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Final Fantasy XIV |OT6| Casino Royale

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WolvenOne

Member
Knockback comes from Twintania's Twisters!
There's a lot of familiar patterns is all I'm saying which is why say when we attempted T10 blind we immediately started brainstorming ways to stack/unstack/kama sutra our way around the mechanics as opposed to just screaming WHAT DO WE DO.

Actually that makes me wonder how they're gonna approach further encounter design because besides reconfiguring mechanics, is there really that much they haven't done yet?

Probably a combination of rejiggered existing mechanics, alongside a handful of new stuff. Honestly, I have no idea what else that could come up with, but I thought that before and ended up being surprised by things like Petrifaction/Voice, so who knows.
 

Tabris

Member
They kill the unlucky sapper but if somebody happens to stand close to the explosion, they do get knocked back with the force of a thousand suns, and I'm not sure if it doesn't go all the way into the wall in 100% cases.

Oh that could be true. I never seen that as we never stood close to each other.
 

scy

Member
They kill the unlucky sapper but if somebody happens to stand close to the explosion, they do get knocked back with the force of a thousand suns, and I'm not sure if it doesn't go all the way into the wall in 100% cases.

Think it's the entire length of the arena? I'm fairly sure I've been punted at least once from one side to the wall of the other.
 

Valor

Member
Knockback comes from Twintania's Twisters!
There's a lot of familiar patterns is all I'm saying which is why say when we attempted T10 blind we immediately started brainstorming ways to stack/unstack/kama sutra our way around the mechanics as opposed to just screaming WHAT DO WE DO.

Actually that makes me wonder how they're gonna approach further encounter design because besides reconfiguring mechanics, is there really that much they haven't done yet?
I actually don't think they need to do too much. That learned behavior in players is a good thing, not a bad thing, because they can add complexity and moderately "bullshit" mechanics that can be decidedly less "bullshit" because they have a callback to previous mechanics. Basically, they can add further complexity without compromising integrity and up the difficulty level of mechanics because they don't have to introduce the mechanics.

Example: T8 introduces a tether that someone can intercept.

T13 brings the tether back in final phase. Instantly you know that these tethers A) can be picked up by someone B) probably should be brought away from the group because of t8.

Instantly you figured out the entire mechanic because of previous experience, the difference now is that you're taking a lot more damage and all that other fluff, which is the added complexity.

That's a simple point, but I think everyone can see what I'm trying to say.
 

Tiops

Member
Tiops, T13 progression is exactly the same as that except the Phase 4 moment of T9 occurs in Phase 3 of T13. That's the hard part to get out of successfully (everyone alive, healers mp not fucked, etc).

You still go through the "Let's do boring Phase 1 and 2 over every single time to get to practice later phases".
But is it a "you're already dead" phase or do you have a few seconds to understand what's going on?
 

WolvenOne

Member
Indeed, they don't need to add entirely new mechanics with each and every single mechanic. The occasional new mechanic is great, but not every fight needs to be a special snowflake. Trying to make each fight a snowflake eventually takes it into gimmick territory anyway.

Speaking on the future, and this has nothing to do with battle design really. I really hope they add a few Dragon models in the expansion. We have like, the one big one, the dragonfly model, the Naul model, and those smaller sized eyeless/armless dragon models. A couple of these don't even really feel like dragons, so a few new dragon models would be appreciated. Especially if they're really going to be a lot more prevalent.
 

Tabris

Member
Speaking on the future, and this has nothing to do with battle design really. I really hope they add a few Dragon models in the expansion. We have like, the one big one, the dragonfly model, the Naul model, and those smaller sized eyeless/armless dragon models. A couple of these don't even really feel like dragons, so a few new dragon models would be appreciated. Especially if they're really going to be a lot more prevalent.

Just in T13, there's 7 different dragon models.

But is it a "you're already dead" phase or do you have a few seconds to understand what's going on?

That depends on the person & group. If you're all new, you'll most likely die a bunch on the first one, then the second one, then the third one. We personally practiced before using markers just in the arena (and kept accidentally aggro'ing Bahamut lol)
 

WolvenOne

Member
They're all recolors.

Indeed, they're all models we've seen before, and if dragons show up a LOT in the expansion, those models won't be enough.

A small handful of new models, and reworked existing models, will pretty much take care of this though.

Edit: Case in point, in the teaser trailer we see dragons that, from a distance, appear silvery or white and possibly have feathers. None of the existing models fit that bill, so there's one new model right there. And if we get another Stone Vigil esque dungeon full of Dragons, it'd be really disappointing to see the same 2-3 models from SV used again. I realize they cannot go crazy, but a handful of new models for what is presumably going to be a prominent enemy type, is probably warranted.
 

Dunan

Member
It doesn't matter if you can handle the later phases or not. If you can't handle a phase leading up to a later one, then you still won't get the fight down, whether things are random or not. How exactly would making the phases random solve anything? If anything it just makes it harder and guarantees that less people will even down the fight because they can't adapt to the randomness.

It would still help, because you would get an equal amount of practice at all the mechanics that are thrown at you. As it is, if it takes two tries to get a feel for each phase, if you've taken N tries, you've had the first phase N times, the second phase (N-2) times, the third phase (N-4) times ... meaning that your practice sessions aren't very balanced.Some kS

Now you might say that this has been part of video games for 40 years; you have to clear the early parts of the game every time in order to figure out how to handle the late stages of Pac-Man where energizers don't work, or how to handle those fire-spitting Hammer Brothers that you don't see in World 1-1 of Super Mario Brothers.

But with those games, you're playing by yourself, and you can sit down, controller in hand, and just say "I'm going to practice until I master this." Not so in an MMORPG where you are letting other people down (and taking their valuable time) with each failed attempt.

Some kind of practice area, or Guildhest (preferably with the exact same names for the attacks) would be quite helpful here.

I agree that those "surprise! You're dead" phases aren't really great. T5 and T9 has those after 10 minutes of easy stuff.

After that it's 10 minutes of boring easy stuff until you get to pure chaos that wipe the party in 5 seconds and you have no idea why. You have to record that and watch in slow motion to see what's hitting you, why and in what order. When you finally get it, Divebombs.

This is the next part of the problem. In a non-MMO, you can pause, whenever you like, and get your bearings. You can typically have all the time you like in between commands, and can lower the battle speed.

In this game, everything happens so quickly, and you can't pause or slow things down at all. When people are talking about using recording equipment to analyze an unavoidable defeat frame-by-frame, that's when you know that your game design needs to be tweaked.
 

WolvenOne

Member
Well, to an extent, but there are a few counterpoints to that.

First: With seven other people playing, you're not always going to see what started your parties death spiral, regardless of speed. The human eye can only focus at one place at a time, and in single player games you pretty much only have to look at yourself and the enemy, rather than yourself, the enemy, and seven other people.

Second: High End raid content IS supposed to last people six to seven months. So there needs to be some level of difficulty. Granted, that doesn't mean you're wrong in and of itself, but it's something that needs to be considered.
 

Kintaro

Worships the porcelain goddess
Indeed, they don't need to add entirely new mechanics with each and every single mechanic. The occasional new mechanic is great, but not every fight needs to be a special snowflake. Trying to make each fight a snowflake eventually takes it into gimmick territory anyway.

Speaking on the future, and this has nothing to do with battle design really. I really hope they add a few Dragon models in the expansion. We have like, the one big one, the dragonfly model, the Naul model, and those smaller sized eyeless/armless dragon models. A couple of these don't even really feel like dragons, so a few new dragon models would be appreciated. Especially if they're really going to be a lot more prevalent.

They will just add in the XI wyrms to the game. =P
 

Tabris

Member
In this game, everything happens so quickly, and you can't pause or slow things down at all. When people are talking about using recording equipment to analyze an unavoidable defeat frame-by-frame, that's when you know that your game design needs to be tweaked.

Totally disagree, that's when you know a game is a good kind of challenge. When you want to game tape to see what happened and what went wrong. It's like you are preparing to play the same team again later in the year, so you watch game tape of your last loss to determine how to beat their strategies.

If it wasn't for the challenge of Coil, I wouldn't play this game anymore personally.

Also that frame-by-frame is very common for challenging games. Look at games like DMC and Ninja Gaiden. Or Dark Souls. This is much easier than those, this is more about the team work side of it. So actual less about frame-by-frame but more about game-taping for here's how individual people can help / improve a situation. I want to see the challenge I am seeing in T8 Savage applied to actual tangible rewards (like maybe i135 gear as an example).
 

Xux

Member
Heavensward being about dragons is really boring. It's like they were going down the western fantasy checklist, saw dragons listed twenty or so times and Yoshi-P said "Eh, let's get it over with."

The two new beast races, Alexander, and the wacky floating islands seem radically more interesting. Not to mention the Zodiark, Omega, and ongoing beastmen stories.
 

studyguy

Member
Heavensward being about dragons is really boring. It's like they were going down the western fantasy checklist, saw dragons listed twenty or so times and Yoshi-P said "Eh, let's get it over with."

The two new beast races, Alexander, and the wacky floating islands seem radically more interesting. Not to mention the Zodiark, Omega, and ongoing beastmen stories.

Eh, the 1000 year war has been in the lore for fucking ever now. We'd have to get to it at some point considering Ishgard is the gateway to the north and they're all dragon obsessed nutjobs since 1.0.

Honestly I find the Ascians to be the most boring, tacked on enemies in the game at the moment. I would have preferred we head north east towards the Garleans rather than north west towards Dravania, but all in due time I guess.
 

studyguy

Member
Also why is this not a pet?
I want a mooglebird thing...

hz8Vfdh.jpg

 

Xux

Member
Eh, the 1000 year war has been in the lore for fucking ever now. We'd have to get to it at some point considering Ishgard is the gateway to the north and they're all dragon obsessed nutjobs since 1.0.

Honestly I find the Ascians to be the most boring, tacked on enemies in the game at the moment. I would have preferred we head north east towards the Garleans rather than north west towards Dravania, but all in due time I guess.
Yeah, I'm more interested in Sharlayan and Xelphatol than Dravania. And I think the Ascians could've benefited from keeping their 1.0 design and less foppish subtlety.
 

studyguy

Member
Yeah, I'm more interested in Sharlayan and Xelphatol than Dravania. And I think the Ascians could've benefited from keeping their 1.0 design and less foppish subtlety.

Completely agree.
Everyone shitting themselves in 1.0 including the enemies when one appeared was great. Like holy fuck hold your breath what the hell is that??

ARR designs meanwhile just turned them into what look like generic midlanders with a funky mask and robe. I get that they can just possess bodies, but on the whole the impact of their presence feels sorta lost when they look like basically any other dude onscreen.
 

WolvenOne

Member
Eh, maybe the 1.0 design will be used again down the line somewhere.

As for Dravania and dragons, well, if you look at the map, there are really only two directions the expansion could've gone in. Towards Ala Mhigo, or north in Coerthas/Dravania.

I don't think the story is quite ready for us to be liberating lands away from the empire though, so North was the sensible choice, though I suspect we'll see a tiny bit of Ala Mhigo territory in the expansion. Besides, they've been teasing people about going into Ishgarde for ages now, it's time.

Edit: Oh wait, they probably cannot use the 1.0 designs again, because of China. China has a thing about seeing skeletons, I guess. That's not all that big a deal with skeleton mobs elsewhere in the games, easy enough to replace them with other humanoid mobs, but if Lahabrea reveals his true form to be a black robed angel of death skeleton, they'd likely need to make a whole new model for China and any other territories that don't like skeletons.

:p
 
Completely agree.
Everyone shitting themselves in 1.0 including the enemies when one appeared was great. Like holy fuck hold your breath what the hell is that??


ARR designs meanwhile just turned them into what look like generic midlanders with a funky mask and robe. I get that they can just possess bodies, but on the whole the impact of their presence feels sorta lost when they look like basically any other dude onscreen.

Not that I like the actual design much, but a shitty generic-death design with toothpicks on their backs is not that great either.
 

LiQuid!

I proudly and openly admit to wishing death upon the mothers of people I don't like
Man I've been waiting 30 mins for this temple of qarn duty finder which has an avg time of 25 min:/

Make friends with a tank for insta-queuing. DPS queues can be absolutely brutal depending on what you're trying to get into.
 

dramatis

Member
But with those games, you're playing by yourself, and you can sit down, controller in hand, and just say "I'm going to practice until I master this." Not so in an MMORPG where you are letting other people down (and taking their valuable time) with each failed attempt.

Some kind of practice area, or Guildhest (preferably with the exact same names for the attacks) would be quite helpful here.

This is the next part of the problem. In a non-MMO, you can pause, whenever you like, and get your bearings. You can typically have all the time you like in between commands, and can lower the battle speed.

In this game, everything happens so quickly, and you can't pause or slow things down at all. When people are talking about using recording equipment to analyze an unavoidable defeat frame-by-frame, that's when you know that your game design needs to be tweaked.
I think you are overly preoccupied with comparing FF14 to a single player rpg, but FF14 is not a single player rpg.

Taking up valuable time? That's the point. The balance between making something difficult enough so that majority of the player base has to use a great many hours to beat and making something that can still be beaten with enough skill is something MMOs are supposed to do. They need the players to continue paying. But they also make the fights beatable with enough coordination and skill. If it takes hours of wipes, then it's working properly.

In the early hours of the game it literally holds your hand on everything. You can't walk into an NPC without a popup telling you what the effects of walking into that NPC does. When an in-game NPC is talking to you about game mechanics (enmity), you don't think, "I've been solo all this time, this talk about enmity is just flavor text"—do you really think the NPC would be talking to you about enmity if the game wasn't expecting you to use it right in the next fight? It's not hard! It's actually incredibly easy—if you would just open up a bit and take the systems for what they are instead of ceaselessly comparing to "my single player offline rpg experience" and how much more comfortable you have it in an offline game where you set your own pace.

FF14 is not a single player offline rpg experience. To those who are seasoned MMO veterans, I have even heard them call the combat slow.

You want to be able to clear the fight but you carry the attitude that you're wasting people's time when you get into a duty. Why does that matter? Nobody walks into Coil with perfect knowledge and perfect execution from the very start. Everybody has caused parties they run in to wipe in some way at least once. No group clears a Coil Turn the first time they enter. There's no better place to practice than in the arena. Because you can sit in your practice area and practice that one mechanic over and over, but in the actual fight there's mechanics firing off everywhere and you're overwhelmed because you just polished that one stone and didn't learn how to do anything else.

Not being able to pause is not a problem in an MMO. Because it is literally impossible in an action-oriented multiplayer system. You might want to play slow but the other three guys want to play fast. Then what? If there were settings that allowed players to adjust the combat speed are you going to tell the other players to play at your speed because it's what you're comfortable with even if they're comfortable with something else? If the criteria for the game design needing tweaks is that people have to record the battle in order to figure out what's going on, wouldn't that put pretty much all fast-paced action games as problematic game designs?

MMOs are not single player offline rpg experiences.

The story up to 50, the trials (Garuda/Ifrit/Titan), the dungeons, and the guildhests are a gradual ascending slope that does its best to teach you and prepare you for endgame content. The initial Coil ramps up to the most difficult fights and teaches you the necessity of party coordination and the importance of performing your job correctly. If by the time you hit Turn 5 and you still cannot adjust to the speed of the fights after all this time, then that's the wall you hit until you learn the fight. You watch videos, you ask for advice, you repeat the fight until you get the pattern down in your head and you play your job to the fullest of its ability in that battle. You keep going at it because chances are you're not the only one wasting other people's time, there are probably other people learning the fight who will also waste yours. It's an exchange with other players. That's what an MMO is.
 

Ravidrath

Member
ARR designs meanwhile just turned them into what look like generic midlanders with a funky mask and robe. I get that they can just possess bodies, but on the whole the impact of their presence feels sorta lost when they look like basically any other dude onscreen.

Yeah, my hope is that we'll get to fight them looking like this / some giant mutant end-boss version of this at some point.

When they were shown like this in 1.0, I believe they were invisible to others and non-corporeal. So as long as we're fighting them corporeally they're going to look like boring people, though.

But I think it would've made sense for them to look like that in the Chrysalis fight, so maybe they've just abandoned that whole notion.
 

aceface

Member
If you want to practice a fight, find 7 other like minded people who also do. Ideally these would be people at the same stage of progression and you could form a static with them. Worst case scenario put a pf up for a learning party.

What most people do at this point is ride with experienced groups up to final coil at which point you pretty much need a static, at least if you want loot. Then once you get there you wipe for hours and hours with your group until you get it. That's the practice stage and you're not wasting time, you're learning the fight.

Edit: yhippa Id go with you guys to T5 on a Friday help night and I'm incapable of carrying anyone so you're in luck!
 

iammeiam

Member
An FC on Ultros made matching badges for PAX East. GAF needs to step their game up.

Somebody needs to do this for those of you who go to PAX West. It always floods my office building with attendees and if you could all tag yourselves for easier avoidance/later mocking, it would make things way more entertaining.
 
Just a quick question... does the activation code expire at some point?

A Japanese friend of mine shipped over a copy of FFXIV PS4 to me but when I tried activating the game code it was giving me an error. He has his own copy on the PS4 so that takes out the possibility of him using the code.

Any idea?
 

BadRNG

Member
A Japanese friend of mine shipped over a copy of FFXIV PS4 to me but when I tried activating the game code it was giving me an error. He has his own copy on the PS4 so that takes out the possibility of him using the code.

Any idea?
Are you using the code under the right region?
 
Heavensward being about dragons is really boring. It's like they were going down the western fantasy checklist, saw dragons listed twenty or so times and Yoshi-P said "Eh, let's get it over with."

The two new beast races, Alexander, and the wacky floating islands seem radically more interesting. Not to mention the Zodiark, Omega, and ongoing beastmen stories.

Dragons are awesome
Deal with it

P.S. Dragons appear in both European and East Asian mythologies though they look different
 
Western style dragons look far superior

Which is why it's the type used the most in games.

And the whole expansion won't be dragons. Just like the whole 2.0 wasn't Empire/Ascians. I mean Ascians there's a bunch, but you're done with the Empire stuff by the time you hit cap. While the 1000years war might not end just from the first batch of story quest, it doesn't mean EVERYTHING is going to be about dragons and coerthas. We're probably going to explore the floating lost continent of the Ixal, there's already an insect-like primal thing, Alexander is well, not very dragon related and so on. You can totally expect the 3.0 story to be all about them dragons, but most of the content won't be after that I'm fairly sure.
 

Demoskinos

Member
God. The only thing I've done on this game in the past two weeks is coil and going after fucking Triple Triad cards. What have I become.
 
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