Things that should be improved about FFXI...

[PhiberOpticks]

I figured a place to discuss possible gameplay improvements would be a good idea. Not technical, though, as I believe there is another place for that.

But I find the character design to be a bit lacking and I would love to see some more player support on revamping that. There could be many features to character design that would make players more unique. I'll put my ideas into bullet-points to better organize my thoughts:

• Make character heights scalable instead of having preset heights.
• Instead of having two versions of each face, a color palette would be good. (electric blue hair, anyone?)
• More faces. I find the range of choices to be very lacking.
• Make a body type variable portion. You could choose between making your character muscular or obese. Although the range of how far this would go could be limited to how the races would look, logically.
• Eye color palette would be a pretty nice feature. But not completely necessary.

Also, for post-creation I have a few in-game ideas:

• Facial expressions! Not to be taken too seriously. But just have an option for mood in your menu and you can choose how you want your character to look.
• More linkshell supporting content. Whenever I played FFXI, I always felt that the linkshells lacked that fun experience of kinship that makes grouping more fun. There could be a linkshell moghouse, possibly.

That's all the ideas for now. Feel free to share yours as well.

[Murphie]

Re: Things that should be improved about FFXI...

PS2 limitations, blah blah blah.

Not that your ideas aren't interesting.

[Taskmage]

Re: Things that should be improved about FFXI...

I think for your character creation enhancements, the scalable height and hair color palette would have been pretty doable, but adding in more face types and body structures would involve putting new geometry in the game, and might require too much of the PS2 limited memory to load in all those models and textures at once. Eye color is probably pretty doable too, but that level of roleplay/personalization is something that I think would appeal to a relatively small segment of the playerbase.

Facial expressions probably would be struck down for the same reason as new face/body types, but maybe the overhead would be lower and it would be possible. Personally, I'm happy enough with the in-game emote animations for expression, but I could see the desire to not have the same expression perpetually on your character's face.

I think there could definately be a lot done to improve the linkshell system, and some SE employee actually said once how much they'd like to overhaul it, but in the same breath he said that because the LS system was one of the first things they designed, it's so deeply embedded in the code that they would have to rewrite significant chunks of the game system to make any modifications to it.

[Lmnop]

Re: Things that should be improved about FFXI...

even City of Heroes doesn't have a direct means of controlling eye color (you can make glowing white or blue or emenating black from the sockets, but you can't make "normal eyes, but blue instead of green"). And I think that says a lot, since if you've ever seen the character creation engine of CoH....


I guess the point is: it's a detail not worth the memory usage since in-game graphics would make it hardly ever noticed.

[PhiberOpticks]

Re: Things that should be improved about FFXI...

Personally, I never caught on to the idea of playing FFXI on the PS2. But perhaps there will be an install base shift to next-gen consoles that would allow Square-Enix to make changes without sacrificing the gaming experience of players.

I wouldn't put off the idea of revamping the LS system because it's so embedded, though. I'm sure there's some way of doing that without changing game mechanics. I think a patch would be the best way to do that. That way, it's available to everyone to download and is mandatory, so everyone must undergo the change and would prevent technical conflicts.

[Murphie]

Re: Things that should be improved about FFXI...

Personally, I never caught on to the idea of playing FFXI on the PS2. But perhaps there will be an install base shift to next-gen consoles that would allow Square-Enix to make changes without sacrificing the gaming experience of players.

Until a majority of their playerbase isn't using the PS2 (which most of their JP player base is), it probably won't happen.

That said, I don't have a problem at all with the graphics. FFXI looks better on my PC than many of the newer MMOs out there. I love the look and feel of this game.

[Taskmage]

Re: Things that should be improved about FFXI...

I'm not an SE programmer so I can't tell you exactly what the problem is, but they made it seem very unlikely. For now we can hope and try to make use of the workaround they made.

[PhiberOpticks]

Re: Things that should be improved about FFXI...

Perhaps in the future, they'll take the Everquest approach and just make a second one to address these issues. Although I hope they don't sacrifice the look of the game, which I've grown to like.

[LyonheartLakshmi]

Re: Things that should be improved about FFXI...

The Linkshell Community thing appears to be a step in the right direction, as far as communication and organization of events, etc. The Kokba Hostel is probably the closest thing we'll get to a "Linkshell Mog House".

[Murphie]

Re: Things that should be improved about FFXI...

Perhaps in the future, they'll take the Everquest approach and just make a second one to address these issues. Although I hope they don't sacrifice the look of the game, which I've grown to like.

There has been some vague talk about another SE MMO, but from what I've seen here and at other forums, the general feeling is that a direct FFXI sequel wouldn't be ideal.

But maybe I misread. Personally I'm ambivalent about the idea.

One thing I like about playing on the PC is my ability to tweak the registry so that the game looks better than it does for PS2/3 and 360 users. Honestly, I can't complain once I crank up the settings a bit.

edit: I kind of wish the LS Community was sort of a cross between what it is now, and WoW's Armoury system (of course, a lot of people aren't fans of that, so you never know). One of the biggest failings I see with the LS community is the lack of options for non-shelled individual players, and the fact that it's opt-in, so you don't really get a comprehensive look at the LS situation on your server.

[PhiberOpticks]

Re: Things that should be improved about FFXI...

I've seen screenshots of the new MMO they're working on and I hate it. It's too cutesy for my tastes. The FFXI-2 idea was more of a spontaneous idea, that I don't personally like. I find a patch would be more appropriate after the install base of the game has changed.

I would much rather see a whole new FF MMORPG. And that one could simply be titled Final Fantasy Online. FFXI is always a title that has urked me, since it's basically, a different genre. But I've thought about new ideas for an FF MMORPG so many times before.

[Irisjir Callard]

Re: Things that should be improved about FFXI...

I think for your character creation enhancements, the scalable height and hair color palette would have been pretty doable, but adding in more face types and body structures would involve putting new geometry in the game, and might require too much of the PS2 limited memory to load in all those models and textures at once.

A-men.

Eye color is probably pretty doable too, but that level of roleplay/personalization is something that I think would appeal to a relatively small segment of the playerbase.

That relatively small segment being me. I wanted my character to have vivid knock-your-boots-off green eyes...
.dat for the win. I don't notice the eyes on other characters except very occasionally, since they are such a minor detail, but knowing they're there for me...I can't explain it. I think the playerbase has a suitable means of altering hair-eye color, at least for PC.
*Personal opinion time* I played on a game that allowed eye color/shape to be selected. Everyone picked the one shape that was cat-eyed and they all picked the color red for it. I think the same thing would happen in FFXI...everyone would decide that one particular setting looked "badass" and they would all have the same thing anyway, end of story.

What I WOULD like to see, in this vein, is hardware/software that enables personal .dat upgrades to be made available to ps2/xbox users. I agree that .dat swaps and other 'borderline' infringements like TPparty that a lot of people are divided on are only REALLY unfair because they're only available to PC users.

Facial expressions probably would be struck down for the same reason as new face/body types, but maybe the overhead would be lower and it would be possible. Personally, I'm happy enough with the in-game emote animations for expression, but I could see the desire to not have the same expression perpetually on your character's face.

Actually...

This sub-divides the .dats we have right now. Instead of one head .dat, we would have a face .dat and a hair .dat. Infact, we might even have a head .dat and a hair .dat that was optional, given the "bald" option hume male has.
So REALLY, it would just be one more visible .dat per character model loading. Considering that right now there are six per char, bumping up to seven, I don't think the load would be that much greater. I beleive we would still have the same number of facial expressions as we have head .dats right now.

Unfortunately, this, even more than linkshell, is something embedded so deeply into the game coding that changing it would be nigh-impossible. This would be more than an update, more than a patch, this would be FFXIv2.0...giving us the opportunity for...

I think there could definately be a lot done to improve the linkshell system, and some SE employee actually said once how much they'd like to overhaul it, but in the same breath he said that because the LS system was one of the first things they designed, it's so deeply embedded in the code that they would have to rewrite significant chunks of the game system to make any modifications to it.

Having not played any MMO's except FFXI, I really cannot propose any alterations to the current linkshell system. I think, though, with the beta LS community, they had a good idea going. The community would have done much better say,

Without the word limit on posts
With the ability to edit first post for a topic
With the ability to post images/links/downloads

Basically, if it was more like one of the fifty billion standard, normal forums just like this one.

A linkshell armory, though, sounds intriguing. Would it be possible to drop rare-EX items from monsters the linkshell killed straight into the armory for a time and then distribute them to players? Or even have players "withdraw" EX items from the armory and then the item would automatically return after a set time period? The possiblities are fascanating.





Oh, one more update that I think would be interesting...

Reservations for Dynamis. Just like the hostel, you can reserve your room ahead of time, I think it would be nice if Dynamis could be reserved ahead of time. Nothing stinks more than having a zone stolen from you, or having to steal it from someone else really isn't that much better. It would also help players mobilize and organize on time...my current LS is drifting 'backwards' and out of my time slot because people are having trouble organizing on time. Message says gather together at ten, we enter at ten thirty, and people actually gather at ten thirty, etc.

[DakAttack]

Re: Things that should be improved about FFXI...

I've seen screenshots of the new MMO they're working on and I hate it. It's too cutesy for my tastes. The FFXI-2 idea was more of a spontaneous idea, that I don't personally like. I find a patch would be more appropriate after the install base of the game has changed.

I would much rather see a whole new FF MMORPG. And that one could simply be titled Final Fantasy Online. FFXI is always a title that has urked me, since it's basically, a different genre. But I've thought about new ideas for an FF MMORPG so many times before.

What?

[Murphie]

Re: Things that should be improved about FFXI...

A linkshell armory, though, sounds intriguing. Would it be possible to drop rare-EX items from monsters the linkshell killed straight into the armory for a time and then distribute them to players? Or even have players "withdraw" EX items from the armory and then the item would automatically return after a set time period? The possiblities are fascanating.

That wasn't exactly what I was referring to.

Basically the WoW Armory (link not working atm) is a database of every character playing WoW. All of their stats - searchable, sortable, etc.

[Lmnop]

Re: Things that should be improved about FFXI...

FF8 Online.

Ok, my personal dream aside...

I was under the impression that the only screenshots they've released were solely means of showing off their intended game engine. Not actually of what the final product will be like.