Offline Mode

[Dellita_of_Mtek]

They've already redesigned the Crystal Tower raids in the mobile remake to make them 8-man. That is the standard they intend for it going forward for future updates.

Genuinely think it's only a matter of time before FFXIV gets an offline mode, but FFXI has managed to hang in there for way longer than I think most expected it too. It might be a long time.

And that's only if the mobile remake doesn't take over. Being free-to-play is really going to change the dynamic.

You know what is the core problem with the mobile version to me? that it is on mobile, I detest playing games on phones, I did for a long time because I liked the games themselves, but my experience is that even playing them could get physically painful to me, not in a hyperbolic "the experience is so bad" way, but rather because phones tend to heat up when you run games on them, and because they are so small, it's your screen that is going to get really hot, the same screen your fingers are constantly tapping and rubbing against, an hour in and my fingers started to feel like they were bleeding just from the heat, more than that was just not possible for me, and I've played FFXIV for a lot longer than that in one sitting, I couldn't imagine possibly playing this game on mobile as a result, unless I played extremely sparingly....

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Just going to say what I've said before in the other thread relating to the mobile game:
- Square isn't designing or deeply involved in the mobile game. That is Tencent/Lightspeed and they are an entirely separate publisher to Square Enix. Tencent would have bought the rights from SE for the mobile game, so all development and choices made will be by Tencent while they kick back some profits to SE/CBU3 overtime.

- As I said in my other post regarding my girlfriend who's actually played this mobile game, it is a dumbed down version of FF14. Side quests have been removed, the story isn't in the correct order at points, you don't have to work as hard for anything (the game literally just gives you a chocobo out of nowhere without even having an idea of what grand companies are or doing the mount side quest, for example) and the market board is locked behind a paywall similarly to how we have with the free trial. So, if you have issues supporting gacha/gacha companies I'd prepare to not even be able to sell items to other players.

- You don't *need* to play the mobile game, especially if the only reason you want to is for cosmetic purposes. You'll be sinking a lot of money into it, more than you would just by playing the PC version as they have weekly rotating limited time cosmetics/hairstyles/mounts and are fully driven by FOMO. You could easily spend $200 a month in blind boxes for different items if you want everything and have awful luck (1 per week) and that's not even counting the individual outfits and mounts they sell alongside that.

[Exmo]

If you're in a raid and you lag a few seconds, the boss looks like it's standing around doing nothing. Then suddenly your client catches up and several mechanics happen and resolve at once. Combat in this game is conducted through client-server communication. It would be an impossibly large task to rework that to be completely client-side for an offline mode, and for such little benefit at that.

[VeyaAkemi]

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Just going to say what I've said before in the other thread relating to the mobile game:
- Square isn't designing or deeply involved in the mobile game. That is Tencent/Lightspeed and they are an entirely separate publisher to Square Enix. Tencent would have bought the rights from SE for the mobile game, so all development and choices made will be by Tencent while they kick back some profits to SE/CBU3 overtime.

- As I said in my other post regarding my girlfriend who's actually played this mobile game, it is a dumbed down version of FF14. Side quests have been removed, the story isn't in the correct order at points, you don't have to work as hard for anything (the game literally just gives you a chocobo out of nowhere without even having an idea of what grand companies are or doing the mount side quest, for example) and the market board is locked behind a paywall similarly to how we have with the free trial. So, if you have issues supporting gacha/gacha companies I'd prepare to not even be able to sell items to other players.

- You don't *need* to play the mobile game, especially if the only reason you want to is for cosmetic purposes. You'll be sinking a lot of money into it, more than you would just by playing the PC version as they have weekly rotating limited time cosmetics/hairstyles/mounts and are fully driven by FOMO. You could easily spend $200 a month in blind boxes for different items if you want everything and have awful luck (1 per week) and that's not even counting the individual outfits and mounts they sell alongside that.

Yeah, I always expected something like this, to a degree. The moment I heard about f2p I expected every scummy monetization method under the sun, and some that only exist in the darkness. What people are doing right now is going through a honeymoon phase of a sort exacerbated by their discontent with the game, hyperfocusing on the things it does better, while ignoring all that is done worse, even the things that make those better things not as good as they sound on surface. It was always going to get this sort of reaction.

Messing up the story order wasn't in my bingo card, though...

[TBerry]

It is basically one mediocre RPG with lots of DLCs. Some better, some worse. But it would make housing easier. One ward, 1 house or apartment. Yours.
It would be like multiplayer in old FPS games where you're alone until someone joins you, or a Minecraft server, or... an RPG with multiplayer option.

But that would require to rebuild the game from scratch and change some things, like dungeons, raids, ally raids, etc.

[Dellita_of_Mtek]

Yeah, I always expected something like this, to a degree. The moment I heard about f2p I expected every scummy monetization method under the sun, and some that only exist in the darkness. What people are doing right now is going through a honeymoon phase of a sort exacerbated by their discontent with the game, hyperfocusing on the things it does better, while ignoring all that is done worse, even the things that make those better things not as good as they sound on surface. It was always going to get this sort of reaction.

Messing up the story order wasn't in my bingo card, though...

According to her they stripped out a lot of the beginning quests to fit with mobile game expectations (i.e. fast progression w/ little time investment). She started in Ul'dah with Summoner (unknown if that was a 2.0 decision or they just decided to switch things up with mobile) and did the intro quests (learning how aethers work, markets work, etc.) but after that it felt like she had only been playing for 30m-45m of story before already going to visit the other main cities (without even going to the Waking Sands or meeting the grand companies). You don't fight Ifrit and you skip Tam-Tara and Copperbell. Satasha you still do but they slot it in at level 10 now. You skip learning about materia and retainers and guildleves as well.

So the flow for the beginning is: character creation -> normal introduction quests -> extremely summarized version of your main city questline (like 6-7 quests tops, there's 23 in the PC version) -> unlock chocobo randomly -> go visit Limsa and New Gridania -> stay in Limsa and do Satasha

Edit:
She just brought up something else I forgot to mention. There's no push or reminder that class/job quests exist until after Satasha. So either they are just lazy and forgot to add that into the tutorial/pre-Satasha bits or they've redesigned class quests to where they're pointless now for progression outside of lore. She hasn't dove too deep into them yet because crafting/gathering testing took up her attention lol, but that really stuck out to her as something that was "off". There are also a lot less cutscenes than there are in the PC version, they turned them into simple like...half-cutscenes where the character just kind of stands there and you go through their text.

[TaleraRistain]

You don't fight Ifrit

How the heck does that work storywise? One of our whole things early on is that we're the primal slayer.

[Crafoutis]

Oh I'd love this!

[papandbuddyg]

would love a offline mode but i dont think it will happen till this game officially goes to maintence mode just like dragon quest 10

[AmiableApkallu]

Combat in this game is conducted through client-server communication. It would be an impossibly large task to rework that to be completely client-side for an offline mode, and for such little benefit at that.

Telling a client program to talk to {server over here} versus {server over there} is actually relatively trivial. The real trick would be convincing the FFXIV launcher to actually launch the server program locally in addition to the client we all know and love.

[ShadowyZero]

bro...its an mmo

There are like 20 other FF games that you can play offline if you do not want the mmo part of the experience and they already bend over backwards so hard to accomodate the ppl who don't want to play an mmo that we are barely even playing a coop game anymore, much less an mmo. If anything we need to be forced to do things with others even more.

the idea is to not have it encroach on the multiplayer aspect of the game as i stated in my initial post this would just be a separate thing from the online service, and it would not include things PvP, Raiding, Eureka-esk gameplay, or Ultimates. and this offline server would still require a subscription to access. it would essentially function as an on and off switch
to give some examples FFXV had a seperate online version while the main game was solo player an you could switch between the two, some gacha games also have this to where the main game is completely solo instanced but you can connect to online to play with your friends an do challenges or trials etc. monster hunter is even like this to where you have the one main lobby where you can meet with friends an then do hunts together.