IMO - If this game is to stay relevant - the gameplay needs a massive overhaul

[Yaichiro]

Came across this on my google new feed yesterday. So many may disagree with you.
http://www.psu.com/feature/28361/13-...st-MMO-out-now

That feed is full of misinformation. This is infact a bad way trying to sell the game.

[AlternativeOne]

There is no value to the gear and items you receive because its all replaceable by simpler means at a later time. As long as that's the case no content they add will be worth a damn. There are no systems in place that control the world so everything feels artificial. This game is almost too simple and balanced for it to have lasting effects that FFXI or WOW had. All the content is instance so you never need to live in the world just wait in town for duty finder to pop. No reason to communicate with others ever, its optional which is bad for a mmo. There are no long term goals to set and nothing interesting to do in the journey to the goals you can set. I cant really put into words what this game makes me feel but it would have been better as a FFXI remake with a party finder added. Its gonna die a slow obvious death on this path. I cant even get excited 3.1. so i probably wont resub.

[Tizzy_Tormentor]

I don't think it needs a huge overhaul, but I do hope to see some changes during the games lifespan, as it goes on, nothing too drastic all at once (or else everyone will go apeshit) but add some changes and improvements to the system.

Personally, I am taking a break from the game, got a bit tired of it, will return in full form for 3.1, but for now I will just play other games for a while.

[Xerius]

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Re-Reborn. 2020 Please look forward to it.

[Craiger]

I would also direct this comment to the vast majority of MMOs.

This is an opinion. I do not mean to upset anyone. I feel that FFXIV is a beautiful game with a great story, great visuals, great music and better than most MMO gameplay.

IMO - Heavensward has perfected (and also exhausted) what I will call the "World of Warcraft" gameplay. You can only take decade-plus old gameplay so far and I believe that FFXIV has taken it to the max.

The past few months I have wondered why I can't get excited about this game. To me (and I've noticed this with others), the passion is gone. We can think of a million different reasons as to why the excitement is gone - but for me - the reason is that I am finally sick of the WoW gameplay. It's an ingenious craft - but after 10 years plus - it's time to innovate. Unfortunately FFXIV sought to utilize the WoW gameplay very late in the game.

Games such as Destiny, Dark Souls, etc. are showing us how you can take the MMO-like concept(I realize I'm using this term very loosely) and give the player almost total control over the character's action. Instant action without cool downs is the best way to describe it. In Dark Souls I can block, dodge, swing, backstab, maneuver, etc. In Destiny I can jump, dodge, retreat, hide, use weapons that vastly change my experience by adding countless different perks. In FFXIV and your typicall MMO (outside of a raid) I'm typically targeting an enemy with a mouse click, and repeating a keyboard rotation with cooldown periods between each action. New FFXIV weapons / armor increase my stats but almost never change the way I play. I can dodge rectangles and circles, but the enemies have no mass or genuine hit detection (I can run through them).

I realize that the WoW gameplay "is" fun. I've enjoyed it for over a decade. But for me, the "is" has become a "was." How many more expansion packs can FFXIV have with this same gameplay? What more can be done "fresh" with the same gameplay? We are probably only a few years away from a new MMO that completely changes the way we play MMOS (likely incorporating concepts from the Soul series and Destiny). If FFXIV wants to stay relevant, IMO, now is the time to innovate (which they are hopefully already doing). I'm hopeful the next expansion changes the way we play this wonderful game.

I'm sorry to say, but those 2 games you chose as examples, aren't really helping your argument...

Destiny is a completely different type of game... It's not even a real MMO, and it's a FPS game, ofc it's gonna play differently. It's not like it have been a big success, and if FFXIV were to be like this, I would quit the game...

Dark Souls... ??? It's an awesome game, but it's extremely far from being an MMO... It's a single player game, with online play. The online play is as far from "Massive" (from MMO) that it can be...

Dark Souls combat is cool in a single player game, with just a few enemies/players. In an MMO environment, it would be clunky as hell, and it just wouldn't work with the amount of players that needs to be rendered in an MMO.

An MMORPG is held back by the fact that it have to feel good/render well for a ton of players in the same world/area, which a single player game doesn't.

People need to distinguish MMOs and games with online play... It's starting to get annoying.

[Einheri]

OP you should play Tera. Wildstar is a mix of both classic and action mmo combat.

[Einheri]

What is horizontal progression? I keep seeing the term thrown around and each person uses it to fit their own desires.

Gw2 is basically all horizontal. You get max level then a set of exotics then grind and grind for glamour's. They didn't even raise the level cap for the xpac.

In ff14 you constantly replace gear as part of your grind. Then you glamour over it.

I do think they could scale more content. It would have to be purely optional as people already complain they can't face roll scaled content, while others complain everything is faceroll.

Like expert roulettes could scale all dungeons (at least the last 6) to be challenging. In this way you see more then two dungeons in your roulette and people will be happy they can't face roll. If you want a face roll run it on regular.

[Gilthas]

What is horizontal progression I keep seeing the term thrown around and each person uses it to fit thier own desires.

Basically, horizontal progression is the Messiah that will save FFXIV because such a system has absolutely no flaws compared to the crap that is vertical progression. There is no such thing as BiS items in games with horizontal progression, new competitive items are constantly being added to the game and drop rates are very generous allowing players to gear up in a timely manner (just look at the history of FFXI for proof of these).

As for me. My problem isn't the vertical progression, it's that everything is so grindy that I'm forced to focus on only a small amount of content to achieve anything of worth. That's the real problem in FFXIV, the excessive grind.

[MiniPrinny]

I really can't see the devs turning FFXIV into an action MMO.

Just because I have to point it out, MMORPGs are action RPGs by default. They can't be anything else, because the genre has to be played in real time.

In regards to the main topic at hand however, Final Fantasy XIV is suffering from two things at the moment, the first is skill bloat. It's apparent on every Job for every role that there are just too many "core" skills. And unfortunately, for many of the Jobs, there is no elegant solution to this problem. For a good handful of the melee Disciples of War, you could in theory make each combo a three-part attack. So just to use Ninja as example, you press 1 to do Spinning Edge, then 1 again to do Gust Slash, and then 1 once more to finish the combo with Aeolian Edge. This would remove a lot of abilities from the hot bars for those Jobs, but what about Bard? Or Monk? The casters especially are stuck with what they have.

A more realistic solution to ability bloat would be to overhaul all 13 Jobs while also adding (hopefully) 3 more Jobs in the next expansion. This however would take away from other possible new features of that expansion and would be highly risky financially due to the high cost and the chance of annoying a lot of players to the point that they quit. We already have seen a pretty hefty exodus of Dragoons, Black Mages, and Disciples of the Hand mains, although that last one is due to completely different reasons.

So, what can the developers do? There is very few options left to them moving forward and those options left aren't going to sound appealing. The first option, and by far the easiest would be to introduce new abilities that were just flat out better than the current abilities. For example, in the case of Black Mage, their next fire spell, Fire V, would pretty much be Fire II with more potency and maybe some interaction with Enochian. But this would be tragically boring and do very little to change how the Jobs feel, it would be power without substance or depth.

A second option would be to lightly overhaul each Job to place less reliance on the amount of abilities and give abilities less often, but have them create more of an impact on how the player plays. At the moment, we have a handful of stances that do this already, but the developers don't need to limit themselves to just stances, there are plenty of traits that vastly change the gameplay of some Jobs, the Bard's River of Blood trait comes to mind.

A third option, and arguably the worst option for the playerbase would be to ignore the problem and press on. This is a dangerous path to tread through, since as they create more and more skills, the Jobs will grow increasingly more and more complex until the question of "what can I not use and still do fine" pops up even at the highest echelons of raiding groups. This was a route that the prior major game to use this style of gameplay ran into, and one that they struggled to fix. They eventually did fix it, but how well they fixed it is another question all together.

So, what can they do? I'm honestly unsure. None of the options that are apparent are particularly pleasing or possible, it is almost jarring to see an MMORPG reach this issue so quickly. And while I'm left pondering what they could do, I'm also left asking, maybe the system just isn't right for a Final Fantasy game? Which would then beg the question, if not this system, than what system could they use while keeping combat smooth, and could that system be implemented without needing to re-write the entire game engine, and if they did introduce that system, could they make sure that the system also didn't horribly break every fight that had been introduced prior to it? I don't have the answers unfortunately, since I don't know the engine that Final Fantasy XIV uses, but one could assume that they may be able to do more with it than we think, since they have proven already they can create "Mario Kart" and recreate Lords of Vermilion inside of the game's engine.

[Alahra]

I wouldn't be playing the game if the combat was more like an action game. Honestly, I wish the game's combat were *less* "actiony" and more like it was in FFXI.

But to each, their own.

There is no such thing as BiS items in games with horizontal progression, new competitive items are constantly being added to the game and drop rates are very generous allowing players to gear up in a timely manner (just look at the history of FFXI for proof of these).

None of this was true for FFXI. Best-in-slot items certainly existed--every physical DPS class had a "best" set for TP, each WS had a "best" set for maximum damage, and so on. Gear added was also frequently worthless compared to pre-existing items that were extremely good. And FFXI's drop rates were hardly "generous" in any respect. Just as one example, the best Hands piece for MNK and SAM at 75 cap had about a 5 percent drop rate on a monster that spawned about every 2 hours. Drop rates in general were so unforgiving that players started latching on to items that mentioned "lucky" in their tooltips out of the wishful thinking that they perhaps affected drop rates.

That being said, I do want more horizontal progression, but don't argue for it via falsehoods.