A Lived in World?

[yaba_gabagool]

FF14 is a lobby mmo. they used to care about the world, but now it's just a means to get you into the end game lobby, and put you on the gear treadmill of non-choice, and run you through content.

The reason it's like this? It was easier for them to produce around that model and expect consistent sales. It's not about being innovative, it's not about caring too much about mmos and the genre in general.

They've found a safe model for income and they're going to stick with it. It's on lock and it's never going to change for the remainder of this MMO's lifetime.

FF14's most memorable trait isn't that it revolutionized mmos, or that it was even a great mmo (it's somewhat okay by most metrics - though the boss fights are quite good by industry standards). The most memorable fact about FF14 by far is that Yoshi P resurrected the game from the dumpster bin and took an unworkable game and made it profitable.

That's it.

FF14 will be forgotten to the annuals of time, nothing more than a well tuned profit model square rode off into the sunset with.

Meanwhile Everquest still brings a tear to any seasoned MMO player who wasn't raised on mobile gaming.