Thread: What are your thoughts on 2.0's summoning system?

GE: What is the one aspect of new content you are most excited for people to see.

Yoshida: The new summon system.

GE: Ummm… what can you tell us about the new summon system?

Yoshida: [Laughs] As you know there are primals – powerful demigods- in FFXIV. Summons are a staple to any Final Fantasy game, but to me, in recent games the summons have been cheapened because they are so easy to access. The current Ifrit and Garuda battles are hard, but I don’t want a world where everyone has summoned, and is walking around with, their own personal Ifrit. It cheapens how hard it was to get access to that primal. In 2.0 there will only be one of each primal per world. So one Ifrit, maybe one Shiva maybe one Ramuh, per world. These primals will be somewhere in the open world, roaming,and players will need to find them and then get together to defeat the primals. If they win and are the first to defeat it, the primal will come under their (temporary) control. For a 2-week period, the free company or linkshell who defeated the primal will have time to raise up the primals’ “gauge”. If they get it sufficiently raised, they will get to choose when and where to summon the primal for help. It could be used in any battle, and once they use it, the weather in the whole world will change so everyone in the world will know that the group used the primal. Once they summon the primal, it will of course return to the open world.

GE: Will there be a way to know the status of each primal?

Yoshida: No. Currently, we don’t want to show that. We want players to talk among themselves about the primals and their status.

GE: How does the primal gauge get raised?

Yoshida: Other than “raising its gauge” we can’t say any more right now. But what we can tell you is that it will be very community related. The capturing group is going to have to do certain things to raise the gauge.

GE: We take that that if you don’t raise the gauge within that two weeks the primal is released?

Yoshida: Exactly. Also, its not necessarily two weeks. That’s what we have now, but it could change. It will be a set period of time.

Here's a link to the full interview

RPG Site: Primal fights will become roaming in 2.0 for the summoning system; are there any specifics you could go into? Will weapons and things like that still be obtainable, and will there still be instanced fights like which are available in the current version?
Yoshida: Most of the primals will not be “roaming” the public areas, and their battles will still be instanced, though it will be more challenging to discover these instances.
Koji: It looks like there was a little bit of misinformation given at the E3 interview (and this may have been my fault, or it may have been Yoshida-san’s). The implication given was that all the primals would be roaming, and once they were summoned, they would pop somewhere else in the world. This is not the case. While roaming primal are still not out of the question, the summonable deities will be instanced-based, with the primal going back to these instances once they’ve been summoned. However, players will still have to look for these instances once they’ve become available, preventing camping.

Seems like there was another statement made recently on the subject saying that most of them wont be roaming?



Okay so I'm going to try to keep my post from being overwhelmingly negative as best I can. Let's talk about this new primal summoning system. I've been thinking a lot about it since I read this interview. What's the point of it?

One of the potential uses for a summon I came up with is that they might be used to take down HNMs that would be otherwise nearly impossible to defeat without them. Which means, everyone would compete with other groups to get the primal, spend a bunch of time doing stuff in order to summon it, and then use it to try to kill a HNM... While everyone else waits approximately two weeks for it to be used so they can get another chance. I don't really like this idea.

The other idea that crossed my mind was that they could be used just like they were in other games in the final fantasy franchise. One hit powerful attacks and that's it. If this is the case, seems like there would be really no reason to put forth the effort of obtaining them, so I rather doubt it.

I guess It could also be possibility that in addition to the summon being a powerful attack/buff, by using a it during certain boss encounters the group would have a chance of obtaining rarer loot that wouldn't otherwise drop? I don't know, that seems to be stretching it.

I really can't think of any other possibilities, and to be honest I'm not too satisfied with the ideas I've come up with. The fact that Yoshida says this is what he's most looking forward to in 2.0 really has me curious.

What are everyone's thought on the subject?

I think it's the worst idea of FFXIV.

in recent games the summons have been cheapened because they are so easy to access."
Well, it's not in recent games but, in all of them

There is no FF where getting aeons has been hard.
Except maybe the recent FFXIII...

I don't like the idea to use summons in a kind of PvP.
There's a huge fan base lovin' them, but they will be reserved for this kind of pvp and PGM -.-

I don't want to walk around all the day with my Ifrit
It would be okay to me if only some ppl in LS could summon.
It' would be okay for a big recast time like 24HRS, and a recast shared by all the free compagny members.
But
I want the possibility for two LS to call Ifrit at a same time.
And I don't want to go search an aeons again and again.

What would you think of:
- A hard fight tp obtain the right to call the primal
+
- A LS/Compagny recast time
+
Offerings to summons in order to make them come
To call Gilgamesh we would need to have/spend/offer 999 darksteel swords.
To call Carbunckle, 999 rubies.
To call Leviathan 999 cooked fishes.
...