Thoughts on XIV and MMOs in General...

[Raesvelg]

So.

Yeah.

FFXIV.

Hmmm...

It's got potential...

When they finish it.

The only problem with that is...

That the idiots went and released it unfinished and now, frankly, I expect they're doomed to failure.

If they scramble, and I mean scramble fairly hard, they might be able to salvage this particular train wreck. It'll take long hours, hard work, and communication with the fans who are still playing, but I think they could do it.

The thing is, I said pretty much the same thing about Warhammer Online back when the failure of its endgame was revealed, and that ultimately didn't happen. The game launched with dozens of servers, and is currently being played on like 4. So I'm not exactly hopeful that SE will learn from Mythic's mistakes, particularly when by some accounts they repeated the biggest one.

Which one was that?

Trying to beat a WoW expansion to market. Seriously.

Don't.

There was some consternation as to why Mythic released WAR when they did, given that, while the game was relatively fun until you got to the level cap (so long as you avoided the broke-to-hell PVE), it all fell apart there. Why not keep the game in beta for another few months, work out the kinks, figure out a way to run things so that the first fortress siege doesn't crash the server repeatedly, stuff like that. By many accounts, they were under significant pressure to get the game out before WotLC, so they pushed out a product that was fundamentally unfinished, optimistically hoping that apparently nobody would notice.

Yeah, that worked well.

Now, at this point in the conversation, I'll typically have someone chime in with a "But FFXI wasn't very good at launch either!"

I'm aware.

It's also irrelevant.

FFXI was launched in 2002. NONE of the MMOs at the time were very good.

Things are different these days. There are lots of MMOs, most of the ones currently still running are... okay, at least, and there's the WoW juggernaut crushing everything before it.

Which brings me back to my earlier point: Almost the last place you want to be is right in front of the WoW juggernaut.

Gamers are fickle. MMOs, you might have noticed, typically get one chance to succeed. Now, XIV is multiplatform. There is a slim chance that SE can turn things around come March when the PS3 version is released, but that depends largely on how they react in the next month or so. Rushing the game out to make a deadline that nobody really cared about, quite possibly just because it was a couple months ahead of Cataclysm, is dumb.

Like traumatic head injury dumb.

See, you have to wonder; what can SE do with 6 months more development time? That was about the time frame that I thought it would take Mythic, through focused effort, to make WAR's endgame into something playable, assuming that they beta-tested for that entire period.

And that's what the game feels like to me, currently. A beta test. A really big, elaborate, make you pay for it beta test.

Cue the FFXI-deriders and XIV apologists.

No, I don't give a shit about bugs. I don't even give a shit about lack of content. I don't care that the story quest system is unintuitive, that there are relatively few quests aside from levequests at all. I don't care that there are governors on the leveling system at almost every turn.

I care that there is no auction house. No mail system. That the interface is laggy and clunky, that it takes me 15 seconds to just set up a damn synth because SE decided that I had to work through 5 separate laggy-ass menu windows to make one item, every time I want to make it. I care that the targeting system is practically worthless, that the chat system is obnoxious, that half the time my menus and mouse controls go apeshit, that the party system is terrible, and so on.

Basic functionality. I can deal with lack of content if the game runs well, has a well-designed interface, and has all the amenities that we have come to expect from an MMO that actually succeeds.

So far, for me at least, the only one of those conditions that FFXIV meets is that it runs well. And it's very pretty, I will also grant that, but that's not one of my major conditions. Most current games have acceptable graphics, and don't have to be as pretty as XIV for me to enjoy them.

Of the 10 or so people in my LS on Sylph that picked up FFXIV, only one of them is still playing.

(o_o)/ Yo.

And most of the reason that I'm still playing is that I can only play games in little snippets of late for the most part, at least until November, so I can't make any headway in XI. Leaving me with the option of grinding a few levequests in XIV and logging off, which is pretty much what I've been doing. I don't play the game long enough to get frustrated with it.

Now, like I said, I think XIV has a ton of potential. I also think that SE should have manned up, and left it in the oven for another 6 months until the PS3 version was ready, at least. It's unfinished, and it shows. And that bothers me, because I want the game to succeed.

 

[ShomeGhuye]

I'm just as disappointed in this as the next person, but I do hope they turn it around, however slim of a chance they have. The problem IMO, is that to accomplish this they really really need to be taking player feedback into account, but history has shown us SE isn't really big on that. Add to that that I'm betting they aren't willing to admit they fucked up big time, so they'll pretend they think nothing's wrong.

I guess I'll just have to hope the PS3 release brings some fresh faces to the scene, it's obvious many people have flown the coop. Tak's LS has something like 86 members, but whenever I look at the members list, 60 of them are always offline. Names that I never see in chat, etc.

Oh well ... time will tell.

 

[Orta]

Too much worries.
3 choices:
1, Play now.
2, Forget it.
3, Play later.
I'll choose 1.

 

[Tristam Green]

Two words: instant gratification.

If this game didn't supply it in droves to the slathering fanatics who were looking for a completely different game than FFXI, then they turned on it just like every other MMO that was released since 2003. Cue the "death march" music for Aion, Age of Conan, Dungeons and Dragons Online, City of Heroes, and Warhammer Online.

Now, D&D:O is experiencing a resurgence in popularity simply because they went free-to-play, with premium content. Same with LOTR:O. Is Square Enix really gaining anything by charging $15/mo for an MMO? Does anyone really believe that that money is being spent on server upgrades and real development, or is it being spent on the next port+omgupdate of an existing FF title to a new platform? I mean, they have to release FF 1,3,4,5, and 6 in 3D format now, so they have to fund the machine somehow...

 

[Raesvelg]

It's just puzzling to me why they didn't wait until the game was, well, at least more finished than it is currently. The recent Dev discussion on things like nameday and guardian diety was, for me at least, rather telling. It was a "well, we hadn't figured out what exactly to do with this info at launch, so we'll just finish it up later when we feel like it".

This is not how you make a successful product in a highly competitive market.

It's akin to buying a car, then having the manufacturer say "Well, we weren't sure exactly how we wanted your seatbelts to buckle up, so we just left the buckles out for now. We'll get around to it later though, promise!"

I'm not singling SE out for this either, btw. Pretty much every MMO has launched with similar issues, and since one of them (WoW) became wildly successful, every other one has been relegated to a particular niche, or outright failed.

And if you look at customer reactions, half the reason that these games failed is because they released in a less-than-perfect, or in some cases downright incomplete state. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the market is substantially less forgiving than it was in 2003.

Apparently, however, the people in charge of these games don't even rate average intelligence. Sometimes I feel like we should ship them all off to be assistants to the Superintendents of interstellar prisons.

It's not even a matter of being different, really. You need something to set yourself apart from the rest of the pack, obviously, but at the core if it pretty much all MMOs are basically the same. They almost have to be, because of the limitations of a persistent world. It's not like you can have just one fight with the Shadowlord, and after that he's dead and nobody else gets a shot at it, after all.

Though I have occasionally argued that an MMO with a heavy emphasis on special one-off events might be an interesting game to see. But I digress.

The trick, then, is just different enough, while still being a very functional game. I'd argue that FFXIV is different enough, both from its predecessor and from most of the other games out there, to warrant a unique appeal, it's just the functionality that is missing.

Except in one regard, actually. Let me backtrack for a second.

One of the things that bothers me about FFXIV is how similar the low levels are to FFXI. That is to say, lots of wandering around in largely empty zones killing random monsters for no apparent reason. I realize, pretty much every MMO operates in this way (WAR was a notable exception, which I'll get into later), but it's still... dull.

Now, I said Warhammer Online was an exception, and it was. That was one thing about the game; the first tier of content was, in my opinion, relatively well designed. It needed some polish, like the rest of the game, but fundamentally it accomplished the goal of a sense of immersion and immediacy, even urgency, imparted to the starting player. Which really might have been part of what killed the game, when you think about it. At low levels you're thrust into combat (with NPCs and/or PCs if you so desire) basically immediately, and all the starting quests revolve around that idea. The further you progress into the game, however, the less you feel that.

In most MMOs, you start slow, and build your way up to the "fun" content. Early challenges are only challenges because you're a low level newb, typically with crappy gear, struggling to figure out and adapt to each game's peculiarities. WAR took something of the opposite approach, and I think suffered for it.

But regardless, an MMO really ought to have a fairly engaging beginning, something to draw people in and make them spend the first 3-4 hours of their playtime constantly involved. FFXIV does a better job of that than FFXI did, certainly, but then it all just... stops. You get through the tutorial story quest line, and then you've got to wait until you're level 10 or so to pick it up again. Which is similar to FFXI's model, and similarly ill thought out.

That kills that sense of immersion and urgency. It's "Hey, I figured out how the game works! I know more or less what the basic mechanics are! And now... I grind for 8 levels while this looming crisis is apparently put on hold? Huh?"

The goal, I should think, is to make a game more like a traditional RPG, with a variety of branching elements that converge at appropriate level ranges for specific quests. SE has always been able to write quest chains like that; the missions in FFXI serve as a good example.

But.

SE hates giving out experience points for quests, for reasons that have always been somewhat opaque to me. Sure, it messes with skill progression, unless you set your skill advancement at such a rate that it does not. Sure, it can mean people level more quickly than you intended, unless you set the levels spaced appropriately to prevent it. It smacks of laziness more than anything else, and leaves people disinclined to actually bother with mission and quest chains, as often as not. I'll be honest, I haven't made significant progress in a mission chain since I finished CoP. Part of that was seeing how lackluster the rewards for finishing ToAU were. Part of it was the fact that the story in ToAU just didn't engage me very successfully. But largely it was looking at the missions and saying "So I'm going to spend how much time working on these? For that? I think not. Maybe if they offered me more, it would be worth my time, but I don't do enough Assaults to warrant that much effort for that item."