Address the entirety of what I posted, if you would. Relating to that actual internal design decisions of the development team.
Yeah, the game has a cash shop. As I noted:
It doesn’t negatively affect the game design, at all. And believe it or not… some people don’t mind dropping a few bucks here or there to support a game they enjoy playing. I mean, look at the LoL or DotA models - cosmetics aplenty, but you would be hard-pressed to say that they have a driving influence on the gameplay of those games.
I think WoW is overall a much better game other that is crippled by the limitations of recent systems and currencies that put you in repetitive daily loops when you reach max level.
It’s my preferred MMO right now because I can check my cynicism at the door, log in, and simply do the things that I enjoy doing. The game is, by no means, perfect. But the driving philosophy behind it is something I completely agree with.
It is utterly cheesy, but I truly feel like I am some small part of a journey that we’re all taking together - developers in unison with their playerbase.
In WoW… the second I log in, I’m being pulled toward my list of chores. The entire game feeds into the loot treadmill. By design, I am being told what I need to do, regardless of personal enjoyment. As such, the relationship with the developers is inherently antagonistic.
Even if WoW is the better game by quite a few metrics, feeling that I’m fighting against the developers to find enjoyment in the game is simply exhausting.
Remember just because you have an opinion doesn’t mean you’re right. If more people are playing one MMO compared to the other than that’s usually a sign that people think that one MMO is currently the better of the two.
I recon it’s because a lot of the WoW addicts that are dropping out to play it have forgotten what that whole new world to explore and different ways of progressing a character feel after just playing WoW for so long
Like classic felt god damn amazing to play again when it dropped because the whole experience felt new again
Long story short, FFXIV hosted a year-long event with four ranked crafting seasons. As a reward for the final season, whichever crafting class performed the best overall would be rewarded with a permanent statue on their server.
I hit Armorer hard. I encouraged Armorers around me I saw to push hard, as well. A few Miners began rooting for us and supplied our efforts. Even though we are generally the least popular class, we were able to amass the highest score (I even netted first place!), and we secured the statue.
I made a small mark on the game.
Could you imagine Blizzard doing anything like this? I didn’t even kill anything for months leading up to this season as I was progressing my character to a competitive state for crafting! It’s not for everyone, but having that breadth of development is fantastic. Even if that means that not everything they implement is going to appeal to me personally.
So i feel FFXIV has just a totally different design philosophy for most of its RPG type content. Its a very different IP than wow, and has perhaps more background and depth due to games being made in the IP since the NES system.
Dont assume the RP part of the RPG is lesser there. I do recall a frequent occurrence of non MMO people who are into the FF universe asking about starting an old MMO just because there is stuff thats happens in FFXIV thats cannon for the single player games. So i do know there is enough RP value in FFXIV to gain interest from people who are not fans of MMORPG type games, which is strange because most of the newer FF single player games play just like a MMO…
Keep in mind the only reason FFXIV is the center of attention is the POSSIBLITY that they can drop two expansions in a row that are fantastic, they already have one under their belt and a new expansion is on the horizon.
So Square does have a chance to drop the ball and that would kill this games momentum. Right now hands down that game has the better development team that seems to know what its doing finally and they are backed by a company that can deliver solid RPG content.
Thing is the story has a lot of Final Fantasy to it, which could be a negative for this community. Either way youll all probably quit before you get out of the old ARR content, Shadowbringers is remarkably better in quality than most of the FF content before it. They also do a great job with side systems to occupy you while between content.
But if you are burned out on wow, FFIXV wont be new enough in endgame for you to care imo and the levelling part, you better like meet n greet quests where you run around talking to NPCs with cutscenes will be a majority of your game levelling, and it will take a LONG time to cruise through the main story quests.
Indeed. If you come to play FFXIV, you need to play FFXIV. Don’t play it as you would WoW. The intended design of these games are two wholly different philosophies. If you’ve not yet burned out on the loot treadmill, and that’s your preferred type of content, stick with WoW primarily. WoW does WoW best.
My issue is that the scope of what WoW does best only gets more and more narrow with each passing year.
I i dont think its been narrowed, but i think replaced around Legion. Its just time gated treadmills now, and while yes technically thats how raids were, it was just raids and there was a big deal social thing around the raids, so locking you out built up the week wait to try again.
You just cant take that content loop from raids and add it to world quests and levelling its not the same seriousness and so the time gating isnt a benefit, it just slows you down and forces you to do it every day to keep up. Its chores, not fun.
FFXIV has chores dont get me wrong but i feel the rest of the non chore content is good enough, and the chores are mostly optional. In wow chores are the expansion.
Most activities are in FFXIV are ends unto themselves. They tie in with each other where logical (like crafting providing gear) or optional (like grinding PotD for levels or relic progression).
It’s not that WoW has necessarily trimmed the breadth of its content - it’s that it made everything feed into the singular endgame progression loop. Covenant progression, Torghast… these would have been fantastic systems in isolation. But once you make them “mandatory fun,” you sap all that potential. The design becomes watered down to appease people that don’t even want to do it in the first place. And then the system gets thrown out and rebuilt from scratch for the next expansion, completely missing the point that it wasn’t the system itself that was broken, but it’s placement in the progression loop that was flawed. That’s been going on since WoD.
Torghast has two problems, one you mentioned, with the mandatory but capped weekly progress applied makes it not fun to do, but also torghast i would say is 25% complete, given what Ion says about it. All the systems that make rogue light content fun are absent from torghast in its current state. Torghast has been just a static dungeon since launch in reality. None of the rogue systems are there other than the pick a skill thing, for which everyone just picks the same stuff every run if they can.
I didnt like it due to it not being anything like a rouge light, it having boring mechanics, and then on top of that i need to run it X amount of times weekly or my progress falls behind due to time gating.
Basically blizzard is ruining any entertainment value in their systems by time gating and drawing it out longer than natural.
Idk, I was surprised too. But WoW really has made me question things like the justifications of the Horde and Alliance amongst the other players etc. But… FF has me not really thinking anything right now. Just know I gotta stop these evil black hooded guys, now dragons.
FYI they have a lot of store items because they gave many of those items from an event, and to avoid FOMO, people that missed the event will have access to those event items by buying them from the store 1 year later.
For example if you participate in last year summer event you get a summer clothes and pets, if you miss it, then you can buy it this year, and this year summer item is different than the past event and so on. (Unlike WOW where every annual event gave the same cosmetic/item).
Yep. And they can’t improve upon it without drawing the ire of those running it purely because of obligation. Even its staunchest defenders continually state, “It only takes X minutes a week!” They defend it based on time investment, not on enjoyment. To make it more enjoyable would undoubtedly add to the time investment required… so why waste resources on something that won’t be well received?
Designing entirely by engagement metrics has totally twisted what WoW was, and continues to hamstring the potential of what it can be. They need to innovate, with passion and creativity being prioritized over the numbers generated by their systems.
