FF14 devs just keep doing your thing because my god

[MsQi]

Blizzard doesn't understand personal progression. SE is starting to head down the same path.

The Blizzard team never understood RPGs. They only had Diablo which is barely an RPG, more like Gauntlet with gear and a few story elements. They just had a good interface which was from there experience with RTSs. As RTSs go they were not nearly as good as Westwood, in the gameplay department and their interface design was already standard in the genre (colorful buttons that make everything clear). The RPG elements that made early wow pretty good were just lifted from other RPGs. But since the team didn't really understand why they were important the game quickly degraded. I remember comments from them like "that's just and RPG element" as reasons for removing them.

[Puremallace]

Blizzard doesn't understand personal progression. SE is starting to head down the same path.

The Blizzard team never understood RPGs. They only had Diablo which is barely an RPG, more like Gauntlet with gear and a few story elements. They just had a good interface which was from there experience with RTSs. As RTSs go they were not nearly as good as Westwood, in the gameplay department and their interface design was already standard in the genre (colorful buttons that make everything clear). The RPG elements that made early wow pretty good were just lifted from other RPGs. But since the team didn't really understand why they were important the game quickly degraded. I remember comments from them like "that's just and RPG element" as reasons for removing them.

Personally I hate role quest and find them as cheap replacements for job quest. You might be able to justify them in Shadowbringers but stripping them from Endwalker seems like a case of cheap penny pinching and slowly killing RPG elements of the MMO.

One big fear a LARGE amount of people have with FF14 is job homogenization and using broad generic terms to describe jobs and also only doing role quest does scare me when it comes to job design in FF14. It is an RPG and they are watering that down.

Cecil in FF4 was Paladin not just tank job. You remove job identity by attempting to save some money because making job quest is hard. This is one big area that is a red flag that I see Square Enix copying Blizzard.

It becomes far to easy to start going down the road of generic borrowed power abilities to save even more money and be even more lazier with job design. WoW is famous for having a bunch of class trainers standing around in every zone that literally do nothing now and serve no purpose.

The next step that will actually make me unsub as the writing will be on the wall is if I EVER see Square Enix start tying new abilities to these role quest instead of being job specific. You cannot claim the MMO is at its most successful ever then go down the penny pinching route when we all know they are making bank off this cash cow.

[linayar]

Cecil in FF4 was Paladin not just tank job. You remove job identity by attempting to save some money because making job quest is hard. This is one big area that is a red flag that I see Square Enix copying Blizzard.

The problem is they can't keep making 17+ storylines and have the MSQ as well. How much of the story in FF4 is strictly about Cecil as a paladin? At some point, Final Fantasy stories are more than simply about what specific jobs the characters have, at least of those I've played, and FFXIV is no different there.

The focus of FFXIV is the MSQ while the job quests served as introduction to the jobs, and I think they've done a decent job at it, but that's all they are needed for.

Also, the continuous progression of a game like FFXIV makes it hard to continue with job-specific storylines. Look at how some people feel about changes to Astrologian and how those changes may or may not affect the validity of the Astrologian job quests.

Moreover, combat itself favors the roles more than specific jobs, so the fact that people like to emphasize jobs over roles is pretty sad. When you're in an instance, what role you are is more important than what job you are if the game has been well made. People need 2 tanks, 2 healers, and 4 DPS. The specific jobs are for the players to decide, but it's the roles that party should care about.

[Puremallace]

The problem is they can't keep making 17+ storylines and have the MSQ as well. How much of the story in FF4 is strictly about Cecil as a paladin? At some point, Final Fantasy stories are more than simply about what specific jobs the characters have, at least of those I've played, and FFXIV is no different there.

I'm just telling you that when MMO veterans get in a room and someone ask them to list 5 reasons they think WoW went downhill this always comes up. Once the community accepts this type of stripping of the RPG then job identity goes out the window. Imagine if instead of getting the Dark Knight questline that allowed the primary writer of Shadowbringers and Endwalker to emerge we only had "generic tank quest" as our option.

I get it is easy to dismiss this as a very minor thing but stripping out the RPG elements of an MMORPG really does diminish the experience. I can promise you Blizzard greatly regrets this and after it was removed they have learned in an extremely hard lesson that trying to reintroduce those RPG elements is nearly impossible.

The problem is the people who care start to leave as they no longer have any attachment to their characters identity. It is a mistake that saves time in the short run but in the long term greatly damages the game.

[Ralph2449]

I get it is easy to dismiss this as a very minor thing but stripping out the RPG elements of an MMORPG really does diminish the experience.

The problem is the people who care start to leave as they no longer have any attachment to their characters identity. It is a mistake that saves time in the short run but in the long term greatly damages the game.

This is very true and has other dire consequences, as this happened in WoW more and more casual minded people quit, this left the community open to be controlled by extreme tryhards metaslaves who see their character as nothing more than a tool to get high end prestige asap to deal with self esteem issues, they ll abandon their spec or even class if it isnt Fotm and would even change specs or classes per boss fight simply because the one they current were playing isnt 100% optimal, and the community has degenerated so much that you see this attitude and even people telling others what to play or what talents to use in low end content or ridicule people for playing "non meta" because they cant imagine someone playing non meta because they enjoy it, they must be a "bad player" to play non meta.

The rpg element and attachment to one's character has been completely lost in most of WoW's community and anyone who might try to ask for it back is attacked as a "bad noob casual" who "doesnt know how to play" or "lol show me your mythic/arena/m+ achievements" because in a world were prestige and ego are the only thing that matters, that is the community you create.

"only endgame matters so just focus on finishing MSQ now". And the same players who complain here about "elitism" are the ones who complain if their "main job" isn't on high demand for said high-end content that supposedly shouldn't be the focus, and that they don't do. The homogenization of jobs is a direct result of focusing on high-end pve compositions. Throwing theme-park attractions outside PvE doesn't change that.

Sorry but I have not seen people say "only endgame matters so just focus on finishing MSQ now" bar that one blatantly obvious troll who goes around saying "nobody cares about the story" and talks about how great high end focus games like WoW are.

If you wanna see a game that has full abandoned everything for the sake of high end you should check out WoW, they quite literally throw scraps to casuals because they have no idea what to do since high end and streamers complained they had to play the rest of the game instead of raid log. If you want more details read my post in end of p1 and start of p2.

I am not saying SE doesnt have any questionable decision but my god they are nothing compared to WoW's terrible design choices and elitist tryhard community that has degenerated so much it cant be saved

[linayar]

I'm just telling you that when MMO veterans get in a room and someone ask them to list 5 reasons they think WoW went downhill this always comes up. Once the community accepts this type of stripping of the RPG then job identity goes out the window. Imagine if instead of getting the Dark Knight questline that allowed the primary writer of Shadowbringers and Endwalker to emerge we only had "generic tank quest" as our option.

I get it is easy to dismiss this as a very minor thing but stripping out the RPG elements of an MMORPG really does diminish the experience. I can promise you Blizzard greatly regrets this and after it was removed they have learned in an extremely hard lesson that trying to reintroduce those RPG elements is nearly impossible.

The problem is the people who care start to leave as they no longer have any attachment to their characters identity. It is a mistake that saves time in the short run but in the long term greatly damages the game.

Yeah, but usually, those "MMO veterans" have a different view of story than what is presented in FFXIV anyway.

Many of them probably can't understand why instanced contents have to be locked behind story quests.

And take the faction war or allied race requirement or race-class restriction or even the covenant system in WoW. Many people have used "RPG elements" as reasons to defend these systems. But coming from Final Fantasy, and especially FFXIV, I see these elements as being in contradiction to the story being told or irrelevant, which means they are the opposite of being an RPG element to me.

To me, restricting gameplay* or putting in anti-QoL features in the name of "choices that matter" or "lore reason" is the worst form of an "RPG element" that you could have, especially when the "lore reason" doesn't even stand up to scrutiny.

* And before someone thinks to say locking dungeons/raids behind story quests is restricting gameplay, it's not, it's restricting content behind content, so that's fine, especially if it's truly story/lore appropriate, which it is in FFXIV.

And so, to get back to the story, putting in role-relevant stories would be more meaningful as an RPG because it shows an expansion of the story in terms of scope as you're not stuck at just looking at your own limited view of a job, especially when the MSQ itself has gotten bigger in scope as well.

[Garet]

They are removing job quests in Endwalker? I really love the job quests to be honest. It really makes me attached to my character and his main job haha