Alright, so Final Fantasy XIV was announced, and it’s another MMO.  Me and the Yeti have been looking for a different escape from WoW, and this could be just the ticket we were looking for.  I mean, hey… we met on FFXI, and we’ve had our fond share of memories about that game, but there’s no denying that in order for us to really want to give it a good go, there’s a couple of things we’re looking forward to in terms of changes.

If you haven’t seen it already, this is the E3 trailer they ended up showing.  I still believe it’s basically FFXI-2.  The hume looks the same, but they tossed in both an elvaan and a galka on the side (although it’s strangely a tail-less galka).  Not to mention the trailer does say “…you must join hands… once again.”  That just screams ‘sequel’ in itself.

So allow me to indulge in some old FFXI memories and what I hope to see changed with the upcoming XIV.

Winner of the Congeniality Award

The Good

FFXI was definitely one of the more sociable MMOs I had ever come across.  There was always a hearty hello and greeting, and it was easy to make friends and allies seeing how small the server populations were.  Of course, because you ALWAYS had to team up to get anything done, it was inevitable that you had to make friends somehow in that game.  It was key to keep a good list of associations if you wanted to get anywhere in that game, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  PUGs (Pick up groups) even seemed much less painful.

The Bad

Nothing was rarely ever solo-able.  So that ‘very easy’ mob that you think would go down in two hits (what with being 20+ levels above it) still took at least 5 minutes to take down.  It’s not like every other MMO where, if it was low enough level, you could auto-attack a mob and go out to the kitchen to get a drink.  This made it tough to get anything done unless you had a constant bunch of folks ready to party at a moment’s notice.

I mean, even in regular FF games, as soon as the main guy was practically omnipotent, those two extra party members you brought along were pretty much only there for one of two reasons:  A) you forgot to level them up because they were characters you didn’t like to use B) they are your favorite characters and you take them with you every chance you get.

The Nightmare

What we hope gets changed is the wait time for groups, or at least giving a player the option to fight out on their own while waiting for other folks.  I remember the hours of waiting in Jeuno because there either wasn’t a white mage or a tank (which is usually a general MMO nightmare in itself), to the point where we started making up silly games (like the Sit Down Olympics) just to pass the time.

And not just the ability to solo at some point, but giving jobs the freedom to not have to rely and wait for one specific healer type/class.  I know that will always be a sort of staple problem in MMOs, but all I’m really hoping to see is less cookie cutter groups and more variety in the classes that are used.  I remember going out to the dunes with a monk for a tank, simply because we didn’t know any better.  But it was fun, and even through one or two deaths, the group went on.  There wasn’t a wait for a specific job, we took who we could and it continued.  It’s not like that come end game, but I can hope there’s a way to keep that kind of changeup going without resorting to a set group of jobs for every group I join.

A Vast Expansive World To Discover

The Good

Vana’diel was big… huge even.  The areas were, for the most part, different, lush, and exciting to explore.  Each main city was different, and held their own cultures, colors, and sights.  There was always something different about where you were fighting, from the Crawler caves to the lush jungles of the Yuhtunga, and off and away to the ethereal emptiness of the Promyvions, they all stood out, and had their special nuances about them.

The Bad

Traveling the world took forever and a day.  Folks who play WoW might spend a lifetime on it and might truly have no life, but folks who played FFXI and had no life were only there because it took ages to get from one place to another.  For a good chunk of your early levels, you hoofed it wherever you went.  Even going from a city to a fighting area could take the better part of 10 minutes.  I spent three hours getting lost in Windurst from it’s massive size.  Chocobos were great (when you could afford them), but the moment you dismounted, you were resorted to walking till you hit a teleport station (if you were lucky).  And how is it that airships took almost as long as ships to travel from one place to the next?  At least, at sea, you had the option to fish or fight skeleton pirates.  There was something on a sea ship to break the monotony that the airship never had.

The Nightmare

Remember those swift chocobos?  Before you had the ability to raise one, you were subjected to forcing yourself to buy one from the city you were waiting at, or at a midway station (if your city owned it at the time).  And it wouldn’t have been such a nightmare if it didn’t cost you the better part of an arm, a leg, and most anything else you had in your pockets.  The idea that chocobo’s riding costs would go up in price whenever someone bought them was painful punishment after having spent whatever pocket change you had on supplies you needed for the group (another nightmare).  So, if you were short on gold, pray you had a forgiving group that would wait while you walked your slow butt to where the camp was supposed to be.

Square… we like to pretend we have lives.  But if it takes us the better part of a day just to get to where we’re supposed to fight, don’t expect us to be all smiles (and in some cases, sober).

Customization, A Look For All Occasions

The Good

When you saw a monk in monk gear, you knew immediately what the job was, and it looked kick ass (hell, even white mages looked awesome… even if the hume males looked like they were wearing pajama bell bottoms).  Everyone had job specific gear they could get, and that gear was classy and snazzy and clearly indicative of the job the player was playing as.  They came in some pretty bold color schemes as well, and the quests to achieve them had a great story to go along with it all.

The Bad

Unfortunately, everyone started looking the same after a while.  To start off with, the choices when starting a character were pretty slim.  Out of all the races, the humans seemed to have the most hair styles, but it stopped at that.  You couldn’t even customize the hair color, which is a pretty standard thing for general MMOs nowadays.  All Galkas looked alike, the only difference was probably if they had a beard or not.  Same with the mithras, the only real difference was their choice of hair (which was limited to something around five or six choices) that made them stand out.  And no one could tell a tarutaru from first glance.

The Nightmare

Eventually, after you did get your quest gear, that was all you wore in the end.  Unless you had some high level crafting (another nightmare), or were in a raiding/Dynamis linkshell, the chances of you getting anything else to wear were slim pickings.  And, like most MMOs, the gear with the best stats were what you were aiming for.  But when everyone wears the same high-stat gear, again, you all end up looking like a pile of clones.

If they could have more clothing drops, I would be in heaven.  It doesn’t even have to be useful gear, just sheer variety and numbers of random equips would be bliss.  How much junk did you end up collecting in FF games?  Tons.  I want to see that variety again.

Let’s hope Square doles out more color combinations and costume drops and less… subligar.

Space, I need Space!

The Good

FFXI had an awesome idea of giving players their own home sweet home, a room to decorate and fill with random bits of furniture and quest spoils.  Going one step further (ala Phantasy Star Universe) and letting more folks pile into the rooms would have made it icing atop an already delicious cake.

And there were quests, Gobbie Bag ones, that let you expand your inventory to pile on even more gear.  Things came in stacks, and it seemed that room could have been plentiful.

The Bad

It wasn’t as roomy as we thought.  The reason was because, every job had its own gear, and unless you really wanted to throw away your class specific equips, you had to save them and store them for the rainy day you decided to switch from Red Mage to Dragoon.  Head, body, arms, legs, feet, rings, etc… those equips add up and they take up space, and fast.  Not to mention the side stuff you brought with you like silence oils, invisibility powders, food buffs, arrows, and whatnot.  It soon became clear that enough was never going to be enough in regards to inventory.

The Nightmare

What made it worse was even though you had armor equipped, they still took up slots in your inventory.  So a set of gear was taking up precious space that could’ve been used to actually pick up items to sell and make up for what you’ve spend getting ready for the fight (let alone that damn Chocobo rental).  Woe be it to the bard/mages who actually bought and cycled through the magic staves.  That was another six or seven slots blown just to hold those, which would then turn into a possibility of 12 or 14 slots if you managed to get your high quality ones.

And those Gobby bag quests I mentioned?  I forgot to say that it required a lot (and I mean) a lot of material to actually get the quest done.  So even before you got your first slot finished, you had to have room to hold the four to six items you needed to complete the quest.  And some of those items were not cheap.

And your Moogle house, your room, could only hold so much.  If you wanted to hold more, you had to buy furniture and manage to arrange them properly so you could fit and condense as much into what little space you had.  Forget showing off the room, it’s nothing but forty pots arranged so you could keep all that equip you can’t throw away because it took forever to save up and buy or the quests took forever to do.

Oh, and having areas where you were forcibly deleveled did not make it any easier.  So you had to haul your regular level gear as well as the underleveled stuff, unless you were wearing it already.  Pray you didn’t die and delevel under the level of your gear.

Well, I really could go on forever with this, so I’ll cut it down to a few more things that I’m hoping to see in FFXIV.

- Less Lag.  I know this is a hard one, what with everyone’s connections being so different and all over the place, but if there was anything that killed a group faster than a gobbie bomb, it was the lag.

The citywide attacks they ended up implementing in one of the expansions could have been the most epic of fun ideas IF the lag didn’t disconnect you and that hour spend protecting the city amounted to not even being able to receive the credit because you lagged out the last five minutes of the battle.

- Better patching methods.  The server went down, and it went down a lot, and most of it would end up being patched (unless it was the other nightmare of ending up with a corrupt file and needing a full reinstall).  But no one can deny that patching took For-Freaking-Ever when it happened.  There has got to be a better, quicker way to get that stuff fixed and sent than waiting for four hours of patching.

- Death penalties that aren’t so harsh.  I can understand losing xp, and I can understand deleveling, but I can only take so much of it if you’re allowed to make up for it in solo fighting or quests.  The amount of time it took to get back that lost level was the equivalent of spending a day playing if you didn’t have your friends there, and you couldn’t count on quests to give you more than a piddly couple of hundred xp.  You couple the deleveling with that lack of bag space, and having a naked group member wasn’t all that uncommon.

- Ditch the taxes.  From some ungodly reason, Jeuno, the main city you went to sell junk, always had taxes whenever you wanted to sell something.  It didn’t even matter that you were personally selling it by yourself on your own body, but you still managed to lose gil here and there because of taxes that went nowhere.  Those gil added up, and because the economy was pretty harsh in the game, you can’t afford to lose what little you gain.

- Keep the nation pride going.  FFXI had an interesting idea to keep territories changing hands and forced nations to really go at it and keep forts and teleports when they could.  We had Windurst pride and it showed when, at the end of the day, you saw the map littered with the nation’s conquests.  That little bit of rivalry is much more appealing to me than having PvP areas.

- Less reasons to camp mobs.  I hate camping, and it all started with FFXI’s Leaping Lizzy and the rest of their mobs.  Rare spawns are awesome, but I like them more when folks didn’t quite know where they were going to appear, and when it didn’t take 24 hours to get one to appear just to have it drop gear people say you need.  Did I love my Joyeause to death?  Hell yeah.  Would I spend the six days I did trying to camp that thing again?  Hell no.

- More, easier crafting.  Look, I know the whole crafting at a certain day, pointing in a certain direction was interesting the first time around.  But in the end, the whole myth of it just got old and irritating.  Not to mention, even at high levels, when crafting level one stuff, you still had a chance to fail and lose items.  Not cool.  It took a good chunk of time just to farm and collect the items, so you would think that was enough punishment and effort.  And don’t get me started on those hakutaku eyes…

- Keep the job switching.  There is a great amount of freedom to only needing one character to shuffle around all the jobs.  That should never change.  I like being able to pursue one main and one sub and switch it around anytime I like.  I would hope there’s less dependency on specific mains and subs, however, so that everyone’s free to experiment more with oddball varieties (go go Rdm/Drk for-evah).

- Linkshells are awesome.  Of course, when you collect them like I did, they need their own separate bag compartment, but there was such a freedom to having various linkshells to pop in and out of to say hi to friends or ask for help.  And when you wanted silence, you could just pop it off and not have to worry about text babbling on in the chat box.

- Keep the uncluttered UI.  The majority of the game was macro-driven, button pressing was the norm and there was little, if any reason to really spend time with clicking, especially in the midst of the battle.  That meant there was nothing really taking up screen space (except for the chat box on the PS2, yikes!) apart from the compass.  Even the maps were pretty bare bones and free of clutter.  That helped bring you into the world instead of just staring at another game screen.  Of course, when booty1icious666 walked in front of you… that was a different story.

FFXI had a great storyline, but it was constantly lost amidst LFG (looking for group) and traveling the long distances to get to where you needed to be.  It was an amazing social game, but they need to find a way to let folks have a little space to themselves and still see results.  Keep the lore, the beautiful lands, the awesome magic spells and fight visuals (some of the best and flashiest around), but if they could fix the baggage along the way, they’ll be sure to have another happy little subscriber in their midst.

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