I'm not gonna mince words, your idea is bad and you should feel bad.
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I'm not gonna mince words, your idea is bad and you should feel bad.
Terrible idea. Won’t happen. The game is simply not built for that.
Imagine if your dps character with mogstation outfits and a house is struck by a tankbuster because the tank died or had no stance on, died because someone didn’t stack or missed a bodycheck, someone broke the rocks on Behemot in LotA, etc. Or better, once had a healer pull a tank with an AoE tankbuster and managed to kill the entire raid save the tanks in Thaleia. I can already imagine the toxicity this would bring.
So many things can kill you through no fault of your own in this game, even DCing at the wrong time. Then who would endure replaying the whole thing from scratch each time they die?
Anyway, if OP wants to do that, he is free to delete his character each time he dies.
Someone would have to do actual work to make this mode happen? OwO'
Mode which would be 99,99% played by trolls or few different sorts.
And even then even fewer people would invest in it than in Ultimates.
Why not just find some cosy survival game insread, op?
Is this inspired by Path of Exile? The only MMORPG that had permadeath that I can think of is Shaiya, even to this day they have "normal" and "ultimate" mode (previously had also easy mode) which affects the amount of stat points you get per level (5 vs 7 respectively). In order to preserve your character, you had to buy a special cash shop only item that would be consumed upon your death, but you'd keep your character, then they added a 15-day and 30-day buff later. Game ended up being p2w so hard, it just collapsed on itself.
I've been playing Hardcore WoW for the past couple of days, and while I find it both a refreshing and enjoyable experience, I don't think it can work in FFXIV. Even at a low level, the open world mobs do not present any big challenge to you, unlike mobs in WoW who may nuke you if you pick up the wrong target, even if both of you share the same level. The only challenge would be in dungeons and trials, which shouldn't be the case in hardcore.
In Hardcore WoW, you're not surviving a dungeon to another, but surviving a quest to another. When you visit dungeons, you do so when you're high enough to not worry as much as you'll do in the dungeon's intended levels (Deadmines intended level range are 16-20, but people go there as +20)
If FFXIV can replicate this experience, then I'm all for it. Not every gameplay mechanic or mode has to conform to the lore (Not totally break the lore, but also not conforming to it, just like levels)
In summary, Hardcore mode in MMOs is a neat idea, executed beautifully by WoW, but FFXIV is not built for it. The only close hardcore experience we have in this game is solo deep dungeons, which already has it's own community. If SE can change the game, or introduce a hardcore mode that's significantly different than the base game, then I'm all for it, and anticipate it would have its own community just like deep dungeons do.
This would be a good idea if this game had interesting/challenging open worlds and proper dungeons, but sadly it does not so I don't think it would really work.
Why? This game is absurdly easy and a slog to play through MSQ. I can't think of anything less fun than a hardcore FFXIV playthrough.
If someone was really inclined for this, they'd be better off making it a self-imposed challenge rather than Square spending resources towards a system that very, very few people would actually try. This game just wasn't intended for any kind of hardcore perma-death options.