Final Fantasy XIV Hot Takes

[Shurrikhan]

My hot take:

SMN doesn't need Shiva, Ramuh, or Leviathan summons. But it could stand to have Alexander and Eden summons.

Have one from each expansion, so to speak, over one of each element?

I wouldn't hate it, as much as I'd like elemental mixing and matching, but I can't say I'd be too fond of summoning, essentially, giant robots (Eden and Alexander)... I don't really see how either would fit alongside the nice Asia Minor / Persian / Bactrian mixes we have now with Titan, Ifrit, and Garuda.

If I liked Alexander's movesets (and assuming summons ever get enough unique to them to possibly be called a "moveset"), I'd probably be okay with him, but Eden... probably not.

Also, adding some kind of reference to Zanarkand (based on real-world Samarkand and all that of the summoning connotations it has from X) would also be rad af under this "Iranosphere" interpretation of Summoner.

Now that I'd love, especially if it fit with the next expansion's world.

[Shougun]

Another one is I feel like the games getting more boring/stale the more expansions we go through.
Probably because the formula is unchanging for 10 years. This was fine at the beginning
but the SAME things and removing things with nothing in return quite frankly, sucks.

There are so so so many variables in play so everyone please take this as a range of mountains of salt, but I've long a sense for what is like wind or water over long ages of rock that includes all else that ails the game (issues flowing on the streams)... just simply age makes familiarity and is the enemy for many players in games that are meant to 'never end'.

Sure there are some old games that some people still play, and by old I mean not last 5 years. But, as something ages and is in some way required not to evolve 'too much' yet things around it do (because they're new).. I think this is one major factor to WoW constantly in search of the glorious days. Yes, YES of course there are many other issues to point at... but I feel for 'most' people around 10 years is a long life span for a game. It's literally around the age of many pets.

I guess I can make this my third attempt at a hot take, 'MMORPGs are not meant to last forever', it's okay they don't. Certainly you do want them to last longer than a couple years lol, and taking breaks can make it easily last longer- particularly in MMOs that allow you to take a break without getting punched in the face. In a general sense FFXIV allows that, though not financially if you own a house lol. Cataclysms might help, but given you can't stray too far from the source without angering people is also dangerous and potentially less fruitful than just making it different enough they can coexist. Say for example if in 2-5 years SE announced another MMO, my bet would be it'd have a substantial departure from FFXIV somehow that allowed FFXIV to live on like FFXI did (and FFXI still has a good chance to live on with it's small crowd and perhaps even more if they did ever pick up that mobile concept again).

Such a thought is why I occasionally openly wonder if they're secretly working on "titan 2" and hopefully they don't pull a WoW and kill it lol. My personal belief is WoW was going to slowly corrode no matter what, but given certain actions they've done both recently and not so recently have helped speed that up. Hence the water / wind analogy and what extra deeds are carried on the current. Like WoW did I'm certain SE can keep FFXIV making good for many years to come, and I've no doubt they can keep making expansions, but it makes me quite curious how they're going to batter and fortify against the river of time (and I'm not even sure if that's possible). No doom is coming to FFXIV soon, imo, I am talking in the frame of multiple years..

Maybe another analogy is eating at the same restaurant every day, without break. With break it'll help, with the restaurant changing the menu up it can also help (or hinder even lol), but there is still this sense of diminishing returns (slowly, very slowly, it's a many many year process, hopefully), and the shadow of the golden days growing taller when it was still a new experience.

Just my thought that MMOs do have a half life that is exceptionally hard to maintain the desired users through (you can /absolutely/ carry the 'never quit' fans though, like FFXI probably has players from the original days, there are some people who never stop playing the same game over and over and over, I think most people are not exactly like that though). I note that often the 'over and over' games are usually PVP, which helps keep a sense of variability throughout all else- I think that is probably a HUGE constant in most of those games that are quite old and yet still played a lot.

I personally don't find FFXIV currently boring, though I of course love to imagine hence I enjoy the forums as well lol, but I also have a decent amount of work and will make time for other games occasionally (like right now I am enjoying God of War now that is on PC). So I'm more paced than perhaps someone who finishes everything on day one patch or streams a game as a job lol.

[Shurrikhan]

That's all well and good, but what does that have to do with

When some people want certain elements/people gone, they want them to be removed in the most painful ways they can imagine?

[Equitable_Remedy]

So many of these "hot takes" are actually just bad takes.

It seems that a lot of you don't know what hot takes are.

[kpxmanifesto]

FFXIV is known as a game for perverts because of the rampant oversexualization of characters in the game. There are people that think this game's main selling point is catgirl/au'ra/bunnygirl ERP.

[LisSquid]

FFXIV is known as a game for perverts because of the rampant oversexualization of characters in the game. There are people that think this game's main selling point is catgirl/au'ra/bunnygirl ERP.

This is your third post tonight about being angry over the furries, are we okay over there?

[SeverianLyonesse]

Have one from each expansion, so to speak, over one of each element?

I wouldn't hate it, as much as I'd like elemental mixing and matching, but I can't say I'd be too fond of summoning, essentially, giant robots (Eden and Alexander)... I don't really see how either would fit alongside the nice Asia Minor / Persian / Bactrian mixes we have now with Titan, Ifrit, and Garuda.

If I liked Alexander's movesets (and assuming summons ever get enough unique to them to possibly be called a "moveset"), I'd probably be okay with him, but Eden... probably not.

Alexander is like a weird amalgamation of the figure of Alexander and the lighthouse of Alexandria, especially in recent games where he more clearly took on aspects of the former (XIII), latter (XI), or both (XIV). Alexander conquered what was pretty much the Persian empire and attempted to syncretize Greek and Persian cultures, something which survived him and arguably was what led to later Greco-Buddhist developments in regions like Bactria. The lighthouse of Alexandria of course is an edifice that really straddled the line between Greek and Egyptian culture. I think "Alexander" as envisioned, especially in more recent iterations which emphasize a "library/lighthouse" reference, could somewhat squeeze into SMN's aesthetic while adding something new.

But I also think it's just begging to be balanced out by the reimagination of Eden in the ShB raids. The final design of Eden is very clearly taking inspiration from the statue of Artemis from the Temple of Artemis (another world wonder alongside the lighthouse of Alexandria). The statue of Artemis at Ephesus was actually the appropriation by the Greeks of a pre-Hellenic Anatolian goddess. Using that in XIV for a final boss of an Eden raid is freaking brilliant because Ultimecia is really just a poor localization of "Artimesia" (which is semi-confirmed by Loghrif's true name Artemis). And, if you go back to how VIII portrayed Ultimecia/Artimesia, *she* was heavily inspired by a different Artemisia, Artimesia II who built the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus (a third ancient wonder) to mourn her late husband--which ymmv if you like the R=U theory, but we do seem to have some additional love for that myth with the Halicarnassus boss. But that was also a Persian Satrap, again making Eden's design this really weird and beautiful Greco-Persian amalgamation.

Alexander is already quite book-adjacent, and Eden is already quite summon-adjacent. They both also have wings, which would work really well with the aesthetic of SMN's job bar. I just really appreciate the amount of cultural referentialism both have been imbued with in XIV, and think they are wayyyyyy more deserving of being referenced in SMN's moveset than Shiva/Ramuh/Leviathan. I don't think SMN necessarily even needs more summon phases. We could just have one big Alexander Summon spell and one big Eden summon spell. Bam. SMN complete. Chef's kiss.

[Nizzi]

There are people that think this game's main selling point is catgirl/au'ra/bunnygirl ERP.

Well it certainly isn't the gameplay!

[kpxmanifesto]

Well it certainly isn't the gameplay!

Lmao, well I guess we can say some of the music is good.

[Shurrikhan]

1.23 had the best potential of XIV and every good it had was scrapped for no good reason.

What good things would that have been, though? Incaps were removed before 1.23 on account of its making certain jobs obligatory. Customization was shallow and illusory at best, what with Yoshida having already imploded the Armory and "build your own job" systems. Combos then worked just as poorly as now, except in that they took several auto-attacks to unlock (via TP costs) and their costs roughly tripled the cost of hitting any "combo" button out of order. The netcode was worse. The engine (a clipped version of Crystal Tools) couldn't support a Z-axis. (Though, its frame-bogging, upon fixing the issues inherent to the game's Full Screen rendering, were badly overstated.) Job depth and identity were both far shallower. The storylines were brief and, with few exceptions, incredibly basic. End-game content was limited to dungeons (of which there were only four) and trials (only 2; 5 if you include the chief NMs and Skirmish). Behests were just escort FATEs; Hamlet defense was a disjointed mess. Leve-grinds, the predominant way to level up (until people used up their allowances as just mob-farmed), frequently took more time traveling than in combat.

Modern XIV has its problems, but it's difficult to find any threads worth developing from 1.23. The earlier, pre-alpha "Guild FC Wars" design concept, complete with primal summoning, garrisons, ship- (and cake-) building, highly involved guild activities, and large-scale and naval combat? Maybe. The original Armory concept? Maybe. The already watered-down unambitious principles of 1.23, though? Nah.