FFXIV has some serious competition with WoW: Legion

[Iromi]

Open worlds with vast samy-looking zones are boring. Controled zones are much interesting. I realized this the moment I started playing Ragnarok Online back in the good ol' days.

They weren't in Lineage II, or FFXI...or Aion...or Tera >.> There was stuff to hunt, camp and farm...bringing a friend along made it even more fun. It is the games fault if they make huge zones for nothing, then yes..they are boring. But these other MMO I have played have utilized all the space quite nicely..and made it feel very fantasy like, big with tons to do and never feeling like "oh god I gotta run THERE AGAIN WHYYYYY"

I agree though, if they make them big for the sake of a "big zone" then yes, that would be really...boring.

[Windi]

The fact that Yoshida doesn't want to put in interesting stats and character growth says a lot lol.

Because the current stat system is fine as is? WoW's stat system is a bloated, ugly mess of things that intuitively sound similar to each other but operate on menial things at best.

[SessionZero]

Because the current stat system is fine as is? WoW's stat system is a bloated, ugly mess of things that intuitively sound similar to each other but operate on menial things at best.

If by "fine" you mean "irrelevant".

[Windi]

If by "fine" you mean "irrelevant".

In what way? Aside from the admittingly useless elemental resistance set, pretty much all stats do their job for their respective classes.

[loreleidiangelo]

Because the current stat system is fine as is? WoW's stat system is a bloated, ugly mess of things that intuitively sound similar to each other but operate on menial things at best.

Care to translate your buzzword string into meaningful criticism? There are four secondary stats in World of Warcraft, and from what I've seen and read it looks like different classes prioritize different stats. No stat is neglected, unlike in this game with it's ridiculous accuracy requirements (leading to it being a "dead" stat once you get enough of it to meet the cap). The closest "dead" stat WoW has is versatility, and even then there are quite a few classes like tanks that actually prioritize it.

Serious question, since I haven't checked XIV theorycrafting a while: do any jobs actually use skill speed/spell speed as a meaningful stat besides BLM? It SEEMS like MNK and NIN would use it, but the stat is so poorly balanced that it seems like crit/det might still be king.

[Zumi]

In any mmo you can have a super complex stat system with all sorts of crazy stats but then you are still given an illusion of choice. People will do the math and find out the optimum builds and best in slot gear. Which is why devs seemed to move away from super complex stat systems because it just lends itself to players making bad choices and they have no idea why.

[SessionZero]

In what way? Aside from the admittingly useless elemental resistance set, pretty much all stats do their job for their respective classes.

Parry is functionally useless for tanks, except to proc certain skills, yet they throw it on just about every piece of gear, forcing tanks to use a hodgepodge of tome, crafted, and raid gear just to avoid it as a stat.

And why even let us allocate stat points if there's only one specific "build" for them in the first place? In FFXIV's case, dumping them in your primary stat (VIT for tanks, STR for DRG and MNK, etc).

Some stats matter, but to say that FFXIV's is fine while WoW's is bloated is just... no.

[Fyce]

They weren't in Lineage II, or FFXI...or Aion...or Tera >.>

They were though. You had small patches of areas more or less organized to look like something, but traveling between these areas was filled with emptiness. The way WoW and other "moderns MMO" do this stuff is simple: you have an area with some mobs and quests to do, all of which are more or less grouped around one particular "theme" (would it be a cemetary, an inn, a big tree, statues, whatever). Once you're finished, one NPC gives you a quest to "bring a letter to the dude in that camp overthere", and you travel to it, which will be the next area where you'll repeat what you just did. But the journey from one of these area to another is completly useless and often really feel like you're just crossing an invisible line between said zones. It was just there to be able to say "hey, look, it's an open world!", but it serves absolutly no purpose besides wasting player's time.

FFXIV is a bit guilty of that because of the size of Heavensward's maps, but it was clearly not as obvious in ARR.

Directly cuting areas out from each other and putting loading times may break the immersion of some players by unveiling this whole "open world" illusion, but the benefit is to have much more freedom in the zone design, as well as giving a logical/lore reason for getting out of a forest to be in the desert. To do that in the games you mentionned, you'd have some kind of boring mountain inbetween the two zones with a single passage from one "map" to the other, and you'd clearly see why that moutain is here: to act as an invisible loading time while you cross that boring passage between the areas.

More often than not, "open worlds" feel very synthetic and man-made, nothing very "organic". And this breaks my immersion way more than loading times.

[Windi]

In any mmo you can have a super complex stat system with all sorts of crazy stats but then you are still given an illusion of choice. People will do the math and find out the optimum builds and best in slot gear. Which is why devs seemed to move away from super complex stat systems because it just lends itself to players making bad choices and they have no idea why.

^^^^ This.

@SessionZero: A fair point. What I was trying to get at with my post was that we don't need more stats, and I cited WoW as an example of a game with a stat system that is too bloated for its own good. Rather, we should push to make what we have better. Fixing parry, for instance, would be a better step then trying to replace it with a brand new stat that's meant to be more "interesting."

[Kaurie]

Speaking of stats, I really like how Mastery works in WoW - where it does something slightly different for every class/spec.