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The Mog Log: FFXIV lessons from Final Fantasy XI
Final Fantasy XIV is in the final push to launch now, with phase 4 right around the corner and early access shortly after that. This is good news for me, since it means I can get back to actually playing the game that I write about every week after nearly a year. And, you know, the game is pretty awesome, so that's a bright point as well. It also means that the future isn't what it used to be. The relaunch has been The Future for a very long time, but now the relaunch is The Almost Right This Second, and The Future consists of patches and expansions and new classes and the like. All good things, all welcome, and all things that could take a few lessons from Final Fantasy XI. I've said before that Final Fantasy XIV was designed to fix some problems from Final Fantasy XI that it never was going to have, but that's not what I'm talking about. Instead of talking about preventing players from leveling consistently or hunting the possibility of RMT with McCarthy-level vigilance, let's look at some simple lessons to internalize in the future.
The Mog Log: Parties and roles in Final Fantasy XIV
Final Fantasy XIV's party setup already makes a bold step away from normal conventions. Where most games these days top out with parties of four or five players, a full party in Eorzea is eight people with according benefits. It's definitely a game of numbers. This offers some unique drawbacks and advantages all at once. The drawbacks are implied just by the sheer size: It's harder to get three strangers to work with you as part of a team; it's harder still to gather up seven without one person dragging you down through a combination of cluelessness and hapless malice. But considering the pre-relaunch game offered a lot of content that could be done solo or in ad hoc groups of varying sides, perhaps this won't be such an issue in the long run. So let's talk about the potential advantages. I think the game is uniquely poised to deliver on this front simply because having more people in the party allows you to do things that more modern games don't have the space for -- things that Final Fantasy XI was quite good at doing in party composition, as it happens.
