See Final Fantasy XIV’s Upcoming Auto-Attack in Action

 

It’s been a while since I covered Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve been reading up on the news for it, but there was nothing particularly of note until just recently.

A few hours ago, Naoki Yoshida posted a new Letter from the Director on the Lodestone website and this letter was a rather substantial one for one reason. He added a two-minute video showing of the auto attack function that’ll be making it patch 1.18 of the game. While it’s not 100% perfect as of yet, citing the need “to make major revisions to enmity algorithms, tweak the motion of certain actions (as seen in the above video), and also rebalance a handful of them,” among other things, the news is quite exciting, to be sure.

In any event, you can expect the following changes in the lineup for the future of Final Fantasy XIV:

  • Auto-attack functionality will be prioritized in 1.18.
  • Attack motion diversification and fine-tuning are planned for 1.19.
  • Battle classes only will receive auto-attack.
  • The stamina gauge will be abolished with the introduction of auto-attack.
  • Recast timers will be adjusted for certain actions obtained via quests and guild marks whose action costs were managed solely through the stamina gauge.
  • Certain actions dependent on the stamina gauge will have their effects adjusted.
  • Characters will be made able to switch between passive and active modes while moving.
  • Multiple attacks during auto-attack is also being planned for the future.

Sadly, the testing means that the changes will not take effect as soon as originally planned, and Yoshida estimates “two more weeks beyond the anticipated mid/late-June release date” before the changes to the battle system can be released. I guess July should be an interesting month, then, don’t you think?

Welcome to the New Games and Geekery!

If you’ve reached this site through a post or, by some godly providence Google is linking these posts now, then congratulations! You’re now on the new home of Games and Geekery.

Now, before any celebration can really commence, it must be noted that there’s still a process of ongoing fixing that I have to do to get Games and Geekery formally ready. This includes writing new About and Contact Pages, recreating the blogroll, and seeing what I can do to make Games and Geekery essentially better.

To that end, I do not want to go through using this site alone, so I asked a friend of mine here in the Philippines who loves toys and tabletop gaming to help out and post when he likes. We’re still ironing out details, but he seems to like the idea of a place to write, since he used to write with me on the old gaming news blog I worked for from 2006 to 2008.

As for plans, well, I’m hoping to round out Games and Geekery with folks who want to discuss console games a bit better, or who have other general interests that fall into the geeky line of thought. While I set up a form for that purpose (boy, that’s a lot of different extra pages), feel free to email me a [email protected] for information, if you’re looking for a place to write.

The (Not-So) Final Post on Stillwater’s Blog of Games and Geekery

Sometimes, you know that even a good thing like a humble little blog has to end. It’s been 460 posts since I started this blog, and I’m proud to have done so many things and started discussions on particular topics of interest to me and other folks.

That said, it’s time to move on to better things, and it’s time to say farewell to the blog that was once known as Victor Stillwater’s Blog of Games and Geekery.

Beginning today, until the time that I can’t find anything else to write about and I’ve lost all my friends in the blogosphere and twitterverse, you will have to find Victor Stillwater on a different part of the web, and that’s on https://www.gamesandgeekery.com, otherwise known more succinctly as just plain Games and Geekery.

I’m not leaving the things I love so easily, and I thought that, by buying my own domain, part of a long-standing dream I’ve had, I could grow as a person and take care of and be responsible for something that is wholly and completely my own.

With the help of Arkenor, Geek Goddess, and Stargrace, I’ve been able to work on the beginnings of a new site, though I’ve yet to find time to completely change everything accordingly to fit the needs of a new site. Call this a soft opening or a weird beginning; either way, I’m staying put, and writing what I can, and I hope you can add my new site as Games and Geekery on your individual pages.

As for what’s up next? Give me another hour or so, and I should have some new content up on the new site that might interest you folks. Cheers!

Perspectives on Perfect World’s Cryptic Acquisition (Or It’s Alright to be Wrong, Part Two)

Most everyone in the MMO gaming and blogging community has probably heard of the acquisition of Cryptic studios by Perfect World. It was nice to know, thanks to Mr. Jennings of Broken Toys, that Cryptic was bought by Perfect World for almost double the base price that Atari paid for the company.

In reference to my previous post about my blogging habits and about how it’s okay to be wrong, assume we have at least two different viewpoints. On the one hand, we can have a viewpoint where the acquisition can be seen as a “complete mess”, made potentially worse by the fact that a predominantly F2P MMO developer bought the game company(inaccurate wording, but give me a break) for double the price. On the other hand, we have the the generally positive, cautiously optimistic viewpoint that this can be good in the short term for both companies (from a PR and development standpoint), but cannot be accurately predicted in the long-term.

I have no qualms with either viewpoint, and will generally leave my personal bias out of this discussion. Both sides have some good points and bad points, and though the research on the cautiously optimistic viewpoint is more pronounced, acknowledging the possibility of catastrophic failure on the part of Cryptic is something that should be considered and thought, since acknowledging a potential unsavory future for the company and the history of gaming leads us to try and steer clear of it.

With the naysayers in this case, I think the issue of relevance may be a factor in how their perception has come to see this situation. Some of them may have come from an earlier point in time in STO’s lifecycle, and thus have not experienced changes made to the game. Worse still, there’s no pertinent information in the above linked blog post to conclude that Cryptic games will “nosedive” after this acquisition.

As for the cautiously optimistic… well, for lack of a better way of putting it, you can’t be full-blown optimistic about this one, so a measured dose of skepticism may be needed given Cryptic’s track record. So long as people support Cryptic in the future though, and Perfect World can infuse the game with renewed vigor that adds onto the changes Cryptic has made to its games, then it should be good.

As for me, the best part of this is the possibility that curious members of the gaming community will try other Perfect World games, realize it isn’t as bad as it seems, and partake of Perfect World’s offerings outside of Cryptic games and the Torchlight MMO.

Better still, Perfect World now has two companies that have a deep knowledge of how to offer player-created content to the public. If Cryptic and Runic Games can be convinced to share resources and information with Perfect World, it would be an amazing bit of gaming to realize a F2P fantasy MMO with player-created content set in a completely original world. F2P MMOs would no longer be constrained by the stigma of grinding, but instead be connected to player-made content, and that would be awesome.

That said, I have to once again look up at the infinite vastness of space, consider the immeasurable number of possibilities, and say to myself, “Gee, I don’t know. I could be wrong.”

Of course, Being wrong never stopped a man from hoping though. 🙂