Final Fantasy XIV at Gamescom

[Lionx]

There will be 'some kind of machines' as in Final Fantasy VI.

OH !!!! ITS BIO BLASTER TIMEZ!!!!

Or so i hope anyway i love the MagiTek Armor if thats what they are talking about.

One last thing we were able to get out of Tanaka was the possibility of having Airship battles after seeing similar trysts in the CG trailer from E3 this past June.

/HomerSimpsonDrool bwaaaaarrrgggh...

Everything is so full of win.

[Loony BoB]

I love how you guys are getting all drooly over the big things while I go "ooh, I can move my windows around like in Eve Online? That's such a massive improvement." xD I think FFXI is fantastic but it's the small things such as that which are most in need of change - and I'm glad they're fixing it.

Shame about the lack of jumping, though.

[Del Murder]

There's a windowed mode for FFXI, BoB.

[Loony BoB]

I mean the windows within the window. Like, the chatbox etc. In Eve Online you can manage all the things like your items, player info, chatbox, etc. and move the individual windows around just like you're using an OS. In FFXI, the chatbox is always at the bottom, the status info always displays at the top left, etc. You can't move things. It can be annoying at times. =|

[Lionx]

Its probably because FFXI is so dated so anything seems cool. o_o

[Loony BoB]

Just going through the website now, there's a massive (well, relative to what I saw on previous FF websites pre-release) amount of information including an interesting bit which notes that you can, using Smithy tools, repair armour etc and sharpen blades. Does this mean we're going to see the end of endlessly flawless weapons?

[Lionx]

Hopefully! The problem with FFXI was that alot of weapons do not degrade, so they just recirculate in the game. This means that crafting anything that was not a consumable, unless its a fat rare HQ item, to be quite a profit loss and useless to consider trying. They did try to remedy this with Guild Point items and Enchantments like Warp Cudgels ...but so little of them are useful... ._.

This made Alchemy, and Cooking alot more profitable by far, and made every other craft more of making things until they HQ for profit. Why else is Amemet Mantle so cheap and the HQ so ridiculously overpriced? But even then, lets say the game goes on forever...eventually certain HQ pieces of gear that were released earlier will become more common and even they will lose value too since theres more and more.

So with degradable weapons, they will break meaning you take them out of circulation, and meaning theres more point to making them in the long run. I don't know how XIV will do this however, if its anything like WoW then usually you wont have to worry about it degrading til it breaks. However i kinda do wish they would for common items, and for super rare l33t items to either have an insane durability rate or none at all.

[Loony BoB]

I'd personally rather the opposite. It would be pretty harsh to force new members to have to shell out constantly for new items while the older members have weapons that last forever. If it's insanely good, you should either save it for the fights that you'll need it in, maintain it well or not expect to have it around for all that long. This would mean the higher up people with more cash will have to actually use that cash in order to maintain their "top flight" status.

What I imagine will happen is that every level of weapon will have both high and low durability varieties so you can choose how to invest.

[Lionx]

I kind of imagine Guildleves as away of making more money easier than FFXI since they might not have an AH this time around. I remember in WoW Durability was pretty much nothing or a couple quests.

Usually for things with insane durability or lasting forever...i imagine them to be super hard to get, with possibly something with similar stats with weaker durability with less effort.

[Loony BoB]

Given that the AH is one of FFXI's strong points, it would be a shame if they did away with it in favour of something from WoW. I seem to remember Penny Arcade making a blog about how much they missed the AH and how WoW was horrible for how they decided to do things.

[VeloZer0]

Sorry, not having played FFXI I don't know how the AH works in that game. Can you enlighten me on how it is so much different/better than the WoW AH? I didn't really have any problems with the WoW one, so I am somewhat curious as to what could make it even better.

[Rostum]

I always thought FFXI's AH was worse than WoW's AH. In FFXI you have:

• People monopolise prices.
• Can only put up 7 items for sale at one time.
• Find it hard to see popular items up for sale (I spent about 3 days trying to buy all my HQ staves).
• Overpriced.
• Taxes are overpriced (yes, you pay taxes to put stuff up for sale).
• Sometimes you're better off sticking to rare/ex gear until you can get more rare/ex gear (meaning unless you have millions upon millions of gil, you will find it hard to gear yourself up well with the medium priced gear).

So no, the AH in FFXI isn't its strong point. Not by a far stretch. In fact, it's caused many many problems over the last 6 years. It and the way the crafting system is set up, makes it extremely hard to get gil even at high levels (unless you want to sell your soul to a HNM linkshell, which trust me; is not something you want to do).

[Loony BoB]

I haven't played WoW, I'm just going by a Penny Arcade I read the other day. It was an old one, though, so who knows if things have changed since then. I was just re-reading anything to do with FFXI to see if I would "get it" now

[Rostum]

Well, to FFXI's credit I think it was one of the first MMO's to use an auction house? Not sure if Ultima Online did but I don't think the others did (like Everquest, Asheron’s Call, etc.). I guess perhaps it's just I had always wished they'd continue to fix the problems with the AH system and they never really did, though perhaps that is just a limitation with the engine or the way the mechanics are set up in general.