Please, Developers, Please! Put an end to Easy Mode thinking

[Rutelor]

SE's in a particularly difficult bind with this problem. On one end they want to keep the players they currently have, and on the other end they want to attract new people. People who remember FFXI and thought, "that was too hard".

It's a difficult thing to balance, but I agree with most of this thread, thus far I've seen very little content that's actually challenging to the point of being endearing. We're getting all the easy stuff first while they fix their broken systems. It's fun for a couple of weeks but then just dies on you.

Here's hoping for more challenge in the future.

I don't think the issues most had with FFXI were problems of difficulty. The problems had to do a player base that felt alienated by the game. This, by association, made the world feel difficult and unwelcoming. I went, and I know I'm not alone in this, through the pain of trying to bring throngs of friends to the game; I did it just to crash against the disappointment of seeing most of them unable to get past the eccentricity of the user interface, or the painful learning curve, or the backwards lack of streamlining to the processes and the procedures in-game. I like challenge, and minimal spoon-feeding, but my first PC video game was Myst, which told you nothing, and gave you little. FFXI was made my size.

However, many of those friends, having come to FFXI from playing things like WoW, or EQ2, had trouble with what people back then started calling the "Unforgiving Learning Curve." Many of them did not have the patience to adapt to the world (well, the city, really) and wanted to start killing anything right away. I always thought that more than anything, the game had an issue with rhythm and pace, and a rather alien feel, for the average, testosteronal, generational/gender/nationality group that made a success story out of World of Warcraft.

The exception to that rule was the vast numbers of American, male and young players that had fallen in love with the Final Fantasy franchise. Alas, this group encountered one enormous conceptual obstacle when faced with FFXI: They couldn't understand why they had to pay a subscription to play yet another installment of a game series that traditionally was one-charge only.

So, for the average American gamer of the early 2000s, (still mainly Male and Young) the game seemed alien, esoteric, clumsily designed and incomprehensibly conceptualized. To say nothing that it almost forced them to play in a console-like manner, even on their PCs. (And these were the years in which, because of the market's obsession with FPSs, the console acquired a reputation for clumsy, kiddy, playstyle. The base and the media defined it's player-group's identities as juvenile or ghetto, whereas the PC, on the other hand read as adult and sophisticated. To a certain extent, you still encounter long threads or rants, hyping the very un-gamelike combo of keyboard and mouse--a pairing the computer world cannot wait to shed--as superior to the more ergonomic design of the gamepad.)

On the other hand, for the one subset of that group that was culturally prepared to receive the game well, and understand it, the legacy Final Fantasy fan, XI seemed perversely expensive, and illogically burdened with group drama.

Hence the double-edged alienation of the game. The ability to maintain an average 500k subscribers over more than 9 years is one of the unheralded success stories of the genre, btw, completely obliterated by the general audiences' infatuation with the fantastically designed, but conceptually diluted, World of Warcraft.