Thread: 2.0 in vain?

First of all, you aren't going to know how fun it is by a sample of a few hours. Second, there are plenty of people who are playing this game and enjoying it as it is now, while 2.0 isn't even out yet. Yes, it still has some problems, many of which can't be fixed until they transfer the data to a more functional client. Have you even SEEN the new UI in the screenshots? It looks almost nothing like what we have now, and probably has been built from the ground up to be better streamlined than (to put things brutally) the clunky crap we have now. There are a handful of things I hate about this game in its current state, the majority of which involve the server instability, but the point of 2.0 is to fix these problems. While we wait for that, SE is doing an excellent job of keeping us interested with the drastic changes they make in even the smallest patches.
The only reason I'm giving you the time of day is because you took the time to articulate an argument, but don't be surprised if you get a negative response for bashing something you barely know in a forum used by its fan base.

I gave it another week but Shibal hit the nail on the head. The leveling is fast but it's really the only reason why this game is even slightly bearable. The cutscenes don't do anything to make you feel involved and the world seems really disconnected from my character. I hope that 2.0 will give you a reason to exist instead of explaining everything through a series of hamfisted cutscenes

Originally Posted by afk4life

This is the second time I've given this game a chance. I picked it up for the hell of it about a year ago for $10, played a couple hours and quit. I started playing this game yesterday and played longer.

I guess it's gotten better and I have read the development plans for 2.0 but I'm afraid that it doesn't really add much to the game except bring it closer to XI. If we recall PC Gamer's review of FFXIV, the game got a score of 30 for these reasons:

http://www.pcgamer.com/review/final-fantasy-xiv-review/

-Shallow and slow
-Grind heavy
-Horrible interface
-Nonsensical player limitations

2.0 doesn't seem to address any of these complaints. The game still has a massive delay which is not present in modern (it wasn't even present in old) mmos, the game still sticks to its 90s roots of forcing players to grind mobs, only allowing a maximum of 8 leve quests in a 24 hour period (the leve quests aren't even that fun). The interface looks like it was developed for a console, I found it easy to look past this flaw in FFXI because it was a port from a PS2 game but seeing as how FFXIV was developed specifically for the PC this is unacceptable. The PC Gamer article describes it as "an interface that demands 12 clicks to change your weapon, robs this of any potential."

I don't know what the stance on WoW is on this board but I'm going to assume it's neutral. While WoW was simple, it was also extremely fluid and excelled at what it was supposed to excel at.From FFXIV's 2.0 mission statement it still feels like one big overambitious project. The zone design feels lazy, the leveling feels lazy, and it feels like the crafting was just tacked on as an afterthought to keep players busy. WoW may be simple but it did a great job at blending battles with the lore. I don't even know why I'm fighting monsters or doing guildleves, the two parts of the game feel so disconnected.

wow, the first time you gave the game a whole couple hours...

Originally Posted by afk4life

I gave it another week but Shibal hit the nail on the head. The leveling is fast but it's really the only reason why this game is even slightly bearable. The cutscenes don't do anything to make you feel involved and the world seems really disconnected from my character. I hope that 2.0 will give you a reason to exist instead of explaining everything through a series of hamfisted cutscenes

I'm not going to be one of the ones to belittle you, but I think other people nailed it on the head when they said you were quoting a review of the game from the past. Hell, one of the points you mentioned specifically talked about the EXP cap that was placed on players to stop them from leveling. That's gone now. Why even list it?

And you say the Cut Scenes don't do anything to make you feel involved? I'm not a professional or anything, but I've played rift, WoW, and Aion and I can safely say the cutscenes in this game do more than a quest box that pops up that you immediately skip to get to the pig snout collecting.

The fights in this game are so much more interesting because of the scale of them. Have you watched any cutscenes involving the White Raven or Black Wolf? Those guys are badass. Take a trip to YouTube. Or just do either story missions or grand company missions. Both contain that mystery of "What the hell's going on in the world and when can I get my revenge on this goddamned kamehameha who keeps shooting me with his %^$&ing gunhalberd?!"

The storytelling in the Final Fantasy MMOs are lightyears ahead of the WoW clones BECAUSE they make you feel like a part of the story. The cutscenes are simply badass. If there's one thing XIV has done correctly from the beginning, it's the sense of mystery as to what's going on.

As opposed to World of Warcraft, where the only sense that someone's powerful is that they literally have so many 0s in their HP bar that they can't properly be portrayed in the game.

WoW has accessibility. It has some great fun going on if you want to queue up for whatever content you're into and give your character an extra 20k HP by equipping a pair of gloves.

FFXIV, while it had a REALLY rough start and still has problems today, is getting a lot better and you should be looking FORWARD to 2.0. You shouldn't be looking BEHIND at a review from over a year ago.

Congratulations on dinging 44. If you honestly still can't play FFXIV at the moment, wait until the beta of 2.0 to see if it's any more enjoyable.

I have to say the combat is so much more fun than the rotation system of other MMOs. That's an opinion of course, and THM is pretty rotational in terms of damage, but still. . . The story in this game is great. If you're feeling hamfisted by the cutscenes then maybe the pop up boxes from most standard MMOs is more up your alley.

While I do agree with most people here, I also have to look at things from afk's perspective. I just recently started playing FFXIV about 3 weeks ago, I am level 37 as of now, but i cant blame someone for giving this game up to an hour and quitting outright. FFXIV does kinda throw you into this world without much explanation, and its a bit difficult to star a game, have no idea what to do, and step out into this almost lifeless world.

That all being said however, this game has come a long way and pushing just a bit past that initial point the game starts to slowly come together. Grand Companies story arc intrigues me, and Dalamud gives me a sense of joy and mystery that only reminds me of Majora's Mask, constantly letting me know the start of something new is on the horizon.

As far as grinding goes, i dont know about you, but i much rather grind mobs in the company of a party of people to gain exp than grinding dailies everyday forever and ever so that all my work can be in vain come next patch.

At the same time I can understand your lack of faith in V2. I myself put up a post on my personal concerns about 2.0, and in it i clearly state that it is only my opinion and that i know nothing of whats to come in 2.0, but it is hard to put all my troubles in Yoshi's hand. Clearly he understand what i want in a FF mmo, as he has addressed a lot of my feelings towards what i want this game to feel like. What everyone has to realize though (with all due respect to Yoshi-p), is that no one has ever done something like this before for an MMO, and although Yoshi gives the impression that this game will be almost completely different, its hard to imagine it without having seen anything on it yet. So while i might not agree with afk, i can sympathize with her concern.

Grind, defined as the repetition of content, is necessary (a) because devs can't make new content faster than players can burn through it and (b) even if they could, that would lead to a situation where everyone was doing different things at different times, so finding people to do the content with would be near-impossible: Every new piece of content you add fragments your playerbase. Some games try to get around the former problem with user-generated content, but the quality is really variable, and anyway, that doesn't address the latter problem.

A better way to address this is parametrised (meaningful) variation in essentially the same content - procedurally generated quests. But if the variation is not meaningful, the procedural generation is for nothing, and people seem to be pretty stuck on how to make meaningful variation - at best it's cutting-edge research and far from being ready for commercial application (though it's basically what we were promised -- but didn't get -- in Skyrim).

I have played some "grindless" MMOs, and to be honest, I think they would make better single-player games (or perhaps small-scale co-op MP). They're actually diminished by being MMOs.

Originally Posted by afk4life

A whole slew of recent MMOs (Rift, Aion etc.) as well as some old MMOs (WoW) have shown that an RPG doesn't have to be about grinding the same mob for hours on end. I was okay with this in FFXI but that was then. There's no reason why leveling in FFXIV should feel so sterile and uninvolved. The game became far more mundane than it already was when I ran out of guildleves that I actually wondered how people could play this without botting. Yeah, grinding is a part of games to some degree but the difference between old RPGs and new RPGs is that new RPGs actually try to disguise the fact that you're grinding. Square seems to be rather shameless about it.

Perhaps I am weird, but I would honestly go out with a group of people and slaughter monsters by the thousands if it meant I never had to do the quest based levelling from WoW people seem to love so much. People like to say levelling in WoW wasn't a grind because they quested, it's absurd! You just grind quests!

These quest based levelling systems which may hide the fact that you are grinding (which, I mean, do they really? I would think most of us can see through that) don't hide the fact that you are in a game at all. In WoW I never felt like I was a part of Azeroth, I just felt like a piece moving through a predesignated assembly line. It's designed to be a theme-park, it's just a really bad one.