How to Join a Party!

[jenova_9]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JVK3vL_pXE&feature=player_embedded]YouTube - FF14party[/ame]

This is very interesting! The party system seems different from FFXI, I used the FFXI /sea all <job> <levels> method to find recruits and stuff,
FFXIV method is very different but it could be useful too, mew.

[Raydeus]

Re: How to Join a Party!

Do you still need to be at hug range to invite them? <_<;

[ShepardG]

Re: How to Join a Party!

Do you still need to be at hug range to invite them? <_<;

yup

[Firewind]

Re: How to Join a Party!

Do you still need to be at hug range to invite them? <_<;

You can invite people on your friend list at any time and there's an invite command. You can also invite people who are seeking from the looking for group menu.

So its basically the same as FFXI except you don't need to be in the same zone anymore.

[Aeni]

Re: How to Join a Party!

Do you still need to be at hug range to invite them? <_<;

Yes and no.

Yes if you're trying to invite a friend (and the seek is horrible and inaccurate ... they even list players who logged off hours ago and aren't even in the game anymore)

No if you use the seek and just want to invite random players (but ^ problems)

[TheGrandMom]

Re: How to Join a Party!

(and the seek is horrible and inaccurate ... they even list players who logged off hours ago and aren't even in the game anymore)

I second this. I kept using it to invite my son who was in Ul'Dah with me and had been for the past half an hour. It kept telling me he wasn't online so I gave up, hunted him down, and used the menu to invite him.

[jenova_9]

Re: How to Join a Party!

I heard rumors that the majority of FFXIV staff/developers is made up of Chinese developers and Square Enix outsourced much of FFXIV to Chinese developers, is that true? A Japanese friend said something about that.

[Raydeus]

Re: How to Join a Party!

I heard rumors that the majority of FFXIV staff/developers is made up of Chinese developers and Square Enix outsourced much of FFXIV to Chinese developers, is that true? A Japanese friend said something about that.

It certainly wouldn't surprise me AT ALL considering the current state of the game.

As BBQ said the other day, it's obvious SE realized (probably way too late) they would not be able to make their full projects happen due to the massive costs involved in creating such huge environments. Which ties to my comments on how game development seems to have hit a wall in terms of content HD-ness VS cost.

No matter how impressive new hardware is, it's currently too expensive for developers to bring their visions into reality due to funding restrictions. So they end up outsourcing and/or cutting content half way as a result.

And like I've said before, apparently only NCSoft learned the lessons from everyone else's failures. Not only did they not foolishly push for the latest graphics (the way SE did) but they went in a far more sustainable direction using pretty much the same hardware requirements (the way NES developers did back in the golden NES days.)

An approach that has been proven to work time and again.

Take a look at BioWare/EA with The Old Republic, they went big, and are spending truckloads of money to make it happen. But they didn't make the mistake of outsourcing development because that would've affected quality severily. And without quality there's no chance such a project could survive. Fortunately for them hands on experiences seem to point to BW's gamble paying off eventually. (Well, you know, as it's usually the case with them.)

So...

TL;DR Yes, seeing the results it's very possible SE outsourced development, and yes, they will get pwned for taking a shortcut the same way the US (and many other countries) got pwned when they decided to take the money away from their local labor force and give it to China instead.

[Fliegar]

Re: How to Join a Party!

I made a comment about companies out-sourcing to China during class the other day, and the Chinese exchange students all gave me a dirty look. I don't want to get on their bad sides! D:

[Raydeus]

Re: How to Join a Party!

This... can't possibly happen in ALL the zones?

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OODPo9fzk0Q]YouTube - FFXIV Repeated Terrain[/ame]


Right? <_<

[Elwynn]

Re: How to Join a Party!

I'll admit to having seen copypasta terrain in FFXI. Some of the rocks in Sarutabaruta, some of the valleys in south Tahrongi, etc. But it's like they went copypasta in XIV just to make the place bigger, just to slow everyone down.

Also, it looks to me like near the end of the video it flashes a full screen map, and it's some sort of griddy maze? I've noticed from time to time when I see FFXIV maps that it looks like the terrain features follow compass directions and even the map gridlines way too much.

Outdoor areas that are "griddy mazes" is something I consider to be bad outdoor level design, partly because it's a great way to make you have to walk farther, and partly because... it just ain't right for land to do that. The original FFXI zones had some really nice outdoor areas. Then starting with ZIlart areas they started making most outdoor areas be "dungeons with a blue ceiling", rooms connected by passageways. Tavnazia was semi that way, in that some of the "rooms" were pretty big, but there was still too much "outdoor cave" effect, especially in ToAU and the new WoTG zones.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: How to Join a Party!

I'll admit to having seen copypasta terrain in FFXI. Some of the rocks in Sarutabaruta, some of the valleys in south Tahrongi, etc. But it's like they went copypasta in XIV just to make the place bigger, just to slow everyone down.

Well, as Raydeus referenced to one of my other posts (it was about FFXIII, but still), creating original assets - stuff that's only going to be used on time, one place in the game is more expensive than just reusing or reskinning areas.

Additionally, I think you might just feel this way because there's not as many places to go in FFXIV as there are in FFXI right now. Easier to see the repetition when you're faced with it more often and feel places are maze-like when you're still not familiar with them.

How many times have people not from Windurst have complained about how confusing and lengthy it is to navigate Windurst? Its just one big circle, really. Once people figured out where the Teleport tarus were, it got a bit easier.

Could the expense of HD content creation led to outsourcing? Its entirely possible. If you can see the credits to the game and find a bunch of Chinese names all over the place, then that would probably be the case.

Let me put it another way.

Let's say Atlus makes Persona 5 for PS3. Is that really a huge financial risk for them?

I wouldn't think so. Persona's dungeons are randomly generated, so they can get away with copypasta quite a bit there. The story of the game usually just takes place in one town or city, so there's not a lot of locales to create as you'll constantly be revisiting them.

For something like Final Fantasy VII to be done in HD, though, that's a lot to ask. You're looking at a world so large that chances are you'll only pass through many of these areas once. Modeling NPCs, houses and other places for a one-off area is a lot of money when it comes to 3D modeling and HD graphics.

Back to Persona 5. What if they opted to make it for PSP or 3DS instead?

They're going to save a shitload of money. First off they're going to get to recycle the PS2 engine for the game, secondly if PSP wasn't capable of fitting in all the areas in 3D, they'd do what they did with P3P and just convert the town to 2D stills. All the NPCs don't really have to even be created in 3D as they could just make 2D pixel version to fit the image.

Even if 3DS couldn't give them all the space they needed. they could just do 3D pre-rendered backgrounds for towns and have low-poly NPCs in them. Cheap? Sure. Effective for a Persona game? Totally, particularly given the 3D areas on the console games are just on-rails anyway.

SE doesn't like to think this way, though. They always want to push the limits of technology rather than take steps backward in technology, I mean, they even milk the tech in DS and PSP for all its worth even though that's not always necessary.

So when they're faced with a challenge like HD, they crumble. Its the price of being trapped in the "progressive" mindset. They'll resort to a methods that feel even more cheap within higher technology than just make a practical choice that's less shiny, even though most gamers would be OK with it..

Considering all this, would SE outsource? Cheap labor and recycling in exchange for maintaining high production values? Yeah, I think they would.

[Aeni]

Re: How to Join a Party!

I heard rumors that the majority of FFXIV staff/developers is made up of Chinese developers and Square Enix outsourced much of FFXIV to Chinese developers, is that true? A Japanese friend said something about that.

Well, you may want to take this with a bit of salt, since many of the Japanese players (not all, just a lot of the vocal ones, maybe vocal minority?) have been expressing a lot of ... shall we say ... negative views on anything Chinese. Go to Amazon.co.jp and they are unhappy with SE's usage of Kanji on many, many things in the game, much more than in FFXI. Go to 4chan and you'll see the usual rhetoric on how RMT (Chinese) are ruining the game and how Chinese players should be banned. The recent controversy of Japan detaining a Chinese fishing boat captain and the heated words that Chinese diplomats and politicians threw across the way aren't helping matters much.

With that said, I wouldn't be surprised, as many others have said, if they did oursource development or at least parts of development.

[Taskmage]

Re: How to Join a Party!

This... can't possibly happen in ALL the zones?

Yes, I believe it can.

[jenova_9]

Re: How to Join a Party!

copy paste zones is not a bad thing and hardly noticed in a persistent world, as long as it isn't a network of instanced dungeons like PSU. Going through a real forest for example, people would think the grass, trees and layout is basically the same until you exit the similiar areas.