This video tells you why some people thought FFXIV 1.2. is a better MMO than 2.0

[ShanXiv]

If you hate this game so much, why do you even play it? If 1.x is that great as you said, then why does 2.0 exist? What is the reason that the game failed before?

1.0 failed it's because it was far from finished, the V1 developers asked SE to delay the release date, but SE refused, because SE want fast money,
not because the 1.2x contents are bad,

For example, which Relic quest in 2.0 is the best & the most interesting you think? I think it's the first one(ilv90),
you have to go different place , beat different bosses.
but do you know that it was a water down version of the V1 Relic quest? V1 Relic quests are even better
the later relic quests(ATMA farming, light farming) are more and more boring

Another example: FATEs, guild leves, did you see anyone doing them in SB? no.
V1 had better open world contents, fiction leves(need a party to fight very strong mobs, rewards were good), beastmen strongholds(they are strong & they drop treasure box keys), NMs, open world guild leves for DOL DOH, etc.
NMs in V1 drop unique gears, but 2.0 NMs just give you some boring seals etc etc

I am not saying everything in 1.0 are perfect, the Moogle King battle in V1.0 was broken ,no strategy needed, just kite the moogles,
but the moogle keystone farming was fun, & it‘s a good party content for FCs

Why so many FCs died in 2.0, because 2.0 forces you solo every MSQ & Job quests,
because the DF, because the best rewards are in duty roulette
people will pick the easiest route,

What is the easiest lifestyle? Eat! Play! Sleep! repeat! is it good, no
You have to go to school even if you don't want to,
but after 10 or 20 years, the school life will become one of your best memory in your life

[Vidu]

What gets me is how many people did not even play Version 1, yet they have a big opinion on how shit it was. If anybody says there where some good things they are shot down..everybody to their own.
I loved a lot of things from V1 yet there where bad things obviously, problem with FF14 now is that it does have issues and lots of aoe dancing is one of them. Endgame is glamour. I also feel there where lots of really nice things in V1. The opening scenes the music the look the feel everything hands down beats this version. I like the ease of the game now I can be a dirty casual if I want.

Its a little bit "funny" that you talk about the big opinions people have on 1.0 in this thread - considering that the OP has the strong opinion on how sh*t this game is and how much better 1.0 was.

Its true, I didnt play 1.0 - but I dont need to have played it to know that it was bad enough to almost bankrupt a big company like SE and thats telling me something. I dont doubt that 1.0 and specially later 1.x versions had good idea and brought some fun and enjoyment to people, though! But at the same time I have to assume that there just wasnt enough good and well executed ideas - or there would have been no need for ARR and a huge campaign about how this game is all fixed and better now.

So, what gets me is people who are completly stuck in the past that they need to mention how much better 1.0 was than what we have now at any possible and impossible occassion. I understand that people are still passionate about 1.0 and their memories with the game, but at the same time, people are passionate about the current FFXIV too and coming here to tell them "Hey, you're all wrong about your opinion and you ruined my game!" is maybe not the best way to go.
So, thank you for a post that can apperiacte both games!

In this context I'd also like to talk about something that has been on my mind for a few days now and that is how perfectly the whole difference between 1.0 and 2.0 (...and to FFXI aswell, actually) fits into the Final Fantasy series as a whole where no two games are alike.
My favorite FF, specially gameplay-wise, is FFX. If they'd asked me, every game would have worked like FFX! It was the first FF I ever played and I knew nothing about Final Fantasy being this globaly known RPG-series at that time, I dont think I had even heard about FF7 at all (forgive me, I grew up in a tiny village. We had more sheep than people and sheep dont play a lot of videogames - lack of thumbs, I guess, poor souls.)
So when I learned more about the game and got some of the older FFs, I was confused and disappointed at first. Why couldnt I just put other people onto the battlefield! Why were my summons only lame spells! Why didnt I get to controll Bahamut instead of my party?!
And I also learned that a lot of people who knew older FFS had issues with FFX - world-map gone, was a complaint that I read, for example.
It got even more intresting when my brother who had only played (but liked!) parts of FFX got an Xbox with FF13 - and hated it, because the battle worked nothing like FFX.
And while I have to admit that I never got into FF13 aswell, I played almost all other FFs (still missing 3 and - yes - 7! And I obviously never played FFXI) - and learned to apperiacte each of them for their own ideas and style and mechanics. Even if they were different from my beloved FFX and never quite good as that, I ended up loving each of those games for their unique ideas.

And I would imagine that its similar for FFXIV - if you think of 1.0 and 2.0 as "seperate games" and not so much as a continued game (which is, from all I know, kinda accurate, considering that they worked quite differently, right?).
Its not unuasal and actually rather a trademark of the FF-series to change the whole style from game to game - and I think thats kinda what happend here. No two FFs are the same - and FFs dont really compare to each other, specially not the later versions. If you talk about other game-series you can usually talk about things like "Oh yeah, part 1 did this and part 2 did it aswell, but added a little twist!" but FFs? Something more or less totally new each time - new world, new story, new characters, new music, new atmosphere, new gameplay - with a few recuring elements, obviously.
But you can grow to love each style!
...and if you cant, you can always skip the game that totally isnt to your taste. But playing a game and constantly telling yourself or even other people "This sucks, it all has to be different and just like my personal favorite FF!" wont do anyone any good. Each of us has their personal favorite FF, I believe. An FF, that we love dearly and that we dont like to see trashtalked (constructive critisms is okay, obviously!) - so I feel a bit sorry for all of those people who have 1.0 as their favorite FF and see it trashtalked (and because they cant play it anymore).
But at the same time, trashtalking the current game isnt a great way to go about it either and I think a lot of the backlash in this thread comes from the notion that the OP does that in most of their posts.

I'd love to seem some... mutual respect for all FF-games - and I have a great solution for everyone who doesnt like one of them, which ever one of them it might be: Dont play it.

[Vidu]

What is the easiest lifestyle? Eat! Play! Sleep! repeat! is it good, no
You have to go to school even if you don't want to,
but after 10 or 20 years, the school life will become one of your best memory in your life

So, are you actually really missing the time of your life when you were at school and could just play MMOs and specifically 1.0 all day instead of having to work?
Is it really that, what you're missing?

...in that case: No game will ever bring that back. No game can make you 15 again and take away all your daily duties...
I'm just asking because I always assumed that thats a big part of the explantion of why people have so fond memories of old games: They remember being kids again, not having to worry about paying rent and bills and going to work - but only playing games all day long. Even if those games are worse than what we have today.

[ShanXiv]

Even the Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak in 2.0 alpha is better than what we have now

2.0 alpha, 3 different routes, 3 final bosses (you have to pick one):


retail version:




2.0 gives you a lot of candies,
but after you taste them for a while, you will find that there's no much stuff behind it, the game is very shallow & simple

[Rymm]

Oh good lord, kill it with FIRE! Toto-Rak as it is now makes me want to gouge out my eyes every time it comes up in the duty roulette. I couldn't imagine how torturous it would be if it were even longer and more confusing. You have to realize there is a difference between your (clearly biased) opinions and unbiased fact. Not everyone is going to like the same things you do and just because you like something, that does not make it objectively better.

[Vidu]

Even the Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak in 2.0 alpha is better than what we have now

2.0 alpha, 3 different routes, 3 final bosses (you have to pick one):

So, tell me: Whats the impact of that choice? Why would you choose one over the other? Different loot? Different fights better for melee/ranged/caster?
What makes the choice intresting and meanigful? Or is it just "flip a coin"?

Coil T2 had a "good choice" - depending on you way to the boss you had different ways that would lead to different debuffs on the boss. It was relevant, you had to carefully weigh which DPS you had and who you wanted to buff.

How was Totorak a good choice?

[Enla]

Even the Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak in 2.0 alpha is better than what we have now

2.0 alpha, 3 different routes, 3 final bosses (you have to pick one):
-snip-



2.0 gives you a lot of candies,
but after you taste them for a while, you will find that there's no much stuff behind it, the game is very shallow & simple

You're mistaking needless complication with enjoyable depth. That kind of dungeon would work perfectly well in a single player game where the player can pause, take a moment to decide the best route for themselves, and path out the best course that they feel is appropriate. In an MMO though that kind of dungeon is only going to cause issues as you now have four people all wanting to go a specific way because it happens to be the fastest, nullifying the rest. Even in current Toto Rak there's entire rooms and routes with auracells that people outright avoid because it's the slower option.

Frankly if that was what one of the dungeons looked like in 1.0 I understand why people disliked it.

So, tell me: Whats the impact of that choice? Why would you choose one over the other? Different loot? Different fights better for melee/ranged/caster?
What makes the choice intresting and meanigful? Or is it just "flip a coin"?

Coil T2 had a "good choice" - depending on you way to the boss you had different ways that would lead to different debuffs on the boss. It was relevant, you had to carefully weigh which DPS you had and who you wanted to buff.

How was Totorak a good choice?

And hell, didn't that ultimately devolve into just going down one route then waiting for the soft enrage to avoid some of the worst mechanics? At least that's how I remember when I joined during 2.4.

[ShanXiv]

There are two types of gamers.

The Rules gamer and the Role gamer.
The rules gamers want jobs and no classes, without jobs all of their characters blend into a generic adventurer class who acts as a sort of everyman. Without racial modifiers, choosing a race becomes a cosmetic choice with no lasting impact. Without strict faction memberships, guild quests become senseless and arbitrary. They love the strict combat script of this game that role gamers call jump rope.

The role gamers dislike a game having too many arbitrary rules, they feel hemmed in. If they can't choose a role they find desirable, the game is not worth their salt. Roles should be defined by decisions not rules.

On one hand, the rule gamer is right:
If you don't have rules and statistics, if you don't have attributes, classes, racial modifiers, and skill requirements, your role is undefined. That isn't role-playing, that's pretending the way kids pretend.
There's no hard limit to push up against, no consequences for your decisions, no meaning to any of your actions.

On the other hand, the role gamer is also right:
If the rules prevent you from playing a desirable role, what's the point of playing?
If there are too many arbitrary rules restricting your freedom of choice you're not really playing a role, you're just following a script. It might be a good action game, or a good strategy game, but it's not really a role-playing game if you can't make basic decisions about things like your character's skill development, what kind of armor they wear, or whether or not Derplander the WOL can reject his destiny and live in the cities as a drunk pimp with a Lalafell girlfriend and a gambling addiction.

1.0 was mostly role and little rule, now we swung over to the other side. All rule and little role. A great game has to have a balance between role and rule.

Guildleves remains as a repetitive sidequest and material gatherer option, in the most boring way associated with fetch quest rpgs, only they removed the long walk to return quest giver. It has basically been untouched since the beginning of 1.0 for the most part.

It has/had the potential to be a fast easy way to jump in and out of different styles of content solo or in a pre made group.
https://guildleveideas.webs.com/

My issue with fates, GW2 dynamic events, ESO anvils is immersion. Immersion is a suspension of your senses or beliefs.

So you can have immersion whether you have convenience or not, but that requires developers to think about what their mechanics mean. Which unfortunately for MMO’s tends to rarely happen.

There is too much “weird MMO crap” going on for me to get truly immersed the way I would with a single-player RPG.

By “weird MMO crap” I mean all the stuff MMOs seem to need to have to be MMOs.
Things like enemies that simply stand around all day in the same spot, never moving, simply waiting for someone to come and kill them.
And ones that respawn faster than their predecessor’s corpses de-spawn.
People standing around waiting to be the hero who saves the village by slaying the monster, only they can’t because someone else is slaying it right now (but don’t worry, there will be another monster along in a minute, and the village will need saving again).
Bar patrons who bounce up and down on the table for hours while waiting for this mysterious “group finder” thing to “pop” and yelling at the other patrons to queue.

I mention the immersion thing because that is something XIV Hamlet and FFXI beseiged got right. If it happens constantly and very conveniently, it is immersion sapping and loses it's flair and oomph. The wildlife and enemy AI from 1.0 was amazing and immersive. They had reasons to exists beyond being your experience points or a means to an end on a quest or material farm. Sure, some of their tendencies were weird and annoying, but it made the world feel more like a real place.

Fast travel, I love it and don't want to see it go. But it's whole point was to not force a player to waste time seeing the same static environment they have been through a thousand times. Maybe if the environment was not static, I wouldn't mind a temporary or out of the blue reason for it to be limited for a time being? Maybe the aether gets plugged due to an ominous storm, maybe the fog gets so dense it renders my mini-map useless for a bit, maybe the sun and moon get so eclipse I can barely see two feet in front of my face, or maybe at night a new race of vampires and evil beast come out to feast on my rotting corpse? If it is static, do not touch my convenience with a ten foot pole, thank you. Idk, perhaps there is random treasure chest that spawn rarely with a mini game to unlock it? What if once an eorzean month or year, a crater opens in the Sagolli desert and some ancient ruins reveal a lost civilization?

Well said,
You can often see some old school MMO players making good posts like this. thanks

I will say the "MMORPG is a service" concept is BS, it's an excuse for not knowing how to make a real MMO, bad gameplay & lack of imagination

[Vidu]

And hell, didn't that ultimately devolve into just going down one route then waiting for the soft enrage to avoid some of the worst mechanics? At least that's how I remember when I joined during 2.4.

Yep, pretty much - and even without enrage, you'd end with a "meta"-strat or route anyways. As always in games, actually.
So I'd be most curious to hear how 1.0 solved the problem of having one "meta" or "best" way and actually making this a choice and not "the one boss everyone always does and its two brothers that no one is ever intrested in".

[Nariel]

Oh good lord, kill it with FIRE! Toto-Rak as it is now makes me want to gouge out my eyes every time it comes up in the duty roulette. I couldn't imagine how torturous it would be if it were even longer and more confusing. You have to realize there is a difference between your (clearly biased) opinions and unbiased fact. Not everyone is going to like the same things you do and just because you like something, that does not make it objectively better.

This !

Funny enough its the same for the two other "V1.x" dungeon for me, Toto rak make my eyes roll like no tomorow when he show up. Dzemael make me "Oh god why of all other dungeon it have to be this one..." and Aurum val its a no from me, I take my 30 min penalty rather than doing this again.