20th Anniversary Expectations...

I like it. Every FF including XI has been reusing its own ***since the beginning so I dont see what the deal is here. Its not like XIV doesnt have a load of its own original designs either.

It's... something in between I thought.
Not exactely canonical, officially, but then again you get what I mean.

Yes, and that's pretty stupid if you ask me.
But then again their parts are so small and only accessible through time gated events that really it doesn't matter that much if they really existed or if they're just a bonus event, whatever, who cares, right?


It's all a mixture of love & hate for me though.
I love, love, love, love, love the NieR Universe and Yoko Taro and all the references, OST and stuff mixed together in those raids is *** AWESOME.
Then again it's so... out of place.
Really, why?
Why go that far?
At that point it would've felt better to use the old, cheap, abused excuse of "this is not really happening it's a virtual simulation" sort of thing, than actually really trying to canonically put NieR stuff into FFXIV.
I dunno, it annoys me.


Small things, I know, it just feels that in general (even outside of this canonical discussion) they really pushed a bit too much on the side of references/quoting/homage/stuff.
I love that sort of things but they really overdid it, for my tastes of course.

Yeah you're certainly entitled to your own opinion. For the record I found the nier thing stupid too. A random space station that crashed into a hidden but not hidden mega factory full of robots that somehow mo one ever saw even though there's a city that has airships like a mile away? Idk always rubbed me the wrong way.

The story side of the Nier raid was extremely dumb and I think most people just ignore it happened. Yoko Taro probably wrote that ***on a napkin while drunk. It made no sense at all. The raids themselves were awesome though.

"Here, I have some made up numbers to prove my point." Lolz

It would only be "made up" if you couldn't literally see them there by looking.

In fairness anyone capable of that simple comprehension would avoid playing an mmo like the plague, so it's not surprising.

Everybody knows there are bots. Don't you account for like half of them? Lol

The problem is you ascribed actual figures as if you know the real numbers. But you don't. So your numbers are, in fact, made up.

People really taking the hypothetical numbers as a statement of fact?

He was saying theres alot more bots than people realize, his numbers were just to illustrate a point.

Do you guys think there's gonna be a new expansion? New jobs?

Or, in other words, he is trying to prove a point with made up numbers.

Expansion, virtually no chance. A new job, possible if they can create it fully using reused assets like Chemist

Not a new job or a new full-size expansion. I wouldn't put it past them to make a mini expansion that contains new endgame, e.g. Abyssea Divergence. That would be my play, anyway.

They need to release new stuff anyway to keep people playing. Might as well wrap it up in an "expansion" and extract an extra month of subscription to subsidize its development costs.

Valhalla being Abyssea-Divergence or something like it seems like the obvious route. At a basic level there isn't much reason for the implementation of Master Levels unless something harder's in the works.

Master Levels adds a ton more grinding time to keep people playing. That seems like a pretty good reason for its implementation. Content has always been time gated with that in mind as well

Since we're going off the rails anyway...

Shameless plug for FFXI fans to play Stranger of Paradise! It's absolutely not a reimagining of FF1 but with more bros, despite it maybe seeming that way from the weird marketing and the first few hours of the game. Laughing about the "I WANNA KILL CHAOS" memes is admittedly kinda funny, but the game is so much more than that and it's really not apparent from most of the reviews, general discourse, and SE's own marketing approach.

Spoiler?
Anyway, FFXI nerds in particular have a lot to love with SoP. The job system features tons of FFXI jobs/abilities, and the general mechanics of leveling new jobs (an absolutely core part of the gameplay loop), employing those job abilities, setting additional jobs as effectively a sort of subjob, there's a lot of gearing/stat decisions and different job "affinity" on gear leads to different traits (though gear drops like it's Diablo, so for your sanity you really shouldn't obsess too much until getting to a reasonable stopping point to re-evaluate your equipment)...

I just know that the overall commentary/reviews of the game, and SE's marketing, really don't seem to paint a very full picture of what SoP even is. To me, the notable thing for FFXI players is that it really pulls in a lot of mechanics that will probably appeal more to XI players than they might to the overall RPG crowd. In particular, the job system in SoP really scratches a very similar itch as FFXI's jobs/abilities.

For me personally, SoP joins a very small group of games that truly capture some of that FFXI feel:
1) Some are due to similar aspects of job/ability systems. SoP falls into this bucket, as does Bravely Default (abusing Ninja Utsusemi made me so satisfied in that game).
2) The other main branch would be games that feel a lot like "FFXI offline" by using MMO style gameplay/combat, but in a single player game:
- FFXII (of course)
- White Knight Chronicles (somewhat under the radar PS3 game by Level-5 that feels a hell of a lot like a FFXI offline "campaign")
- Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and 2; in combat, the battle pacing and party roles have heavy FFXI vibes - tank/dps/support roles feel similar, stuff like positional abilities on cooldowns a bit akin to Sneak/Trick Attack, XC2 has ability chains that feel a lot like XI's SC/MB systems, etc.

/derail (but is it really, in this dumpster fire of a thread?)

New job: janitor.
Skills: none, but the world needs someone to clean up the mess.
Quests: get back to work.

This use to be in the game but was removed. The job was called GM and it use to remove all the filth.

I think its possible, plenty of old games still get them

A real Veterant zone could be nice :

Percs ( 10 years sub mimimun Paid to S.E ) rank 10 , all job masterS

All quest , all missions from all nation and Add-ons

Master levels and SU 135 ish JOBS.....

and a Zone where /follow command doesn't work :), and Savage blade nerfed where it belongs

Ps forgot also : All Pets jobs geared and mastered , to piss off somes ....

Well, sure, the null hypothesis is always easier to imagine.

I don't think they will make an expansion.

However just to look at it from a pure business standpoint, it makes zero sense to me they would not do it.

If Square kept using their developers/money to knock out amazingly successful games there would be no argument, the money and time would be better spent on those projects. However Square keep putting out garbage that loses money, so given that why on earth would they not invest money into making a £40 expansion pack for a game that doesn't even cost that much to make is beyond me. They would not even need to use SE developers, they could outsource most of the world as they did with seekers.

The audience are fiercely loyal, you can pretty much know how many sales you are going to get before you even make it and expansions bring back many casual players for a while. Plus it extends the life/player numbers of a game where 50-60k people are paying them money every month.

They are putting out free expansions, when with more effort/money put in they could of charged for them. Makes no sense.

Really, not that much manpower is needed for an expansion when they are reusing most assets. Not that I would want that of course, but they already did it with most of Adoulin. I still wanted to imagine Delve with actual ice caves or lava etc, they just used a standard cave or open forest lol.

An expansion breaths life into this game every time, for literally years. They could do another expansion like Adoulin, reusing most things, and that would carry people for years. Even something smaller like rhapsodies, we were doing Escha for ages.

I would personally want to see Dynamis Divergence Dreamlands (DDD). All the game assets are in there, it won't need much to be a refreshed content. Players also got tested at Gaol with no sub jobs.

An expansion would also have the added benefit of press. I'm sure a lot of folks would be talking about it. I've said it many times, but I think some acknowledgement is all the game needs. A lot of people heard about how it went into maintenance mode, but only a fraction of those heard about how it came back.

Let people know it's still going. That's literally all they have to do lol

what

No one has heard it came back because it hasn't. Game is still maintenance mode.

There is no big deal. It’s just salty shitposters bored and inventing things to complain about. FF games have had things taken since the beginning, even when they make no sense. One game will toss in a random guy named Cid or use enemy names even when they look absolutely nothing remotely like they did in the last game.

I’m fine with that, even when it is obvious they were just trying to give the illusion of FF.

I hope whatever new content they are making is more open world this time, Abyssea had a good content system. Farm item > pop NM > get KI > pop bigger nm. Instancing doesn't work that well on XI.

I also wish they would do something with spawned kings and other HNM, add new drops to them.

I'm waiting for them to do Intense difficulties on HTB and changing the strats up and making them harder. They already have a lot of content they could keep tweaking like Ambuscade, might be neat