FF14, WoW, and why UI Mods are great

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I’ve been playing Final Fantasy 14 recently, and I’ve found that one of the biggest adjustments in going from a lifetime of playing World of Warcraft to playing FF14, is the fact that the latter does not support UI mods. 

Mods were always a pretty big part of my WoW experience, and customising my UIs over and over again as a teen taught me a lot about myself, and about games as a whole. What’s more, mods played a huge part in the development of WoW as a game, from mods so good they were built into the game, to mods so good they were blocked by the devs, to mods that completely reshaped the way the playerbase interacts with each other, to complete minigames, to mods the playerbase loves so much they are willing to support their development on Patreon, and everything in between.

This is barely scratching the surface, but suffice it to say that over the years, UI mods have completely and fundamentally changed the way that players interact with World of Warcraft. Anything you want your UI to do, chances are, someone has already made that addon. Even players who don’t use addons can benefit from the ideas that have made their way into the base WoW UI, and which in many cases are now industry standard.

Of course FF14’s UI is very customisable out of the box, but the fact remains that without mods, all one can do is tweak the UI modules that the game already has. You can tweak the size and positioning and visibility of what’s already there, but there’s very minimal ability to change what or how information is displayed. In practice, you’re essentially limited to aesthetic changes.

So, I thought it would be fun to think about the top 5 mods I would immediately download if FF14 were to one day support UI mods.

1) Damage Meter

I’ve always said that if I had to play WoW with just one singular addon, it would be a damage meter. So it’s no surprise that it’s the addon that I miss the most playing Final Fantasy 14.

To me, I get a lot out of being able to see, in real time, a breakdown of the fight in progress, Who’s attacking the right targets? What is my biggest crit? Where is most of my damage coming from? Who has the biggest burst damage right off the pull?  Who’s taking the most damage? How much damage am I even doing overall? How much more damage am I doing than yesterday? Is anyone dispelling the debuffs? All these are questions very easily answered with a damage meter, and without that information constantly present, I can’t help but feel like there’s a layer of context missing whenever I’m doing anything, even if it’s just single player.

Granted, there are third party applications that can give you this functionality, but not being an integrated part of the game, I have a hard time counting this. It’s “technically” against the game’s TOS, it’s not available on PS4, and it’s clearly just something the devs chose not to include on the game. I can understand the social reasons for not wanting it in the default UI, but boy do I sure miss it.

2) Target of Target (of target)

FF14 seems to be much more into throwing adds at you than WoW is, in general. In fact, whenever you’re in combat, you’re provided with a list of all the currently engaged enemies, which is quite convenient. Add the party display on top of this, and you can quickly tell who all the combatants are in a given fight.

My problem is that I can never tell what anyone is actually doing. Who are people attacking? Who are people healing? Who’s tanking what? What is my focus target even doing? Nobody will ever know, and it makes party experiences feel surprisingly empty, because I don’t really have much ability to keep track of anyone but myself, and so when things happen, they often come as a surprise. It can tend to feel more like 4 or 8 or 24 individuals existing in the same general vicinity than a cohesive party, and it makes it unnecessarily difficult to work together.

There’s no better example of this, than when doing the Hall of Novices quests for DPS - the game’s ultimate tutorial for how to perform your class’ primary function in group play. One of the points that the game tries to drive home to new players, is that DPS should try to attack the same target as the tank. And yet, they never tell you how to actually tell what the tank is attacking. Because there isn’t a way - other than straight up targeting the tank and looking at the target of target display (save for using some kind of target assist macro, I suppose).

Of course one could always try and discern what the tank is attacking from the game world, but it can be really hard to tell when there are more than one target up at a time. The game does have the option for the little blue/red lines that will sometimes draw between targets momentarily, and those help, but they only display for a short while, and I don’t find them super reliable in most situations, whereas if I could look at my party frame and see who everyone is targeting, or look at my focus target and see who they are targeting, that is information that’s instantly available whenever I need it.

3) Better Unit Frames

Further to the idea of target of target displays, we have the actual unit frames themselves (player, enemy, party, etc).

I’ve tried writing this section several times now, and truthfully, there’s just too much to say here to get into it all. I could quite literally write a whole post on just this, and likely will in the near future. Suffice it to say though, that I think FF14’s unit frames mostly-fail at their most important 2 jobs:

1) Allowing the player to quickly discern which entity the unit frame is giving them information about

2) Allowing the player to quickly understand what the unit frame is telling them about that entity, such that the player can decide which action they need to take (if any)

I don’t know I would say there are any super major issues with the existing unit frames, but I have a million quibbles with them, and they all add up to a very disappointing UI performance. I constantly feel like I have to work just a bit harder than I should have to in order to get the information I need. In complex group scenarios, I often feel like I’m on the back foot just a bit, because I don’t get the information I need to act until after something bad has happened, when ideally one would be ready beforehand, and already prepared with the correct solution.

I very rarely feel that way in FF14, and I think a lot of it is purely down to the latency between things happening in the game, and how quickly I can discern what’s going on from the game’s feedback.

4) Better Nameplates

The term “nameplate” refers to the little health bar that can appears over the head of entities (primarily enemies) in the game world. I’ve found they are one of the UI elements that are hardest to get right just because they are an element appears inside the actual game world, and being constantly on screen, they are also constantly under scrutiny. They’re also challenging because they have to be able to support a wide array of situations. Targets can exist in an absurd number of states, and an absurd number of them can be grouped up in very close proximity, which can cause big headaches.

Unfortunately, if one were to compare what FF14 does with them compared to WoW, it’s not a great look for FF14. Beyond just name and health bar, in WoW we can see the enemy cast bar, debuffs you’ve applied to the enemy, and aggro warnings (which act differently based on if you are a tank or not). In WoW, the nameplate goes a really long way to give the player the critical information they need, without requiring they look anywhere but at the enemy they want to be looking at. FF14 requires that you look away if you want to acquire any one of those pieces of information.

FF14 plays it very conservative on this UI module, which is definitely the safe way to go. Their nameplates are certainly not offensive in any way, but I do think there’s a lot of potential to add a lot of value here with just a few small changes.

5) Move Anything!

One of the most straightforward but vitally important mods in any good WoW UI is good old Move Anything. As the name suggests, it allows the player to move any UI element the game will ever show you.

Now FF14 is pretty good about this in general, but no matter how hard you try, there are some UI elements that you just can’t move. Things like achievement toasts, text notifications, static dialogue, the loot window, and so on. None of them individually are a huge deal, but when you have any element that you can’t move, it instantly means that you’re somewhat limited in what you can do with everything else. Either you make what you want, and accept that some elements just won’t ever work well with it, or you compromise your overall approach in favour of accommodating that which you cannot change.

Is it really so much to ask, that squeenix doesn’t spam the ever-so-precious middle of the screen? It’s premium real estate, and it’s hard to put the information that you really want there, when that’s where all the immovable notifications go :(