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Every Theme Park MMO is a World of Warcraft Clone: Final Fantasy XIV Edition | MMORPG.com
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Every Theme Park MMO is a World of Warcraft Clone: Final Fantasy XIV Edition | MMORPG.com
In the first of our new tongue-in-cheek column, Nick explores how every theme park MMO is simply a WoW clone, starting with Final Fantasy XIV.
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Level scaling.
M+
Raid+
Tiered Gear.
Paid tokens.
Mtx.
Boosting.
Transmogs.
Mount reskins.
Flying over content day 1.
Making the world irrelevant.
? and ! fetch quests for the sake of having quests.
Mingling factions.
Arcade style bosses.
No permanent choices.
The current wow expansion feels exactly like the last 4. They have done nothing to mix anything up and freshen the game.
Nah, just playing Throne and Liberty and enjoying it.
Fishing on Gilgamesh since 2013
Fishing on Bronzebeard since 2005
Fishing in RL since 1992
Born with a fishing rod in my hand in 1979
However, both of them are awesome!
Have you even played FFXIV or WoW? I think not. Where did you find this magical group that makes it past the second wipe without at least one person, usually the tank or healer, rage quitting because "None of you idiots have a f'in clue!"
I know this sounds crazy, but I actually found 2 separate public groups on Throne & Liberty today that wiped 10+ times each before finally clearing the final dungeon boss and no one rage quit. I haven't seen dedication like that in years.
This is why I have given up on the mmo genre as a whole pretty much, every game feels like the same thing these days. Can't get excited for a new mmo when first vid you see of it, basically looks like world of warcraft style gameplay. The old quest hub to quest hub solo mmorpg. No sense of a community in these games anymore due to how soloable they all are. Don't get me started on endgame, the endgame in most mmorpgs to me is a total waste of time, why put in the effort or time to get gear that has no more use or purpose for you? FF14 is especially bad for this because when the next expansion hits, you can buy gear for tomestones thats roughly as good as the raid gear, or even in some cases better than it by just running normal dungeons. Kinda makes the whole endgame gear treadmill pointless if you ask me.
I play FF14 for the main story quest of each expansion then basically quit and unsub till the next expansion, as I feel no need to bother with the "endgame" as its all pointless, i'd rather do other things with my time then spend weeks to get gear that will just be replaced day 1 in the new expansion.
Being a pessimist is a win-win pattern of thinking. If you're a pessimist (I'll admit that I am!) you're either:
A. Proven right (if something bad happens)
or
B. Pleasantly surprised (if something good happens)
Either way, you can't lose! Try it out sometime!
If you want to write about how refreshing T&L is in comparison to the popular titles, just write that column.
- Instanced dungeons
- bosses with specific mechanics
- level scaling for players
- fetch request missions
- kill X amount missions
- raids with huge bosses and many players, special drops
- multi-mission story arcs
- tiered drops
One game has all these and definitely is not a WoW clone. It was developed before WoW even released.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
So... that being said.
Fact of the matter is there's a lot of stuff WoW does right. It's not the most successful MMO in history by accident. Last I checked it's still quite profitable and has plenty of players. As a developer of a new MMO, you frankly would be a fool to not at least look at what WoW does well and see if those elements would be beneficial to your game. I'm not saying wholesale copy/paste the game like so many have tried, but for sure there are many features you would do well to emulate. Top of the list would be the polish. If you're going to spend 7+ years of your life and $100 million or more building a game, don't turn in some janky, buggy, floaty, unresponsive turd of a game that falls flat on its face under any sort of load whatsoever. Look at what they do with their gameplay loop both at the micro and macro level. What about that keeps people engaged for months of their life at a time? That would be something worth emulating. Heck most new MMO's see a huge influx at launch and 3 weeks later it's a ghost town. Why is that and what is WoW doing that keeps players coming back? There's a lot of valuable case study data to be extracted from WoW in spite of the occasional hater that declares the game 'dead' in spite of the irrefutable evidence that it's clearly quite the opposite of dead.
And what would that game be?
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
It's the most successful mmo because it makes the
Lowest Common Denominator
feel Epic.
There, I said it.
Enjoy your game though!
Not really. It coaxed ideas out of EverQuest but it wasn't really a clone. Actually FFXI was what I'd call an EverQuest clone. Any MMO with vague questing systems and a death tax was/is (do death taxes even exist anymore?)
Interestingly enough, EverQuest II, which I had an ad on this article for and didn't even know was stull active, was a WoW clone. They did away with the death tax and made it much more "player friendly" with how classes and quests work, which was a lot like WoWs style. But almost Every MMO had that knee jerk reaction after WoW was released.
All true. No one has ever cared. And I'm sorry if that sounds like I'm being rude to you, cause it's not meant to be pointed at you aside from quoting you. It's just that after WoW arrived and dominated, you couldn't convince even people who knew that other game exists, that the game you're talking about ever existed. Everything was WoWs discovery, even if that's highly untrue
That said, there were things in this I want to act like they went over my head too. Like I'd love to pick at my personal scab about FFXIVs main quest and how it's both a wall and a gun to our heads, where I wouldn't really say WoW has that problem unless something changed since I played WoW 10yrs ago (I just re-picked up FFXIV after the same amount of time, because of it being on consoles -makes having the itch more manageable, even if controllers aren't great for MMOs no matter how much Yoshi lies to us about it)
FFXIV main quest being the barrier of all barriers is such a huge disappointment for someone who comes back to the game, had their old characters wiped by Square's war against inactivity (see XIVs self-made housing crisis), and has to start all over. I only played ARR, but playing it again now, I realized how far I was when I was forced to let life take over and quit me from the game. The problem becomes that after 10yrs and a lot of other issues, I don't really want to deal with cranky MMO people (see the article above about grouping), maybe because I'm now a cranky people people. This game makes it nice because, supposedly, you can do almost everything solo.
Lies!!! Shame!!!
The main quest is a barrier though the whole game. Not being able to do anything at all at a certain point because you didn't do 20 main quests is.. stupid. But it's mostly okay because you can solo it with NPC helpers, until you get to lv50+ and you get to ARRs post game and the game forces (there's that firearm to our head I talked about) you to raid with more people you attempted to avoid before, in encounters that break and distort immediately because they weren't built around lvl90 people and their gear deforming into lvl50 shapes. And one of those raids being a whole fortress of bosses with mechanics you can't really plan for because of the prior said problem of blowing through ridiculously fast, which usually leads to 2 phases happening at once(?), and because there's a whole plethora of mechanics that you probably won't see again for another 100+ hours.
Add to that doing this with a controller. Which feels like a "me" problem, but it's just one for whoever wants to play this horrific scenario out on a console. Or whoever is sadistic enough to want to do it with a controller on PC. You sick..
Anyway. The game lies to you about being able to solo things pretty much up to new content. It's impossible because of this block created by the main quest, which they chose to include old endgame raids that most players who are past them, never really want to do. It makes it impossible to feel like you're going to see any of the other expansions you've bought, unless you have the overzealous (but impressive) drive of an FFXIV speedrunner.
But WoW doesn't have this problem, unless they changed something since the end of Pandera that I haven't overheard since the same life stuff knocked me out of my WoW habit. All you really seemed to have to do is reach a level requirement and you were catching a boat, or a rocket ship, or whatever the heck they were up to at the time to get to the new content. You were never explicitly forced to finish old content to ever see the new. And that is a *huge* difference between both games. If I had a PC right now that could do WoW, I could probably jump back in, level up, and be in War Within in a few days. FFXIV feels like I need to set aside half a year. And thats... Not great. Not great at all.
I'm glad you asked
- CoH has an overworld set of mobs and instanced dungeons too
- some bosses have shields that protect them, you have to wait for the right time to attack, other bosses explode when they die so you have to know to keep a certain distance, etc
- when a player joins with another player to team up, the joining player has their level scaled to the leader's. It was called "sidekicking" back then
- fetch and kill X missions were there from the beginning
- the Hami raid is an example of a giant boss that requires many people (40 or more) and has very specific mechanics to beat. Completing it drops special enhancements that cannot be gotten any other way
- multi-mission story arcs have been there since the beginning
- enhancement drops are based on the level or tier you are fighting
All of these features were in CoH before WoW was released. Perhaps WoW cloned it from them?
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2024: 47 years on the Net.