SE stop doing the "norm"

[TohruHonda]

Leveling is too easy in almost all games these days. I can't believe they are making it easier in 2.0. I remember playing old MMOs and taking 10+ months to hit the level caps. Or playing text based MUDs and dying so much that I would go into negative experience points. Leveling was the reason I stuck to playing these games for so long, it gave me long term goals to reach without even touching the endgame.

[bobbygunz]

And what's so ironic is that Yoshi was interviewed about SW:ToR and asked why it was considered to be a failure, to which Yoshi famously replied the questing system was at fault. And ... then... he... put the same thing in FFXIV: ARR!

I don't know what market research they did over at SE but if you read the message boards on websites like MMORPG.com or Massively or thisisgame or mmoculture.com or steparu.com, you really get a sense that players don't enjoy the status quo they've been fed for the past MMO generation. So you kind of have to question that decision, first of all.

On top of that, when was the last time SE announced an innovative feature? 2009?

Korean games with staffs of 50 people can create a whole engine from scratch and produce a MMO with more features in the same time SE can with a staff of 250. The first thing Yoshi should have done was fire the FFXIV team and hire some koreans.

On topic, the MMO genre (genre probably isn't even the right word, platform is probably more correct) has really been diluted in terms of how many typically "hardcore" features it has. And players are left with a vacuum in the market for which there are no contemporary offerings, so maybe capitalising on that would be a strategic decision, at least from a monetary standpoint.

Many players don't like typically hardcore features, but some do, and where's the game for those players?

[auritribe]

You'll all play it anyway. Deal with it.

[Rokien]

You'll all play it anyway. Deal with it.

No I wont, not with... Well, I'll edit this when youtube is back up.

Seriously, I won't play a game I wont have fun with, I'm playing tera now, it's fun because of the combat, though, I will play it till i'm bored.

FFXI I played for 9 years, what mmo now a days can stand the test of time?

[Elexia]

You'll all play it anyway. Deal with it.

A lot of current players will probably, but SE's main concern is getting new people or they wouldn't have even tried to relaunch this game for the small amount of people who still actually play.

[Gramul]

You'll all play it anyway. Deal with it.

No I won't.
You deal with it.

[indira]

EQ1 & FFXI were zoned but felt open world and you did whatever. SWG was hardcore sandbox but sony decided to kill it off lol.
now 99% of mmos are the same thing with a gimmick to make it different.

[fusional]

while i generally vehemently disagree with anything you say, i think there may possibly be an element of truth to this.

ffxi was deeply flawed, and was only ever going to be a niche MMO. but the things that it did right were things that no other MMO was really doing, or has done since. i would've been quite happy if they'd taken that foundation and just modernized it a bit, rather than going off in another completely 'new' direction and flopping in execution.

the things they're doing with ARR are certainly not really 'new' since they're just trying to bring the MMO up to the world standard, but that doesn't mean they can't still take things from XI (and possibly other games) that nobody else is really doing and find ways to weave them in- as along as the execution is sound.

i agree with their approach, because you definitely need to meet certain standard criteria to have a successful MMO. but that shouldn't limit them to *just* those things, especially since they also need XIV to stand out from others.

that said, i think they're already fully aware of this and have long-term goals to do precisely that. but in the short term the goal is to first remake the game into something functional and fun at its foundation, and from there the sky's the limit. a lot of people will be impatient or have difficulty understanding, but i think they're only looking at the short term.

SWG was hardcore sandbox but sony decided to kill it off lol

because it was atrocious

[auritribe]

No I won't.
You deal with it.

Square Enix could take maple story, resprite it with FF artwork, put final fantasy on the cover and it'd still sell.

[Shougun]

I would like SE to take itself seriously, ahrimon mount....?

Vanity + raindeer outfit = ~_~

Going to see some very silly generic mmo stuff they aren't careful.