ppl already started taking it easy and only showing up on raid nights/vaultday
Shadowlands is round 3 of RISK in an all nigher with friends. The first game was great, the second one got long in the tooth, and the thought of game 3 makes you want to run for the hills.
I think people focus on SL directly and are a little shocked that just because it may be marginally better than BFA, people are not interested anymore.
Not only that, some people have convinced themselves that The Legion-SL design is casual friendly when it is anything but. You need significantly more /played time to get anywhere now. Its a neat little trick Blizzard pulled by increasing the treadmill speed but then upping the time as well on the treadmill.
Either way people just see it for what it is now and are tired of it. It is not worth playing a game once the content is complete 75 thousand times for micro-upgrades. Its way too boring for the average person.
They need to think of something else as we are on year 5 of the Legion design and people are sick of it. Ion is going to have some big grapefruits if he even mentions pathfinder at Blizzcon.
11 Likes
I do understand that aspect of silent protagonists, it’s just:
-
I’ve been doing the “imagining” too long, with too many characters who are silent protagonists… the cliche is over-done, and I’m frankly tired of it… this is also because writers / developers would rather go the easy / cheaper route and not hire more voice actors than they have too, which hurts the latter’s profession overall and is a practice I cannot support…
-
I’m jaded towards gaming – and you’re right, not just silent protagonists like Crono – because of an overall decline in gaming experiences over the years, there are plenty of videos on youtube detailing why, even if they have differing opinions… Shadowlands launch was a perfect – and horrific – example of this decline…
So when developers put barely any effort into developing and fleshing-out a protagonist / player character, I’m supposed to make up for their slacking and expect to be happy with such an experience? If I really wanted that, I would just play MUDs instead of any other type of video game… but I don’t, and when producers are lazy with features such as silent protagonists – many of which are done poorly, for other reasons I might add – I am quick to call them out on that…
1 Like
I think the problem is you perceive it as slacking. It is the only way to give the player true creative freedom in their experience. It appears as if it is slacking, it does take away certain workloads. While it also introduces workloads in the form of making a silent protagonist actually work with the flow of the writing. It is arguably easier to just have a set of dialogue patterns than it is to make something work well with the player’s imagination entirely.
Just because there is a lack of effort in a specific area doesn’t mean the developers are slacking though. It means they understand and respect the process of the game design philosophy they are trying to adhere to.
Do you really find FFXIV to be lacking in voice acting though? It is surprising how many quests they go to the effort of adding voice acting to. There is just a LOT of dialogue in that game. I am glad that it is not all voice acted because it would be way too much. I can read way faster than I can listen, and I don’t need to hear some idle banter about killing some kobolds. When the subject is significant to the plot and/or emotionally charged, there is voice acting. When it’s insignificant, there is not.
I agree though, gaming has become extremely predatory. It’s been nice playing FFXIV because I feel my time is genuinely respected. If I want to cut corners, I can. I can’t skip the flight paths in WoW. I can’t fast travel to nearly every hub at will for a trivial fee in WoW. The magic exists, the precedent exists, blizzard just doesn’t like players using their time well.
2 Likes
Yeah I’ve already quit. This is the first time I’ve quit an expansion during its first raid tier. Shadowlands is just boring as hell.
18 Likes
Of course it is, from a PVE perspective the game is fundamentally flawed at the moment. M+ is/was a great alternative activity for people to do in between raids, but as the game currently stands, there is almost zero reason to run them (besides a challenge/raiderIO swagger). I know they’ve been nerfed, but up until now, to comfortably clear m15+ without a full FOTM comp, you needed a higher ilvl group than the gear that is rewarded for clearing.
Not to mention, with the minimal loot drops after ~45 min of effort, it can feel very demoralizing for people to receive their 35 anima consolation prize. That being said, if you want to gear, PVP offers a substantially faster and more consistent (and higher ilvl) reward system. The only issue is that PVP isn’t everyones cup of tea.
There is such an easy fix available. Make PVE M+ gearing similar to the current PVP gearing system. Bring back a currency system to dungeons. Offer item upgrades via currency up to the current highest M+ level cleared - similar to the PVP upgrade system concerning rating. Raise the max ilvl for upgrades to ~220 ilvl. M15+ is considerably harder than Heroic CN, so I can’t see a big issue why the gear shouldn’t be better.
If blizzard implemented the above change, you can guarantee there would be a substantial increase in player interest in M+. It makes no sense to gate PVE players’ gearing behind a weekly vault and once-a-week raid drops when PVP offers a consistent play-more-get-rewarded-more experience.
1 Like
Flat-out disagree, it takes almost zero effort to work a silent protagonist into the writing…
Well, there are quests and cutscenes even where the usually voiced characters aren’t even voiced at all, and just spouting dialogue… they’re definitely lacking in voicing the player characters, but also in other areas…
For example, mentorship programs in FFXIV are mad toxic… my sister quit the game because she tried to be a mentor but others were talking mad crap about her because they wanted to mentor others more than she did, and what-not… a friend of mine also quit FFXIV because some pre-teens who were lying about their age kept sending nudes of themselves to him in his guild’s discord, even when he told them repeatedly to stop and kept blocking them…
I think the fact that SW:TOR caters to a more mature audience than FFXIV and WoW do, that they tend to have less of this drama, but that is beside the main point of what we’re talking about…
Also the fact that Square-Enix still refuses to do anything with the Chrono series since 2000, other than porting Chrono Trigger to every mobile device imaginable including toasters, is part of why I won’t support them with any purchases… apart from the horror stories I’ve heard about the more cringy, immature members of FFXIV’s community – because again, they cater to that target audience with all this cutesy anime stuff, the same way WoW does with Vulpera / Pandaren / Battle Pets and such – there are other reasons why I prefer other games…
I’m actually the other way around, I’m an audible type, so if I don’t hear the characters talking I usually have to stop and read quest text or something, which is a hindrance but something I can’t really change about myself… just like my autism and what-not…
This is just about one of the only things we have agreed on so far…
My time playing SW:TOR was respected as well, maybe not in the same exact way FFXIV does, but I liked numerous aspects of SW:TOR and it’s community… the relatively few problems it did have, I didn’t pay as much mind to… even when they did go F2P with paywalls, and did some pruning of their own…
It’s not that FFXIV apparently respects time more than any other game, it’s that Shadowlands is HORRIBLE at respecting time investments currently, some of the worst cases of which I have ever seen in my entire time playing WoW…
So you’re saying other developers, who put more effort into voicing their characters, don’t? I feel like it’s absurd to disrespect them like that, for all the extra lengths they put in to try and make their gaming experience more immersive, at least to those of us who enjoy that… again, there are plenty of voice actors who would strongly oppose your view that “more voice acting = bad”… since otherwise, how else will they be able to find enough work, especially during a pandemic?
I did.
/10char
-edit-
to elaborate on how… protip: make some friends or join a mythic guild.
Especially guild heroic alt runs go a long way with bypassing all prerequisite gear content if you’re in a raiding guild and are specifically leveling the new character to use in your guild’s mythic progression, guilds are more than willing to help every members gear their alts as fast as possible in full heroic clears, pvp, and keys and funnel gear to them, so that way they can jump straight into mythic content asap and help the raid progress mythic content.
Such as the guild I am currently in, even though we are progressing mythic, we still do a weekly heroic clear for people’s alts (or other guildies), they also do weekly rbgs for peoples mains and/or alts, and also weekly mythic BoE farms where the BoE priority goes to those who need it and has the lowest item level in that slot…
For my entire history of playing wow, I never been in a mythic guild that didn’t at least do heroic alt runs that also invited non-raid team guildies, so even if you’re not a raider yourself, it can still be beneficial to join a guild that raids mythic, as you can probably ask and tag along when they do alt runs and get some loot.
It definitely doesn’t take zero effort or else all silent protagonists would feel the same. Sometimes it’s a poor implementation, sometimes it is perfect with the writing. You and I both know that it is not effortless.
Voicing player characters would ruin the rpg experience for so many people. Voicing every bit of dialogue in the game would mean it would take me literally 3 months longer to get through the story because I don’t skip anything. I can read probably 10x faster than I can listen.
That stuff is all community based, so I’m not going to address it as it will always vary and you can structure which parts of the community you are exposed to over time by committing to blacklisting and avoiding people. Discord is another matter entirely, I would never join an mmo discord community personally and think it is one of the most damaging things that happened to the mmo industry. Moving social system outside of the game to another program just doesn’t work. Lots of FFXIV players are on ps4 though so it’s not really as integrated into the experience as it is here.
Yeah I had really negative feelings toward square enix for how they have been handling jrpgs, but now that I’ve played ffxiv I feel like it’s the purest representation of the final fantasy universe. It makes sense to me that they are heavily invested in it and not working as hard on other projects. They have still been making huge games, but it feels like that the majority of their passion is going toward making FFXIV a wild success.
I agree with the other points you made, up to the last paragraph. Of course other developers do, they are just adhering to a different game design philosophy. I don’t think a game can really be considered an RPG if the character has pre-written dialogue that happens on its own though. It’s already pushing it with dialogue options, if the options aren’t comprehensive enough it will feel like you are unable to express how you feel in the situation.
By that logic too, FFXIV isn’t perfect. In the second expansion I find a lot of the time I get 3 choices, 2 that I don’t agree with, and then “…” which is a fitting response, and how I would really respond if I think about it. But I am literally a silent protagonist at that point lol.
I think they can do plenty more voice acting without having to voice the player character though. Personally I would prefer 10+ extra voiced story characters over having the player character voiced. Having the player character voiced actually kills my rpg immersion, so in that specific context it is bad.
2 Likes
10/10 troll comment. Good one!
1 Like
More people selling runs than actually playing. So yea, I’d assume so…
Honestly, if this wasn’t the only MMORPG worth my time, I would have jumped ship long ago.
Alas, MMORPGs are my favorite genre of video game and I can’t stand Final Fantasy XIV, so, here I am, sulking in the forums.
1 Like
They’re coming out with FF16 one of these years anyway, and I’m pretty sure what happened to FF11 when FF14 came out will be happening to FF14 when FF16 comes out…
When it comes to Discords, I’m of the opinion that if you want something done right, you do it yourself… I myself and many others I know had been at the mercy of poorly run Discords by toxic guilds for some time, until we just decided to make our own Discords, and set the rules for those ourselves… but then managing a Discord server is work, so even if you do everything correctly, it’s still detracting from your time in-game to also keep up with all that’s going on there… so for the large part, I agree with you on that being one of the worst things to happen to the way MMOs are played, we shouldn’t need Discords but a lot of times that’s just not the way things are when you’re trying to coordinate online gameplay…
Square Enix has butchered a great many of theirs – and Squaresoft’s – previous series upon the altar of milking Final Fantasy, titles I grew up with that were pretty much abandoned… and I honestly can’t bring myself to have anything else to do with a company that is only interested in milking their main series and doing almost nothing else…
You and I will say what we are going to about Blizzard, but at the end of the day they at least still release Diablo and / or StarCraft titles while coming out with new IPs like OverWatch, even as they work on WoW…
Maybe I’ve been out of the loop with regards to JRPG series other than Chrono / Xeno and other obscure forgotten Squaresoft gems, but the last several notable projects I have seen from Square Enix have almost all been: Final Fantasy games and / or spinoffs, games like Kingdom Hearts with Final Fantasy woven into them… or games from other companies Square Enix bought out, just so that they can slap their logo into the title screen somewhere…
We have to agree to disagree on almost everything else, namely our conflicting views of whether a silent protagonist is a contributor – or a detractor – toward immersion…
There were some other related things I was going to discuss, but I forgot what they were, and thus I’m too tired to do so now…
You and me babe!
We are the only two people playing this game.
It’s cool that a company put so much time and money to make a game for the two of us… LOVE!
1 Like
I believe you but I do hope you realize this has been quoted a million times the last 16 years?
I am on AM…it is FAR FAR FAR from even close to full and it is merged with The Forgotten coast, Gorgonnash, Warsong, Anvilmar, Undermine, Balnazzar
1 Like
I do find it interesting how varied peoples use of the word troll is. I wonder which is more varied, troll or toxic since neither of them have meaning anymore.
Hey me too! 
Seems full to me, different experience I suppose. Or maybe, different expectations
WOD actually had some of the lowest subs. WOD is also far from the general consensus if it being better than any other xpac, but if you liked it that’s your opinion and that’s cool 2
If you notice I specified…at RELEASE.
So, you win in against the argument that I never made. Congrats I guess