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Final Fantasy XIV is changing a lot with its relaunch, but many of those changes are a matter of giving the old a new purpose and function. Such is the case with the much-maligned levequest, previewed in the latest video update from the game’s alpha version. The new system seems much cleaner, with more narrow level bands, a distributor right at the camp, and a much simpler interface for starting and finishing one of these quick repeatable bursts of content.

Looking forward to working in a team a bit more? Then you’ll be happy that the second half of the video is devoted to an early preview of group combat, switching back and forth between several members locked in battle with large opponents. While the abilities and balance are still rough, it’s a clear departure from how the game looked and felt in the first version. Check out the full video just past the break.

Comments

BenjaminFindout

I really like it. The first version of FF14 was a mess. Im a long time FF11 player so I had some expectations. At first it might not look very spectacular but you can spot some very important parts. First off combat looks finally again impressive, full of action and it immediately reminds me of FF11 which is a very good thing. The given example shows a classic setup with tank, damage dealer, healer and supporter roles. For me this is fantasticnews. You can also see the classic attack from behind to take advantage of a blind spot. You can see an Archer doing his job and a Mage switching between heals and offensive spells. It all lokks like the reborn realm will be great. I hope they keep up the promise they deliver with these videos.

ShaneAngle

Of course, the new opening movie is the only piece of information we’ve had about the game for a little while, but it seems worth analyzing and examining even on its own merits. No, I’m not talking about speculating as to whether or not the guy on the horse who looks exactly like Odin is in fact Odin or not (spoiler, doy). I want to talk about what this means for the lore, what the overall effect is, and whether or not this monster of a trailer succeeds at what it’s meant to do.

The first part of the trailer is familiar to anyone who’s followed the game for a while; it’s the End of an Era trailer in its entirety, with no differences that my eyes could pick out. It’s a good trailer, but I wonder if it might confuse players coming to the game for the first time because there are a lot of important people on the screen in short order, and we don’t get a sense of who they are at any point in the video. That makes it all the more likely that they’ll be around in the new world just so players unfamiliar with the first version will know who these people are.

Mind you, Merlwyb is awesome, and I don’t want her to die. But the death toll from the Battle of Carteneau should really be higher than “one old elezen who might still be around in some form.” Punchy endings aren’t a bad thing.

Let’s move on from morbid ruminations. The second part kicks in after the final spell is cast, and in parts it’s just a pastiche of footage that we’ve already seen in bits and pieces. The roaring behemoth and Odin in the woods have been glimpsed before, and neither of them has any connection that we know of to what’s unfolded in Eorzea. They work as establishing shots but aren’t terribly exciting.

When we see Thancred and company, things take a turn for the interesting. The fact that they lived seems almost a given, especially as they were nowhere near Dalamud’s landing spot, but the fact that we see them hammers home the idea that it hasn’t been all that long since we were last in the world. None of them looks older, and all of them look to be expecting the return of the players, and of course they’ve got snazzy new pseudo-steampunk bits adorning their outfits.

This does raise some interesting questions regarding the storyline: Do they know that the players are coming back? Thancred and Y’shtola’s actions in particular seem to suggest that they were waiting for a sign that just arrived. That makes me wonder just how much of what has happened was already part of Louisoix’s planning in the first place, whether he expected the whole summoning ritual to fail or not. It might have always been a contingency plan… but that’s all wild speculation.

I have to say, Eorzea repaired awfully quickly from the absolute destruction Bahamut inflicted. I’ve seen five years thrown about as the accepted figure for the gap between the original game and the relaunch, but considering the effects of Dalamud, I think five years seems a little short. Still, none of the Circle members appears to have been ravaged by long years in a post-apocalyptic world, so it looks like five years is just about right.

Once we’ve had a roundup of the major NPCs, it’s back to the stand-in players, who do nothing particularly interesting — they call their chocobos, then run off toward a weird thing in the distance, full stop. Worth questioning is whether they’re in a reborn Silvertear Falls or not — the landscape could easily be Ishgardian, or Dalamud’s return could have restored what the airship’s tussle with Midgardsormr knocked loose.

As a lead-in to the remake, it works fairly well. While there are some bits that won’t be clear to non-veterans, all of the major points are addressed. There was a massive battle, a cataclysmic awakening, and all of the heroes were cast to another time and place to renew their efforts. If you weren’t around for everything leading up to what happened in the trailer, you can get the gist of it, even if it’s uncomfortably long in that regard. Not that there’s a whole lot that can easily be trimmed out.

As a trailer, it’s… less successful. More than half of it is either recycled footage or bits that we’ve seen in passing, enough that watching it for the first time feels like a long recap followed by a few moments of things actually happening. It raises some interesting questions, but some of those questions either would be answered in moments by the remake or will likely be ignored altogether.

It’s not bad, but boy, I would have rather seen a benchmark. Just for nostalgia’s sake, really; I do not have any real worry about the game running properly.

The currency one is what’s going to throw the largest number of players for a loop, as the game is reducing all money values to a tenth of what they once were. To reduce numbers, all money is getting the ones digit removed, meaning that players will be 10% as wealthy as they are now, but all vendor prices will be 10% of their current values. Net purchasing power should be identical.

There will also be a number of items removed from the game, altered, or otherwise changed with the new version. Players will lose several key items and ammunition, and other items will be bound to a player to prevent trading. Take a look at the full rundown for all the particulars on graphics, money, and other mechanical shifts to inventory management.

Would I do it again? In an instant.

There’s no way that I can repeat the amount of information that was in the roundup in a single column, so I’m not going to try. What I am going to do is talk about some of the other assorted bits and pieces of my Final Fantasy XIV experience and the surrounding events because it was truly something to see. I’ve been fairly skeptical up until this point, but I’ll say that after sitting down and playing the beta version for a little while, I’m now a believer.

A lot of this comes down to little things. Yes, it looks as if bonus points are still in the game exactly as they were before, and that should upset me… but it doesn’t, largely because they actually seem to be a bonus now. The verdict is still out on how easy they are to reallocate, but if you can actually use them to tweak your stats and build your character toward a distinct sort of playtstyle rather than auto-spending them in the most immediately relevant stats, that makes things much better. I actually never spent my points in my high-level playthrough, and I didn’t run into issues of survivability or damage.

Furthermore, there’s the fact (touched upon in my hands-on preview) that the game might have a traditional quest model, but in no way does it follow the tried-and-true hub model. Quests are scattered hither and yon along a variety of paths, and it’s very easy to miss them rather than simply starting here and going on to there. The game is large and diverse enough for you to find things as you level a new class you never noticed before.

And then there’s Naoki Yoshida.

Seeing the man in person made it even more clear why, exactly, he’s managed to capture the hearts of Final Fantasy XIV players. There’s an energy about him, a definite sense of purpose and direction that at the same time can be tempered by outside forces. Yoshida knows what he wants to do, but he also is flexible enough to take outside input into account. He’s like the ultimate developer.

There’s also the fact that the entirety of the venue was decorated to remind everyone about FFXIV. National banners hung from the ceilings, walls were covered in Gridania-appropriate art, and concept art decorated the windows. There were even plenty of fake trees, which sounds like overkill but wound up giving an air of warmth and closeness to the goings-on.

On a personal level, this was a watermark trip for me for a couple of reasons, not the least of which being the fact that it’s the furthest I’ve ever been. Going from one coast of the country to the other is sort of by definition the farthest you can go, yes, but I’d gone all of my life without going further from my home than Chicago. But I absolutely needed to be at this event.

Normally this sort of trip just isn’t in our budget (and we don’t accept travel stipends from studios), but even Joystiq knew this was a big deal worth splurging budget on. There’s nobody on the staff who knows FFXIV as well as I do, and this is the real start of the media push for this game. That wow factor I’ve been talking about for the past several months? This is where it needed to start.

So how did it go? Pretty well, I’d say. The game is open without being empty and directed without being on rails. It offers guidance but does not push; it offers options without bewilderment. There are some factors that I think need further examination — housing sounds unnecessarily restrictive at this time — but that’s the point of testing, and it seems as if we’ll be getting a better game as a result of the tests.

Obviously, I can’t talk about the test in depth, and neither can anyone else who would like to continue to test the game. But I think other Legacy members will be pleasantly surprised, and I think new players coming in will find more than they bargained for.

Can the game sustain a subscription model in a world of free-to-play? Before I would have said no. Now, I’m going out on a limb and saying… possibly. It’s really something else, after all.

Oh, and because everyone’s already sharing this? At maximum resolution and graphical settings, I scored 8673 on the benchmark. Slightly tweaking down the shadows and having long-distance objects at lower detail kicked my score up to 9609, and the shadows were only really notable when looking at the Aetheryte from above. So the game is just plain going to look better more consistently.

So let’s talk about the potential advantages. I think the game is uniquely poised to deliver on this front simply because having more people in the party allows you to do things that more modern games don’t have the space for — things that Final Fantasy XI was quite good at doing in party composition, as it happens.

Checklists over roles

Final Fantasy XI’s classes certainly fell into roles or were forced into those roles through player use. However, this was prior to the days of the modern trinity’s rise to ubiquitousness, meaning that group composition was very different. You had your tanks and healers, but you also had buffers, debuffers, magic damage, melee damage, pullers, and various other miscellaneous functions. And for several classes, your subjob and your gear determined whether or not you could fulfill a certain role or not.

Pullers, for instance, needed a ranged attack, which cut a small number of classes out of the running, but I still fondly remember pulling with Dia as a Red Mage and having a Dragoon fling pebbles to pull targets. Healers needed to keep the tank alive, but tank survivability scaled pretty well, meaning that during normal content it was quite possible to have a healer providing some other useful role like debuffer or buffer or what-have-you.

The emphasis was more on a checklist of functions rather than a specific set of roles. It was a matter not of looking for a healer but of looking for someone who filled the needed role of healing and other possibly needed roles. A COR/RNG could be a puller and a buffer, meaning that you could fill the healer spot with something else.

Not that this was a perfect system. There are approximately a million classes capable of doing melee damage and two or three capable of tanking, which means that a lot of players are just out of luck. But this seems like something that could be applied to Final Fantasy XIV quite easily, especially while reinforcing the reason a player might choose to use a class over a job in a given situation. Sure, a Dragoon is a better melee damage dealer than a Lancer, but the Dragoon can’t also serve as a debuffer. The Lancer, when played correctly and given the right skill loadout, can do precisely that.

Depending on the skills available, of course. I’m just throwing out ideas here.

Scaling content

Here’s another idea worth considering: What if Final Fantasy XIV turned its party size into an advantage rather than a disadvantage? City of Heroes had the same upward limits on a normal party, but it managed to make its content more fun despite the huge party size by allowing people to group up more or less at will due to the wonders of content scaling.

CoH managed this through a fairly simple trick. As more people entered an instance, the size of enemy spawns increased so that three regular enemies turned into five regulars and a lieutenant, then 12 regulars and three lieutenants, and so on up the line. The first couple of steps up were fairly linear, but as you approached the full size, spawns got exponentially larger and major villains had to be faced at their full power.

This scaling wasn’t perfect. Archvillain scaling was sometimes dicey for small groups or solo players, and good builds could often sweep through huge spawns normally without the need for a party. But the idea and the core execution was spot-on, especially the exponential scaling part. A party with two or three members could easily just be three damage-dealing sorts, but once you got into near-full numbers, groups were meant to be large enough to require crowd control, tanking, and healing. The game swelled or shrank to account for others.

FFXIV already even has a system for marking tiers of content in the form of party size flags. Imagine a dungeon that scaled purely based on the group size. At 1-3 players, the major bosses are tough fights that can be handled solo with care or in a group without too much difficulty, and enemy groups are reasonable or require minimal crowd control. Once you hit Light Party status, bosses and enemies get tougher and require more coordination. In a full party, you’re into the full-on party vs. party combat that was talked up before the game was released, where having a really hard set of roles is an asset rather than a drawback.

I’ve mentioned the whole endgame back-and-forth before in this column, and I’d like to see FFXIV be something spectacular. Offering honest-to-Twelve scaling content from launch would be wonderful, especially since it would match the in-game leve scaling. Just food for thought.