FFXIV draws too heavily on wow

and not enough on its original predecessors... and this might seam confusing given that the game is littered with other ff references and systems. yet everything from the shifting sense of narrative, the gameplay and even the boss design is drawing too heavily from WOW and not enough from other FF games.

it needs to look back at some of the older and better FF games and see what they did with combat and with story, then hopefully it will see that at this point it is coming too close to emulating the experience of wow. including all of its mistakes...

Most of the older FF games weren’t MMO’s I’m not sure how you can draw much from them except references

Like say you wanted to “draw inspiration” from………the fight against yu yevon. FF 10 is conditional turn based and Yuna has to sacrifice her aeon’s then fight their corrupted versions

Literally how would you emulate that as an action MMO

The narrative and boss designs are absolutely nothing like WoW. The gameplay takes inspiration from it but so does nearly every other MMO of the last 20 years. What are you wanting them to do, make an MMO turn based?

Every MMO ever tried to copy WoW for quite a long time. Why? Because it was the top MMORPG and given how rare it is for a competitor to succeed, the best way to convince any investor is to assure them it will copy its best competition.

But to an extent you're also wrong. FFXIV has many things that are different as well. There are games that copied WoW a lot more precisely than FFXIV, such as SWTOR, which was an actual carbon copy of WoW with lightsabers. They've since begun to copy lots of things from FFXIV for the same reason (I noticed they just did their graphics update to much the same mixed reactions as here).

They did initially try to ignore WoW and just copy FF11. The result of that was 1.0 which was a commercial failure. So at that point what other option was there than to look at what the top MMO was doing?

I do agree that they could take inspiration from some aspects of the single player games better to create other experiences though:

• Narratives that involve internal conflict between main characters.
• Being able to use items on eachother. Just for fun, but also useful for people that didn't unlock other jobs.
• Take the hunts right from FF16 and replace our current B ranks with them. It's a night and day difference.

Maybe use the various battle systems from those games to inspire other mechanics too, such as:

• The power configuration in FF16.
• The materia system from the original FF7.
• The slow but more strategic battle concept in the older games where the long recast times forced you to decide whether to heal or attack. To elaborate on this, it's easy to go on a healer and spam your DPS button 100% of the time, but if your recast time was 10 or 20 seconds, you'd have to consider more carefully whether your next action is an attack or heal because you won't get another chance for ages. The rest of that time could be spent doing mechanics. The game was at least closer to this before they added all these ability heals which completely evaporate that choice most of the time.

This game wishes it drew heavily on WoW, that game's combat is so much more enjoyable than this one.

what are you talking about
a majority of the final fantasy games are turn based so what combat could they pull from?

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I do agree that they could take inspiration from some aspects of the single player games better to create other experiences though:

• Being able to use items on eachother. Just for fun, but also useful for people that didn't unlock other jobs.

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I'm pretty sure you can use items on other players, can't you?
For instance, if your healer or somebody in Palace of the Dead gets inflicted with silence you can target them and use Echo Drops to cure it so they can keep attacking / healing

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Maybe use the various battle systems from those games to inspire other mechanics too, such as:

• The materia system from the original FF7.

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How would that system possibly work in an MMO setting?
The materia system in FF7 is hilariously broken
Every spell is single target until you give it an All materia in a linked slot
You can get x4 cut and other things to absolutely destroy enemies
I don't see that working with the materia they have us use now, because what would the point be of linking them?

They would have to completely rehaul the materia system (which I think it could do with, just not like this because some stats are not used like piety)

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

• The slow but more strategic battle concept in the older games where the long recast times forced you to decide whether to heal or attack. To elaborate on this, it's easy to go on a healer and spam your DPS button 100% of the time, but if your recast time was 10 or 20 seconds, you'd have to consider more carefully whether your next action is an attack or heal because you won't get another chance for ages. The rest of that time could be spent doing mechanics. The game was at least closer to this before they added all these ability heals which completely evaporate that choice most of the time.

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What games had long recast times?
You pretty much got to use a spell as soon as your bar filled back up, and if it took time to cast you could negate it with an accompanying haste spell
That, or you had a limited number of times you could use a certain spell in combat

Also, with how much people have been talking about healers in the forums I don't think reducing their one dps skill to a 20-30 recast time would do anything beneficial for them

Of course they'd need more skills, but even then it sounds absolutely dreadful to play in an MMO

A constantly updating, long running MMO taking inspiration from other MMOs instead of single player turn based RPGs... Who would've thought..

Tab-target MMO players when they play a tab-target MMO and it plays like a tab-target MMO

The issue with FFXIV isn't that it's attempting to emulate WoW, (It's not.)

The issue is that the FFXIV devs have become arrogant, just like the Blizzard in 2018. They think they can get away with anything, and everything. Oblivious to the rising discontent within their community by simply ignoring and brushing their feedback under the rug. Lower quality content, longer patch cycles, complete absence of communication, and the dev team being COMPLETELY out of touch with the community. There is clearly a slow bleed off of the community and I don't think they care.

Square Enix likely knows that they don't have to introduce much content into this game anymore to boost revenue. They can just put out a mogstation set/mount and all the whales will pay for the subs that have dropped off. Long term consequences be damned, they only pledged to keep this game around another 10 years, longer patches mean less work. And you bet the trashy mobile version is going to be raking in the money without any effort on their part. Welcome to games managed by AAA developers who prioritize profit over your personal enjoyment of their products.

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Originally Posted by NegativeS

Tab-target MMO players when they play a tab-target MMO and it plays like a tab-target MMO

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Could be worse. It could have better net-code and frame-rate, more enjoyable filler and moment-to-moment variety within rotations, be more responsive, more open to nuance, and have greater diversity in job and encounter profiles, etc. Then what monster would we be?

The problem with FF14 is, it is way too much a theme park game. The devs create new creatures and new quests and new areas with new landscapes and ... the players play it through once and that was it. And with a content patch you are easily done in a weekend. It is somehow a huge waste of ressources. And even the "exploration zones" aka Bozja etc. are like this. It has nothing to do with exploration. It is a very simple gated content. And yes, they repeat the errors, which the WoW devs already made. One error was: we do certain formulaic stuff over and over again because it worked in the past. The WoW devs learned from it. I guess, SQEX will hear the wake up call when they start to lose money on this game.





Cheers

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Originally Posted by CVXIV

I'm pretty sure you can use items on other players, can't you?

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Like using potions on people, or phoenix downs in battle, or anything else. Never really used Echo Drops on people so I didn't know about that one.

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How would that system possibly work in an MMO setting?

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It could have changes, but the concept of adding in different materias and obtaining them was fun.

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The materia system in FF7 is hilariously broken

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I don't think so at all. Of all the FF games I've played, I would say its materia system was the most fun thing to me personally because I could personalize everything.

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Every spell is single target until you give it an All materia in a linked slot

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That's not necessarily a problem. That could allow you to choose which elemental spell you want to be your AoE for example.

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You can get x4 cut and other things to absolutely destroy enemies

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That's a bit of an anomaly, quite far into the game as I recall (like with all the 4x materia), but even so it wouldn't necessarily be a problem if, say, it just buffed your auto attack rate by 4x, because we have auto attack buffs in the game.

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What games had long recast times?

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Whatever the recast time, it certainly felt longer than 2.5 seconds by default. So there was more of a factor of "should I heal or resurrect now?" since the next opportunity might be too late.

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with how much people have been talking about healers in the forums I don't think reducing their one dps skill to a 20-30 recast time would do anything beneficial for them

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It's not really just for healers. I have just thought what a piece of content that was more mechanically-focussed would be like, rather than the focus being on a DPS check or a 2 minute meta.

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Originally Posted by AlucaDragonheart

This game wishes it drew heavily on WoW, that game's combat is so much more enjoyable than this one.

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Yea... no. WoW Combat is a snoozefest.

if it is heavily based on wow why can't I murder my tanks as a DPS?

Drawing inspiration from story is fine as far as drawing from FF goes.

Anything beyond that, not really. Most of those games are turn-based, and none bar FF11 are MMOs. An MMO should not be drawing from single player games in any capacity, IMO.

This is just a misdiagnosis of the actual problems the game is facing. Most of the issues are related to complacency with respect to quality, and if it isn't complacency, then it's the overly rigid patch schedule, in combination with their inability to actually reflect on what content is released and when. It sometimes feels like they are out of touch with not only the community but with the game itself. Surely nobody in their right mind would think that it is healthy for an MMO to go nearly 4 years without a new substantive grind for all players. Too much stock is being put into 1-off experiences with a weekly objective tradeoff, and not enough into long-lasting repeatable content. Old content can only sustain players for so long.

None of the issues whatsoever are due to where they are drawing influence from, bar maybe story, but then you can draw inspiration from a stellar story, but still ultimately get undercut by poor writing and character development.

I recently decided to try wow and ff14 is nothing like wow in wow there are at least talent trees and classes feel diverse and not the same. And every mmo that came out since 2004 tried copying wow. And if ff14 was to copy anything from past ff games combat wise I think ff11 probably be the only best option.

If it is drawing too much from wow, why am I cursed to go through the exact same circular arenas with a single gigantic boss taking half my screen and solving stack, partners, limit cuts and countless chariot/dynamo or cross shaped AoE again and again like Sysiphus pushing that rock, instead of getting actual RPG dungeons and raids?

I mean, I could agree that the devs don’t seem to care much anymore about jobs having ‘FF flavour’ or references. Like, many of them ( *cough* Bard *cough ) have barely any resemblance or similarities to how they appear traditionally in FF. Like, White Mages don’t even use Cure or Cura! It’s a travesty I tell you!

Obviously though this only applies purely in design concept and not in actual practice cuz, you know, MMO lol.

I don’t think it’s ‘impossible’ to try and use inspiration from previous FF games and the way they present/execute their boss fights to inform how they’ll do it here. But in the same way, that can really only apply in purely conceptual terms - one it gets to ‘practical terms’ it then needs to be converted in an ‘MMO’ appropriate mechanic (which apparently means DDR lol)

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

I guess, SQEX will hear the wake up call when they start to lose money on this game.

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Therein lies the problem. When SE starts losing money on FFXIV, that's.. pretty much it, in their current market position -- none of their other activities are bringing in enough money to offset the combined development costs and overhead of the rest of the company. If they don't see a problem until the main product that has been keeping their game dev company afloat turns into a net loss too, it is too late for them to launch any recovery plan that doesn't involve bankruptcy and selling the IP to someone else.

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Originally Posted by Connor

the devs don’t seem to care much anymore about jobs having ‘FF flavour’ or references.

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PCT is heavily based on Relm Arrowny from FFVI, to the point a Lalafell Archon named after Relm is the creator of the school of magic in-universe, it actually leads to PCT being extremely flavourful, and tied to Gunbreaker(who is in turn based on Squall/Leon) as the XIV-original Job that has the strongest connection to past FF games, as opposed to RPR, VPR or SGE(Sage exists in other games but Sage as it is in FFXIV is so different it is Sage in name only).

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Originally Posted by VeyaAkemi

PCT is heavily based on Relm Arrowny from FFVI, to the point a Lalafell Archon named after Relm is the creator of the school of magic in-universe, it actually leads to PCT being extremely flavourful, and tied to Gunbreaker(who is in turn based on Squall/Leon) as the XIV-original Job that has the strongest connection to past FF games, as opposed to RPR, VPR or SGE(Sage exists in other games but Sage as it is in FFXIV is so different it is Sage in name only).

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‘Don’t seem to care much’ isn’t supposed to literally mean ‘do not care at all’.

The extent varies between jobs. Black Mages does what a ‘final fantasy BLM’ does, which can be boiled down to ‘uses elemental magic to attack’. Likewise with Pictomancer which can be distilled down to ‘draws magic pictures of creatures to do magic/attsck. Bard absolutely does not lol. It what. sings to power up its own arrow attacks? lol And some jobs have lost a lot of what made them feel closer to ‘traditional’ like Dragoons losing a bunch of Jump skills. To me the level of ‘Dragoon’ any job has is directly proportionate to the amount/frequency of Jumps lol. Hell they could make it like 22 Jump abilities and I’d be like ‘at least it’s a classic DRG’ lol. Or Astrologian having elements of its design that mirrored an FF ‘Time Mage’ like Time Dilation or Celestial Opposition. Plus Retrogradation from PvP in HW or SB lol, I remember you!

Summoner is another one that I’d say has ironically lost some of its ‘ff flavour’…in their attempts to make it more ‘traditional ff’ lol. The job is usually associated with two things; high MP costs on a variety of versatile summon spells, and having generally long cast times on those summons. Instead we only have 3 summons out of the billions of options we could’ve had, and to make things worse the job’s entire identity is being siphoned into association with a single summon (Bahamut lol).

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Originally Posted by sindriiisgaming

and not enough on its original predecessors... and this might seam confusing given that the game is littered with other ff references and systems. yet everything from the shifting sense of narrative, the gameplay and even the boss design is drawing too heavily from WOW and not enough from other FF games.

it needs to look back at some of the older and better FF games and see what they did with combat and with story, then hopefully it will see that at this point it is coming too close to emulating the experience of wow. including all of its mistakes...

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Did you play retail WoW? I suppose not, because the bosses' design in FFXIV are the barebones of the bosses' design in retail WoW.

An example would be a boss fight in WoW where you attempt to run away from the boss until you reach the end line without letting it catch you. Another boss fight has you riding a minecart to escape from the dungeon's boss while throwing explosives at it. My favorite boss design to date in WoW was where you have to mount up and chase the boss across the dungeon's map, or mount up and escape far away before a one-shot area-wide mechanic catches you.

Meanwhile, FFXIV bosses are simply you fighting a boss in a circular or a square arena, with most of the mechanics being a partywide attack, tank buster, and a stackmarker. Definitely nothing alike.

And WoW drew from Everquest and whatever big MMO comes next should draw from WoW, GW2, ESO, and FF XIV.

Unless they're just gonna jump forward and make Sword Art Online, you build upon what worked in the past. You learn from their success and mistakes and try and make a better product.

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Originally Posted by Kranel_San

Meanwhile, FFXIV bosses are simply you fighting a boss in a circular or a square arena, with most of the mechanics being a partywide attack, tank buster, and a stackmarker. Definitely nothing alike.

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You forgot the overly flashy 15 seconds long wind-up animation for the boss that signifies he will slice either right or left side of the arena. Don't forget to move 1 inch in the opposite direction while hugging the boss's bum.

And if developers feels daring, they might throw an In/Out mechanic. Are you excited already?

Hot take. FFXIV doesnt copy other MMOs enough. The reason WoW was / is so successful is because it copies other successful things from other MMOs or copies things and makes them better.

Dont try and reinvent the wheel.

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Originally Posted by Hallarem

Hot take. FFXIV doesnt copy other MMOs enough. The reason WoW was / is so successful is because it copies other successful things from other MMOs or copies things and makes them better.

Dont try and reinvent the wheel.

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Mao heard from friend whats played FFXIV 1.0 that designer of FFXIV 1.0 ignored what was learned from other MMOs and decided to "reinvent the wheel". Anyones know if what friend said is true?

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Originally Posted by Thaciscokidd

And WoW drew from Everquest and whatever big MMO comes next should draw from WoW, GW2, ESO, and FF XIV.

Unless they're just gonna jump forward and make Sword Art Online, you build upon what worked in the past. You learn from their success and mistakes and try and make a better product.

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Even if you jump forward and make a Sword Art Online game irl. It has to be based on things from the past generations, and the anime was already based on JRPGMMOs from 2000s to 2010s era.

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Originally Posted by Eraden

Mao heard from friend whats played FFXIV 1.0 that designer of FFXIV 1.0 ignored what was learned from other MMOs and decided to "reinvent the wheel". Anyones know if what friend said is true?

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No

Legacy was garbage was because it tried to be FFXI 2.0 but lacked everything that made 11 actually good and substituted the lack of depth with puddle deep content and sky high PC spec requirements for the stupidest reasons

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Originally Posted by Eraden

Mao heard from friend whats played FFXIV 1.0 that designer of FFXIV 1.0 ignored what was learned from other MMOs and decided to "reinvent the wheel". Anyones know if what friend said is true?

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Copy and paste was one of the biggest problems of 1.0. They reused basically everything multiple times.

https://i.ibb.co/h8HRfwt/ff14-1-0-c-p.jpg



Cheers

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Originally Posted by Eraden

Mao heard from friend whats played FFXIV 1.0 that designer of FFXIV 1.0 ignored what was learned from other MMOs and decided to "reinvent the wheel".

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Ignored what was learned from other MMOs, that is correct. They didn't even play any other MMOs or do any market research.

However, a quick analysis of 1.0 and of FF11 makes it pretty obvious that they were trying to make FF11 version 2, because there are a lot of similarities between the two games. They did need a version 2 because I think that FF11's engine wasn't able to be salvaged (it seems they concluded it wouldn't hold up to future technology as early as 2005 because that's when FF14 development started and it's evident by the fact they gave up trying to port it).

There are some examples of less rigid ideas than 2.x had, for sure, but mostly it was taking inspiration from what the team knew (FF11).

It's not like they are incapable of doing things completely differently. They recreated FF15 and FF16 mechanics for the crossover events and they recreated Monster Hunter and Fall Guys. They made Deep Dungeons. And many of them worked on FF11 itself. It's just a choice to do it the current way.

Maybe Square should start and copy more from wow, so we have a real meta, good dungeons, nice open world content, nice chances for grind etc etc etc, because final is lacking in every aspect compared to wow

I don't think they fully appreciated a lot of the variety the earlier versions of FFXIV (from 2.0, I mean) had because it aped so much of WoW when trying to turn things around.

At least as far as the battle system goes (including job design), many earlier dungeons, raids and trials brought more elements from RPG games to the table because they did so in WoW. As time has gone on, many elements have been "streamlined" away and they've focused on making more fights like Titan, more fights like a8s and fewer fights like Ramuh Ex, Ifrit Ex or a5s.

Whichever type most players prefer, over the years it has led to less variety in encounters and jobs and them trying to pass off FFXIV as a more traditional action game than as a hotkey based MMO, which it is not. I don't think it will easily or cheaply become a pure action game because the foundation wasn't built with that in mind. Many players tend to think of WoW as more responsive and fun on a moment to moment level in combat and I think that's heavily tied up with its generally better ping, and even despite that they tend to have more RPG elements than FFXIV at this point. And, while many enjoy (or even prefer) FFXIV's pseudo fighting game action timings involving "combo strings" of longer action chains and weaving abilities between spells/weaponskills, many in that system also cheat to increase the frames and time they have they can do these actions without clipping their GCD using add-ons, so I'm not positive that gameplay alone is enough to carry the battle system, especially as it gets more and more similar with the 2min meta singularity.