Quote Originally Posted by Puremallace View Post
I'm just telling you that when MMO veterans get in a room and someone ask them to list 5 reasons they think WoW went downhill this always comes up. Once the community accepts this type of stripping of the RPG then job identity goes out the window. Imagine if instead of getting the Dark Knight questline that allowed the primary writer of Shadowbringers and Endwalker to emerge we only had "generic tank quest" as our option.

I get it is easy to dismiss this as a very minor thing but stripping out the RPG elements of an MMORPG really does diminish the experience. I can promise you Blizzard greatly regrets this and after it was removed they have learned in an extremely hard lesson that trying to reintroduce those RPG elements is nearly impossible.

The problem is the people who care start to leave as they no longer have any attachment to their characters identity. It is a mistake that saves time in the short run but in the long term greatly damages the game.
Yeah, but usually, those "MMO veterans" have a different view of story than what is presented in FFXIV anyway.

Many of them probably can't understand why instanced contents have to be locked behind story quests.

And take the faction war or allied race requirement or race-class restriction or even the covenant system in WoW. Many people have used "RPG elements" as reasons to defend these systems. But coming from Final Fantasy, and especially FFXIV, I see these elements as being in contradiction to the story being told or irrelevant, which means they are the opposite of being an RPG element to me.

To me, restricting gameplay* or putting in anti-QoL features in the name of "choices that matter" or "lore reason" is the worst form of an "RPG element" that you could have, especially when the "lore reason" doesn't even stand up to scrutiny.

* And before someone thinks to say locking dungeons/raids behind story quests is restricting gameplay, it's not, it's restricting content behind content, so that's fine, especially if it's truly story/lore appropriate, which it is in FFXIV.

And so, to get back to the story, putting in role-relevant stories would be more meaningful as an RPG because it shows an expansion of the story in terms of scope as you're not stuck at just looking at your own limited view of a job, especially when the MSQ itself has gotten bigger in scope as well.