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

Originally Posted by LemmingKingXXX

Stop overreacting to interview answers and wait until we have an opportunity to see this idea in the flesh (so to speak).

Well from these two interviews we know a lot, and it's possible to pass judgment on what we do know. Here are the facts:

A: Primal fights are going to be highly competitive. You're going to have to go up against everyone else to get one.

B: Only one Free Company/Linkshell can possess the ability to summon each primal at a time.

C: There will be some sort of activity(s) that the members of the Free Company/Linkshell holding a primal's summoning ability must do in order to build "Points" to be able to summon it. It's been mentioned that this may take up to two weeks, but that's subject to change.

D: As it is now, the Free Company/Linkshell can only hold a primal for two weeks.

E: When the primal is summoned the world will have some sort of graphical reaction, and everyone will be aware that one has been summoned all over Eorza.

That's a lot of information to make a judgment on. If players are going to hate this system, it's a lot better that the devs know now rather than when it's too late to do much to change it... Like when we're already in the beta phase.

Originally Posted by LemmingKingXXX

What this game needs more than anything is creative ideas

This is a side note as it's not directly related to the topic, but I strongly disagree with this. People often throw around catch phrases like this without actually thinking about what they're saying. "Creative Ideas" run the risk of failure, what this game needs more than anything is to follow the ideas set in place by its predecessors that we already know work. While innovation has it's place, you don't always need to try to reinvent the wheel...

The worst sequels of any genre are many times poorly received because they were undesirably far too different from their predecessors. Here's a cool video on the subject. All of the games in that video have one thing in common; they're too different from the original, and guess who's number 7 on the list.

Some of you may remember Mario 2 for the NES. Mario 2 was poorly received because it was so radically different than Mario 1. The reason was because it was actually not even a Mario game, and it was just labeled as one so it would sell better in North America. Mario 3 on the other hand, brought us what fans were expecting. All of the elements of Mario 1 were in Mario 3, but with more bells and whistles. Mario 3 was the best selling game of all time.

What this game needs right now isn't innovation... It needs is to bring back what fans expect from the series. There is no logical reason to decide, "Hmmm FFXI was very successful, and fans loved many things about it. Let's make everything completely different in FFXIV and cross our fingers." I think too many developers try to make new concepts, and then hope that they'll work so they can put on their portfolio, "Oh look what I came up with." (paraphrasing)

This is the formula for a successful sequel:
Copy what players loved about the prequel, Get rid of what they didn't, and add a little innovation here and there.

This seems to be SE's formula:
Make everything exoticly different and hope people like it. When it doesn't work change directors, make everything exotically different some more, and hope it works harder.