People Enjoy hard Games

[Renalt]

Someone should force the devs to replay the story as Healer. It's incredibly tedious, easy and boring.

I was one of those kids who liked throwing rocks...so I had plenty of healing experience before I even started FF14!

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Someone should force the devs to replay the story as Healer. It's incredibly tedious, easy and boring.

Don't forget: they should also do it as a Hrothgar + AST.

No job swapping allowed.

[Aword3213]

Don't forget: they should also do it as a Hrothgar + AST.

No job swapping allowed.

What's wrong with Hrothgar AST?

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

What's wrong with Hrothgar AST?

AST: because it's the worst of 4 healer to play as to progress through MSQ.

Hrothgar: have fun with that limited hat glams & some comically shaved snout helms. No. I'm totally wasn't referring to their combat performance when I mentioned this race in that post, it's purely aesthetic.

[AnotherPerson]

AST: because it's the worst of 4 healer to play as to progress through MSQ.

Hrothgar: have fun with that limited hat glams & some comically shaved snout helms. No. I'm totally wasn't referring to their combat performance when I mentioned this race in that post, it's purely aesthetic.

Pain

Also Hrothgar's tail physics animation can break when you play AST, so there's that too. Just a minor inconvenience, but with a lot of them adding up it starts to take its toll.

[VentVanitas]

Someone should force the devs to replay the story as Healer. It's incredibly tedious, easy and boring.

just finished doing it on an alt. specifically, I did as much of the MSQ I could purely solo just to see what it was like. it is quite possibly the worst experience anyone could deliberately put themselves through in this game. duty support NPCs deal laughably weak damage which pads out dungeons, yet they don't take enough damage either so you're not actually healing that much unless you pull more yourself (which doesn't even make some dungeons go by faster since the NPCs don't do enough AoE damage). on top of healers already doing low damage, it grinds every single encounter in the game to an agonizing crawl to the point where some solo instances can stretch out to almost 10 minutes, all the while, you only have one damage spell and a DoT to use. for all 90 levels, for every single fight.

someone might say "that's your own fault for choosing to play alone in an MMORPG" which is partly true, but it does not excuse that the MSQ healer experience is still absolutely miserable compared to a tank/DPS playthrough.

[Jojoya]

I find it interesting that everyone criticizes forum posters asking for harder content and they dismiss us for being the vocal minority on these forums but to be honest we may be somewhat of the silent majority with a few outspoken people.

The game has repeatedly doubled down on making itself easier because it has been under the false impression that people calling for an easier game were in fact the majority.

If anything, market trends have telling data that a games difficulty is actually something gamers enjoy. If we take a look at Baldurs Gate and Elden ring both of them became main stream hits despite being more difficult titles to beat, and they both outperformed FFXVI which is a story game with incredibly easy gameplay.

We could argue that using the PS5 platform only hurt them however, it doesn't change the fact that making an engaging and difficult game DOES NOT mean you are reducing your playerbase and hurting the games bottom line.

In short, XIV is too easy, and recent commercial successes reveal there is no reason to dumb the game down to where it is today.

I understand the desire for more difficult content and support it as side content in a MMORPG.

The problem is that some individuals are asking for the base game content to be made more difficult. That does not work well in MMORPGs (the games you mention are not MMOs) where players of different skill levels will be playing together in the base content.

Just because someone is playing an online game does not mean they consider themselves a "gamer". Games are generally a minor part of a player's life, not the focus. They are playing only a few hours a week and not several hours a day. Unless naturally gifted, they're not going to reach the same skill level as those who consider themselves "gamers" because they're not investing as many hours to develop that skill.

Another difference is that single player games allow players to have save points. That gives players a "safety net" that makes tackling higher difficulty content less stressful. You try, you fail, you load the saved game so there is zero negative effect on your character. Nothing is lost. It's as if the failed attempt didn't happen. Not so with MMORPGs, where you need to repair gear and replace consumables after failure. That might feel like a trivial problem to some but to others it ends up frustrating. They are playing the game for different reasons.

One thing the market trends aren't telling you is how many players that purchase games like Baldur's Gate and Elden Ring actually manage to complete the game all the way through. Many players will pick a game up, play until they hit their skill ceiling (or their interest dies out) then quit.

What highly publicized MMORPG tried going the higher skill floor route? Wildstar. Where is that game today? Totally dead (unless someone has it running on a private server). Not enough players were interested in difficult content and that's all there was for end game. Once a casual player completed the leveling experience, the game was over for them.

It just does not work in practice for MMORPGs.

Certainly there is room for improvement in this game to make it more appealing to more highly skilled players. Increasing the base difficulty is not the way to do it.

If you want a MMORPG that is truly difficult, try contacting FromSoftware. They seem the most likely developer that would be able to produce one that would succeed.

[Absimiliard]

They could please more players if they would just fix the bloody netcode already. They're extremely limited in the types of mechanics they can introduce simply because of a number of factors on their end, not the least of which being the incredibly strange way clients and servers communicate with one another. Every fight boils down to DDR. High tier endgame content ranges from slightly above average DDR to a crackhead's idea of DDR, but it's DDR all the same. You can only rehash that so many times. The ability to implement randomized, reactive fights where you may know what each mechanic does but have no clue what order they're coming in would go a long way toward opening up their options.

As it is, it seems like they've been experimenting with reactive mechanics it at least a little. We've got more randomized mechanics now than we used to, and some of those do demand a degree of quick on-the-spot decision making, but the bosses themselves still have a set rotation of sorts.

[Jeeqbit]

They could please more players if they would just fix the bloody netcode already.

Do you mean weaving?

The ability to implement randomized, reactive fights where you may know what each mechanic does but have no clue what order they're coming in would go a long way toward opening up their options.

Believe me, they are perfectly capable of this. This is how old fights used to work in ARR. I recall that Shiva from ARR chooses random mechanics. You can fight S ranks from ARR and they cast in a completely random order. The first cast isn't the same and is random out of 8 or so casts.

We've got more randomized mechanics now than we used to, and some of those do demand a degree of quick on-the-spot decision making, but the bosses themselves still have a set rotation of sorts.

We have definitely always had random mechanics that still happen in a set rotation of sorts since Heavensward. Chaos in Stormblood would completely choose a random phase to start with and it was easy for that to throw the whole fight off for you after you'd got used to starting with the other phase.

[LilimoLimomo]

If we take a look at Baldurs Gate and Elden ring both of them became main stream hits despite being more difficult titles to beat, and they both outperformed FFXVI which is a story game with incredibly easy gameplay.

We could argue that using the PS5 platform only hurt them however, it doesn't change the fact that making an engaging and difficult game DOES NOT mean you are reducing your playerbase and hurting the games bottom line.

In short, XIV is too easy, and recent commercial successes reveal there is no reason to dumb the game down to where it is today.

So here's the thing: while some people do think Elden Ring and Dark Souls games are hard, they're really not. From Software has more than a decade of experience making games that feel challenging, while at the same time bending over backwards to give players feedback and an excess of tools with which to succeed. And it's no surprise that after doing that for so long, Elden Ring is easily their most accessible game to date. They are masters at their craft.

The same can't be said for FF14; the game is just not very good at teaching people to play it, nor does it give players any variety of tools or methods with which to succeed. Credit where credit is due, most non-Ex/Sav fights have gotten pretty good at introducing boss abilities at a cadence where players can fail the first deployment of a new mechanic without wiping so they can learn from it on-the-go, and I really love that about FF14. But after a full decade, there's still nothing that teaches players how to effectively use the only tool they have to actually beat a fight: their kit.

Creativity is rewarded in Elden Ring. You can beat the same boss in wildly different ways depending on your build, the tools you use, and the way you approach the fight. FF14 offers none of this. FF14 asks you to dance a specific dance, and if you are at-level there are generally no alternative steps you can take. FF14 has right answers and wrong answers, and sometimes a continuum between them along which you can be more or less right. Creativity can help you find the solution, but it can't help you find a meaningfully different one.

In addition, Elden Ring lets you over-level. As an MMO, that's simply not an option that FF14 will ever be able to provide its players. I mean, you can wait a handful of updates until there's gear with a higher iLevel, but that's wildly different from taking an hour or so to grind some runes and giving the fight another go.

If you just have difficulty, but you don't offer players an accessible variety of ways to tackle challenges, your game will never be anywhere close to the success that Elden Ring is. Elden Ring is where it's at because the people who made it are experts at crafting games that give players every possible advantage so that they can overcome content that would otherwise be difficult. It would take a drastic pivot for FF14 to even approach Elden Ring's success in that arena.

(And beyond that, I'd say you can't really compare the sales numbers of an MMO with a non-MMO, as there are plenty of people who won't play an MMO just because it's an MMO, or they'll drop it because it's a really big ongoing commitment, or they can't afford to pay monthly for a game, etc. There are simply other factors that need to be taken into consideration to do a fair comparison.)