Zepla said WHAT? Xenosys said HUH?! Asmon’s a WHO?! REACTION! REACTION! INCOMING, BRACE YOURSELVES, IT’S A REACTION. Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail? More like Final Fantasy XIV: YAWNTRAIL. Remember Blitzchung? No, of course you don’t. Remember those lawsuits? WARLOCK TANK, THOUGH. Furtive is the wolf what stalks the home of the sinner willing; a door ajar speaks not words of man, but the hunger of beasts.
#anime #gaming #gameplay
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TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Introduction
0:32 Loading Screens
1:33 ARR is Still Terrible
2:44 The Open World
4:03 Mounts in Cities
4:44 Synced Roulettes
5:34 The Netcode
6:27 Mounts
7:23 Gearing is Boring
8:49 Gameplay Mastery
10:18 Predictability
I make all of the music you hear on the channel.
source
For loading screens at least 1.0 had full cities, but optimization on those was bad enough the 2.0 gave us the current versions as a fix
1) I dont think predictability is a bad thing. Its far easier to understand exactly what we are getting and how much we are getting for the money we pay to play the game. Comparing it to lets say other live services games, WoW has issues on if certain things will be put in game, Destiny 2 virtually has players spend 70 dollars with the hope they get content. Knowing that There's going to be 7 primal fights, a 12 boss raid, a 24 man raid and myraid of 8-10 dungeons is not bad standard to uphold. Its not a minimum nor is it overflow. There's also the issue of putting too much on the plate for the player themselves, allowing a FOMO mindset to kick in. This is how WoW and other games play, institute FOMO and allow players to trip over themselves until the new FOMO is ready.
2) Loading Screens, Net Code, Open world = relics of PS3 era. This all starts with Yoshida promising PS3 support for FFXIV, something the previous Dev team did say was going to happen. The big problem was, PS3 was not powerful enough to run the full might of the engine (Luminous Studios), so what XIV got and still has to this day is a stripped down version of the engine. This caused issues…that is loading screens….net code and limiting open world. I'd even argue that modern MMO's as they stand right now still use Loading screens, they are just masked in a way that tricks the player to think its still expansive. If you look at Star Citizen's Persistent Engine streaming, that's true open world tech right there and no other company other than a kickstarter is developing it. The net code has been an issue with the game and its gotten better over time…its not as great as WoW but its far better than it was in 2012-2014. Open World….PS3 legacy issues to this day…..there's a hard limit of how many monsters and players can be in the open world before the instance becomes congested and inaccessible. Again, i'll always stand by this point. bringing the game to console should have never been on the table and XIV would have been in a far better position if it was PC first with console compatibility later.
3) Gearing…just be glad its not live service. Also WoW's gearing system is hit or miss and having to balance everything in that game…no wonder so many classes are 'dead' due to either the gear getting hit with the nerf bat or class getting hit. Having a system not like WoW makes the class balance a lot healthier and while there's a discussion on job uniqueness ect….the amount of jobs to balance is going to be rougher on the dev team to keep everything viable…or is it 100% ok for powercreap to run rampant? Another issue is the RNG on top of the RNG…this was heavily experienced in Diadem 1.0, there was gear in the diadem when it was first introduced. This gear was level 60 with random ilvl + random weapon stat. So you could get a ilvl 190 piece with 200 crit on it, find a ilvl 200 piece with 10 crit…so on. There was even an ilvl weapon that you could do in a random spawn raid (ie those 'loved' random encounters that anyone can eff up) that gave out a weapon, but it was random…it was all random…. So what did team do when the players at the time panned the whole experience, Diadem died….no one went there. The Gearing became what it was because it was easier just to have good stable gear over RNG bullshittery.
I Do 100% agree that different gearing avenues need to exist with the expanding roster of classes. I disagree on the RNG bullshit that is trying to hunt down a mob for a specific gear hoping it has a god roll drop.
4) Gameplay Mastery, Mounts and MISC. I honestly like how we dont have to deal with mounts in the city. That's just my personal preference as it takes away from the city and other players….We all know that there'd be a group of people mounted on the largest mounts just to be obnoxious.
Gameplay Mastery, from the lil drama that apparently hitting AoE button's is 'elitists'. A healthy chunk of the playerbase is incapable to doing just the basic requirements of their job. So my question is this, would you rather have a hard dungeon and deal with bad tanks & healers that you'd be unable to kick due to them running and opening a chest (that prevents them from being kicked) wiping constantly because neither of them understand how their kit works or….a semi-easy dungeon you can do with 2 potatoes in tow. I rather have the easy dungeon that even a potato can do over the hard one. I remember ARR dungeons with bad tanks and healers that my group had to kick….and waiting 20 minutes for a fill…or begging a friend to que in progress for that dungeon. It was not a nice experience. The consequences of allowing NPC help in offloading que times is easier dungeons fine, the benefit that I don't have to contemplate a 30 min penalty because johnny one thumb is unable to do his 1-2-3 combo in my expert. I would argue this though, making dungeons hard again would breathe life back into FC's as people will just choose to run FC/Friend groups to do roulettes with.
Fixing ARR would hamper everything else (just as much as splitting the studio team to make XVI hampered post EW patches) so it serves as a great filter. Oddly enough there are some people who say ARR is ok. Its gotten better (after doing a 2nd run though) but god it was holy hell before the two re-works its gotten.
I personally HATE the game's UI and inventory. By UI, I mean interacting with NPC vendors mainly. Having to pick a bunch of vague text boxes to see if the item you want is in that menu is annoying, and Quest UI, mainly for relics, could really do with a slight overhaul to resemble the new crafter relic quests where it actually tells you what stage# that quest is, and add a built in tracker to see what has completed what(or remove the previous quest from appearing if on a class that has completed it).
As for inventory, it's just a mess of a bunch of different inventories, fake inventories, and wasted spaces(looking at you Key Item inventory).
Crystal tower made me cry and I'm not joking
I used to hate syncing down in daily roulettes but after experiencing the hell that was ESO daily dungeons I have completely backtracked on that. You were unable to do anything but trying to keep up with veteran players who were blasting through the dungeons with endgame gear since there was no level sync. You got to do something once you yourself became that.
The only thing I dont like about the game is gearing, everything else doesn't bother me at all. Gearing In this game is boring as hell lmao, I didn't feel any excitement or powerful when I got by BiS, the only thing that kinda comes close to that is relic weapons. I really wish that in the Dawntrail expansion, they would do something about it, because everything right now is too linear and doesn't have any freedom in terms of gears progression at all.
Sounds like someone should be playing WoW. lol WoW is litterally copying and pasting FFXIV into their game and you are trying to tell me it's a better game. WTH?
As an Mmo andy if you wanna talk about predictabily Wow just committed that sin,we already know all 3 expansions and basically what the story leads to and everything included with at least the first one,which was a turn off for me,i was excited but as soon metzen said 3 expansions i was turned off immediately, the open world in wow is really the only thing that keeps me playing but raids and story nah man theyve been kinda bad especially Df i just cant handle the disney feel its been going and since its the same team doing the next 3 i just got no hope just gonna keep on huffing the "a realm reborn" type of reset copium but hey man if youre excited for Tww more power to ya hope im wrong but i have no faith in blizz
I'm not expecting FF14 to swap engines or be able to do much to improve their netcode, but I also feel if there was a group of devs that would passionately push for that, it would be CBU3.
I'm glad people can't use mounts in cities. Last thing I want is the aetheryte Plaza to be filled to the brim with mounts
After seeing many vids with similar points of discussion 2 things I would add.
1st an observation from playing since beta for 2.0 is the discourse around ARR not being good only became a prominent talking point since around stormblood. Mostly because of the rise in content creators/streamers engaging with the game. Not saying people people didn't have problems since day 1, but it really has only been in the later half of FF14's life span that it appears to be everyones talking point of being very bad.
2nd I would have to say almost nobody is mentioning how the game really needs to change when abilities are available during leveling. The current way is utter garbage, especially when level sync in accounted for. Not having acces to over half your kit until lvl70 is quite rediculous at this point. It is always lower level skills that get gutted with each expansion to make room for new skills. Hopefully with the new expansion it change to where most of your skills could be unlocked sooner and that would give a better experience to new players and level sync content.
i wanna quickly say that i'd hesitate to draw negative conclusions regarding the game's profitability among its competition simply because it demonstrably can and does compete with them successfully
Gearing being so boring is why I can't take 14 seriously, and slow. Wow's upgrade system got limited in 10.2 and yet it STILL feels faster and like it respects my time more (minus bullshit drops of course, GIVE MY FUCKING MIRRIOR RISE OF MURZOND) then 14's slow progress that also locks you out of gearing if you just aren't interested in savage like me. The difficulty of 14 also has no in between of normal vs savage, so what you end up with is you make a jump akin to the jump between heroic and mythic in wow….between extreme and savage. Gearing feels more with tier sets and trinkets, Stats are also just more interesting in wow due to their direct affect on gameplay. Literally the only stat that affects the feeling of gameplay in 14, skill/spell speed, is typically a stat almost all classes now avoid, meaning most classes I've seen just play on the same GCD. Meanwhile, in wow, you have haste, the equivalent of Skillspeed, being the most dynamic and enjoyable stat in the whole game….
There are 2 "cities" that allow mounts: Idyllshire, and Rhalgr's Reach, but the former is a non-human city, and the latter is in the middle of a war zone.
The others don't really make sense from a world building perspective; having your mounts there should kind of cause a lot of trouble for the people there.
I can't say I really agree with the sync hate. The real problem I have with it is that some of the dungeons sync gear down too much. In particular at level 50/60/70/80/90 each has a variety of dungeons that cap Ilvl. This wouldn't be such a problem if they capped the ilvl appropriately, but usually they will tune gear down to a point that it really doesn't make the content much easier than it was the first time around. Stuff still hurts too much and damage is nerfed down so you can't skip too much in the fight. For example, The dead ends requires ilvl 540 to enter, but caps at 570 where as the other two requiring this bare min of 540 caps at 600. They always make that first 50/60/70/80/90 dungeon cap too low to artificially keep its difficulty, which is more annoying than it should be.
Show off mounts, thank god they don't. My biggest issues are paying 5 fking euros to change my eye or skin colour 0.0… boss fights that are repetitive light shows that feel more like memory tests devoid of actual complex AI. Bag space locked behind a paywall. Bots, gold sellers and """buyers""" they need to use AI engines designed to find them (their engine is just pathetic at controlling them) and crush them.
M+ is the most toxic dubg sistem .
Gearing is meant to be a choice.
There is variant,crit,deep dung and extreme as content between normal dung and savage.
not being able to use mounts in cities is honestly a good thing for me..I wouldn't want to load in to a very populated Limsa while everyone is riding gigantic mounts (eg. Landerwaffe, Cerberus, and other mounts that get scaled relatively large for larger races) potentially blocking out other people and possibly NPCs/Marketboard..back when Island kicked you out to the ferryman NPC and I didn't know it kicked us out for being afk, I went back to my game while my character was riding Landerwaffe standing right next to the NPC blocking him out and I just felt sorry for the people who had to deal with that while I was afk
as for level sync, while they could probably do better with it (maybe adjust skills so we have our basic rotations at low level) I'm glad it exists cuz I didn't feel useless when I was a mere sprout running msq dungeons with my veteran friends, it's usually a dealbreaker to me in an mmo when I have to do a required content as a new player with other people and all I end up doing is running behind the vets trying to keep up while they bulldoze everything
Dude, I agree w everything u said…. awesome points, i hope xiv devs listen
Another video crapping on FFXIV
Another x WOW player got it
I'd want to play FFXIV but whenever I see how much grind it requires, the UI, HUD and the gameplay and combat system I'm just happy there is a community that enjoys the game but I know it's not for me sadly.
Well, from these points I can honestly say I'm glad you're not developing FFXIV. You're free to your opinion of course.
Regarding the point on savage, there is a difficulty called extreme which is like the entry point to high end raiding. It helps introduce players to party roles, raiding know-how, etc. Personally i recommend people going to extremes first to get a feel of harder difficulty raids rather then going expert which doesnt help at all 😅
Load screens are because the game also came out on the Playstation 3 and it couldnt handle open world maps. It also helps with performance with people who play on laptops.
Hmm Dawntrail needs to step up a lot of things regarding the main story. Other than that the game will be the same 2 extremes, 1 raid tier, new hairstyles. I know they talked about the graphical update but this was long overdue. Hmm what else? Oh yes the typical "new gold saucer activities, new treasure hunts"
I don't like how vieras can't wear hats 🙁 . I just want my bunboi to look good wearing hats
Seriously looks like most WoW player
Pls rip off gw2 down scaling T.T
HARD disagree with you on mounts in cities. That would be dumb as hell. You make some other valid points, though.
Good video, you can add clunky UI and horrible Glamour system. From what I've seen for 8 years, they're not gonna change anything, because of japanese mentality.
maybe im just a fangirl, but i actually disagreed with like literally every single point you made in this video xD
I've been saying about the loading screen since ARR. Back then, the excuses I've heard was the game supports PS3 with its limited 256MB of RAM. Which explains the weird loading area for the first Alliance Raid.
My issue with this game is it that feels more like an offline RPG with online tacked on than an actually MMO.
I was thinking, what if old savage raid gave rewards for all previous savage gears. Just like how poetics became a currency for all previous vendor gears. We need a unified books like a poetics but for savage gear. Imagine being to clear ARR savage to earn Alexander omega raid gear. People would start farming more raids. Of course there should be a rule like you'll need ilevel sync and echo off to get the currency or something.
FF14 has fallen down a lot in the last 2 years, and even the community these days is one of the worst among the big MMORPGs
As a WoW refugee I'm familiar with what happens when certain people are given free rein to mount up wherever they like. Blocked portals, blocked quest givers, intentional and malicious interference with rp events, visual congestion (you might call it visual pollution). Let's leave cities a place to show off our glamours, and not our mounts.
The UI. Nuff said.
whats with the ffxvi hate train