FFXIV: Chat Bubbles / WhiteBoard System & More! - Pax West 2024 UI Design Panel

hello and welcome back to another news video for Final Fantasy 14 this time looking at the PA West panel for 2024 which is putting the U in UI tailoring the Final Fantasy 14 experience this was broadcast on Twitch and YouTube and was also for the attendees there at P it featured foxclon K odiri and of course the Fantastic translation from Aman uh K odiri if you don't know who they are have been around since 2012 as a UI designer for Final Fantasy 14 currently the lead UI designer that's their title and they've spent 12 years on the project from the beta test of A Realm Reborn up until dawn tril currently so that's a long time responsibilities for kiri's job include quite a lot of things that I'm surprised at this includes movement and camera systems targeting systems for both basic and ground targeting system config character config your keybinds game pad calibration button config configuration the element specific and Universal UI scaling system uh the ability to disable UI features uh text commands the auto transation dictionary configuration backups so you can you know move between PCS uh in terms of game mechanics uh on the control side the active time Maneuvers are responsibilities of this job snipe mode um gold sourer Air a Force 1 the PVP spectator mode and then we've got in-game features such as the way marks the signs performance actions control system performance assistance and assemble mode group pose is his baby idling camera Duty recorder Adventurer plates and portraits then there's the accessibility options of color filtering visual alerts and mouse sonar and miscellaneous ones including the launcher login features the implementation of Playstation Xbox control features uh console features trophies and achievements Etc and the embedding dual sense support for the windows version Etc so that is a lot of things that I'm surprised are included under that one job title and I think most of you probably watching this will be like really all of that under the lead UI designer turns out that is exactly what is on his shoulders in terms of looking at those then individually I'm most surprised by the in-game features as well as just the UI systems like the performance actions for Bard stuff like that as well as you know responsibilities for accessibility options as well as the login launcher it's mind-blowing isn't it absolutely mindblowing so obviously when it comes to the movement and camera system as they talked about in further detail here uh this includes autorun autof follow lock on uh the ability to ride plion on a two-person Mount uh swimming and diving controls the flying Mount system Legacy movement as well as the camera system as well as standard movement uh which is really interesting they actually have a bit of a a couple of slides here for a system a UI system reborn for 2.0 where they talk about the development and how they wanted to focus more on both keyboard and mouse as well as Gamepad and this was back in 2011 look look at that original slide there that they had uh and obviously they wanted to implement a total overhaul in terms of design as they say functionality and customization of all of the UI Windows this included complete support for mouse and keyboard input with an intuitive drag and drop multi- window system along with the realization of a dedicated Gamepad interface and of course I think they managed to do that they learn a lot from obviously Final Fantasy 11 uh they said offering uh parity of experience for both mouse and keyboard and Gamepad that is something that they obviously worked on for 11 and they would obviously bring forward they also thought a lot about how World of Warcraft does this and at the time World of Warcraft didn't have any gam pad support I mean you can do it through add-ons right now I I think I I'm not sure if they have native support but they wanted more accessibility for their MMO than others that were currently on the market it sort of set that Trend so obviously they wanted to create a world- class MMO title enticing the core demographic of MMO players and encouraging them to play that was uh to stay rather and play that was their mandate um in terms of building an iterating on a robust mouse and keyboard input system which is the thing they wanted to talk about um they've been working very hard to look at other examples of games on the Market implement features look at feedback feedback has been one of the most important things they talked about quite heavily on how they listen to to player feedback of what people want what people would prefer for systems to be uh you know quality of life features and there's been a lot of iterations over the last 11 years and they say that they're focusing on um you know giving all their all their hard work towards this they did a little bit of a statistic here in terms of if the majority of players per region used key uh you know your keyboard and mouse or a Gamepad and you'll see here that North America has 60% of keyboard and mouse Europe has 67% and it's completely the opposite for Japan the majority of people have 77% of Gamepad now the reason for this in my opinion is because uh personal computers have always been less um socially accessible at home for a lot of Japanese people at least from what I've seen in documentaries just simply because of the space and it taking up more of that whereas a games console has always been typically something that you'll see in a Japanese home as opposed to you know in Europe or North America much more so it's much more common to have a games console because it's something you can hide away you can put the controllers away that sort of thing so it kind of reflects that the big difference between Europe and North America there's not much of a difference but it's surprising to me that there are more North American players statistically here that use Gamepad but there's nothing wrong with Gamepad I've seen some incredible stuff cleared on Gamepad it's just very interesting to see that they would be alienating 40% of their North American audience if they hadn't have done Gamepad support and likewise in Europe and even worse so in Japan right that would be a huge portion of their Market that required game pad support it was something they expected which is really cool in terms of the two movement settings we've got Legacy and standard uh this is an interesting one they did a bit of a usage breakdown statistic in Japan 97% of players use Legacy controls I mean it is the best way to play in my opinion because obviously moving backwards and forwards with your actual character uh changing direction means you can run directly south with the S key as opposed to having to you know strafe walk it's still the best system in my opinion I love it but yeah as you can see Europe 65% and 69% nice in North America it's quite telling isn't it definitely if you've never tried legacy mode give it a go uh standard mode in my opinion is not really that useful and it can be difficult to adjust to I don't think I'd be able to do Savage roads in standard mode it would be a lot of strafe walking uh in terms of group pose then because that's another feature that K odiri has worked hard on is um the evolution of it right that we didn't have it at the start and they focused on trying to capture capture memories um that players could have with their friends along their Journeys right so they obviously wanted to uh field all of this they offered questions to Their audience and the forums of which you know the feedback came back it would be nice to have a feature where we could take pictures with our friends you know sort of document our history through AOS here and it says uh the early implementation the test implementation of group players was the feature placed copies of the players and party members characters on the field and had them execute emotes on Loop that was the test sort of bed for that and then when it came out that's basically what you got as you can see here I'm not sure why I mean they've got a beautiful IL mag in the background here but obviously it was before that um and as you can see we've got the patch numbers for all of the relative things so in 3.2 they had camera orientation can now be adjusted uh camera Focus can now be adjusted and facing the camera can now be toggled on and off and pets can now be included in group posts but as you can see every patch so 3.2 3 4 5 all the way up to 4.0 then 4.45 uh patch 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.0 and 6.3 all of those options have basically been uh 11 years in the making and obviously not 11 years to get to group pose but it's uh it's incredible as it and I've not seen all of the features added from the patch notes on one slide before and seeing it like this you start to realize the the extra effort that this on its own takes without considering all of the other elements of the job title of lead UI designer that kod deiri has to you know be responsible for uh one thing they're talking about then future support uh fishing this is something that is coming so in 7.1 we're going to be able to use uh group pose go pose for our fishes this should be in 7.1 they say um and yeah it's a highly requested feature currently if you're fishing and you want to take a picture of you reing in that big fish yeah you have to do it with a UI turned off um basically because the group post feature won't let you enter it there are a few like weird glitches to get into it but let's not talk about those um but yes it it's coming so that's really good that's a good feature that they announced here additionally portrait screenshots so taking your picture portrait uh if you wanted to use like a social media portrait or something of your character you know you'd have to probably take a landscape picture because it default takes them in landscape and then you'd have to crop them and mess around with them where apparently there is a feature in the works that will allow us to actually take uh portrait pictures profile pictures that kind of thing it says work continues to add the ability to pan horizontally and vertically after adjusting your roll angle so you'll be able to obviously adjust things better so the actual camera mode itself on the GamePad or on your mouse and keyboard you'd be able to instead of just doing a and d to slide it left and right you'd be able to do you know completely rotate it rotate the image and then pan uh which is very cool that's something I'm I'm looking forward to as well uh then of course we've got this this is probably the final but most exciting thing from the entirety of a pac's uh presentation this is a first look at the chat bubble feature this is something a lot of other content creators seem to be absolutely nuts for it's something I wasn't really necessarily you know against or for it was I'm kind of indifferent it it's cool if people want this and the Japanese audience certainly seem to want this from the forums that I've read um it could be quite fun it could be quite fun having these chat bubbles appear uh as long as obviously these have a toggle function to you being able to turn them off from certain people things like that but they're quite cool so as you can see here there's some players doing a bit of RP there's like thank you I must now take my leave see you again and then you've got hello I think the that is an MPC though in the green text and then you're responding to that so it shows up I suppose it's all about immersion World building for the RP Community this is a huge thing obviously it's going to make the world building feel a lot more real when you can actually not have to stare at the chat box down on the bottom left right oh actually no that is green text from a player FFXIV pvp1 so they're using a player so there must be a way of changing the text then text colors or something that's interesting I wonder if there is a toggle to change what color text you have obviously the party text is in blue because the party window is in blue so Pres ably the text would change depending on what you change the text to for that so I'm guessing that's say chat and then that's some other form of chat I don't know but anyway that's really exciting a lot of people will be definitely down for that it doesn't sort of you know interest me either way in terms of I don't hate it and I don't love it it's it's a cool idea and I would like to see it in the game definitely if it's something that expands and enriches is the RP experience which is a huge portion of our community now and that is not the only thing we've also got this this is actually your um your whiteboard editing system so this was shown a very very long time ago so what this is you might be looking at this and thinking this is a blue Mage mass carnival uh level or something this allows you to place icons as you can see there's a the blue uh lines and dots and resize them around job icons so you can drag those onto this and this is actually your standard Arena you can change I believe the type of Arena if it's square or Circle and you can place markers down and you can actually do um basically uh White it's a whiteboard editing so you can share this with other people so instead of having to Tab out of the game to actually go and watch like a slideshow of how you're supposed to do a mechanic perhaps your raid lead wants to help by looking at some strats online maybe Implement some uptime strats you can actually plan out the fight in the game on this whiteboard by moving these character pieces around and because you can set multiples of these it looks like up to 50 which may or may not be enough um you'd be able to switch between them so you could have this as the start point then switch to number 12 and then perhaps like oh it's tanks out and and healers in with DPS in mid or something you could do that you could do mechanics and then showcase this and yeah it would probably take up quite a few of these you'll notice that these uh are item placements I don't know if this why oh actually no these are all the actual pieces so you can add up to 50 elements per board it doesn't say how many boards you can have hopefully it's more than more than 50 because some fights are going to require but if you're if you're looking at certain phases and you want to illustrate this better to your teammates this is a really good feature without you having to you know leave the game um to actually look at something on a on a website or something that may or may not be everyone's cup of tea and it's also something especially useful for people who play on controller not everybody is is going to have access to a second monitor or to Tab out of the video game to a Chrome browser or whatever it might be so this is really cool very excited for this they showed this a long time ago but apparently this is in the works they don't say when it's going to come out out but honestly things are starting to look like 7.1 in my opinion so we'll have to wait and see butth that's pretty much the PS panel and I honestly think K odiri is definitely to be commended for his hard work I'm surprised how many things are included in his job title and I have even more respect than I already had for gentlemen and I uh I really think this is great but yeah highlights definitely are obviously you know the Whiteboard element that's going to change everything hopefully people use that it's such a good tool the chat bubbles are amazing uh for people who wanted that and of course we've got the portrait feature but yeah hopefully we get more panels like this cuz it was incredibly fun it was condensed and um yeah it was nice to nice to peer into the world of designers and uh what they get up to anyway let me know what you think about these elements are you excited about any of the upcoming parts are you as surprised as I am for basically all of the the job roles just for this uh lead UI designer I am let me know below and I'll see you all next time bye-bye [Music] [Applause] [Laughter]