Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Suggested Changes based on Alpha 2 Weekend 1
Trickk
Member, Alpha Two
Suggested Changes:
As a healer who prefers to play in action combat, I believe that its needed for your current party member target to reflect in the group list. This is suggested due to the current player selected is hard to notice while in combat with more than one enemy and when you have a full party of 8 people running around.
Examples below:
First this is how the party screen looks when a character is selected in Ashes:
This is how it looks in FF14 when you have a party member selected:
Currently the only option I have seen is the Hud element that shows which friendly creature you are targeting which is not helpful in scenarios where there are more people nearby than just your party members.
This leads me to my next point, which is there must be key bindings that only cycle through your party members, as currently it seems to cycle through each friendly creature nearby and is limited to those who are visually in front of you. Maybe I'm mistaken, and this is already an option, but I noticed that occasionally it targets onto players' horses nearby and doesn't consider the players you cannot currently see on the screen.
A change that I would love to see later, but it's not necessary currently, is the option to simplify the UI elements such as the party group hud, your player health hud / class resources, and really anything that has bars that go up and down. It would also be nice to not have the experience bar stuck at the very bottom of the screen.
I believe that your party member’s icons on the map should always be visible and should grow or shrink in size in proportion to how zoomed in or out the map is. This would make finding your party members on the map much easier and they would not get lost as easily.
Overall, I really enjoyed playing Alpha Two and the action combat felt much better than I originally thought it would. I am extremely excited to continue playing and helping the development team narrow in on bugs and issues as time goes along. All of my suggestions are from someone who has played for over 1k hours in Final Fantasy 14 as mainly a healer / support character that was decent at it. Hopefully, this helps some and gives some ideas on which areas need some assistance.
As a healer who prefers to play in action combat, I believe that its needed for your current party member target to reflect in the group list. This is suggested due to the current player selected is hard to notice while in combat with more than one enemy and when you have a full party of 8 people running around.
Examples below:
First this is how the party screen looks when a character is selected in Ashes:
This is how it looks in FF14 when you have a party member selected:
Currently the only option I have seen is the Hud element that shows which friendly creature you are targeting which is not helpful in scenarios where there are more people nearby than just your party members.
This leads me to my next point, which is there must be key bindings that only cycle through your party members, as currently it seems to cycle through each friendly creature nearby and is limited to those who are visually in front of you. Maybe I'm mistaken, and this is already an option, but I noticed that occasionally it targets onto players' horses nearby and doesn't consider the players you cannot currently see on the screen.
A change that I would love to see later, but it's not necessary currently, is the option to simplify the UI elements such as the party group hud, your player health hud / class resources, and really anything that has bars that go up and down. It would also be nice to not have the experience bar stuck at the very bottom of the screen.
I believe that your party member’s icons on the map should always be visible and should grow or shrink in size in proportion to how zoomed in or out the map is. This would make finding your party members on the map much easier and they would not get lost as easily.
Overall, I really enjoyed playing Alpha Two and the action combat felt much better than I originally thought it would. I am extremely excited to continue playing and helping the development team narrow in on bugs and issues as time goes along. All of my suggestions are from someone who has played for over 1k hours in Final Fantasy 14 as mainly a healer / support character that was decent at it. Hopefully, this helps some and gives some ideas on which areas need some assistance.
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