Alpha Video #7 - Levequests and Party CombatFollow

You get the feeling that they heard the 'ehhh ...' response to the solo play, and decided they should cook up a video showing the frenetic and more colorful activity of party combat instead.

Leves look simple enough, like they did in 1.0. I like that you can initiate them where the activity would begin, as well as apparently alter the difficulty away from an encampment. The music is also much more fitting and enjoyable for what is going on compared to 1.0's, but I've been on record numerous times as saying "FFXIV + Less Uematsu = Thumbs Up".

I still think the spell and ability effects need to be toned down a little. To me it's more distracting and kind of annoying to see these huge explosions when all the character is doing is stabbing some poor creature. Not sure what to think about levequests still being in, maybe I assumed that traditional MMO quests would be the leveling route this time, save time on development maybe? Import a great deal of 1.0 levequests and add about 1/4 traditional quests?

Can you now get levequests on the go, or are you still only able to do a certain # and then have to go back to town and get more ?

It's safe to say that we won't see much of what a longer, more involved battle will be because of the 20 cap and limited jobs in alpha. I just hope that there is more to it than standing in place and spamming like you said.

Combat remains largely unchanged and I think this will be the biggest barrier to me getting started in ARR. It looks amazing, but it doesn't look fun.

I usually don't write on these forums but when I do, then I WANT TO PLAY THE GAME !:D is it just me or does the alpha look much better than 1.0 did post patch 1.23 ? :P

Well that does look pretty and well strimedlined but god combat looks boring lol just standing around

Btw, they're violating the "law of inverted boom" here.

What I mean is that the felt impact of a boom decreases
with the frequency of said boom due to desensitizing.

So in a way, the more bells and whistles they add,
the less felt impact those bells and whistles have;
and in the end only a headache remains.

The mobs' spasms are definitely annoying, they really don't feel epic when it looks like that. Combat does look boring so yeah I sure hope there is something more on the horizon that is yet to be implemented.

About the effects I can agree about them being a bit too flashy sometimes, sort of like what Rinsui wrote... too much of the booms makes it less "boomy". However to me this doesn't seem to apply to the spell effects, job abilities yes, but the spells seem lackluster as ever.

I wish I had gotten more excited tbh, but then again a lot of games look rather boring until you try it yourself.

Both charming and humorous/sad how much it hearkens back to the old FF days of your party standing in a straight line adjacent your enemy. Except at least in those days your characters actually took a step toward the monster from time to time :P

On the plus side there's potential for more interesting gameplay than what we're seeing. Global cooldown's aren't inherently bad if the pacing is ok and the choices are actually interesting. It does seem that there's a lot of "spam A" battle going on here, though. If they can find a way to make those decisions really matter, it could be strategic if not high-action. Of course I'm not actually optimistic.

Developers are afraid to break from "boring" because boring has been selling pretty well. In this kind of game, it's almost impossible to make things boring without making them more complicated, and god forbid endgame play should be more complicated than you can understand from watching a three minute trailer.

I'm reserving my opinion. It looks like the scope of Alpha is just too limited to get an idea of how group-based party mechanics will flesh out, apart from the big picture overview of 1.0 differences.

We see, what, three classes in that video? It looks like a caster, archer and looks like a lancer. And all of them appear to be capped to 20. Abilities used were nothing more than simple 'click and do damage' based ones it seems. Aside from the cures, there was no group-based abilities or effects present, if there were I couldn't distinguish them from the light show spam.

Of course combat at this release stage and level is going to be simplistic - it's an alpha of limited scope. Honestly, 1.0 lowered my expectations so much regarding a FF MMORPG, I'm just happy there's no 1.5 to 2 second delay upon clicking an ability.

I just hope I don't have to come back later and eat my words, when group combat at level 30, 40 and 50 with jobs and other classes mixed in is just as unintuitive and boring.

Edited, Dec 20th 2012 10:41am by Whales

I'm sorry guys but the game looks too easy for my taste, it gives you the location of where to go, difficulty settings.

This is exactly why people have been begging SE not to make the game "casual". Because oftentimes, casual means easy-mode. Having things like positional requirements, teamwork, or strategies that require actual strategy have a tendency to elicit complaints from a sizable portion of the "casual crowd". These casuals basically want to set up autoattack, occasionally click a button, and watch a movie of their character making things explode. And then collect their uber1337 gear that drops at the end of the movie. As I've said before, everyone want to be a rock star, but few people actually want to learn how to play the guitar...


Edited, Dec 20th 2012 10:42am by ChaChaJaJa

ok Im confused you said the difficulty can only be brought UP not down from your level. thus meaning if Im level 2, the lowest difficulty would be +1 from my level which is level 3.. and +1 was what was shown in the video.

the part you lost me at was he is doing a level 15 quest at level 20. so the lowest difficulty +1 would make it level 21... as such how is it a level 15 quest?

Yeah the adamantoise seizures have got to go. I guess I never noticed that on the smaller mobs they showed in the earlier videos.

On the flipside, the reason combat looked "easy" is cuz the dude doing the leve was fighting mobs 5 levels under him, and if I was reading that video right the big turtle was the same level as the party. (Or maybe it was ten levels higher, it was kind of blurry.) It looks easy-mode because it was easy mode.

Both the adamantoise and the dullahan were lvl 20. The members of the party were all lvl 20 as well I think. I'm guessing these are examples of the new FATE system. They aren't meant to be super hard battles and are just random "events" that will pop up every once in awhile similar to what the random quests or events are like in Guild wars 2.

Yeah, uh, choosing difficulty is a great feature as long as it properly scales rewards. Not sure why anyone would complain about that.



Yet to many people, grind-based games are easy-mode. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are people who think they want a game that's casual and easy, but there are lots of challenging casual games and lots of easy hardcore games. I think when most people want a casual game, they simply want a game that they can play with little time commitment and still make meaningful progress. Contrast to games like FFXI in the old days where if you don't have a few hours, don't even bother logging on.

But what I don't think is that anyone actually wants easy-mode games. People get frustrated when things are too hard, sure, but as long as you prepare them for the challenges you give them, it doesn't matter if the game is hard. Most players want to overcome an actual challenge, but if the game isn't genuinely fun, then yeah, they'd rather just meet their goal with no real effort, because their choice is to earn their goal doing something boring, or to abandon their goal altogether, which people do not like to do. But they will, and then they won't set new goals, so they'll quit.

CoP/Sky was hard and frustrating. I'm sure I spent many evenings cursing it during my FFXI days. But you know what, it felt damn good and extremely satisfying when you finally got something from it accomplished.

It's partly based in nostalgia, yes, but I haven't felt that level of satisfaction and accomplishment with any modern MMORPG since. I'd like to feel that way again, and I don't care if it's a huge time sink with forced grouping. And I say that as someone who has no where near the same amount of time to play FFXIV as I did FFXI.

Modern MMORPG design of WoW/Rift/GW2 isn't the end-all solution, but neither was the EQ days of past. Still doesn't mean people wouldn't enjoy one over the other every now and then. I hate this forced odds between what MMORPG design should be, I think a modern EQ-type MMORPG would succeed in today's market and would give players a choice in their online RPG experience.

I'm not at all saying that's what FFXIV should be or that it will be unenjoyable regardless, simply an overall picture of what's available out there.


Edited, Dec 20th 2012 11:42am by Whales

I hope so if only because the synths are pretty horrible even if the themes themselves are pretty good.

Really, as old as FFXI is the synths were clear and worked really well. What I've hear so far is awash in reverb and just generally sounds cluttered as hell and washed out.

I'm still not feeling the 3 second GCD/ability cooldown that I see. It just feels too long and that may change when I actually get a chance to test it out in the game. But right now, just looking, it feels slow no matter how beautiful the animations are.

It's a recommended level 15 leve because that's the one he accepted. The leves didn't start at your current level, they were grouped by 5's (recommended level 5, 10, 15, etc). Since this is alpha and the cap is 20, I imagine 15 was the highest leve they have implemented so far. So, when he started it, you notice it said recommended level +4 (raising the level to 19 since the player is level 20). They then backed down to the recommended level +0 to kill faster. None of this is any different than 1.0.

No. That's only what people trying to defend their MMO against the Behemoth WoW try to sell you as the truth.
WoW most likely is the first (and up to now only) MMO to strike a balance between hardcore and easy by offering
content for both. Although, strictly speaking, WoW did not create any MMOs.

Even though you have explained and I do understand the reason to select difficulty, I'm still disappointed because everything looks easy and elementary to me. You know exactly where to go to get the quest done, combat is impressive with graphics but no real skill involved, I'm sorry I'm just stating my opinion. I will still try the game but I already know it won't stick. Because so far from what I have seen the game requires no thinking whatsoever everything is done for you. I never understood why people like casual so much. I don't have much time but I rather play something that requires skill. I guess my hopes for something like XI has died today.

I'm going to chalk that up to YouTube compression as well. Although the music in 1.0 wasn't memorable, it wasn't bad either. (Sound effects were another story. Eeesh. And that hasn't been improved much yet.)

FF has always been a leader in music, not just because of the composers, but also because they pushed the envelope of video game sound. From the opera of VI, to the lush orchestrations from FF Tactics (in which the sound engineer said screw native PS1 sound, lets do it right - and then did it so very very right), to the MP3 songs used in later games, they've always pushed the envelope on what a game system was capable of doing.

That's not the case at all, the fact that in this alpha video it shows you step by step to get a quest done is boring to me. And to be honest it's okay I'm just one player but I have the right to give my opinion. I'm not here to complain I'm just disappointed because I have been waiting for 3 years. Like I said I'll still try the game.

you just described every AAA MMO released in the last ~5 years. i'm not saying you're necessarily wrong in your assessment (though you've certainly simplified things to a semi-ridiculous degree, based on very little evidence), but I think it's funny that you are surprised by any of this.

Furthermore, to say that ARR or any similar MMO "does not require skill" is simply incorrect. It may not be the level of skill you're looking for (i complain about this all the time), but come on with the blanket statements. I like to think we all are better than that in this forum.

Finally, if what you really want is XI, then by all means go re-sub; the servers are still up, the community is thriving, and if you're lucky you can hook up with one of those "Ye Olde Grinde Was Ye Beste" linkshells that recruit over in the other forums from time to time.



Its a proof-of-concept video. They're showing how the quest system works, and that it does work. And that its the same as every theme-park MMO ever. I'm not a fan of too much hand-holding either, but tbh, i'd prefer this over the vague XI quests that required wiki-ing everything. Something in the happy medium area would be of course ideal, but that's just crazy talk.


Edited, Dec 20th 2012 1:53pm by Llester

It's fine to have your opinion. But the thing is this just isn't new. Levequests in FFXIV 1.0 had an almost identical style of how to do them, from the scaling of difficulty and being able to change it depending on your level and party size, to highlighting where the enemies are on your map so you know where to find them. The only difference between 1.0 and 2.0 is that 2.0 allows you to start the levequest from anywhere in the zone that it takes place, instead of via an Aetheryte Crystal in the middle of a camp.

Let me ask, do you use FFXI Wikia? Or maybe even the ZAM Wiki at all? Do you use it for quests? Maybe you were stumped on how to get the map for Ranguemont Pass. Or perhaps you had no clue which NPC you had to approach to progress a quest in Wings of the Goddess? The thing is, in the end, unless you are the most hardcore of gamers to have ever gamed the games, you have surely turned to some form of guide or walkthrough to help you get through something in FFXI. It would be next to impossible to have completed a lot of those quests without doing so, or having to spend days upon days meandering the whole of Vana'diel trying to figure out what you need, or who to talk to.

I am bringing all this up because what's the difference between turning to a Wiki for a walkthrough, and seeing a highlighted point where you need to go to next? In essence it's ultimately the same thing, except one is done through a collection of fans archiving game information, and the other is done by the developers to keep you on track.

Anyway, that's all I got on the matter. Do I wish that sometimes quests had a bit more thought put in to them? Maybe a bit more vagueness to force you to do some more footwork? Sure, why not? It would give you a better sense of accomplishment by successfully figuring out where to go, who to talk to, what to gather, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm not going to lose any sleep over it so long as the quests themselves are insightful in to the world, enjoyable to read, and occasionally are challenging either through some manner of mini-game, or a difficult fight.