Gamescom 2012 "A Realm Reborn" Screenshots.Follow

I was never a big fan of jumping (or at least the idea of it), but the more I watched the vidoe and how easy it was for them to get around, the more I appreciate the idea. As for everything else you mention: couldn't agree more... the basic functionality is what I am excited about... a seemless and quick interface for nearly everything is a giant step in the right direction. One thing I saw that I am extra exctied about is the bar below the equipment screen. There appears to be a selectable 'gear set' drop down... if they have this built the way I hope they do, job switching might be a slightly smaller pain in the butt.

Edited, Aug 21st 2012 10:24am by Grandlethal

About the only role I'm aware of for psychology in game design, with the exception of educational software, is one of creating an addiction such that players spend more money on the game, which is a relatively recent phenomenon. This is the stuff MMOs and "free" iPhone games are made of, with carefully paced entertainment that seems easy and rewarding at first, but then throws increasing challenges and roadblocks so that more time and money have to be spent to get that same rewarding feeling again. It basically treats humans as wealthy lab rats who will pay you to run your increasingly difficult mazes for that incredibly tasty cheese (except you're not even getting a real piece of cheese; it's all virtual! Insidious!).

It's little different than using PhDs to make cereal more addicting (when you think cereal, do you think salt? probably not, but there's enough in there to rival the sugar content and stimulate your need to have more...) or to genetically engineer tobacco to be more addicting or designing a casino to be more addicting (the lights! the sounds! the alcohol!). But it sure seems like using science for evil to me. It's too bad evil pays so well.

Is there a mod or any way to fix my typo on the subject line? "Screnshots" is really bugging me.

Edited, Aug 21st 2012 11:06pm by UltKnightGrover

Exactly.

Thanks, Tarkain! That fixed it.

really late to the party i know, but....


wut.


FFXI's enmity system worked great if you understood it. miles above XIV but thats not saying much.


yes its mostly broken/useless now, basically due to XI's own brand of power creep.


also. umadbro.

exactly. If i pop counterstance(or yonin or voke w/e) i know that the mob across the room wailing on the whm is going to run back to me, because i know where i am on the "hate list" relative to my party. i call that understanding how to use a system that is working as intended.


cringing when someone takes hate? i call that not knowing how enmity works.




also, its only really "broken" now in scenarios where DDs are capping hate quickly through damage. Which admittedly, happens a lot. But there are plenty of situations (proccing in aby) where that isnt the case.


edited because it looked like a stoned person wrote it the first time.




Edited, Aug 22nd 2012 6:50pm by Llester

This is where it all gets a little bizarre to me. People who write amazing books, or create instant-classic films, or play hit music aren't generally psychologists by trade. I'm loathe to believe that creating a game simply can't be successful without a psychologist at the helm, especially with the diverse types of games out there. Most people aren't fans of horror games, but those that are love a good thriller like Silent Hill (the babies... the babies!).

And that's really why I have to dismiss this notion that you should make your game around what's pleasing to most people. People like new experiences, not all people like the same experiences, and basing your whole game on what's known to be a safe bet among the masses is antithetical to creativity. It's what turned Dragon Age from an decent game in DA: Origin, to numbingly dull in DA2... the sequel was so sensitive to pleasing the most people possible that it ended up completely uninspired and milquetoast.

Contrast that with FF7 which took lots of risks: Eco-terrorism, class warfare, plutocracy, prostitution, cross-dressing, mass murder, experimentation on humans, and the end-of-the-world to name a few. And it pulled off and is forever beloved for it. If you had to run this through a psychologist who wanted to ensure it was completely pleasing first, there's no way it would have turned out so well. Storytelling has to take risks, and that means it won't work out so well every time. But if you never push boundaries, you'll never have a hit.

This is all sh*t that has been available in other MMOs and asked for by the players not happy with FFXIVs current system. We were then insulted and flamed for wanting a "wow clone". The thing is, once you experience how movements and UIs should be, you wonder why you ever had anything against it. I think for the most part it was people's unfounded hatred of other mmos they never played for more than a day or two.


Edited, Aug 23rd 2012 5:58am by Transmigration

lol...pnwd. Nasty...sometimes its best to just leave something alone if you are unsure.

Enmity played a huge part in FFXI back in the day. No idea if its the same now...but in my static group, we knew our roles, and yes...it took some skill to manage hate. You introduce a new cog into he party and you were playing with fire. How people managed hate was a sure fire way to know if they knew what the hell they were doing. This would be from where they positioned themselves, what skills they used and how often, and even what foods they decided to take during a grind fest.

Obviously you don't have to be a psychologist to create an excellent work of art. However, many of the principles of say, good narrative, are based on psychological principles. A good writer can develop an intuitive sense of how these principles work without having a formal understanding of them. Game psychology is not necessarily about mass appeal at all. It is often about creating the most appealing product for a niche audience. People, obviously, are different. They identify with different sociological constructs. Even in terms of individual development (e.g., age, intelligence, experience with the media), some audiences will prefer a more canned experience, while others will prefer something with exceptional novelty. These are all things a good psychological analysis of a game must include.

So risks are neither inherently good or bad in the context you're describing them, but they often fail or succeed predictably according to the traits of the audience. If there was one right formula, then game design would be easy. An attempt at that "one right formula" is often applied to the type of game psychology you're thinking of.

@Rinsui; so your issue with me of the personal nature. Tell me something I didn't already know. But did you honestly think it would matter to me if my posting trends bothered you? Did you overlook the likelihood that the feeling was mutual, and that you are usually the one to instigate the interpersonal conflict between us?

It's easy to laugh me off as oversimplifying an incredibly complex system of ideas, but you can't expect me to all at once convey my entire understanding of such a broad subject. The bottom line is that neither of us have any meaningful familiarity with the other's work, so neither of us are able to comparatively evaluate one another's claims without laying them out on the table. There is no resolution to this fundamental disagreement until you stop mocking my ideas and challenging me on the grounds of authority, and actually bring a substantive counterpoint to the debate. Since I've never seen you do that, you've been written off long ago as someone with a chip on his shoulder and no dip to put it in. So if my lectures disagree with you, here's a tip: don't read them. But don't presume to put me in my place without either of us having established where the other's place should be. Maybe you have some valuable insights that could expand my knowledge of the field? We'll never know if you don't stop trolling me and share some actual perspective.

Also, post-hoc explanations are sufficiently extendable to product distribution like games (but you're incorrect if you're saying that psychological sciences don't deal in prediction... business psychology does this all the time). You never have to make a game for just one person or fixed group of people and predict if they will like it. In the end, counseling is infinitely more complex than leisure systems design for this very reason.

Edited, Aug 23rd 2012 8:57am by Kachi

I'm not even sure why jumping is a topic.

Its jumping. You can jump. Sure...yea...I know...its new to FF...oh dear. Still...its jumping.

Lets worry more about quests, UI, level progression, combat, endgame, and the economy.

High Jump - does nothing to enmity.
Chameleon - wut?
Stealth Shot - only applies to the attack you use it before and only decreases enmity for that attack. Find a RNG who merits this and slap them.
Ventriloquy - another merited skill usually taken by PUP who duo with their automaton a lot.
Hide - only works on mobs that are sight aggressive and even then, only works for the thief.
Trick Attack - a nice tool, but not much use after everyone reaches the cap and requires positioning that isn't always an option.
Seigan and 3rd Eye - only effective for SAM.
Utsusemi - doesn't do much for enmity and is more a tool for mitigation.
Cover - lol?

With few exceptions, these tools do very little. Like I've said before, most anything worthwhile is being done with PD/Embrava zerg so people pretty much ignore enmity.


Enmity hasn't played a huge part in XI since people realized it was broken and formed groups based on that fact. Notice the bolded part of Louis' statement. Your static xp group does not qualify as endgame content, no offense.



Edited, Aug 23rd 2012 3:19pm by FilthMcNasty

Coincidentally, with all of the psychology that's going on in here that "insatiable twitch" I think is a telling player mechanic.

I know personally I hit the spacebar mindlessly when waiting around for something, again it's not a deal breaker when I can't jump but it solves a "twitch" that a lot of people do have and it, of course, mechanically familiarizes the game with other MMOs.

I think it's kind of funny, but psychologically jumping might be more important than many think. Not to get too crazy, but what does it represent? Dominance over the environment, freedom and solving that "twitch."

----
I would talk about FFXI some more but I could write pages and pages about what that game did right and what it obviously did wrong.

What I will briefly say is that there can never be another game like FFXI; just as there can never be another WoW.

It's amazing how much progress Yoshi and his team has done over the year and a half he has been at the helm. And I hope, whatever mechanics they use, that those mechanics work and in the end make people and especially fans happy.

If SE wants you to walk over a hill or a log or some other obstacle, they will let you, and if they don't want you to then they won't let you. It's not that the jumping feature makes you cross over terrain they didn't want you to cross over before.

It's just like Kanekitty says. Jumping while running, standing and fighting, jumping like we're on some pogo stick. Basically just like those moogle gloves: gloves on..gloves off, gloves on... gloves off, glove on.... gloves off... just because it makes this special sound...

Oh well people cried hard enough for it. Congrats.

I think SE should make it so all mobs can jump too... and NPC's. Just see the world standing around and bouncing everywhere. I would honestly like for some game designer to take jumping tto the next level if it is a 'must have' now... make it so that STR and armor weight play into how high/far you can jump... as well as passive/active mode. Something to make it so the physics behind it don't look so pathetic.

That being said, I think one of my goals will be to gather as many people as I can into one area and have everyone start jumping... make it look like an FFXIV mosh pit.

Yet, given all the tools available in FFXI to try to lower hate, its still dirt easy to just cap it again as a damage dealer. Jumping to the top of the hate list isn't hard and the tools you mentioned are limited once things get going.

Worse, as the trend of harder NMs last I checked is just AoE spam.

So the problem isn't that the hate tools don't exist, its that they can easily become irrelevant concerning the ease of which hate is capped, as the cap hasn't scaled up since 75, but the damage has.

FFXIV's hate system seems to scale to relative performance, which means when you lose it completely due to a hate reset, it's much more difficult to get back - as it seems as if voke and flash are a set value. That's really all that the problem lies there. If Voke and Flash gave a relative value for hate spiking, tanking would probably be too easy to manage.

People who complain "Take Dies, party wipes." issues in FFXIV arn't using a varied set up. Warrior is deisgned to work with Paladin when it comes to hate maintenance, and if one dies, the other can easily take up the main tanking role while the dead is revived and attempts to regain hate.

So I don't see much of a problem with FFXIV's hate system. It actually keeps track of the hate order beyond who's on top as well, which makes fights more interesting when certain abilities target who's second on the hate list instead of who's first.

I should have been clear about it and in reading my previous post I see how it comes across, but DRG don't use HJ as a tool to ditch enmity. It's used mostly as a tool for TP gain. If you are waiting until you amass some large amount of enmity to dump with it, you're doing it wrong.


This ability doesn't work on the two most important abilities you would actually use it for, WS and barrage. It only remains active when you're directly behind the mob and is pretty much useless on anything kited.

As for stealth shot, a point in this will lower enmity for the next shot by 10 once every 5 minutes. Because your enmity will be capped well before that point, most RNG use their points in Snapshot and either Recycle or Flashy Shot. I never said that this wasn't a hate tool, just that it's pretty much useless and no one merits it.


As with any merited skill, using a point or more in this takes a point or more away from something else useful. This skill doesn't shed enmity, it swaps enmity. When you use it your enmity is replaced by the amount your tomato has and vice versa. You could use it to keep enmity on your tomato if you were duoing with it or you could use it to keep your tomato alive which, as you said, isn't necessary anymore with DEA.

Seigan and 3rd Eye are used to block incoming damage. They are not hate tools.

The amount of enmity shed when you lose a shadow is easily off set by the damage you are pumping out if you're a heavy DD. This change was implemented to make it more difficult for NIN to tank than just requiring that you be able to count to 4 and also to keep any xxx/NIN from becoming a tank as well.

Anyway, my point was never that people don't have tools for trying to control enmity. My point was that the way the game currently works, they are ineffective at best.





Edited, Aug 24th 2012 4:02pm by FilthMcNasty

Seems like they changed the chocobo theme. I can't really make out the zone's background music, but it sounds new to me too.

I totally agree with the sympathies of

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/11352-Please-get-Naoshi-Mizuta-to-re-do-this-disastrous-soundtrack
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/40520-The-direction-of-FFXIV-s-music.

so this is an auspicious sign for me. New music really would make it feel like a brand new game.

EDIT: Nevermind, I realised it's already known that there'll be a new soundtrack.

Edited, Aug 24th 2012 8:19pm by Dizmo

Edited, Aug 24th 2012 8:19pm by Dizmo

My original point was that enmity is broken and that managing hate isn't done by using this 'wealth of tools' you refer to.

It's not that people can't, but that they don't. People are not playing the game like they used to years ago. They also don't approach content in the same ways. Almost everyone rolls a zerg tactic where you account for the fact that people will ping-pong hate around. Even the best tanks are expected to lose aggro. PD covers enough mitigation so people aren't being one-shot all over the place so no one really cares these days.

The same old 'kill it before it has time to do lots of damage to you' mindset still rules.

Oh. :( I'm not playing at the moment so I didn't realise.