For 1.0 players: Anything you miss?Follow

Yeah, but what you're speaking out against is baseless since the reasons you're providing are false.

As for what I miss, it would have to be the CG cutscenes. It seems they went the FFXI route for using in-game graphics for cutscenes rather than integrating CG and in-game scenes as they did in FFXIV 1.0.

It's a minor issue, but certainly not one that has me hating the current version. I'm very happy with ARR as a whole.

You still haven't backed that statement up. There is your false reason.

(I know I should let it go, but it really irritates me when people spout baseless rumors as fact.)

Edited, Oct 1st 2013 5:14pm by Pickins

Right, the pre-rendered CG they use is a mesh between the old 1.0's opening with Garlean's assault on Midgardsormr and ARR's new End of an Era movie

What I'm more referring to is the CG scenes which rendered your character in the scene as well.

Example.

The things I miss:

- Ferry/Airship rides
- Some of the music

...and that's it. ARR is a vastly superior game.

I miss the fishing. Granted I didn't play long. I guess I didn't see any of the good anyone here saw. Yes, the in-game touches were nice. Yes, the graphics were very pretty (I ran it just fine on a tower I built for around $2k to replace my older one that died a horrible death). The opening for the game, where you actually fight was awesome (and awful, stay tuned).

But were there problems? OH BUDDY!

Hey, remember when I said the opening was awesome? Well, try starting as a DoH. I would have thought they would have made a custom scene, like having you run for your life, or having to hide... but no, you need to fight the SAME DAMN BOSS your DoW/DoM did. By throwing rocks. Yea. That was a thing. Sure there was an NPC there, but you felt retarded.

The classes at launch all felt bland, identical. PUG, MRD, LNC... Same **** different name. Only PUG was truly unique... and damned broken. I remember spamming the base attack and destroying everything. The early enemies were crap. The ability to distinguish the level of enemies sucked. I know that at least one other person had to try to take on a mob just outside town only to be stunned to be crushed.

The engine was too overblown for an MMO. There's a very excellent reason they don't use high-end graphic engines for these games. And no, it is not hardware limitations, Gifted. It's because of the sheer amount of load that creates for the game. There's no need to have 400 perfectly rendered players, armor glistening in the sun, while they face hordes of enemies on the fields of battle. The reason is because it would require ridiculous invested by their fanbase to be able to play... for what purpose? Every MMO (including the upcoming ESO) downgrades for this exact reason. You are wasting the PC's resources to render **** no one will be looking at when push comes to shove. Your vision will be locked on the UI or the enemy in front of you. It's a waste, pure and simple. Can you do it? Sure, you can do it and raise the required specs, lowering your audience for the benefit of no one, really. The hardware is there, it truly is. It's just a pointless waste of said hardware. When PCs move to the next processing level, maybe it will make more sense, because that will lower the cost for entry. But having to pay 2-5k for a rig just to play an MMO you will be paying over $100/year for makes no damn sense when there is other competition out there offering better, deeper, already built experiences for far less.

The entire linking with FFXI was novel, but utterly ridiculous. It's hard enough to commit time to one MMO, committing to two is pretty insane, especially the way FFXI runs.

Yea, for those feeling like you missed something, you did. You missed suffering through a game that was deeply, horrendously flawed from its inception. It was an ego project from one of the single most anti-player, anti-community developers in Squeenix's company, and it showed. They were warned in the beta that the game needed drastic changes, and they didn't listen. This game is the one of the reasons ego projects never get done anymore. Tanaka was developing something that no one truly wanted, even if his base concept sounded interesting on paper. The simple fact is that the reason most MMO conventions exist is the same reason certain genres exist: They work. This game didn't, it truly didn't. They did their best to overhaul the atrocious launch version, and I commend them for that. From what I heard, they did a lot to improve on the release version. But at the end of the day, a flawed core will lead to a broken product.

I would absolutely love to see this quality of animation make a return,ARR has been completely bland for story telling in comparison

I had the idea, not the answer, and I never claimed to

Then don't complain for something you cannot envision. Just wanting something to be different just because it's different is how 1.0 happened. Different doesn't equal better.

Just pretend a game had none of that and no inventory screen and no visible stats. Just click on whatever is lying around to equip and then you take off whatever you had on and leave it there.

No indication of your HP. No map. No clues what to do or where to go.

Would you play that game?

I would give it a shot.

How then would you represent damage on the character? How would you compare armor/weapon stats to know if that item you just picked up is any bit better? What about spells? Or ranged combat? How would you deal with status ailments that would occur?

I throw these out there to prove a point. The UI in a game is the conveyance of these pieces of information in a clear, concise manner. You want to see how the game would look without a UI? Disable it and watch a battle. That's a UI-less game. You would have no clue what was going on if you had not played this game before.

I get the concept: Total immersion. Blur the lines between game and reality a little more. Make it seem more real by forcing you to interact with the environment to discover what you need. But the truth is that you'd wind up upset because you would die from effects you couldn't see. You'd have to test every single weapon you find against your current to even know if it was better. Without the ability to understand an enemy's strength, you'd just die repeatedly not knowing that you were dealing almost no damage to the enemy.

The reality is that until there is another way to convey this information in a clear format, a UI is needed. The UI is your "sense of self." Like the example after this of the GM telling the player how they feel. That, that is a UI. That GM is conveying information. He was the method by which the player interacted with their character. Sure, it wasn't as specific as a UI is on a game, and you could try to use something similar in a game.. but to do so, you need to have an idea how to wordlessly convey damage.

The closest game to a UI-less game is Journey. But it has no life bar, no real enemies. No combat. Why? Because all of these things become increasingly impossible without conveying some idea to the player as to the status of their character. So you'd either be left with a gutted exploration game, or be fumbling in the dark unknown trying to make sense of the game.

I think the UI-Less concept is very interesting, but for an MMO it would be ridiculous.

It would be basically like Dark Souls, but even tougher.

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In short you have to replace the UI with something. And that something, to me seems like relying on other senses to convey what the UI should be conveying.

And this is only truly possible with something like, motion sensing, haptic feedback, alternative visual representations of feedback (like a purple screen for poison), UI replacement, like a journal, or a log, and just good old fashion trial and error. Also voice and voice commands would have to play a strong role as well.

For example, for things like spells, you wouldn't have MP, but rather you'd know by trial and error, that you can only cast 3 spells in succession before you can't. I can see a Skyrim model here, where the more you use an ability the better it becomes and you would learn that.

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However this begs the question, it would be an interesting experiment, but would it be fun? Also this would be a monumental task for a single player game, but for an MMO, it would be almost impossible. Well a small irony is that communication might be easier in an MMO, because of voice chat; until NPCs are smart enough to have conversations, you would be relegated to just yes or no answers.

I think by the time any of this happens the MMO genre, will probably be dead and gone, or morphed into something else entirely.