all this somehow? We're way way way past the dev team sitting down for 6 months to make a 'better' introduction to Paladin because some sprouts don't get the memo about using a job stone.

For me it's more about cleaning up the systems than anything to do with the job stones and dungeons. Honestly, I've only ever seen that a handful of times and I don't care.

In terms of 0-benefit, removing all the exceptions that exist in the code to handle the class/job distinction plus all the weapon/job stone variation plus all the equipment that has to be labeled class-specific instead of gear-specific (i.e., tanking, healing, maiming, striking, scouting, aiming, casting, healing).

We have all these different ways of slicing gear because of the early evolution of it, and it would be good to kind of bring that under a single axis. Every long-running piece of software -- even an MMO -- eventually needs to drop older systems. Some of them do it with a completely new game (e.g., Guild Wars 2) and some of them do it with a re-architecture (e.g., Cataclysm), but at some point, you have to do it. I would rather they get rid of some of these dead systems in order to make room for more greatness.

[Boa-Noah]

I would rather they get rid of some of these dead systems in order to make room for more greatness.

Okay, be specific, what systems are you talking about? Gear distinction? That's 'job identity' and the devs insist on doing it, so that's not going away and if it did it would require overhauling the entire gear system as every single piece of armor in the game is currently distinct. That's a straight up spreadsheet/archive system so it's not like it's taking any computing power or anything for the system to go 'X class can equip Y gear', there's really no need to get rid of that beyond dropping class specific gear (which I'd love but isn't something the devs want to do).

So what systems should be dropped/cut from the game and in your opinion what would they get replaced by?

Cause your example was class/job quests and gutting that would be a monumental undertaking just to overhaul the first 30 levels of the game and would require the devs to go through all the dialogue in the game to cut/change mentions to those early classes. That also included fundamentally changing how job stones function and remaking them into a sort of automatic system rather than an equip, so that's also a big change and would take weeks to untangle from everything else in the game. And this is all to 'reiterate' on the early game? The part of the game literally everyone rushes past as fast as they possibly can?

[Sjol]

So what systems should be dropped/cut from the game and in your opinion what would they get replaced by?

Sure, early gear is categorized as DoW or DoM or by specific classes/jobs being listed out instead of the categorization system they later came up with where they broke down the left side equipment into 7 categories and the right into 5. The sticking bit is ARC ("the mistake") going into both Healing and Casting depending on job, which prevents them from pushing the 7/5 breakdown lower and introducing it at the beginning rather than late ARR/early HW.

Data is not the problem. The additional logic is. The extra UI required is.

Various filtering system could then reference the 7 and 5 sub-categories. And early equipment could still indicate multiple categories so that you don't have to have quite so many pieces, though I'm all for more low-level glam:

Tanking, Maiming, Striking
Scouting, Aiming
Casting, Healing

And I'm aware there would be consequences to the rewrites. That's the cost, but as I stated earlier, it's one that every piece of software eventually pays in order to keep growing.

If you eliminated the Class Quests or at least decoupled them from the idea of you getting abilities from it, it would just be you helping out the Lancer's Guild with their various issues instead of you being and gaining abilities as Lancer.

Instead, you would get new level 1-30 questlines for PLD, WAR, WHM, SCH, DRG, MNK, NIN, BRD, BLM and SMN or they could just shift the existing stories from 30-50 down to 1-30 with a lot fewer rewrites. You would just have to hook the story earlier.

I think there's probably also a limitation on the retainers that they have to be classes, which they might also be able to address at the same time.

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Second system is removal of crafting recipes that require non-crafting components (e.g., the Crab Bow requiring an Oak Composite Bow). I'm fairly certain that's partly why we can't change jobs while crafting. It's one of those places where you could do a dupe with the correct timing both moving the bow and consuming the bow at the same time.

While I was in the crafting system, I would realign the early HW recipes to not use the late ARR components and then introduce a cleaner 1-star to 4-star labeling. You could also indicate source expansion.

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As an aside, I would also push multi-expansion systems down. E.g., the Shared FATE system and Trust (with leveling) system into SB and HW