If it weren't already wholly obvious, I'm pretty excited. The game is shaping up to be amazing by every standard I care to use, and the fact that it's this close to release is unexpectedly wonderful news. But while I would have happily discussed some of the release details last week, there were other events that needed attention first. Now that I can sit back down and take a closer look, however, there were a couple parts that really stood out to me. I mean, even beyond the squealing joy of its oncoming release.
The retainer is a part of many things
Having your mule in Final Fantasy XI is all but required if you want to play the game seriously, and absolutely required for crafting. Finding a way to sell all of your crafted goods is often a burden, especially since the game has sharply divided goods that are profitable and those which make you lose enormous amounts of cash. Between storage space and setting up a bazaar, there's always been a sense that the development team wanted to make crafting a viable method to playing the game but never quite hit the right formula.
Final Fantasy XIV's devotion to the art clearly goes beyond simply allowing you to craft and level in the same motion. The fact that you will, in effect, have a mule that automatically does the selling for you whilst offline is somewhere between an update to the status quo and a deranged version of The Sims 3, but in a good way. (All of you who immediately piped up with "actually, that's more like The Sims 2: Open for Business" are excused. You get a gold star for the day.) It also helps serve to push the game's economy in a player-driven direction.Because of this, I fully expect there will be people who craft nothing and focus on killing things and buying what they can... and it will be feasible to level up without needing to do anything but craft, with a spot of harvesting here and there. Retainers will cause a big shift in the way players approach crafting, selling, and auctioning goods -- we don't even have an auction house to worry about, at that. I can hope that they'll offer some sort of search feature, but that's for the future.
I can also hope in the future that you can call your retainers to come running out for you in the middle of monster-infested areas, both for the convenience of offloading crafted and harvested goods and the comedy value. How could you not love the chance to call your own Mr. Smithers to walk across fire for you for frivolous purposes?
Retainers are big. And the option to have more than one of them suggests that there will be a distinct benefit to having a couple extra staff members when your business gets big.
Armor seems to be effect-based rather than stat-based
One of the slow shifts we've seen in the Final Fantasy series as a whole is a gradual change from statistics on armor to general effects. Final Fantasy XIII does away with armor almost entirely -- all you have are accessories, which sometimes function similarly to armor but often have totally different angles. Looking at the pre-order items, it seems possible that FFXIV will be using a similar general model.
This has a huge number of benefits over the usual stat-based armor progression, as seen in that game everyone played until it gave away your address. For starters, there's the fact that the next tier of armor doesn't have to be any more powerful to be useful, just useful in a different way. A 50% resistance to poison is going to be super-helpful against a boss with nothing but poison abilities and useless against Fire-Spewer Blazegun. (His poison abilities ignore resistance.) It also means that armor pieces are composed not simply of the mathematically best pieces, but the parts that best augment your character's specific abilities.Perhaps most notably, it avoids any sort of stat inflation, or at least slows it significantly. FFXI wasn't as bad as it could have been in this department, but it created the opposite problem: since there were so few pieces of equipment that raised Accuracy, for example, anything that did became a treasured item for any class that liked hitting its target. That led to ruinous prices on the pieces of gear that players could nab to be more reliably accurate, and it meant wearing those stupid mittens for-freaking-ever if you played a Dragoon.
Not that I'm bitter.
Moving along, the pre-order pieces that we've seen thrown around are both items with a passive effect and no other stats. That might just be because they're meant as little starter bonuses, but it's hard not to notice that we haven't heard much about stats on any equipment anywhere. While I might be getting a bit too hopeful, I certainly would like to dream that we'll be in a land populated with gear that just gives non-numerical bonuses. And perhaps ponies.
Square has learned a lot
I think I come off with some frequency as critical of Square's corporate culture and its attitude toward the players. This would largely be because I am quite critical of these things, which I don't think foster a very positive rapport with the audience. And so I can understand why some people have been nervous about what FFXIV would play like, if it really would just be FFXI with better graphics.
Oddly, even those these two aspects of gameplay are minor things, they're deeply heartening. Even though they might be nothing large, they show that the game isn't sticking by tried and true methodology. It's going to be a different ball game in the new world, and I for one welcome it.
I will welcome it in like two months, that is. Holy wow. Do want. (Feel free to call me a fanboy in the comments, or fire off a mail to eliot@massively.com.)
