XIV and the MMORPG Genre

[Mezolitik]

I honestly don't have an issue with a game that is a polished version of a good idea.

Developers can't risk moving too far outside of their genre if they're targeting the MMO/RPG crowd. The Secret World is a good example of that. It was a great, innovative title but its core elements were so different - an RPG in the modern world - that nobody played it, and it went F2P with loads of lay offs.

Square had to protect their brand after 1.0. They couldn't afford to take any more risks with FF. And, tbh, I don't think FFXIV needed innovation. I'd imagine that the vast majority of people who play FFXIV do so because of Cactuars and Chocobos; not because of any particular system.

It's just fantastic that it (eventually) turned out to be a great game.

[Aethyriel]

It's not like there were no games who tried to do things differently, they simply failed for one or the other reason. I don't think people need dungeons/raids/tank-healer-dps-system and everything else that's typical or that they wouldn't play a game that doesn't have them but the problem really lies in how the differences have been done and I think they were just poorly done, like:

Tera real live action combat - turns out it was running around in circles to "dodge" stuff, very boring and idiotic actually.
GW2 doesn't have a tank-dps-healer system and it plays horribly (in PVE) but it's not because of the missing mechanic but the AI/skillset they have and the "combatrezz"-system that drove most pve-oriented players away.
Aion introduced aerial combat, neat idea, horrible controls.
We could also look at Defiance that was a shooter-mmo which failed due to repetitive gameplay and no longterm motivation or
the Secret world and the unique quest design that a lot of people liked but it once again failed because of no long term motivation.

The reason raids exist and the reason WoW is succesful with it is because it does two things that 90% of all mmo players care about the most (and they might not even realize it):

Accessibility to all game modes without being forced into any "niche"-game modes offered
Longterm motivation with variations.

FFXIV was very succesful because it did a lot of things right, it has:

- great graphics, without knowing a game this is pretty important people, it just looks cool.
- great atmosphere, the music and the way maps were build is really good.
- an immersive storyline that makes you "commit", it gives your character a very personal touch through the quests (the reason so many people stuck with SWTOR for so long)
- it's Final Fantasy, it sells itself - the game has gone downhill so hard since the "glory days" yet people still buy it like crazy and anxiously await every new release, hoping it'll be good again (also like swtor, it sold because it's Star Wars)

And that is enough for a purchase and 2/4 months subscription, 2 months because it keeps you entertained that long without being overly bored (assuming you don't play ALL day) and 4 months because you now maybe have made friends, you at the very least made personal progress with your character or you just really like the way the game plays and just hope for a change in available content and content design. I knew multiple people who bought this game and played like CRAZY for 1,5 months, than decided to quit for the same reason a lot of other people are going to quit, what FFIXV does wrong:

- no easy access to any and all content (housing prices [Rift managed to keep probably 50% of subs going throughout a crappy expasnion because housing was cheap, easy and fun) or very grindy progress towards it (3h waiting for a fate anyone?)
- repetitive gameplay, increasing the Myth. TS cap to 450 is nice for newer players to gear up faster, sure but if the main focus still remains farming a single dungeon over and over for them people will get fed up with it (many already got fed up and left)
- no longterm motivation due to the game being repetitive - I am not excited about killing Garuda again, extreme mode, ultra mode, I don't care, I need something new and Coil was too small a raid anyway, 4 bosses is a dungeon, not a raid.
That being said you keep grinding the same stuff to get better egar to do stuff you already have done, it's a cycle that gets broing quickly and there are no real alternatives, no other reason to log in.

So, being a WoW-clone does help sales, sure, but you can't keep subs if you don't offer more than WoW (most palyers that left here went back to WoW btw) which isn't easy cause it's been around forever. The best solution one might think would be to offer something other games don't offer (or don't offer it in a good quality), sadly FF didn't and doesn't seem to want to do just that. The games I mentioned all had good ideas, hey just failed horribly at acutally making it work (which really makes you doubt their intelligence seeing how live action combat has been done by SO many offline games and done well at that). I do hope FF will still turn things around, I really like the basic setting of the game, it's really just the content that bothers me, I've played WoW quite a while and quit mmos for a long time after all i did was log in every Wednesday to kill LK hard and log off again with 1 item more sometimes and I just won't ever again invest a lot of time in any game doing grindy stuff just so I can enjoy the portion of the game I actually like, a lot of people always talk about "earning" something in a game - I earn stuff in real life, I want to just play the game.

On a sidenote: User generated content is somewhat of an illusion, it really doesn't matter all that much if a dungeon for example was created by devs or another player- in fact, the motivation to do something someone else has created is lesser, seeing how you can't expect a quality standart and/or no real reward for beating something, Neverwinter Nights showed how people lost interest after the story was done and only player generated content was left (not that it was a seriously good game to begin with).

[Zafrei]

i can't comment on star citizen, but how do EQN and TESO break away from the traditional model apart from having "action combat"

Do they have action combat? Wasn't aware if that. I was commenting on the fluid skill systems, much more freeform than current mmos

[Anjian]

User created content does work though but the MMO has to be designed for PVP the ground up. Was in EVE Online for a number of years. Another heavily PVP oriented successful MMO is Age of Wulin. Enemy players can fight you in the dungeons, and you have mass raids against other schools whose players fight you back too.

[WhaleBiologist]

I remember playing World of Warcraft, it was different to previous games I had played (notably lineage II and Anarchy Online). I liked it. It was a PVE focused game of a different sort.

Then came Wrath of The Lich King, and I began to realise all of the content was a glorifed system of chores that I was paying Blizzard to do. The LFG tool in that game killed all love I had for it, because then the community began to suffer as typical party content meant that the only way I met and chatted with new people was recruitments in my guild.

I left to play Rift. To cut a long story short it was very similar, but when I came back from an extended holiday overseas to find that they had implemented a LFG tool I immediately logged out, canceled my subscription and let my remaining time rot, never looking back.

I have acknowledged that the game genre I once loved is dead, everything is instanced, social interaction in MMO's is at its lowest ever unless required by the game (isolated incidences aside). The only reason I'm playing this game right now is because of the small amount of socialising that occurs within my free company and linkshells.

Overall what this means is my loyalty to this game is egg-shell thin, as has my loyalty to every game that has come out seeking to replicate Blizzard. It is not what I want in a game, and if I find a game with a decent population within my region of the world that provides a good game AND the people, I would probably drop this game in a heartbeat. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way and even if the majority just want more warcraft but with better graphics, a lot of us do not. Worth considering from a developer perspective.

[Inuakurei]

I still don't know why they didn't stick with 1.23's battle system....

[coffeeking]

support, every mmorpg is the same, the one that would make a complete refreshed one is gonna be rich...RICH

[Enkidoh]

I still don't know why they didn't stick with 1.23's battle system....

Because it was slow? Really, like FFXI you just went into auto-attack and let the character slowly build up TP to use a weaponskill/ability. And the attack delay was huge. Dragging the battle system out like that just made things more torturous, and the whole 1.23 system was still showing the legacy of the original action-system at release. It was broken fundamentally, and hence no amount of tinkering would fix all it's design flaws. That is why ARR's system is completely different.

That's not saying ARR's battle system with the GCD and full TP at start is flawless. But at least battles don't drag on unnecessarily and actually require you to do things, rather than just sit back and let your character attack on autopilot.

[KraggyKor]

the same archaic dungeon system with LFG/LFR

<snip>

The original FFXIV <snip> had an ATB combat system which involved manually using your attacks to build up TP and then using that TP to attack with skills

LOL, that mechanism was first seen in an MMO to my knowledge in .. 2002 with FFXI. Archaic or what?