SE enough of the treadmill, please make the game more interesting!

[Delily]

Duelle,

You seem to be happy with the limited stats we have now. Is it easier to balance than if we had additional stats? Of course.

But at least for me (and various people in this thread), the itemization is very predictable and boring. I'm glad you like it, but I'm leaving my feedback that I'd like to see more than just the same pattern of "+VIT, + [Main Stat]" for every single new gear set as the gear grind continues.

The game feels very basic and boring in many ways because of it.

He's simplified the combat in this game, removed Party Combos, simplified stats, etc. to try and ensure balance but I feel (just my opinion) that he's stripped away the soul of the game as well. It feels very calculated and he relies on silly Team Jump Rope / Gimmicks encounter design to compensate. Again, some people like this, others don't.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the need to start with a clean foundation (and as few variables as possible), but his approach seems to have gone too far in that simplified direction. Square's Design department have created decades worth of fantastic RPG systems and itemization (granted most of them for single player games), but there are great ideas there and they've had plenty of post-mortems after development as well to learn from.

The bold part is important, because MMOs are not single player games. While that much is obvious, the implications may not be. When I play a game like Skyrim, Dragon Age, Planetscape, etc, my actions only effect myself. I can play the game how I want, and designers can offer more compelling customization, more intricate battle systems, and more varied itemization because the focus is on a single player.

MMOs, on the other hand, have become graphical spreadsheets. Customization is an illusion since people will crunch the numbers, determine the optimal setup, and people will follow suit, because people want to be efficient as possible when it comes to running content. Also, the more complex the system, as you mentioned, the harder it is to balance a game. It's not interesting, but keeping itemization and customization simple reduces the churn on an individual level and lets the designers focus on more compelling content (in theory).

With that in mind, the comment of the game being "boring and basic" speaks to a much larger issue within the MMO genre itself. I think a good article on it can be found here: http://mud.co.uk/richard/The%20Decline%20of%20MMOs.pdf.

I think the issue here is that FFXIV is aiming to be a story driven MMO, and it succeeds for the most part; the main questline pulls you through to the hard leveling cap and even a bit afterwards, but then the whole thing falls apart. After that you're left with either leveling new characters, which becomes tedious, or running the gear gauntlet.