People Enjoy hard Games

[shiraneko]

Creativity is rewarded in Elden Ring. You can beat the same boss in wildly different ways depending on your build, the tools you use, and the way you approach the fight. FF14 offers none of this. FF14 asks you to dance a specific dance, and if you are at-level there are generally no alternative steps you can take. FF14 has right answers and wrong answers, and sometimes a continuum between them along which you can be more or less right. Creativity can help you find the solution, but it can't help you find a meaningfully different one.

Other games also have a "correct" way to beat an encounter, but either the meta isn't there yet or the community doesn't push into it. In elden ring and other souls games you can say you have creativity to beat a boss, but there's always going to be the build or rotation or strategy that beats it the fastest. Elden ring being a single player game, there's no push to play optimally other than speedrunning.. but take Monster Hunter World for example, after the DPS meter became standard in coop it's clear what builds are better sometimes you would even get shunned for not doing enough dps or not being meta. Same in Tera where before the DPS meter was standard people did whatever they want, then afterwards it became about playing optimally. So, you can be creative and play as an ice mage in 14 too, but that's obviously not optimal. Similarly pretty much any encounter that requires doing damage has "the" solution. This is especially true in 14 because doing damage is the only metric that matters in a boss fight (ex: CC, dispelling, almost doesn't exist at all), and the way that you output that damage has basically no variance because they're tuned around job rotations that are balanced to all be within a few % of their role. Also because 14 is a tab target where you just lock on the boss and do damage, unlike other action combat games where active evading/blocking and hitting/missing the target is a thing.