Subscription deadline is coming up and the question is: will you subscribe?

[Chrysania]

What fixitman said was a bit harsh. @fixitman: Try saying that for those who are narrow-minded, to try to open their mind and try to experience the little things, like music, water mechanics, weather patterns, the beautiful sunrise/sunset. The starry night sky is also a beaut. Just, don't just call others simple-minded. You are just shutting them down and making them feel bad. It isn't going to fix the issue. =/

Those things are all well and good, and they did indeed make a rather pretty, atmospheric game with splendid music. Three cheers for their art department, in fact.


If the game itself is crap to play though, many won't bother. Right now, its not crap, but its not good (in my book); its pretty forgetable. That's arguably worse than bad, because at least bad is memorable and fixing bad is remembered; fixing forgettable is obligatory if you want anyone to care at all.

Secondly, the main story. If they keep the main story dungeon gated, they're going to lose a lot of players noted just now but forever after, because that is a PITA. And most don't care about 'how it separates the men from the boys' or 'makes people find fc's and be social": the competition its not making their games this kind of PITA to just log in and go solo play. This is making it unnecessarily difficult to get people to invest their time and energy in this game, and SE needs new blood to invest time and energy here so that they'll also invest money in the long haul.

Forced due to lack of quest content to grind xp, commonly via fates? That's just bloody lazy game design. It won't impress anyone, already alienaces some unknown quantity, and WILL, you can be sure, be a thing people remember in not-good ways. In an era of MMO design when bald-faced grind is commonly regarded as toxic and a great way to commit suicide in the western market, here SE comes with...rather a lot of bald-faced grind.

'Oh man, it was so fun to stand around mindlessly grinding in a zerg for weeks to level the rest of my main glass and every battle class after, then grind crafting so I can make one (1) thing in the entire game that anybody actually needs and most won't actually bother with! I'M HAVING THE TIME OF MY LIIIIIIIIIFE!' -- a quote from nobody, ever. (It is this author's belief that if you're having fun in ARR, you've never actually played any of the other MMO's on the market and are have probably lived in a very small shoebox for most of your life, as it is this author's observation that ARR does exactly nothing that many other MMO's haven't been doing better for quite some time. -Edit)

'This game feels very slow and unforgivably clunky to play compared to WoW, its crowned genre competitor. Even SWTOR's once notorious ability lag, a cause of enough concern to dissolve and drive off innumerable endgame and pvp focused guilds and individual players alike, pales in comparison to this one-legged slog through hip-deap B.S. Its so terrible that statedly instant-cast abilities are blatantly not, and are incapable of being. Some classes are vital to certain boss encounters for one ability, and can do little to nothing except wait to click that one ability when its needed because the global cooldown is so long they don't dare. Moreover, for many players, dodging enemy AoE's is unnecessarily difficult because, no matter where you are in the world relative to game servers, by the time you see something on your screen to dodge, there's a distinct chance its already hit you on the server's side. By the time you see it, its too late. By the time you dodge, its done and gone and you either took the damage or are dead.

Worse yet, though in another track of boiling failure, if you're a fan of Final Fantasy, you should look away now. You shouldn't have to remember a beloved series this way, carved up like a Frankenstein monster with a 2 hour game's story and a 10 hour game's quests spread out over 100+ hours of time-consuming grind and endless back-tracking for almost no reason at all other than to blatantly make you either spend a lot of gil teleporting or take a lot of time hoofing it.

If it were itself anymore, it wouldn't want to be remembered this way. Let it go. Pray that FFXV on the ps4 somehow washes away the taste of this failure that, unlike the Enterprise it shamelessly namerips, boldly goes nowhere we haven't gone too many times before.' -- the general reality this, right now, faces.

Its like that.