Do We Remember That a Game Is Meant to Be Fun?

[Khiel]

I have been a FINAL FANTASY XIV player since the very beginning, back in A Realm Reborn. Over the years I’ve had periods of rest and others of heavy playtime, but I have always remained connected to the game.
My current Total Play Time is 465 days, 0 hours, and 26 minutes, which I believe clearly reflects my level of commitment and experience.

I want to share this opinion with one clear goal: for FFXIV to better adapt to current demands and continue receiving genuine care from its development team. It saddens me to say this, but the game has become boring, and in many ways it feels like long-time, loyal players are no longer being considered.

I don’t want to overextend this post, but the accumulation of questionable decisions is becoming increasingly frustrating—so much so that maintaining an active subscription sometimes feels pointless, even if it means risking the loss of a house. And that should be a serious warning sign.

The question is simple: do we remember that a game is supposed to be fun?

Society quests, roulettes, grinding, farming… everything has become so repetitive that it often feels like a job. More than once, I’ve had to fight against a “sense of duty” toward the game—logging in not because I want to enjoy myself, but because I have to do my dailies. The motivation has shifted from “I want to have fun” to “I can’t leave this unfinished.”

I love this game. I love its visuals, its story, and its world. But in my opinion, the playable content has become absurdly boring.

Who on the development team believes it’s fun to do the same Society Quests every single day?
Who thought it was engaging to constantly send players across the entire map just to collect objects?
Who considers it enjoyable to run the same dungeons over and over again just to get proper gear?
I’ve been running essentially the same dungeons for ten years.
And who thinks it’s fun that, as a SCH, my main gameplay loop is pressing Broil repeatedly?

At times, it even feels like the team forgets this is supposed to be an RPG. The MSQ could include more combat, more interaction, and more actual gameplay. Expansions—narrative aside—often feel structurally identical, with only the environments changing.

I try to convince myself that maybe the issue is simply that I’ve been playing for too many years. But when I stop and think about it, the sense of surprise has been gone for quite a long time now.

I know changes have been promised for the next expansion, and I’m waiting to see what will be announced at FANFEST. But honestly, 8.0 feels like my last hope.

It feels like a team that has been working on the same title for many years and is struggling to take risks. There’s a noticeable lack of new ideas, creativity, and innovation. Please listen to your players, listen to the feedback, and don’t be afraid to bring in new voices and bold ideas.

Thank you for reading ❤️

[theunhappypotato]

i mean at the end of the day its still an mmo even if its story focused you'll still have boring repetetive stuff todo in it, the content in dawntrail has been pretty good, the story i couldnt care less i wish they'd give us a skip buttonf or it for free but eh it is what it is, also alot of the boring parts about the content is because everytime SE changes something up some people cry about it be it raiders or msq andys who only log in for msq so yea i dont think it will chance, and also nobody is forcing you to stay online and play this game, take a break play other games or do w/e its your free time

[Khiel]

Yes, of course I’m aware that no one is forcing me to play a game I don’t want to play… thank you for the repeated clarification that always comes up whenever someone dares to criticize something. However, conformity or passive acceptance are not solutions for change.
Square Enix is a company and, like any other, it wants revenue and active subscriptions. My statement is about the fact that, at this pace, the game risks disregarding players who think the way I do.

As Yoshida himself once said: “I’m more worried when a game receives no criticism than when it does.” He was referring to the idea that criticism is an expression of players’ care, involvement, and desire for the game to improve.

[CCheshire]

Hi, have you considered taking a break?

Ok, a more serious reply since I'm hoping this is written by a human and not genAI is that I only do activities that I find fun for me even if I'm not playing the game in the most ideal situation for over a decade now. Then I login around reset time and do my fav rous like mentor, trials, and nraid when I'm not working on my relic so now that I am it's added to 2x EXDR and 1x Capped because I hate leveling rous alot.

Finally, I don't do Society quests because I find them boring and I stopped caring about them after I got my mounts for years too. Then I tried Cosmo Exp and it boring so I just bought the tradeable rewards and moved on to the next thing. Also, I did OC at release date because it was the best way to get demiatmas, but after I got the riding map and the 4 man ship mount, then I stopped going there because I don't want to do FT1.

Most of the content of MMO is going to be repetitive and locked by time gates because it's normal in this game format as players will always burn through what took devs months and years of content so fast that they will always run out of things to do before the next big patch release. However, if this is your first MMO then I understand that you might not be aware of how a MMO works too.

[Khiel]

Are we really normalizing the idea that an MMO has to be repetitive and boring? I honestly don’t think that’s the right path if the goal is for the game to grow, evolve, and surprise its players. My criticism is not about repetition alone, but about the lack of innovation, and I would even add the increasing simplicity of many systems.

Jobs have been simplified over time (speaking as a former SMN who used to manage Bio and Miasma). Combat encounters rarely introduce truly new ideas, maps remain similar in size with very limited exploration potential (GW2 as an example), and the endgame structure has followed the same formula patch after patch for nearly a decade.

I understand that repetition and time-gating are common in MMOs, and I’m not new to the genre. What concerns me is how little FFXIV has evolved in its core gameplay systems despite its success and long lifespan.

And no, I’m not an AI, I just use AI tools to help polish my English since I’m not a native speaker.

[Isolte]

I really do agree with you on a bunch of the things you criticized here but this whole post seems to be wrapped in a weird soapboxy message. Do we remember that a game is supposed to be fun? i mean yea? i still do? Is there things i would like improved? yea. Does not rushing out changes affect the fun im having? no. Like i get it, doing the same thing for years on end gets stale. Theres no helping it, and i feel for the devs who have to balance making changes to keep things fresh and keeping things similar enough to not chase people away. Take a break, walk away. Play another game.

[Jeeqbit]

The question is simple: do we remember that a game is supposed to be fun?

Games are meant to be fun, but the MMORPG genre as a whole has always incorporated grinding and boring repetition and RNG, so even if there are fun parts of this genre, these things often dilute it.

Society quests, roulettes, grinding, farming… everything has become so repetitive that it often feels like a job.

None of that has changed. It was the case in ARR, if not moreso. Remember the Atma farm or numerous beast tribes?

Who on the development team believes it’s fun to do the same Society Quests every single day?

I believe the fun is meant to be in the progress bar that ranks you up.

Who thought it was engaging to constantly send players across the entire map just to collect objects?

Compared to many other games, they reduced the time it takes to do dailies to just 10 minutes or less though. So at least it's over with quick. I don't think they need to have us repeat these quests, but they do so that's just how it is, and at the end of the ranking you may need to do them again for currencies or rewards later on.

Who considers it enjoyable to run the same dungeons over and over again just to get proper gear?

No "proper gear" comes from dungeons. The gear from dungeons is for players that are too lazy to gear properly using crafted gear, tomestone gear or savage gear. However, I agree that farming dungeons for glamour reasons with no guarantee of even getting it is boring. Most likely SE would agree it's boring, but they never see the feedback on changing this whenever it's brought up on the forums, because they ignore the forums or at least the English ones.

And who thinks it’s fun that, as a SCH, my main gameplay loop is pressing Broil repeatedly?

I don't think they do. I think they were reducing stress for new, returning or casual players or non-gamer partners of FFXIV players that can barely figure out what the controls do, etc.

The MSQ could include more combat, more interaction, and more actual gameplay.

Although I agree because there are games that tell a story without locking you into a cutscene always, I believe they are copying other FF games where a lot of time is spent actually just clicking to the next textbox.

Expansions—narrative aside—often feel structurally identical, with only the environments changing.

That's an issue. Their aesthetic department is able to come up with a lot of fresh stuff (music, environment, etc). But mechanically, their programmers, UI team and mechanical design team don't really create much that's new. They explained recently to us that there is a problem where they just do stuff based on precedent without even consulting Yoshi-P due to deadlines.

[ovIm]

snip

No, you are not alone in that. And its not a case of burn-out either, as some people on the internet might want to try to gaslight you to believe. What I read a lot is that people are bored. And while some constantly repeat the mantra of "content in DT has been the best it has ever been", raids are pretty much still like in Shadowbringers/Endwalker - namely, all of the meaningful stuff is "square or circular arena with boss that does mechanics on a fixed timeline". Those that find this particular design paradigm boring get left behind, and while I think it is good that people that enjoy this kinda dance learning have content that caters to them, we need to remember that this game used to offer more variety than that. More than just "learning the dance". ARR and HW raids were not pre-planneable to the same extend as the current raids due to boss phases shifting with HP threshholds, which drastically changes how they are played and experienced. Classes played less samey too, which increased replayability imho.

And its not just fairs - a lot of the content has been quote unquote streamlined, and it feels. Variety in societal quests feels less than in previous expansions, at least.

Its unfortunate that MSQ has seemingly less and less gameplay too. Watching 4-6 hours of cutscenes, only to have that interrupted by 15 minutes of gameplay when you can enter a dungeon feels, quite frankly, unengaging.

Currently, I'm in a similar boat like you, really. Hopefully 8.0 is wonderful in more ways than just visuals and story-telling.

[CCheshire]

Also, I want to say it's OK to quit FFXIV if you're not having fun anymore because this is a paid sub MMO and if the money could be better put towards a different game or hobby, then it's fine.

Finally, I want to say to everyone who believes that 8.0 will totally revamp the game that this is never going to happen or in a way that actually would be meaningful to keep players who are bored with the core gameplay too. Also, I can only expect we're going to get more fun zones, 2 new jobs, new dungeons, new collectibles/glams, and some job revamps, but nothing that would be like ARR 2.0 again, so it's time to give up this dream.

FWIW: Most of my friends have already quit for one reason or another, and I just play because I like and find FFXIV fun, even if I'm not the primary audience for every new content released too.

[Kaurhz]

I don't mind the repetitive aspect within an expansion, as to a large degree that is what gives an MMO its content (Granted we still haven't had a great deal of it).

But what I personally take issue with is the simple fact that for the most part an expansion is just a reskin of a previous expansion, albeit with different items.. Like for the most part I am not doing anything different than what I have been for the past 3-4 expansions.