Final Fantasy 14 took a very bold move and it changed the meta of MMO’s forever.
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Microsoft just bought active/ blizzard .
It works because it doesn't try to be an MMO or an RPG, just a good story baised single player experience, those other things are there, but they dont matter to the core
The current 14 expansion, Endwalker, has more in common with Mists and clasic then it does with Shadowlands or Season of Mastery
"Thancred: This is Thancred" is a meme, but it is also peak questing.
Guild Wars has the best questing system and it isn’t close.
ESOs story quest lines and writing are pretty damn good.
fyi, Microsoft is buying out blizzard the stock went up
FF14 quests are often like full questlines in other games. You'd have a quest that's like, "Bert needs help on lookout", and it ends up making you: 1) find a clue, 2) go to circle, 3) kill 3 things that spawn on you, 4) talk to bert, 5) kill 2 more waves to protect Bert, 6)help bert with his task, 7) return to the original questgiver. In WoW a sequence of events like that would actually be several quests, a breadcrumb to Bert's assistant, a clue collection quest to find bert, several kill quests to kill things in the way of Bert, an escort quest for Bert, and then finally a collect/kill quest for bert. FF14 basically has changed the kill quest to just spawning the 3-5 things on you to kill in one pull, changed the collect quest to go to specific spots, and linked serial fedex quests. It's actually very familiar gameplay, but streamlined out all the searching and trash on the way.
Combat Oriented Endgame Activities —
Extreme Trials, Savage Raids, Ultimate Raids, Unreal Raids (old content scaled UP to 90)|
Casual/Completionist Oriented Endgame Activities
Glamour (transmog), Player Housing, Crafting/Gathering/Marketboard Economy for the Radiers during Savage patch release, Crafting/Gathering/Marketboard Economy for the glamour, housing, gpose community, Treasure Hunts, World Hunts (World Bosses), Mount Farming, Blue Mage (a PVE class that lets you collect skills from enemies/bosses), gPosing, RP (bard performances, community events), Gold Saucer games, Triple Triad card collection, Fashion Report, Lord of Verminion, Chocobo Racing, Doman Mahjong, Leap of Faith Jumping Puzzles, etc. etc. etc.
The genius here is that some of the Glamour that casuals would want, the crafting materials for it can only be acquired from extreme trials, so they have to buy it from the raiders, but the raiders also need the crafted gear at the start of every savage tier when patch drops, especially during RWF week. So there's always reasons to interact ACROSS the community.
there is hardcore crafting too. Also a card game and an RTS. So much stuff to do lol
I like pvp, and they are updating it. Happy times ahead.
You can pretty much choose your own end-game in FFXIV. I know some players who makes millions of gils because they get hired by other people/FC to decorate their houses. That's literally what they all do almost every day.
Speaking of questing, I watched Quazii's reaction to [Asmongold's reaction] "FFXIV is Too Hard For WoW Players" and he mentioned that there's this add-on called Azeroth Auto Pilot for WoW that basically does the questing for you. Once you accept the quest, it can skip all the dialogues, has a big arrow showing you where to go, hands in the quest for you and even be able to choose the reward. It's also the most downloaded add-on too! Makes me feel bad for Blizzard's Quest Developers.
The words of a future omnicrafter.
WoW killer is the WoW itself. WoW committing seppuku out of shame
i have a player in our FC that is still a sprout today . literally only played for housing stuff and some crafting stuff and glamour and stuff. and she is still enjoying the game immensely. she is our events manager, making events like cosplay competition etc.
The biggest reason PvP is trash is the engine being trash, slow and sluggish, so there's no easy fix for PvP.
Its not a game that you NEED to play everyday, only you choose to. Yoshi-P always all player don't burnout, its ok to unsub and play other games, so if the endgame isn't for you? Play something else until next patch drops, there's no system there to make you login everyday or else you fall behind.
I’m part of a community that has a literal 100% tracker that counts everything. From one of ever crafting item, doing every fate once, and so on. I’ve been playing sense 2.0 and I’m at about 53% (that’s pre endwalker, it hasn’t updated yet cause we’re all just playing the game lol) Now I took around a year off here or there and I’m far from efficient, there are people who are in the 80s or 90s. What I mean though is that if your just casual and just enjoy lots of kinds of content or a raider who enjoys random stuff on your own, you will never run out of content until they stop adding it. And that’s not even starting into the social/rp side of things lol.
I think one thing FFXIV does get right about pvp in an mmo, is that pvp and pve need to be separate things. I'm not saying they've made pvp work, but they also haven't broken pve because they tried to balance something in pvp. One thing that WoW has proven over the years, is that you can't balance pvp and pve in the same world. They just don't scale the same.
If you don't like endgame you can always leave play other games and comeback when there is a patch with things you like. There is nothing forcing you into things you don't like, even for raiding, you can skip a whole tier and comeback just buy crafted gear and plunge right into the new raid.
I think part of it is that hardcore raiders in FF14 don't have to spend 100% of their in-game time with crap external systems they have to grind so they can maintain or progress their player power. This is the first time I have raided in current content in FF14, having come from WoW heroic raiding about 4 months ago. I was geared to go into current raid content hours after turning max level. I was doing savage raids all night last night and didn't have to grind any system or farm anything… just ready to go in. Everything resets today, im not worried about getting out there and trying to get upgrades from mindlessly grinding mythic dungeons and hoping to get as much rng luck from my weekly vault. None of that. I can grind bicolor gemstones or hit the gold saucer or do maps or any other fun thing and my toon is ready to raid regardless…
I am a fairly casual player – I don't do the Big Endgame Raiding stuff, I've not done any of the Ultimates…..but I'm a max-level omnicrafter, and I do housing commissions, and I make glamour pieces for my FC mates. We run treasure maps every Friday, and Wondrous Tails on Tuesdays. There's the seasonal events, too, and FATE leveling. There's Bozja, and the Firmament crafting and gathering. There's just……SO MUCH to do! And that's not even touching things like the sightseeing log, or Triple Triad, or Lord of Verminion!
I also take regular breaks from the game, whenever I run out of socialization spoons, but I have….probably a good 300-400 hours worth of gameplay/combat content that I have either a) not done, or b) not mastered. I still need to get all my other jobs to 90, and there are sidequests in every city that I've never even touched, and I don't have the top-level achievements for Gold Saucer or fishing or PVP. I've still got role quests to finish once I get some other jobs leveled. A handful of my FC mates have RP "jobs" at event venues and nightclubs.
I think the only way for PvP to become great is for them to ignore the competitive side and just try to focus on making the matches fun.
Crafting is so engaging in FF. they actually made a system where i REALLY look forward to the next expansion and its features. On top of that, the quests are actually really fucking good and engaging
"i was weaving for 6 hours" sounds like the beginning stage of becoming an omnicrafter like myself 😂
I think this definition of casual and hardcore doesn't really fit in this case. People who spend dozens or even hundred of hours getting their houses just right aren't casual. People who go out of their way to clear content just for the glamour aren't casual. Same with many other types of players. People who manage events like parties and clubs, rp-ers, photographers. These people are all hardcore players, but it's just in content that was either non-existent before, or unusual for us who are used to the older style of gaming.
And honestly one of the reason I think ff works really well is because it's our nature to want to be special or show off in one way or another and get recognized by their effort and skills. I can go and play my raids and get some really nice gear to look badass, but I'm still in awe at the houses people make, at how people can make the game look stunning with their screenshots, so on. I just want to see more of what the community can make, each in their own way.
Here’s a fun story I hope you will enjoy about crafting endgame and how it impacted me:
I wasn’t much of an end game player, I got my roe character to max lvl and was just messing around crafting coffee biscuits, when I notice a group of people surrounding another cheering them on. I found it amusing and continued my crafting. Little did I know that they spotted me next, and then all of a sudden, they surrounded me as I was crafting and started cheering me on. I found it amusing and nice to be cheered on, so I ended up giving them some of my coffee biscuits as a treat for cheering me on. I started talking to the group and found out it was a raid group and then on it became almost a ritual for them to cheer me on when I was crafting, and I would give them some of the stuff I crafted. (I was then given the nickname “the cookie man” as a joke xD)
One day, they decided to do a raid for glamours and they invited me into it. I was super nervous as I never did any of that before, but I soon fit in with the group and now I chat with them daily. I’ve done a few different raids for mount farming with them and it’s been a blast. I would never have guessed that doing something like that could even lead to this. My endgame was just crafting food, but somehow that led to something even more amazing.
FFxiv PvP was shoehorned in originaly after a small but vocal group of players play.
Regarding FFXIV being a 'WoW Clone', it is interesting because at launch, A Realm Reborn undoubtedly did resemble WoW more than it has ever since. Since 2013, both games have evolved in remarkably different ways.
I don't think it was really until after the launch of Heavensward that FFXIV really found it's ultimate identity. Even through Launch HW, FFXIV was still a game trying to drive players away from MSQ and into other systems (levequests!) via routine level-gating, the early HW raids were still beholden to hold-over mechanics like trash in raids and whatnot. Jobs, on average, were much more complicated, as were roles in general (where my dps at that remember having to mitigate hate!).
I think they realized somewhere in 2016 that the path to growing FFXIV wasn't in trying to siphon the traditional MMO audience away from games that they were already invested in. They decided to instead go after more casual players and the huge base of (mostly older) Final Fantasy fans that had grown up with the games.
So you see huge adjustments to the relative difficulty of content, the slow-but-steady removal of any blocks to MSQ progress, a streamlining of roles and jobs to lower the skill floor to participate, the introduction of 'play when you want, sub when you want' mentality, all while focusing on providing aspirational-difficulty content for the (much smaller population of) hardcore players to allow them to also stay invested.
And it worked.
FFXIV 1.0 failed because it was so beholden to doing its own thing that it refused to heed the way the genre and playerbase had evolved in the previous decade. 6.0 now thrives because it figured out how to do its own thing by understanding those changes.
its funny that ffxiv is called a wow killer because the thing that really makes it the wow killer is its made with idea that you would want to play other games including wow, wows greatest weekness is you cant afford to stop playing
Aw Accolon is taking his first step into being an omnicrafter. xD
I'm sure you know him, but Lucron has been pretty active in the PvP. He came over from WoW a while ago and has talked about different stuff one of them being the PvP. iirc his stance was that it was fun, but the biggest problem is there isn't really a large community for it. Outside of specific time periods it is so inactive that you can spend time in que for several hours without getting a single match-up.
I think the changes they mentioned in one of the previous life letters about the changes to pvp could help this. They are adopting a battle pass like system without the cash grab and without the FOMO to incentivize players to jump into PvP more as well as a new pvp game mode.
There's also lots of people who play through the story and then quit for a while until the next patch comes around. Some folks even save up a few patches for more content. And there's nothing wrong with playing that way either. I know a bunch of folks who do that, because life is busy and they don't have time to log in daily.
the game is built with a three letter word in mind…. FUN.
I find the lack of knowledge containing MMO History by streamers alarming. FF14 'borrowed' Raiding from WoW as much as WoW 'borrowed' it from Everquest – or as Everquest 'borrowed' the Idea from Guild/Partygroups 'raiding' hard Dungeons in Ultima Online… WoW hasnt invented ANYTHING .. just made it easy for the masses. Casualfriendly. Easy to use and to learn. THAT was their biggest selling point. But they never evolved.
btw.. forgett PvP .. only a small percentage of player really like pvp – most play it for Glamor or Items in generall. These "I am better then you" Faction PvP Nonesense is one of the reasons WoW is in this disgracefull state right know. Leave PvP where it belongs. In the Cellar.