FFXIV the worst game I've tried in a while

[Puremallace]

Honest chances begin at level 1, if the game can't keep the player interested then that is a problem with the game. There is no such thing as "The game begins at max level.", that was always a player created myth.

Does that include WOW? Yes.

Look show me this magical MMO that I login at level 1 and I am like Jesus H Christ best mmo created because I have played most of them since 2005 and have yet to see it. My point is before I go on an MMO's forums and start making broad statements I like to get the full experience. I felt qualified to say "Aion leveling is HORRIBLE" after playing Aion 1.0 and grinding for 8 hours a day to get like 3 levels.

I felt qualified to say pruned classes in WoW felt like shit after playing lvl 80 ret Paladin in raids and having gaps in my rotation because RNGJesus did not bless me with procs and watching my name fall off the dps meters because of it.

If FF14 changed the 2.5GCD to make the 1-50 experience "feel better" then it would have insane consequences for 50-80 level range. Could they move level 50-80 abilities lower into the range so that they are obtained quicker!?!? Yeah maybe?!?!

What people do not seem to understand about FF14 and it is because the development team is Japanese and the English speaking parts of the community are taken for granted is the game does not out date its content. Changing 1-50 abilities has HUGE consequences for people who still farm old raids and who run Palace of the dead to this very day for the rarest title in this MMO.

Main issue I see with FF14 is the community is so trained to be nice all the time that they have stopped trying to defend the game or explain anything for fear of being accused of harassment because that is a policy heavily enforced by Square. So many post I can just shoot massive holes in them because it is clear people never gave the game an honest try or noone even bothered to explain WHY SOMETHING IS DIFFERENT.

If you approach FF14 like you approach WoW then you are going to be confused and incredibly pissed off constantly because FF14 the 1-79 content is still played actively by the people at 80 which is seriously not the case for WoW.

[Azerate]

Also another thing that people don't seem to realize in this thread is you can modify the UI so that the combos/chains are very, very obvious to press. IE, you can just spam 1 button over and over to cycle through combos.

Yes, I did not actually know this was possible, which is a shame because maybe that would have changed how I see combat, at least when it comes to the bloated rotation, because the fluidity is still not there imo. Still, clicking 20 buttons one after another is just frustrating and boring af, so if you can alleviate that by macroing multiple skills into a cycle-button of sorts, that is great.

Maybe I'll try that when I decide to resubt at some point.

[kaid]

You seem to be missing a massive point that every MMO developer comes to understand, end game doesn't matter if you lose the player before they get there. You can hype up end game till the moon explodes and it still won't mean anything if the leveling experience doesn't hook the player.

Been doing the free trial I am enjoying it but this game has a lot of the same issue wow did and why wow did the level squish. There is just so much time needed to get through the lower level stuff till you start getting into newer more relevant content now add to this you seem to be kinda expected to try/pick up other jobs and that sends you back to square one makes for an odd feel for the game where you spend a lot of time in the not current content just trying to flesh your character out.

[Flame6]

The game needs a serious revamp on its low level content. WoW has continually done things to help with this. Things like giving class defining abilities early, Cataclysm remaking the leveling zones, and quest/level syncing have all help a ton.

I just hit 60 and can say the game is more enjoyable later. The in game cinematic are still shit, but at least the story is getting better.

[kaid]

My weirdest gripe in the leveling up content is random voice over work. It is weird as hell that some sequences have voice acting for parts and then other parts with same people are just text. I have seen in one conversation go from no voice to voice to no voice. Just really jarring it should be one or the other not both in the same conversation.

[Arevalo]

I've played this game since 2.0 launched. It's been awesome fun. Definitely a narrative story driven game so if that's not your cup of tea, then I would give it a pass. Still, there is tons of content here. SE is also actively revamping the early game, which is a bit of a slog admittedly. But once you get to where the first expansion starts, it picks up big time! Unlike some other MMO's that have released in recent years, the development team is pretty transparent and has a deep love for their own game, and it shows. Definitely give it a try, there is even a free trial that is untimed!

[kaid]

I've played this game since 2.0 launched. It's been awesome fun. Definitely a narrative story driven game so if that's not your cup of tea, then I would give it a pass. Still, there is tons of content here. SE is also actively revamping the early game, which is a bit of a slog admittedly. But once you get to where the first expansion starts, it picks up big time! Unlike some other MMO's that have released in recent years, the development team is pretty transparent and has a deep love for their own game, and it shows. Definitely give it a try, there is even a free trial that is untimed!

Its deffinately better now than it used to be. Just doing basically only main story and class quests I am at least 5-8 levels ahead of the main story line stuff so if you are just wanting to blaze through the main story stuff in the old content its very doable to just do that and not bother with side stuff.

[Seiryu99]

Biggest fucking problem I have with ffxiv is that the spell distribution is SO FUCKING BAD while leveling it literally cant be understated. WoW kinda fixed this problem when they made the switch to giving classes their "signature" ability when you hit level 10. Anyone whos played BLM KNOWS how bad that shit is, it literally feels unplayable until like level 71(72? forget tbh) when you can cast blizzard 3 with 0 mana or when you get blizzard 4 and can cast more than 2 fire 3's without going oom and yet even with how completely unplayable BLM is to play while leveling it easily became one of my fav classes at max. Also playing the melee classes like lancer/rouge were rough without AoE and in general without most classes "gimmicks" theyre pretty trash to play. Tanks and healers kinda dont have this problem, but healers are pretty boring until you actually have to heal in dungeons and not be forced to just dps for 95% of it at low level. WoW is like a natural progressive line of spells/talents, FFXIV is like a flat line and then at 50-60-70-80 it fucking shoots up

See ppl complain about the whole 2.5 gcd vs Wow's gcd all the fucking time, but to anyone who actually plays ffxiv if that game had a faster GcD the classes would become WAY to fucking hard and demanding to play, SMN's and NIN's would probably just stop playing and just not even bother. You have way to many things to keep track of that having the slightly longer gcd helps kinda plan things out and time them since it SOOO punishing when you miss time something. You need to have that rest period to fucking cooldown your brain when you arent in burst mode and are switched to filler. 95% of WoW classes are "Use spells on cooldown, hit the shiny button when you get a proc, spam filler" The only optimization comes from movement and knowing when the boss goes invuln or summons adds to aoe etc. "Rotation" for the most part is just priority.

[kaid]

HOLY CRAP so I finally finished the realm reborn content. That praetorium instance + ending sequence was maddening. Everybody over geared it so badly you basically have 10 seconds of fights with a constant chain of overly dramatic non skippable cutsceens. Then once you finish it then you get the ending cinematics all told its about 45 minutes to an hour where you are kinda just stuck there with minimal ability to do anything.

[Super Kami Dende]

HOLY CRAP so I finally finished the realm reborn content. That praetorium instance + ending sequence was maddening. Everybody over geared it so badly you basically have 10 seconds of fights with a constant chain of overly dramatic non skippable cutsceens. Then once you finish it then you get the ending cinematics all told its about 45 minutes to an hour where you are kinda just stuck there with minimal ability to do anything.

Grats, you entered content that was outgeared 6 years ago.

[kaid]

Grats, you entered content that was outgeared 6 years ago.

Yes and that just makes it that much more god awful of an experience for new players. The vets just sprint through the thing so you are stuck with brief moments of trying to figure out what you can do followed by unskippable cutsceens. It just feels like a really insulting farce of an experience not the culmination of a story line.

[Katchii]

Yes and that just makes it that much more god awful of an experience for new players. The vets just sprint through the thing so you are stuck with brief moments of trying to figure out what you can do followed by unskippable cutsceens. It just feels like a really insulting farce of an experience not the culmination of a story line.

Prior to them making it unskippable, groups would scream and yell at you to smash space bar and you'd end up missing the entire instance if you watched the cutscenes.

The current experience is clearly not ideal, but it's WAY better for new players than it used to be.

This is why they changed how stuff like that works, where there are no cutscenes in the middles of a dungeon besides the entrance one showing off the place and the final boss introduction.

[Tonkaden]

Yes and that just makes it that much more god awful of an experience for new players. The vets just sprint through the thing so you are stuck with brief moments of trying to figure out what you can do followed by unskippable cutsceens. It just feels like a really insulting farce of an experience not the culmination of a story line.

At least you get to see the content. Most games you cant experience older content at all.

Look on the bright side though. A vast majority of the story is done outside of dungeons and raids which means you arent really missing much if people sprint through them or not.

[Wuusah]

Prior to them making it unskippable, groups would scream and yell at you to smash space bar and you'd end up missing the entire instance if you watched the cutscenes.

The current experience is clearly not ideal, but it's WAY better for new players than it used to be.

This is why they changed how stuff like that works, where there are no cutscenes in the middles of a dungeon besides the entrance one showing off the place and the final boss introduction.

It surprises me that they didn't turn those dungeons into solo scenarios that main story quests have plenty of nowadays, and just remove the roulette completely, when they also put some work into 2.x quests with this patch.

[Malix Farwin]

Its fine if you do not like the game but its another story to call it trash. The game is the the most successful MMO since WoW and nothing else but WoW beats it. There are aspects of 14 i like over WoW and aspects of WoW i like over 14. Combat a lot of jobs feel good at endgame and certainly doesnt not feel slow at all like someone mentioned earlier there are ogcds you are pressing quite often and i could go on to list them if you would like but you are pressting them often enough to make the pacing of the combat feel fast, faster than WoW? now thats debatable but probably not however the trade off is things feel more meaningful to press and its not so much slower than WoWs that its a cause for concern.

[Rogalicus]

The game is the the most successful MMO since WoW and nothing else but WoW beats it.

By what metric?

[Thestrawman]

By what metric?

Subscription numbers, and development come first to mind.

[Rogalicus]

Subscription numbers, and development come first to mind.

Runescape has bigger sub numbers and there are many F2P/B2P games that you exclude, while they bring more money.

By what metric is it not?

I assume you don't know how argument works.

[blackbird1205]

By what metric?

One would be that FF14 is one of the very few mmo's which can afford having a subscription model even after many years (besides wow).

And there are stats that they have reacher over 20 million registered users since release with a peak of active players of over 1 million in 2019.

[Rogalicus]

One would be that FF14 is one of the very few mmo's which can afford having a subscription model even after many years (besides wow).

I don't see how keeping the same monetization is success. FF11 is sub only too even 18 years after release, Ultima Online was sub only for 20 years, DAoC dropped the sub less than a year ago. Do you consider them popular?

And there are stats that they have reacher over 20 million registered users since release with a peak of active players of over 1 million in 2019.

You think retention rate of 5% is success?