
Originally Posted by
Nalien
As I said earlier, I think the idea is to have a game that is both "easy to pick up", and "hard to put down". You want the former so that people can get into it easily, and minus Heavensward being gated behind 2.55, XIV does a great job of that. The later though... No, this game is so easy to pick up, that it's easy to put down... I could quit today and come back for 4.4 and catch up pretty damn quickly... There's not really much here to retain my interest... I continue to play out of good faith for the developers, and just to support them, because things like the world and music are amazing IMO, it's just the gameplay where things start falling apart IMO... I could sit here and pick apart all the content in this game, but I don't think any of use have time for that... Diadem alone is probably a 10,000 word essay...
Item level, I think, is an absolutely terrible form of progression... If they want to effectively reset progression every other patch, then fine... I get why they do that, it makes the game easier to pick up... Give me some alternative means of progression though, give me something I can work on throughout the game, that perhaps has me doing all sorts of content... Relics Weapons could be that, Relic Armor would be an amazing addition... Right now though, the Relic quests are really quite bad, IMO... Zodiac quests are better IMO, they at least feel like a quest. Anima weapons are just directionless though... I get why they gave us so many options for them, but the result is just that I don't do anything to get the weapon... If I wanted a Zodiac weapon, I had to go out of my way to finish it... If I want an Anima weapon? I'm already bleeding Gil/Grand Company Seals/Poetics/Esoterics because this game throws them at me for pretty much everything... I put no extra effort into my Anima weapon, I just kept PvPing and got all the resources I needed off that... The result is that the grind just isn't entertaining... I want to actually do something for that reward... I'd liken it to climbing Mount Everest... The reward for that is in the doing, but XIV has effectively put me at the summit because, to quote my pedometer "You've climbed X flights of stairs! That's the height of Mount Everest!"