Asimo posted:Yeah, that's probably the biggest part of it, with squeenix being both willing to readily reuse assets and encounter design and, more importantly, good enough at doing so that it still feels fun to do. I remain impressed by the hard mode dungeons in FFXIV even if I know they're fairly low effort... changing all the enemies and bosses and taking a different route through the map does make it feel new enough, even if it's reusing all the map assets. The reuse of mechanics also works surprising well too, yeah... I don't remember the address to it but I saw that same article and agreed with a lot of the assessments. Having repeated mechanics with visible and clearly distinct "tells" and markers makes it a lot easier to dive into a fight and understand what's going on even if it's a surprisingly complex encounter. In FFXIV, two of the big universal mechanics are gaze attacks and "stack together" mechanics. Gaze attacks are denoted with a giant red eye over the thing casting it, and you dodge it by facing away. Stack together is denoted by 4 massive yellow arrows so everyone knows to get in the arrows. In the new 24 man they combined the two, so a person got big red arrows with a gaze eye over them, and everyone instinctively knew, in my group, to stack on them, but face away. Granted, people died to a bunch of other poo poo in the fight, like running the moon drops through the raid and such, but having a few mechanics like that gives players a place to sort of sink their teeth in so they can get in the fight. Also, FFXIV managed to make a good roguelike randomly generated dungeon with PotD, and because the last 50 floors are super stacked with glamour pieces and a rare mount and orchestrion rolls you can only get from beating those floors, it's a fantastic money maker for people who are good at just playing the game, but don't like crafting and that sort of thing. This is on top of it being super easy to level classes in the earlier floors, so you can do PotD without getting poo poo DPS queues (no party requirements except any 4 people) and level really fast there, too. It's probably my favorite content any mmo has even tried to do, and they've announced there'll be another one in Stormblood 
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Feb 27, 2017 18:28
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Minrad posted:PotD was pretty cool but it seems like it would be amazing with just a -little bit extra- added to it, but I'm not sure quite what it's missing. A food resource? Some way to change up your classes after a few sets of 10 floors? The last twenty floors were pretty hype and tense to get through the first time I did em tho, I really liked it. I want more small scale content like that in MMOs, it's easy to round up a few friends and maybe a random pubbie for a dungeon, but much harder to get 8/10 people together for a raid. But yeah, PotD has the most potential of any content in FFXIV I Think. Better bosses and making it so you can start at floor 100 if you're a fixed party are pretty much all I'd change about it. A trial version boss rush mode would be pretty cool, too.
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Feb 27, 2017 23:34
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Pierson posted:It could do with a mix of bigger set-piece rooms rather than just the single room-size they have now. Mixing up the tilesets and music does keep things from getting stale but the endless configurations of grids mean there's nothing to break monotony. I sort of disagree here, but that's because from floor I believe 170 to 200 is an open air sort of ice tileset where the rooms are open to view, but the floor is still the sort of grid pattern you'd expect. It really changes the feel of the place in a very good way, so I don't think bigger rooms will really do a whole lot to change it, but really playing around with the tileset itself and getting rid of the walls or ceiling and such does a lot to break the monotony. Different room sizes could be cool, but later on you're not full clearing every room anyway, so a large room could just be a bigger skip instead of an interesting thing to explore. A lot of people tend to think potd is super monotonous, but they also don't ever go above floor 100 because you need a fixed party for that, and even 100-150 is pretty low key. It's when you hit floors 170+ where you get gigantic pulls of like 10+ guys that can all stack vuln and really gently caress your poo poo, and the pomanders are suddenly vitally important just for proceeding instead of something that just makes the run go faster.
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Mar 1, 2017 23:47
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Truga posted:I had BLM at 60 before the early access was even done. Level dps as your first class, get that free quest xp that isn't getting better with armoury bonus anyway. Goon guilds are strange beasts that trend better than average on clearing content and playing more than one game. I'm not saying you're lying or anything, but you do have to keep that in mind. FFXIV is special, though, just like WoW is, because the parent companies running the games are so big that eating a loss on a month if they have to is fine as long as each quarter is profitable and the brand isn't damaged. It's the main reason FFXIV in particular can have a sub and a game like Wildstar can't. That stability also means that as long as SE is happy with the money they make, Yoshi and the devs have a very stable and reliable budget.
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Mar 20, 2017 20:42
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the issue being your computer has wildstar installed on it
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Mar 20, 2017 21:22
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From what I remember, ws actually had a pretty decent wardrobe system, but then they had to make it shittier because people were using glamour slots for more storage because oh no how can we let them do that.
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Apr 12, 2017 17:17
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My favorite questing in any MMO to date is still the secret world. It was fairly generic in some aspects, but it showed that you can take the time to draw a player in and it can pay off massively. Then Tokyo and all the rest of it happened.
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Apr 13, 2017 02:34
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I'm already checking my email constantly for an invite and was a grand master, so yeah I'm gonna play the poo poo out of it. It's been long enough since I played through the main story that I probably won't remember a lot of it.
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Apr 13, 2017 17:53
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Rhymenoserous posted:Really the American Northeast was the only really awesome spooky part of the game. Egypt and Transylvania were both overwrought and too busy. Egpyt was definitely the low point, but transylvania was great. You had the bleak horror movie camp of the farmlands, the modern day grimm fairy tail stuff in the forest, and then the cold war supersoldier throwback stuff in the fangs. I enjoyed the poo poo out of it. Also, even Egypt was better than anything in Wildstar and 99% of wow's questing.
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Apr 14, 2017 03:05
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Pierson posted:I'm interested but I remember the combat in TSW being really floaty and bad so I hope they do something about that. The main thing being addressed in the revamp is combat and the ability wheel. It's becoming an action rpg.
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Apr 14, 2017 18:20
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clone on the phone posted:If they relaunch under a different name and strip out all the MMO bullshit and work on the combat, sorta like the secret world is doing then it might stand a chance. It'll be a totally different game but that's all that can save it now. The combat wasn't so bad, but the whole thing felt p janky at all levels. Like, you could see what they wanted combat to be if you squinted, but they certainly didn't get there. If they just took what they have, polished it up, then dumpstered interrupt armor and about half of the numbers from everything so it's doable with a group of friends and pubs and then left what they already made for ball kick hard mode it'd go a long way to making the game playable. Oh and take out 90% of the challenges. Getting the occasional challenge to hoverboard down a river around geysers was cool. Getting a challenge to kill x amount of poo poo in a time limit every single time you entered a new area was tedious and grating.
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Apr 20, 2017 17:16
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At the very least, they're redoing cross class stuff in stormblood so you don't have to level other poo poo, although details are light so who knows. Also the people who defend the MSQ bullshit in the thread here are some funny people.
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Apr 25, 2017 07:32
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Asimo posted:The piano keybinds for a lot of classes are inexcusable and it boggles the mind how people in the FFXIV thread defend insane poo poo like the current endgame black mage rotation. But the black mage rotation is probably the easiest one out of them all? Like, go look at a ninja rotation, what the actual gently caress were they thinking? When they said they were ability pruning I was happy, then they said we'd end up with about as many buttons and I was sad again. hobbesmaster posted:The first sentence is explained by your last sentence. It's also why MMOs have plateaued and as a genre don't have anywhere to grow. Welcome to the micro transaction based card game future! Really they just have to find ways of cutting down on development time without harming the experience, and the best way is probably like what PSO2 does where you have the ark ship that everyone is on and you go do missions and then come back. There's no wide open world that has to get made and the focus is only on content that you either play like dungeons or socialize. Getting rid of leveling and making it just about gear progression is another path they could take, and after cata I'm not sure leveling is even worth it to make content for in terms of how fast people blow through it.
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Apr 25, 2017 17:40
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RottenK posted:is there any bad game design that idiots won't want more of as long as it makes spooky casuals unhappy anything pay to win is about it.
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Apr 25, 2017 22:02
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Mayor McCheese posted:Well that's lame. They sort of do that in FFXIV with the armory bonus by giving you a 100% exp bonus below 50 for combat classes below your highest and 50% above 50, but that'll probably get buffed in SB, but the first one takes a long time, yeah. They've made it a lot better by making the MSQ before level 50 give a lot more XP so you don't have huge dead zones anymore, but the sidequests tend to all suck regardless. It gets parroted a lot, but they did a lot better in HW. Partially that's because levels take longer, so they pack more MSQ into each level than average. There was a huge argument in the thread about the jump potions they're doing that make your character a level 50 in the class of your choice and have the MSQ done up to HW so that you can catch up with friends easier. The thread regulars tended to think it would make everyone suck at their class and "Why are you playing the game if you don't want to do ALL of the content" but SE already put the potion in on the chinese version and the statistics showed (to almost no one's surprise outside of the grogs) that people who bought the potion had a much higher retention rate because they could catch up and play with friends easier. What a shocker. I'm not sure if jump potions are in yet or not, but if they're not they should be in relatively soon, and if you've got a character at 50 you'll have access to every class and will skip the worst part of the story straight into the very good HW story. There might be another version of the potion that brings you to 60, or they just update the potion, not sure about the details because I'm a broken human being with all of the combat classes at 60. They've also added a roguelite dungeon called palace of the dead that lets you play any class at 60 because it's an alternate leveling system and lets you level pretty fast because parties don't need a specific party make up, so 4 dps is just fine. It's much easier to level in FFXIV now than it ever has been, and people still complain about it on the forums like it's a bad thing.
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Apr 26, 2017 18:00
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Kelp Plankton posted:To Wildstar's slight credit they did eventually just make sprinting the base non-combat speed and then the Sprint bar stuff was only during combat. Yeah, there were a million things like this that would have been fixed if the lead devs weren't completely stupid. Like, why does my motorcycle have a sprint speed?
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May 28, 2017 21:31
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:Turbo boost duh Turbo boosts are when you hit a button and you hang on for dear life for a set amount of time, not this weak rear end hold down a button for an extra 5 mph bullshit.
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May 29, 2017 08:58
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Blasphemeral posted:I'd say, instead, that ANet included too many trash mobs with too much HP, and when people found bypasses to those encounters, ANet neither fixed the bypasses nor the problems that caused people to work out the bypasses and that led to a toxic and boring meta. GW2's dungeon problem wasn't that the mobs had too much HP. It's that they did entirely too much damage that had to be mitigated by bouncing threat or using specific longish cooldown abilities like reflect, which meant very few people were actually good enough to stumble through dungeons in a random group. Also, making unavoidable damage with mob attacks that just happen instead of having everything be like your attack where you have to aim at least a little bit was a really bad idea if the only ways of dealing with unavoidable damage are reflect and aggro bouncing. The only logical conclusion of all of that bullshit was people finding geometry to abuse and stacking as much damage as possible to make dungeon runs go faster because all of the damage had to be either mitigated with specific abilities or negated with speedrun strats. Also I'd argue that the trinity is actually good game design in its own right and people constantly poo poo on it without understanding what it actually does. Giving stabilization to encounters where everyone knows what they have to do at a base level and then building off of there with new mechanics actually allows fights to be more complicated and better puzzles than things like dark souls bosses. Like, pontiff is a hard fight in DS3, but he's hard because he swings fast and the timing on some of his attacks is weird and he's got weird reach on at least one of his attacks. He's not hard to understand, just to not gently caress up. If pontiff had things like alexander prime's time stop mechanics and group seperation mechanics and stacking different aoes in different places you'd have no time left to think about dodging just his normal melee damage because there isn't someone whose job is to deal with that.
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Jun 6, 2017 04:27
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Meskhenet posted:The FTFY. And stopping playing GW2 was a great decision. It's a floaty mushy game with zero sense of pretty much anything to it. I laugh when people tell me the combat was good, though.
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Jun 20, 2017 16:28
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Harrow posted:ArenaNet's utter refusal to add new armor sets to the game (instead of gem shop outfits) completely kills it for me, honestly. When the game launched, endgame was fashion--the whole point to doing dungeons or Arah events was to get new, cool armor skins that you could mix and match. Since launch, they've added a single-digit number of new armor sets that you can earn through gameplay, and let's not forget that's over the course of almost 5 years. (They did just add legendary armor, but, well, I'll get to that.) They made the gold-gems market so technically everything is earnable in ga-ahahaha I can't even finish that sentence. Not adding new armor sets rewarded specifically through gameplay and then saying "but you can buy gems with gold so now all armor is for our real money currency" is actually the worst thing.
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Jun 20, 2017 21:37
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StuG Jeebus posted:Was it even possible? Bliz drops about two tiers a year right? I don't think most Americans get four weeks of vacation a year, much less the option to take them back to back. I know I don't. College students Also it depends mostly on what your job is, so it varies. There's definitely enough people in those margins not on the average to do that kind of schedule, but the real problem is who the gently caress would want to? Taking a week off for a new expansion might be a thing, but two weeks just for a raid tier?
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Jul 5, 2017 19:31
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Bieeardo posted:Quality of life took hilariously large steps shortly after Paragon Studios was calved from Cryptic. There was really nothing they could do about the grindy COH game loop except dress it up in new settings and subsystems though. There's nothing grindy about making an endless stream of new characters to hang out in pocket d with.
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Jul 17, 2017 19:22
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The Moon Monster posted:CoH was pretty cool and good when it came out but then WoW came out like a year later and made every other MMO look like garbage. CoH was good mainly because it was a super hero MMO with nontrash character customization, travel powers, and adding in the paragon stuff before the end and mentors was ahead of the curve when it came to scaling content. Even now there isn't really an mmo that scales you up to your friends instead of just everyone down to the lowest level. Plus making a lotr dwarf and accusing people in pocket D of being elves never got old.
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Jul 18, 2017 03:03
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Dick Trauma posted:How is this game (and thread) still going? Ahahaa, I forgot I posted that. Pretty hardcore.
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Sep 26, 2017 07:16
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