Recognizing parasistic game design decision

[Tulzscha]

To summarize what happened to WoW: imagine if relic farming was part of MSQ and if you didn't made it, then you would never have enough DPS/Tank/Heal capacity to be called for an endgame instance. But, if you made it, for the next expansion all your progress is gone.

Except said relic can be in any gear slot so naturally players would make them for the slots with the most stats because they have a higher ilvl, then next patch SE comes out with special gear for those slots which also require extra farming to upgrade making everyone refarm relics for different slots. Hope you like farming repetitive boring content!

Yep that's exactly what happened in WoW.

Effectively the best example is borrowed power systems that are put into an expansion that contribute nothing and can quickly be retired and noone would notice.

Some prime examples for FF14 are Diadem, Deep Dungeons and Blue Mage. Now Square Enix has walked a fine line here of making all of these things optional but it is worth it to be educated about this topic.

I personally believe FF14 is approaching a tipping point that WoW hit and took the borrowed power approach to combat ability bloat with obvious horrible consequences.

No, no, and no.

Borrowed power is when your character temporarily gains power from something other than their job/class. In Legion there were special weapons that granted bonus abilities and were retired at the end of the expac. BFA had artifacts giving extra abilities through certain pieces of armor for BFA only. In Shadowlands there are covenants that grant extra abilities for this expansion only. Every one of these things affected how your class played everywhere for the duration of the expansion, thus they contributed a lot and are very much noticed when removed.

Diadem is bonus content for gatherers and crafters, is relevant for leveling as well as obtaining cosmetics and some useful items. Deep dungeons are their own thing, relevant for leveling and seeing job abilities beyond your current lvl as well as obtaining cosmetics and stuff. Yeah you get extra abilities in there but it's more like Torghast. Blue Mage is side content, completely optional for anyone who wants to do it, again with cosmetic rewards. None of these give your character power for endgame; arguably BLU makes farming low lvl stuff faster for relics but that's it, it's also an entirely different job.

WoW uses borrowed power as an extra way to keep classes fresh every expansion without having to worry about bloat and allow for further customization, and are a balancing nightmare. Side content is not borrowed power. The closest things FFXIV has to borrowed power are Eureka and Bozja which have you playing your job as normal + extra bonuses but said bonuses only apply in those areas unlike WoW's bonuses which apply everywhere so it's still not the same and is largely optional, even when making a relic in ShB you can do most of the work outside of Bozja, or you can work on a relic for one job while leveling another.

FFXIV and WoW are also different games, FF has a lot of side content in general, honestly everything is optional and you're free to do whatever. WoW funnels everyone towards the same endgame and whatever side content they have in any given expansion mainly serves to push players towards that same goal rather than simply being a fun optional thing to do when you're bored with the grind - in WoW it's all part of the grind.

FFXIV is just starting to feel the pressure of bloat having already pruned and reworked many jobs, we'll have to wait and see how they deal with it.

All this said borrowed power and parasitic game design aren't necessarily bad, it just means having something unique for an expansion that's replaced with something else from the next. It's disliked in WoW because it tends to come with massive grinds and terrible systems. Covenant abilities themselves are fine, how they're implemented is a different story.

Parasitic design does tend to waste a lot of design time when devs constantly throw away what they make, FF has been pretty good about that so far. You can always head over to Eureka for relic glamours/Ozma mount/whatever, are you ever going to go back and do a Warfront in WoW? Island Expeditions? Garrisons? MoP farm? Timeless Isle or any of its clones? They haven't been updated to maintain relevance and don't have many rewards people would want so it's basically dead content. Which just means at any given point of time in the future there will be that much less to do. I don't see that being a problem in FF for a while.

[Shougun]

Garrisons?

I still feel including including this particular content greatly disrupts the value of the discussion. If Garrisons fit into parasitic design then so too do squadrons, and perhaps some other content. It makes more sense for speaking specifically about borrowed power since it's something that is basically stolen away from you, a reaaaaaalll waste of your time when you get to the end of it all.

Garrisons still offer means to make gold and have unique items, achievements, and such to them (even if the amount of gold is far less than it was back when it was causing economic disruption). If such a system, that is obviously abandoned, though apparently also nerfed a bit afterwards (kicking one while down), counts, then a lot of stuff people are saying don't should if we're being fair.

Just seems a little odd people are going off on other games with systems that FFXIV does have. Though honestly it seems like, minus the kicking a system while it's down.. a lot of games has this. Sometimes they're appreciated I think, but obviously one might say their resources might have been better spent if they spun back into the game. Whatever, not trying to focus on that bit right now in the post.

The video also goes on to discuss Warframe's systems, which are absolutely in line with some of the systems FFXIV uses. Some people call them content islands, of course certain islands in warframe are more egregious than others. Maybe railjack or related flying things being worse compared to the core game, but say Eureka gear (besides looks) has no real application to the rest of the game. Of course one would say cosmetics and exp are important! Which they can be, everyone knows glamour is the real end game, and defends FFXIV's systems, but then immediately going back to some of the stuff people call parasitic design for WoW and Warframe. You could pull them out of that title by the fact many of them too offer things like exp and cosmetics. . . .

Just seems like people are slapping oil all over the surface and angling the plates in the direction that favors their game ;/