Thread: 1.0 Nostalgia

Originally Posted by Leira_Raine

I miss when all my friends were together and we were acting stupid. I also miss Malakhim and I trolling people randomly (i.e. run up to a random party and emote them to death). Finally I somehow miss the 38 times it took to help my friends beat van Buttface, especially when it took me three times when I did it for myself. And super lastly, I miss just shooting the breeze in random pretty areas like the lakes at Coerthas or the dangerous beaches on the east La Noscean coast. You know, where there were level 70 or so jellyfish and crabs.

Now I am just hearing from the friends I kept in contact with: I miss XIV! Even those who had quit before the end!

Soon... /10char

Originally Posted by IndigoDarkwolf

1.0 made a huge comeback in my eyes, in spite of the limited player population. I remember it started off as... well, not the the worst MMO I had ever played (I've played some real low-budget stinkers), but certainly the worst among AAA titles.

When I first saw FFXIV 1.0 in-person, I was at PAX Prime in Seattle. This was 2010, I think, and 1.0 was nearing Public Beta. I remember the booth attendants couldn't answer a lot of basic questions about the game, and were frequently having to guide players through basic tasks such as finding where they were on the map, or where their objective was. Those poor booth attendants*... I popped in and out several times throughout the day, until I spotted PC at the far end of the booth as it became available.

* By reputation, Japanese companies often aren't very good at communicating with their international counterparts, so I had assumed the staff were placed in charge of the booth setup with no actual knowledge of the game, its requirements, or really anything at all asides from its title. Though I'm sure the Sony guys had it much, much worse. Some of the stories I've heard from colleagues who used to work at Sony and its studios still leave me shivering, and absolutely amazed that Sony is still in business.

I remember feeling that the graphics looked great... but ran at 20fps on the character selection screen. Worse, though, was the input lag: 7 frames, at 20fps, is more than 300ms. I have a very good sense of rhythm, so I did circles with the mouse until I was exactly one loop ahead of the input lag and counted the number of flashing cursor icons that made up the circles I was doing with the mouse. I pushed to the gameplay, only to discover the menu-heavy interface, ripped straight from the last decade and FFXI, along with a myriad of other problems that generally made the game hard to learn and play with. I couldn't even use the map correctly, and got lost (though that's hardly noteworthy, as I have the navigational skills of Marcus Brody). I needed a lot of coaching from the booth attendant who was keeping half an eye on my lackluster success at performing basic tasks, same as with the person to my right, and the person to their right, and doubtlessly down the entire line of PCs. Upon completing my first guildleve, I had decided I'd seen enough from the show floor and would rather hope that the public beta would be better.

You always remember your first, right? Well, that was my first impression of 1.0. I was non-plussed. It was worrisome, really. In spite of some very impressive production values, I sensed that this game was going to be plagued by engine performance issues, and that the philosophy behind its UX would hinge on the Asian phenomenon of net cafes, places populated by enough players that you can simply turn to and ask for help, unlike Western gamers who prefer to play in the privacy and comfort of their own homes, on their own equipment. It wasn't just a question of whether the issues could be fixed in time, but whether anyone on that side of the Pacific wanted to fix them.

My second impression came with the beta, on a machine powered with then top-of-the-line hardware: An AMD Phenom II with 6 cores clocked at 3.2GHz, twin ATI HD 5870s configured for Crossfire, 8 GB of the fastest memory the motherboard could support, and high-performance hard drives in RAID 0 (although the machine cost a mint at the time, my budget was actually finite and prohibited SSDs). Sadly, more play time did not greatly improve my experience. The game was generally more performant on my hardware than on the machines setup at PAX, but it was clear that engine performance had been accurately presented. With more play time, I quickly found the combat to be repetitive and uninteresting. Mashing the basic attack button over and over was tedious. The stamina bar added very little to the experience, as really all it did was allow me to start a fight swinging wildly until I was forced to settle into a pace determined by the stamina bar and TP requirements of my different actions. I didn't understand the use of allocating points to elemental attributes. I didn't know where to assign my attributes for a given class, and worried that if I didn't specialize my attribute points correctly that I would end up being useless in the endgame. This, of course, stole my appreciation for the game's vaunted Armoury system, because what good was raising a bunch of classes if I'd only be good at one of them? And then I decided it was time to see about upgrading my equipment, and took to the market...

It was a deeply flawed iteration on FFXI. I found myself frequently remembering that my friends from XI had quite explicitly expressed that they had no interest in migrating to XIV, and I wished that scheduling conflicts hadn't separated me from them so that I could go back to a game that, while dated and aging, at least had an engaging combat system. I kept coming back to the beta to see if it would change, but I've seen public betas before. I've been on the development side of a beta, albeit not for an MMO. These things just don't turn on a dime. I can be prone to impulsive, hopeful financial decisions, but I couldn't bring myself to pay a subscription for XIV. I wrote it off.

Historically, I have never been much of an MMO player, either. I try, but for various reasons I never reach the endgame.

I leveled a Tauren Shaman to 30 back in vanilla World of Warcraft before the tedium of fighting without a party, or shouting for one out in Barrens' channels, finally turned me away. I had a love-hate relationship with Earth and Beyond and my fearless Jenquai Explorer, a game that had incredible potential which it never saw. I was a devout subscriber to EVE Online for a long time, though I was a total carebear and mostly stayed subscribed so I would continue to accrue skills that would ultimately let me be a better pilot. I leveled DRG and WHM in FFXI, but when I started to have a hard time matching my schedule to my friends', I got lonely and left.

I'm naturally shy, and not socially adept, so finding new networks of friends to play with has always been a challenge for me. Really, this is my Achilles' Heel in the world of MMOs: My friends stop playing, or our schedules stop aligning, and I find myself without anyone to play with.

I tried coming back. I wanted to come back.

I had tried to come back to the game when S|E stopped asking for subscription fees. My local Best Buy had a copy discounted to $30, and with a $20 coupon from spending too much money there previously, I felt I could bring myself to give it another go. I knew changes were coming, I liked the attitude from the new lead producer, Yoshi-P, and I hoped that the game would be better. For whatever reason, though, I just didn't notice what had changed, and failed to build a social network for myself, so when S|E reinstated subscriptions, I stopped playing again.

Fast-forward to PAX time again, 2012, and I was grateful to simply be there. Tickets sold out in hours, and a busy day at work had precluded me from a chance to buy any. Luckily, I had committed to attending PAX Dev again, and PAX Dev had arranged to sell 3-day passes to PAX Prime for attendees who hadn't been able to score a ticket from the general pool. The Penny Arcade guys are just too awesome for words.

Jovial to simply be standing in the Queue Room, I was even more delighted when someone passed by our line, handing out cards advertising Square|Enix's 25th Anniversary Party for Final Fantasy, being held just up the block. Whatever I had planned for the day wasn't really important anymore, I was going to go to that party. Later that day, standing in line, I chatted with the fellow fans around me. One of them was an active subscriber to XIV. I said I was sorry to hear that, and asked whether the game had actually gotten any better since launch. Although I wished the guy had gone into more details, it was enough to intrigue me.

The party, by the way, was awesome. I got a chuckle out of the minigames that had been setup, which struck me as silly and maybe not too terribly well-conceived, but I got a chance to play FF II, III, and V on actual Famicoms (I had never seen a Famicom or a Super Famicom in person, before), and delve into the depths of the moon at the end of FF IV and give Zeromus another pasting that he once again so richly deserved. I made it a point to stay until the big announcements, one of which turned out to be the Limit Break system in ARR. I couldn't decide whether it would actually be something new, or a reimplementation of Skillchains from FFXI, but it was definitely more fuel on top of my rekindled interest in XIV.

And then, suddenly, 1.0 was... better.

I resubscribed, or maybe should say finally subscribed, after PAX 2012, hoping to get into Legacy status. The game definitely felt different. The stamina bar in combat was gone. Elemental attributes were gone, and I had to reallocate my attribute points, but now each class had its own set of attributes to allocate towards. I had... combos? When were those implemented? No more button mashing for basic attacks! And Praise the Twelve, the market was fixed (largely)! Crafting was still laggy and felt needlessly cumbersome outside of leves, but seriously, we were finally talking about a game that didn't suck.

In fact, it more than just didn't suck. I found myself logging in daily and grinding a level or two before logging off for the evening. I quested on weekends, and generally explored a world that suddenly felt much more open than I had previously experienced. I even fell in with a small LS to quest with.

And then I hit the level cap on DRG. I realized: Final Fantasy XIV had somehow gone from worst major MMO I'd ever played to the first MMO in which I'd ever reached a level cap.

Well, it wasn't all rosy. I didn't care for shouting in Ul'Dah for groups to attempt United We Stand and To Kill A Raven, which frequently turned into multi-hour affairs just to fill the party with anyone who was willing to try. I have to say, though, even though my hodgepodge groups failed a lot, I was having fun once they were assembled. I don't really know if all of the other players I was failing with were having as much fun, being frustrated by taking sub-optimal groups which didn't even always have AF gear into hard fights, but I liked the challenge.

I'm so incredibly looking forward to what's in store in ARR. I want into that beta, badly. But even if ARR ends up with its own problems, I'm going to remember 1.0, probably forever, for being the comeback king, at least in my eyes.

nice write-up. cheers

I can't wait to make Mog weapon noises in 2.0!

Moments of my characters that i love collecting

Want to say thanks to Wandering Flames's Asana and Zephyr, Thanks to withfrosted LS, such as Restless Abota, Totobi, Minhfla, thanks to Acacia, Besaid/Balmung Community and most important to two of my dearest friend that i made in FFXIV, Namiye and Tsuchi (also Tricia Greenflower)


Namiye(Elezen) and Tsuchi(miqote)

I will miss the intro... I loved that, expecially the LimsaLominsa one! Do you think it will be the same o similar?