Quote Originally Posted by Ceridwenae View Post
I love how someone mentioned TSW earlier. For story and atmosphere, it's probably my favourite game ever. It's what I always wanted to pootle about in. The combat was, however, effing terrible and a blight on humanity. TSWLegends reworked the combat so it's bearable. Still horrid, but bearable. I had a blast playing through it, and it's my current back up if I have to drop my sub here for a month or so, as I have more to do there.
As I said earlier, pretty nearly everyone agreed TSW's combat was a dark moment in MMO design—from casual players up to serious PvPers and people who more or less lived in Nightmare-mode dungeons. It was like a shining shard of WTF Did You Do It This Way so dense that it collapsed into some form of hitherto-unseen and never-to-be-seen-again exotic form of Raw Terrible.

Which makes TSW the perfect example of how people can deeply love a game despite loathing what's arguably the core gameplay loop.

And no matter how many complaints people have about FFXIV's combat, it is not in the same neighborhood as TSW's when it comes to terrible design choices. (Arguably it's not even on the same planet, and possibly even a different solar system.) So I have no issue believing people might enjoy this game mostly for other systems beside the combat portion.