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Final Fantasy XIV |OT| ARR: Alpha Closed. Beta mid-Feb
- Thread starter demosthenes
- Start date
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I would imagine if you have a decent quad core you will be ok TBH.
I run it maxed with a 660 ti at 1920x1080 right now. Then again, I don't think all the eye candy is in place in this current build.
ROBOKITTYZILLA
Member
This was pretty much my experience and I'm running at 1920x1080. There are some areas out in the field where it drops into the upper 30s and 40s, but it's been very smooth overall and I can maintain a solid 60 FPS in many areas. This is with Maximum settings and areas populated with a high number of players at all times. I did have one hard lock while doing Tam-Tara but I have been smooth and crash free otherwise.
Network performance has been great also. Despite being on presumably Japanese servers, there is very little lag. It's still noticeable but nothing like the original game. I imagine that lag will be almost non-existent on a local server. Character tracking has also improved tremendously. For example, playing side-by-side next to another person in the old game, if I would move and run around, my actions would be greatly delayed on the other person's screen and would almost never match what I was actually doing. In ARR, I can run around in circles around a person and that is exactly what appears on the other person's screen, albeit with a slight delay.
In comparison to 1.0, I could get 60 FPS in a lot of areas but it was choppy, laggy and ridden with freezing, crashes, system halts, screen tearing, massive frame drops, etc. This was with some settings lower than the maximum available, AA turned down, and with Ambient Occlussion off. In addition, this was in areas of mostly low player population. With AO on, I would be lucky to maintain a consistent 30 FPS. Performance was a mess with that game.
For reference my system is: AMD 1090T @ 4.2Ghz / MSI GTX 670 OC 2GB / 16 GB RAM
Where are you based, I've noticed a fare bit of lag, especially when you hit something it takes a second or so to show the damage on the HP bar.
As you say though its nowhere near like the lag in 1.0 and the UI, vendors and NPCs all are super fast now, I've not noticed any animation lock as of yet either which is a massive plus for me. (Ifrit will be so easy now
)Yea I think all round this looks much better than 1.0, so many objects in a zone and the diversity in the landscapes makes for a much more enjoyable experience.
Getting a top of the range PC playing this and experiencing some of the future content they have planned is going to be pretty sweet
What is your average FPS and what drivers are you using?
Im the guy with the 660ti having issues with it. I can run it max but my fps is all over the place, going as low as 16 and as high as 60 depending on whats going on.
I still havent had a chance to sit down and work on fixing it, though, so any insight you can give on drivers, etc would be helpful.
ROBOKITTYZILLA
Member
Where are you based, I've noticed a fare bit of lag, especially when you hit something it takes a second or so to show the damage on the HP bar.
As you say though its nowhere near like the lag in 1.0 and the UI, vendors and NPCs all are super fast now, I've not noticed any animation lock as of yet either which is a massive plus for me. (Ifrit will be so easy now
Yea I think all round this looks much better than 1.0, so many objects in a zone and the diversity in the landscapes makes for a much more enjoyable experience.
Getting a top of the range PC playing this and experiencing some of the future content they have planned is going to be pretty sweet
I'm on the East Coast, USA. There is definitely some noticeable lag but I haven't experienced any delays in hit registration or anything like that. Primarily just some small delays in movement and some actions not activating right away. As you said, the animation blending is great and the UI is nearly flawless. Loading times are also a non-issue. Other than the initial load into the game (which is significantly faster than 1.0), zone transitions are very fast. The trade-off for more diverse and lush environments is totally worth it. So much stuff I want to talk about... I wonder if they will lift the NDA when beta starts? I'm thinking they may not lift it until open beta.
What CPU usage are you getting in task manager and what GPU usage does it show in afterburner, did you install the game on a secondary HDD, I always find that helps a lot especially for MMO's.
Yeah, reading the forums make me cringe, too. Some of these guys need to go play other games. Not necessarily MMORPGs, just games.
darkblade77
Member
Don't worry about the forums. If yoshi-p was actually listening to these guys 2.0 wouldn't look like anything like it does now. The development team definitely cherrypicks the better feedback out.
Agreed, all I'm seeing in alpha forums is do it like FF11 ... *pukes*
Yea, as I suspected ARR is basically a WoW clone dressed in Final Fantasy clothing, I don't mean that as an insult either, he's obviously more in touch with modern games than many FF11 fans
Ill have to check my usages again. I thought I took a screencap of it but I cant find it.
It is installed on a secondary HDD.
Even FFXI has strayed away from the FFXI formula. Its just not good anymore.
There are aspects of FFXI that can still make it into ARR (story, boss battles, etc) but the core gameplay just doesnt hold up.
Skillchains, level sync they invented formulas that still work.
Got my invite on the 10th as I was building my new desktop. Provided more pressure and motivation to get it done.
1 day later, I'm enjoying the sights at a solid 60fps (I've been playing XI and XIV around 15-25 FPS on a laptop for years, so this has been a world of a difference!)
1 day later, I'm enjoying the sights at a solid 60fps
(I've been playing XI and XIV around 15-25 FPS on a laptop for years, so this has been a world of a difference!)Chances are its your CPU, from whats been said *cough* you know where, 2.0 is more dependent on processing power. ( 1.0 was using shaders for everything remember
As said above though 4870 would prob be better suited to 720p @ max settings.
Just ordered my new PC should be here tomorrow yay !
1440x900
AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.20GHz
I mean its not like i'm getting horrible performance or anything, just odd drops here and there. The majority of the time its high 30s.
Glorious Ownage
Member
I agree with this. The combat system in xi right now still trumps ARR in terms of depth, strategy and challenge involved imo
I applied for the Alpha, I think I have a decent chance of getting in too
Crap we have to apply? I thought they just sent out waves to former XIV players.
Robobandit
Member
Crap we have to apply? I thought they just sent out waves to former XIV players.
Only former FFXIV players could apply in the first place..
If you don't have an active account, you need to apply on the site. People who had an account with the sub got invite mails. I stopped playing before the sub was introduced.
Sometimes, the memories are only fond because of how hilarious it was to see full alliances wipe to the mobs that you needed to kill. They were total bloodbaths. The hours you had to spend to do something like that....ugh!
The flipside is that they really felt like adventures. Youd gather up your friends and go out there and just spend hours together. Some of the best times came from that boring, long, monotonous crap. I miss that game but I dont think that current day me would able to play another game like that.
Yes and yes. I love that stuff.
With some tweaking last week, I was able to get it to be a stable 30+ fps as week but I still saw weird drops. If you have a chance, run from the Aertheryte to the Archers guild and back and see if you get any weirdness. Thats where my huge, inexplicable drop happened. A steady 17 FPS for no reason.
I should set aside an hour or two tonight to work this out. I cant put down P4G, though.
Robobandit
Member
I had to apply.. I applied the day they opened sign-ups and my sub was active at the end.. (I wanted to get Legacy.. and I did.. barely)
Although not the same, quests to unlock skills for both classes and jobs are being introduced.
I like the idea genkai as long as they are small scale party based objectives, but not large scale alliances like they had in FFXI, took too long to get everyone together.
I can't begin to imagine the chaos and time sink of gathering a party that will ensue with alliance raids in ARR.
I played 11 recently and thought it was just dumb and arachic, but I guess some people just enjoy it
(also didn't bother to play too far simply because it was just too horrible, so maybe it becomes totally awesome later, however hearing what would have been ahead of me, no thanks). However at this point its not hard to have anything thats better than ARR simply because the current system is just brain dead and sucks. I really hope beta/final videos will show some kind of combat that looks remotely close to be interesting. Seeing all the videos from the Alpha I have my doubts that any fight in ARR will ever be as entertaining as winning Nael van Darnus (Hard) was for me. Pretty much everyone in my static and tons of friends from my server feel just the same way about 2.0 at this point.I don't see how anything shown in alpha videos can give you any indication of what endgame boss fights will be like any more than you'd have an idea of what van Darnus (Hard) would be like by watching videos of people in 1.x going around fields and killing random mobs.
Not to mention that everything's restricted to level 20 max right now, so it's not like you're even seeing the full set of skills and things on display.
I played 11 recently and thought it was just dumb and arachic, but I guess some people just enjoy it
I wouldnt judge a boss fight like that until we actually see a boss fight like that. The approach to that kind of fight could end up being drastically different than what we are currently seeing from the the Alpha.
I mean, they definitely pulled off some cool stuff with the Ifrit, Garuda, and NVD fights in 1.0. I just dont see them scrapping those ideas in favor of mindless slaughter.
That's why I said I am waiting for the beta/final to show me anything interesting. I just got a bad feeling ever since seeing 2.0 the first time and the full alpha videos did not really help to ease my worries. Also SE's general secretivity about the game in generell isn't doing it either for me.
http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/blog
Can also keep track here.
EDIT: The UI elements make this feel/look like XII-2 at times. Not a bad thing of course.
Can also keep track here.
EDIT: The UI elements make this feel/look like XII-2 at times. Not a bad thing of course.
Which site URL do I need to visit to get the ball rolling?
Excellent. Wish I had been keeping up more on this sooner. Better late than never.
We better be bros in this alpha if you get in!
I did not know there was such a thing. I need to find him to level more.For those that played do you have to finish all the quests to unlock the npc that boost your character's level or is he just in some random place?
(Pretty sad that i still havent hit cap even though i've been in since november
Manthra bros 4 life!
I think hes at the end of a quest chain, have you done all the quests ?
Nope. I got to level 12 and ran out of quests. Had to be level 15 to get more.
Xux
Member
All there is is an NPC outside of the dungeon to boost your level to 15 of your above ten to do dungeon.For those that played do you have to finish all the quests to unlock the npc that boost your character's level or is he just in some random place?
(Pretty sad that i still havent hit cap even though i've been in since november
Robobandit
Member
He's outside the tam tara deepcroft dungeon.. literally right outside the entrance. Go there and you should find him.
Awesome! I just found him and leveled to 15. I walked past him and thought he was just a random NPC.
Edit: He sells the cool gear too!
I never want to see in-combat gearswaps ever again.
You include the qualifier "right now" so maybe mechanics have changed since I quit XI (right at level cap increase past 75), but I played a lot of jobs at 75, and played several of them very well, and I can say from years of experience that XI's combat system was heavy on math (as in, it boiled down to skill ranks/stat numbers), heavy on planning, heavy on macros, heavy on general game mechanics understanding, and very light on anything else. I do not consider writing a bunch of gearswap macros to make your Tachi: Gekko or Asuran Fists or ancient magic hit for 4 digit numbers to be deep combat. I don't consider knowing how to sac pull Dynamis or rotate Utsusemi to blink tank to be strategic (entertaining as it was). Knowing how to SATA a tank is only challenging if the party doesn't know how SATAing works, and I don't consider maintaining a refresh or haste cycle to be challenging (despite how many people couldn't actually do such a simple task).
Honestly, XI's combat was very simple. Most (not all) "challenge" in XI was simply understanding basic party mechanics and knowing how to get the most out of its clunky UI. Very little of XI's combat would be hard to understand and master in short order, given the player was paying attention and was appropriately stat'ed. I never played PUP at cap but I think being good at PUP was probably the closest thing XI's battle system had to something worth bragging about. Most (not all) of the "strategy" in XI was knowing how to learn from wipes and memorize information about an enemy. Most (not all) of the "depth" in XI was because roles were so tightly defined, party makeup and synergy was important and this colored the entire game (in a good way, mind you--despite all this I'm saying that might sound negative, I played XI for years and enjoyed it).
What XI had going for it was strong party-based synergy which made battles feel like they meant something (even if you were just killing crabs for hours). Putting together an exp party and seeing the chains tick as your party mowed things down like a well oiled machine--that was pretty awesome! But it wasn't because the battle system was deep or challenging, it was because you had a party of people who weren't oblivious to how the mechanics work.
Endgame content was largely the same. Because leveling with any kind of semi-reasonable pace meant you were leveling in a party, and because some things were level capped, the gap between grinding and "content" was small, so the leap was easy for most players--knowing "how to play" consisted mostly of knowing how to use your job effectively with the rest of your party, which you'd already know how to do from leveling. (As an aside, this is precisely why the whole rift among players regarding powerleveling exists, and why anti-PL faction had some ground to stand on in XI.) The only major change, generally, was alliance rather than party. Information and group experience were king in XI, and margin of allowable error was never very large.
The combat and class system in XIV1.x, by comparison, was way less synergy-based (no skillchains, etc.). What synergy there was came more from cross-class skills, and as a result, the emphasis for learning was on the individual to master his or her class(es) while ignoring the rest of the party, rather than on the party to be built with a particular group synergy in mind or to have a good understanding of the capabilities or roles of other members. Even when jobs were released, this still was an issue in 1.x. As a result of this and monster balance in general, fighting anything that wasn't boss-tier in 1.x felt very inconsequential. (As an aside, this is also why the anti-PL faction in XIV is a bunch of (probably jealous) morons, because in XIV how you play at level cap had very little to do with how you play a class while leveling.)
Information was still important in 1.x, but since knowing "how to play" was more about knowing how to do your own thing in your own bubble (how to do personal combo rotations, etc.), there is, to me and some other people, less of that feeling of cooperative accomplishment that XI captured very well. Margin of allowable error was also very large while leveling up in 1.x, which created a very tall hurdle at endgame because leveling up didn't really teach you anything about how to fight more challenging enemies (either for yourself on your own class, or for party mechanics). When suddenly those margins tightened up and you could die to things in one hit (and thanks to lag, not even know when or where you messed up), or one slip-up could cost your whole team a speedrun, one must question why the leveling grind, traversed by felling thousands of smallfry enemies, exists in the first place.
I think XIV's battle system (what we know of 1.x and what we've seen of 2.0) still had just as much depth to it as XI's. That is to say, not a terrible lot, so if you think ARR's combat has even fewer redeeming qualities, little flags go up in my mind. I think what 1.x lacked in the group synergy department (and 2.0 seems to be, as far as leveling goes), it makes up for in battle pacing and much more demanding individual skill ceilings.
That said, downing hard mode Darnus was the most fun week I had in an MMO probably since finally clearing vanilla WoW Naxxramas just in time for TBC years ago, and I hope 2.0 can deliver similar experiences. I just hope that however it turns out, they don't forget that the reason people like me play MMOs (and, in fact, I'd argue, what makes an MMO worth playing at all outside of PvP) is for experiencing those cooperative accomplishments. I'm not asking for Absolute Virtue or anything, but I want the battles to feel like the mean something--but this can be done regardless of how the actual battle system is compared to another games', as evidenced by hardmode Darnus (and Garuda to an extent, but Garuda was much more of a gearcheck fight than Darnus was).
Not enough is known about 2.0's full scale battle system and eventual content for the alpha to be a good indication of what the team is capable of, just like no one I know really expected something as engaging as hardmode Darnus to show up in 1.x. For all we know (unless they've stated otherwise and I haven't seen it), monsters may be toned down for the sake of alpha testing (burst combat, higher respawn rate, encourages more moving around, stresses server more) and it'll feel less faceroll at launch. However, I guess I do share(?) the sentiment that I'd prefer all combat to more consistently feel like it has meat on its bones, rather than anything that isn't boss-tier to be like snacking on celery, and if anything I think this has more to do with content design than it does with battle system in particular. I hope we see more improvements in group synergy in 2.0 and I will be OK with the fact that soloing for exp is WoW-tier as long as there is solid group content.
CPU usage ~50-60-%
GPU usage ~40-60%
I took 2 screens as well but I cant post them here. In one shot, the camera is slightly pointed downward and Im getting 60FPS. In another screen, all I did was pan the camera upwards slightly. FPS dropped down to 27.
One odd bit is that, the other day, I posted here about how I was getting 17FPS in some areas. I cant replicate that at all. Im not sure what changed because I saw it happen 2-3 times in in the few times I played the alpha. I cant explain it.
Clear
CliffyB's Cock Holster
omlet said:
Post 75 things have changed up significantly with the implementation of several "Stagger" systems. Essentially what these do is provide an impetus for including multiple job classes within a group by making them advantageous both for battle difficulty and likelihood of receiving better spoils.
Abyssea introduced this concept with every NM supporting three independant stagger criteria: Striking an enemy with a particular physical weapon-skill, magical weapon skill, or specific magic attack would each both inflict a severe status effect on the monster, and modify the likely content of the loot pool.
Each of these is chosen randomly from a pool of possibilities, with a hint system allowing for precise identification based on magic element, weapon type, damage type.
Dynamis was revamped using a similar method, but instead of a hint system it used an approach based on job-type or time-of-day; The recent Voidwatch monster battle system has the most elaborate variation with optimal battle strategy based on continually hitting "staggers" in order to defeat these formidable foes.
These may seem like trivial changes but they have significantly altered how combat works, making it a lot more fun and interesting.
I've heard about this. All they did was shoehorn in a mechanic to discourage the heavy job stacking that was going on pre-Abyssea, and possibly was still going on after that (aka, throw a few good SAM (or MNK if Salvage) and BLM at anything and you win). This further strengthens one of the main strong points of the game (party synergy, team play) while also giving justification for using an lolJOB, but it doesn't enhance the depth of the battle system. Changing jobs is not a strategic activity. Being required to have job X or Y in order to beat something doesn't add challenge or depth (unless you're stubborn or dumb, or going for some kind of challenge run, and are intentionally using job Z instead). A similar kind of system was in 1.x for some enemies and all it added was tedium.
But I believe you--for XI, that probably does make combat more interesting. One of my favorite things to do before I quit, besides MNK tanking chariots, was meripo on my WHM/SCH with a JP BRD friend at bird camp. I would heal, pull, debuff, haste cycle, and melee (no KC, oh well
) and there was never a dull moment (also, so many "wait, no RDM?" skeptics buried under mountains of merits). Anything short of that level of task juggling, as far as combat went, was pretty boring. If you were melee under haste cap without buffs, XI combat was about chatting via typing while you build TP. And let's not even talk about BLMs...- Status