Other MMOs that you think ARE ACTUALLY BETTER?

[RareItems]

Overwatch xD.

[KisaiTenshi]

To elaborate from my comment on the first page (which I trimmed down.)

FFXIV has not been exceeded by any older or newer MMO in the graphics department. V1.0 was better at a few graphics things, but it's fairer to look at XIV V1.00 as the game that XI players wanted, where as XIV 2.00 players wanted something that was more casual oriented and more fun than WoW. So it's disingenuous to say XI was better, when we had "a prettier XI" as XIV V1.00. V1.00 had a lot of other failings, but had it really been "better" than XI, then XI players would have stuck with it, and they didn't.

A lot of games that we think were "better" than XIV at something, are largely looking at some mechanic that wasn't as casual friendly, but felt more intuitive or logical than what we got. Take for instance crafting. UO was the king of this, and then Minecraft came along and went "hey, you know what would be more fun? actually finding the materials, rather than fixed mining nodes". To that end, "Landmark (EQ Next)" was going to be that, and then Sony killed it.

Housing was another thing that UO did well and only Archeage actually followed up on. Place your home anywhere, take up multiple homes slots by rotating it 15 degrees. I'd honestly prefer Landmark's take on this as well, where you could harvest materials from the world, and build a home on an area of land you "claimed" and can make it look like anything you want. For obvious reasons (eg wanting a world to look consistent) you'd never want this in a game like FFXIV, but you would want it in a game that was 100% Role-Play. Otherwise you'd get people making castles that take up as much space as possible with phallic-shaped cupolas. Really what I want for "home construction" is a MMORPG to rip-off "The Sims" way of doing this. Just create a floor plan, and the game figures out where the walls and props go. Visually consistent.

FFXIV has some semblance of UO's scheduled NPC's, but not really. In XIV V1.0 you'd actually see the NPC's walk into and out of the camps when the battle wardens were to start a behest. In XIV V2.0 you see this in the form of FATES. But neither of these are how UO's NPC's worked. UO's NPC's and monsters (at least when I tried it, dial-up era) actually had needs, so they'd eat and sleep, and so forth. Really the only version of this I've seen in anything hasn't been in a MMORPG but rather in a manga/anime based that takes place in a MMORPG's called Log Horizon. It's insanely difficult to do this kind of thing and keep game balance because players gear creep will eventually make it so that they can kill everything. That is, actually how it didn't work in UO. UO literately invented the notorious monster through this mechanic, where the monsters themselves leveled up from defeating players and prey npcs, so you'd need a lot of players to take down the high-level monster, and because you lost exp for dying, the only way to make the monster weaker was to kill it as frequently as possible. I'm not sure if that mechanic was kept past the early UO days, but that was certainly how emergent game play should work.

UO also invented "culinary" stuff in a MMORPG, though over time "food" in MMORPG's moved from being a healing item to a buff. No game IMO actually does culinary stuff better, though other games have more variety (eg Mabinogi had baking, boiling, stir-fry, etc) in the actual way food was prepared, no other game that I'm aware of had "fatness/buffness" as an effect from eating. The pre-MMO Ultima games would actually cause damage or death if you ran out of food, so we have come quite away from "no food = instant death" of Ultima I.

"Raiding" is something that EQ more or less invented for 3D MMORPG's. There were text-based MUD's before that had this concept, but EQ was the first to actually do it intentionally (as opposed to Ultima Online's emergent gameplay of killing the high level monster that just became high level by how the game worked.) WoW popularized the actual raiding, and that's the kind of raiding that is in FFXIV 2.x. This is also why a lot of the "game spoiling" tools are tools designed to optimize a raider's time and suck the fun out of playing the content. There are studies showing that "raiding" is a health hazard since people are glued to their computers for hours, hence where FFXIV has actually improved over other games in that the raids themselves are not 20-hour long efforts but at most 2 hours, and even then, an optimal strategy brings it down to 10 minutes. To that end, I played EQ but not WoW, and didn't play EQ very long as the PvP aspect of it was not fun when I tried it and it put me off games that allowed PK until Wizardry.

PvP, sad to say, has been awful in every game. Period. This can be blamed squarely on bots. If a game allows PvP, then bots can PvP and PK anyone instantly. In games that have no checks on PK (eg Wizardry, Archeage) the PvP system could be used against criminals and bots with impunity, but it requires players to intentionally role-play being a villain. To that end, this is mentally disturbing when some players get a thrill out of being a murderer. Hence PvP should be restricted in MMORPG's to "arena/battle royale" and "tower defense/capture the flag" style setups that players can be adequately prepared for, or opt-out entirely. Sure we can't murder the bots with impunity, but neither can the bots murder players. I think FFXIV at least took the right route to PvP, so people who don't want to play it, are not forced to ever participate in it. However games like WoW, Archeage, EQ, Aion, and so forth all had "clan/race/alliance" type of open-world PvP and as a result, the fun in those games can be sucked out by being forced to enter PvP areas that players may intentionally impede progress. Which is to say, UO didn't even do this well. UO allowed (initially) PK and theft, but only Wizardry actually put no restriction on it. Archage let you steal crops from players who didn't pay a subscription.

Party finding, FFXIV is fairly decent at this, especially with roulette's to fill in empty player slots. Mabinogi was gawdawful at this. Archeage actually had an auto-party mechanic for NM's on the field, which worked pretty well, but for instanced dungeons had no equivalent of the duty finder, and realistically, all you had to do was out-level the dungeon and then just bulldoze your way through it. Hence the entire level-sync mechanic in FFXIV actually works much better than anything else I've encountered in any other game.

Races, let's be honest. You're playing this game for the catgirls/potatosacks/dragongirls. Archeage's cat people (Firran) are actually very hideous, and their initial concepts for them actually looked more along FFXIV's design rather than what we got. Archeage also did a dragon-race (or demon race?) as well. Other games I played had their own version of "human, giant, elven, dwarf" and XI/XIV did that as well as any other game did. If you did not like the art style of XIV, you wouldn't be playing it. More to the point, games like Tera and B&S, are basically "everyone is a different sized human, and a dwarf race with animal ears", even though the art style might be at least comparable to XIV. In Western CRPG's, well ESO is butt-ugly as always, which their models are basically "different heads glued on the same body".

Star Wars: The Old Republic probably has the closest cinematic quality to cutscenes that FFXIV has, and probably exceeds it in a few ways in regards to decision trees and voice acting, but that's about all I can say about SWTOR in a positive context. As the rest of SWTOR felt like the same mechanics I found in every other turn-based-combat game that I tried. One thing it did better was how dynamic zoning was. So if an area was only available to a specific race/role/msq progress, it would simply not be unlocked (and yell you why) or if a dungeon needed to be played to progress the MSQ, you'd seamlessly get the MSQ version with no other players in it but the ones who haven't cleared the MSQ part (or nobody if it was companion only) and once cleared, you could re-enter it to fight things again if you wanted to, but now everyone else can to. There wasn't any queuing at all. So if anything can be taken from SWTOR, it's how seamless that was. If FFXIV ever gets to a point where the companion AI is smart enough like the SWTOR companion AI, it might be worth creating "seamless" duties where you get players that are queued for it, or companions if there aren't any, but I digress.

The common trend in the games I liked to play is that they are all heavily story driven, and when the story doesn't feel like anything but set dressing, I lose interest in it. Like Mabinogi I really enjoyed the story for, up until G12, and then the game kinda just waffled around till G15 when I quit it at G17 (even though they picked the story back up from G12, it was going nowhere.) That's the only MMORPG since Nexus TK that I actually invested time into playing for the storyline. EQ, Tera, Aion, Archeage, Wizardry had stories but they felt like set dressing and little effort was placed on their significance. It made those games feel like you're just logging in to kill mobs until you outlevel the area and move on. SWTOR had a pretty good story going into it, but it felt exactly like playing EQ aside from that.

Like if you've played Diablo/Diablo II at all, you'd recognize quite a few MMO tropes in it, because it created the UI shorthand for those tropes that all other games copied. Inventory Tetris? Diablo. Red HP, Blue magic? actually that was Ultima Underworld. Toolbelt/bar? Diablo. (Prefix) item of (suffix)? Diablo. Colors for rare items? Diablo. And that last one was because you could play it multiplayer and trade stuff with other players.

Somewhere between UWI and Diablo I many western CRPG's started to syncronize on CRPG user interfaces and you started seeing a lot of the same things. When all the cheaply produced MMORPG's started using Unreal Engine, you started seeing everything look the same. Even Star Trek Online has the same look and feel of Perfect World (which acquired Cryptic who produced Star Trek Online) and Tera. Like I don't know about anyone else, but when I see screen shots from a Korean MMORPG's, they all look the same. Final Fantasy XIV has it's own identity. WoW has it's own identity. But put 10 screen shots from "up and coming MMORPG"'s side by side, and chances are people would think they're all from the same game because there is so little identity to high fantasy 99% human "humanoid" characters.

I wish we could get a game that allowed you to make your own guards/monsters, set your own traps, etc and reward adventurers who make it to "you" the final boss. But hey, that's probably another game type entirely.

edit: Blade and Soul was something I watched the anime for AFTER being told about there being a game in development. When the game finally came out, I actually got a lot of deja vu from having seen the anime. However story-wise I felt it at least was trying to follow the story it was based on. The race/class I picked actually interacted with a character who dies in the game, but I recognized from the anime, so I felt compelled to at least play it longer than I'd have otherwise given it, given the "samey-same" feel that other Unreal engine games have.

[Zeonx]

bless online is releasing on may 30th for packs early access i'll tell you then.

[Sigma-Astra]

Final Fantasy XI Online, still playing it after 16+ years and I enjoy it a lot more than this game :P


Better Story than 14's
Better design of gameplay
Better endgame
Better Auction House
Better music

While I don't mind that people like and enjoy XI, there's nothing wrong with liking another game instead of what's popular and mainstream. But, to say that XI has better music than XIV is kind of mean and unfair to poor Soken (and Uematsu) in my opinion. >_>;

[XenoCranel]

bless online is releasing on may 30th for packs early access i'll tell you then.

I'm waiting for that too.

[ko_]

For me.. PShome. too bad it's dead :c

[Super_Bee_Brian]

Overwatch xD.

lmao!!!...

[Averax]

For me.. PShome. too bad it's dead :c

Isn't that the game where all you did was just run around and buy cosmetic items with real life currency? You can do that here.

[Tanathya]

FFXIV has not been exceeded by any older or newer MMO in the graphics department. V1.0 was better at a few graphics things, but it's fairer to look at XIV V1.00 as the game that XI players wanted, where as XIV 2.00 players wanted something that was more casual oriented and more fun than WoW. So it's disingenuous to say XI was better, when we had "a prettier XI" as XIV V1.00. V1.00 had a lot of other failings, but had it really been "better" than XI, then XI players would have stuck with it, and they didn't.

FFXIV 1.0 wasn't anything like FFXI, end of. Now, FFXIV can't be better than a niche game like FFXI is, but it gets to a larger playerbase due to the nature of the game. This is, a niche game you either utterly love or hate, whereas a theme park game such as this you can like it or not, but there's something for everyone and it's gonna cater to a wider audience, which is what games nowadays work. FFXI's depth alone, when compared to FFXIV, already makes it a better RPG in every aspect, and I'm just talking about the stat depth, not to mention the world, lore, community, and battle aspects. FFXIV can't get any more shallow, and if it did, it'd blow all over the place. Feels like an action RPG, which may or may not be good depending on the player, but again, this isn't a niche game so it's more likely to get to everyone.

[LeoLupinos]

I actually like Aion's musics better than FFXIV's musics.