Quote Originally Posted by caffe_macchiato View Post
Many people, like the above poster, want you to think that you have to and there’s no choice. To them, FFXIV has no competition in the MMO space right now. People keep promoting this game everywhere they go to get anyone and everyone to play. They say it has the best story, the best raids, the best gameplay, the best community, and so on. Whenever someone mentions a reasonable criticism or nuanced opinion, they get shot down. We have to consume this particular product because other people have made it a part of their personality.

Unfortunately for them, regular consumers aren’t turned on by this constant circlejerk. Given that FFXIV isn’t even the third most-played MMO, there’s millions upon millions of people who know about this game and simply don’t care for it. There’s something that just doesn’t click with the vast majority of MMO gamers. Maybe having 90% of the gameplay be a visual novel snooze fest is one? For every interesting cutscene in this game, there’s ten with nothing but nodding, hat-tipping, and endless walls of text that have no impact on the plot. It’s molasses compared to even the dullest Final Fantasy title. And we’re supposed to like this?

The FFXIV community has way too much hubris and self-importance for a hat-tipping cutscene and dress-up simulator.
Indeed it does.

As far as competition goes I can't say I missed the game much during my break as I replayed the Dragon Age games and a number of other rpgs, with WoW and FFXI to get my mmo fix. FFXIV by comparison is a bloated mess with rapidly degrading gameplay and increasing the level cap will only stretch out what few abilities we have further and make the early levels even more unbearable - suffice to say I would not have made it past ARR with the state of classes in this game. An enormous waste of time before combat gets good and a story that betrays you by the end, no thanks.

FFXIV is currently suffering from an extreme mismanagement problem on all fronts. The story in the past may have redeemed it, but the shift from actually entertaining the player with a decent adventure back in Heavensward and Shadowbringers has all been thrown away for the sake of the need of some of these writers to play at being philosophers when I'm at odds with the morals they try to put across and the obtuse way they've gone about doing so. "Forge ahead!" the game tells me as the Scions get magically brought back from death while the former companions a malevolent witch manipulated us into murdering get permakilled off.

Unless FFXIV becomes an actual video game in 7.0 I can't see how in the world this game will manage to pull off its alleged "10 year plan." You can't hope to keep this game running with a story that generated the most backlash in the past decade and doubling down on it further with progressively lazier and moralizing writing, jobs getting ruined left and right, and absolutely 0 response to any of these problems. But I guess the Limsa crowd will enjoy their graphics upgrade so the game looks like it came out in 2015 instead of 2010, whereas most others will be off playing whatever's slated to come out around 7.0, like FFVII Remake Part 2, etc.