FFXIV draws too heavily on wow

[sindriiisgaming]

and not enough on its original predecessors... and this might seam confusing given that the game is littered with other ff references and systems. yet everything from the shifting sense of narrative, the gameplay and even the boss design is drawing too heavily from WOW and not enough from other FF games.

it needs to look back at some of the older and better FF games and see what they did with combat and with story, then hopefully it will see that at this point it is coming too close to emulating the experience of wow. including all of its mistakes...

[Supersnow845]

Most of the older FF games weren’t MMO’s I’m not sure how you can draw much from them except references

Like say you wanted to “draw inspiration” from………the fight against yu yevon. FF 10 is conditional turn based and Yuna has to sacrifice her aeon’s then fight their corrupted versions

Literally how would you emulate that as an action MMO

[CidHeiral]

The narrative and boss designs are absolutely nothing like WoW. The gameplay takes inspiration from it but so does nearly every other MMO of the last 20 years. What are you wanting them to do, make an MMO turn based?

[Jeeqbit]

Every MMO ever tried to copy WoW for quite a long time. Why? Because it was the top MMORPG and given how rare it is for a competitor to succeed, the best way to convince any investor is to assure them it will copy its best competition.

But to an extent you're also wrong. FFXIV has many things that are different as well. There are games that copied WoW a lot more precisely than FFXIV, such as SWTOR, which was an actual carbon copy of WoW with lightsabers. They've since begun to copy lots of things from FFXIV for the same reason (I noticed they just did their graphics update to much the same mixed reactions as here).

They did initially try to ignore WoW and just copy FF11. The result of that was 1.0 which was a commercial failure. So at that point what other option was there than to look at what the top MMO was doing?

I do agree that they could take inspiration from some aspects of the single player games better to create other experiences though:

• Narratives that involve internal conflict between main characters.
• Being able to use items on eachother. Just for fun, but also useful for people that didn't unlock other jobs.
• Take the hunts right from FF16 and replace our current B ranks with them. It's a night and day difference.

Maybe use the various battle systems from those games to inspire other mechanics too, such as:

• The power configuration in FF16.
• The materia system from the original FF7.
• The slow but more strategic battle concept in the older games where the long recast times forced you to decide whether to heal or attack. To elaborate on this, it's easy to go on a healer and spam your DPS button 100% of the time, but if your recast time was 10 or 20 seconds, you'd have to consider more carefully whether your next action is an attack or heal because you won't get another chance for ages. The rest of that time could be spent doing mechanics. The game was at least closer to this before they added all these ability heals which completely evaporate that choice most of the time.

[AlucaDragonheart]

This game wishes it drew heavily on WoW, that game's combat is so much more enjoyable than this one.

[CVXIV]

what are you talking about
a majority of the final fantasy games are turn based so what combat could they pull from?

[CVXIV]

I do agree that they could take inspiration from some aspects of the single player games better to create other experiences though:

• Being able to use items on eachother. Just for fun, but also useful for people that didn't unlock other jobs.

I'm pretty sure you can use items on other players, can't you?
For instance, if your healer or somebody in Palace of the Dead gets inflicted with silence you can target them and use Echo Drops to cure it so they can keep attacking / healing

Maybe use the various battle systems from those games to inspire other mechanics too, such as:

• The materia system from the original FF7.

How would that system possibly work in an MMO setting?
The materia system in FF7 is hilariously broken
Every spell is single target until you give it an All materia in a linked slot
You can get x4 cut and other things to absolutely destroy enemies
I don't see that working with the materia they have us use now, because what would the point be of linking them?

They would have to completely rehaul the materia system (which I think it could do with, just not like this because some stats are not used like piety)

• The slow but more strategic battle concept in the older games where the long recast times forced you to decide whether to heal or attack. To elaborate on this, it's easy to go on a healer and spam your DPS button 100% of the time, but if your recast time was 10 or 20 seconds, you'd have to consider more carefully whether your next action is an attack or heal because you won't get another chance for ages. The rest of that time could be spent doing mechanics. The game was at least closer to this before they added all these ability heals which completely evaporate that choice most of the time.

What games had long recast times?
You pretty much got to use a spell as soon as your bar filled back up, and if it took time to cast you could negate it with an accompanying haste spell
That, or you had a limited number of times you could use a certain spell in combat

Also, with how much people have been talking about healers in the forums I don't think reducing their one dps skill to a 20-30 recast time would do anything beneficial for them

Of course they'd need more skills, but even then it sounds absolutely dreadful to play in an MMO

[lucatracy]

A constantly updating, long running MMO taking inspiration from other MMOs instead of single player turn based RPGs... Who would've thought..

[NegativeS]

Tab-target MMO players when they play a tab-target MMO and it plays like a tab-target MMO

[Archeron]

The issue with FFXIV isn't that it's attempting to emulate WoW, (It's not.)

The issue is that the FFXIV devs have become arrogant, just like the Blizzard in 2018. They think they can get away with anything, and everything. Oblivious to the rising discontent within their community by simply ignoring and brushing their feedback under the rug. Lower quality content, longer patch cycles, complete absence of communication, and the dev team being COMPLETELY out of touch with the community. There is clearly a slow bleed off of the community and I don't think they care.

Square Enix likely knows that they don't have to introduce much content into this game anymore to boost revenue. They can just put out a mogstation set/mount and all the whales will pay for the subs that have dropped off. Long term consequences be damned, they only pledged to keep this game around another 10 years, longer patches mean less work. And you bet the trashy mobile version is going to be raking in the money without any effort on their part. Welcome to games managed by AAA developers who prioritize profit over your personal enjoyment of their products.