Quote Originally Posted by Berethos View Post
The point is, innovation rarely happens after the game has launched. It's not easy to do, and games that supposedly do it aren't doing it as much as people tend to think.
For the most part I agree. However, sometimes relatively small changes can have tremendous repercussions or advantages.

Sometimes even mere reward scaling, small decision by small decision, can allow for a feeling of freedom and connectivity that one would never have expected to receive from something so minor until everything fits just right.

Or, to take some of the WoW examples, the technology of Artifact Weapons was indeed only the smallest addition. But, the fact that the rate of talents was now linked to something other than leveling, that you could see mechanical rewards from gear (more specifically AP) progression, and that the leveling experience had paths of growth rather than truly mutually exclusive growth decisions all heavily differed the experience from the norm. In a time where talents signalled choice and a memory of progression (when talents were level by level), in an expansion aiming to be the best since WotLK (again, where talents were level by level), it provided rapid increments of growth to or addition of potentially gameplay-affecting traits, and then allowed for an RNG-less weapon value progression when players were otherwise getting ticked with RNG too largely determining their gear progression. It was a small change, technologically, but it couldn't have been better timed; it made itself out as a centerpiece to the expansion, and despite certain issues (alt-exclusion, etc.), it succeeded as such.

The addition of Dailies and later Objective Zones and finally World Quests was much the same. Technologically, they gave virtually nothing. But, in their effect on the player experience, they gave an excuse to create fun little gimmick quests or even just quests to grind out skinning or stick around a beloved zone a little longer and to check back later; places to grind out a bit more efficient experience if aligned in quest progress with a friend but behind in character level; places to revisit to keep the open world regularly, almost anywhere and everywhere, to at least protect some small form of relevance.

It's true that they're not technological innovations of note. The transmog system likely required more to make or to later revamp than the frameworks of all those things put together. But, they were incredibly efficient determiners of player experience, similar to a change in broad quest design philosophy that results in more attractive questing (i.e. to give a real feeling of aesthetic not just graphically but through the urgency, tightness of space, types of quests, etc., to a given region), or a rebalance of a racial that was previously so weak that people wouldn't play it despite the attractive lore and model: little technical development time that nonetheless reaps big rewards.

Yet, we rarely see even that in XIV. So many of the design gestures are just that -- gestures. There's no determinable drive behind them, and therefore, if any lessons are being learned -- which seems unlikely, as it seems unlikely anything was purposeful enough to be learned from significantly -- we are not reaping the rewards of those lessons enough to notice. Technologically, there's little difference between same-location FATE chains and GW2 Dynamic Events. Yet, the prior is generally considered stagnant and the latter much more varied and immersive. Even with the tech, the basic ideas seem to go unnoticed, untested, and without improved understanding.