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Final Fantasy XIV - Keeping Content Alive - MMORPG.com
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Final Fantasy XIV - Keeping Content Alive - MMORPG.com
Final Fantasy XIV is a big game. Maps are separated by loading zones, so Eorzea doesn’t feel quite as open as, say, Azeroth, but there’s a lot to do. There are 60 dungeons and nearly 50 trials, and, thanks to the roulette system, these all get run almost every day.
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As for your main point of content relevance, the game lacks a foundation, or maybe just has one that is trying to build a three-story house on feeble wooden unreinforced planks. Players can't be properly rewarded because the gearing system is bare bones while also replaced on a predictable system. Its trying too much to be like WoW without even understanding how WoW works while keeping elements of FFXI without even understanding how FFXI worked. Even with wow "doing away with set bonuses" in BfA, you still have the substitute of the HoA necklace which will honestly have set bonus level tiers eventually (people are losing their sh!t just because they dont see everything on the beta). On top of that, you have trinkets and other things that can give additional things like an extra cooldown, extra proc, etc. Even FFXI had simple versions of that kind of stuff in terms of procs etc on gear; however, FFXIV has none of that and Yoshida's excuse is because of balancing (aka they are just lazy). I mean having a gear set bonus that lowers a cooldown on one of your main abilities, adding an additional effect to a skill or proc chance to restore health etc wont break the game. I mean even 1.x had more interesting types of materia that gave a chance to restore tp etc, why not have something like that? Its a pretty game of course, just no forethought and given how often it updates its cash shop (usually once a month) I dont think it'll ever intent to be a "serious" game.
You have two choices, grind Palace of the Dead endlessly for levels or wait in a queue for 20 - 30 minutes whilst grinding fates. I've done enough Palace of the Dead to be buried there myself and waiting 30 minutes for a dungeon roulette pop whilst grinding fates is equally soul crushing.
Problem is, however, I don't know how to repair this system. I can't suggest any other way to bring the queue times down enough to make a difference, the only time I felt this could be mitigated was introducing a new healer or a new tank class, neither of which made it in this expansion.
Good game, but the Class system works against itself. Levelling an Alt in another mmorpg, you could do the same quests again for a steady levelling pace with changing content. Though, you could argue Palace of the Dead offers the same experience... but it fails to keep players attention for levelling, at least with myself and my social circles.
While FFXIV gets 'new' content regularly, the vast majority is little more than a re-texture. Dungeons are probably the worst case of this, with every single dungeon for the past 3+ years having the same design of being a corridor of 3-bosses with AoE spam trash in-between. Not to mention that by the time a dungeon comes out it's so far behind the (incessant treadmill that is) gear item level that it's almost entirely face-roll (honestly if it wasn't for roulettes and their bonus rewards dungeons in FFXIV would be largely DOA). And even ‘raids’ and ‘trials’ are starting to feel very samey (and almost indistinguishable), with the SB designs all just being a single boss in a square / circular arena.
Also, yes, it is nice that they try new things, but it would be even nicer if they put some rational thought into them (or had a test realm and actually listened to feedback). I don't know if it's a cultural thing, but disasters like LoV, Diadem, and (depending on your playstyle) Eureka, are largely the result of some very poorly made design decisions... i.e. LoV is far too complex for the sake of complexity and needs to be (at a minimum) much simpler and easier to control... Diadem was just a whole mess of bad choices, from forced grouping with mixed objectives (combat vs. gathering), to ultimately being little more than a mob / FATE grind (i.e. nothing new)... Eureka is slightly better, but if AFKing on the 'NM train' isn't your thing then good luck with the worst (and currently most pointless) grind in FFXIV's history.
And then there is the dry lake bed that is class customisation and itemisation … Namely, once you get a class to cap, that is how it is going to play from then on (minor speed adjusts from gear aside). This is somewhat mitigated by being able to switch classes at will, but with DPS being the only metric of any weight in FFXIV, and the current trend of 'balance' (at the expense of fun) being towards homogenization, the only gameplay difference between most classes of a given role is 1-2-3-4-5 vs. 1-2-3-1-2-4.
Which is not to say FFXIV is necessarily a 'bad' game, and I would say that it is absolutely worth playing for anyone interested in theme park MMOs (just need to push through the ARR MSQ quests) … however it is (and has been for a while) in desperate need of a shake-up / re-design / meaningful improvement to its core content design and systems, yet ironically this seems to be the one area that the Devs absolutely refuse to disrupt or 'try new things' with, ultimately leading to every patch feeling very much like Groundhog Day.
First, they just keep adding more and more and more without any thought at all about the new content's place in the overall game. People can only do one thing at any one time and people want to do different things. So, when give people a dozen different activities, people will be split into a dozen different ways. That means the activities with the best rewards or the most relevance(ie raiding) will have the most players and all of the other activities will get everyone else. Too many choices can be worse than no choices.
Second, when they introduce a new activity they dont spend a lot of time iterating or improving it. When a new activity is introduced it will be popular because everyone wants to check out the new thing but it falls out of favor the developers have to see why people are no longer playing it and what they have to do to bring people back.
If people are only doing these side activities as a way to level alts then perhaps they need to examine the leveling process and they also need to examine what content people actually want to do and why. Do people actually like Palace of the Dead for what it is or do they only do it because they feel they have to as a quick way to level?
I couldn't agree me. What I think is funnier is that the general community on the official forums was harping about how much bigger a budget SB had in comparison to HW, so the game will get (or should get) higher quality content, yet in reality, the game is getting even less so far. So not only are they getting inferior content in terms of how it works in cohesion with other content but they are also getting less of it too. Yet I'm seeing Yoshida with a silver platted kitchen sink nozzle around his neck as jewelry....Dont even get me started on the cash shop update defenses some community members come up with...hell even behind renting retainers...they got some of the whitest knights I've seen in a while that's for sure.
I have invested hundreds, if not thousands of hours in the game, maxed all crafting and both botany and mining jobs to 70 with mains on SMN, BLM and AST... and yet, I currently play FFXI... hmm something's most certainly wrong with this picture.
Many of the above posts describe issues that plague FFXIV...from the boring, basic gear design to its intrepid progression system, to its broken raids/trials to its' attempts to re-invent itself as most recently seen when it introduced Eureka to the live servers.
At this point I'm not sure what can be done to salvage the game... for me the saving grace is the story (main scenario) which I actually always enjoy experiencing; however beyond that... it's a serious snooze.
Let's compare The Elder Scrolls Online [ESO] (I currently play this as well and ENJOY it immensely)... so I ask myself, why... why if I'm literally doing the same thing as in traversing a large map on a mount, (albeit, flying mount in FFXIV) am I not "bored" in ESO... the answer is rather simple. In ESO, traversing off of the beaten path I encounter a quest, most often times multi-tiered quest, which is in itself a story... usually tragic and it grabs me... as a novella would. So I'm trying to help this woman who's husband disappeared in a tomb, surrounded by undead but also barred from a hidden camp, where her husband was ousted because he discovered that the hidden campers were cannibalizing the locals, since they feared attempting to escape the tomb... I find her husband's spirit, defeat it, then solve the issue of the cannibalism at the camp... quest complete. Not far from that is another quest... etc..and so on. Looking at the map for FFXIV (regardless of zone) it's a fetch quest... get A bring to B... done. Rinse - repeat.
I am not asking that FFXIV be redesigned to encompass what has been a successful model for other MMOs, but I do expect that they look closely at their design..which is similar to FFXI's quest design... FFXI didn't have expanded overworld quests similar to ESO... but that's not what makes FFXI longevity unique. FFXI has undergone facelifts, one of which (going to Item Level armor/weapon progression) I, along with many others, thought it wouldn't and ALMOST didn't survive. But the developers LISTENED to its dying player base and made the necessary changes which allow it to survive to this day.
FFXI's weapon and armor system has so much variety and customization that I could spend hours, just piecing together various combinations of relic, empyrean, artifact and Job Specific Equipment on my Puppetmaster to come up with a wide variety of play styles... something that CANNOT be accomplished in FFXIV. If I wished to have a set based on reducing the damage my automaton takes it be accomplished... if i wished to increase my and my automaton's health regeneration or hitpoint and magic point percentages, it can be accomplished..the list goes on and on... FFXIV severely suffers here.
Where FFXI maintains to this day, the significance associated with Relic, Empyrean, Mythic etc. weapons and their place in the weapon hierarchy as the most powerful weapons in the game... FFXIV has made the very idea of a Zodiac Weapon... a laughing stock.. at most... glamour.
I could go on and on with the problems FFXIV suffers from which would make this post longer and longer and ultimately sound like (if it doesn't already) a rant. I appreciate the Realm Reborn because it allowed me to experience a BEAUTIFUL Final Fantasy Online game... but FFXI it is not... what continues to make players return to the world of Vana'diel is something FFXIV has yet to encompass or embrace or on some basic rudimentary level understand. My fear is that if FFXIV continues to fail it's players by not living up to what the brand has always been... its servers will eventually shutter.
90PUP, 90DRK, 90WHM
The sync system in FFXIV is the only one I've ever seen that makes you go backwards in terms of skills earned.
Going back to having 5 skills on your hotbar with a slow GCD is not fun.
Ultimately this game shoots itself in the foot by pumping out content as fast as they do, while not actually creating anything different. Mechanics change, setting changes....but the content types have been basically the same since ARR. Palace of the dead has been about the only worthwhile addition to the game since then.