We Really Need To Talk About The State And Path Of FFXIV

[Magic-Mal]

Yeah but I think new players are often heavily Influenced by existing or former ones.

Some of my friends see me playing xiv on steam or psn depending which I'm using at the time. Ask me if its any good or should they buy it. I generally say not really. The main reason I play is because I have some very long standing connections. Some over 15 years...

Or friends look through the store find final fantasy 14. See that loads of there friends have played it. But then wonder why none still do... can't be that good won't buy It...

It doesn't create a positive image if people are getting to 70 smashing a content patch in a day and then not playing for several weeks or even months... no point even getting to 70 if that's what they see players doing....

I mainly only had friends/newbies who were just starting and really wanted to play with the much stronger FC members but just couldn't make it through the story. Approximately 0 made it to the end of base SB/HW story. ARR is just that bad.

[KisaiTenshi]

I mainly only had friends/newbies who were just starting and really wanted to play with the much stronger FC members but just couldn't make it through the story. Approximately 0 made it to the end of base SB/HW story. ARR is just that bad.

That sounds like a problem of them wanting to be carried through everything.

SE should stick to it's guns and not ever nerf the storyline. They put the cash shop jump pot out there, the community didn't want that, but we also realize that some players just want to play with each other and don't have a week to commit to doing the entirety of ARR. It doesn't help that players who roll a DPS get blocked by DPS queues.

Which if that's true, that means MMORPG's are too much of a commitment for casual "get friends together" and SE should instead make something like Mario Party Online.

[Dzian]

That sounds like a problem of them wanting to be carried through everything.

SE should stick to it's guns and not ever nerf the storyline. They put the cash shop jump pot out there, the community didn't want that, but we also realize that some players just want to play with each other and don't have a week to commit to doing the entirety of ARR. It doesn't help that players who roll a DPS get blocked by DPS queues.

Which if that's true, that means MMORPG's are too much of a commitment for casual "get friends together" and SE should instead make something like Mario Party Online.

i think its an issue of how much junk there is in the story.. admitedly expansions have had less of the junk.. but in ARR for example there's 44 maybe 48 quests just in that section between killing titan and going to do battle with garuda.. and how many of those 44 or 48 quests have any relevence to the actual plot..............

most of them exist for the sole purpose of handing the player some exp.

i think at present theres something like 600 msq quests in total.. i honestly think you could delete more than 300 (half) and not impact the core story at all... because most of them aren't relevent they're just tacked on as an excuse to throw some exp at you.. and often times you get a string of 4 or 5 quests that could quite easily be 1..

there's never any epic moments in the story either and when there is a high point (i.e fighting titan) its immediately followed by a soul crushing grind of another 44 quests before you get to the net one... and most of those high points are so easy there's no real satisfaction from clearing them. so its like
ok cool i gotta fight titan >> what the hell was that it???? >>>>> slog grind slog grind bash head against wall >> ok cool gotta fight garuda >>>> wait that was it??? what the helll???

i use that part as an example because thats the bit where i've had quite a few friends just give up because its so tedious, monotonous and unsatisfying

[Corue]

i think its an issue of how much junk there is in the story.. admitedly expansions have had less of the junk.. but in ARR for example there's 44 maybe 48 quests just in that section between killing titan and going to do battle with garuda.. and how many of those 44 or 48 quests have any relevence to the actual plot..............

I think the worst part is how the quests are even written to show that they're wastes of time. It's just "Haha! We're acknowledging that they're pointless filler quests that serve only to pad out your play time. Aren't we so funny?" They acknowledge that it's a problem but they don't want to do anything except lampshade it hIlArIoUsLy because that's what MMOs do. Rather than actively try to improve the flow of gameplay.

[OurMom]

That sounds like a problem of them wanting to be carried through everything.

That's not them wanting to be carried, I brought some friends with me here and all of them got bored with MSQs and quit.

The quests are just boring and most mmo players don't play mmos for story, they play it for the content/gameplay. Forcing MSQs and then locking content, expansions, and even jobs behind it is bizarre in the mmo world. I mean want MMO makes you play the entirety of an expansion as a class you don't want to play at all?


That's nothing to do with commitment, that's just dumb design.

[KisaiTenshi]

The quests are just boring and most mmo players don't play mmos for story, they play it for the content/gameplay. .

I'll disagree. If you are playing a MMORPG, you are playing it for the story or role-play component. Especially a Final Fantasy game, which has long story components to it (where the "oh no unskippable cutscene" meta-joke comes from.) It's true some of the MSQ feels more like it was padded out, but consider that was the initial game, you wouldn't want people to burn through all of it in less than 60 hours, and you need to get 50 levels out of it.

If ones friends don't like story, they are playing the wrong genre, and should step away from RPG's entirely. If you like playing the game, and your friends do not want to play it, then you can't force them. The complaint I've heard from people who play MMO games and won't play MMORPG's anymore is not the story, it's the "gear grind". So they don't want to repeat content in order to progress. You can play the entirety of ARR without repeating any dungeon if you do the sidequests, or you can skip all of them and play the FATE's or repeat each level 30+ dungeon twice as you get it, since you've missed the sidequest-unlocked dungeons.

The expansions are less of an issue because you only need to get 10 levels out of them, so the story for the expansion can usually be done in a day.

[Skivvy]

I'll disagree. If you are playing a MMORPG, you are playing it for the story or role-play component. Especially a Final Fantasy game, which has long story components to it (where the "oh no unskippable cutscene" meta-joke comes from.) It's true some of the MSQ feels more like it was padded out, but consider that was the initial game, you wouldn't want people to burn through all of it in less than 60 hours, and you need to get 50 levels out of it.

If ones friends don't like story, they are playing the wrong genre, and should step away from RPG's entirely. If you like playing the game, and your friends do not want to play it, then you can't force them. The complaint I've heard from people who play MMO games and won't play MMORPG's anymore is not the story, it's the "gear grind". So they don't want to repeat content in order to progress. You can play the entirety of ARR without repeating any dungeon if you do the sidequests, or you can skip all of them and play the FATE's or repeat each level 30+ dungeon twice as you get it, since you've missed the sidequest-unlocked dungeons.

The expansions are less of an issue because you only need to get 10 levels out of them, so the story for the expansion can usually be done in a day.

I will disagree with you. An MMORPG is a game where you get to pick your class, pick your character, pick your path, gear your character, etc. That in itself covers that "RPG" factor nicely. It does not mean that you also have to enjoy story telling in order to play the genre. That is why MMOs generally have so much varied content - to appeal to a broad spectrum of players. Story lines do exist in MMOs, but it does not mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that these games are not for you if you don't like the story.

[Mahrze]

I'll disagree. If you are playing a MMORPG, you are playing it for the story or role-play component <...> If ones friends don't like story, they are playing the wrong genre, and should step away from RPG's entirely. If you like playing the game, and your friends do not want to play it, then you can't force them.

The crux of your argument is that because an MMO'RPG" has 'RPG' in it and you only play 'RPG's for the story. It's your view, but it really looks like a very narrow and one-line one.

People don't need to enjoy the story to enjoy the game, but if the only way they can enjoy the game is to enjoy the story than already sounds like a game design problem.

Even more so when their solution to the story issue was jump potions. xD

[OurMom]

I'll disagree. If you are playing a MMORPG, you are playing it for the story or role-play component.

You don't get to decide what other people play mmos for. BDO is a pretty popular mmorpg, it *barely* has a story/lore and majority of the playerbase have absolutely no clue what's going on lore wise. They only care about grinding to 60, pvp, and grinding silver. I mean I personally tried to get into the lore of BDO and there really isn't any. I played Archeage since before Trion picked it up for NA, I have no clue about the story, same with most people that play that game and I can provide a ton of example of other mmos.

This being a FF game means nothing once they slap "MMO" onto it because mmorpg players just simply play mmorpgs regardless of the lore. The only reason I'm here is because it's a mmo I've never played a FF game outside of this and most likely never will.

[KisaiTenshi]

You don't get to decide what other people play mmos for. BDO is a pretty popular mmorpg, it *barely* has a story/lore and majority of the playerbase have absolutely no clue what's going on lore wise. They only care about grinding to 60, pvp, and grinding silver. I mean I personally tried to get into the lore of BDO and there really isn't any. I played Archeage since before Trion picked it up for NA, I have no clue about the story, same with most people that play that game and I can provide a ton of example of other mmos.

This being a FF game means nothing once they slap "MMO" onto it because mmorpg players just simply play mmorpgs regardless of the lore. The only reason I'm here is because it's a mmo I've never played a FF game outside of this and most likely never will.

Archeage has a story, it's just not in exclusively in cutscenes like FFXIV. It's usually a wall of text by the quest giver, and the occasional cutscene. It's cutscenes were not really any more impressive than Wizardry Online's, and Wizardy Online had a story with familiar cues, like FF's MMO's.

The point is that if you are playing a MMORPG, especially one with "Final Fantasy" in it, you do not get to decide for the rest of the fan base what part of it is boring. There are parts of the MSQ IMO were padded out in a way that felt like they could have cut some steps out, or reduced the amount of map traversal for an intermediate step, but everyone points to the Company of Heros quest chain before Titan that leads to Brayflox Longstop, all for cheese. Every quest chain has you do something "important", which leads to the dungeon in the MSQ. It could be argued that the dev's probably should have had the first dungeon at level 5 or level 8, instead of 15, because unlike a single player game (where you're usually thrown directly into the combat) the point of the level 1-15 quests is to show you that there is more to the world than just the starting city.

One of the things that SE fumbled, was when they removed the ability to progress through the storyline as anything other than essentially a DPS. Tank and Healer? Combat is still Combat. You can't start as DoL/DoH, and V1.0 let you get through the MSQ storyline as those. If players are going to play a MMORPG and they prefer to RP as a crafter/gatherer, they are not afforded a means through the MSQ in pretty much every MMORPG, because MMORPG's are principally RPG's to begin with.

A pen and paper RPG, is pretty much all storyline with combat, and a bad GM would recognize when their story-telling is terrible and just improvise ways of putting the party in danger to go back to combat.