Quote Originally Posted by Enkidoh View Post
Someone seems to have forgotten though that the Final Fantasy series is famed for story more than gameplay (and that this is a Final Fantasy game first and foremost.).
This.

People are playing this game because it is firstly a "Final Fantasy" game with "Final Fantasy" names attached to it. If this game was "Generic MMORPG with Lore I do not care about, and characters gated behind gacha mechanics" people would not be pulled into it.

Like it's amazing that people are complaining that FFXIV is a Final Fantasy game. If you want to skip everything and play a gacha, play "FF7 Ever Crisis", the story is nerfed, you can pick whatever characters you want to do the story with, and you aren't compelled to play it in order.

If you cut the entire story from FFXIV, then the rest of the game is just a generic grindfest and you can get that from all the the hands-on-your-wallet F2P MMO games.

People who come from WoW, either are amazed there is a story at all, or decry having to do the story just to play with their friends/RP. For the latter there are skips. Thank you for buying the game twice, your impatience fuels future development on content you're going to skip too.

The point I'm making here is that if this was not a "Final Fantasy" to begin with, you need look at all the other trashfires Square-Enix has put out in the mobile space that has had poor uptake and they shutdown almost immediately. See what happened with Chocobo Racing GP, they basically gave it 9 months. Most of the people who heard about it's shutdown didn't even know it existed! And those that did saw it for being an evil monetization game and spent their time somewhere else. Remember what happened with version 1.0 of FFXIV? Square-Enix has a VERY VERY poor track record on listening to global feedback. What works in Japan (mobile-centric gacha games) does not work outside of east asia because the commuter culture is different. If you want a game to do well in the West, it has to have a PC port. A mobile-only game will fail unless it only has a 90 second gameplay loop.


The most important rule for getting people to play a game, is making it accessible (regardless of skill level) enough so that players and their friends can play it together. Regardless if you gate the content behind gacha, 300 hours of cutscenes, or a 79.99 price tag, that still means some players AND their friends are going to skip playing the game and play something that doesn't have the "fun" part gated.

Smash Bros, Mario Party and Mario Kart are the most successful "party" and "multiplayer" games entirely because you only NEED the game. You do not need a subscription, gacha for characters, or have to sit through hours of cutscenes to start playing with your friends. You only need to own the game and the very-expensive console. A more successful game would need to eliminate the console and initial game cost. So go look at the PC, there's a handful of free games that clone the basic way Smash Bros, Mario Party and Mario Kart work, but they don't have the traction those games have because the gate the content behind gacha or grind. If you want to play with a friend, well you have three characters in the "free" mode that rotate every day. Good luck learning how to play the game when you keep changing the rules. That problem exists in Dissida NT, and exists in a handful of other "free" fighting games.

Meanwhile Nintendo tried all these mobile phone games, just like Square did, and also failed. Not because they made "mobile phone" games, but because they didn't put the games on the PC. Nintendo must hate money so much that they never want Mario Kart on the PC. Square-Enix likewise failed to do so.

FFXIV is Square-Enix's only "successful" multiplayer game, and had it not been a "numbered" FF game, they would have killed it back in 2010 after a few months too. That is the only, single reason, why this game still exists. The company was embarrassed that it put it's big brand marquee on a game that was incomplete and performed poorly.

People want this to be a Final Fantasy game. Not a copy-paste of another game reskinned with FF characters.