What does FFXIV lack?

[MonsutaMan]

(This is simply one man's opinion.....it is not gospel......)

It lacks an identity. Hence, XIV is like the less cooler brother, who takes everything from the old brother but it does not hit the same.

XI had an immersive, deeeeeeeeep world. That is what XI is known for. It was like, if Fromsoft made an MMO.

Example, Notorious Monsters within the open world of XI were basically cryptids. They were difficult to find, or claim most of the time. Like other players, I would question if this monster even exist......standing there camping it all day.

That is basically the hallmark of cryptids. They are rare, and ppl doubt they even exist.......Very few "See" them. Some "Do" by happenstance.

Oddly, many encounters of NM are simply ppl passing by. Other times, a NM was deemed a hoax (Fazasher Death Weapon, Yensho, etc).

XI is a beautifully constructed title. I retired from XI retail last year.....but this thread might make me come back lol.......I digress.......

....XIV does not have an identity imo. Just my opinion....One man......

[Connor]

snip

Despite all the issues with it, I think XI embraced its identity and never apologised for what it was. Even with all the changes they’ve made over the years to make it more easily accessible / modernised / etc it’s still more or less the same beast it always was; for better for worse lol.

XIV, conversely, seems intent on doing nothing but apologising for what it is and desperately trying to change that to cater to the widest possible demographic. It feels like they actively seek to undermine any sort of ‘identity’ the game could develop from fear it would negatively affect profit margins. Which ultimately just means it’s a game for literally nobody (but also everyone, somehow lol).

[Myotis]

Everything is pre-scripted what does kill any excitement of the game.

The script after 15 years doesn't work anymore.

There is complete lack of fresh air in this game. - It's too stale...

[Kisshu]

Fazasher Death Weapon.

Man, I remember this one. The myth even went so far that the devs made Shikigami Weapon based on this.

FFXI devs weren't shy of giving no directions in the game for some really obscure events. Still remember the Gobling Wolfman, only reason people knew of it was because of datamining, and they only had a hunch that Goblin Drink was used to spawn it. Yet noone had any idea how to get or craft this drink, so one crazy player tried every imaginable combination based on the drink's description, and after a long time it was created.

[Shurrikhan]

Sorry if these seem nit-picks, but just trying to balance out any nostalgia-farts others might otherwise trigger for themselves:

But, we still have lost a lot of other mechanics, notably:

Mob positioning (hits in the back doing crits was removed in SB, ranged mobs and patrols stopped being a thing after ARR)

This was only on Raw Intuition, which guaranteed parries to the front and crits received from behind (and originally also heals from behind because... XIV and sensible coding have never gone together, apparently). All enemy autos could, at the time, critically strike (and crits couldn't, again because of bizarre coding decisions making them mutually exclusive to RNG mit categories, be blocked or parried), with that chance increasingly mostly just with level disparity, iirc. What was significant was just that you couldn't block or parry attacks from behind altogether.

Enmity management for tanks

True, but this was frankly a pretty awful mechanic except when treated as a party-wide consideration. Unless optimized for, it was 6 buttons of bloat for tanks and 1-2 more for all other roles for, at best, a game of The Price is Right based upon the combination of your DPSs' output and --especially once in Stormblood-- their refusal to use their party tools (among which Diversion was decently important). In early ARR, the choice offered different approaches to small-but-threatening pulls, but... nothing else. Large pulls and very small pulls (so, some 80% of ARR and HW leveling dungeon pulls and then 99% of everything else) offered no real choice and therefore no strategic variance.

General party resource management, because MP behaved differently which introduced different constraints on healers and a balance to reach between damage and healing, and this also meant running out of cooldowns and resources was more likely to happen if the DPS slacked off

The only "balance" it struck was in very rarely preferring Cure over Cure II (and the SCH/AST equivalents of each), since the first healed for 60% as much for just 40% the MP [or effectively 25% for Cure if including Freecure averaged RNG]) and made Regen far more valuable. You still spent no time idling unless oomed by necessary rezzes, and that cost would still be more favorably taken up by the Bard, whose raid buff song at the time only affected elemental magic and whose MP song was a smaller penalty to their own damage than a damage benefit to even just one healer. Apart from that, they simply each further penalized Spell Speed and Skill Speed, since they alone did not increase output-per-resources-spent and meant that a pull could be lost within its first 25s or so even if it took 70s or so to die, simply because lackluster physical DPS meant that they could run out of the ability to hit any weaponskills except every third GCD or so before the mobs died, extending the fight into so late a time that the tank and healer run out of CDs and are inevitably overwhelmed.

On which note, unless it's used as a way to skip ahead on combos and make the GCD more flexible (e.g., by having a GCD of 2s but only being able to sustain an average of 2.25s) AND we start to see reasons to want to stay in or get out as deliberate choices with melee being rewarded commensurately to that increased risk (while casters/rangers get their own due added complexity and variable reward in turn), I really do not at all care to see TP reintroduced. As for MP, I have zero attachment to it, either, and would almost prefer it be used primarily as a shared resource system for special actions (the rest being mostly negligible) instead, akin to HW Ruin III or being used mostly be abilities if we wanted to reduce the frequency of their use without reducing their in-a-given-moment's availability.

/shrug

[Reginald_Cain]

Good tutorials for how to play your job.

How many cure 1 white mages do you see failing to heal thru a big pull because they aren't using cure 2? Hall of the novice is garbage and too many players aren't taught how to play correctly until somebody wrongfully rages at them over it and then they dont wanna play anymore. It is not the noobs fault that the game and community can fail to explain important mechanics.

There's a similar problem with new players trying to jump from brain dead normal mode content into ex or savage. It's a big jump for casuals and I wish there was something to mitigate this.

[ReynTime]

XIV has an identity. Well, it had more of a unique identity before Shadowbringers... But it's current identity is simply being a "PlayStation Home" with a story. But replace PlayStation with Square Enix.
The game does have original lore in it, but by and large it exists to advertise Square Enix's other products. It's literally Square Enix virtual Disneyland.

[CapaxInfiniti]

This game lacks a dev team that's willing to do something that hasn't already been done before.

The content cycle is so "safe" at this point, that you can predict how the entire expansion is going to play out just by the very first few weeks.

You already know the kind of content each patch is going to bring. You know when you'll do trials/dungeons/etc. You know how the zones are going to look and feel. You know how the quests are going to feel.

You know how each job is going to play. You know exactly how the same tired, boring, dull 2 minute meta is going to feel.

There's nothing to look forward to that's going to be new and unique and exciting. There's no risks that are going to be taken.

It's going to be the exact same excuses over, and over, and over, and over. Every single time. Telling you how they can't do this, can't do that, can't provide this.
Can't fix housing, can't change the meta, can't add stuff, or job balance, etc mid-expansion. Endlessly.

The game is so stale at this point that it's no longer "stale". It's petrified.

[LeCorbeaux]

Good tutorials for how to play your job.

Fully agreed. And if you think PvE is badly tutorialised, look at the state of in-game PvP tutorials and weep.

There's a lot which should be improved here.

[AlliciaCapulet]

Good tutorials for how to play your job.

I agree with you, and that’s why I keep saying the following:

1 – Skill distribution at lower levels needs to be reconsidered. It currently takes far too long to get a meaningful toolkit, especially in synced dungeons. With every expansion, skills are removed, merged, or shifted to higher levels. As a result, lower-level gameplay has become overly simplified. A level 50 job in ARR felt more complete than a level 50 job does today. Now, those brackets feel stripped down and lacking depth.

2 – Dungeons and trials should gradually return to a reasonable level of challenge. You don’t truly learn your job without some degree of struggle. I understand that difficulty was reduced so players wouldn’t get stuck in the MSQ or fall behind, but in reality, you improve by facing mechanics that require proper execution. I’m not suggesting everything should be tuned to Extreme level, but there should be consequences for poor play. Even in a dungeon, there should be a DPS checks on bosses. Tanks should need to mitigate properly or die. Healers should have to actually heal, more than just healing on the trash mob pulls. If roles are not played correctly, wipes should be possible. Dungeons also need more variety than the standard “two trash pulls, one boss” repeated three times.

3 – Leveling should be slower, especially at lower levels, and experience shouldn’t be awarded to jobs you didn’t actually play. For example, Frontline roulette allows you to queue as one job, swap, and level something you never actively used. You learn a job by playing it.

Wanting more challenge isn’t elitism. Right now, the difficulty curve is so flat that it’s no surprise many casual players struggle when they first encounter mid-tier content like Extreme trials. If you’ve never had to worry about DPS checks or proper rotation before, of course it becomes overwhelming later.

Developers shouldn’t lower the difficulty of group content to accommodate weaker players. If necessary, they could offer a dedicated “story mode” version for players who want to experience the narrative with NPCs on an easier setting. But when you queue with other players, the difficulty should be high enough that you’re expected to understand your role and perform it correctly.