Thought about SWTOR vs ARRFollow

What would your vision of a Final Fantasy-themed MMO be?
An mmo that takes elements from every Final Fantasy before it, streamlines those elements, allows solo progress for leveling and the daily redundant task, but pushes us into a strong multiplayer direction.

What style of combat?
The exact UI they have now for the controller. But incorporate a modifier feature via UI or button manipulations such as holding it down, etc. This modifier would let you control parameters like potency, range, etc.

How would you like to handle questing?
More varied questing with unique ideas and interfaces for interesting quests. Play around with changing npcs views or minds through my actions and conversation choices. Explore different quests job descriptions besides the common kill, fetch, escort stuff.

Story?
I'm no writer for games or books. The writers seem to be doing a good job in ARR. I wish for some emergent lore but the story should be done by SE.

Remember that your golden rule here was "not WoW." So, ok, do those things well without making it at all like World of Warcraft.

As long as the game puts Final Fantasy before mmo or any other game. I care not if they take mindsets or ideas from other mmos. But whether or not they borrow. It has to be good, really good. Half *** execution in being unique or common makes people want to butcher babies rather than play your game.

You are very true, but i want to believe that game that hopes to achieve something will resolve the stability and lag fast enough. I believe almost every MMO game has server problems in their launch but its up to them to fix it fast enough. From what you say SE failed to do that with 1.0 something i trust your word since i didn't get to play it.

I'm not gay, but I'd totally tap Bill Murray.

The golden rule isn't really "not WoW", I just don't have zero interest in clone games. WoW is a pretty good game and I don't think it's so wrong to take inspiration from it, but I don't want to play a game I've already played in a new skin.

For me, it would be a sandbox MMORPG, first of all. It wouldn't be a themepark World of Warcraft game where you're on rails all the time moving from quest set to quest set where you have to play almost exactly like the developer intended.

I would probably put a big focus on exploration and rewarding player curiosity, with lots of easter eggs for the players to find (little hidden camps, secret quests, secret monsters, etc.) and trophies for finding that stuff. There would be easy to use grouping tools.

There would be quests to encourage exploration to new areas to keep the player moving through the game without totally handholding them, most other quests would contribute facts and tidbits of information relating to the overarching story. I wouldn't add any mindless kill/fetch quests, or go talk to this person for a chunk of EXP. This stuff is just tedious.

I would have a seamless open world, no zones (which break immersion).

For story... I'm no writer. I think it would be cool if you got to make some choices throughout the story which made you feel like you had some impact, even if it didn't necessarily change the outcome (I'm thinking of The Walking Dead). Also, I would probably try to make the nations much more distinct from each other than they are currently. I mean, if one nation was supposed to be a bunch of savage pirates, one more spiritual (I think that's what Gridania is supposed to be?), one more rich, there would need to be a lot of elements in the environment to drive those ideas home.

For combat, I would go with building up TP to unleash devastating attacks. It just feels good. FFXI did it, and TERA did it (with much different targetting, etc). I don't think FFXI's combat was bad on a technical level, it just needed to be more fast paced and have cooler graphics.

I really don't know if people would want a game like that, and I'm clearly not a game designer. I just tried to answer because you asked. I don't think you need to know exactly what the "perfect Final Fantasy MMORPG" would be like to say that people don't want another themepark World of Warcraft game. At this point, there are literally hundreds with the same features and gameplay as FFXIV.

Yea i never understood why its bad to borrow elements from wow. I enjoyed some of the elements wow had so if i can have them in the next game it wouldn't be too bad.

He just asked what my ideal Final Fantasy MMORPG might sound like. Also "you can tell"? You stated that you were a game designer and proceeded to put me down for not being one, but you didn't really call out any of my ideas as being bad for game design reasons... it just seemed like an unnecessary jab at the end.



The information is all public at this point.



That idea isn't necessarily from Xenoblade (it goes back way further), but the concept of taking things from other games isn't a bad one. It only becomes obnoxious when you take so much that your game doesn't really have its own identity.



I don't see why building up TP points through regular attacks has to be a slow process.



A little bit, in the sense that they're not handholding you from quest to quest. They were more fragmented. The quest system in FFXI was too confusing and unclear for people though. How to start quests, how to complete them, whether you had started a quest... it was all a bit unclear. But yeah, kind of.

Edited, Apr 16th 2013 11:58am by Killua125

I want to put my fist through my monitor when people use the phrase "break my immersion". It's such a ******** excuse to ***** about things done in the game.

Sorry to cause another hole in your monitor, Wint, but I do have some things that do break immersion in a game.

Inconsistent music. A forest playing hard rock music or something where it clearly doesn't make sense.
Inconsistent style. 1.0 bugged the hell out of me when we went from walking through the Shroud to Thanalan desert with no sense of gradual transition.

There's other things, but loading screens isn't one of them. It can get a bit annoying, but until processing power catches up with graphics on home consoles it's something that'll need to be dealt with.

Edited, Apr 16th 2013 9:01am by UltKnightGrover

In hindsight, maybe it should have been Bill ***** Murray, but I stand by my original statement.

I recognize that my involuntary urges around "immersion" are unusual and most likely idiotic, but I can't help it (it's like when people say gils when referring to multiple gil HULKSMASH )

Regarding zone loading times, I don't think they should be long either, but from my experience with my hands on, the zones load fast and are really not a big issue.

Fun fact for you XI players (noticed from my hands on in San Francisco), you can keep typing your message to your friends (Tell, LS, Party, etc) while zoning, the UI doesn't blank out while you're changing areas. It's freaking awesome

You keep saying every few seconds. I highly doubt that's accurate.


edit: If the zones are as big as they were in FFXI, I really don't think it'll be an issue. I think XI was very immersive.

Edited, Apr 16th 2013 12:27pm by JonnyWolf

I love zones, and loading screens accompanying them.

In your example of a snowy area that gets gradually snowier, how is your immersion not "broken"?

You have 2 ways to do that:

- The snow gradually builds after walking MANY MILES, like real life.
- The devs realize no one wants to walk miles and condense it to feet.

In the first case you have a boring game, and in the second its the same thing as a zone, only you need 2 braincells to notice it, instead of just one with a loading screen.

Same with any other drastic environment change.


In terms of limiting creativity, see example above. Other examples include expansion packs with new areas. "Well we really wanted to add that tropical rainforest area but there just was no place to start the transition and we didn't want to spend all our resources making it."

Creativity is limited by hardware and software capability, and by making zones, the designers can create more elaborate structures, more caves, more giant lighthouse windmill thingies with moving parts.

So yes, seemless world comes at a sacrifice to playability (not just PS#4 limitations, but people with lower-end computers)

The thing is, even zones within the same region should have subtle variations in color and landscape. Although the regional climate will be the same, the micro climates due to elevation and proximity to rivers and streams will all be different.

One of the things that was depressing about The Black Shroud in 1.0 was that it was the same uniform green throughout every zone, then suddenly switched to the jagged mountains of Mor Dorhna without warning. With the individual zoning in 2.0, they can probably have a much more gradual change over to the mountainous area.

Edited, Apr 16th 2013 1:31pm by Catwho