The list of planned updates has expanded again, too, and it's starting to help paint a more coherent picture of where the game is going as a whole. Storylines and world quests are en route, more class-based gear is coming into the game, there are instanced dungeons on deck for the higher-level bands... they're big changes. And while we don't know the implementation of several attributes just yet, it looks like Final Fantasy XIV is moving away from the highly sandbox-based core of its launch playstyle. If anything, it's looking a lot like another game altogether.
I can't be the only person who looked at the new changes and saw several familiar elements. Quests with NPCs that have a familiar marker? A choice between several rewards following a quest? Instanced dungeons? World of Warcraft is hardly the only game with this stuff, but it's also hard to look at that planned list of changes without reading between the lines on several features.
And you know what? I'm all for it. If Yoshi-P's plan is to bring the game into Final World of Fantasycraft Online XIV, I'll be completely on board. Because while it's a big shift, it's essentially what Final Fantasy XI turned out to be.
No, Final Fantasy XI doesn't owe a debt to World of Warcraft, but it owes a very clear debt to EverQuest. Several aspects of the game are almost wholesale pastes from EverQuest, something I found out from a combination of research and EQ-playing friends. (I skipped out on EQ, see.) The party structure and leveling game are almost identical, for instance, with the exception of the job system, which allows more lateral mobility since you aren't locked into a single class.
This isn't a bad thing. It's traditionally been one of the strengths of Square-Enix as a company -- it takes a formula, revises it, and adds a satisfying twist onto the play. Final Fantasy wasn't terribly innovative for its time, and in a lot of ways it was more restrictive than its contemporaries, but it worked because it was an excellent refinement of the then-nascent console RPG conventions. A house of innovation is nice, but a house of refining good ideas and making them work better is also pretty satisfying.There's no room to debate that Square can make an excellent old-school sandbox MMO, and that entry was FFXI. That game hit exactly the notes it was going for, and if you need an example of everything that used to be considered a high priority for MMO design, you could do worse than playing through the game. Final Fantasy XIV seemed poised to be the same riff on more modern sensibilities, a take on the newer elements of the genre in the intervening eight years.
Putting more WoW into Final Fantasy XIV isn't everyone's idea of a good time, but it does seem to be the direction that things are moving at the moment. It's what many people expected from the game in the first place, for that matter. The game can only benefit from the addition of more goals, more reasons for players to move forward rather than simply be in a virtual world -- as it stands, there's not a whole lot to work toward.
Of course, it does raise some questions about what the battle system will look like after the changes are made, something that's clearly on the minds of the developers, considering the new player's poll. And while I like the current battle system, it does have some issues, ones that would really get skewed to all heck with the implementation of a straight auto-attack feature. Still, the current system does have problems that could benefit from another pass, including the lack of meaningful interplay between the various class abilities. We've got an awful lot of weaponskills without many good indicators of why one should be chosen over the other, save that Gladiator skills do more damage when a Gladiator uses them and each skill offers different debuffs.
Some of the flavor, though, is going to go away. I say this with a reasonable amount of certainty, because the current combat system isn't designed to work with an auto-attack in place. Even a Star Trek Online-style auto-fire for a given attack wouldn't work, since cooldown timers on basic attacks are nigh-invisible anyhow. Most likely we'll be going to a base "attack" command, seeing some weapon skills replaced with more general-purpose abilities, and generally moving toward a model closer to both FFXI and WoW in execution instead of the current plethora of attacks. We might also see a larger number of abilities locked to a given class, along the lines of the Lancer's Speed Surge.Yes, I'm a bit sad about this. But I've seen enough of what's being done so far that I'm still on board. While I've been liking the current stamina system, an overhaul to combat is a good thing in the long run, and Yoshida has proved thus far that he knows what he's doing. I feel some confidence that he can take the more WoW-related elements that are promised and put the Final Fantasy spin on them.
Plus, we're not nearly as likely to devolve into a morass of pop culture references and villains with daddy issues. So that's better.
As always, feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments or via mail to eliot@massively.com. Next week, I've got to admit that for the first time in a long while, I'm really not sure what I'll be covering. There are an awful lot of possibilities.
From Eorzea to Vana'diel, there is a constant: the moogles. And for analysis and opinions about the online portions of the Final Fantasy series, there is also a constant: The Mog Log. Longtime series fan Eliot Lefebvre serves up a new installment of the log every Saturday, covering almost anything related to Square-Enix's vibrant online worlds.
