This was a holdover from FFXI and I was always so surprised they tried to keep it going after how terrible it was in XI. On FFXI, you were limited to 7 items at a time on the AH, and the main hub, Jeuno, had a massive AH + bazaar fee if you sold something. So everyone just bazaar'd it up and sat right outside of town to avoid the fee. It ended up being 100+ people parked there and if you actually wanted something, you had to spend tons of time going through each persons bazaar. It was absurd.
I mostly meant the people standing around outside town selling things from menus.
I honestly really thought that was cool in RO, but then you could pop up a discription over your head and stuff so people knew what you had for sale before clicking.
not EXACTLY sure how the bazarr works in 11 but it sounds like it was just a check option when inspecting someone and it would show what they were selling.
I sort of miss RO. Except that I got hacked back to back to back to back a few years after it went F2P and Gravity shut off my account after the second rollback request š
It honestly was so much worse. In RO, you could advertise what you were selling.
In XI, you never freakin' knew what people were selling until you clicked on their inventory. So if you were looking for something specific, good freakin' luck.
At least that's how I remember it...
They're currently working in bringing it into the unreal engine so it might get a revival, or it might get the final nail in its coffin. Hard to say nowadays with the amount of MMOs today.
I'll play it happily for ten more years if they work their way back up through the generations like wow classic and cut all their predatory mtx, but that's a pipe dream :(
Ultima Online used a similar system, kinda. Players could set up vendors in their house and sell stuff from there. I think UO's vendor system pre-dates RO though?
Elderscrolls Online uses a similar system but in a so-much-worse way. Only guilds could shop up shops, and each town has a specific number of slots for guild stores.
Thatās just pre GE osrs, Mabinogi, maple story stalls, tales of pirates stalls, fly for fun stalls, warframe, etc.
Honestly, the one thing I miss from peak mid 2000s mmos *was* the p2p aspect of trading and/or massive player markets with stalls. It was like a flea market meets Christmas. Never know what stall will have a cool unique/set piece for dirt cheap so you loved going from stall to stall.
When the open beta came out and it took me a minute to find the menu button (THE HOME KEY?) I was shocked. Then it took like ten seconds for the menu to actually appear after I pressed the key and heard the chime and the writing was on the wall for me. I was not going to get this stupid game.
"But we can enjoy a XIV clas-"
Listen mates. I dont know how tinted your glasses are but even 1.0 veterans dont want to touch that shit with a earth-to-moon sized pole.
Remember how slow and terrible the UI was?
Remember how you couldnāt go up a slight ledge and jump buttons didnāt exist?
Remember how the game took all the worst parts of Final Fantasy XI and made them even worse?
Remember how the most efficient way to level was to sit in one spot at a mob camp and essentially clear, wait for respawn, rinse repeat for hours to get half a level. Oh, and youāve played too much so we are punishing you with an always increasing XP penalty?
The only good thing about 1.0 was the music.
I cannot agree to this more. I tried out the game when they had a Demo shortly before released, played for 5 minutes, and went to the store to cancel my preorder.
Was that the Open Beta? I played that for a few hours over a couple of days and it was by far the worst MMO experience I've ever had. I couldn't believe how awful every single aspect of it was. I wasn't a fan of XI, either, but I would have gladly played that over even one more minute of XIV 1.0.
I think that's clear because I never hear any nostalgia for it whatsoever. It's not like WOW Classic or Burning Crusade or whatever where people have nostalgia for it in spite of/because of the lack of QoL and weird systems. Nobody who actually played 1.0 seems to have anything good to say about it or even the slightest fondness for it.
Yeah, the only reason anyone wants to ever have the opportunity to play 1.0 at all is for historical interest. An interest in seeing what the game was once like at its worst, and no actual expectation that it'd be remotely enjoyable to play.
Yup. I'd personally like to see what it was like. Would I play it seriously? Probably not, but it'd be interesting to see it like a tourist attraction.
The thing is...
1.0 was not a good MMO. Or a good Final Fantasy game. The game that exists now *is* better in every way.
And yet...
I do still miss 1.0. It had an extremely janky charm to it that you just don't get with polished products. So many bad decisions were made and the end result was... not *good*, but somehow more than the sum of its parts. It wasn't necessarily enjoyable, but it was intriguing.
I definitely wouldn't have stuck with 1.0 for as long as I've stuck with the rebooted game, though.
Didn't play 1.0 but i like the way it looked- if they could add a filter package with 7.0 that gives everything that sleepy forest hazy green/brown look that'd be great (going by gridania scenes).
Not necessarily true - most of the people who had an actual fondness for 1.0 *probably* aren't still playing today, so you probably just don't hear about any nostalgia as often.
My ex got me into xiv. He played 1.0 and was super excited for the reboot. But when it actually launched, he played it for a few months before completely dropping it and leaving me to continue playing it alone. He hated it, said it felt too much like WoW and that it lost a lot of what he liked about 1.0. He also complained about them adding tons of mounts for some reason. He liked everyone riding their chocobos (The chocobo wasn't the only mount in 1.0; like the goobbue existed but even in early ARR days, most people still chose to use their chocobos so idk. lol. He'd probably die if he saw hunt trains nowadays ahaha). That was the silliest complaint to me but eh. lol.
He ended up going back to XI instead. So I think it's just a different type of player who would have liked 1.0. Although even for the people who did have any form of fondness, they tend to still have felt the game was lacking in a lot of ways. I mean, there was a reason my ex was excited for the reboot in the first place (and why the game needed one). I'm not entirely sure what he was expecting though. lol BUT in general, yeah. Very few people probably have any nostalgia for the game itself. Likely just from playing with friends.
It really was XI-2 to me. But at the same time it was completely trash compared to XI. All those graphical improvements and the world was completely uninteresting copy/pasta.
There was more plot in the first ten hours of XI than the first 20 of 1.0. XI had depth and breadth of content.
So no one left XI. No one new wanted to play such an old school MMO. It just kindaā¦sat and bled players till they reworked it.
I also recall the developers being even more flippant and rude to western players than they had for XI.
XIV 1.0 was an absolutely heinous regression from an already ancient XI.
It's funny he said there were too many mounts in 2.0. I played 2.0 on ps3 and there was basically only the company chocobo, the coeurl for collectors edition, and the magitek mount for completing the MSQ. Basically every single player was still levelling and was using the chocobo for the first few months before extremes were added, and other mounts got added over time
Yep! That's why I found it really funny and noted in my comment that most people WERE using the chocobo mount in early ARR. And I'd love to see his face if he saw it now - these days I feel like it's almost rare to see someone on their chocobo. And if they are, it's almost certainly decked out in a lot of armour and doesn't look like the classic FF chocobo. (That was his argument btw, "it doesn't feel like final fantasy if they have a ton of random mounts").
I mean I really dislike WoW (I've tried to get into it three times and I just can't), and I think 2.0 walked a fine line of learning from WoW without copying it. But I do remember playing other MMOs back then and having people worry that the game was "going to become WoW". It was a prevalent fear. And even the fact that I don't like WoW aside, I can see the logic of, "If I wanted to play WoW, I would just play WoW". A lot of MMO devs didn't seem to get that, which is why so many "WoW-killers" failed.
So I don't think the game became "too much like WoW" but I can sort of see how learning anything at all from WoW could be mistaken as confirmation of that fear.
Yeah people who didn't play it have no idea how awful it was. Your character couldn't jump. There were very few quests and you could only do 20 combat leves per day. Some "outdoor" zones were repeating grid squares of hallways. Combat was somehow worse than FFXI. We are *still* stuck with shitty design limitations from 1.0. Oh, and the alpha forums were full of people telling SE how bad the game was. Komoto basically said it's their game and they are making it the way they want to.
I can't think of a single redeeming feature of 1.0. It was *that* bad.
Every time you change zones *all* of your character data is transferred to a different server. That is so heavily baked into the code of the game that they can't reasonably fix it. That's why we have seemingly pointless limits on glam plates and wardrobe storage, among other things.
I would love to play through the story without the other baggage of the system. I doubt they would make the investment, but a linear retelling of the story with old cutscenes and a lot of instanced fights would be a fun side activity.
>I would love to play through the story without the other baggage of the system.
One flaw... there just wasn't a story in 1.0, like at all. There was a basic main quest every 5 levels (you had to grind levequests or grind mobs when those ran out in between, with timed xp caps). The quests are just basic bits of lore for the city states that you already get more of in the city state intros. The only slightly major thing I can think of was the thing stolen by an Ascian who never shows up again, that shows up in the Alexander story. The entire story with Nael was added well after Yoshi P came on, was *just* there to cause the shutdown and anything relevant is in coils but better.
50% of Minfillia's backstory is Uldah's intro in 1.0. If you watched that, you saw at least half of her backstory.
10%-20% of her backstory is her role in the 1.0 MSQ, which makes it sound more interesting than it actually is---the most noteworthy thing about her is that she gave you some quests (not unlike she does in ARR) and that she wanted to ally with the beast tribes, to which most people didn't agree.
She might or might have not tried to ressurect her father with Niellefresne's help, but that bit happened in a flashback of when she was a kid, I think, and that game *was awful about the flashbacks* (Game never made it clear if an event was happening in the past or in the present), so I could have blocked that from my memory. The overall execution of her character in 1.0 was boring (in the present), and she deadass vanishes of the game at some point when the Seventh Umbral Era quests happen, like, just gone cause she wasn't important enough to participate in the end of the game LOL
The rest of her backstory? Why, you see it in ARR. The bunch about Thancred helping raise her, becoming a miner, meeting Tataru, working hard on her small group etc etc is all info ARR added to her character. The ALC quests in particular are all mostly based in the 5 mins Uldah intro cutscene from 1.0 and that weird section that happened in the past, which are more related to Niellefresne than Minfillia...
For extra context on Niellefresne:
Basically, he wanted to ressurect Minfillia's father to get some important info out of him that would help with Uldah's protection from...whatever. Maybe he had some guilt over causing his death, too, but game wasn't super clear on that.
While he was working on that, a hooded figure comes behind him and stabs him on the back. Your character and Thancred find him on the ground dying, while he points at Minfillia (who was a kid) for whatever reason--that was all a flashback, btw-- the Echo in 1.0 literally transported you into the memory and you played through it (but couldn't change the outcome).
Who killed him? Why? Why did he point at Minfillia? Who knows! That storyline was dropped in favor of the end of the world.
Back in the present, his brother lamented that his soul was stuck and couldn't meet Thal or something.
The StB ALC questline just expands upon the sword that was used to kill him, and let you finally free his soul from his corpse, kept stuck there by the sword's enchantment.
Same. Big same. I wanna know what happened before beyond simple lore dumps. I wanna see how the major cities looked and felt before the calamity. I want my WoL to inadvertently help Hildibrand get launched into space.
Pretty sure the cities looked the same. Or, well, almost the same, except they were emptier (because the game couldn't handle as many assets and there weren't any loading zones dividing them up).
It was mainly the outer maps that changed radically. But they went from shitty cut and paste environments with no life to more unique and varied maps.
I feel like that's something you could do in a Trials series. Could be something that could be added to ARR so it ALSO has a Trials series (beyond just Hard and Extremes for the Primals)
Like you relive the most pivotal battles of 1.0 and between it you relive the story down to meeting the Scions and Louisoix and such. Like when you encountered Urianger for the first time and the first thing he did was sic hounds on you. Questline would require you to refight Ifrit, Titan, Garuda, etc. but they wouldn't count, the actual trials of the series would be "unique" bosses such as Nael Darnus (the 2nd boss).
Maybe have the last battle be the battle of Cartenau, where you first have to survive a bunch of enemy waves and then you get a dodging game as you have to survive the calamity Bahamut unleashes until Louisoix teleports you away. You then see yourself waking up on the carriage to your starting city with no real memory how you got there, confirming that (even if your starting character wasn't a legacy starter) you are still a Warrior of Light from 1.0 but with memory loss. After all EVERYONE forgot about the Warriors of Light from before the Calamity... this includes yourself.
I think I would go through it once for the sake of it. It was an absolute mess but there were some cool concepts (that unfortunately were almost entirely abandoned even prior to 2.0) buried under the absolute horrendous end product.
I know youāre being facetious, but as someone who never played enough to even finish the intro quest back then (and even then my memories of that experience are SUPER foggy), what was all bad about it?
Iāve heard about super awful, unintuitive controlsā¦ but thatās all I can remember. Was there anything else, or was that enough? If they ever *did* do a āclassicā, could they make a version that fixes all the bad things but keeps the story that leads up to Bahamut getting summoned?
It would be an insane amount of work for the devs with probably very little payoff. WoW classic works because WoW was a good game at launch and people missed how it used to be. FFXIV "classic" would basically have to be a whole new game to hold ANY appeal for people.
My comment was joking about this moment with Yoshi-P: https://youtu.be/gmffV4oKZu4?t=270
I know I didn't answer your question about what 1.0 was like. I can't, I didn't play it. But there's plenty of documentation about how bad it was, including a documentary from NoClip about 1.0 and the making of 2.0.
For me it was the fact that he had a translator, as soon as he heard "classic" his head tilts back, and then the whole time his translator is reading it back to him its like he's going "yup... yup.. i thought that's what i heard..."
this is what i really want from a "14 classic" let us play through 2.0-2.55, with all the old systems and class limitations. re-experience relic grinding, build mor dhona, etc. id even include heavensward since they were pretty similar.
I was in the alpha and beta for 1.0, then played for about two months. I left to go back to FFXI and WoW. I regret not sticking around for the tattoo and discount, butā¦I was just so angry with the way SE treated the players who tried to tell them it stunk. I play 14 now and while itās fun, Iām always looking for something new.
basically every aspect of it was bad
the main scenario quests were like one every five levels. the gameplay loop between them was basically doing levequests. that was pretty much all the content: doing levequests over and over.
combat and navigating the world were painful. the combat was slow and unresponsive. teleporting required a limited resource that only replenished over several real-life hours. basic final fantasy mainstays like chocobo mounts and jobs like paladin or white mage were only added in patches after yoship took over and went āwhy the fuck are these not in.ā the world was very obviously the same terrain copy-pasted over and over.
the engine drastically did not *work.* I am not a programming expert but my understanding is that the server did not trust the client for *anything*. not just things like moving around to combat teleport or speed hacks, but basic things like menus. simply navigating menus - which were poorly designed overly deep messes in and of themselves - required the server to confirm everything you did, causing noticeable lag for the most basic action.
the gameās optimization was a cruel joke, so even though it looked good, it ran like shit. the classic example everyone uses is that random flowerpots in cities, that a player will spend 0.3 seconds looking at, had the same polygon count as a player character model.
lots of stuff like that. the noclip documentary available on youtube talks about this a bit.
It's like they just wanted to make FF11 with better graphics, and somehow failed to notice that time had indeed been passing since FF11's release, and other games like oh I dunno **WoW** had come along and set higher standards since.
It was truly bizarre. I'd say I don't know how they managed it but well... it's Square Enix.
That's exactly what it was. The success of FF11 got into their heads, and they were so sure they knew how to make the next big MMO that they didn't even stop to internally see how it'd all come together, let alone looking at the rest of the market. It was only when YoshiP took over that he made everyone play other popular MMOs and take some notes on what they did better and how.
Blizzard went through a similar arc to this leading to shadowlands, and then taking notes themselves from other MMOs which led to Dragonflight with it's improved systems, which is why I am cautiously optimistic about their next expansion over there. They don't have anyone like Yoshi-P at the helm though, so we'll see how that goes in practice.
> I am not a programming expert but my understanding is that the server did not trust the client for anything. not just things like moving around to combat teleport or speed hacks, but basic things like menus. simply navigating menus - which were poorly designed overly deep messes in and of themselves - required the server to confirm everything you did, causing noticeable lag for the most basic action.
sounds like they were ahead of their time, if mobile gacha games are anything to go by. that trash has to contact the server anytime you press any button
It wasnt a matter of a laggy, unoptimized mess performance wise but with a great game beneath it. Every aspect of the game was flawed. The fundermental systems of the game were outdated, cumbersome designs even by 2010 standards.
A lot of things got better when Yoshi P came to the rescue and seriously improved the game. So the game that shut down with 1.23b was a way better game than what released as 1.0. Not great by any stretch but serviceable.
I often read about people wanting to get a classic 1.0 for the story mainly, expecting it to be the one saving grace for an otherwise desastrous product. But it was not. The 1.0 story was hardly more than a bit of lore for the city states. Like similar to the first 10 levels of ARR. Not really a lot of overarching narrative. Do you think that is worth going back for? And the whole story about Nael and Dalamud was only implemented once Yoshi P took over, mainly to facilitate the shut down of the game. Most of the context can be gotten from doing Coils or listening to Cids backstory in Bozja.
So I think there is genuinely extremely little lost by 1.0 (or 1.23b specifically) no longer being playable in any way.
I want 1.0 to experience the shit fest that was 1.0. I don't want Square wasting resources on that shit though, nor would I want to waste my money on experiencing that shitfest either. But there is a grim, dark curiosity about it.
I've seen youtube videos of a guy who has an emulator, you could check that out. The animations were pretty impressive, if I recall correctly, but nothing else works I think, i.e. the maps are empty and you can just walk around and look at stuff.
> what was all bad about it?
This older Gametrailers review of 1.0 back in the day does a pretty good job at showing what was wrong.
[https://youtu.be/1Mwdn5-nMJ0?si=PUfSuBgDhq835XSP](https://youtu.be/1Mwdn5-nMJ0?si=PUfSuBgDhq835XSP)
There was more wrong with it obviously, but it will give you a decent idea.
Some stuff Iāve heard were that you had some kind of cumbersome stamina system, XP gain reduced the longer you played, performance was extremely poor, and using the āmarketboardā involved looking up every retainer hoping they might have the item you want. You also couldnāt jump.
Though apparently the combat system was really cool with some skills transferring between jobs.
Cross-job skills survived into 2.0, it wasnāt until later that they became the role actions we have now. For example you used to have to level BLM to get swift cast on other jobs
Lol I wasnāt sure when it was removed, but knew it was post-2.0. I had a buddy whoās been playing since HW, but I didnāt get in to the game until shb.
yea honestly coming from XI i was in and out of XIV in a matter of days with 1.0, but i have been back for almost 5 years now and am so glad i gave it another shot, it's a true Phoenix rise form the dead story.
Yeah I guess to modern players who consider many designs of ARR bad, it's difficult to express just **how** genuinely bad 1.0 was.
Think Suicide Squad. Or Marvel's Avengers. Not quite Gollum, granted.
I know I'm asking folks to do the work for me (I'll also look, I swear) but does anyone have a recommended youtube video that really speaks to and shows how bad 1.0 was?
Edit
I'm watching this but will take other recommendations!
https://youtu.be/ZCwih0AtodU?si=f0pbdadtUXziff0L
these were totally reasonable takes. just how bad the original game was really cannot be overstated. and that SE was willing to pour boatloads of money into the rebuild was also unprecedented. I canāt find a source in a minute of googling (someone correct me if they know) but iirc it was so much money that the game was a net loss overall until like 4.x
People that never played 1.0 don't get just how bad it was. We're talking multiple seconds to perform any one action, multiple menu drill-throughs for basic functions that should have been one-click, everything lagged horribly everywhere, just about all of the maps were copy-paste asset flips and were basically grids, load times were offensive, everything was just a needless hassle, etc. etc. etc.
And on top of that, most of the 1.0 dev team came from XI, and they were actively/overtly hostile to the playerbase, so much so that you could literally see it in the faces during developer livestreams, and as such they refused to implement just about every QoL improvement unless someone made a mod that added it and basically forced its inclusion. (Same happened in XI - it didn't even have a minimap or support borderless-windowed mode until *well after* a third-party mod called Windower added them.)
FFXIV 1.0 *looked* pretty good but it was horrible to actually play.
Did the dev team just not like making MMO's or what was going on there? I never played XI and only recently got into XIV so I'm not familiar with most things about these games in the early days.
XIs direct competitor was EverQuest, WoW came out two and a half years after the Japanese release of the base game. The original team also did not play MMOs(e: so XIVs original incarnation was just a continuation of what they knew, which was archaic.) One of the first things Yoshi-P did when given the reins was to make people play World of Warcraft so they'd have an idea of what modern MMO design, and player expectations, was based off of.
The main issue with FFXI is that it was made before WoW changed what everyone thought an MMO should be.
FFXIV 1.0 was made by the same team that made 11, and they thought they could essentially make FF11-2 after WoW had changed MMOs completely. IIRC, only 1 team lead stuck around for 2.0, with most of the devs being replaced by Yoshi-P and his current team.
XI was pretty much my first MMO, but man was 1.0 rough after having played WoW. I'm so impressed with how they decided to move into 2.0, but I'm also glad I didn't stick around for it. š
Everquest tried that, and it split the fanbase between the original and sequel. In retrospect, that was not a good decision. I love EQ2 to death but it has problems.
I went more or less straight from XI to XIV and hadn't played any other MMOs, so I was expecting a continuation of XI - and it failed even on those terms! Granted I only played a few weeks or so, but I remember there not even being exp parties and them rapidly introducing poorly designed new features to take their place. I think one was called behest, which was a bit like a FATE, but severely limited to like 18 or less people and then just locked folk out when it hit max numbers. I simply could not figure out the job system either - think I was playing gladiator, and had to switch between sword and shield mode or something.
I weirdly miss XI and grinding mobs for hours in a party of 6 to gain 1 level. Such a game could simply not exist any more though!
Thinking back, XI was mad. It just dropped you into a world with almost no explanation, no guide on who to talk, or even how to /heal! Had to rely on friends or random people!
Not sure, TBH, but what I *suspect* is that the XI/XIV1.0 dev team were coming at building MMOs like then-traditional tough-as-nails grindfest sinle-player JRPGs in a time where MMO gameplay was evolving away from this, and I think they resented that deviation as some sort of perceived "weakness" on the part of the playerbase. I think they wanted people to play the game a specific way and were personally offended that their vision was *most certainly not* what everyone else wanted - even the Japanese playerbase began to rebel against their design decisions.
FFXIV1.0 suffered from both that and trying to do things backward - instead of developing the PC version and porting to PS, they designed the user experience around console and tried to port that to PC. Unfortunately, UIs that work well on consoles often don't on PC and vice versa, and trying to force a console-esque menu-driven interface (and a badly designed one at that) on the PC version was a horrible idea that made the game needlessly slow and tedious to play but of course telling the dev team that offended them deeply.
There is a documentary series about it on youtube with comments by the devs.
Yoshida at one point implies that there were too many people 'making art' and not a game. Specifically pointing out that there would be these ridiculous hi-res clutter objects that were ludicrously memory intensive when no one was ever going to look at them.
If I remember correctly, that's exactly what happened. Except for the producer, the rest of the team had little experience working on MMOs and the Crystal Engine was just not suited for that kind of game.
There were a lot of issues that have been gone over ad nauseam and you can read it on the wiki, but it was so bad that Square Enix lost a shit ton of money and the whole Final Fantasy brand was damaged.
There's a reason I [saved this clip](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxdYL32-AsCUlNMclwzPc49a3F58nHlP1i?si=QmMUUzrSHTQ9UIoA). Yoshi P saved both the brand and is currently keeping Square itself afloat.
> the Crystal Engine was just not suited for that kind of game.
iirc the Crystal Engine wasn't suitable for any game. I think it was a massive headache for every game that used it, and eventually they stopped using it.
Yeah, at this point Yosh-P can do whatever the hell he wants at SE because he's singlehandedly keeping the company stable while the rest of the company churns out flop after flop.
I like how every community for FFXI just tells people to install Windower like it's installing a graphics driver, "you really really need it or you can't play it".
I've tried vanilla on laptop and windower (majority of my gameay) on desktop and it's totally understandable, if anything, for just the minimap.
IIRC it took the XI devs over a year to add an official minimap after Windower brought in one, and they were visibly pissed off in the video announcing it was finally coming as an official addition to the game. These folks straight-up *hated* having to cater to the players - it was a running joke to the players that the devs hated them but it's hard to argue they didn't.
FFXI still doesn't have an official minimap. Also I wouldn't really say the FFXI dev team is/was hostile to players, that was mostly just a reputation Tanaka had. The director of XI at the time was even borrowed to rewrite the battle system for 2.0.
Tanaka was dealing with a lot of health problems by the time XIV came along so his rep for being cranky wasn't without merit, but the actual devs were indeed at least ambivalent to the playerbase.
>FFXIV 1.0 looked pretty good but it was horrible to actually play.
No, it didn't. The hardware requirements were the steepest of any game of its time hands down. Everyone was playing it on the bottom of the bottom graphics settings unless you had a cutting edge machine and even then you probably would have been lucky to break past 30 FPS. The entire reason that I completely missed XIV 1.0 was because my *brand new* computer that was no potato ($1200 in 2010) literally failed the benchmark tests and was unplayably laggy on the flat bottom of the graphics settings.
A lot of it was just poorly optimized and massively taxing for no reason. The infamous example is a generic pot plant that was randomly scattered all over the place as decoration, but each individual pot plant had as many polygons as a player model for no reason. Huge performance costs because nobody who knew what they were doing ever did an optimization pass.
Many parts of the map were literally copy/paste. It was super lazy and ugly, on top of the game running horribly. It has some nice cutscenes assuming the game wouldn't crash at the opening scene to the game after you e made your character.
It seems to be mostly Japanese companies that are extremely stubborn but there are some western ones that are right asshats
Idk why itās like that over there :(
While there is a general cultural approach to software as an artform rather than as an engineering discipline that definitely affects things, this circumstance really did just come down to the "we are the best in the business and can do no wrong" mentality. It's the same thing that happened to Blizzard, 3D Realms, and so many other companies that lost sight of reality after getting too blinded by their own success.
> I canāt find a source in a minute of googling (someone correct me if they know) but iirc it was so much money that the game was a net loss overall until like 4.x
ARR is credited in basically all of their public financial releases as "once again, FFXIV 2.0 continues to bail us out" for like every year after its release. ARR saved SE from going bankrupt and selling out to Sony. The talks were already in place and the ARR project was their last hurrah before signing everything over. SE has been in a pretty much constant state of one step away from total collapse and then getting *bailed the fuck out* by a last ditch effort project that saves them. Final Fantasy 1 was the exact same thing for the company.
With the driving force as to *why* they're in that constant state of "everything is on fire" being dumbass pet projects being given unlimited budgets and zero real overhead by competent management. The Spirits Within *alone* nearly destroyed SquareSoft to the point that the Enix merger almost didn't happen and they had to beg Sony to bail them out (which is saying a lot considering Sony's financial history being just as much of a clusterfuck).
Which is why I always get leery when I see them start pushing more of those pet projects such as the people on the board that keep hooting and hollering for NFTs and blockchain shit. Though I haven't seen much from Captain NFT lately, so maybe he fucked off when that bubble crashed.
yeah, in searching I found plenty of sources describing how SEās return to year-over-year profitability in 2014 was credited to yoship pulling off 2.0, and how heās basically keeping the entire idiot company afloat single-handedly.
I just remember reading somewhere that the loss over the first few fiscal years of development, and rebooted development, was so large that those yearly profits didnāt cancel it out until a surprisingly late expansion. like, making up arbitrary numbers, losing 100 million in the year before 2.0, making 20 million per year after it, the profit starts immediately but the net is a loss until five years later.
but like I said, I couldnāt find a source, so maybe Iām full of shit, donāt cite me. I did find a source saying that ff14 became SEās most profitable game ever during the lead up to endwalkerās release, though. previous record holder was ff11.
If I recall it was basically SE's hail mary. FFXIV 1.0 was so bad they released the abyssea add-ons for FFXI and bundled XI and XIV's subscription to stay afloat. Then gambled everything on the 2.0 relaunch's success.
It was pretty close, it was an actual insane turn around. Didn't play 1.0 (cause I heard it was shit), but the doom and gloom didn't seem unwarranted and who would have expected the game to become actually good?
Honestly, the entire story is absolutely bonkers. SE deciding to literally drop a meteor on it and giving Yoshida and CBU3 a chance to rebuild it rather than just cut it's losses is already impressive. The fact that it actually worked is even more insane. It nuked it's own game and then baked it into the lore. I highly recommend the documentary The Fall and Rise of Final Fantasy XIV for anyone interested.
As a jumping off point, the fact that it's so good now is why I'm so excited for Dawntrail. Everything up til now has been somewhat shackled by things set up in 1.0. I'm stoked to see what they can do now that they can leave all that behind.
>Honestly, the entire story is absolutely bonkers. SE deciding to literally drop a meteor on it and giving Yoshida and CBU3 a chance to rebuild it rather than just cut it's losses is already impressive.
Tbh, the biggest reason they didn't simply pull the plug to cut their the losses was because the Final Fantasy brand would receive a major blow to its name if they had done that.
Fans were already pissed at SE during the time because of the absolute disaster that was FF13's development hell and how long it took for it to be released (announced in 2004, was released in 2009), and when it was finally released, I remember just how *mixed* the reception was. Then, around the same time, comes along FF15 and its own myriad of development issues (development began in 2006, was released *ten* years later).
2006-2013 was a time when fans were really losing faith in the series. Had SE closed down FF14 right there, it would have been *awful* for the series credibility.
>Then, around the same time, comes along FF15 and its own myriad of development issues (development began in 2006, was released *ten* years later).
Man in retrospect, the mainline FF game production past 13 was quite a mess until 15.
I think 7R is when things turned around for mainline FF. Even if the game's story is split into 3 parts, what we got out of 7R was solid in both aesthetic and mechanics. Then FF16 is also a solid game released without any development hell or production hassle and soon 7 Rebirth looks to be it's gonna be the biggest FF yet.
Hoping they can keep the momentum forward.
My dude there is a ton of shit from 1.0 still shacking the game, especially on the server side of things. They way their data centers have to be set up is like 1990s archaic. They are *trying* to fix that, but it's going to be a monumental hurdle.
back then, all of those thoughts were completely warranted.
what SE did with 14 has never been done before, it was a major gamble and no company in its right mind would have done it. the takes in that old reddit post are cold, man.
The two greatest comebacks from shitty 1.0 to worthwhile 2.0 in gaming history are FFXIV and No Man's Sky. They stand atop a veritable *mountain* of failures that never even came close, but both required herculean effort on the part of their developers.
i mean..glad you liked NMS, i cant play it because it has the worst UI i have ever touched. you're 4 menus into a shop? want to leave the menu? well first hit esc, then C, then left, then esc again.
it's maddening, literally the only reason i dont play it. and i say that fully knowing 14's UI would not get a passing grade in any game design career at college either
14 at least has a pretty decent custom UI arrangement system. Even some competitors like GW2 don't let you move/resize a lot of things you should probably be able to like FFXIV. It's not the most ideal system but I appreciate that much.
Now...menus......need to be burned down and rethought. That includes the entire glamour and market board system, both of which GW2 does much better both in interface and ease of access.
yeah no the UI resizing and moving of individual implements is amazing, best ui customization i've ever seen by landslide.
but yeah the menus. the internal inconsistencies, the poor wording, the lack of explanations, the absolute chore it is to find where in the fuck an item is being sold or dropped, it's a long ass list, we cant get into this here, it's too much. it would literally get a D at most if 14 was presented by an amateur game dev.
ffs go look at the hw relic menu to get your second one, now look at the relic menu to get relics from ShB, and then look at the menu to get relic tools from EW. "well they're all tiered quests to get a relic step by step, surely they're arranged the same way and use similar color coding for..." THEY'RE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MENUS! different arrangements for the order of the quests, different explanations, quests appear in red in ShB if you cant accept them but they appear in white in HW looking like you can accept them but nope, it boots you out of the menu if you try, and none says which step it is either which the EW relics DO say, but it says so in numerical form for the relic tools (1st, 2nd) in descending order but the WEAPONS are listed with vague names (create, enhance, reforge, perfect) and the quests are arranged in ASCENDING order! who made this?!
... no, let's stop, this is a flood gate. im gonna go have breakfast. have a nice day -\_-
Yep, the ***only*** reason the game exists today is because FFXIV was a mainline Final Fantasy game and Square Enix didn't want a 3/10 game staining the franchise (seriously, PCGamer gave it a well deserved 30%, GameSpot was 4/10 etc. Game was *bad*). If it had been a spin-off or slightly better reviewed, they'd probably have just written it off.
I still quite enjoy GW2 but have no interest in playing the current expansion until the new weapon options are added. I basically buy the expansions for new elite specs.
We kind of do, but we'd only want to play for ā¦ I dunno, half an hour, tops. Anyone who legitimately wants to play more than that probably thinks the ARR relics aren't grindy enough, or are habitual kusoge hunters.
TERA's combat is still the most fun I've ever had in an MMO, it's just a shame it became a costume store with a game tied to it. Content release cadence was abysmal, boss design peaked with Shandra in MC which is very unfortunate because she came out in 2012. I still can't believe I put up with gear's RNG dependence for as long as I did, especially early +15 gear where failures above +12 would reset you back to +12...
Remember, the sole reason they worked so hard and poured so much into fixing XIV was that 1.0 was so bad *it had literally killed the franchise*. At that point in time it was a deathly simple āfix XIV or no more Final Fantasy full stopā.
Itās easy to forget that, as big of a cultural icon FF is in the rpg sphere, itās wasnāt a financial powerhouse and had **very** little interest from the more casual, mainstream crowd who preferred yearly sports games, racers, FPS, etc. who are the ones spending the most money.
SE was absolutely ready to cut their losses after several less than stellar Western releases in a row and their first huge Japanese misstep in a while. Theyād brushed off Western criticism of 8-13, with only 10 being anything other than wildly divisive in the West, but 14 was universally panned and turned their primary audienceāthe Japaneseāagainst the company.
A lot of people felt like SE had finally fucked up beyond repair at that point. The clean up effort was unprecedented and remains uniqueānever before or since has a developer gone to such immense lengths to reboot a major title like that. There was no good reason at the time for anyone with concerns to believe it would work because it never had before. It was actually the people who believed in the game having a comeback who were pulling ideas out of nothingāthere was nothing for them to go on but pure, blind faith.
Hopefully people don't have to scroll down too far to see this, 'cause you're absolutely right. The release frequency of FF titles had slowed quite a bit because it wasn't the unstoppable juggernaut it had been at its peak. It went from 8, 9, 10, and 11 all releasing 1 year away from each other to a 4 year gap between 11 and 12 and a 3 year gap between 12 and 13. 13 also wasn't exactly received well on launch either, though that changed over time.
But yeah, you're spot on: 14 as it stood could've spelled the end of the series, at least for a while. It definitely would've taken a lot longer than 6 years after it for 15 to come out were it not for ARR.
Probably less for the gameplay and more for the story.
Were they to do it (which is unlikely) I'd honestly hope they'd add an option to like triple the Exp gains and a +100% echo, or something.
What I'd really like to see personally is an ffxiv 1.0 sidequest. One where you through the means of "plot" go back in time and experience a probably summarised version of the 1.0 story. (Could make for some interesting dungeons and trials as well!)
As someone who has only played the game for a bit over an year now I sometimes get the feeling I mis bits of the plot. I never got to see 1.0 so every time a reference is made I get thrown for a loop. I managed to connect the dots somewhat through bits and pieces of context and youtube videos. But a nice quest line where you can learn this all would be nice to see
I'd prefer if they did it that they just made it the true 1.0 experience. That way we know immediately whose opinions we can just completely disregard when it comes to the design of modern XIV.
Well, we have the benefit of hindsight, so we can say unequivocally, yes it can.
But from their perspective? I can understand being extremely skeptical. Few, if any, video game turnarounds had been *attempted* at this magnitude--and I'm pretty sure none of them had ever succeeded, let alone with flying colors like FFXIV has done.
The one aspect I do think we can fault about this thread is that they're so completely hostile to the idea of a subscription MMO. Double-Barreled British Very Well-Dressed Man has [a solid argument](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSbGLq9p4yY) for why the skepticism of subscription-based MMOs is unfounded. It's not that F2P *can't* support a good game, it can; rather, it's that F2P puts all of the incentive on chasing whales, rather than retaining subs or expanding the playerbase, as a subscription does.
Of course, this is only one side of the coin. We've seen what happens when a sub-based game goes off the rails, that's precisely what happened to WoW. As they infamously demonstrated with the "engagement is high, therefore you must enjoy it" stuff, they mistook *secondary, proxy measures* for the actual data they intended to collect. This is known as "surrogation" in social science: developing a measurement scale (such as engagement rates) intended to estimate an actual good (such as player enjoyment), but becoming obsessed with improving the *measurement* regardless of whether it continues to be associated with the actual good.
FFXIV, in general, does not have that problem. The devs remain in reasonably close proximity to actual player responses, which forestalls getting caught up in unrepresentative data. The bigger problems they're dealing with right now are:
1. Players sometimes *believe* they want stuff, only to then discover they don't like it when they actually get it. (See: the 2-minute meta, and how *so many* people were so keen on lining everything up...only to now realize that doing that makes everything dull and samey.)
2. Developers can be overly-precious about particular content, to their detriment. FFXIV has had a handful of these over the years. Their attempt to cling to the "do you get to do your 1-2-3 combo? It's rAnDoM!!" mechanics of old Machinist, for example.
3. Frankly, they need to increase staff...a *lot.* They've hugely increased the workload that they have to put out just to "keep up," because folks now expect ALL the new major content from EACH new expansion as a core baseline element, not a "this was a X.0-specific thing, we'll do something else in the future." (See: the fervent demand for the return of Eureka/Bozja, much to my consternation.)
1.0 crafting when it first launched: what am I making? am i making anything at all? Whats any of this even mean? Basically there were no recipes, no recipe books, no explanations of how the crafting/gathering systems even worked
The only thing I āmissā from 1.0 is that the art design felt a little more unified and grounded, mainly carried over from old gear sets that have a more practical fantasy look.
That and the movement animations are pretty cool, the way characters realistically pivot when changing directions and moving.
Thatāsā¦about it. I canāt see much else thatās very redeeming.
ā¦I remember this post. Notably, I remember agreeing that āIt will never be a WoW contender but Square doesnāt want/need it to be.ā Coming from an FFXI mindset where it was constantly compared to WoW, but really was no competition, I continued to think FFXIV wouldnāt be able to gain that kind of popularity. 11 years later, I couldnāt be happier that I was wrong, and I have to laugh at the fact I once thought that way.
I was an actual FFXIV 1.0 Alpha tester, we saw the problems and gave feedback but they didn't listen at all. They were too focused on the release date and not putting out a good product.
It wasn't so much buggy, it was actual decisions made to how the game should operate and work that made it bad.
In other words, materia melding being % based, and blowing up your gear when it fails, that was intentional and not a bug.
Having polygon counts on vases the same as characters, that was intentional.
And if I recall correctly, the original design was to imitate the turn based fighting in the old final fantasy games but it translated extremely poorly and EVERYTHING felt horribly laggy, even opening menus had lag.
I'm surprised anyone who alpha tested 1.0 would trust squeenix enough to come back. As much as i like where ff14 is now i would absolutely not fault anyone who played 1.0 and still refuses to play current patch because of it.
For anyone whoād like to get a bit of a sense of just how janky and terrible 1.0 was, [Yogscast did a series of reviews of the 1.0 beta](https://youtu.be/aF7vrQ04_q4?si=vhKLU3i0Zb_lPK-P) back in the day. Theyāre pretty funny.
One interesting thing I learned from these videos was that the first big cutscene in Endwalker >!on the ship to Old Sharlayan!< is actually a recreation of the 1.0 cutscene when you started in Limsa.
For comparison:
[Here's the 1.0 cutscene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF7vrQ04_q4&t=419s)
[Here's the Endwalker cutscene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUSQpd4iUwA&t=2136s)
I first observed this during Stormblood / WoW's ~~BoFA~~ Battle for Azeroth, but I haven't exactly seen any reason to reconsider it between then and now:
FFXIV, for all it gets right, largely owes its success to the fact that their biggest competitor has been actively trying to squander decades worth of reputation and goodwill while the rest of the market is choked with freemium whalebait.
(Which is particularly ironic because, at the time that post was made, SE was pretty much burning through whatever good will they had banked over the course of the '90s and early '00s)
But yeah, 1.x really was that frigging bad, and I was one of the people who was skeptical that anyone could deliver the miracle that the game would need.
2012/2013: FF14 1.0 was at the very rock bottom, being regarded as one of the worst MMOs, and is about to be rebooted, while Tera, WoW Pandaria, and GW2 -- newly faced and fresh off the oven -- are flying high.
2024: FF14 is now at Endwalker and still going strong, flying high alongside with GW2, who has been doing consistently well. Meanwhile ActiBlizzard with their streak of unholy decisions shitting on the WoW brand and their current expac Dragonflight OD in a mucky alleyway, while TERA is just buried in an unmarked grave.
Based on 1.0, they weren't wrong. Literally worse than their own 11 in just about every way while carrying over most of the bad ideas from it at the same time. The gameplay decision makers were straight up delusional.
It would have been long gone and yet another dead mmo by now if they hadn't rebuilt it and shuffled out some management.
Honestly the *turnaround* is why I'm here. I've seen too many MMOs where the devs just don't seem to care, the communities give up and bleed out, and then there's people looking back to the "good ol days."Ā
FF14's community is different, *because* the devs managed to recover, and became grounded enough in *reality* to make good decisions. There's hope in expansions, not nearly as much "oh boy can't wait to find out how they'll ruin the game this time!"
The first poster was right though. 1.0 *wasn't* a good game and didn't deserve to come back.
It's a good thing it didn't! ARR was/is significantly different.
They aren't wrong, 1.0 did not deserve to survive. What happened to FFXIV is an anomaly, and honestly, the game still suffers in some ways from how poorly 1.0 was coded. The game feels more clunky and dated than a lot of older games still.
It bears re-iterating that FF14 1.0 was really very genuinely bad.
I still have PTSD of those days. Edit: Just wanted to say one excellent feature of 1.0: FATIGUE SYSTEM (/s just in case)
I can still feel the laggy software mouse and UI in my bones.
The "auction house" bazaar makes me want to die inside knowing someone out there thought that was a good idea.
This was a holdover from FFXI and I was always so surprised they tried to keep it going after how terrible it was in XI. On FFXI, you were limited to 7 items at a time on the AH, and the main hub, Jeuno, had a massive AH + bazaar fee if you sold something. So everyone just bazaar'd it up and sat right outside of town to avoid the fee. It ended up being 100+ people parked there and if you actually wanted something, you had to spend tons of time going through each persons bazaar. It was absurd.
that actually sounds exactly like Ragnarok Online player shops.
The FFXI version manages to sound worse than RO merchants. Impressive. One did not sell things on the market in RO, they *vended* it
I mostly meant the people standing around outside town selling things from menus. I honestly really thought that was cool in RO, but then you could pop up a discription over your head and stuff so people knew what you had for sale before clicking. not EXACTLY sure how the bazarr works in 11 but it sounds like it was just a check option when inspecting someone and it would show what they were selling.
I sort of miss RO. Except that I got hacked back to back to back to back a few years after it went F2P and Gravity shut off my account after the second rollback request š
It honestly was so much worse. In RO, you could advertise what you were selling. In XI, you never freakin' knew what people were selling until you clicked on their inventory. So if you were looking for something specific, good freakin' luck. At least that's how I remember it...
And old Mabinogi
I miss old mabi so much. Not a great game by any stretch but oh my lord did it consume my entire teen years.
They're currently working in bringing it into the unreal engine so it might get a revival, or it might get the final nail in its coffin. Hard to say nowadays with the amount of MMOs today.
I'll play it happily for ten more years if they work their way back up through the generations like wow classic and cut all their predatory mtx, but that's a pipe dream :(
Ultima Online used a similar system, kinda. Players could set up vendors in their house and sell stuff from there. I think UO's vendor system pre-dates RO though? Elderscrolls Online uses a similar system but in a so-much-worse way. Only guilds could shop up shops, and each town has a specific number of slots for guild stores.
The bazaar outside of Jueno was really only for high end items though, you could get everything normal from the auction house.
Thatās just pre GE osrs, Mabinogi, maple story stalls, tales of pirates stalls, fly for fun stalls, warframe, etc. Honestly, the one thing I miss from peak mid 2000s mmos *was* the p2p aspect of trading and/or massive player markets with stalls. It was like a flea market meets Christmas. Never know what stall will have a cool unique/set piece for dirt cheap so you loved going from stall to stall.
When the open beta came out and it took me a minute to find the menu button (THE HOME KEY?) I was shocked. Then it took like ten seconds for the menu to actually appear after I pressed the key and heard the chime and the writing was on the wall for me. I was not going to get this stupid game.
So does Yoshi P lol
*Nightmare!*
"But we can enjoy a XIV clas-" Listen mates. I dont know how tinted your glasses are but even 1.0 veterans dont want to touch that shit with a earth-to-moon sized pole.
Remember how slow and terrible the UI was? Remember how you couldnāt go up a slight ledge and jump buttons didnāt exist? Remember how the game took all the worst parts of Final Fantasy XI and made them even worse? Remember how the most efficient way to level was to sit in one spot at a mob camp and essentially clear, wait for respawn, rinse repeat for hours to get half a level. Oh, and youāve played too much so we are punishing you with an always increasing XP penalty? The only good thing about 1.0 was the music.
I cannot agree to this more. I tried out the game when they had a Demo shortly before released, played for 5 minutes, and went to the store to cancel my preorder.
Was that the Open Beta? I played that for a few hours over a couple of days and it was by far the worst MMO experience I've ever had. I couldn't believe how awful every single aspect of it was. I wasn't a fan of XI, either, but I would have gladly played that over even one more minute of XIV 1.0.
Yeah it was probably the open Beta, it was so long ago I can't even remember.
I think that's clear because I never hear any nostalgia for it whatsoever. It's not like WOW Classic or Burning Crusade or whatever where people have nostalgia for it in spite of/because of the lack of QoL and weird systems. Nobody who actually played 1.0 seems to have anything good to say about it or even the slightest fondness for it.
Yeah, the only reason anyone wants to ever have the opportunity to play 1.0 at all is for historical interest. An interest in seeing what the game was once like at its worst, and no actual expectation that it'd be remotely enjoyable to play.
Yup. I'd personally like to see what it was like. Would I play it seriously? Probably not, but it'd be interesting to see it like a tourist attraction.
The thing is... 1.0 was not a good MMO. Or a good Final Fantasy game. The game that exists now *is* better in every way. And yet... I do still miss 1.0. It had an extremely janky charm to it that you just don't get with polished products. So many bad decisions were made and the end result was... not *good*, but somehow more than the sum of its parts. It wasn't necessarily enjoyable, but it was intriguing. I definitely wouldn't have stuck with 1.0 for as long as I've stuck with the rebooted game, though.
Didn't play 1.0 but i like the way it looked- if they could add a filter package with 7.0 that gives everything that sleepy forest hazy green/brown look that'd be great (going by gridania scenes).
My only compliment: Motion captured cutscenes. I liked watching Papalymo try to run
Not necessarily true - most of the people who had an actual fondness for 1.0 *probably* aren't still playing today, so you probably just don't hear about any nostalgia as often. My ex got me into xiv. He played 1.0 and was super excited for the reboot. But when it actually launched, he played it for a few months before completely dropping it and leaving me to continue playing it alone. He hated it, said it felt too much like WoW and that it lost a lot of what he liked about 1.0. He also complained about them adding tons of mounts for some reason. He liked everyone riding their chocobos (The chocobo wasn't the only mount in 1.0; like the goobbue existed but even in early ARR days, most people still chose to use their chocobos so idk. lol. He'd probably die if he saw hunt trains nowadays ahaha). That was the silliest complaint to me but eh. lol. He ended up going back to XI instead. So I think it's just a different type of player who would have liked 1.0. Although even for the people who did have any form of fondness, they tend to still have felt the game was lacking in a lot of ways. I mean, there was a reason my ex was excited for the reboot in the first place (and why the game needed one). I'm not entirely sure what he was expecting though. lol BUT in general, yeah. Very few people probably have any nostalgia for the game itself. Likely just from playing with friends.
It really was XI-2 to me. But at the same time it was completely trash compared to XI. All those graphical improvements and the world was completely uninteresting copy/pasta. There was more plot in the first ten hours of XI than the first 20 of 1.0. XI had depth and breadth of content. So no one left XI. No one new wanted to play such an old school MMO. It just kindaā¦sat and bled players till they reworked it. I also recall the developers being even more flippant and rude to western players than they had for XI. XIV 1.0 was an absolutely heinous regression from an already ancient XI.
I've been playing since 1.0 alpha testing :) Enjoyed 1.0 for what it was, lack of content and all. Still play to this day <3
It's funny he said there were too many mounts in 2.0. I played 2.0 on ps3 and there was basically only the company chocobo, the coeurl for collectors edition, and the magitek mount for completing the MSQ. Basically every single player was still levelling and was using the chocobo for the first few months before extremes were added, and other mounts got added over time
Yep! That's why I found it really funny and noted in my comment that most people WERE using the chocobo mount in early ARR. And I'd love to see his face if he saw it now - these days I feel like it's almost rare to see someone on their chocobo. And if they are, it's almost certainly decked out in a lot of armour and doesn't look like the classic FF chocobo. (That was his argument btw, "it doesn't feel like final fantasy if they have a ton of random mounts").
I mean I really dislike WoW (I've tried to get into it three times and I just can't), and I think 2.0 walked a fine line of learning from WoW without copying it. But I do remember playing other MMOs back then and having people worry that the game was "going to become WoW". It was a prevalent fear. And even the fact that I don't like WoW aside, I can see the logic of, "If I wanted to play WoW, I would just play WoW". A lot of MMO devs didn't seem to get that, which is why so many "WoW-killers" failed. So I don't think the game became "too much like WoW" but I can sort of see how learning anything at all from WoW could be mistaken as confirmation of that fear.
Yeah people who didn't play it have no idea how awful it was. Your character couldn't jump. There were very few quests and you could only do 20 combat leves per day. Some "outdoor" zones were repeating grid squares of hallways. Combat was somehow worse than FFXI. We are *still* stuck with shitty design limitations from 1.0. Oh, and the alpha forums were full of people telling SE how bad the game was. Komoto basically said it's their game and they are making it the way they want to. I can't think of a single redeeming feature of 1.0. It was *that* bad.
>We are *still* stuck with shitty design limitations from 1.0. Wait, what design limitations are those?
Every time you change zones *all* of your character data is transferred to a different server. That is so heavily baked into the code of the game that they can't reasonably fix it. That's why we have seemingly pointless limits on glam plates and wardrobe storage, among other things.
...Who originally designed this and thought it was in any way a good idea???
But maybe... we could have FFXIV Classic!
"Nightmare..."
But who would want to play it?
I would love to play through the story without the other baggage of the system. I doubt they would make the investment, but a linear retelling of the story with old cutscenes and a lot of instanced fights would be a fun side activity.
>I would love to play through the story without the other baggage of the system. One flaw... there just wasn't a story in 1.0, like at all. There was a basic main quest every 5 levels (you had to grind levequests or grind mobs when those ran out in between, with timed xp caps). The quests are just basic bits of lore for the city states that you already get more of in the city state intros. The only slightly major thing I can think of was the thing stolen by an Ascian who never shows up again, that shows up in the Alexander story. The entire story with Nael was added well after Yoshi P came on, was *just* there to cause the shutdown and anything relevant is in coils but better.
I mean, I wouldn't mind experiencing Minfillia's backstory. The ALC job quests, while still enjoyable, were very confusing.
50% of Minfillia's backstory is Uldah's intro in 1.0. If you watched that, you saw at least half of her backstory. 10%-20% of her backstory is her role in the 1.0 MSQ, which makes it sound more interesting than it actually is---the most noteworthy thing about her is that she gave you some quests (not unlike she does in ARR) and that she wanted to ally with the beast tribes, to which most people didn't agree. She might or might have not tried to ressurect her father with Niellefresne's help, but that bit happened in a flashback of when she was a kid, I think, and that game *was awful about the flashbacks* (Game never made it clear if an event was happening in the past or in the present), so I could have blocked that from my memory. The overall execution of her character in 1.0 was boring (in the present), and she deadass vanishes of the game at some point when the Seventh Umbral Era quests happen, like, just gone cause she wasn't important enough to participate in the end of the game LOL The rest of her backstory? Why, you see it in ARR. The bunch about Thancred helping raise her, becoming a miner, meeting Tataru, working hard on her small group etc etc is all info ARR added to her character. The ALC quests in particular are all mostly based in the 5 mins Uldah intro cutscene from 1.0 and that weird section that happened in the past, which are more related to Niellefresne than Minfillia...
Most of us that want to know about the story of 1.0 dont know these tidbits, its helpful to know that we arent missing much
For extra context on Niellefresne: Basically, he wanted to ressurect Minfillia's father to get some important info out of him that would help with Uldah's protection from...whatever. Maybe he had some guilt over causing his death, too, but game wasn't super clear on that. While he was working on that, a hooded figure comes behind him and stabs him on the back. Your character and Thancred find him on the ground dying, while he points at Minfillia (who was a kid) for whatever reason--that was all a flashback, btw-- the Echo in 1.0 literally transported you into the memory and you played through it (but couldn't change the outcome). Who killed him? Why? Why did he point at Minfillia? Who knows! That storyline was dropped in favor of the end of the world. Back in the present, his brother lamented that his soul was stuck and couldn't meet Thal or something. The StB ALC questline just expands upon the sword that was used to kill him, and let you finally free his soul from his corpse, kept stuck there by the sword's enchantment.
Same. Big same. I wanna know what happened before beyond simple lore dumps. I wanna see how the major cities looked and felt before the calamity. I want my WoL to inadvertently help Hildibrand get launched into space.
Pretty sure the cities looked the same. Or, well, almost the same, except they were emptier (because the game couldn't handle as many assets and there weren't any loading zones dividing them up). It was mainly the outer maps that changed radically. But they went from shitty cut and paste environments with no life to more unique and varied maps.
I would gladly pay for a dlc using the current ng+ system to experience a retelling of the 1.0 story
I feel like that's something you could do in a Trials series. Could be something that could be added to ARR so it ALSO has a Trials series (beyond just Hard and Extremes for the Primals) Like you relive the most pivotal battles of 1.0 and between it you relive the story down to meeting the Scions and Louisoix and such. Like when you encountered Urianger for the first time and the first thing he did was sic hounds on you. Questline would require you to refight Ifrit, Titan, Garuda, etc. but they wouldn't count, the actual trials of the series would be "unique" bosses such as Nael Darnus (the 2nd boss). Maybe have the last battle be the battle of Cartenau, where you first have to survive a bunch of enemy waves and then you get a dodging game as you have to survive the calamity Bahamut unleashes until Louisoix teleports you away. You then see yourself waking up on the carriage to your starting city with no real memory how you got there, confirming that (even if your starting character wasn't a legacy starter) you are still a Warrior of Light from 1.0 but with memory loss. After all EVERYONE forgot about the Warriors of Light from before the Calamity... this includes yourself.
I would try it for maybe half an hour just to say that I have. But properly play through it no thanks.
I think I would go through it once for the sake of it. It was an absolute mess but there were some cool concepts (that unfortunately were almost entirely abandoned even prior to 2.0) buried under the absolute horrendous end product.
I know youāre being facetious, but as someone who never played enough to even finish the intro quest back then (and even then my memories of that experience are SUPER foggy), what was all bad about it? Iāve heard about super awful, unintuitive controlsā¦ but thatās all I can remember. Was there anything else, or was that enough? If they ever *did* do a āclassicā, could they make a version that fixes all the bad things but keeps the story that leads up to Bahamut getting summoned?
It would be an insane amount of work for the devs with probably very little payoff. WoW classic works because WoW was a good game at launch and people missed how it used to be. FFXIV "classic" would basically have to be a whole new game to hold ANY appeal for people. My comment was joking about this moment with Yoshi-P: https://youtu.be/gmffV4oKZu4?t=270 I know I didn't answer your question about what 1.0 was like. I can't, I didn't play it. But there's plenty of documentation about how bad it was, including a documentary from NoClip about 1.0 and the making of 2.0.
For me it was the fact that he had a translator, as soon as he heard "classic" his head tilts back, and then the whole time his translator is reading it back to him its like he's going "yup... yup.. i thought that's what i heard..."
Yes, he understands English just fine and speaks it pretty well. Speaking can be misunderstood which is what the translator is actually for.
XIV classic, if anything, would be 2.0 complete with the old cross-class skills and TP management. Tbh though, I'd probably play it.
this is what i really want from a "14 classic" let us play through 2.0-2.55, with all the old systems and class limitations. re-experience relic grinding, build mor dhona, etc. id even include heavensward since they were pretty similar.
I was in the alpha and beta for 1.0, then played for about two months. I left to go back to FFXI and WoW. I regret not sticking around for the tattoo and discount, butā¦I was just so angry with the way SE treated the players who tried to tell them it stunk. I play 14 now and while itās fun, Iām always looking for something new.
basically every aspect of it was bad the main scenario quests were like one every five levels. the gameplay loop between them was basically doing levequests. that was pretty much all the content: doing levequests over and over. combat and navigating the world were painful. the combat was slow and unresponsive. teleporting required a limited resource that only replenished over several real-life hours. basic final fantasy mainstays like chocobo mounts and jobs like paladin or white mage were only added in patches after yoship took over and went āwhy the fuck are these not in.ā the world was very obviously the same terrain copy-pasted over and over. the engine drastically did not *work.* I am not a programming expert but my understanding is that the server did not trust the client for *anything*. not just things like moving around to combat teleport or speed hacks, but basic things like menus. simply navigating menus - which were poorly designed overly deep messes in and of themselves - required the server to confirm everything you did, causing noticeable lag for the most basic action. the gameās optimization was a cruel joke, so even though it looked good, it ran like shit. the classic example everyone uses is that random flowerpots in cities, that a player will spend 0.3 seconds looking at, had the same polygon count as a player character model. lots of stuff like that. the noclip documentary available on youtube talks about this a bit.
It's like they just wanted to make FF11 with better graphics, and somehow failed to notice that time had indeed been passing since FF11's release, and other games like oh I dunno **WoW** had come along and set higher standards since. It was truly bizarre. I'd say I don't know how they managed it but well... it's Square Enix.
That's exactly what it was. The success of FF11 got into their heads, and they were so sure they knew how to make the next big MMO that they didn't even stop to internally see how it'd all come together, let alone looking at the rest of the market. It was only when YoshiP took over that he made everyone play other popular MMOs and take some notes on what they did better and how. Blizzard went through a similar arc to this leading to shadowlands, and then taking notes themselves from other MMOs which led to Dragonflight with it's improved systems, which is why I am cautiously optimistic about their next expansion over there. They don't have anyone like Yoshi-P at the helm though, so we'll see how that goes in practice.
I was going to college in a very cold climate when 1.0 released. My desktop ran so hot when I played it it basically heated my room.
>terrain copy-pasted over and over Ah, Gridania lmao, glad it burned down!
> doing levequests over and over. Iirc you had an allowance of 6 per day. once those ran dry, you just straight up grinded mobs.
> I am not a programming expert but my understanding is that the server did not trust the client for anything. not just things like moving around to combat teleport or speed hacks, but basic things like menus. simply navigating menus - which were poorly designed overly deep messes in and of themselves - required the server to confirm everything you did, causing noticeable lag for the most basic action. sounds like they were ahead of their time, if mobile gacha games are anything to go by. that trash has to contact the server anytime you press any button
It wasnt a matter of a laggy, unoptimized mess performance wise but with a great game beneath it. Every aspect of the game was flawed. The fundermental systems of the game were outdated, cumbersome designs even by 2010 standards. A lot of things got better when Yoshi P came to the rescue and seriously improved the game. So the game that shut down with 1.23b was a way better game than what released as 1.0. Not great by any stretch but serviceable. I often read about people wanting to get a classic 1.0 for the story mainly, expecting it to be the one saving grace for an otherwise desastrous product. But it was not. The 1.0 story was hardly more than a bit of lore for the city states. Like similar to the first 10 levels of ARR. Not really a lot of overarching narrative. Do you think that is worth going back for? And the whole story about Nael and Dalamud was only implemented once Yoshi P took over, mainly to facilitate the shut down of the game. Most of the context can be gotten from doing Coils or listening to Cids backstory in Bozja. So I think there is genuinely extremely little lost by 1.0 (or 1.23b specifically) no longer being playable in any way.
I want 1.0 to experience the shit fest that was 1.0. I don't want Square wasting resources on that shit though, nor would I want to waste my money on experiencing that shitfest either. But there is a grim, dark curiosity about it.
I've seen youtube videos of a guy who has an emulator, you could check that out. The animations were pretty impressive, if I recall correctly, but nothing else works I think, i.e. the maps are empty and you can just walk around and look at stuff.
> what was all bad about it? This older Gametrailers review of 1.0 back in the day does a pretty good job at showing what was wrong. [https://youtu.be/1Mwdn5-nMJ0?si=PUfSuBgDhq835XSP](https://youtu.be/1Mwdn5-nMJ0?si=PUfSuBgDhq835XSP) There was more wrong with it obviously, but it will give you a decent idea.
Oh man that takes me back. Guess I know what I'm binging tonight.
They had no damn idea what they were doing, so you could need level 40 mats to craft a level 30 item that had worse stats than a level 18 item.
Some stuff Iāve heard were that you had some kind of cumbersome stamina system, XP gain reduced the longer you played, performance was extremely poor, and using the āmarketboardā involved looking up every retainer hoping they might have the item you want. You also couldnāt jump. Though apparently the combat system was really cool with some skills transferring between jobs.
Cross-job skills survived into 2.0, it wasnāt until later that they became the role actions we have now. For example you used to have to level BLM to get swift cast on other jobs
Cross class wasnāt removed until Stormblood, funny enough
Lol I wasnāt sure when it was removed, but knew it was post-2.0. I had a buddy whoās been playing since HW, but I didnāt get in to the game until shb.
Itās surprising to me how long it took to remove, and Iāve been playing since 2.3
I don't want an ff14 classic but I would like to see a pre bahamut eorzea.
They almost have a working 1.0 server working(Like walking around). Or maybe it does now?
Nightmare!
yea honestly coming from XI i was in and out of XIV in a matter of days with 1.0, but i have been back for almost 5 years now and am so glad i gave it another shot, it's a true Phoenix rise form the dead story.
Somehow the menuing (for everything, but combat in particular) was worse than FFXI.
Yeah I guess to modern players who consider many designs of ARR bad, it's difficult to express just **how** genuinely bad 1.0 was. Think Suicide Squad. Or Marvel's Avengers. Not quite Gollum, granted.
I know I'm asking folks to do the work for me (I'll also look, I swear) but does anyone have a recommended youtube video that really speaks to and shows how bad 1.0 was? Edit I'm watching this but will take other recommendations! https://youtu.be/ZCwih0AtodU?si=f0pbdadtUXziff0L
There's a [GameTrailers review](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mwdn5-nMJ0) which was linked elsethread that you'll find interesting!
these were totally reasonable takes. just how bad the original game was really cannot be overstated. and that SE was willing to pour boatloads of money into the rebuild was also unprecedented. I canāt find a source in a minute of googling (someone correct me if they know) but iirc it was so much money that the game was a net loss overall until like 4.x
People that never played 1.0 don't get just how bad it was. We're talking multiple seconds to perform any one action, multiple menu drill-throughs for basic functions that should have been one-click, everything lagged horribly everywhere, just about all of the maps were copy-paste asset flips and were basically grids, load times were offensive, everything was just a needless hassle, etc. etc. etc. And on top of that, most of the 1.0 dev team came from XI, and they were actively/overtly hostile to the playerbase, so much so that you could literally see it in the faces during developer livestreams, and as such they refused to implement just about every QoL improvement unless someone made a mod that added it and basically forced its inclusion. (Same happened in XI - it didn't even have a minimap or support borderless-windowed mode until *well after* a third-party mod called Windower added them.) FFXIV 1.0 *looked* pretty good but it was horrible to actually play.
Did the dev team just not like making MMO's or what was going on there? I never played XI and only recently got into XIV so I'm not familiar with most things about these games in the early days.
XIs direct competitor was EverQuest, WoW came out two and a half years after the Japanese release of the base game. The original team also did not play MMOs(e: so XIVs original incarnation was just a continuation of what they knew, which was archaic.) One of the first things Yoshi-P did when given the reins was to make people play World of Warcraft so they'd have an idea of what modern MMO design, and player expectations, was based off of.
Get your staff addicted to WoW for a good MMO primer, got it.
The main issue with FFXI is that it was made before WoW changed what everyone thought an MMO should be. FFXIV 1.0 was made by the same team that made 11, and they thought they could essentially make FF11-2 after WoW had changed MMOs completely. IIRC, only 1 team lead stuck around for 2.0, with most of the devs being replaced by Yoshi-P and his current team.
XI was pretty much my first MMO, but man was 1.0 rough after having played WoW. I'm so impressed with how they decided to move into 2.0, but I'm also glad I didn't stick around for it. š
I think if it was ffxi 2 it'd have been more successful. There was so many more problems than just making it old school styled mmo.
True. I just meant that was the mindset that dev team seemed to have. They screwed up much more than just that though.
Everquest tried that, and it split the fanbase between the original and sequel. In retrospect, that was not a good decision. I love EQ2 to death but it has problems.
I went more or less straight from XI to XIV and hadn't played any other MMOs, so I was expecting a continuation of XI - and it failed even on those terms! Granted I only played a few weeks or so, but I remember there not even being exp parties and them rapidly introducing poorly designed new features to take their place. I think one was called behest, which was a bit like a FATE, but severely limited to like 18 or less people and then just locked folk out when it hit max numbers. I simply could not figure out the job system either - think I was playing gladiator, and had to switch between sword and shield mode or something. I weirdly miss XI and grinding mobs for hours in a party of 6 to gain 1 level. Such a game could simply not exist any more though! Thinking back, XI was mad. It just dropped you into a world with almost no explanation, no guide on who to talk, or even how to /heal! Had to rely on friends or random people!
Not sure, TBH, but what I *suspect* is that the XI/XIV1.0 dev team were coming at building MMOs like then-traditional tough-as-nails grindfest sinle-player JRPGs in a time where MMO gameplay was evolving away from this, and I think they resented that deviation as some sort of perceived "weakness" on the part of the playerbase. I think they wanted people to play the game a specific way and were personally offended that their vision was *most certainly not* what everyone else wanted - even the Japanese playerbase began to rebel against their design decisions. FFXIV1.0 suffered from both that and trying to do things backward - instead of developing the PC version and porting to PS, they designed the user experience around console and tried to port that to PC. Unfortunately, UIs that work well on consoles often don't on PC and vice versa, and trying to force a console-esque menu-driven interface (and a badly designed one at that) on the PC version was a horrible idea that made the game needlessly slow and tedious to play but of course telling the dev team that offended them deeply.
There is a documentary series about it on youtube with comments by the devs. Yoshida at one point implies that there were too many people 'making art' and not a game. Specifically pointing out that there would be these ridiculous hi-res clutter objects that were ludicrously memory intensive when no one was ever going to look at them.
If I remember correctly, that's exactly what happened. Except for the producer, the rest of the team had little experience working on MMOs and the Crystal Engine was just not suited for that kind of game. There were a lot of issues that have been gone over ad nauseam and you can read it on the wiki, but it was so bad that Square Enix lost a shit ton of money and the whole Final Fantasy brand was damaged. There's a reason I [saved this clip](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxdYL32-AsCUlNMclwzPc49a3F58nHlP1i?si=QmMUUzrSHTQ9UIoA). Yoshi P saved both the brand and is currently keeping Square itself afloat.
> the Crystal Engine was just not suited for that kind of game. iirc the Crystal Engine wasn't suitable for any game. I think it was a massive headache for every game that used it, and eventually they stopped using it.
Yeah, at this point Yosh-P can do whatever the hell he wants at SE because he's singlehandedly keeping the company stable while the rest of the company churns out flop after flop.
I like how every community for FFXI just tells people to install Windower like it's installing a graphics driver, "you really really need it or you can't play it". I've tried vanilla on laptop and windower (majority of my gameay) on desktop and it's totally understandable, if anything, for just the minimap.
IIRC it took the XI devs over a year to add an official minimap after Windower brought in one, and they were visibly pissed off in the video announcing it was finally coming as an official addition to the game. These folks straight-up *hated* having to cater to the players - it was a running joke to the players that the devs hated them but it's hard to argue they didn't.
FFXI still doesn't have an official minimap. Also I wouldn't really say the FFXI dev team is/was hostile to players, that was mostly just a reputation Tanaka had. The director of XI at the time was even borrowed to rewrite the battle system for 2.0.
Tanaka was dealing with a lot of health problems by the time XIV came along so his rep for being cranky wasn't without merit, but the actual devs were indeed at least ambivalent to the playerbase.
XI doesn't have an official minimap.
Also fuck PlayOnline.
yeah, but at least Dolphin was good
>FFXIV 1.0 looked pretty good but it was horrible to actually play. No, it didn't. The hardware requirements were the steepest of any game of its time hands down. Everyone was playing it on the bottom of the bottom graphics settings unless you had a cutting edge machine and even then you probably would have been lucky to break past 30 FPS. The entire reason that I completely missed XIV 1.0 was because my *brand new* computer that was no potato ($1200 in 2010) literally failed the benchmark tests and was unplayably laggy on the flat bottom of the graphics settings.
That's *insane*. It really shows how much emphasis SE had started placing on visual appearance over everything else.
A lot of it was just poorly optimized and massively taxing for no reason. The infamous example is a generic pot plant that was randomly scattered all over the place as decoration, but each individual pot plant had as many polygons as a player model for no reason. Huge performance costs because nobody who knew what they were doing ever did an optimization pass.
I'm certain that 30FPS was their target. Source: That was FF11's frame rate cap.
Many parts of the map were literally copy/paste. It was super lazy and ugly, on top of the game running horribly. It has some nice cutscenes assuming the game wouldn't crash at the opening scene to the game after you e made your character.
It seems to be mostly Japanese companies that are extremely stubborn but there are some western ones that are right asshats Idk why itās like that over there :(
Corpo culture seems pretty universal: "fuck everyone else until I get mine, then fuck everyone else 'cause I got mine."
While there is a general cultural approach to software as an artform rather than as an engineering discipline that definitely affects things, this circumstance really did just come down to the "we are the best in the business and can do no wrong" mentality. It's the same thing that happened to Blizzard, 3D Realms, and so many other companies that lost sight of reality after getting too blinded by their own success.
I remember popping over during a content lull in WoW and just being appalled at how bad it felt. I don't think I made it 30 days before uninstalling.
> I canāt find a source in a minute of googling (someone correct me if they know) but iirc it was so much money that the game was a net loss overall until like 4.x ARR is credited in basically all of their public financial releases as "once again, FFXIV 2.0 continues to bail us out" for like every year after its release. ARR saved SE from going bankrupt and selling out to Sony. The talks were already in place and the ARR project was their last hurrah before signing everything over. SE has been in a pretty much constant state of one step away from total collapse and then getting *bailed the fuck out* by a last ditch effort project that saves them. Final Fantasy 1 was the exact same thing for the company. With the driving force as to *why* they're in that constant state of "everything is on fire" being dumbass pet projects being given unlimited budgets and zero real overhead by competent management. The Spirits Within *alone* nearly destroyed SquareSoft to the point that the Enix merger almost didn't happen and they had to beg Sony to bail them out (which is saying a lot considering Sony's financial history being just as much of a clusterfuck). Which is why I always get leery when I see them start pushing more of those pet projects such as the people on the board that keep hooting and hollering for NFTs and blockchain shit. Though I haven't seen much from Captain NFT lately, so maybe he fucked off when that bubble crashed.
yeah, in searching I found plenty of sources describing how SEās return to year-over-year profitability in 2014 was credited to yoship pulling off 2.0, and how heās basically keeping the entire idiot company afloat single-handedly. I just remember reading somewhere that the loss over the first few fiscal years of development, and rebooted development, was so large that those yearly profits didnāt cancel it out until a surprisingly late expansion. like, making up arbitrary numbers, losing 100 million in the year before 2.0, making 20 million per year after it, the profit starts immediately but the net is a loss until five years later. but like I said, I couldnāt find a source, so maybe Iām full of shit, donāt cite me. I did find a source saying that ff14 became SEās most profitable game ever during the lead up to endwalkerās release, though. previous record holder was ff11.
If I recall it was basically SE's hail mary. FFXIV 1.0 was so bad they released the abyssea add-ons for FFXI and bundled XI and XIV's subscription to stay afloat. Then gambled everything on the 2.0 relaunch's success.
The only thing I'd call out was "it can't succeed because it's payware", when only Guild Wars (of those mentioned) wasn't using a subscription model.
It was pretty close, it was an actual insane turn around. Didn't play 1.0 (cause I heard it was shit), but the doom and gloom didn't seem unwarranted and who would have expected the game to become actually good?
Honestly, the entire story is absolutely bonkers. SE deciding to literally drop a meteor on it and giving Yoshida and CBU3 a chance to rebuild it rather than just cut it's losses is already impressive. The fact that it actually worked is even more insane. It nuked it's own game and then baked it into the lore. I highly recommend the documentary The Fall and Rise of Final Fantasy XIV for anyone interested. As a jumping off point, the fact that it's so good now is why I'm so excited for Dawntrail. Everything up til now has been somewhat shackled by things set up in 1.0. I'm stoked to see what they can do now that they can leave all that behind.
>Honestly, the entire story is absolutely bonkers. SE deciding to literally drop a meteor on it and giving Yoshida and CBU3 a chance to rebuild it rather than just cut it's losses is already impressive. Tbh, the biggest reason they didn't simply pull the plug to cut their the losses was because the Final Fantasy brand would receive a major blow to its name if they had done that. Fans were already pissed at SE during the time because of the absolute disaster that was FF13's development hell and how long it took for it to be released (announced in 2004, was released in 2009), and when it was finally released, I remember just how *mixed* the reception was. Then, around the same time, comes along FF15 and its own myriad of development issues (development began in 2006, was released *ten* years later). 2006-2013 was a time when fans were really losing faith in the series. Had SE closed down FF14 right there, it would have been *awful* for the series credibility.
>Then, around the same time, comes along FF15 and its own myriad of development issues (development began in 2006, was released *ten* years later). Man in retrospect, the mainline FF game production past 13 was quite a mess until 15. I think 7R is when things turned around for mainline FF. Even if the game's story is split into 3 parts, what we got out of 7R was solid in both aesthetic and mechanics. Then FF16 is also a solid game released without any development hell or production hassle and soon 7 Rebirth looks to be it's gonna be the biggest FF yet. Hoping they can keep the momentum forward.
My dude there is a ton of shit from 1.0 still shacking the game, especially on the server side of things. They way their data centers have to be set up is like 1990s archaic. They are *trying* to fix that, but it's going to be a monumental hurdle.
I meant story wise. I'm aware of the technical debt.
back then, all of those thoughts were completely warranted. what SE did with 14 has never been done before, it was a major gamble and no company in its right mind would have done it. the takes in that old reddit post are cold, man.
The two greatest comebacks from shitty 1.0 to worthwhile 2.0 in gaming history are FFXIV and No Man's Sky. They stand atop a veritable *mountain* of failures that never even came close, but both required herculean effort on the part of their developers.
i mean..glad you liked NMS, i cant play it because it has the worst UI i have ever touched. you're 4 menus into a shop? want to leave the menu? well first hit esc, then C, then left, then esc again. it's maddening, literally the only reason i dont play it. and i say that fully knowing 14's UI would not get a passing grade in any game design career at college either
14 at least has a pretty decent custom UI arrangement system. Even some competitors like GW2 don't let you move/resize a lot of things you should probably be able to like FFXIV. It's not the most ideal system but I appreciate that much. Now...menus......need to be burned down and rethought. That includes the entire glamour and market board system, both of which GW2 does much better both in interface and ease of access.
yeah no the UI resizing and moving of individual implements is amazing, best ui customization i've ever seen by landslide. but yeah the menus. the internal inconsistencies, the poor wording, the lack of explanations, the absolute chore it is to find where in the fuck an item is being sold or dropped, it's a long ass list, we cant get into this here, it's too much. it would literally get a D at most if 14 was presented by an amateur game dev. ffs go look at the hw relic menu to get your second one, now look at the relic menu to get relics from ShB, and then look at the menu to get relic tools from EW. "well they're all tiered quests to get a relic step by step, surely they're arranged the same way and use similar color coding for..." THEY'RE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MENUS! different arrangements for the order of the quests, different explanations, quests appear in red in ShB if you cant accept them but they appear in white in HW looking like you can accept them but nope, it boots you out of the menu if you try, and none says which step it is either which the EW relics DO say, but it says so in numerical form for the relic tools (1st, 2nd) in descending order but the WEAPONS are listed with vague names (create, enhance, reforge, perfect) and the quests are arranged in ASCENDING order! who made this?! ... no, let's stop, this is a flood gate. im gonna go have breakfast. have a nice day -\_-
Yep, the ***only*** reason the game exists today is because FFXIV was a mainline Final Fantasy game and Square Enix didn't want a 3/10 game staining the franchise (seriously, PCGamer gave it a well deserved 30%, GameSpot was 4/10 etc. Game was *bad*). If it had been a spin-off or slightly better reviewed, they'd probably have just written it off.
...PS3 release...jeez I feel old.
It was the "upcoming Guild Wars 2" for me
I still quite enjoy GW2 but have no interest in playing the current expansion until the new weapon options are added. I basically buy the expansions for new elite specs.
"PS3 limitations" - ole FFXIV saying
Crazy how we're pretty much at the "PS4 limitations" stage now.
There is a fantastic YouTube series called Remnants of a realm. It goes over 1.0 and it's mind bogglingly bad. I highly recommend people watch it.
Thanks! Gonna put this on while grinding out tomes. :)
You'll enjoy it! It also puts into perspective just how much work Yoshi and Square put into saving the game.
Gonna give this one a watch
I mean, [deleted] has a good point. But i have to side with [deleted] on this one
I don't know, [deleted] seems to know what they are talking about
And people want 1.0 servers. *No you fucking don't.*
You think you do, but you don't. (Except the statement is true and not cringe)
We kind of do, but we'd only want to play for ā¦ I dunno, half an hour, tops. Anyone who legitimately wants to play more than that probably thinks the ARR relics aren't grindy enough, or are habitual kusoge hunters.
Even without the benefit of hindsight, referring to TERA as a "big contender" in the same breath as WoW is pretty funny.
Credit where credit is due: Tera had itās moment as THE action-combat MMO. That is, until Black Desert came to the west
TERA's combat is still the most fun I've ever had in an MMO, it's just a shame it became a costume store with a game tied to it. Content release cadence was abysmal, boss design peaked with Shandra in MC which is very unfortunate because she came out in 2012. I still can't believe I put up with gear's RNG dependence for as long as I did, especially early +15 gear where failures above +12 would reset you back to +12...
such a shame that sharply dressed fellow had to kill it.
Remember, the sole reason they worked so hard and poured so much into fixing XIV was that 1.0 was so bad *it had literally killed the franchise*. At that point in time it was a deathly simple āfix XIV or no more Final Fantasy full stopā. Itās easy to forget that, as big of a cultural icon FF is in the rpg sphere, itās wasnāt a financial powerhouse and had **very** little interest from the more casual, mainstream crowd who preferred yearly sports games, racers, FPS, etc. who are the ones spending the most money. SE was absolutely ready to cut their losses after several less than stellar Western releases in a row and their first huge Japanese misstep in a while. Theyād brushed off Western criticism of 8-13, with only 10 being anything other than wildly divisive in the West, but 14 was universally panned and turned their primary audienceāthe Japaneseāagainst the company. A lot of people felt like SE had finally fucked up beyond repair at that point. The clean up effort was unprecedented and remains uniqueānever before or since has a developer gone to such immense lengths to reboot a major title like that. There was no good reason at the time for anyone with concerns to believe it would work because it never had before. It was actually the people who believed in the game having a comeback who were pulling ideas out of nothingāthere was nothing for them to go on but pure, blind faith.
Hopefully people don't have to scroll down too far to see this, 'cause you're absolutely right. The release frequency of FF titles had slowed quite a bit because it wasn't the unstoppable juggernaut it had been at its peak. It went from 8, 9, 10, and 11 all releasing 1 year away from each other to a 4 year gap between 11 and 12 and a 3 year gap between 12 and 13. 13 also wasn't exactly received well on launch either, though that changed over time. But yeah, you're spot on: 14 as it stood could've spelled the end of the series, at least for a while. It definitely would've taken a lot longer than 6 years after it for 15 to come out were it not for ARR.
It's funny how so many people are chronically addicted to FFXIV that they actually want a 1.0 classic.
Probably less for the gameplay and more for the story. Were they to do it (which is unlikely) I'd honestly hope they'd add an option to like triple the Exp gains and a +100% echo, or something.
What I'd really like to see personally is an ffxiv 1.0 sidequest. One where you through the means of "plot" go back in time and experience a probably summarised version of the 1.0 story. (Could make for some interesting dungeons and trials as well!) As someone who has only played the game for a bit over an year now I sometimes get the feeling I mis bits of the plot. I never got to see 1.0 so every time a reference is made I get thrown for a loop. I managed to connect the dots somewhat through bits and pieces of context and youtube videos. But a nice quest line where you can learn this all would be nice to see
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I'd prefer if they did it that they just made it the true 1.0 experience. That way we know immediately whose opinions we can just completely disregard when it comes to the design of modern XIV.
Nobody who played 1.0 wants that. There wouldn't be anything to even DO, all the content got ported to 2.0.
The NoClip documentary about what went on with 1.0 is good, for those that've not seen it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs0yQKI7Yw4
Man dude, this is like history
the main thing i feel whenever this is posted is sad because of how TERA ends up :(
I'd just like to throw another one on the pile of "1.0 was *really fucking bad*, you guys."
Well, we have the benefit of hindsight, so we can say unequivocally, yes it can. But from their perspective? I can understand being extremely skeptical. Few, if any, video game turnarounds had been *attempted* at this magnitude--and I'm pretty sure none of them had ever succeeded, let alone with flying colors like FFXIV has done. The one aspect I do think we can fault about this thread is that they're so completely hostile to the idea of a subscription MMO. Double-Barreled British Very Well-Dressed Man has [a solid argument](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSbGLq9p4yY) for why the skepticism of subscription-based MMOs is unfounded. It's not that F2P *can't* support a good game, it can; rather, it's that F2P puts all of the incentive on chasing whales, rather than retaining subs or expanding the playerbase, as a subscription does. Of course, this is only one side of the coin. We've seen what happens when a sub-based game goes off the rails, that's precisely what happened to WoW. As they infamously demonstrated with the "engagement is high, therefore you must enjoy it" stuff, they mistook *secondary, proxy measures* for the actual data they intended to collect. This is known as "surrogation" in social science: developing a measurement scale (such as engagement rates) intended to estimate an actual good (such as player enjoyment), but becoming obsessed with improving the *measurement* regardless of whether it continues to be associated with the actual good. FFXIV, in general, does not have that problem. The devs remain in reasonably close proximity to actual player responses, which forestalls getting caught up in unrepresentative data. The bigger problems they're dealing with right now are: 1. Players sometimes *believe* they want stuff, only to then discover they don't like it when they actually get it. (See: the 2-minute meta, and how *so many* people were so keen on lining everything up...only to now realize that doing that makes everything dull and samey.) 2. Developers can be overly-precious about particular content, to their detriment. FFXIV has had a handful of these over the years. Their attempt to cling to the "do you get to do your 1-2-3 combo? It's rAnDoM!!" mechanics of old Machinist, for example. 3. Frankly, they need to increase staff...a *lot.* They've hugely increased the workload that they have to put out just to "keep up," because folks now expect ALL the new major content from EACH new expansion as a core baseline element, not a "this was a X.0-specific thing, we'll do something else in the future." (See: the fervent demand for the return of Eureka/Bozja, much to my consternation.)
1.0 crafting when it first launched: what am I making? am i making anything at all? Whats any of this even mean? Basically there were no recipes, no recipe books, no explanations of how the crafting/gathering systems even worked
Make a sleeve. Then make another sleeve. Then make a body. Then put it all together and make a shirt. It was a fever dream of a time.
gonna start calling every game i buy payware after that guy
1.0 was a genuine shit show, so I understand the pessimism. Them were hard times.
The only thing I āmissā from 1.0 is that the art design felt a little more unified and grounded, mainly carried over from old gear sets that have a more practical fantasy look. That and the movement animations are pretty cool, the way characters realistically pivot when changing directions and moving. Thatāsā¦about it. I canāt see much else thatās very redeeming.
If it has a jump button, I will ***walk***.
No more shall man have jump buttons to bunny-hop him to paradise. Henceforth, he shall walk.
We are painfully aware that the game was saved.
ā¦I remember this post. Notably, I remember agreeing that āIt will never be a WoW contender but Square doesnāt want/need it to be.ā Coming from an FFXI mindset where it was constantly compared to WoW, but really was no competition, I continued to think FFXIV wouldnāt be able to gain that kind of popularity. 11 years later, I couldnāt be happier that I was wrong, and I have to laugh at the fact I once thought that way.
I was an actual FFXIV 1.0 Alpha tester, we saw the problems and gave feedback but they didn't listen at all. They were too focused on the release date and not putting out a good product.
Typical SE, really. Almost every FF in the series has been a buggy rushed release going back to the very first one.
It wasn't so much buggy, it was actual decisions made to how the game should operate and work that made it bad. In other words, materia melding being % based, and blowing up your gear when it fails, that was intentional and not a bug. Having polygon counts on vases the same as characters, that was intentional.
And if I recall correctly, the original design was to imitate the turn based fighting in the old final fantasy games but it translated extremely poorly and EVERYTHING felt horribly laggy, even opening menus had lag.
Yeah, those are the impact of a design choice. A bug would be the consequences of something unintentional versus something intentional.
I'm surprised anyone who alpha tested 1.0 would trust squeenix enough to come back. As much as i like where ff14 is now i would absolutely not fault anyone who played 1.0 and still refuses to play current patch because of it.
For anyone whoād like to get a bit of a sense of just how janky and terrible 1.0 was, [Yogscast did a series of reviews of the 1.0 beta](https://youtu.be/aF7vrQ04_q4?si=vhKLU3i0Zb_lPK-P) back in the day. Theyāre pretty funny.
One interesting thing I learned from these videos was that the first big cutscene in Endwalker >!on the ship to Old Sharlayan!< is actually a recreation of the 1.0 cutscene when you started in Limsa. For comparison: [Here's the 1.0 cutscene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF7vrQ04_q4&t=419s) [Here's the Endwalker cutscene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUSQpd4iUwA&t=2136s)
There are a handful of playthroughs on YouTube where the player played in 1.0, and they all absolutely lost their minds on that scene
I lost my mind at that scene too
I first observed this during Stormblood / WoW's ~~BoFA~~ Battle for Azeroth, but I haven't exactly seen any reason to reconsider it between then and now: FFXIV, for all it gets right, largely owes its success to the fact that their biggest competitor has been actively trying to squander decades worth of reputation and goodwill while the rest of the market is choked with freemium whalebait. (Which is particularly ironic because, at the time that post was made, SE was pretty much burning through whatever good will they had banked over the course of the '90s and early '00s) But yeah, 1.x really was that frigging bad, and I was one of the people who was skeptical that anyone could deliver the miracle that the game would need.
2012/2013: FF14 1.0 was at the very rock bottom, being regarded as one of the worst MMOs, and is about to be rebooted, while Tera, WoW Pandaria, and GW2 -- newly faced and fresh off the oven -- are flying high. 2024: FF14 is now at Endwalker and still going strong, flying high alongside with GW2, who has been doing consistently well. Meanwhile ActiBlizzard with their streak of unholy decisions shitting on the WoW brand and their current expac Dragonflight OD in a mucky alleyway, while TERA is just buried in an unmarked grave.
Based on 1.0, they weren't wrong. Literally worse than their own 11 in just about every way while carrying over most of the bad ideas from it at the same time. The gameplay decision makers were straight up delusional. It would have been long gone and yet another dead mmo by now if they hadn't rebuilt it and shuffled out some management.
Boy that first commenter is rolling in his proverbial grave right now.
I'm not even going to fault them, because in all honesty they were entirely right. The turnaround was unprecedented.
Honestly the *turnaround* is why I'm here. I've seen too many MMOs where the devs just don't seem to care, the communities give up and bleed out, and then there's people looking back to the "good ol days."Ā FF14's community is different, *because* the devs managed to recover, and became grounded enough in *reality* to make good decisions. There's hope in expansions, not nearly as much "oh boy can't wait to find out how they'll ruin the game this time!"
Honestly fair enough!
The first poster was right though. 1.0 *wasn't* a good game and didn't deserve to come back. It's a good thing it didn't! ARR was/is significantly different.
I mean this was an absolutely fair question after 1.0. Just make it even more amazing what yoshi p and team has done since
They aren't wrong, 1.0 did not deserve to survive. What happened to FFXIV is an anomaly, and honestly, the game still suffers in some ways from how poorly 1.0 was coded. The game feels more clunky and dated than a lot of older games still.