FFXIV: Going against the flow

 According to Massively OP,  FFXIV is getting so popular these days that a producer released a letter to apologize to players for the server loads and difficulty creating new characters.  FFXIV does appear to be insanely popular.  I haven't seen a login cue less than 16 players deep on my server in ages, even in the wee hours of the morning on a weeknight.  However, I am not sure I would say my server is more crowded than normal these last few weeks.  The game has always been hopping since I've played.  That said, the game sure is appearing all over my blogroll.

My character flying around on the first non-chocobo mount I earned.  Even if my current outfit is a big goofy looking (a fantasy fur trader?), I find the game to be quite pretty.

If populations are ramping up, I think it may have something to do with the woes of retail WoW.  We are now on the second poorly received expansion in a row.  According to Metacritic, user ratings are sitting at a fairly abysmal 5 out of 10.   Though to be fair, even that is a step up from the last one.  Regardless, a lot of players seem to getting fed up with retail WoW, and Blizzard in general,* and the perception (real or not) is that a lot of them are switching to FFXIV. 

My main character in another slightly goofy outfit, this time seemingly inspired by the mad hatter.

It's a scenario that makes sense. When a lapsed WoW player looks around for another tab-target combat Diku MMO with strong production values from a publisher they have heard of,  FFXIV is one they are probably going to at least consider.   Even Blizzard may think this is happening.  They recently released a poll asking players whether they plan to play the next FFXIV expansion.  Soon after getting the results, they released a new mount that you get for free with a six month sub.   This mount, the Sapphire Skyblazer, bears more than a passing resemblance to a mount that every player of FFXIV that plays through the main story of the Stormblood expansion gets for free. 

A mount that everyone gets during the main story of Stormblood.  Yes this is an a cool mount, but it's probably not why players are gravitating to FFXIV.

I could get a whole post of of comparing the two games, and there aren't a lot of points in which retail WoW would come out ahead in my mind.  I have been wildly entertained by FFXIV until recently.  Somewhat ironically, even as the hype around FFXIV builds to a fever pitch in anticipation of the next expansion,  I find that the game is finally winding down for me. Part of it is that I am nearly to the end of the main adventuring story line, and the last few steps I have left to to finish it just don't sound like a lot of fun to me.   However, I hit that soft content wall a few months ago, and remained highly engaged for a few months past that.  That's a bit unusual for me.  

Yet another night shot, this time of one of the last big cities you discover in the most recent expansion.  The storyline that runs through it depicts a stark contrast between the wealthy elite of the city and the have-nots living in the shantytown outside it.  

In many MMOs hitting the end of the levelling content is a death knell for my interest, because for whatever insane reason many designers seem have this idea that endgame in a MMO should equal raiding, PvP or "time-to-uninstall."  Not so in FFXIV.  Whether you are leveling or not, there is simply a ton of fun stuff to do in the game.  The developers have put real thought into making activities that are boring and grindy in most MMOs deeper and more engaging (or needlessly complex depending on how you look at it I suppose).  

Crafting and gathering classes are really well thought out in FFXIV.  For example in this screenshot I have switched over to botanist.  It's class that gathers wood and wild plants (e.g., cotton to spin out into cloth).  All of those hotbar buttons are different abilities I can activate while gathering.  I can choose to emphasize quantity or quality, or activate abilities that make it easier to gather items at the edge of my abilities.   There is also an entire chain of botanist quests with a delightful, if somewhat inane, storyline.  FFXIV is also unique among MMOs I have played in that there is a whole gear progression just for gathering.  Many games have one or two items that help (e.g., high level mining picks in LoTRO).  Here I am decked out in a full suit of gear, fully socketed with materia, that does almost nothing but make me better at gathering.  I'll be replacing it all in a few levels, just as I would on a normal adventuring class   

For example, the crafting system.  FFXIV has the most fun gathering and crafting professions of any MMO I've ever played.  The closest comparison among the games I've played would be EQ II.  Like that game there are entire crafting quest lines, one for for each profession in FFXIV, and you have to activate abilities to make items.  However it's also a fair bit deeper in that there are entire gear sets for crafting and gathering, and many more abilities to learn.  When I switch over to the goldsmith class, even at level 41 I have something like a dozen different crafting abilities I can use.  Various abilities increase progress on a finished product, increase quality, restore endurance, or restore small amounts of the "mana" that powers all the abilities.  You often have to balance them carefully to make the best products.   Any decent crafter can make high quality items by starting with high quality materials, and being a skilled gatherer (e.g., a high level miner or botanist) makes obtaining high quality materials easier.  However, an exceptional crafter can make high quality items out of any  materials, even starting with a zero item quality bonus. 

FFXIV has an absurd number of classes, and once you have unlocked one you can switch in and out of it at will using the outfit system (shown).  I have unlocked something like 18 classes, but almost all of them are crafting classes.  As far as classes that fight monsters and go on (non-gathering related) adventures, I have only unlocked four so far including my main class of Black Mage. 

It's really incredibly fun, and I have gotten every crafting and gathering profession in the game to at least level 20 now (and some more than half way to the cap). However, despite how engaging it is, I find myself wondering why I am learning to make all this gear if I have no intention of ever using it.  I could use it to kit out different adventuring professions, and I have done that to a point.  The problem is that lately the repeatable content that you use to advance new combat classes has started to get stale to me.  I have taken the crafting far enough to make completely awesome gear for any class.  Yet I have almost no combat classes high enough level to use the best gear I can make.  For example I can make suits of plate armor for level 30ish characters, and my highest level tank class is 22.  

I recently went to another guild wedding.  It was adorcable, and this time I had duds a little fancier that my adventuring garb to wear.

It's a bizarre quandary that I have never gotten into in any other MMO because I generally make gear to use it first, and for the fun of making it as a distant second. I could in theory make gear just to sell to other players. However, the crafting market is pretty crowded on my server. It would be real work to find a niche I could profit from.  Even if I did find one, I would be reduced to crafting only a few items that sell well. A related issue is that I find the gathering even more fun, and I can gather stuff that's so high level none of my crafters can use it. At least it's fairly straight forward to make a profit on, since it costs me literally nothing to gather.  However, I don't have the patience to gather a lot more than I really strictly need to level my mining, botany and fishing.

I find the fantasy themed visual designs of FFXIV in general really compelling.  My wife collects Asian (mainly Japanese) ball jointed dolls, and the aesthetic is very similar.  She has asked about this game a lot more than others that she has seen me playing when she wanders past my screen.

The last few weeks I have been logging on less and less, and I will probably cancel my sub by the end of the month.  This is not to complain. I've been playing for eight straight months.  That is a great run on any game, and I don' regret the time I've put into FFXIV a bit.  I may even come back for Endwalker.  But for now it's probably time for me to take a break.  

My next post?

I have started dabbling in Star Trek Online, and I may be posting about that soon. It's an interesting game that's not very much like anything else I've played (besides the tween MMO Pirate 101 oddly enough). As a side note, I haven't died.  I've been on hiatus, from even my normal infrequent posting schedule, because real life has been insanely busy for me the last few months.  Six months from now, I'll be in a new house, in a new job, in a new city, so things certainly won't slow down in the near term.    

*I wrote this before recent news broke about what has been going on at Blizzard. I am not going to get into that save to say that I am boycotting their games until I see indications of real changes.  When harassment in a company gets so bad that someone commits suicide over it, and it continues to be tolerated, that is over a line for me.  Work conditions like that should not be legal, much less rewarded financially.

Amazon's Lord of the Rings MMO cancelled, at least mostly

From Massively OP and Blomberg news, the Lord of the Rings MMO that  Amazon was working on has been cancelled.  If you dig into the Blomberg piece and the companies involved, a surprisingly convoluted story emerges. 

Apparently the Lord of the Rings game was being developed by both Amazon Game Studios and another less well known company I had never heard of.  A Chines FAX machine repair service, turned poultry product  manufacturer, turned game developer called Leyou Technologies.  The company also changed hands several times during all this and, after finally settling on video game development, secured the rights to create an online RPG based on the Lord of the Rings from Middle Earth Enterprises in 2018.  By the end of 2018 a FtP online game set in Middle Earth was already in development. In 2019 Amazon formed a partnership with Leyou to complete the game and to publish it in the US and other markets outside of Asia.  Despite the game generally being referred to as "Amazon's Lord of the Rings MMO," a lot of the development seems to have actually been underway at Athlon Games. Athlon is an offshoot of Leyou founded specifically to publish games in the US. All of this makes me wonder how the agreement between Athlon/ Leyou and Amazon happened in the first place.  Was Leyou having trouble with the US market?  

In December 2020 Leyou was was purchased by Tencent Holding's.  I assume that at least part of the reason they acquired Leyou was to get access to the Lord of the Rings license.  Tencent is a very large company, reportedly worth more than $500 billion.  Unlike Leyou, they were probably able to negotiate with Amazon on a pretty even footing.  For example if the negotiations went badly and the entire game disappeared in a puff of lawyers (as it apparently has), it really won't affect Tencent very much at all.  What, if anything, Tencent tried to renegotiate with Amazon no-one has said.   However, the net effect of the purchase was  "contract negotiations" between Tencent and Amazon, which eventually broke down and caused Amazon to lose the rights to publish the game.  

So it sounds like whatever was being produced at Amazon Game Studios specifically will never see the light of day.  However one thing that the Blomberg story does not emphasize is that Tencent is a specialist in video game development and internet technology.  If Tencent wants to use whatever parts of Leyou's game they still own to create a complete game, they certainly will be able to.  I also assume they still have the LoTR license because the agreement with MEE and Athlon predates Amazon's involvement.  The license also seems set to become quite valuable. Amazon's streaming program, the first two seasons of which are rumored to be very nearly be the most expensive series ever produced by humans, is getting ready to come online soon.  It seems almost guaranteed to be a big hit, and has the potential to create a lot of demand for video games set in Middle Earth.  

So to summarize, Tencent may still own whatever Leyou created before Amazon got involved, and it was being developed as an online FtP multiplayer game of some sort.  It could be that Tencent realized they had a very valuable game, or at least license, on their hands and decided they didn't want to share it with Amazon under the original terms that Leyou negotiated.  In terms of MMOs, the only real competitor to a new Lord of the Rings MMO is getting a bit long in the tooth, and is run by a studio that increasingly seems to have little interest in appealing to audiences beyond their existing core user base. Leyou was focused on the Asian market, and something will almost certainly still come out there in time to take advantage of all the hype around the Amazon show.  Whether that game will be anything that would appeal to Western audiences, or come out here in the US at all, remains to be seen.  

Adding spice to the entire mix, presumably at some point EG7 will have something to say about the focus the existing Lord of the Rings game.  So far they have seemed happy to step aside while SSG doubles down on systems that seem designed around extracting more money from existing users. This could all get very interesting in the next year or so, especially if the Amazon show is a big hit.

Augmented reality: the next big thing in MMOs?

Niantic recently posted this proof-of-concept video that shows off Pokemon Go as viewed through VR glasses.  You can already experience a really primitive/ terrible version of this with your phone by turning on the camera when you play.  I never do so because it makes throwing poke balls accurately absurdly hard, I much prefer the abstract cartoon backgrounds.  However, what is on display in the video looks much more interesting.  It also go me thinking about how augmented reality could be used as a major step in between current MMOs and something like the Multiverse from Ready Player One. 

Probably the biggest challenge remaining for creating truly immersive 3D worlds ala the Multiverse is the interface.  How do you make players feel like they are physically running around in and interacting with with a real place?  Science fiction authors would have us believe that the answer will be a neural interface that allows us to jack into something like the Matrix. Much as when we sleep, the connection between our motor cortex and our bodies' skeletal muscles will need to be temporarily turned off.  Electronics and software will then be used to interpret signals from the motor cortex, and perhaps also the cerebellum,  and translate them into the movements of a digital avatar.  At the same time signals representing the virtual world will be transmitted directly into the sensory centers of the cerebral cortex, or perhaps the major nerve groups that connect to it.  Simple enough!  

However, that's not really very simple sounding to me.  The technology for every part of that scenario is probably years off, and getting them to work well together likely years beyond that.  The simplest way I can imagine getting most of it to work would involved planting tiny electrodes directly into your brain. As much as I love Everquest and WoW, I am not going through surgery to play the next versions of them.  However complete artificial realities are not the only way forward.  For the next generation of immersive online roleplaying games, augmented reality is a good alternative that is very much in our reach already.  

Augmented reality neatly sidesteps a lot of the problems games based on neural interfaces will need to overcome.  You don't have to shut down a player's skeletal muscles, figure out how to translate signals from the brain's motor centers, or figure out how to beam complicated information about a virtual place straight into the brain.  Instead you take advantage of the real world and layer some fantasy elements on top of it.  To help create a highly detailed world players can walk around in, you let real life do the heavy lifting. The primary new technology that's needed is a way to project a 3D images onto what players are seeing, and we already have technology that's at least close.  For the illusion to be really convincing, a system of cameras and software that interpret the space around you and incorporate the game elements into that space is also needed.  This seems to be exactly what Niantic is working on in their work with Microsoft. 

Beyond technological considerations, I also feel that current augmented reality games have barely scratched the surface of what is possible.  Much like when you were a kid and you pretended the floor was lava, or a wrapping paper tube was a light saber, augmented reality games could take what is already available and work with it.  I want to something like Everquest, but where there are random mobs to fight in the woods near my home.   I want NPC vendors that buy and sell gear or consumables to set up shop at major landmarks in my neighborhood, or perhaps in my utility room.  I want to be able to see the avatars of other players that I run into and trade items with them.  I want to be able to spawn raid bosses in a park or in my living room by getting enough players together and performing a ritual.  I want a troll under every bridge, a dragon in every sewer tunnel, and spooks in every graveyard. I want monsters in my closets, and if they have a bit of treasure I certainly wouldn't mind that either.  

Basically, I want to be able to play a full featured fantasy or horror MMO in the neighborhoods, parks and shopping malls near my home.  I also want there to be something fun to do in my house or apartment when I can't or don't feel like going outside. I want classes, levels, gear, some kind of specialization system and all the other basic mechanical stuff we expect from a MMORPG (though certainly more on Kingdom of Loathing end of the complexity scale than EVE).  As much as I enjoy Pokemon Go, there is so much more we could be doing with augmented reality games.  It's such an obvious next step, I find it hard to believe someone isn't already building one.  The design writes itself once you start thinking about it.

Why do MMO developers keep taking our toys away? On MMO content amputations

A recent post over at "24 Hours In . . ." got my gears turning.  In it Sixuality complains about about an upcoming expansion for Neverwinter in which a whole set of zones are being removed from the game.  An entire module released in 2013, Fury of the Feywild, is being retired to make way for new zones in the same location.   I don't follow the Neverwinter community very closely.  However, in the commentary I could find players seem less than thrilled with the change.  Sixuality remarks:

"No MMO is so inexhaustibly rich in content that the dev team can afford to throw away entire zones."

I couldn't agree more.  Yet, for no sane seeming reason, MMO developers do this all the time.  Forget about the old, in with the new!  

Take the Catacombs in Dark Age of Camelot.  It used to be some of my favorite content when I was playing in the early 2000s. When I returned to DAoC a few years ago, I found a PvE game that was much richer than I remembered from the previous decade.  There were two entirely different chains of PvE quests, a new one running through the main zones of the game and another much older series of quests that ran through the Catacombs.  About six months after I started playing, Mythic effectively amputated Catacombs. All of content in the zones was cut out so the zones could be repurposed for raids. In the process, the amount of solo PvE content in the game got cut by nearly half.

I don't like raiding, so it was a net loss for me.  I also never understood why Mythic couldn't have created duplicates of the zones and left the old quests in place in the original zones.  Adding insult to injury, the gear that you earn in those raids is now much easier to earn with bounty points (which can be obtained solo) than by running the raids.  The raids have very little reason to exists now, and all the quests I remember with rosy nostalgia from when I used to play in the 00s are still gone.  

Mythic is far from alone.  The most recent large update to Destiny 2, Beyond Light, removed entire planets. I had only been playing the game for a little over a month at the time.  The update removed Mercury, Mars, Titan and several other whole large areas from the game.  Most of what they removed I had yet to even set foot on, and it absolutely killed my enthusiasm.  Instead of being excited about all the new content being added, all I could do was mourn the loss of zones I would never get to explore.  Destiny is another game community I don't really follow.  However, in general players don't seem all that enamored by the shakeup, with current Steam reviews of Beyond Light trending "Mostly Negative."

Other notable examples include the Cataclysm expansion in WoW, which set all the old levelling zones on fire (in some cases literally) to make room for revamped zones.  At the time I enjoyed the changes, but hindsight has not been kind to the expansion.  It's now widely considered the expansion where Blizzard started to lose their way.  There was also something called the NGE, where an entire game was pretty much ripped out and replaced with some other game using the same setting and art assets.  Players were not amused.    

I can see why developers amputate systems.  In many cases the only way to implement a new system, like switching character development from skill lines to classes, is to remove and replace it. What really baffles me are designers that seem eager to remove entire zones, with all of their content.  Play zones are an absolutely enormous amount of work to produce. The art, the writing, the items that you can earn; game designers put their hearts and souls into all of it.  When you remove a zone from a game you are likely removing thousands of person hours of work from a product.  In a series of offline game players can always load up older editions of the game if they want to.  Not so in a MMO.  If you close off areas they are simply gone, and all the work from that designers put into them has basically vanished.

Losing explorable content hurts especially hard in a MMO. One of the main reasons I love MMOs so much is because they give me the illusion of exploring a living breathing world.  There are two things that really make MMOs pop for me.  Other players, the knowledge that there is a real person behind so many of the digital avatars I encounter, are a big part of it.  However that's not enough by itself.  The other half of the equation for me is the places themselves, how enormous they tend to be and how permanent they feel. The feeling that I could spend months there seeing new sights and having unexpected new adventures. The knowledge that like any real place, things still happen and change when I'm not around.  

When developers decide to rip content out of game, that sense of endless possibilities is diminished.  Of course it makes the game smaller in a literal sense of diminished virtual real-estate.  However, it also reminds me that the game is not a real place, and that ultimately MMOs are as impermanent as any other game that ceases to exist when you shut off your PC.  Further, if the developers don't care enough about the content they build to even bother to keep it around when they add newer content, why should I get invested in any of it?   

Now of course there are a lot of very good, or at least explicable, reasons for developers to retire zones.  To keep players from getting too spread out as the geography of a game expands.  To reduce the footprint of a game on storage devices.  To stop players from wandering into older areas that no-longer meet expectations for design quality.   So that the lore of the game makes mores sense, and players aren't wandering between zones with story lines that obviously take them back and forth in time.  I could go on.

Yet all too often it doesn't feel like these or similar sensible reasons to me.  Frequently it feels like zone amputations happen for some combination of one of two reasons: (1) To force players to buy new content by removing old content that competes with it or  (2) New designers want to put their stamp on a game, and place little value on the things that designers before them built.  Rather than a a reluctant choice forced by the holistic needs of the game and the player base, too often content removal feels like greed or hubris.   

If you aren't sure whether to leave a zone in or take it out, maybe it's better to err on the side of making your game a bigger, better value for players.  More importantly, maybe it's better to err on the side of not ticking off everyone that likes the zones.   Sure some players won't care much one way or another.  But in a MMO, the ones that do care will likely care deeply.

Universal Paperclips

For the three or four readers that might not have heard of it yet, this is far and away the best game about making paperclips I have ever played:

Universal Paperclips

Supposedly inspired by the paperclip problem.  Now I have to head back to the other browser tab and see if I have made enough paperclips to earn the next level of trust yet.  That advanced wire extruder isn't going to buy itself!

What is the bare minimum LoTRO needs?

Wilhelm over at Ancient Gaming Noob recently asked What Does LoTRO Need?  It's a great post, you should go a read it if you haven't yet.  After typing up a monster of a response over there, I realized I had 90% of a blog post.  So here we are.

With the acquisition of Daybreak games, EG7 also acquired Lord of the Rings Online, a game near and dear to me (and apparently many other crusty old timey MMO bloggers).  EG7 indicated that they intend to modernize the game to try and bring it to a new audience and capitalize on the attention that the IP will be getting soon with the release of Amazon's upcoming competitor to Game of Thrones, set in Middle Earth's second age.  However as Wilhelm points out, bringing a game that has aged so poorly in some respects to a modern audience is going to be quite a challenge.  

I doubt that  EG7 has the resources they would need to do a top to bottom revamp of the game into something that could be a major success with hundreds of thousands of players.  For example, I will be a bit surprised if they are really able to port it to consoles.  However, if they want to aim for even dozens of thousands of new players when the Amazon show comes out, there are a few common sense changes that I think are absolutely necessary.

1. LoTRO needs to be as reliable on Windows 10 as any other modern game. 

When you download and install the client, either from the SSG website or from STEAM, it needs to just work 99% of the time on a modern PC.  No workarounds, no having to install random background software packages that aren't included in the download.  When players have to get together an "install guide" like this one, it is not a good sign. I personally can't get the game to run reliably on a Windows 10 PC that has never given me the slightest issue with any other game I've tried on it.  The last time I was playing LoTRO on it I had to figure out workarounds for two different issues that came up.  When the third issue hit (in less than two months) I uninstalled.  Life is too short.  

When I log in at all these days, it's on an old Windows 7 PC or a really old Vista PC I never turn on for anything else.  Ironically it runs fine (if with very low frame rates in some areas) on the ten year old Vista PC. Most players don't have those options.  In the modern PC market it's Windows 10 or bust.

2. The UI needs to work well on 4K monitors.  

If you crank the resolution way up on a 4K monitor, the game actually still looks surprisingly good.  The environments, shadows and water effects are holding up better than they have any right to in a 13 year old game.  However, if you do that the UI becomes tiny squares on your screen that are way too small to see clearly or quickly click on.  Even having the option to magnify them and have them look all pixely would be better than the current option of having them almost disappear.  This is the single change that I think is most desperately needed

3. The character models probably need a further revamp.  

Yes I know they just got a revamped a few years ago.  Now they look 8 years out of date instead of 13.  The problem is that even at launch the character models weren't that great.  For example, Age of Conan had far superior models even in 2007.   However I assume that the last revamp was the best they can do without ditching the 32 bit client and/ or redoing many of the armor assets.  Certainly redoing all the equipment would be an insanely large undertaking at this point, so serious further improvements to the character models may be off the table.

4. There are too many quests (and I love quests!).  Even the Epic quests need a polish pass.  

LotRO has an absolutely overwhelming number of quests, and it seems like at least half of them are to hunt bears, boars or wolves for some reason. This really turns new players off. Wilhelm's idea of turning the Epic book quests into a golden path (ala the class quests in SWTOR) is a good one in general.  The game isn't actually very far off from this right now.  I recently did a once-a-week family-time playthrough where we mainly focused on the epic quest lines.  We made it all the way to Moria and rarely had to stop and do side quests.  However this playthrough also highlighted some other problems to me.

With year 2020 eyes I could see that a lot of the epic quests are not all that great by modern standards.  There is a lot of running around.  Some entire evenings were mainly spent riding horses back and forth between distant NPCs.  There are also a handful of quests in Angmar where just figuring out where the heck you are supposed to go seems to be the quest.  You can see where you want to be on the map, but it isn't at all obvious how to get there.  Poor stretches like that will need to be worked on.  

The story itself through to Moria also isn't as good as I remembered it being.  Some quests that were great in 2007 just because they were logical and tried to tell a long and involved story (making them well above average for the day) are not holding up well 13 years later.  That said, some of the early quests are still very engaging, and you can see the quality of the quests improve markedly in later content (especially from Rohan on).  There is a lot of good stuff there to work with.  But overall, the launch era quests running from levels 1 to 50 don't compare well to content in more modern games like ESO, SWTOR, TSW, ect.  If players are going to come in from a TV show for the story, they need to be engaged by it.  

5. Rough edges (clunky legacy systems) will need to be sanded down or removed altogether.

There are several absolute train wrecks that you will encounter as you level through the game.  Systems that are completely different from what you have been doing during the 100+ hours it takes to get to that point, aren't very well explained, and aren't all that fun even once you do understand them.

The worst of these was epic battles/ big battles.  I could have easily gotten a post out of how much I hate that system.  However with a recent patch SSG added the option to play through those chapters of the Epic quest line without needing to set foot in a big battle.  Instead, there are now a series of solo quests that take you through the battle of Helms Deep.  These quests do a good job of conveying the story without making players hit a brick wall of arbitrary difficulty and poorly explained systems.

Something like that definitely needs to happen for quests with mounted combat .  Every time I get to a quest that I need to mount up to finish, my heart sinks.  Apart from Epic quests, where I have no choice but to muddle through if I want to see the whole story, I usually ditch them.  Though mounted combat has a few fans, for the most part I have the impression that other players tend to hate it as much as I do.  Mounted combat employs a completely different set of combat and movement mechanics from the normal game.  It also forces you to spend time leveling up a horse, or at least your horse's equipment. It's a good example of a system where the designers force you to play some other game you probably don't like as much (horse battles) to keep playing the game you do like (adventuring as your character). This system really needs to be entirely optional.

Finally something needs happen with legendary items.  It's a neat system that at some point got too bloated and SSG has never really been able to reign in.  They probably also need to stop breaking the system to try and force players into the item shop (thankfully  SSG did back off of the worst of that intended change).  However legendary items are such a huge issue it would need a full post for me to do it justice.  The short version is that leveling legendary items up needs to take a lot less time and fewer resources than it currently does.

Wrap up

All of these seem like fairly obvious issue to me, that I would hope SSG already has plans to deal with.  For example, a client that fairly frequently doesn't work on Windows 10 PCs when you follow the normal installation procedures seems like a pretty obvious issue you would want to address.  As does having a UI that is functional on 4K monitors.  This lends me optimism that EG7 might be able to deal with them without needing to dump a ton of resources into the game, as fixes are presumably already at least in the planning stages.

However if all of these issue remain unaddressed, trying to bring the game to a new audience will likely be completely pointless.  The game in its current state is not one that is ever going to be able to grow beyond its current audience of highly invested veterans.

 

FFXIV First Impressions

ESO  wound down for me when I was in the high 30s.  The clunky combat eventually killed things for me, as enjoyable as I found the rest of the game to be.  I did find a class, necromancer, that was more fun to my tastes than the one I've ben using as my main so far. I am sure I will want to go back and play one up at some point.  However, for the time being  I have cancelled my sub, and I now only log once a week to hang out with a static group of my relatives.  As an aside,  meeting up in a game to form a party and murder monsters while you chat on Zoom is a heck of a lot more fun as a way to keep up with family than a phone call once a month!

My first character in FFXIV, soon after becoming a full fledged Black Mage and earning a set of class armor.  I already have more that a dozen random pets, but the cat is still my favorite.  The game is quite beautiful, but I have found it hard to get screenshots that really capture how charming it is in motion.

After ESO wound down , I moved on to the next of the "big five" MMOs* that I haven't played, Final Fantasy 14. I love most of the Final Fantasy games, and so in theory it should be right up my alley.  Like many sub based MMOs the up-front cost is pretty low. There's an endless free trial that let's you play to 30, which  I  played for a few days and found absolutely enchanting.  After that you can get the base game and both expansions (roughly seven or eight years of released content) for $60, or $45 if you discount the price for the month of sub time it comes with. Further, when I bought it there also happened to be a black Friday sale going, so I was able to get the all-in-one pack for only $30. It seems like quite bargain compared to other MMOs I've played recently.

*The big five being WoW, GW2, ESO, FFXIV and ....?  Sources seem to disagree about the last inhabitant of that list, though Black Desert gets mentioned a lot.  In any case, I fully intend to move on to Guild Wars 2 whenever FFXIV winds down for me.

The same character, soon after earning his first mount.  A chocobo of course.

So far I am only up to level 54. The core gameplay while leveling consists of an admixture of story heavy solo play and content that can only be cleared in a group.  Forced grouping is normally a huge turn off to me, but FFXIV handles it really well.  Most of main quest series is soloable, but about every five or ten steps you need to run a dungeon or kill a raid boss to continue.  In most MMOs that would bring your progress to a screeching halt. However FFXIV has a really well designed system for organizing PUGs.  You cue up for whatever specific dungeon you need, specifying your role (healer, tank or DPS) and then continue on about your business.  After the game finds three to seven players that want to play the same dungeon as you, a little window pops up asking if you are ready to go.  When you hit the accept button you get whisked off to the instance.  If you cued up for something related to a quest, at the end of the instance the game deposits you wherever you need to be to turn in the quest and continue the story line you were working on.  The entire process is amazingly painless.  

A scene from the Crystal Tower quest series.  This includes three raids that are mandatory to play through the game's main story.  There are some areas you can't even set foot in until you clear it, such as the capitol city of Ishgard.   That absolutely would have been a brick wall for me in most MMOs, but in FFXIV the raids were fairly painless. From queuing up to done, none of them took me more than 30 minutes.  I found watching strategy videos before hand really helpful. The "Updated for 2020" series by Mica (like this one for World of Darkness, by far the hardest of the three raids) were fantastic for this. 

As a DPS most cues take 5-25 minutes to pop. My understanding is that they are nearly instant for tanks and healers.  After that it takes roughly 20-30 minutes for a dungeon or five minutes for a boss fight.  In the 1-49 content everything is quite easy to anyone with MMO experience. As a DPS in low level content all I really needed to do was know how to use my abilities and "not stand in the stupid" (i.e., move out of the giant glowing orange zones that signal where a big attack is about to land). You can also count on your party members at least knowing the basics because to qualify for using the party finder you need to play through a series of solo training quests that teach you your role in a group.    However once you get into the Seventh Astral Era quest series, the difficulty starts to ramp up, and you will start dying a lot if you don't research particular instances before you run them.  Oddly I am finding that I don't mind the research, which is a bit shocking.  Normally a difficulty spike like the one I am playing through now would be a huge red flag for me.  

Crystals like these are found in many areas of the game.  You have to get fairly far in the main story before you find out where they came from.

Part of the reason I don't mind all the mandatory group content in FFXIV has to do with how painless it is to que up for what you want.  However a lot of MMOs have a similar system (e.g., the one is WoW is nearly identical, save that there are no "qualifying exams" to use the system like in FFXIV).  Another big part of it is the basic structure of the game.  You only need to muddle through something once, and then you can return to the relaxing and engaging solo game.  Overall the ratio is probably something like 5 to 30 minutes of group content to every two hours of solo content.  Even if you generally prefer to solo, there isn't enough forced grouping to completely turn you off if you are enjoying the game otherwise.  

  Aethernet crystals form the game's primary quick travel system.  Once you are attuned to one you can teleport to it at will.  It makes travelling all over the map for quests extremely painless.  A huge improvement over the "get your horse/ wyvern  taxi started and go make a sandwich" that we so often see in other games like LoTRO and WoW.  That said, I am still a bit fuzzy on why game designers so often feel the urge to send us across an entire continent for every second quest step in a chain.

I think the lack of friction also comes down to some clever social engineering on the part of the game designers.  Even after doing research, I have to admit I often slightly suck at a given instance the first time I try it (shocking no?). So far everyone I have met in my random PUGs has been extremely chill about me making occasional mistakes. Some part of that is undoubtedly the giant loot bonus they get for having me along. When you clear an instance using the party finder, if it's the first clear for anyone in the party you get massive bonus to your rewards.  For example dungeons that would normally only be worth 15 of the currency you can use to buy gear are worth 75 or 90 if anyone in your party clears it for the first time.  That's worth almost 1/3 of a very nice magic item in my level range.  Far from being disappointed when a "sprout"** like me appears in your random PUGs, you actively hope one will join. 

**Sprouts:  FFXIV helpfully puts a little green sprout next to your name when you first start playing until you hit some threshold of experience that I have yet to clear.  It lets players know that you are new, and a lot of vets go around handing out free stuff to any sprouts they encounter. It also lets players in PUGs know that you are probably the reason they are getting a 5x loot bonus.  Another clever bit of social engineering.  My experience in FFXIV is making me wish more MMOs took that aspect of game design seriously.

 This is the smaller of the two cathedrals in the capitol city of Ishgard, an area that was added to the game with the Heavensword expansion..  It took me nearly a month of playtime to get far enough into the game to see it, and so far I am still only about half way through the main story.   

The community itself also seems to be far above average.  I have met tons of really friendly players.  In fact I have yet to encounter a single asshat.  Though I am dead certain I'll encounter one eventually, FFXIV probably holds my personal record for "number of consecutive interactions with strangers without anyone being a dick."   I even got invited to my first in-game wedding a few nights ago. They are purely social events that you have to make reservations for ahead of time, there is only one chapel per server.  It was surprisingly elaborate and a lot of fun.  It was also fun meeting some of my guildies, that have just been random names in a chat box until now.  So far the community of FFXIV has been incredibly welcoming.    

I attended my first in game wedding wedding recently. Here a bunch of us are seated in the chapel waiting for the ceremony to begin, my character is the one wearing the black wizard outfit.  I had nothing more appropriate to wear because I had only been playing for a week at the time.

My only niggling concern is that there is a high end raiding scene that has a reputation for being exceedingly hardcore and elitist.  They are so serious about measuring their DPS e-peens that they rely heavily on parsing programs that are technically against the game's Terms of Service. That is a giant red flag, and it's entirely possible that the game will fall flat on it's face for me once I finish playing through the main story lines and hit the level cap.  However for the time being I am having a ton of fun.  This feels like something I could play for a long time, at least if there's anything remotely fun for a casual player like me to do when I hit the level cap.

The wedding was fairly elaborate, and a fun diversion.

You may have noticed that this post includes very little about what the game is like to play or game systems.  That's because I haven't gotten far enough to have much of an opinion, save that I like what I see so far.  I'm less that halfway through the main story, maybe 50% of the way to the level cap in terms of playtime, and have yet to attempt any side activities like crafting, fishing or house decoration.  I have also been digging the game so much on the first class I tried that I haven't wanted to put time into anything else so far.  I actually have no idea what it's like to play a melee for example.  I am sure I'll have more to say about the game once I'm further in.

Mainly I have been powering through the game's main story.  But I did pause to take part in the game's Christmas celebration, which I found charming.  It also came with a really goofy mount.  

Finally, as this will almost certainly be my last post for the year, Happy Holidays! May the rest of your year be safe and relaxing, and for the love of all that is good may 2021 be less "interesting" than this year has been :-)