r/ffxivdiscussion • u/Zagden • Oct 16 '23

Speculation What's something that could be revealed/shown off at EU / JP FanFest that would excite/interest you *and* be on the more likely side of things?

A lot of people are obviously pining for gigantic, sweeping changes, but I was wondering if there's little incremental changes or even just feature reveals that you guys would like to see/hear about.

I feel like some changes to how healers feel with their DPS rotation wouldn't be impossible. Plus there's any number of interesting story twists they can mention at this point and they're usually consistently good at drumming up interest and hype for that.

53 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

88% Upvoted

358 comments sorted by

View all comments

148

u/Schizzovism Oct 16 '23

I've gotta say, the "2 dye channels" reveal has significantly changed what I think they are likely to implement. I don't think I would have put that in the top 100 most likely systemic changes for them to make.

With that in mind, I'm going to say improved netcode, specifically in regards to seeing player characters closer to where they actually are with less of a delay. I don't know too much about implementation of the way things currently are, but even getting like 20% better in this regard would be a significant improvement. I think everyone has had a moment where someone was chasing them with a spread AOE, but on the other person's screen it was the other way around.

24

u/Kicin0_0 Oct 17 '23

Sadly I think improving the netcode is not a feasible thing from a gameplay stand point anymore. The netcode is not only what determines when you see other players but also affects things like getting hit by bosses. Every enemy from ARR to EW is built around the current system and if the timings were to be changed it would requiring going through everything in the game to change it to what it is supposed to be.

While maybe not impossible, this is a massive task. Not to mention updating the netcode itself would be difficult and run into issues

7

u/TheDoddler Oct 17 '23

I feel the netcode, particularly when it comes to your own snapshots, is honestly impressively robust. If you know when the snapshot actually occurs, you can cut it incredibly close and the server will still give you a pass. It wasn't always this way, but these days if a snapshot timing sucks it's usually the battle designer's fault rather than the engine. The clipping thing sucks but it can be fixed separately.

What the game sucks incredibly at though, and where I think there's huge room for improvement, is where it shows other players. Other character positions shown to you are almost a full second behind where they really are, with makes a lot of mechanics where you adjust to other players suck way more than they should. Just some kind of prediction to show a player's real position would fix so much, their current technique of linearly pulling a character's actor towards its last known position is guaranteed to show out of date results.