Game too complex or easy?

[Catwho]

What was hard in FFXI?

Unless you're equating hard with time consuming or needlessly convoluted.

99% of XI's "difficulty" could be boiled down to one of three things:
- Needlessly long travel time (without the Tidal Talisman, getting to Einherjar required a 10 minute boat ride with a 10 minute wait if you missed, or using a consumable item to travel through a maze then running through aggressive territory, which also took about 10 minutes. Tidal Talisman cut that down to three zones and five minutes, only one zone of which had aggressive mobs.)
- Unforgiving, no do-over mechanics (you lost control of Dynamis Lord, it was all over) thanks to strategies that required 2-hour abilities
- Competition between groups for scarce resources (HNM pop claims, scheduling Dynamis zones, and rare party members)

XIV eliminates the travel time and makes building a party for any given content much less frustrating (cross-server duties in Duty Finder, and Party Finder.) Open world resources like Hunt NMs are shared and all fights are instanced so you don't need to reserve Coil Turn 9 two weeks in advance. This isn't necessarily making the game easier so much as it is removing the tedious pointless BS that is anything but actually playing the game.

What IS actually easier: XIV is considerably more forgiving about failed attempts. Imagine having to get ejected and then go build another pop set each time you failed Titan HM. That was FFXI.

[Obysuca]

99% of XI's "difficulty" could be boiled down to one of three things:
- Needlessly long travel time (without the Tidal Talisman, getting to Einherjar required a 10 minute boat ride with a 10 minute wait if you missed, or using a consumable item to travel through a maze then running through aggressive territory, which also took about 10 minutes.

Just going to say. You could have always spent the few IS and took Azouph Isle staging point and ran there in like ~5 mins >_>

Imagine having to get ejected and then go build another pop set each time you failed Titan HM.

Tbh, if they had kept that and put it into XIV, I'm sure a lot of players would stop sucking and learn to dodge/listen to the strategy and not cause wipe after wipe after wipe. If you knew that a wipe meant spending a while to refarm the pop to try again, you'd sure definitely want to try your best to not wipe.
Very accessible = too many people causing too many wipes causing unneeded stress.
I've seen so many people pull miracles out of their @ss on XI to ensure a victory. While on XIV, I've seen countless number of pts just go "Just wipe" if a single mistake happens or if 1 healer or tank dies.

[Melch]

Just going to say. You could have always spent the few IS and took Azouph Isle staging point and ran there in like ~5 mins >_>




Tbh, if they had kept that and put it into XIV, I'm sure a lot of players would stop sucking and learn to dodge/listen to the strategy and not cause wipe after wipe after wipe. If you knew that a wipe meant spending a while to refarm the pop to try again, you'd sure definitely want to try your best to not wipe.
Very accessible = too many people causing too many wipes causing unneeded stress.
I've seen so many people pull miracles out of their @ss on XI to ensure a victory. While on XIV, I've seen countless number of pts just go "Just wipe" if a single mistake happens or if 1 healer or tank dies.

What you call miracles is the mastery of spellcast, but I get your idea.

[Ibi]

99% of XI's "difficulty" could be boiled down to one of three things:
- Needlessly long travel time
- Unforgiving, no do-over mechanics
- Competition between groups for scarce resources

This isn't necessarily making the game easier so much as it is removing the tedious pointless BS that is anything but actually playing the game.

An excellent summary.

What IS actually easier: XIV is considerably more forgiving about failed attempts. Imagine having to get ejected and then go build another pop set each time you failed Titan HM. That was FFXI.

True, although it was also (excepting the occasional fight like Dynamis Lord where your two hours were necessarily for mechanical reasons) much easier to stop an attempt becoming a failed attempt in FFXI.

There's no equivalent to "Okay, kite it while three-quarters of the alliance recovers from weakness" in FFXIV, because there's probably an enrage timer in your future if that many people have died.