Interview of Naoki Yoshida during the Japan ExpoFollow

As at E3, Naoki Yoshida responded to several interviews during the Japan Expo, one of JOL-FF XIV accompanied MondesPersistants and Finalfantasy14.eu !

Link : http://forum.finalfantasy14.eu/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=2338

I know this will make some people angry, but I have to offer a bit of commentary on the interview, specifically the greater and greater similarity this game has to, you guessed it, WoW. How FFXIV expects to stand out by making yet another World of Warcraft influenced MMORPG is beyond me, especially at a time when that market is not only incredibly bloated but when even millions of WoW players are tired of the formula.



So, it sounds exactly like another WoW-style leveling experience, clearly without an alternative, at that.



Also sounds like they want WoW-style combat, too: the five-seconds-per-monster sort of thing.



Bah, more of a WoW design.



What!? Now we're even borrowing from WoW's loading screens, haha! (That one's actually not that big of a deal. :P)

Every time I hear more about the development of 2.0, I start to get even more concerned for the future of this game. Obviously SE is taking the most cautious route to their reboot, and a cautious MMORPG, in this day and age, strongly swings toward the design popularized by World of Warcraft, even in ways it shouldn't. Most games that take after WoW fail, and for good reason; FFXIV is now planning to take after WoW, and it's already sitting at one of the lowest aggregate review scores for any game in recent memory.

In my opinion, rather than court the illusory "WoW millions" that every MMO maker seems fated to aim for, SE would have been better off catering to their extremely loyal but relatively smaller Final Fantasy (XI) population, making a "niche" game that would have offered something different for those not interested in the kind of MMORPG that currently exists in droves.

I think its a bad idea if they're going with quest chaining as the main form of leveling up. Not that straight grinding is any better but imo quest chaining is just as grindy and just as dated. It ran its course already and if its your typical quest hub to quest hub progression without any twists it gets boring quick.

From my experience with TERA i enjoyed the game quite a bit. It looked beautiful, the gameplay was a lot of fun, and it was a really fresh experience but by the time i hit level 45 on my warrior, the quests had already burned me out and i stopped playing.

I don't know. From my experience quest hub progression is boring. This said however the FF theme will win me over and i'll play 2.0 til my eyes pop out of their sockets...or til the quests burn me out.

Everything else in that interview sounds great!

@KK
Most of the ideas you refer to as 'more like WoW' are generic and you could substitute any recently released MMO in WoW's place. I agree that WoW set the standard, but players have come to expect certain things from their experience in an MMO these days.

A quest based leveling system is more than likely there for players who want to get experience at their own pace. I don't see a problem with this as it's probably something you can do alone or with a group. Quests are a staple of RPGs in general so pinning this to WoW doesn't make much sense.

Players also want engaging combat mechanics. I think(read: hope) this has more to do with giving players more options for using abilities rather than being able to mow through mobs in mere seconds. Even though I think it needs adjustment, I think TERA has a good grip on this part of the game. Instead of waiting on TP to build, you use your basic attacks to build it up and spend it on more damaging abilities or abilities which debuff, stun or what have you. You have a choice between mowing a mob down in seconds and struggling to get your resource back in the next battle, using it moderately and keeping a steady kill speed or conserving it for something dangerous.



If you don't want to grind, you're in the wrong genre. The grind is necessary because there isn't an endless supply of endgame content for players to participate in should that grind be removed. That said, I'm all for alternate routes to achieving your goals and I wish that this was something that developers would spend a little more time on.

Completely agree. If they can flesh out the quests where we get great storytelling i think it would be amazing. Maybe they will too. Im not writing anything off. Could be the shallow storytelling that turned me off TERA and other MMOs ike it.

@FilthyMcnasty im not against a grind. I enjoyed straight grinding in FFXI for years. But the general consensus is that quests are less grindy, i was just making the connection that they arent. In FFXI the grind was fun for me personally not because i couldnt get enough of killing crabs in Valkyrum for 10 levels and repeat that for 65 more but because it was done in parties and the experience was unmatched for me at the time by any other game (that i've played). What quest progression does is take that and remove the other players. Thats it. I think thats worse. However, if they manage to have good storytelling and some twist on the typical quest system, it can be fun.

I disagree. I don't think anyone thinks that quests are any less of a grind. Quest progression also doesn't remove other players. All it does is remove the necessity to have a group to get something done. The consensus is that people prefer because it is something they can do on their own if they don't have time to form a group. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from recruiting a group and grinding quests or mobs for your levels. At least you'd have the option to complete them on your own if you didn't want to spend 20 minutes assembling a group to quest for 10 minutes.

I do find it interesting that there have been so many threads about how "Level Grinding is such an antiquated method", and now that they say that they are breaking with that, and setting the game up to be more about story leveling, People are now chiming in that Quest leveling is a bad idea.

Personally, I am just hoping that both options are available. That you can do the quests as means of leveling, or you can fight monsters, or both.

Personally, I am all for mob grinding (and considering the butcher's crown...).

I am definitely on the wait-and-see boat, I doubt it will be a make or break aspect to the game.

Euch quest chaining........I was really hoping for a unique MMO with modern features...not a WOW clone...I'll reserve judgement until it's released but I'm losing hope.

There are plenty of 'WoW clones' that are alive and well. I'm not sure I'd trust SE to even be able to pull that off at this point

Not everything. I realize that SE probably could care less about only my subscription fee, but realize that there are many other people like me who are at least hesitant to accept SE's word on faith alone. After failing to launch and following that up with lying about their progress, SE now has a stigma to shake. People tend to doubt anything you say without first seeing your words put into actions beyond that point.

I finally broke down and tried WoW at my brother's insistence. It's alright. I'd still take XI over it in a heartbeat. The interesting thing is to see how many elements from WoW have made their way into XIV. I honestly prefer monster grinding over quest grinding because I prefer to do things with people rather than soloing. Hell, many of the people I completed XI content with and people who filled out my friend list were people I met FIRST in an XP party in the dunes or qufim or the jungle etc. At first I liked XIV's "pull six mobs and everyone take one" version of mob grinding, but it honestly got old quick. I miss skillchains and magic bursts on a mob that could actually wipe the party if you weren't paying attention. XIV's partying style still almost feels like soloing.

I think my biggest disappointment with XIV is the boring-ness of the world. XI had so many interesting zones that you ended up exploring due to the vast amount of questing. XIV's world seems to have these gigantic zones that feel empty because there's not much variety to them. There's no incentive to run to the ends of the world because there's nothing there to advance your character. And I'm really not a huge fan of instanced dungeons either. I liked going down into KRT or SSG or Ifrit's cauldron etc. to farm eyes for a Hopping Taco cluster. I much prefer having item-popped NM's and dungeons you can explore at your leisure on BST without having to enter an instance.

The world in XI just seemed so vast and interesting. I would go skill up in weird places just to see the sights. I LIKED having to roam around. I wanted to do that. I'm not sure if XIV is missing that due to a low pop. or due to actual game design, but it just doesn't feel like adventure in the same way XI did. Neither does WoW. For as much as people bitch about the repetitiveness of XI, I felt like one of it's major strengths was variety. I went to 4367439857348957 different zones to level. I did subjob quests, advanced job quests, and fame quests in each city. I did quests to get outpost warps. I did missions in my nation. I did missions to raise my level cap. I did quests to get a bigger gobbiebag or mog safe. I did ZM, CoP, and ToAU missions. I didn't just learn my spells as a mage, I had to get drops or do quests. I camped NM's. Yes, sometimes I cursed them, but it actually felt like an accomplishment to get an Obow or Byakko's Haidate. That, to me, is variety.

I think my biggest thing I'm hoping to see in 2.0 is that type of variety. And a big exciting world with reasons to go explore it. The two go hand in hand.

I haven't actively played XI since the level cap raised from 75, but I'm assuming a lvl 99 BST would be quite fun for exploring the world at large. I'm not sure if they adjusted NM's at all when they raised the cap to 99, but if not, I imagine you could solo quite a few guys that were formerly pretty mean. I never played SMN either. I had BST, WAR, and RNG capped out pretty well when lvl cap was 75.

Sometimes I still consider re-installing XI, but I think I'm just going to wait it out and see what 2.0 brings. Everyone I used to play XI with has moved on to other games and the game itself seems to have passed me by. What I really want is to be a part of an influx of new people, playing a new game, and experiencing that newness collectively. That's another thing that has me a bit apprehensive about 2.0. I hope they introduce something that's different enough from the current version that it can become what it should have been in the first place- a new and exciting saga that carries on the successful elements that made XI so awesome, while incorporating new elements that allow it to be its own unique game. We'll see.

If they made a server that only accepted new characters, and I could rustle up an old friend or two, I'd do it all again as well. I could even live with the graphics. As we see with XIV, content >> graphics...

SE is not trying to clone WoW. They're trying to update their mechanics, controls and user interface to function properly, as they do in WoW. Accomplishing this will help them in any market, not just in the west. People want games to be responsive and intuitive everywhere.

For what seems like the 10th time now, XIV is not cloning WoW. They're trying to make it play more like a game than the current state of navigating endless menus or toggling between several targeting modes, none of which work intuitively. You could just as easily say 'more like TERA' or 'more like Rift' because pretty much any other game is easier to use and requires much less effort.

Edited, Jul 20th 2012 9:15pm by FilthMcNasty

Reading this makes me remember launch day FF XIV. Every poor little marmor in sight was engaged by ppl trying to lvl fast. And the lag was horrible too.