FFXIV: ARR becoming TORtanic

[Chrysania]

Help me understand your complaint. An MMO requires subs, so you need people to be logging in to do stuff every few days. You hate gear treadmills, and don't want to have to "grind to beat the boss". So, if you had YoshiP's ear, what would you tell him to do? Have the main story quest give you fully materia'd i90 items and put you up against Bahamut? Then, after no reward for beating him, you can do what you do in every FF game and watch a cutscene before turning it off? If you had to pitch that to SE shareholders as a reliable option for a sub-based game (or any game that requires servers), how do you think that would go?

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your complaint, though.

I'd tell him to put a focus on cooperative story-driven activities, not filler. Every game has grind in it, but the best games will leave you feeling like they had no grind at all. How do they do it?

They make their grind fun, with 'fun' being a notion strongly tailored to the milieu or genre of the game at hand.

Gear treadmills put the emphasis on ever-better gear. The whole point of the game funnels into the gear treadmills. The story; the only thing that could possibly set ARR apart from every other gear treadmill game out there; is presently a disjointed, ricepaper-thin thing that YoshiP should be tailoring his game to richly and warmly invite everyone into, and never stop.

Right now, it stops at level 15, 16 and 17. Three back to back dungeons you are forced into if you want to not only continue on the main storyline, but even be able to do regional quests. You are grounded until you do those chores...er, I mean...stuck until you do those dungeons. Yeah, I was just as apt the first time.

Anyway, that's the first, but not the last, example of what needs to go. The main story should be pure Final Fantasy; a gripping tale in which you're the big gorram hero, and you sally forth and do stuff. The main story should walk you by your pretty little nose from questing zone to questing zone, and each questing zone should have numerous local quests in it for you to do. Why should it do that? Because nobody has fun not having a clue what they're 'supposed to be doing now'. While 'supposed to be doing' is a very flexible notion in the context, it should not be in the core leveling game. You're supposed to be where the main story has taken you, and you're supposed to be doing this cunningly crafted, unraveling skein of regional storylines while you're there.

Fates don't suck; they just need more context and relevance. They frequently just...happen on random timers, most of them. Some of them have to be touched off by specific activities, even if that's no more than clicking on a person.

That should be the other way around, and the idea should be expanded upon immensely. A fate should not be a boring-arse not-actually-random event that happens in the same place every 10 minutes in exactly the same way no matter what. A fate should be a reactive event.

Reactive to what? Some player somewhere doing something, even if its no more than clicking on an NPC. Or it could be a lot more. Certain fates could go off all around the entrance of a cave dungeon every 5th time the final boss in it croaks, and a nearby town might pop up with a fate in which they need fishermen to help thin the local waterways of HORRIBLE STILL-LIVING PIECES OF <boss that died> that, incidentally, the dodos seem to love eating.

More thought needs to be put into these things, in short. They need to be crafted into something that flows with a coherence that supports the main story. It is all about that story.

The whole game is about that story. Final Fantasy's keystone is its story. Without that, you have nothing worth writing home about. Look at every Final Fantasy ever. Subtract the story and just look at the games themselves. Some were pretty awful, ya? Clunky, unnecessarily complicated sometimes; changing things just so it'd be different from the last game sometimes; great sometimes?

For most Final Fantasy fans, and RPG fans on the whole, those elements are secondary to the story. Its all a vehicle for the story.

So, how do you make story something viable to the needs of an MMO? MMO's need their hamsterwheels between content releases, right? Yes! Yes they do!

STORY THOSE EFFING THINGS. Don't just put a thin, sad scent of story excuse on a dungeon we'll be herded into and forced to run hundreds of times just so we can run the next dungeon hundreds of times.

You want to make us run a single dungeon a whole lot? Put some effing effort into it. Make that dungeon FUN, first off. Don't make it tedious. Throw some wildcard elements into that sucker; throw some fate-like events into that dang thing. Come up with 15 different bosses, only 3 of which will ever appear on a given run, each with their own mechanics and storied reasons for being there.

Random Dungeon Generators. Look into this technology for content you want to make hamsterwheels out of. How much more fun would people be having with these placeholder group-focused affairs if they truly didn't know quite what to expect every time they set foot into Magical Dungeon'o'Doom?

This last run, it looked like a sewer and was poorly lit and was full of undead. Now its purple-illuminated, slightly foggy castle halls and we've got weird mutant beasties all over.

Splatter random events throughout. A random event could be a door that makes the party answer a riddle before letting them pass (and spawning monsters each time they get it wrong), spontaneous quests (One of the hostages you just rescued is a fellow adventurer that wants to tag along and help you defeat the boss that imprisoned her! Bonus rewards at the end if he survives to the end!) to do with the thing and general encouragement to do more exploring and less racing to nowhere.

You set up gear treadmills and all you encourage people to do is get on them as fast as they can reach them, then race on them until they're exhausted. Why not? The only thing that matters in a gear treadmill game, according to the game itself, is its conclusion; the gear treadmill. Its a very poetic nicety to observe that 'the journey is the point', but lets face it; that's not true in a gear treadmill MMO.

It might be sage advice to preserve one's own sanity with despite the point gear-treadmill games establish, but its always despite them, in defiance of their inexorable downward spiral into treadmill hell.

Don't go there. There's no need. Not when nobody in the entire industry is even trying to engage its playerbase at 'endgame' intervals with anything exploration-oriented. Gear can be part of it. Vanity can be a huge chunk of it.

YoshiP, take a note from one of the smartest things Guild Wars 2 did; don't make top-stat gear all that hard to get. Make awesome appearances and customization options the chief carrot on most of your sticks.

Then, take a note from one of the best things WoW's ever done; make the crafting of a relic akin to the crafting of a legendary in WoW - practically a community ordeal requiring the concerted efforts of many. Don't make legendaries do obscenely greater damage per hit than anything else; make them bloody AWESOME to behold, and give them a gimmicky special power that's either flashy or, indeed, just plain useful. Most importantly, Final Fantasy the hell out of this process. Make the quests for it appropriately epic for all involved, give crafters their own contributory quests (Let several player crafters of different sorts have their Cid-crafting-Excalibur style moments).

Then, take a note from FINAL FANTASY and don't make it a giant PITA to level; make leveling combat classes a Final-Fantasy-Fun experience.

It'll be more work, avoiding the treadmills. Treadmills are so easy every idiot game out there's been doing them forever.

It'll be work that's worth it when you craft a method of 'endgame' that keeps people busy without putting the entire emphasis of your game on gear when it should be on the story.

And that's the summary of what I'd tell Yoshi; he has to make the 'endgame' of his game support the game itself. Nobody looks forward to being max level so they won't have anything to do anymore, after all. They often want to be max level 'because that's when the real game starts'.

The real game should start at level 1. 'Endgame' should not be a gear treadmill, but an activity and community-building endeavor.

Here's an idea: lead up to major content releases with community activities. Don't just drop a new expansion; have our gatherers and crafters do grand company quests making things and contributing materials to build ...lets say airships...so we can oh...fly the army to <place> and kick the next expansion off.

Mundane stuff? Sure. But its the sort of concept a server's entire community can rally behind. Incentive to do it? Make it a bit of a competition between servers, with the top 3 getting a month-long <Yay BuffNameGoesHere> buff of some sort for the whole server to enjoy while bamfing around the new content.

And then have some epic bossfights or invasion events or whatever-might-contextually-fit-a-theoretical-expansion's-theme so people can go charging around blowing crap up in the days leading up to said expansion.

See, while I'm sure none of these ideas are perfect, and all of them would take more work than the same tired old crap, can anyone here see how the work might damn well be worth it?

Who here would like their 'endgame dungeons' to be well-crafted randomly generated affairs with spontaneous events that'd sometimes go off inside, different bosses you might never see twice and fun/weird things with nothing to do with combat sometimes spontaneously being generated therein (like a door asking riddles, or an optional, randomly-generated puzzle; solve it for a treasure box and tokens or something!)

Wouldn't it be a lot more interesting if, via intelligent preparation, 'endgame' never really happened? What if incremental content releases built the story up between major releases, and each major release was presaged by in-game events that gradually scaled up to release day, wherewith...BAM! THE EPIC CONCLUSION of <Stuff that was built up over the last 4 months> and...a new season begins!

YoshiP, look at it more like producing an ongoing television series and less like an MMO, in that respect. Tell an amazing story. Let us feel like we're part of it while you hide the grind in Final Fantasy story up to our ears.

Give that a whack. Nobody's doing THAT these days, much as they probably should.

[Keneblerz]

TLDR

Can we have a shorter one?

I shall sing it to you in the language of your people: harparp derp derrrrrp herperp.

This made me laugh so hard LOL.

[Chrysania]

Can we have a shorter one?

I shall sing it to you in the language of your people: harparp derp derrrrrp herperp.

[Akaasha]

I shall sing it to you in the language of your people: harparp derp derrrrrp herperp.

Made me laugh

[Arriverderci]

I shall sing it to you in the language of your people: harparp derp derrrrrp herperp.

Post of the year.

[Miinister]

They should hire you Chrysania, effing good ideas. I want to play the MMO you envision and wonder why they can not do these simple things to make it FUN.

[Aenarion]

I want to play the MMO you envision and wonder why they can not do these simple things to make it FUN.

Time and money. It's one thing to sit here as fans thinking about the things we want, it's quite another when you're SE and have to pay for it, especially in such a short time frame.

[Yoko_Kurama]

Time and money.

Pathfinder Online, google it. Should launch in 2016, a game that was designed and funded by actual fans who know the genre and what an RPG should be. They actually proposed the idea of a real mmo-rpg which goes back to the rpg roots and asked for donations and said if they reached a mill they would begin the project...they reached more than a mill really fast lol.

[Chrysania]

They should hire you Chrysania, effing good ideas. I want to play the MMO you envision and wonder why they can not do these simple things to make it FUN.

Mighty kind of you to say!

Its long been an observation of mine that mmos are very commonly unfriendly environments and bad games, with the few that are not are cutesy or childishly shallow.

Why, for example, must it be regarded as a staple in mmos for there to be grind you will absolutely hate? Are we still trying to justify this lazy design absence as some sort of 'rite of passage'? Its not good game design; its crap.

Why also must mmo's be work? I define work as labor you may or may not enjoy, but must do whether you like it or not, for this concern.

While it is true that people tend to value more highly that which they feel they have earned, mmos try perhaps too hard to make you feel invested thusly (and more likely to keep passing whether you want to or not lest you have 'wasted all that time') and too little trying to genuinely earn that kind of loyalty.

To this, I think something my husband recently said says it best: "MMO's are like abusive friends in virtually every way. They're very demanding, prone to being manipulative and doing everything they can at all times to make you think you need them, when, in fact, they need you."

And its bloody well true. So why do we put up with it?

Do we, in general, not write yet imagine that it could be better? MMO makers are quick to bemoan how hard and expensive it is, yet it looks to me like the vast majority of their time and efforts are not spent trying to bring us a better game, but rather, refine ways to maximize our time wastes and treadmills.

They say its soooo hard to 'balance'. I suspect the truth is that its hard to make sure we can't have too much fun with any given thing. The balance they actually mean isn't the one we tend to assume.

I won't say that its cheap and easy to make a great game to modern specs, and mmo's have ongoing costs to boot. But I do not think it is as difficult as they would have us believe. Or, at last, it shouldn't have to be if they weren't so often trying to please too many types of gamers at once, and consequently leaving them all often dissatisfied.

MMO's should specialize. They should target a specific market and serve it well rather than trying to 'do it all' and generally sink at everything.

Why? Because WoW has been doing it all for 8 years, and if you can't do even one thing better than WoW, you cannot compete.

SWTOR, as a shining example, should have been more like mass effect as a game, because that style of game is something bioware does very well. Powerful action, great storytelling and lots of dialige-driven character development is, I'd daresay, what most of the audience wanted, along with space combat and rather a lot more to explore in general.

Nobody got what they wanted with SWTOR, however. You'd almost think they set out to screw it up in the most screwed up way possible, at least if you were me.

Here, 1.0 was...junk. Only the most undeterable bothered fighting with its insanities to play it, and having beta'd it, I can well say that SE WA told mammy times and in many different ways by many that out was a bad job and would not, as it was, go far.

I was there one day when a rep asked the group I was in for or opinion on something we'd just done and, in being told some things he clearly didn't want to hear, told us we obviously didn't understand the thing that was bad, and it was fine; we were the problem.

I remember it well, because it was the day I decided never to touch ff14 again.

Here I am though. Its not the same game, that's for sure, but its still an mmo in that it trites very hard, and very transparently, to waste as much of your time as possible while utterly minimizing its own effort on anything at all.

Maybe, just maybe, it could try being a good game instead, and the equivalent of a good business partner at least. Friend might be too alien to hope after.

[Gaddes]

The sad thing is that SWTOR actually had a lot to do on launch, despite however its popularity might've waned afterwards.

The one thing SWTOR kicks FFXIV's butt at is maintaining story quests/cutscenes for far longer than XIV does. The biggest problem I've had with XIV's content is the sharp dropoff once you've completed the main quest. With SWTOR, if you finish one class's large storyline, then you can go and do all of the other ones, and have brand new story content to keep you interested for far longer than XIV. Sure XIV has class quests/storylines, but they are so miniscule and far apart compared to SWTOR's. So once I've finished my main story with my first XIV class/job, there instantly doesn't feel like as much to do with my other classes/jobs in XIV in comparison. Then again, I am partial to plot and cutscenes as opposed to grinding endgame, and some people like grinding endgame, so for them this isn't a bad scenario.