Titan Extreme is NOT Fun

[avecha]

See after watching videos i don't get it. The foot stomp pushes players off the arena but they still run back onto the arena off mid-air. 8 players all standing on plumes, a couple move off after they appear, the rest quite a bit later, none of them get any damage. Same with landslides.

On a brighter note, we beat Garuda EX with only one healer for the whole fight. Was great fun.

[synaesthetic]

My company is currently working on Garuda EX and we haven't had much time to spend on the primals yet since we're still perfecting our Turn 4 execution and making sure our second Coil static is running smoothly. Holidays caused a disruption in our regularly scheduled runs.

I'm sure we'll get Titan EX down, but like Titan HM, it's a very, very poorly-designed encounter. It's full of cheap and punishing mechanics, "gotcha" moves and the like. That's not to say that we won't learn it and complete it eventually, but that it will not be especially fun (just like Titan HM is not fun).

Squee has done a pretty good job with designing good fights... Ultima HM, for example, is a very well-designed encounter, as is Garuda EX. Both of them have interesting and varied mechanics. Titan, on the other hand, is just a latency-dependent copout.

We'll still kill him and take his stuff, though. It will just be met with groans, I'm sure.

I play games with content that is so difficult a minority of the playerbase will ever complete it but none the less they still enjoy a decent following of fans so I guess uh those people can get stuffed? Their taste for difficulty is evidently shared enough to support a niche market but you just went ahead and spoke for every person who played video games ever so we don't exist.

Like seriously is it so disagreeable that everyone has different tastes in games so they all should have a game out there that is for them in our multi-billion dollar video game market. Let everyone have their niche, and always consider the possibility that a game is not for you.

I'm not sure if you realize this, but the number of subscription-based MMOs is so small they can be counted on one hand. EVE, FFXI, FFXIV and WoW. That's it. Everything else is "battle of the credit cards."

There aren't any other choices, really. XIV is literally the last bastion of what is a dying genre. As much as I have hope for Carbine, I doubt NCsoft will allow WildStar to remain subscription-based for long. The pay-to-win will inevitably creep in eventually.

[seriously]

I find the more difficult content in this game to be a tight dance you have to learn the steps to. There's no room for improvisation. You perform it without error for 10 minutes. If you make a mistake you have to start from the top. There is something not very fun about it. I don't know, maybe it's a cultural thing. It feels like a good time designed for robots instead of humans.

[Ri_ri]

I find the more difficult content in this game to be a tight dance you have to learn the steps to. There's no room for improvisation. You perform it without error for 10 minutes. If you make a mistake you have to start from the top. There is something not very fun about it. I don't know, maybe it's a cultural thing. It feels like a good time designed for robots instead of humans.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/134384

I Google translated this thread and it seems like the japanese players have the same exact complaint as you. So it is not a cultural thing, I think.

[Colt47]

I find the more difficult content in this game to be a tight dance you have to learn the steps to. There's no room for improvisation. You perform it without error for 10 minutes. If you make a mistake you have to start from the top. There is something not very fun about it. I don't know, maybe it's a cultural thing. It feels like a good time designed for robots instead of humans.

That's because it kind of is just that. In fact, the majority of encounters in contemporary MMOs are set pattern memorization games that test both the players reflex time and internet connection. The system is favored due to the sense of achievement players get from mastering the dance steps, but at the same time it makes the content static. Also, since their are only so many kinds of dance steps available due to the movement system, eventually it gets easier and easier to improvise and win, leading to situations where developers have to make the timing tighter to make the fights difficult.

However, this tightening of the patterns eventually leads to the same problem that some single player titles end up with, where the mechanics of a fight get explained in real time as it is happening and the player is forced to eat a death in order to learn a part of a fight. In short battles this isn't much of a problem, but at end game where there are multiple people involved and the fights are 10+ minutes in length, someone could mess up near the end and force the battle to start from scratch.

What a lot of people are probably getting at with this thread is that we've got people who want to see the story content, no matter how tenuous it is, trying to do a difficulty mode that is designed for players that love these 10 minute extreme learning segments, and now we have a massive thread of bickering going back and forth between the two parties. We need a better system than what is being used in this game and others for creating challenging content, but I don't think anyone really knows what that system should be.

[Doo]

I find the more difficult content in this game to be a tight dance you have to learn the steps to. There's no room for improvisation. You perform it without error for 10 minutes. If you make a mistake you have to start from the top. There is something not very fun about it. I don't know, maybe it's a cultural thing. It feels like a good time designed for robots instead of humans.

Yup I hate this type of style of difficulty. It makes players feel like they have to look up guides to succeed and there's not much variety in tactics. FFXI wasn't like this so it's not a cultural thing.

[Warlyx]

titan touhou ultramegasuperextreme !!!

[Tano]

It's just a way to timesink.
i agree, fights should be completed with improvisation and skill, not "do it 10 times, so you learn the gimmick and execute it like a robot"

[Craiger]

So basically you want it be more carebear....

Not everyone wants MMO's to have an easy progression... While fights can get me angry, I'm still enjoying it, and it will bring a lot of joy when you finally beat it.

One of my favorite games outside of MMO's, is Dark Souls. That game was very challenging when you first went through the game. The boss fights in it, where a lot like you described FFXIV Primal fights to be... You mess up once, and you have to do it all over again (and usually a lot content before the boss too).

Dark Souls would've sucked if it was easier, and the same goes for FFXIV.

[Calyanare]

So basically you want it be more carebear....

Not everyone wants MMO's to have an easy progression...

I like difficult things. What I don't like is a fight that is a straight-up latency check with instant death if you happen to have lag at the wrong time. Since the maintenance right after Christmas, instances have been mostly unplayable for me during primetime because of lag spikes making the constant Insta-Death gimmicks undodgeable (however, I just tried it a couple hours ago at 6am, didn't have any lag, and it was pretty fun). Things that are beyond the player's control should be recoverable, IMO.