how long do you think 14 will last?

[Magistrella]

snip

Problem with that now is: Noone in their right mind would play a game like that. Not even myself - back then i had time, i was in school and later studying so i had plenty of free time. Now working and with time consumed by RL i wouldn't touch a RPG/MMO if i couldn't reach my goals in a reasonable amount of time. Hence why i didn't buy Witcher III for example - im not pouring in 100+h on a offline game anymore (and not even finish it 100% except if i double my playtime). It might be good and i'd enjoy it, but it would take me too long to complete and i'd just go back to XIV and be like "what could i have done in that time here". And in the end the game would sit on the sideboard. Never to be touched again unlike a MMO like XIV ^.~

[Sapphic]

Agreed. MMO devs are so afraid of innovation.

Look at the last couple of MMOs which tried to innovate. Wildstar and Elderscrolls. Both went free to play.

I don't think it's as much the devs that are afraid to innovate, but the highest part of the playerbase that is scared of innovation. Add in how much capital is now required to produce a AAA title, millions, then add on the constant investments that have to be made with MMOs, maintaing the staff for updates and content, server, server housing and bandwidth costs etc then the fear is justified. Just like any company, software houses want to try to minimize loss and make a profit.

Look at the most succesful game franchises, they are pretty much a yearly clone with a slightly different sub standard story, or just slight tweaks. Talking CoD, any EA sports games, The Sims. Assassins Creed. Just have to look any MMO forums at how many posts you get asking for it to have x, y and z features from the posters previous MMO.

Indy games is the only place where you see innovation in games design which have a limited player base appeal. But the investment they put in (small team, low budget) is like a drop of water in comparison to what SE, for example, had to invest into redeveloping FFXIV.

Simple fact is, if the market was out there for true innovation in games design then AAA companies would invest into it. But until the majority of the gamers actually opened upto instead of sticking within their "safety zone" we will never see large scale innovation.

[Eul]

I think this is the only MMO I've played that has soooo many variety like glamour your equip (This is the only reason I keep playing hehe ), crafting, 1 character many job, housing, and much more I can't explain with word.

[Odstarva]

How long will this game last? How long!?

Forever of course!

[Allyrion]

People are always like "WE WANT INNOVATION" but then the don't say what they really want. Plus innovation is risk. Especially if people don't know what they want and just say "different". FFXIV will crash and burn quickly if it tries to cater to only a small population.

Plus there is a lot of innovation in this game but people ignore it. It's just annoying.

They want innovation and risks. Then when it doesn't go their way, they'll just bail or complain that SE ruined the game.

This "I want new things for the sake of newness" is such an empty complaint.
Throughout 2.0 they filled the game with extra casual content when endgame was bare-bones at launch.
They added so much different things to do over ARR, it's crazy.

Heavensward is the same.
The Airships might be glorified ventures now, but we know it's going to be a new type of content in the coming patches.
There's no reason not to expect new types of content going forward.

Alternate gearing paths or open world content requests are at least real feedback rather than "SE, do something! I'm bored!"

On the hardcore side,
Savage is pretty awesome and no one has cleared it yet.
So that's something to work on.

Even if it's just the new Coil, the encounters in this game are interesting and unique each time.
Those high quality encounters are where most of the development goes, and it's worth it.

Most things in this game are pretty well polished to a remarkable degree.
When they add things, it's in bulk (but with a lot of intricate details).
Asking for variety just for the sake of it, is only asking to spread themselves thin.
Then what we get will be less refined than what we have.

[BubblyBoar]

Agreed. MMO devs are so afraid of innovation.

I get so tired of comments like this when it's been proven time and time and time again that people don't really want innovation when they say they do. And very rarely do innovative concepts actually do well. This is especially true with gaming.

[Remus]

I can see FFXIV lasting for quite a while but the only reason why i say that is because its a Final Fantasy game. In all honest this game is keeping afloat because its Final Fantasy. Right now the game isn't all the interesting once you hit end-game in my personal opinion there is so many caps on stuff I log off so early and won't need to come back till Tuesday they allow people to level multiple classes but lock how fast you get gear for them might as well make people just pick one.Recently i tried a game called SkyForge pretty fun shares similar system of classes to Final Fantasy where you can be all classes they have a cap people complained and people are leaving left and right. You shouldn't have such a low cap when you have such a system in place of playing all classes on one character and it feels like they don't feel confident in their content and believe people would just leave. I would level another class but getting another class to 60 is just so time consuming and not fun for me.

When it comes to a game living the brand also takes a part in it. Also the reason why you may think this game doesn't do much is because remember Yoshi-p had to turn 1.0 into a success so SE could get their money back and that's about it. In 2.0 i let it slide how we geared, how patches were done because they were still recovering from 1.0. Expansion comes only think that was added was new story, areas and flying mounts, once we hit 60 its just 2.0 again with 2 dungeons ex primals and a raid. In the expansion they didn't really try anything new at end-game and everything just feels the same but were in a different location.

If they continue like this I can see their subs slowly declining because there isn't any change in the game. We can already predict what is coming in the next patch up to the next a expansion. 3.1 will just have 3 new dungeons, extreme trial, story, 24 man raid just like 2.1. Sometimes if a game is starting to fail that is when they begin to innovate and try things to bring people back and I agree with the person who says i would like this game to start going down hill so they can see how poorly they are doing right now then start making the changes which the community are saying to make the game better (lets be honest how often do they even listen to the english community?? only when we have 50-60 pages+ then getting a reply saying they give to the dev team which could highly likely mean no they can't do it because server). Also don't get me started on the amount of things we have suggested and they replay with "That would be hard to do and cause server stress" even though almost every other mmo has done it.

[KisaiTenshi]

Look at the last couple of MMOs which tried to innovate. Wildstar and Elderscrolls. Both went free to play.

I think, the greater sense of the problem is that there are simply "too many" MMO's and instead of 100 companies trying to produce their own copy, what should happen is the same thing that has happened with Smart Phones, is that 2 or 3 companies (eg SE and Blizzard) continue to produce the Themepark AAA MMO's, and everyone else bring their best bits and ideas to form "The World" as a (cloud) open platform where each company who wants to be part of "The World" donates the hardware required to run their idea, while every "game" has a pooled playerbase.

So no progress is "lost" by switching "themeparks" so to speak. The investment on the player-side is just enough CPU and memory resources "in the cloud" so that they have their own personal instance equivalent to an apartment. They choose where "the door" of their apartment leads to (Eg a MMORPG, a MMOTPS, etc.) If bad game ideas perish, the hardware remains part of the cloud for that company to try again, or can be "set free" to expand someone elses idea.

As for how a company makes extra money from this, is by leveraging the less damaging part of the existing "Freemium" model where outfits and dyes can be bought to change assets, or having players send 3D models of themselves or objects to place in "The World" , the basic parts would simply be supported by a type of pay-what-you-want structure.

Some places will be free to play in, other places are "pay what you want, next milestone at $$$$$"

And before anyone jumps in and says "you're describing SL", no I'm not. SL is more of a balkanized sandbox where nothing you do in SL matters, just keep paying money to maintain your private island. What I'm describing is a world that anyone can jump into and find their comfort zone, without having to lose "time sunk" due to a subscription, but rather you pay to play the portions you want to support, and you can always stop paying if other commitments come up and still be able to play with the game at any time.

But this is probably not feasable due to a propensity to "Not-invented-here"

[Sessurea]

Dunno, I feel i'll always be dragged back for raid content. And i'll always quit when they remove lockout/put echo. Just wish there wasn't that raid downtime =/

[Havenae]

FF14 will last as long as 11 did.

But like 11 it will only continue to grow so long as a newer MMO worth it's weight doesn't come out. SE is good at making MMOs that are generally classified as "Okay to play for now". As soon as a new iteration of the MMO model comes along you'll see the majority of players pack up and bounce, just like they did in FFXI. Mostly this will be due to SE's inability to design progressively and would rather play it safe while continuing their 'routine'.

As for...

Look at the last couple of MMOs which tried to innovate. Wildstar and Elderscrolls. Both went free to play.

It's not about innovation. It's about expectation. Yoshida did an interview a while back explaining why FFXIV will most likely never F2P. His explanation was because they didn't have to worry about investors so much. SE as a company can front most if not all of their development costs. Most other studios don't have that. Wildstar was created by Carbine, Carbine relied on investors to put up the money to develop their game. Bioware did the same thing with SWTOR, Zenimax likey a similar story.

The expectation on this games has for some strange reason been a 100% return investment upon launch. The problem is.. The MMO genre is a timesink. Not just for us the players, but for the developers as well and by proxy it's investors. It's an 'over-time' business. It's not meant to work as immediate returns, it never has in the past and it certainly doesn't now. that's why the subscription model is always preferred for new MMOs as over the long term it generates more profit. However when you have investors breathing down your neck asking, "Where's my money?" Free to play conversion starts looking really nice to generate a large sum in the short term to get them off your back. But by that time, because you did that conversion, your game is seen as a failure because it couldn't generate enough revenue based on it's original model.

But back to innovation... Wildstar and ESO didn't really try to innovate. They did what all of these developers keep doing. they take the generic MMO model add a gimmick that's really just a 'for show' thing and then throw it out there. They don't attempt to rewrite the model. In fact Carbine all but stated their primary goal was to recreate Vanilla WoW and "do it right this time". A rewrite which is what this genre actually needs, it's what generated so much buzz for EQN two years ago as that's exactly what they stated there were going to do.

Of course FFXIV hasn't innovated anything either. they're either using things native to the FF series or what every other MMOs is doing. The difference and why this game has succeeded so far is because of positive buz due to contrast in comparison between 1.0 and 2.0 as well as having a legend of an IP and an already loyal (arguably fervorant to a fault) fanbase that will buy up just about anything that SE puts their stamp on.

Aside from that it's stable. If nothing else it outshines the many other MMOs launched since (the MMO who shall not be named) that doesn't feel like it's going to collapse under it's own ambition at any moment. Wildstar, ESO, SWTOR, and so on felt shoddy in every sense of the word. They felt rushed, they felt incomplete, they felt low on polish and quality, and so on.

Innovation would be more than welcomed in this genere. The problem is... No body seems to have the balls to do it.