Boring Endgame

[Colt47]

Almost every MMO which have been released since wow release have been dumbed down wow clones (FFXIV ARR included). Therefore I don't really see which games you re referring to when talking about games which tried to innovate.

Also players do not necessarily want innovation, but good RPG and decent raiding content.

There are countless way to implement such content, such as :

- Non instanced or instanced dungeons, which involve exploration and puzzle solving.
- Nonlinear raids, which involve exploration, with more than one boss per floor.

The problem with FFXIV is that every piece of content released in the game is too mundane on a game design standpoint (not talking about graphics), as if there were no passion from the people designing the content. It is hard to believe FFXIV has been designed by the same company which released FFX, FFXI and FFXII (3 amazing games on a game design standpoint).

A lot of games use a linear progression model on gear and stats even before World of Warcraft, it's just that it wasn't the focus of the game. The psychological effects of the shift from a slow, methodical leveling up and absorption of content to the rapid pacing of today are easy to see.

The reason we are probably seeing a lot of cloning going around is a combination of "me too" and "oh hey look it works", attitude. I'd greatly appreciate it if MMORPG designers brought back the idea of paragon leveling systems and epic loot instead of completely depending on some arbitrary end game currency grind. The original Final Fantasy XI had a good pacing on leveling up, it's just the time between story segments was far too long so people couldn't advance through the main quest scenario fast enough to care about it. The way they probably should have handled the story stuff in FFXI was have it fully completable at level 35, then have 15 levels to sort of enjoy expanding ones class, grind crafting, and do other things. Then when the next expansion hit they could start the next story at level 45-55, etc. That way we no longer need an end game where we all have to meat grind and repeat the same stuff continuously.

People like to think that the older MMOs were more "hardcore" than todays, but the reality is that they just had really bad pacing. If anything they were more casual than what we got now. Heck, it's like the standard frantic American work day got somehow ported into our games when you really look at the kinds of changes that have taken place.