(04-14-2014, 07:15 PM)Yssen Wrote:(04-14-2014, 06:47 PM)synaesthetic Wrote: Uhm, what?
What does Square understand that Trion Worlds, Blizzard, Arenanet and countless other developers do not?
XIV is only "innovative" in Yoshida's mind. It's not a bad game--if it was, I wouldn't be playing it at all--but it's so far behind the times it's not even funny.Â
Square's reading out of a playbook that's eight years old, which, ironically, is the same mistake Bioware and EA made with SWTOR.
Why did it take six months for us to get a crippled costuming system? Why did it take six months for us to get a chatbox transparency slider? Why can we still not send tells in dungeons? Why can we not leave a dungeon and then return to it without resetting it? Why do the dungeons have pointless timers? Why can't we invite a FC member to join our in-progress dungeon run when a random drops? Why do I have to close any active windows to accept a party, linkshell or free company invite? Why can't I access the Free Company or Linkshell interfaces while I'm in a dungeon? Why is the world so small and shut in? Why doesn't Square try to make FATEs fun instead of just required? Why is the macro scripting so limited? Where is that add-on API and support we were promised before release? Why is Crystal Tower so hilariously faceroll easy? Why can't we queue into it with a full raid yet? Where's horizontal gear progression? Why is the endgame gearing metagame so boring? Why are they gating new content behind deprecated content? Why did you ever think it was a good idea to design a fight that requires precision split-second timing in a game that's already astonishingly laggy? Why haven't you stopped running the game on toasters? Why can't we have scalar raiding at endgame instead of being arbitrarily limited to how many people we can take? Why is there virtually nothing entertaining or rewarding to do in the open world at level 50 except busy work? Why are the enemy animations desynced from the actual attacks? Why is the character creation so limited? Why is the main storyline so lazy, and why does it contain so many fetch quests? Why are we given the hopelessly-transparent illusion of choice with assigning attribute points instead of having a standard skill modifier system or talent system? Why is the attribute bonus determined by class instead of job? Why do classes even exist at all beyond level 30? Why are cross-class actions so limited? Why is every endgame boss room a big circle?Â
WHY AM I ASKING WHY SO MANY TIMES?!?!
This is because Square-Enix clearly does not understand the fundamental aspect of what makes a world-class themepark MMORPG in 2014.
That's not to say it isn't fun. It is, but it could be so much more.
Okay. Starting to get bugged by this. So here is my "why."
Why is it that you keep nit picking at the game over and over and over, only to claim "SE knob slobbing" or some other pointed near insult at a fan defending what they enjoy?
I gotta know. Throw out the answer. I have been paying attention for a while, and I do have to say that that behavior is starting to seem wicked toxic.Â
That said. Most of the stuff involving dungeons and not being able to send tells and all that is because of the whole on different servers that feed from many different servers that are separate from the ones the rest of the world is on. Also, that is not exactly what I would call "a feature critical to the success of an MMO in 2014." It is just a neat feature to have.Â
Further, many of your "why's" are things you do not personally enjoy. Super. You are entitled to your opinion, and to share it. However, just because you do not like a feature, a boss, a dungeon, or whatever piece of content does not make it a terrible and stupid decision. It just means you don't like it, which you are perfectly free to do. People are also perfectly free to like and stick up for it.
The game is far from perfect. Nothing is perfect. This is especially true of things built to have appeal to a mass audience. Not everyone is going to find it perfect or even agree on what near perfect is. So back to my "why." Why the stream of negativity at the game and the people that admit to being fans and enjoying it?
Yar.
Take it easy, the whole point of this is to stop letting game companies off the hook. Â And if the game is far from perfect, it's not a horrible thing to bring it up.
What Square gets right in FFXIV is something a lot of companies don't put much thought into, what an MMORPG is fundamentally. Â Fundamentally, it's a coffee shop. Â It's a gathering place for like-minded people to have fun together and meet strangers. Â More than any other game, FFXIV gets that right. Â It rewards everyone with at least a little EXP that connects a swing on an enemy, whether it's in the party or not, no matter the level, and doesn't penalize the person fighting the enemy. Â It keeps the nodes for gathering localized to each player so we don't have to fight for resources (or lose out to a bot). Â You can get credit for quest mobs you kill even if they're out of party, so we don't have to fight for quest mobs.
Compare that to WoW, where seeing another player can be a boon if you can get them to party up with you. Â Otherwise, they're nothing but competition that steals your resources. Â EVE made me actively loath seeing other players, because I simply knew, right out of the gun, that there is nothing in the game world we need to collaborate with strangers to do and every reason for them to kill me and take my stuff. Â So I had no desire nor reason to talk to anyone outside my corp. Â I've put together more friends in FFXIV than I have in any other game I've played in such a short time simply because it's so easy to meet other strangers and collaborate.
Now, with that said... it's a bit like having a Ferrari in Butan; you've got one of the best precision engines ever made and nowhere to use it. Â For a lot of the reasons you brought up, it makes social interaction somewhat difficult sometimes and doesn't give you a lot to collaborate on. Â Maybe the occasional FATE that requires multiple people? Â You can't help on Levequests, so why are they in the open world for other people to see? Â You can't help on class quests either, and why can you see some of those? Â Worse, if you're in one, you can't call a friend for help unless they're in your LS, and even then they usually can't help you.
Most of all, the worst question to ask is, "Why would we need to?"  That's a big problem of every single MMORPG made that I can remember! Nothing requires that many people collaborating or gives you any sense of real danger because game developers handle us with kid gloves.  Sometimes, games like EVE will try to tell us that games are hard because of PVP.  It's artificial; all PVP-centric games are hard for however many people don't get more kills than they give.  So even a bad PVP player would think the game is easy if everyone was at least worse than him.  It's like saying that because you win your football division, you're a tough team to beat.  You may just be in a weak division.
The fact is, MMORPGs make everything too convenient for us. Â All the enemies are clustered in nice, polite patches off the main road, wandering around aimlessly for us to find. Â They have nicely-assigned levels that allow us to know what we're up against. Â They're tuned for one person at a time and, if not, we have tools to adequately decide how many people we need. Â Enemies never hunt us or give us a hard time, if it's necessary that's what we let players do. Â PVP-centric games sin a lot in this regard, as they tend to make the PVE breathtakingly benign. Â Hell, in EVE, if there were no other players, there would be nothing to stop you. Â Not that WoW or FFXIV are much better, enemies often offer only token resistance and being "jumped" is a scripted affair.
It's done in other games, being hunted and not being the upper echelon of a thin food chain. Â They appear sometimes in MMORPGs in spurts. Â EVE, to their credit, did put in something like that, the Sansha Incursions. Â There were some patrolling world bosses that could sneak up on you and ruin your day in vanilla WoW and the Burning Crusade (the Fel Reavers just seemed to sneak up on you). Â There's just not enough of it; the worlds we're paying to play in aren't dangerous enough. Â That work is being either compartmentalized (in instances and raids) or outsourced (in open world PVP). Â You always get your party together and hunt the dragon. Â The dragon never hunts you.
I think that's the biggest failing of modern development. Â They haven't yet made the MMORPG that emphasizes the social aspect by making you pray to everloving God somebody finds you or making you grateful to see someone come to help. Â That'd emphasize everything an MMORPG can do that no other game can. Â PVP, raids, instances, everything can and has been done in other genres of games much more effectively. Â It's this one thing that an MMORPG can simulate that nothing else can, meeting random people in an open world to tackle open world problems.
To date, I haven't seen anyone able to pull it off. Â Not that it's impossible, game developers are either not seeing that opportunity literally dangling in front of their faces, or they're simply too lazy to develop it.