Fate Fantasy XIV: An Anti-Social MMO

I finished PLD50 on Sunday and finished the main story, watched the credits, etc. Sooo... chances are that this post will have some spoilers, read on at your own risk! Side note: There are much too many people who worked on this game. Pretty sure that most are contractors or temps as I can't imagine a product that pulls at most $140-200M/year could employ that many people long-term.

Anyway, having "beaten" the game, I can't help but draw direct comparisons between FFXIV and Star Wars: The Old Republic. It feels like a shorter, less social version of SWTOR. This especially rings true for the state of endgame. Let's pull some direct comparisons:

* Standard quest + hub system -- This is identical to any other MMO out there, SWTOR, WoW, Tera, etc. all follow the "main story brings you to a new town where there are sidequests". The sidequests are identical too, the usual kill X mobs, fetch Y items, do /dance to NPCs, go to THIS side of the map to fight a NM, then go to THAT side to talk to a NPC. I'm highly amused that late in the game, they get blatant about it too, not only telling you to your face that they are just giving you busy work, but literally asking you to go to a different town and repeat exactly what you just did.

* Individual "main stories" and content -- The class/job quests, hunt logs, etc. are all meant to be tackled for you alone. You *could* bring a friend along for some of it, but generally it's single player content. Oh, one funny thing is that I think the AF reward was adjusted down to level 45 at some point just before launch. After getting 4/5 AF pieces with the level 45 job quest, I still ran into side quests in the 47-49 range which had gear rewards that were clearly outclassed by your AF gear. The level 44 dungeon gear becomes obsoletely nearly immediately and is probably just for looks now.

Yes. Yes I am.

* Instanced dungeons -- Flashpoints in SWTOR, dungeons in FFXIV. The nice thing is that they got matchmaking working from the start (Duty Finder) instead of having it be something introduced later. Good for optional gear along the way, and you don't have to do it more than once.

* Endgame consisting of "hard mode" encounters -- All done with the game? Alright, here's Ifrit, Garuda and Titan v2 for you to fight... oh, done with those too? Well, don't worry, Yoshi-P has said outright that in version 2.2, there will be a new level of Titan, Garuda and Ifrit for you to fight. He just hasn't decided whether to call it "super", "hyper", or "ultra" yet. I'm going to suggest Super Hyper Fighting Turbo edition! SWTOR called these "hard" and "nightmare" modes.

* Progression-type gating -- In order to do content from dungeon B, you have to grind content from dungeon A before you can proceed. If you try to look at the content from B before you finish grinding, you can't do it at all. This comes with hidden gear checks in the boss mechanics so you have to either read about it, or figure it out yourself. At least in SWTOR it actually rates your gear and tells you outright that you can't even attempt certain content until you finish grinding instead of making you waste your time and gil.

The whole thing really felt like a rehash of SWTOR at some points, even down to the voiced cutscenes. FFXIV however, has a lot less content as well. Voiced cutscenes are limited (and seem to be badly added to the music -- all the voice simply came from my center speaker and sounded exactly like someone speaking into a microphone). The storyline is slightly better compared to most SWTOR stories, though it really is classic Final Fantasy and pretty predictable. Ironically, the *main* difference is that there is significantly less content in FFXIV compared to SWTOR and it goes by much faster. I think it took 1 1/2 months of fairly intense playing to go from 1-50 in SWTOR. In FFXIV, it took less than 10 days.

The Anti-Social MMO
Unlike SWTOR, FFXIV seem to actively discourage any sort of social interaction as well. In SWTOR, I had a bonus for doing things in a party with someone else. Not only were there quests which required 2, sometimes 4 people to complete, but there was also a bonus for just partnering with a friend and going through the quests. You can even do your class quests with the help of a friend for fun, and they get to see some of your story.

FFXIV actively forces you to play alone for not only class quests and job quests, but your Grand Company leves. You can't even play with a friend for leveling content if you want to. About the only thing you can do with friends is repeating dungeons and FATEs.

Now FATEs are an interesting concept. Initially I compared them directly to the dynamic events in Guild Wars 2, or rifts in Rift, but the frequency and rewards of FATEs have lead people to select this as the new "exp party grind" for FFXIV. The fact that dungeons don't give as much exp (but are good for gear) and that levequests give a pretty crappy time/reward ratio(and are more useful for crafting/gathering) mean that in certain zones, you have massive mobs of people roaming around simply doing FATEs.

Typical FATE view. Get used to seeing this if you intend on leveling more than one job.

The funny part is that unlike FFXI, everyone is welcome to a FATE party. It doesn't matter who you are, what job you are on, just that you're in the party and hence, whatever you do increases the experience of everyone in the party. Joining a party is as simple as shouting in the appropriate zone "LFG FATE" and you'll automatically get an invite at this time. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the one-time quests, and that there is only one set of quests from level 20-50, if you want to play more than one job, you will spend most of your gametime simply roaming around in quiet, wordless FATE parties. Even if you are only leveling one job, a certain amount of grinding is necessary to make up for the lack of exp from quests.

A not-so-typical FATE view. Can you tell the difference? The main one is that in this case, the mob you're attacking rarely pops up so you probably can't target it!

The toxic community
My experience in going through the content from 1-49 was generally very pleasant. In dungeons, we talked at first, admitted to being new to a dungeon and experimented to see what new dungeons had to offer. Sometimes we learnt things and failed, only to retry and come to a win. My Garuda fight was a full team which had never done it before, but we went from having no clue to figuring the fight mechanics out and pulling off a win. During one of my high level quests (around level 47 or so), I had to kill some mobs for a quest, but there was a level 50 PLD there clearly farming them for crafting items. When I showed up, he would claim a mob, then turn and not attack so I could do enough damage for credit for the quest. He got his drops, I got my credit and moved on.

That all changed at level 50 with an incredibly toxic community. To finish up the storyline, you have to reach level 50 and do a few 8-person dungeons. Unfortunately, these dungeons are also the exact same ones that you need to farm for "tombstones" (one of the currencies for endgame gear, including AF+1 and darklight gear)  so what you end up with is a group of impatient douchebags screaming at people to skip through cutscenes, running ahead of everyone, triggering mobs, not explaining fights and making the experience generally miserable for everyone. In some cases, SE actually put cutscenes right in the middle of fighting masses of mobs, so you'd be fighting and engaging mobs and suddenly the cutscene would start without warning. Highly annoying, and supposedly people have died to this. As tank, I skipped these cutscenes to make sure that nobody died, but the entire experience is very jarring.

The fights for the final dungeons are pretty easy too so people would go ahead and start fighting while others are in the middle of cutscenes. It's VERY noticeable as even during the cutscene, you can hear the sounds of the boss that is being fought trash talking. It's very silly that the final boss of a Final Fantasy game is already dead by the time you come out of a CS because some assholes decide to go ahead and start fighting with half the team.

This sort of toxic behavior also carries over to the post-story content. In a few instances in duty finder, I've seen people drop out without another word when one person admits that they've never tried the content before. I've also seen cases of people berating others for having a low DPS from running FFXIV-APP and immediately quitting. In all cases, I've reported them to the support desk for harassment, but I'm pretty sure that the GMs in this game are as useless as other games.

This general feeling from the FFXIV community has lead me to ignore endgame activities until more friends catch up. I'm not too surprised, just disappointed that a community that was so friendly could turn so toxic so quickly.

Will FFXIV be successful?
I've stated often in previous posts that the long-term success of FFXIV really depends on their endgame content. Having experienced it briefly, and investigated what needed to be done, I think my answer to this is that it will not be as successful as people think it will be. It shares most of the characteristics as SWTOR, is incomplete in some ways (no PvP, making promises of player/guild housing, like SWTOR promised guild ships) and has vague promises of future content ("Good King Moogle Mog", harder mode of primal battles and other primals). The tiered progression system also discourages casual play at endgame, given that to get from the first tier to the next, you basically have to repeat the same 60-90 minute dungeons a good 30-40 times. Just like SWTOR, you are essentially locked out of some content until you farm the initial content, making it frustrating for casual players.

Unlike SWTOR, the content for FFXIV moves along a lot faster. Not only is the leveling process really fast in comparison (basically FFXIV has maybe 1/3 of the total quest/story content compared to SWTOR), but the farming process has no barriers. In SWTOR, you were limited to 2 operations per week due to lockouts. FFXIV has no lockouts so people can (and have been) farm the dungeons constantly. I expect that people should have full AF+1 and relics before even the basic trial periods are complete.

The tiered progression system is one I am not a fan of and was afraid would actually come to FFXIV. Unfortunately, my fears did come true and in order to see content, you have to go through the grind. Compare this to FFXI where you could select from the different endgame activities to do and do any, or all that you wanted to with the gear that you had when you reached level cap. You could do Dynamis without having to camp the kings, or do Sky without having to touch Dynamis. Or do all at the same time. New events that were later added -- Limbus, ZNMs, Nyzul, Campaign, etc. could all be done with basic gear, without having to do one or the other. Of course, having better gear made things easier and faster, but you could experience all the content and decide which ones you wanted to pursue. Amusingly, about a year after the SWTOR release, they started giving away the first tier of endgame gear to anyone who reached level 50 so that people could jump ahead of outdated content. Will FFXIV do the same?

The tiered progression system also punishes people who want to be helpful and flexible. If you want to be prepared for various roles, after grinding your 2nd or 3rd job up to 50 through FATEs, you have to do double or triple the amount of grinding at the various tiers to gear up your various jobs. It would be simpler to just stick with one role.

I think the player base will split into 3 parts:
1) The hardcore which will be done with content before even the first month is up (possibly being able to actually return the game without entering a code if they pre-ordered and use the early access & new trial +7 days? or maybe they still need to enter a code to get the +7 days to the trial), complain that there is no content and leave.
2) The casual which will finish the story and quickly realize that they don't want to grind through the same thing over and over again.
3) The fans that will actually stick to the game even on the downhill. There are people like this on SWTOR that still raid and do operations. I expect that a large number of similar fans will stay around for FFXIV. Ironically, I think this will end up putting the final nail in the coffin for FFXI as most of the fans are probably current players for FFXI.

My guess is that FFXIV: ARR will peak very quickly in the first 3-4 months, after which it will lose players rapidly, settling down in the 500-700k range of steady subscribers. This is exactly what happened to SWTOR, except it happened over about 6-8 months. Unlike SWTOR, there is less content in FFXIV, and no artificial tethers to slow people down. I actually think that this is also what SE expects given their initial launch of 50 total servers. As I recall, each server can handle a max of 4,000 concurrent connections, but is expected to host about 12,000 players, making for an estimated max of 600,000 subs. I do hope that SE isn't overbuying servers with tonight's maintenance. If they open up too many new worlds, that would just end up with server merges in a few months (which is what happened to SWTOR, which also signaled the failure of a MMO to the public). 600k subscribers is still a decent number, and I believe is about what FFXI had for a good portion of its lifetime.

How about AlphaPrime/Impact/CTR?
Now this is where it gets interesting... This is the first time we've had the whole group from FFXI back together since... well, I think people started dropping off at around 2010-2011? It's really nice to see everyone back together again, though truthfully, we haven't really played together much at all. We've done a few dungeons together, but very little outside of that. FFXIV just isn't a social game in the leveling process. There was even one time when I got into a random FATE party with one other (brand new) CTR member but he didn't even notice me saying hi to him on linkshell chat -.-

I'd like to think that we might end up playing together for a while, but I'm not optimistic as to how long it will last. I'm fully expecting some people to get bored and leave fairly quickly (myself possibly among them), while other people will feel that we're moving too slow and join a "real" FC to progress faster (which has already happened). Personally, I've switched to playing on ARC so that I can join in with some friends as they go through the various dungeons, though it's quite boring on the 2nd job due to FATEs being the only real way to exp.

As for the future of CTR, well, we have a stupid number of PLDs right now. Last I counted, there were between 8-10 of us. That's too many tanks for 30 people, and I'm not even counting the WARs yet! It's mildly ironic that we have very few DDs. Every time someone asks for help in a dungeon, I can't offer it because they're also leveling PLD. For events, I'm not entirely sure what we can do... perhaps some farming runs for currency? 8 people at a time? While it might be fun to do this as a group, it would be almost as easy to just use Duty Finder for it. The same for the hard mode primal fights for a chance at the weapons. We'll have to see what happens as more people get to 50.

What do you think? Leave comments below.

Anyway, here are some pics! Quite limited due to me not wanting to spoil things too much for people, but there *ARE* spoilers...

Despite my complaints, it's still a really pretty game. Wonder how DX11 will make things look

And there's some surprisingly skimpy clothing too, like any MMO I guess

I'm a ghost!

Please make sure your Lalafell is wearing goggles before you practice tossing them!

Generic FF battle scene!

It's a bird! It's a plane! (Yda really has short shorts :o)

Whee, the whole group of Scions

And Ascy on ARC. That bow is as tall as I am o.o