Rift offered me the best, most fun, most immersive, scariest experience ever in a game.
I am calmly questing. Suddenly a Death Invasion starts. Sky and air turns black. PITCH black. Dozens of rifts open in the whole map, in all zones. Hundreds of mobs of all kinds erupt from the rifts and run everywhere, actively chasing players. The terrain changes and all your hubs, quest givers etc are gone.
In such a situation, the only thing to do is to form a big group, and stay together. But it’s easier said than done: as I said, it’s pitch dark, the visibility is at best some meters, sometimes zero. I lose contact with the group and get lost, and alone in the gloom.
The next two hours see Goodberry running like a frightened rabbit, relentessly chased by skeletons, zombies, necromancers, werewolves, nameless things. She is killed many times. At last she manages to reach the only safe point, the top of the highest mountain in the zone.
When the invasion ends, to turn the world back to normal players have to fight to recapture the invaded areas.
Of course it would impossible, nowadays, to implement anything like that. Players would start a riot. The Rift devs, after a while, had to nerf the invasions.
But it’s a pity. For a couple hours, I completely forgot the real world, and lived in the Rift world. Virtual reality, without the VR technology.
A Rift player commented: “In Rift, monsters raid you.” And it was 100% true. Simply great.
This is a powerful thing. I’ve kept my sub to FF even when I wasn’t playing just to help fund the game because I know the devs really care about it and the players.
Yoshi is a grateful and passionate dev, unlike the arrogant leech, Ion.
The funny thing is that WoW players will do anything they can to skip story content in the game; rushing through quest bubbles, skipping cutscenes, etc yet they will go to FF and rave about how they love the story.
I think one of the main reasons it seems to work is because the interactions with the NPCs are vocalized. If the same thing happened in WoW, with NPCs speaking and showing their emotions, then WoW’s story would probably be a great deal more effective. You only need to see how good the high quality cinematics are at conveying emotion. When you have image + voice, things are more immersive.
Text is lousy at conveying emotion. You only need to see how many miscommunications occur here because of that.
Yoshi P is a lad, but his game design is boring as hell.
He also needs to rid of the old 1.0 systems we still have so the game can actually be fun.
Combat/Jobs are in that weird area where they can’t balance jobs without homogenizing them to death because of it.
He really is. Apologizing to his customers when he can’t make something they want happen is powerful. Also taking the time to not only communicate to them but to communicate with them says a lot and is one of the reasons why there is such a loyal player base in that game.
The guy is a class act. WoW needs someone like him. Hell we could use a CEO like Yoichi Wada too. The guy came out and said FF14 has damaged the franchise, gave the reigns over to Yoshi, and let him save the game. I felt bad for Tanaka because I loved his work on 11, but it just didn’t work out.
I think being humble enough to admit that there are problems is what has made them able to fix the game. When you’re the biggest you often become too arrogant to notice the competitors nipping at your heels.
FF14 ARR is a good game, but like WoW, has many flaws…
The big difference is Blizzard is the current running joke when people have forgotten the dark times of SE during 2000-2010 when they couldn’t release a good game that wasn’t FF.
here’s hoping Forspoken is a really good game.
Meanwhile Blizz: The ship is sinking but lets keep adding hated elements into every expansion cause we think it works.
I tried to get into the story there, but never could. I feel it’s very overrated, as is the case with the entire FF series.
There are plenty of moments in wow that are quite sad, Ysera, the Kyrian ascension quest line when you realize what has to happen in Ardenwield, many of the quests from Darrowshire, what our actions in the Jade Forest did.
FF14 has one drawback. If you dont already like the FF series or that type of game, it wont be for you.
My fav part of 14 is the music. Like most FF games.
The only moment in WoW that made me almost cry was the Ysera quest. And that was nothing compared to the emotion I felt multiple times going through the FFXIV game story. I think the best part of the FFXIV story is the fact that you are truly included in it. In this last WoW xpac, you didn’t even have to go save/kill those you needed to do. You just had to watch a movie. But I get it. Good story telling isn’t for everyone. 
I’m a tough guy so the only time I cried during a video game was when Sephiroth made a shishkabob out of Aerith. I was 13, give me a break.
I play WoW and FF14. I almost quit FF14 when I got started because ARR was just so dang slow. Story and combat wise. Things picked up quite heavily when I got into Heavensward, against combat and story wise; but I still prefer WoW for combat.
I play WoW for the combat. I play FF14 for the Story.
Your idea of a good story isn’t the same as mine.
From what I’ve played I’ve encountered more cutscenes and movies in FFXIV then actual gameplay. They realize their MSQs are so lame you can pay to skip it. (And people accuse Blizzard of being greedy, go take a look at FFXIV’s store).
You werent alone.
You’re probably right. I enjoy stories that have twists and turns, that have villains who are more than one dimensional. Stories that connect together and stay connected even 10 years after they begin. And stories where writers know and respect the lore.
And some people dislike this type of game. FFXIV is a story driven game. It isn’t for everyone and If you dislike a good story then it for sure isn’t for you. Oh and as for the items in the store, their producers realize that there are some people who would rather just play endgame, so they don’t force or timegate those people.
Agreed. I really couldn’t get into that game, and the community who came over to tell me about it just soured the taste for me to ever want to interact with them outside of the forums more then just acquaintances.
Also, Playstation fanboys. 
If i’m ever in a mood for another MMO, it’s Guild Wars 2 for me.
Yeah, not gonna like, it’s honestly scummy how people do that. Trying to goad people out of their time like that.
Like you gave it a try and that all it matters. It just seems like their angry that you didn’t like it. 
Indeed, i really hate the “It gets better 100 hours” excuse. I really the good bits come now instead of later. First impressions matter, and that’s not what these fanboys are getting. 
Wait, really? 
Automatically. That implies they don’t have any control over their own opinion on the game… 
While i agree they should at least try it to see if they like it or not, if they only tried it for like an hour or 2, that’s enough time to judge their experience with it and decide if it’s worth continuing or not. Whether they do or don’t is fine either way. We shouldn’t have to goad people out of their money and/or time if they don’t want to.
You do know people can play MMO’s for a variety of reasons?.. right?..
Mind telling us the entire process of getting and keeping that house?..
Well gathering from your 100 hours of cutscenes comment, it sounds like to me that the action between is pretty stop and starty. Or problems trying to marry gameplay and story in a way that it flows.
There are cut scenes?
Well of coarse, it’s a playstation game, is it not? 
I heard the Last of Us was a good movie. 
/j