New Development Team Rolls Out Patch 1.15a

Here's our first patch on behalf of the new development team. Read up on the exact details here.

Not much in the way of the additional content that everyone wanted. It's more just cleaning up. It's probably a good thing that they're not trying to tackle both content and functionality issues at the same time. While one will certainly always be disappointing without the other (what does it matter if everything is streamlined if there's still nothing to do? what does it matter if there's more things to do but the mechanics are an impediment to doing them?), it's good that they've made a decision and just moved forward with it.

Hopefully someone can weigh in on how substantial some of these changes are. It doesn't look like they've altered anything fundamental to the game, but rather just made a number of more small fixes that will improve the general game play experience.

Thoughts?

A bunch of the ongoing things I would still class as "old group" promises. The companies aren't even implemented yet. I'll say it over and over - until you can access Ishgard, it's not substantial enough.

Still, happy with the changes and delighted that things are moving forward. Mentioned to Danielle that we should probably pick up the game again after the next patch and see how notable the improvements are.

Can I just ask, what do you expect out of Ishgard? I ask this because I haven't been following this game or any of the storyline content.

In Ishgard there is a neverending trove of thrilling quests with rewards beyond imagination. And the streets are paved with gil.

I think its a good thing that they fixed these errors before releasing the content, don't forget they said there were going to roll out 2 patches per month, its my thinking that they will be releasing the next patch in about 2 weeks time, time enough to let players come back and see the improvements they made to the game and get used to the new system and all its improvements, my suggestion to you guys is to come back asap and get used to the game again, it would be a good thing to get used to the games mechanics once again, to level up a little bit more and be prepared for the content.

I am also willing to bet the 2 patches per month will be 1 general improvements and 1 content patch per month, as Ouch! said, its probably not a good idea to tackle both at the same time.

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Originally Posted by Rostum

Can I just ask, what do you expect out of Ishgard? I ask this because I haven't been following this game or any of the storyline content.

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You can read about Ishgard at Eorzeapedia. It looks like it is another nation in the story of the game that is bound to be full of higher level content and quests.

The update didn't fix the bug that makes buying, comparing prices, and selling items to other players a complete nightmare, so I'm not really satisfied.

Seriously, market wards need to disappear forever.

I also wish there was a way to lock your UI, so that whenever a target you want to click is partially obstructed by the UI, I would click through it and select the target instead of grabbing an UI item.

I honestly can't see a single update note that I think is important, or should be a priority.

I expected more, but this patch really changes nothing about the game, just smoothing out stuff. Meeeh.

What do you really expect? It's not like they can develop a lot overnight. It's a step in the right direction.

Maybe a lil more on UI designs and convenience. Alot of it they listed felt like small things you can do overnight.

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Originally Posted by Lionx

Maybe a lil more on UI designs and convenience. Alot of it they listed felt like small things you can do overnight.

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You seem to have absolutely unrealistic expectations about how long it can take to develop and implement some of these changes if you think "overnight" is even fair as an exaggeration.

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Originally Posted by Rostum

Can I just ask, what do you expect out of Ishgard? I ask this because I haven't been following this game or any of the storyline content.

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A better idea of what this world is like. In FFXI, Jeuno is the central location that people spend most time in and the highest authorities are (at least, in my short time playing). In this game, it's in a constant battle against dragons. The fact that the game was released without Ishgard being enterable and still to this day lacks any way of getting in was always the biggest sign to me that the game was incomplete. It's one thing not to have additional maps added in beyond the original grouping of areas, but to not have the main city of the game available to enter for me is a big sign that they aren't ready for you to really immerse yourself in the world.

I'm not saying Ishgard is all that is needed, but I'm saying that it's such a major hole in the current game that until it is implemented (and there is no discussion surrounding it at the moment at forums or by the devs, it should be noted), the game is not something I would consider to be ready for reviews. When playing the game, seeing Ishgard from the outside but not being able to go in, makes it feel like you're a very unimportant part of this game and that your character is, well... unimportant. Basically you're just a nomad who wanders from town to town, never really getting to the pinnacle.

Was Jeuno open at the start of FFXI, even if at the later English release?

I will give that the exp and maybe search might take some time. But alot of text in the patch notes was about color changes, some minimap doodle, item placement changes, and things like that. Thats not that unrealistic to be overnight changes.

The way they announced it made it seem big, but its not that big at all what i meant. Maybe i do have too high expectations, but when like a Patch drops i honestly felt there should have been a lil more. Maybe hotfixes is a better thing to name it for the majority of changes here.

I do agree that it wasn't as big as one might have hoped, but it should be noted that they always stated that it would be "sometime after the beginning of February" that the quests/mini-quests were going to be brought in. Hopefully amongst other things.

Regarding UI designs and convenience - out of curiosity, are you still playing? Genuine question as I'm not sure if you ever returned since you decided it wasn't up to standard months back. If you haven't been back since November, then it might be at least worth checking the UI out. I personally found the UI to be absolutely fine in my most recent session.

It's content and purpose I found lacking. This seems to be backed up by the player poll. 8.6% said UI needed most work, over 60% went for either the combat system or in-game content. So them focusing on those two things over the next months rather than the UI will probably be something you can expect.

I played yesterday and I definitely think the UI still needs work.

I am still having a great deal of fun playing WoW atm with raids and all, so i havent gotten to play FFXIV since. I do still have the game installed though, and i been keeping up with my friend still playing from time to time when not playing WoW with me, as well as message boards here and news.

From what i am hearing, it doesn't seem like the UI is unconsole-lized yet. As long as theres too many button presses and is similar to FFXI, its always going to need more work in today's standard. I am pretty sure people would have bashed the UI at release even without the lag, which is thankfully fixed now. I will hit up my friend's place maybe sometime to muck around.

I think both content and UI/system related issues are big(almost equal in importance), its just which one is a bigger problem at the current time. At start it was UI because you couldn't do anything, now its content since theres nothing to do.

Hope the February Quest patches will be good though, with everyone hyping them up.

What kind of UI changes would you guys like sorted out? Just the number of buttons you have to click when making a recipe, or more? I can understand people also requesting things that are mouse-focused, but wouldn't that be somewhat more difficult to replicate effectively on a console?

I'm trying not to get my hopes up regarding the mid-February quest additions. =x I'm wary of disappointment. Heh. I'm just hoping they won't be summed up as "more guildleves" because guildleves are so damned boring.

I'm sure they are working on the UI as we speak. One thing I've noticed is that working on the UI design and flow in this current title I'm working on, whilst a hell of a lot smaller, is still rather complicated to sort out. It really takes a lot of time, especially for something as huge as an MMO.

They have different departments within the team, so just because they're rolled out some smaller updates doesn't mean the UI team stopped working - by the way they got in a UI design veteran to work on it since the team changes.

Anyways...

I can't remember if Jeuno was open during the Japanese release, or at least parts of it might have been. Even if it was fully released, I doubt there was much or any content there. The game didn't come out in NA until a year later when the first expansion was released (and even longer for EU). So by that time we had everything we needed as far as content went.

I'd wonder if they're waiting to release Ishgard as a milestone with lots of content. Did they say anything about airships and chocobos yet? By the way, is the overarching story heading in a good direction? Or is it too hard to tell yet?

Oh, also. I agree with you about Guildleves. I didn't play much, but the idea of having more of them rather than real quests isn't too appealing.

@loony bob
Not as deep menus, and at least not for commonly used actions. Snappier confirmation window popups. If you're gonna ask me if i'm sure about something, at least make the question box pop up instantly.

Better targeting mechanics. Sure, you could "get used to it" and it won't be "as much" of an issue. I find this to be a poor excuse for not designing it better.

Drag-and-drop for menu items, like when you want to set skills, move/trade/sell/buy items.

Automatically remember the skillsets of your previous job. If I set up a nice hotkey bar on pugilist, then change to marauder, and then back to pugilist, it seems like which skills are automatically hotbared are a random mix of some of the marauder skills i set, and some of the pugilist skills i had before i changed to marauder.

I don't particularly care if a more mouse-friendly UI wouldn't work well on a console. They can't expect to have *one* bastard-UI that tries to be good for both gamepad and KB+mouse. If they want to make it good for both control schemes, they will need to design two separate UIs. One made specifically for kb+mouse, and one for gamepads.

I could bring up several more points, but someone's yelling at me to come to bed. Good night!

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Drag-and-drop for menu items, like when you want to set skills, move/trade/sell/buy items.

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At the very least, I know they have planned to put this functionality in. It's in one of the recent Lodestone articles.

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I can understand people also requesting things that are mouse-focused, but wouldn't that be somewhat more difficult to replicate effectively on a console?

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There needs to be two UIs, one for consoles and one for PC. You can't have them both the same. If this game came out PS3 first and had the UI it did now i don't think its that bad because its more made for it. It just needs a keyboard/mouse UI and also one for console pads and etc. Maybe an option kinda like the latest PC games for if they wanted to use a controller or a mouse.

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Originally Posted by Rostum

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Drag-and-drop for menu items, like when you want to set skills, move/trade/sell/buy items.

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At the very least, I know they have planned to put this functionality in. It's in one of the recent Lodestone articles.

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Well that's good to know :)

Obviously this is all up in the air now that the development team has suggested that they're open to changing fundamental aspects of the game, but the following is some interesting reading that might suggest a bit about the future of the game. I know there has been a lot of rumors about some of this stuff in the past, but this is the first I've seen of it all compiled together in such a comprehensive manner. This is a collection of unimplemented data already in the game that a player Crevox has been located via data mining.

• Classes 1
• Classes 2
• Quests
• Game Mechanics
• Status Effects

I've seen that before, one or two months ago. I don't think it will hold much weight anymore. Admittedly I didn't get far into it (mostly the classes stuff before I got bored) but most of what I read just now was instantly familiar.

Ah well. I'd heard rumors of some of it, but had never actually seen it laid out like that.

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Originally Posted by Loony BoB

Was Jeuno open at the start of FFXI, even if at the later English release?

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The Grand Duchy of Jeuno was not accessible when Final Fantasy XI was originally released in Japan.

The difference between the Japanese release and the international release of Final Fantasy XI was that the international release was a significant amount of time later in the development process. The international release included the original game and an expansion pack adding hundreds of hours of content to the game that was not included with the original release.

Maybe it is no longer acceptable to release a massively multiplayer online role-playing game in a scaffold-like state...

Maybe it also is because, as far as I can tell, people level up pretty fast, and the (almost too) easy access to teleportation makes the world feel smaller than it is. This could make it more apparent that there is a lack of things to do, compared to for example FF11.

Teleportation i feel is very important as the game matures and people just wanna go where they need to go for content...atm i dunno if its needed. But i honestly felt that most areas just had no purpose, just alot of empty scenery and towns that doesn't offer any type of service or anything. I don't know if they changed that, but it was pretty disappointing to run halfway across a map looking at a small town only to find nothing there of interest.

That, and i am personally sick of the 'maze' like feel they put into the game. Its such an expansive world it seems until you look at your map and see all these confining mazes like near Gridania,

Teleportation is important, yeah, but as long as there are no other forms of transportation (chocobo, airship, etc), all you do is teleport instantly to everywhere, and that makes the world feel small.

Lionx: Yeah, I know what you mean. For me, it's not that there is nothing out there when it comes to man-made structures on maps... it's that they are so far away from the main road, and with the vast size of the maps a lot of people will be lucky to even find the largely hidden "places of interest". The other downside is that at the moment there is no purpose to these locations, much like the small outlying towns.

Regarding teleportation etc - I do hope airships get a decent purpose to them when they eventually are released. I'm thinking that they could make airships free once you get to a certain level and have them take you to new regions. Then, if they were to increase cross-region travel's cost in anima, the airships would actually be worth using. Otherwise why use an airship when you can travel instantaneously around the globe? They increased anima regeneration to the point that unless you teleport constantly, you probably won't run out. I never got below 50 anima and I played pretty much non-stop during the first week... long before they allowed faster anima regeneration, lower costs to teleport, etc.

I'm surprised Jeuno wasn't around when the game was first out. Oh well. I still think it's a sham that Ishgard is completely locked. I was really looking forward to the first level 50 user posting screenshots, but then... it just didn't happen. Gutting.

i'm sitting at 20 anima now after a few days, maybe you weren't playing hardcore enough? :p

Maybe I'm just anima-efficient!

Well the game is getting huge revamps, i wouldn't be surprised if it won't be released for quite some time...better important stuff first though.

:(

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Originally Posted by Loony BoB

I'm surprised Jeuno wasn't around when the game was first out. Oh well. I still think it's a sham that Ishgard is completely locked. I was really looking forward to the first level 50 user posting screenshots, but then... it just didn't happen. Gutting.

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A local friend of mine, KrsJin, played Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV by importing it as soon as it became available in Japan. From what I have gathered in his comments about both games, it sounds like they were released in a similar fashion with a key difference.

Final Fantasy XI lacked significant content in its original release in a similar way. Only six job classes were available. Only missions that led up to Rank 5 were available. This was enough to keep people interested for the months to come. The Japanese players acted as a type of beta test in a way, because the game was not released outside of Japan for some time until an expansion pack had been released and more job classes and quests were available from the start of the game.

I just want this game to be good already. :(

My biggest concern isn't if they'll manage to make it good or not (maybe i'm optimistic, but I do think they'll manage to "fix" it), but if they'll manage to turn around the public opinion of the game after they've fixed it.

If they don't, I can't see how the game would have a future. With as few players as it has got now, funding for making new content would probably be pretty poor, which would be an early death sentence.

I'm actually having a fair amount of fun in the game, even if I have to fight as much against the game as against the monsters in it :p. Having a couple of friends to play with is probably crucial to get any sort of enjoyment out of it.

I have no friends. :(

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Originally Posted by Rostum

I have no friends. :(

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Y hulo thar!

If you want I can get you an invite into the LS I use, its got quite a few active member as it was only formed recently (coincidentally I was only the second person in the LS other then the creator) and now we have 36 members, most of them a active and we have a good time, they are a great bunch to talk to and I find myself with a bunch of likable people whom share similar interests, we are increasing our numbers every day, send me a PM or reply here and I can get you a pearl.

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Originally Posted by Mirage

I'm actually having a fair amount of fun in the game, even if I have to fight as much against the game as against the monsters in it :p. Having a couple of friends to play with is probably crucial to get any sort of enjoyment out of it.

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Yes, I think that plays a large role in the enjoyment of an online game for any casual or serious player. There are some people who enjoy massively multiplayer online role-playing games for their competitive nature or for their collaborative efforts, but I think that a lot of people simply want to enjoy a game together with a select person or group. I am certain that, even in its current state, I could have fun if I had the time to play it with people that I like.