New Development Team Rolls Out Patch 1.15a

[Lionx]

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.

[Loony BoB]

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.

[Rostum]

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.

[Mirage]

@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!

[Rostum]

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

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

[Lionx]

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?

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.

[Mirage]

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

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

Well that's good to know

[Ouch!]

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

[Loony BoB]

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.

[Ouch!]

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

[Roogle]

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

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...

[Mirage]

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.

[Lionx]

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,

[Mirage]

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.

[Loony BoB]

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.