FF14 is in a content lul but super popular? Here is why.

[DPZ2]

...Except XIV did exactly that. ARR was a deliberate imitation of WoW, according to its own producer/director.

It just apparently lacks more capable coders and/or software engineering foresight, hence the vast difference in systems polish.

Not exactly. True, Yoshi P did point out the success of WoW as something to aim for, and had developers play the game to get a feel for what might have led to that success. FFXIV is still a Japanese MMORPG, and utilizes different code and assets - many of them brought from 1.0. The battle system is different, the glamour system was built long before WoW started using 'collections'.

This game is story driven, with the Warrior of Light (us) in the center of things. When someone like Emet-Selch dies, WE are responsible -- unlike WoW, where story doesn't matter, we aren't the main character and every. single. major. enemy. is killed by long-standing characters who are not us (Can you tell that I am still bitter about Garosh's death ... and don't get me started on the Redemption Arc for Sylvanus "I burned down Teldrassil and enjoyed every minute of it".)

Despite the '[lack of] more capable coders', this game still manages to pump out content at 3 month intervals during an expansion (pandemic schedule aside). The charge of '[lack of] software engineering foresight' is pretty funny considering that Blizzard wasn't handing out information to competitors on what and when, exactly, they were releasing new features. The polish you see in Blizzard might just be due to the fact that the company wasn't trying to recover from a major downturn with a failed game that they were trying to resurrect on a shoestring budget.

I would argue that the game you appear to think a piece of brilliant software engineering is still stuck in the 'grind is good, they'll stick with us despite our 9-month content drought' mindset that is so endearing to those who are now looking for some other MMORPG to call home.

[Jin-]

DLCs are something else if we're gonna be nitpicky, Blackwood is a chapter

Yea in Elder Scrollish words but difference between expansion and dlc has traditionally been the amount of content you get. Expansions have been pricier but rich in content compared to DLCs. However as we progress further on the horizon game companies more often than not release DLCs instead and increasing their prices. 40€ for ESO DLC (chapter) and its only half of the whole thing, ridiculous.

[Imora]

Yea in Elder Scrollish words but difference between expansion and dlc has traditionally been the amount of content you get. Expansions have been pricier but rich in content compared to DLCs. However as we progress further on the horizon game companies more often than not release DLCs instead and increasing their prices. 40€ for ESO DLC (chapter) and its only half of the whole thing, ridiculous.

Chapter is their word for expansion.

I mean even Bethesda labels it's expansions for Yes and Fallout as DLC. They haven't been expansion sets since Shivering Isles.

There's technically a difference. You get access to DLCs via subscription without buying them. Chapters must be bought, like expansions. They're just like expansions with less content. They can't add more without expanding the leveling system imo. And they won't, they're pretty proud of their One Tamriel abomination.

[Shougun]

Chocobo digging. It existed in XI. And 8 come to think of it.

And FFIX (which was where I was pulling the idea from). With the chocographs and hot and cold w/ forest, lagoon, garden, paradise.

[Sotaris]

Yes, started in 8 with that pocket thingy, I think at least. Dunno how it would work here but it was a cool idea.

[Dzian]

I see things like this and think people vastly overestimate ffxivs popularity honestly..

They see all the new players coming in and they're like yay the population is growing.butbtheu don't see players leaving just as quickly because there bored.

Say for example in April the game had a a million players. And throughout the month pulled iin 100k new ones. You look a that and think great... but throughout the month 100k players also got bored dropped there subs. So in May the population is still a million.

In May another 100k new players come in. Great. Cool. But another 100k also get bored and leave... so in June the population is still a million its not gaining popularity at all. As quick as it pulls players in it bleeds them out.

If you were to research things like census data they'd show the population is actually in slow decline I believe.. it follows similar trends every expansion and every patch but the population never really grows much.

Arguably it is a little higher over the last 12months or so but you could hypothesise that to be largely due to the global pandemic and everyone being stuck at home.. similar to how the pandemic has been great for companies like netflix.

It's like someone made a post about how ffxivnis now bigger than wow. And they got there statistics based on users of a sub reddit. Not exactly a credible source but it sounds good so people believe it.

[Shougun]

Yes, started in 8 with that pocket thingy, I think at least. Dunno how it would work here but it was a cool idea.

I didn't even know 8 had it, but I played it for a little bit and loathed the magic system lol.

Here they could keep it simple, though I think it would be neat if they ensured to had some extra elements of /fun/ gameplay (not made more complex just for the sake of it or slow players down, intentionally trying to make it fun rather than "I haz extra systems becuz can").

I mean if you look at WoW's it's in some ways just like FFIX's hot and cold, so you could pretty much straight port FFIX to here and it would be, imo, automatically a bit better than WoW's since in this situation you'd not have to unmount / mount (as your detector is your mount lol).

[Shurrikhan]

I would argue that the game you appear to think a piece of brilliant software engineering is still stuck in the 'grind is good, they'll stick with us despite our 9-month content drought' mindset that is so endearing to those who are now looking for some other MMORPG to call home.

Mate, levels of grind has absolutely nothing to do with quality of code.

When I refer to lack of code quality and related design, I refer to things like

• certain skills arbitrarily not being queueable,
• certain UI components locking any and all actions and many another UI component,
• interactable attempting to interact before they've reached interaction range,
• ground-targeting skills accepting/delineating button-holds, thereby causing movement over the selected area (as common when you, yourself, are moving) to prevent any actual click,
• target selection being dependent on collision boxes and the enemy's nameplate, rather than on on-screen vision of the enemy (thereby preventing you from tabbing to enemies too tall for their nameplate to fit on your screen, which can be a considerable issue in narrow spaces as melee, or especially on Ultrawide monitors),
• the range and facing detection being so terrible that for over a year even at 40 ms many a player were forced to turbo their Face Target key in order to hit other sprinting melee players as melee,
• it literally being faster for the team to remake every 1-handed primal caster weapon into a two-hander than for the team to figure out how to code main-hand glamours simply as main-hand weapons that additionally allowed or prevented shield use, instead of definitively 1h or 2h,
• glamours in PvP being "impossible", and not to ever be expected... until 6 months later when the coders finally learned how to retain appearance tags in cross-server content to the extent that WoW had launched their transmogs with.

Now, let's briefly address your strawman. Avoiding the above does not make a game's code "a piece of brilliant software engineering". It just makes it far less terrible at its job.

[Puremallace]

I see things like this and think people vastly overestimate ffxivs popularity honestly..

They see all the new players coming in and they're like yay the population is growing.butbtheu don't see players leaving just as quickly because there bored.

Zepla and other creators have confirmed they are seeing a wave of new people in their own analytics on Youtube and Twitch. There is definitely a wave and I doubt it is accidental it happened after Belluar out that video slamming Blizzard for treating WoW like a paid beta test.

Yoshi P threw wide the gates with the lvl 60 free trial.

[kaynide]

As I see it, both games are in a content lull at the moment. If you're a brand new player to either game then there's plenty of content to get through because everything is fresh and exciting - whereas a veteran player is going to struggle to have things to do that interest them as they've probably gone through a lot of what they wanted to do already.

What I miss about WoW and envy about ESO, however, is that the open world matters much more than it does in FFXIV. There's many reasons to go out and explore in both of those games whereas most of FFXIV's content is entirely instanced.

I really wish we had something like the archaeology system from WoW and ESO in FFXIV.

Kind of a recommendation if you just want something to scratch that itch is try out Guildwars 2. It has a lot of flaws, but it’s non subscription and a great game to have in the background when a main game gets a little stale.

FFXIV is a game I can mess with everyday for like an hour or two doing things. But… it gets pretty mundane around this point in the dev cycle.

Guildwars I can jump in and play pretty heavy for as long as it’s fun and then just not touch it for months. It’s just genuinely fun to play around in the over world and always something to do outside of MSQing.

It feels like a platformer game with the Diablo loot system and various game genres all mixed in.