The most fun I've ever had playing this game ...
Happened last night at Castrum Novum.
It's been a long time since I've had the opportunity to experience what I experienced in that Imperial stronghold last night. While the content is by no means designed to be played this way and I'm sure it was just a side effect of patch day new content the experience was thrilling and exhilarating and I only wish I could do it again.
So I'm writing this post in the hopes that others might get a sense of what I'm talking about and the developers can try to plan content in the future that is intended to be played in this fashion.
So by now you're probably thinking "get on with it already!"
So I suppose there are a couple factors that made last night what it was.
1. Open-World Non-instanced content.
2. Mass amounts of players all cooperating.
Upon completing the initial GC quest that was released with patch 1.22b, (Don't Hate the Messenger) naturally I wanted to continue on to the next portion (United We Stand) which has you on a mission to infiltrate the new imperial stronghold Castrum Novum and put a stop to their evil plans to bring Dalamud crashing down on Eorzea. After watching the cutscenes from the previous quest in which the Eorzean Alliance was formed, I was pretty pumped up to go beat up some imperial soldiers. But alas, I was certainly no match for the Garlean army all by myself.
However, being impatient, excited, and curious I decided I would just head over to the gates and try to get a peek inside. I mounted up on my chocobo and headed over to the front entrance where I was greeted with a wonderfully nice cutscene, after which I was even more pumped up to see what was inside.
Upon exiting the cutscene I was shocked to see that there were dozens of players that had loaded up on my screen already engaged in combat with the enemy. It was like I had just entered a real war zone. Although I was alone and I wasn't getting any of the monster claims, I felt compelled to join in the fight and help these random parties fight their way through. At first I felt a little guilty for trying to piggy back on the efforts of others in order to complete my goal, but it soon proved to be more challenging than I think anyone anticipated. The shear number of characters on screen made it near impossible to see enemies and we often found ourselves being ambushed by large numbers of wolves and soldiers, as well as the occasional giant machina that could one shot you. Needless to say things were hectic and there were many deaths.
The machina in particular were especially powerful, and I often witnessed entire groups wipe on these. After getting through about the second or third gate people started to get a sense of urgency, and no one wanted to have to start over at the beginning. Although there wasn't much communication people began to cooperate. I noticed many people had changed jobs to white mage to help cure and raise the fallen, and often you would see individuals running back behind gates to try and raise someone before it closed. You would hear shouts from people telling others that a gate had opened and suddenly you'd see a dozen people mount up on chocobo and dash for the gate. People would stop to help take down the big robots regardless of who had the claim, even if they could have easily just ran past to the next area. A sense of comradery had formed between complete strangers in this chaotic battle and to me it was really incredible.
In the end I was picked up by a group of people I had never met as there were many others like myself who had made it to the boss without being in a full party. The large force consisted mainly of many small groups of maybe 3-4 people who all made it to the end by working as one massive force. So we gathered up 8 people and took on the boss. It took us a few tries to get it down, but by our last attempt we made it out with barely a scratch. All-in-All, through the cooperation of complete strangers, I was able to complete a goal that I had without needing to shout in town or any prior planning. I simply went to the area, joined up with the people who were there and got it done.
So the experience left me with this thought: "This is how MMOs should be." And I couldn't help wondering "Why can't this happen all the time?"
Shouldn't there be content that is designed to be this way? The developers need to create more content that many players can all experience simultaneously to complete a common goal. Content like FFXI's Campaign battles comes to mind. We need more of this type of large scale content, because it is simply amazing, and I had forgotten how great it can be.
Now I know there is some large scale content planned for 2.0, and the new graphics engine will support this as one of its main features is an increase to the maximum amount of characters on screen. So I just want to emphasize how much fun this type of content can be if executed correctly.
Let the community work together, don't force us into instances all the time. Things don't need to be organized and structured in order to be fun. Sometimes chaos is ok. We're human beings after all, not computers.
Anyways, I dunno if I've made myself clear or not, but this post has dragged on long enough, so I'll end it here.
btw, I made a little video that I think captures my emotions of the night pretty well, I'll put the link up when it's done uploading.
Here it is.