Where is the gameplay?

[Tunda]

Another L to Square Enix

[xbahax92]

The game is on maintanence mode, it's just not official yet.

But we're supposed to enjoy our once in a while robe glamours, your expensive cash shop item and the lackluster gameplay.

Don't dare to complain!!!1111!!1 /s

[Voidmage]

Are you guys new to the seasonal events? Aside from stuff like the FF15/FF16/Fall Guys events, these things are always like this. Sometimes you might have to kill a level 15 fate. That's about it. I usually just speedrun these events as fast as possible.

Absolutely not.
Halloween event with fun dungeon,
Christmas event with nice letter reading,
Rising event with maze minigame,
Rising event with monsters spawning in the city,
Summer event with a fate where you have to dance,
Summer event with bombers and the sentai squad.

There absolutely were good events in this game. Yes most are just fates but there were quite a number of good ones and even some of the fate ones had a spin on them.

I don’t really care for this summer event because it’s shortly after an expansion and I usually don’t bother with emote collecting but this is just false information.

I wonder…all who say it has always been like this.
Since when do you all play?

[Rehayem]

Lazy events: check
Cash shop focused announcements: check
Mobile FFXIV in the making: check
Lack of moderation: check
Feedback keeps getting ignored: check
Complete homogenization of jobs and lack of innovation: check

Have I been teleported back in time to Aion or something?

[LilyPendragon]

Yeah, doesnt mean its good.
I think the fanbase has been tamed by their loyalty into being conditioned to accept mediocrity.

Any time "this is how it's always been" is stated in an argument, you know the rest can probably be safely discarded

[Jojoya]

Dawntrail has been criticised heavily for having the least amount of gameplay of any expansion, slowly turning more into a visual novel than an actual RPG game.

Same complain has been made for years. It's not a new one.

The new summer event is two quests, where the only "gameplay" element is running between npcs and using 2 emotes. What happened to interactive events? Other MMOs do it, why can't FFXIV? Even FFXI, SE's 22 year old MMO had more involved events than FFXIV does.

I agree I miss the interactive activities during the seasonal events. There's nothing wrong with bringing back some of the old ones that weren't specific to the event's story for the year.

I acknowledge that there is a climbing mini-game, but it's just kinda... there. There is no reason or reward to do it, and it's not even included as a part of the quest for the event.

There is a reason to do it - to have fun seeing if you can get to the top. To socialize and cheer on other jumpers.

It doesn't need a better reward. It doesn't need to be part of a quest.

Learn to embrace life and do things just for the sheer joy of the experience instead of turning everything you do into a job that requires compensation.

[Havenchild]

The halloween event used to be amazing with a totally new dungeon (Haukke Manor with tweaks) and puzzles and tricks to solve.

The FFXIII event was amazing, chasing Lightning around Eorzea doing diferent Fates.
We had that Costa del Sol event with a gigantic bomb trying to invade the beach.

Now the events are just a bunch of "speak to NPC", kill 1 mob, that's it. Certainly, other MMO's do MUCH BETTER seasonal events than nowadays in FFXIV. Even Swtor has a recurrent event when people gets a kind of a zombie disease and they have to fight those zombies and get vaccines or they will spread the sickness with other players doing normal content.

"Where is the gameplay" is something I asked myself several times during the DT MSQ. It's 40 hours of "talk to Wuk Lamat and watch a cutscene". The game used to have better MS quests with more stuff to do other than "talk talk talk", and most of the "talk" quests are pointless and the only thing said is "oh great everybody is here, lets talk about the topic.....but better let's go to another place firts". I guess the Visual Novel players got what they wanted? A MSQ with 0 gameplay. They cry rivers of salt every time the team incorporates some gameplay feature into MSQ. I remember the rivers of cries with Thancread solo duty and the absolute sea of tears of the From The Cold quest in Endwalker, for me one of the absolute BEST QUESTS of the game. But when Visual Novel players have to press more than the glamour buttons they come here to cry about how hard the game is and the game forces them to play in order to keep playing. SAD.

This community robbed itself of interesting duties and quests because these forums consistently harper on good and interesting things they've did in the past. Either it's too hard or it's "not interesting" or some other nonsense reason.

The community, especially on the forums, is the driver of uninspired or bad content. Too many complaints for the sake of and not enough appreciation for unique duties that require a modicum of effort.

[Rueby]

Absolutely not.
Halloween event with fun dungeon,
Christmas event with nice letter reading,
Rising event with maze minigame,
Rising event with monsters spawning in the city,
Summer event with a fate where you have to dance,
Summer event with bombers and the sentai squad.

There absolutely were good events in this game. Yes most are just fates but there were quite a number of good ones and even some of the fate ones had a spin on them.

I don’t really care for this summer event because it’s shortly after an expansion and I usually don’t bother with emote collecting but this is just false information.

I wonder…all who say it has always been like this.
Since when do you all play?

There was a valentines day event that was super cute you queued up for an instance and got matched with someone and did some puzzles together...That was so adorable imo.

[LianaThorne]

Yeah, doesnt mean its good.
I think the fanbase has been tamed by their loyalty into being conditioned to accept mediocrity.

Never said it was. I literally said complaints have been made over the years.

I wonder…all who say it has always been like this.
Since when do you all play?

Shadowbringers, like .1 or .2. For me, they've always been bland outside of the Fall Guys event. The one haunted house I did all we did was walk around and it was more like a building tour rather than an actual event. The majority of the summer events I did were just talking to NPCs and I think I had an obstacle course once that was interesting for the first 1-2 times of doing it and then got boring. Otherwise, it's been cutscene events/running from NPC to NPC.

If they used to be better then I'm happy for those that got to experience them but I can't share the same sentiments since they really haven't been that for me.

[Striker44]

Yeah, doesnt mean its good.
I think the fanbase has been tamed by their loyalty into being conditioned to accept mediocrity.

For me, as someone who enjoys the game, it's not so much "accepting mediocrity" as acknowledging "every game will have its own individual strengths and weaknesses." Over the years, I've played GW, WoW, GW2, SWTOR, and FFXIV. Each one has had certain things that made me enjoy playing it while I did and certain things I didn't care for. I'm just enough of a pragmatist to recognize that no single game will "do it all" and just because Game A has a certain feature doesn't mean every game should have it. Seasonal quests aren't what brought me to FFXIV, so I smile at the ones that bring back references to other characters you've interacted with along the way (some seasonal events tend to continue a storyline from year-to-year while others just repeat themselves) and just shrug at the others. People on this forum love to take everything to extremes and just outright bash the developers...and then wonder why they don't get taken seriously...it's honestly a little amusing. I play FFXIV for the story, the music, and the veritable ton of side content, and all of those continue to please me in DT.