Can FFXIV go the distance?

One question on my mind is whether Final Fantasy XIV can hold attention the same way as FFXI. Most of us played FFXI for many, many years, in some cases, over a decade. Some people are still playing it right now! Even in 2013, over 10 years after the original release, new content is still being released. World of Warcraft also lasted a long time for people playing it. Fuji put it best when he asked the question... "Is this the game for the next decade?"

Over the last year, I've gone through tons more MMOs and did not play many for very long. Tera, Rift, Neverwinter all lasted a few weeks. Star Wars: The Old Republic, lasted the longest at around 6 months. Zurar brings up some interesting points on my last blog post about how generic the combat and quest systems are, and how there isn't any variety in gear. How does FFXIV measure up to other games?

Story
This is SE. Story, graphics and cutscenes is one area where I'm confident they will deliver. They also have the big advantage of pulling in all the references to other Final Fantasy games!

Hello scary demon-looking thing!

Even though I never really played it, I do like the references back to 1.0

Is it just me, or do these guys look like they came from FFXII?

Pretty, likable heroes!

I'd put SE's skills in this department ahead of BioWare, even if the stories may be confusing and may not make sense at first. Heads and shoulders above most other MMOs which don't really engage you, nor do they have much NPC character development. This should give a decent amount of content to keep people interested through the first few weeks at the very least. The bad news is that this content is stuff you experience only one time.

The questing/leveling experience
This would cover the first few weeks, or months of gameplay. The questing system is fairly generic... go to new area, pick up quests, go kill X mobs/fetch Y items/talk to Z NPC. Not too different from Tera, WoW or SWTOR. At some point, the quests blend together and you really just don't pay attention to dialog, just following the arrows and circles on the map. I think FFXIV's questing system has the same general feeling here. The only semi-positive is that there do not seem to be as many quests per area, so the grind isn't as obvious. Some of them might have cool cutscenes too, but those are mainly restricted to the main scenario quests.

Is that galka taunting me?

Yay Marauders!

The good news is that FFXIV has a variety of ways to level. Besides the standard questing system, repeatable levequests, grinding mobs (like old school FFXI, though I'm not sure how well this works) and the dynamic active event system (FATEs) just like Guild Wars 2 and Rift. At the appropriate levels, you can just repeat dungeons for exp and gear as well. FATEs on the other hand, is something that requires active participation of many people. If there aren't enough players in the area to do a FATE, you can't go solo it even if there are NPCs hitting the mob. It's kinda like campaign in FFXI I guess, where if you're trying to solo it, you need to be very careful. There's a time limit to FATEs as well. In the extended future, I'm not sure how effective FATEs will be.

One unique aspect of FFXIV is the legacy players. How will they be pulled in here? Especially those who have hit level cap on all available jobs? Will they simply skip the questing and dungeon stuff here? Or will they play the new Arcanist job? I'm curious how this plays out.

Combat and gameplay
I'm splitting my opinions here into two different sections as I think they are distinct from each other, yet closely related.

Combat would be the actual actions that you take during a fight -- Casting a spell, using an action, even auto-attack. For this, FFXIV has a greater variety compared to the average MMO. Positioning makes a difference, stunning a mob's move can help in combat, you can move out of the way of a gobbie bomb. I'd say this is a slight step up compared to FFXI where you really just stand and take it for the most part.

Some aspects of FFXI gameplay are still here as well. Debuff effects on the mob, as well as on your character such as poison. However, these are nowhere near as common as FFXI where people simply avoided certain mob types due to the effects they could do.

Combat itself is faster compared to FFXI, but slow compared to the fast-paced button mashing of Tera and Neverwinter. The 2.5 second "global cooldown" does make each fight appear slow compared to the action pace of Tera. I do enjoy the fast action-oriented combat of Tera where the skill of the player makes a much larger impact, especially when taking on BAMs. However, this slower pace of combat at low levels gives the game some leeway to speed things up at higher levels. For example, look at the attack speed of a Thief in FFXI when they first start out, compared to the fully equipped high level thief with lots of haste, equipment, etc.

I have to disagree with Zurar's complaints about removing elemental damage/weakness. That aspect of gameplay is merely a memory game. The way that beta.3 handles elements for the mage classes  is more interesting. Do you want to use Stone and add a gravity effect on a mob? Or Aero and put on a DoT first? How much nuking with Fire can you do before you have to switch over to Water to regen MP? At the low levels, and especially when soloing, the decision of what skills you use is pretty simple and you end up just using the same combos over and over again, but that's the same for any MMO during the leveling up/grinding phase. It's during dungeons and bigger fights where you have to make actual decisions and manage your resources.

This brings me to consider gameplay... The dungeon mechanics have changed quite a bit between beta 2 and 3, with boss fights having many more tricks to them instead of the standard MMO "tank & spank" affair. For example, in the Copperbell Mines dungeon, there's a slime boss which you have to hold and use other nearby "Bomb" type mobs to damage. You can't attack them directly. There are also decision to be made as a group, like are you going to AoE down a bunch of small mobs, or kite them, or sleep them. This provides some variety of gameplay and requires at least some communication between party members. Contrast this with Neverwinter, where the average dungeon run has absolutely no communication between players as everyone's role is obvious, and there are no variations on how to beat the boss.

I don't think we've gotten high enough to come to a conclusion about gameplay yet. It wasn't till level 18 that I started to see other possible combinations of my moves in Marauder (and Archer) and I had to make decisions on whether I wanted to do more damage and get more enmity right now, or set myself up to do more damage over the fight. Remember, leveling up and getting to level cap accounts for only a small portion of the game as a MMO.

Loot & endgame
This is the aspect which I think will determine the long-term staying power of FFXIV.

First, during the leveling process, I'd expect gear to be fairly uniform -- quest rewards, dungeon drops, some crafting, etc. would create different types of gear, but I don't expect people would put too much effort during the actual leveling process to come up with unique gear. I'd expect most of the attention here would be placed at the endgame process.

SE has already done this for FFXIV during the 1.0 content. Primal fight weapons all look flashy and are interesting. As far as I can tell from youtube videos, there are also a few different types of weapons out there.

Now the interesting part would be the endgame activities and rewards. FFXI was an expert at the "sidegrade" type of loot drop. For the bulk of FFXI's life, you could start participating in any endgame event as soon as you hit level cap. You'd get some rewards, and when a new activity was released, you might want to get the new rewards which may enhance some specific scenarios. You ended up with lots of different situational gear.

Contrast this with a regular progression-type MMO. For most MMOs, you have various tiers of endgame activity you have to go through. In SWTOR, WoW, Neverwinter, Tera, etc. you have to grind and farm the first tier of dungeons, get enough gear there before you can even participate in the next tier. This ends up being extremely grindy and boring -- there was no variety in the activities you could do. It also really split the community up... The amount of time you had to play would determine how quickly you progressed through the tiers.

With the 2.0 relaunch, FFXIV is again coming from a unique position. Unlike other MMOs, they probably had various endgame activities from 1.0 that could be adapted to 2.0. They also have the experience from FFXI and time to develop different activities, unlike SWTOR which had to rush to add activities on before people got bored of the game and quit.

Can FFXIV pull off a good endgame? I don't know the answer to this... We'll have to see!

Final thoughts
Sooooo... erm... I found out that the 2.1 patch will be adding a barber, soooo... I'll be able to change my hairstyle! The poll on the right is still interesting though! Two weeks of voting left!.

And... I do like this lodestone feature where you can see all the characters and blog and stuff... Is anyone planning on using it? xD My Midgardsomr beta 3 character is up at http://na.beta.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/character/1587861/