XIV and the MMORPG Genre

Well, I have quite a bit to say today and a lot of you may not like it. The main point of this thread is that FFXIV ARR has set the mmorpg genre BACK quite a bit, and it's not because it's a bad game, in fact, FFXIV ARR in itself is a pretty good game. The development process for FFXIV ARR however, was not good for the genre because any potential developers/companies looking to create a new MMO will look back at FFXIV and FFXIV ARR and think "If I deviate from what every MMO has, my game will fail".

FFXIV ARR made me realize that the MMO genre will NEVER change, not for a very long while at least. The next "new" MMOs for the next few decades will always contain the same archaic class system, the same archaic dungeon system with LFG/LFR, more or less the same tab targetting system, and of course the same UI that EVERY MMO uses. All of these things were more or less made popular by World of Warcraft, and as of right now, the current trend for the success of MMORPGs is based entirely on which MMO replicates these systems the best.

The original FFXIV didn't have many of these things, it had an ATB combat system which involved manually using your attacks to build up TP and then using that TP to attack with skills, fairly different UI where most things were organized into menus and I don't recall it having dungeons or raids. This would have actually been a decent game in my opinion, but due to the numerous bugs and glitches that plagued the original XIV, it ended up being a terrible failure.

This led to the development team being switched around and the game being remade into what it is today, a WoW clone. As I stated earlier, FFXIV ARR being a "WoW clone" does NOT in any way shape or form make this game bad, but it's booming success will definitely make newer developers and companies that are looking into the MMO genre really think about how they should design their game. To a company pouring millions of dollars into a game and looking to profit off of it, FFXIV's story has become a cautionary tale about deviating from the magic WoW formula that every triple A MMO has abided to. To the players however, this means that innovation in the genre will be so far and so few in between MMOs that they might as well all be the same game renamed multiple times.

A good GAME doesn't always have to have an auction house, or dungeons, or raids, or LFG, or even a class system, it could do well with things as simple as player created content. However, we've brainwashed ourselves into believing what an MMO should and shouldn't have, and because of that, the entire genre has really just merged into nothing more than WoW and all of it's millions of clones.


TL: DR FFXIV is a great game and it was very successful, but the way it was created and it's lack of innovation in ARR will stop new devs from bringing new things into the genre

The biggest problem with game companies, is dumping so much money into a game for shinies and pretty graphics and cutscenes. Game companies have lost site of why people play games. We play them to have fun. There are too many things in current mmo's designed to impede or block fun (to slow people down because you can't shoot out content fast enough etc).

If companies took all the resources they dumped into CG edited Cut scenes, insane special effects, crazy high texture details, etc etc and instead focused it on making content, they'd get more $$$ return, they'd have a higher subscription base.

I'm sorry, but if you make a game fun, and I mean addictingly "Can't put it down" fun, people don't care about graphics. Minecraft is a good example of that with 20's of millions of people playing it.

I mean, some games today, is like seeing your tax money go to paving a road in the middle of no where that no one drives on and could have stayed gravel when the main high way has pot holes.

Let me summarize this further. The biggest problem is "we" the consumers buy games on hype. We see a Kick Azz Trailer and read all the dev blogs and interviews and get so hyped up about a game, we buy it, and find out it sucks or it's a clone of something and we'll get bored in a year.

Companies spend a ton of money on hyping their games up, because people will buy them on pure hype.

If every consumer in the world got smart and let the game linger for a week or two and see how it's received from a minority of people, they'd quit that marketing strategy real quick.

I haven't taken the time to read your post yet. However it would do the community a favor if you took all of your several posts and condensed it into the OP.

Yes, there's a stupid 1000 character limit (plus other dumb limits) on the forums. However, if you go and EDIT the original post the limit no longer applies.

EDIT: Blame player polls "mob mentality" wanting what they're familiar with. A gamer that played FFXI or any ATB style game is a niche population compared to the WoW crowd. You will never see a game to your liking any time a Dev asks the population 'what they want'. Course you'll probably never get an overall great product doing that either. But maybe.

Generally what happens when you ask a large group what they really want you end up with this:

http://www.motortorque.com/res/image...ar_428x288.jpg

If they implemented something like my Gear Idea, "http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/125292-An-Idea-to-fix-an-old-archaic-design-of-a-loot-system" this game would be innovative and outside of the box.

That's why they call it a "genre".

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Originally Posted by Gwaiyn

Well, I have quite a bit to say today and a lot of you may not like it. The main point of this thread is that FFXIV ARR has set the mmorpg genre BACK quite a bit, and it's not because it's a bad game, in fact, FFXIV ARR in itself is a pretty good game. The development process for FFXIV ARR however, was not good for the genre because any potential developers/companies looking to create a new MMO will look back at FFXIV and FFXIV ARR and think "If I deviate from what every MMO has, my game will fail".

FFXIV ARR made me realize that the MMO genre will NEVER change, not for a very long while at least. The next "new" MMOs for the next few decades will always contain the same archaic class system, the same archaic dungeon system with LFG/LFR, more or less the same tab targetting system, and of course the same UI that EVERY MMO uses. All of these things were more or less made popular by World of Warcraft, and as of right now, the current trend for the success of MMORPGs is based entirely on which MMO replicates these systems the best.

The original FFXIV didn't have many of these things, it had an ATB combat system which involved manually using your attacks to build up TP and then using that TP to attack with skills, fairly different UI where most things were organized into menus and I don't recall it having dungeons or raids. This would have actually been a decent game in my opinion, but due to the numerous bugs and glitches that plagued the original XIV, it ended up being a terrible failure.

This led to the development team being switched around and the game being remade into what it is today, a WoW clone. As I stated earlier, FFXIV ARR being a "WoW clone" does NOT in any way shape or form make this game bad, but it's booming success will definitely make newer developers and companies that are looking into the MMO genre really think about how they should design their game. To a company pouring millions of dollars into a game and looking to profit off of it, FFXIV's story has become a cautionary tale about deviating from the magic WoW formula that every triple A MMO has abided to. To the players however, this means that innovation in the genre will be so far and so few in between MMOs that they might as well all be the same game renamed multiple times.

A good GAME doesn't always have to have an auction house, or dungeons, or raids, or LFG, or even a class system, it could do well with things as simple as player created content. However, we've brainwashed ourselves into believing what an MMO should and shouldn't have, and because of that, the entire genre has really just merged into nothing more than WoW and all of it's millions of clones.


TL: DR FFXIV is a great game and it was very successful, but the way it was created and it's lack of innovation in ARR will stop new devs from bringing new things into the genre

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Sorry but is this serious? There are at least three games currently in development which smash the traditional model to bits - EQN, TESO and Star Citizen.

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Originally Posted by MageBlack

That's why they call it a "genre".

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By your statement then every single science fiction book should be almost identical/cookie cutter.

Genre means they have general similarities to be grouped in, not that they are all identical.

quite the contrary.

The mmo genre is expanding and moving away from the WoW model.

Tera online, and Blade and Soul, are both non tab-targeting mmo's with action based combat systems that are far more intense than FFXIV, WOW, or any other tab targetting mmo, they lack in other areas but it's a neat combat system that is certain to expand and be improved upon.

There's also GW2 which breaks away from the holy trinity of tank, healer, dps for its party configurations.

While B&S isn't currently in the US, all three MMO's are doing pretty well for themselves, without being WoW Clones.

Having said all that. FFXIV's combat is fine. WoW is still a decent model to set as your base and expand upon. Having played WoW for quite some time, the games do not feel very similar at all frankly.

FFXIV 1.0 didn't fail because it was innovative. It failed because it was developed in a vacuum.

Yoshida made it very clear from the get go that his remake of FF: XIV was not going to shift the paradigm. He made it very clear that he intended to go with the safe route and try to make this game as polished as a tab targeting MMORPG could be. There are other MMO that have either already been released or are currently in development that set out to accomplish what you described in the OP. Neverwinter and Guild Wars 2 are not your generic tab target MMOs and both these games have been fairly successful. Elder Scrolls Online and Everquest Next are two more games that will not be featuring standard tab targeting combat and Everquest has promised user generated content. Tab targeting fantasy MMOs is actually a very niche genre and there are already countless other MMOs that differ vastly from this genre.

XIV is already laughed at by developers and critics that claim that it is too generic. Have you seen how much hype there is for the other MMOs that are currently in development?

I'm sorry but I need to ask whether you have even touched World of Warcraft in your lifetime to think that making a statement such as that was a plausible idea.

The problem is that a lot of developers see gratification as linear gear progression and that's not the case most of the time. Some of the most rewarding times when playing games like XI are when you figure out the best combination of gear from all different sources and try damn hard to get them.

Currently in this game you don't have to look around for gear, it's waved under your nose the whole time. There's also no substitutes because there is only one gear set at ilvl70 for example. I guess this will change with time but given that there are only 2 sets of ilvl90 at the moment and being "hard" to get isn't really an issue at all seeing as the only hard part about it is waiting 3 months to be able to get the full set, it's gonna be a very long time before we see anything of any variation.

If the OP's post provided more credible information to back up his standpoint other than, "oMg it'Z A W0W CLONE!!!1" with actual examples, I probably would have given them more credit for their opinion. But you're just yelling on a soapbox with no means for a solution or actual data to back up your claims. MMO's generally contain the same certain elements for the same reason that other games have similar concepts like RPGs and shooters, etc. We're only on patch 2.1, and you're going to compare this game to WoW, which has undergone how many patches over the years?

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Originally Posted by Jimsvaliant

Yoshida made it very clear from the get go that his remake of FF: XIV was not going to shift the paradigm. He made it very clear that he intended to go with the safe route and try to make this game as polished as a tab targeting MMORPG could be. There are other MMO that have either already been released or are currently in development that set out to accomplish what you described in the OP. Neverwinter and Guild Wars 2 are not your generic tab target MMOs and both these games have been fairly successful. Elder Scrolls Online and Everquest Next are two more games that will not be featuring standard tab targeting combat and Everquest has promised user generated content. Tab targeting fantasy MMOs is actually a very niche genre and there are already countless other MMOs that differ vastly from this genre.

XIV is already laughed at by developers and critics that claim that it is too generic. Have you seen how much hype there is for the other MMOs that are currently in development?

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I wouldn't agree with critics laughing at it - all the reviews I've read have been incredibly positive. Yes it doesn't push the boundaries but it does traditional mmo very, very well and is far superior to most.

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Originally Posted by Gwaiyn

A good GAME doesn't always have to have an auction house, or dungeons, or raids, or LFG, or even a class system, it could do well with things as simple as player created content. However, we've brainwashed ourselves into believing what an MMO should and shouldn't have, and because of that, the entire genre has really just merged into nothing more than WoW and all of it's millions of clones.

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Actually Wow in reality is a clone of Everquest, the first real successful MMORPG that started from scratch while WoW had its loyal followers from previous Blizzard games.
Anywho I'm content with what the game has to offer, like limit breakers and such. If things get to different people will be hesitant to play. Everquest Next for example with its strange class combination possibilities and totally destructible world makes some players hesitant to play.

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Originally Posted by Lulu_the_Yordle

Actually Wow in reality is a clone of Everquest, the first real successful MMORPG that started from scratch while WoW had its loyal followers from previous Blizzard games.
Anywho I'm content with what the game has to offer, like limit breakers and such. If things get to different people will be hesitant to play. Everquest Next for example with its strange class combination possibilities and totally destructible world makes some players hesitant to play.

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That and the fact it looks like a pixar movie

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Originally Posted by Zafrei

That and the fact it looks like a pixar movie

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Eh that doesn't bother me really.. I don't believe graphics have to do a lot with general selection of an MMO, its more of what it has to offer, lineage and credibility

As it has been said, ARR is the exception rather than the rule. Much of the new MMOs are action based (Blade and Soul, Vindictus, Blessed Online, Black Desert Online, etc,.) The successful Phantasy Star Online 2 in Japan is purely action based, and so is the next big MMO in that region and in China, Monster Hunter Online.

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Originally Posted by Zafrei

Sorry but is this serious? There are at least three games currently in development which smash the traditional model to bits - EQN, TESO and Star Citizen.

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i can't comment on star citizen, but how do EQN and TESO break away from the traditional model apart from having "action combat"?

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Originally Posted by Fynneun

I'm sorry but I need to ask whether you have even touched World of Warcraft in your lifetime to think that making a statement such as that was a plausible idea.

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yup, level 90 paladin, i haven't played since siege of ogrimmar was released though

Man I really should go to sleep.

I don't feel like this game is a WoW clone it has some concepts from other games sure, but all these games do. Tiered gear and instanced raiding are not exclusive or invented(or maybe they were?) by WoW, and those are about the only similarities, as a longtime WoW player this MMO feels pretty different to me. Dungeons ramp up in difficulty earlier, crafting is a lot more satisfying, it's got trash free boss fight dungeons, it has a strong main story narrative, and that's with only 3 weeks with the game.

I'd like to take a second to address the term "clone", I don't know where or when this became a pejorative but just take a look at this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_clone
Galaga might have been a Space Invader clone, but Galaga is a great game. It's so funny how MMO players throw around "this is exactly like WoW", if you didn't look very hard you might think Galaga is 'exactly' like Space Invaders, but you just haven't looked hard enough.

eff this limit

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Originally Posted by Gwaiyn

i can't comment on star citizen, but how do EQN and TESO break away from the traditional model apart from having "action combat"?

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TESO is going to be very PVP focused like Warhammer Age of Reckoning and won't really feature much raiding, with the exception of some weird adventure zones we don't know much about. EQN is really too early to directly say I feel but it's going to be more focused on world events which will have limited time durations, so a quest town may be founded only once and then newer players instead of finding the "found this town" quest will find the actual town already founded with totally different quests.

EDIT: I really haven't read up on them extensively this is just second hand info I got from my brother when he tells me about the games.

I honestly don't have an issue with a game that is a polished version of a good idea.

Developers can't risk moving too far outside of their genre if they're targeting the MMO/RPG crowd. The Secret World is a good example of that. It was a great, innovative title but its core elements were so different - an RPG in the modern world - that nobody played it, and it went F2P with loads of lay offs.

Square had to protect their brand after 1.0. They couldn't afford to take any more risks with FF. And, tbh, I don't think FFXIV needed innovation. I'd imagine that the vast majority of people who play FFXIV do so because of Cactuars and Chocobos; not because of any particular system.

It's just fantastic that it (eventually) turned out to be a great game.

It's not like there were no games who tried to do things differently, they simply failed for one or the other reason. I don't think people need dungeons/raids/tank-healer-dps-system and everything else that's typical or that they wouldn't play a game that doesn't have them but the problem really lies in how the differences have been done and I think they were just poorly done, like:

Tera real live action combat - turns out it was running around in circles to "dodge" stuff, very boring and idiotic actually.
GW2 doesn't have a tank-dps-healer system and it plays horribly (in PVE) but it's not because of the missing mechanic but the AI/skillset they have and the "combatrezz"-system that drove most pve-oriented players away.
Aion introduced aerial combat, neat idea, horrible controls.
We could also look at Defiance that was a shooter-mmo which failed due to repetitive gameplay and no longterm motivation or
the Secret world and the unique quest design that a lot of people liked but it once again failed because of no long term motivation.

The reason raids exist and the reason WoW is succesful with it is because it does two things that 90% of all mmo players care about the most (and they might not even realize it):

Accessibility to all game modes without being forced into any "niche"-game modes offered
Longterm motivation with variations.

FFXIV was very succesful because it did a lot of things right, it has:

- great graphics, without knowing a game this is pretty important people, it just looks cool.
- great atmosphere, the music and the way maps were build is really good.
- an immersive storyline that makes you "commit", it gives your character a very personal touch through the quests (the reason so many people stuck with SWTOR for so long)
- it's Final Fantasy, it sells itself - the game has gone downhill so hard since the "glory days" yet people still buy it like crazy and anxiously await every new release, hoping it'll be good again (also like swtor, it sold because it's Star Wars)

And that is enough for a purchase and 2/4 months subscription, 2 months because it keeps you entertained that long without being overly bored (assuming you don't play ALL day) and 4 months because you now maybe have made friends, you at the very least made personal progress with your character or you just really like the way the game plays and just hope for a change in available content and content design. I knew multiple people who bought this game and played like CRAZY for 1,5 months, than decided to quit for the same reason a lot of other people are going to quit, what FFIXV does wrong:

- no easy access to any and all content (housing prices [Rift managed to keep probably 50% of subs going throughout a crappy expasnion because housing was cheap, easy and fun) or very grindy progress towards it (3h waiting for a fate anyone?)
- repetitive gameplay, increasing the Myth. TS cap to 450 is nice for newer players to gear up faster, sure but if the main focus still remains farming a single dungeon over and over for them people will get fed up with it (many already got fed up and left)
- no longterm motivation due to the game being repetitive - I am not excited about killing Garuda again, extreme mode, ultra mode, I don't care, I need something new and Coil was too small a raid anyway, 4 bosses is a dungeon, not a raid.
That being said you keep grinding the same stuff to get better egar to do stuff you already have done, it's a cycle that gets broing quickly and there are no real alternatives, no other reason to log in.

So, being a WoW-clone does help sales, sure, but you can't keep subs if you don't offer more than WoW (most palyers that left here went back to WoW btw) which isn't easy cause it's been around forever. The best solution one might think would be to offer something other games don't offer (or don't offer it in a good quality), sadly FF didn't and doesn't seem to want to do just that. The games I mentioned all had good ideas, hey just failed horribly at acutally making it work (which really makes you doubt their intelligence seeing how live action combat has been done by SO many offline games and done well at that). I do hope FF will still turn things around, I really like the basic setting of the game, it's really just the content that bothers me, I've played WoW quite a while and quit mmos for a long time after all i did was log in every Wednesday to kill LK hard and log off again with 1 item more sometimes and I just won't ever again invest a lot of time in any game doing grindy stuff just so I can enjoy the portion of the game I actually like, a lot of people always talk about "earning" something in a game - I earn stuff in real life, I want to just play the game.

On a sidenote: User generated content is somewhat of an illusion, it really doesn't matter all that much if a dungeon for example was created by devs or another player- in fact, the motivation to do something someone else has created is lesser, seeing how you can't expect a quality standart and/or no real reward for beating something, Neverwinter Nights showed how people lost interest after the story was done and only player generated content was left (not that it was a seriously good game to begin with).

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Originally Posted by Gwaiyn

i can't comment on star citizen, but how do EQN and TESO break away from the traditional model apart from having "action combat"

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Do they have action combat? Wasn't aware if that. I was commenting on the fluid skill systems, much more freeform than current mmos

User created content does work though but the MMO has to be designed for PVP the ground up. Was in EVE Online for a number of years. Another heavily PVP oriented successful MMO is Age of Wulin. Enemy players can fight you in the dungeons, and you have mass raids against other schools whose players fight you back too.

I remember playing World of Warcraft, it was different to previous games I had played (notably lineage II and Anarchy Online). I liked it. It was a PVE focused game of a different sort.

Then came Wrath of The Lich King, and I began to realise all of the content was a glorifed system of chores that I was paying Blizzard to do. The LFG tool in that game killed all love I had for it, because then the community began to suffer as typical party content meant that the only way I met and chatted with new people was recruitments in my guild.

I left to play Rift. To cut a long story short it was very similar, but when I came back from an extended holiday overseas to find that they had implemented a LFG tool I immediately logged out, canceled my subscription and let my remaining time rot, never looking back.

I have acknowledged that the game genre I once loved is dead, everything is instanced, social interaction in MMO's is at its lowest ever unless required by the game (isolated incidences aside). The only reason I'm playing this game right now is because of the small amount of socialising that occurs within my free company and linkshells.

Overall what this means is my loyalty to this game is egg-shell thin, as has my loyalty to every game that has come out seeking to replicate Blizzard. It is not what I want in a game, and if I find a game with a decent population within my region of the world that provides a good game AND the people, I would probably drop this game in a heartbeat. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way and even if the majority just want more warcraft but with better graphics, a lot of us do not. Worth considering from a developer perspective.

I still don't know why they didn't stick with 1.23's battle system....

support, every mmorpg is the same, the one that would make a complete refreshed one is gonna be rich...RICH

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Originally Posted by Inuakurei

I still don't know why they didn't stick with 1.23's battle system....

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Because it was slow? Really, like FFXI you just went into auto-attack and let the character slowly build up TP to use a weaponskill/ability. And the attack delay was huge. Dragging the battle system out like that just made things more torturous, and the whole 1.23 system was still showing the legacy of the original action-system at release. It was broken fundamentally, and hence no amount of tinkering would fix all it's design flaws. That is why ARR's system is completely different.

That's not saying ARR's battle system with the GCD and full TP at start is flawless. But at least battles don't drag on unnecessarily and actually require you to do things, rather than just sit back and let your character attack on autopilot.

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Originally Posted by Gwaiyn

the same archaic dungeon system with LFG/LFR

<snip>

The original FFXIV <snip> had an ATB combat system which involved manually using your attacks to build up TP and then using that TP to attack with skills

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LOL, that mechanism was first seen in an MMO to my knowledge in .. 2002 with FFXI. Archaic or what?