Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)

elidrin_sl said:

What would you suggest instead?

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My thoughts as well.... If anything, quests like this are a gesture. It's something to do and not meant to be an exclusive, streamline to getting your character to the max level. It's an option just as anything else. I do not believe that any game has intended any one path to become the means to leveling but people find the most reward and they drive it in the ground. It's not poor game design but our desire to reach a goal as quickly as possible. Next time you play an MMO, quest a little, kill a little, explore a little, heck just run around and do nothing but talk a little. I think we did this with EQ because there wasn't a quest icon over some NPC's head and gave out quest after quest and then when they were out, sent you to the next camp. The quests were actually there but we did what was most fun, effective, and rewarding and that was camping the best camp for exp and names for drops.

If it's anything like GW2, level synching means that you're presumably collecting lower level mob drops and gathering materials below your true level, so you won't keep pace for crafting/AH materials as if you were partying in an area appropriate for your true level. Plus lower level leve item/currency rewards are probably not going to scale up either.

Anyone have more info on this game?

I'd personally like to know what the combat is like.

elidrin_sl said:

What would you suggest instead?

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Alternative ways to motivate players to kill mobs. I'm saying we don't need a task quest system in every game so that there is a "solo levelling alternative to group play". Solo levelling can be approached many ways, and it's sad that all new MMO's want to mimic WoW instead of evolve the gameplay.

an accordion_sl said:

Alternative ways to motivate players to kill mobs. I'm saying we don't need a task quest system in every game so that there is a "solo levelling alternative to group play". Solo levelling can be approached many ways, and it's sad that all new MMO's want to mimic WoW instead of evolve the gameplay.

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Easy.... Get rid of do x quests like the old days and only have the big meaningful ones like "destroy this village" or "beat the evil necromancer". Roll the loot and exp back into mobs and put the manipulate x things quests back in the required encounters, ie. "you need dynamite to blow this door. Go collect some you should have seen coming this way without us telling you with a shiny god damn punctuation mark."

Exploration went the way of the dodo because of data mining. If you don't link every fucking reward in game to a perfect chain of quest stages, people might actually go back to wondering things like "how DOES one kill this necromancer?" Doesn't have to be reverted to the "good luck asshole" edition of early mmos, but there's that comfortable middle ground of obviously connected things (like conversation trees from related npcs) without the need to rigidly define everything in a single window, point by bullet point.

Where people got angry about this, and rightly so, was when quest bloat happened AND there was no easy arrow or list of things to follow. You have 16 quests per zone again instead of 16 quest hubs and it starts being less of a concern it took you an extra few minutes to figure out where one key was, because that was part of a single quest worth a quarter of your level and a bitchin new bp instead of .23% and yet another green pos along with every other chain component quest you kept getting told to ride back to camp for.

an accordion_sl said:

Alternative ways to motivate players to kill mobs.

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Like?

Itzena_sl said:

Like?

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I purposely didn't give examples.

And why is that?

Doesn't have any?

The solo-mode collection quest treadmill model is old and fatiguing to even think about at this point in the MMO genre after having done it SO much.

I will not be buying anymore MMOs that force that upon its players. Developers just don't get it though it seems.

As mentioned above, how could you design a system where that isn't necessary? Mostly get your exp from exploring aka running around? Have it be more about time investment then kills aka Eve? Pay $ for exp? You can't have fully scripted dynamic events for everyone and still keep it fresh / keep up with the player base without spending way more then anyone is willing too.

There is a reason why most MMO's do leveling this way. It is the most effective. Lets hear from you arm chair MMO devs. What would YOU do?

Wuyley_sl said:

As mentioned above, how could you design a system where that isn't necessary? Mostly get your exp from exploring aka running around? Have it be more about time investment then kills aka Eve? Pay $ for exp? You can't have fully scripted dynamic events for everyone and still keep it fresh / keep up with the player base without spending way more then anyone is willing too.

There is a reason why most MMO's do leveling this way. It is the most effective. Lets hear from you arm chair MMO devs. What would YOU do?

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The post is long gone on FoH, but it is using enough interacting systems to create pseudo-dynamic worlds. IE bandits spawn and path at random/arbitrary times. Caravans do the same. Sometimes they intersect. Track player efforts against mobs that collide with caravan, reward like quest. Bam.

Obviously it's a lot more complicated than that in practice, but with enough arbitrary but interactive actors in the world, you don't need to design anything other than constraints for said actors. Never dull, because it's always fresh. Live IN the world instead of progress THROUGH it.

We talking what GW2 did or just setting up a bunch of NPCs that have "If by X, do this" and then just have everyone roam around?

Wuyley_sl said:

We talking what GW2 did or just setting up a bunch of NPCs that have "If by X, do this" and then just have everyone roam around?

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GW2 was hidden quests with population and event based triggers, wasn't really anything 'new' except that someone actually bothered to do it. I mean, as bad as it was, WAR did the same sorta thing with PQs. In the old days you just got a ton of people together to kill a ton of stuff you otherwise couldn't, got no loot or XP and liked it... but I digress.

The thing is, worlds are static because everything is based on static events. Respawns, a few paths, etc. But you can leverage that if you add enough randomization and interactivity between entities on your own to create dynamic content. No one gives a shit about dragons that hide in a corner, so the current gen solution is to have it attack a town every 3 days or something equally retarded. How about adding a dragon that might spawn and just attack, so you know, you might not realize it's ever going to happen, or it might just not happen that way ever.

Of course people cry about not getting reliable loot, etc. But you decentralize that shit and add enough 'random' events and there's alwayssomethingto find/kill/loot, you just don't know what it will be based on the clock or spawn location. Dynamism through the obfuscation of arbitrarily selection and RNG leveraged against massive world size and NPC count. You just have to plan overall safeguards to keep shit from getting wacked and out of control (the cavalry, if you will) and this type of system obviously benefits from destroyable towns/cities/etc. and that type of thing...

Devs have been leveraging computing power in the wrong way. WoW has spent so much time and effort going all Michelangelo reductive sculpture and carefully crafting a million non-interacting little vignettes or quest scripts, when they should have been looking to the 'old ways' instead. Heaps of random shit on top of each other and tweak it's behavior until you have a self-generating Miniatur Wunderland instead of a connected line of 30 second quests that people ignore anyway.

I always think about ways to make MMO leveling better and I just cannot come up with a good idea that makes it truly dynamic/interesting. When I played FFXI, it was just group with 6 people (including yourself) and hope to get the best exp you could over the course of X time (all the while hoping your tank or healer didn't DC or leave the group because you'd never replace them and the time it would take for somebody to show up to camp would be so long that the group would just disband). When I started WoW and it had a quest system, it was extremely awkward and boring to me. The whole "Kill X, come back for small reward" seemed odd but I ended up liking it a bit because I didn't have to wait in town for 2 hours shouting for a party and I could control the outcome almost every time. At this point, though, I'm over the questing systems after EQ2/WoW/WAR/Rift/AoC but I don't know that there is a better system out there. The pq's in WAR and the rifts in Rift are 'dynamic' but only if people are there. I know in Rift it was an issue if you were in a level 30 area and you ran up on a rift by yourself that was a 'major rift' or whatever, you'd end up just dying or avoiding it. That negates the idea and dynamic content all in a shot. That coupled with when the NPC's would invade a quest hub and you weren't able to kill them all to be able to turn in quests or pick up new ones; that is major fail imo.

The only thing I can come up with is more of a RPG type system like the dark brotherhood quest line in Skyrim where it's a series of story-based or mob killing quests leading up to a big conclusion that opens up a daily type hub but not one that means you need to grind X days for Y items. You could get exp along the way for killing mobs or completing portions of the series then you'd be able to complete it for exp/titles/gear/gold or whatever. The only issue is that if you leveled several characters, you'd get tired of that system as well when you did it 2+ times.

Or they could add a good story line and have the quests make sense? How can any of you be arguing for bear asses? Jesus this community has fallen

I am not arguing FOR bear asses just that it makes since logically why devs go that route. Would I want totally unique quests and experiences every time I log on? Sure. Is it a realistic wish? Fuck no.

It's not to far off, take secret world. I know that was really the only it had going for it, but it was a huge step in the right direction for solo progression in MMORPGs. They don't even have to make it as good as SW, just make things make a bit more sense.

And if any MMO should copy Secret World, it should be Final Fantasy.

Penance_sl said:

It's not to far off, take secret world. I know that was really the only it had going for it, but it was a huge step in the right direction for solo progression in MMORPGs. They don't even have to make it as good as SW, just make things make a bit more sense.

And if any MMO should copy Secret World, it should be Final Fantasy.

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I think ultimately though, you would still need those filler quests. Considering that you can level multiple classes on a single character, I don't see how they could possibly generate enough unique and interesting quests to help fill out the leveling experience for people who don't wanna grind trash mobs or chain run dungeons (which is what I'm going to be doing!). Plus, you do have the overarching storyline quests, so it's not all bear asses.

Wuyley_sl said:

I am not arguing FOR bear asses just that it makes since logically why devs go that route. Would I want totally unique quests and experiences every time I log on? Sure. Is it a realistic wish? Fuck no.

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It is realistic. What isn't realistic is asking for scripted content to do that. If you need cutscene quality events and an "epic" story behind every quest, you will forever be disappointed. The real problem is gamers are now conditioned to follow bullet point objectives, so devs are scared of going back to "see interesting shit, go do it" even with modern hardware and lessons learned since the days when you didn't have the technical leverage to really do much more than selective random/rare respawns and make people wait.

I'm guessing if you took a quest in WoW, averaged the quest exp out over ten mob kills and made the quest reward drop off the tenth kill but not have a quest tracker, people would go apeshit over it...