Quote Originally Posted by reyre View Post
While those are some good examples, lets concentrate on the MMO simply because the single player experience makes player agency a bit different. Which is why i asked for MMOs, while there is much to be drawn from them by that same token i could say SMT nocturne, Persona (1-5), FFX, FFIX,FFXIII, ME, DDS, Hollow knight, paper mario, dead cells, The Tales Series in general....etc, and in those games the talent tree is vastly different in nocturne you have to choose what skills to take kind of like pokemon, just without the ability to ever see them again, in HK the amulet interaction is great and can make the shade night immortal, however MMOs have to handle a lot more because of the nature of the type of game.

So ragnarok i do rember palying that game and being a mnk (shockingly so), but the game is kind of build for that creativity, if we were to apply some form of it in ff14, i guess you could end up with eureka which is not fun, at least in its current iteration, other than that is just that this game doesnt have types of enemies, damage so that on its own limits what can be done, either be a dmg skill or a utility skill. Or so it sems to me.
Well, there is GW2, an MMO with a talent tree that provides build diversities. However I would also mention that GW2 is fundamentally different game in its core design, having no solid trinity system that makes one class fill one specific role like FF14 but instead allow every class to fill that trinity system to certain level. Also I should point out that GW2 does hae a specific meta builds and if you are not running those builds, you are subjected to abuse from toxic players. Of course they are not the bulk of the game's population but it is there. If you are playing open-world contents, which GW2 is extremely good at, your build could be anything. I do mean this literally. However if you start to get into PvP, WvW(Large scale PvP) or raiding, you were forced to run meta builds. No one forced you to, but you will find in PvP or WvW you will not be doing much contribution before being slaughtered(making the game feels unfun) or in raiding you either get kicked out immediately or slow the teammates down forcing others to pick up the 'slack'.

Overall I do agree that FF14 is too rigid in its design but you get to choose which class you play. This I believe is the extent of diversity that we can get without too much noise or complications. Another thing that I should mention is that "build diversity" can also intimidate players who are not familiar with this genre. While if you spend time you will learn quickly, but now everyone wants to deal with the level of complexity that "build diversity" can bring, where as in FF14 you can just stick with whatever job or jobs you want and worry little other than learning your class.