Why Savage Feels Like a Chore

[BabyYoda]

hard to compared difficult content between SP and MP.

Personally I don't generally like difficult content when playing with randoms, where you might get situations where you know what to do, but somebody else is holding the group back, (and vice versa, where you are the one holding ppl back)
In single player games however, I love hard challenges because it's only me and the game, and it doesn't matter how much time I waste learning, and I don't need to rely on a bunch of unknowns.

for example If the game offered Ultimates, and savages with trust parties, I would do it in an instant.

Let's say SE just released savage with trusts, would that be more fun?

when I fight a boss in Elden Ring it is for 2 reasons:
1- I want to continue the story.
2- Loot.

but do that exist in FFXIV? for me at least no.

[Router]

ER is punishing way more than savage

What does this mean
If you mess up in Savage you're dead, and possibly killed your entire team as well
If you mess up in Elden Ring you go "damn" and then sip your bootleg Estus flask and keep fighting. This is also ignoring that you can make builds in ER which physically cannot lose. A goldfish killed the final DLC boss

[CVXIV]

Both RPG games and have mechanic to avoid encounter attacks.
there is a differences ofc but they share similarities.

Yeah but isn't Elden Ring more action based though? You can dodge roll, block, parry, etc.
It's also primarily a single player experience, meant to be played solo and you can build around to what you want

Whereas in FFXIV you have to coordinate with a group of 7 or so depending on the content and everyone has rigid builds for what they can do
Not every job has mobility either, you mostly just press your keys to avoid the telegraphs

Granted I've never played Elden Ring but they seem wildly different so I don't really get the comparison
The closest comparison I can make is with Code Vein which I tried a bit of
In that game, if you build yourself correctly you pretty much never have to worry about dying or taking damage (Zweihander + Atlas blood code)
You literally press the block button and from what I recall nothing can damage you so it trivializes the combat system

[kajv95]

I don't care much for savage anymore. I'm in a similar boat; too much emphasis on the dance, not nearly enough on the actual gameplay elements. Now, granted, the encounter design didn't do much in terms of it being more than mostly just a dance to begin with, but there was a good amount of randomization and jobs played different back in Stormblood when I still enjoyed it. Since every job is effectively the same design type now, there is no more "this job is better suited for X encounter than Y" for the most part, which makes the parts where some jobs do function better over downtime sillier than it needs to be.

This is what makes Savage (encounter design in FFXIV in general tbh) so unrewarding for me compared to other games I've been playing lately. At this point, my job in Final Fantasy XIV amounts to nothing more than a script that I press in the same order every time, no matter what party I'm with, no matter what enemy I'm fighting. I probably write a rudimentary script to press the keybinds in correct sequence for me, which leaves the only thing I need to personally think about the part where I'm standing.

Now, this isn't necessarily a super bad thing, but Dawntrail is in the unique position where quite a good amount of jobs feel practically untouched from their Endwalker counterparts, and if you've been playing the game as much as... well, a savage raider, that "job script" as it were is probably ingrained into your fingers. While this creates a comfortable experience in a way, if no pushback from the encounters it makes the whole experience feel rather samey as every encounter just boils down to figure out where you need to be at any given time. And that's what FFXIV raiding tends to boil down to. An exercise in figuring out where you need to stand.

This has nothing to do with singleplayer vs multiplayer, nothing to do with the type of game they are. BabyYoda isn't entirely wrong to make a comparison between the two games because what I think they're getting at the difference in the rigidity of the failstate between the two.

XIV feels like a test, because in most aspects, getting through a mechanic is a nigh-on binary state. You either mess up and die and restart the encounter, or you succeed and you get to continue to the next question.
In Elden Ring, if you mess up, you're first put in a disadvantage state. You're able to fight through it and recover to a neutral state, potentially towards an advantage state later down the line, because the disadvantage is the first punishment.
Now, XIV does apply this in some battles, where missing a mechanic doesn't necessarily mean death, but instead damage down, vulnerability etc. The problem then becomes that XIV heavily relies on enrage timers in this content, so even if you see more of the fight, in some cases you've effectively already lost even if you lived through it.

The feeling of triumph you get from finishing an XIV fight is often more of a "finally none of us messed up the test" thing rather than something you feel you've overcome yourself, whether that is by skill, dumb luck, or being prepared by playing other parts of the game first.

Anecdotally speaking, I've been playing Baldur's Gate 3 recently with my friends I used to raid with. Now *this* game is completely incomparable, even moreso than Elden Ring to XIV, but it's still tangentially related; no matter how many of us are dead, overcoming an encounter after everything went down south is a feeling that is so insanely satisfying, and it's a feeling that is much more directly linked to a videogame, hell, an rpg, than you'd think. Think of the moments in a turn-based game where you survived by a lucky crit or dodge, and turned everything around. Think of that moment you accidentally pulled the best combo of your life in a fighting game without thinking. That moment in a shooter where your friend went headfirst and you ended up playing the perfect cover. That moment in a moba where you made an amazing play based on quick thinking and your skill.

Final Fantasy XIV has none of that. The way the game currently is, it won't ever have that.

If nothing changes, it's just time for those of us who value that kind of thing to move on from this game. It's what I intend to do after I run out of crysta and nothing changes before then, anyway. I fully understand that some like it this way. I just don't. I've come to terms with it, and it's just yet another game that decided I'm no longer a part of the core audience.

[BabyYoda]

...

You got exactly what I mean, it is really comes to what I feel after killing savage and as you said it didn't feel great.

Elden Ring gives you that feeling "Hey guys did it!" moment, or even mobas with friends it feels the same way.

the binary thing I agree, FFXIV feels like true or false answers, which is hardest and feels lame, just imagine it with other players too, you are responsible for other people wrong answers, this creates very bad taste on my mouth, just to simplify it, if FFXIV changes how they do tests, from binary choices (True, False) to multiple choices (A,B,C,D) and secret E it would be in a way better state IMO.

I know it is easier to have true or false answers for developers, but thinking of players perspective it is way harder and punishing to fail even for simplest questions.

[VeyaAkemi]

Aside from all the problems with relying on other players others have cited, there is a lot of other reasons FFXIV and ER can't really be compared, for example...

Elden Ring employs a lot of tricks to keep the game reactive, the biggest of which is input reading, for example, enemies don't dodge your attacks because they saw the attack coming, they dodge because the game read the button you pressed and dodged accordingly, it's why so many spells are so strong, they break the AI around this system, Discus of Light's boomerang effect means enemies can't possibly account for the back swing, Dragon Communion Breaths have gigantic hitboxes that enemies can't dodge because jumping out of the way once isn't enough, Sellian spells, Night Comet and so on so forth, have an "Invisibility" effect to them that explicitly disables enemies from being able to input read them, and many Ashes of War have similar effects on AI(but let's be real, most AoW might as well be magic).

FFXIV doesn't employ any such tricks, it is a lot fairer to the player, but as a result the game is significantly more predictable, this isn't inherently a bad thing, because of how the game is build, a huge part of why Elden Ring can afford to be so deadly towards the player is that the combat is extremely fast, you can build slow and steady of course, but most competent endgame builds are designed around dishing out absurd amounts of damage in short time frames, personally, when I beat Promised Consort the first time, it took me slightly over an hour worth of attempts, but I still died to him like 50 times, because I was dealing so much damage that I was getting him to 10-15% in under a minute, and the run I did win, I outright skipped his meteor attack, while Savage is built around much longer time frames, with 8-10 minutes being expected, and Ultimates going for twice as long, a game with Elden Ring's degree of lethality and reactiveness would be incredibly mentally taxing if fights went for as long as FFXIV considering how there is no downtime in those scenarios.

This is a lot of words to say the two games are fundamentally different different to the point of being impossible to compare them, it may be your gut instinct to do so, since they are both action RPG games, but any comparison requires to strip the game of any unique traits and focus only on the label, I am not saying that FFXIV can't be more reactive than it currently is, it absolutely could and should be, but the most reactive version of FFXIV would still be completely distinct from Elden Ring to the point of still being incomparable.

It doesn't help that when we do get a really fun and reactive mechanic people whine about it out the ass like with Alarm Pheromones, so the game has also fostered a playerbase seem to yearn for the memorization patter style of gameplay, but that's besides the point.

[CaedemSanguis]

ER : solo game, very good gameplay

FF14 Savages : Working with your group to defeat the boss, also interesting/very good gameplay in his own way

I dont know what you mean, I personally enjoy both

[CaedemSanguis]

1- I want to continue the story.
2- Loot.

wait, what ? x)

[Nero-Voidstails]

not gonna lie I suck at souls games but still have my fun and I am well fairly good in savage I do think but I don't do them after day one due to the guide and lack of time I mostly seek the memory over reward that will perish 2 patch later

[TemporalFruitsAndVeggies]

Seems pretty clear that the difficulty isn't a factor in your enjoyment so much as something else. Perhaps you were drawn in by Elden Ring's world, lore, and gameplay, but nothing about recent Savage raids has really grabbed you.