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No current MMOs are scratching the itch that I have. I want a game with comfy base building, really good combat, dungeons, and cool fun poo poo to do. I was thinking maybe Archeage Unchained but all the reviews on steam are dumping on it for going to pay 2 win, having big problems, etc. Like 500 people play at peak hours, which is disconcerting. Why are MMOs so bad right now? I know that FFXIV is really growing in popularity, but I can't get into the story, the characters, etc. I got so bored of it I got the MSQ skip and that ruined it for me completely because I had no idea what was going on. Welp.
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Jun 27, 2021 04:06
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vandalism posted:No current MMOs are scratching the itch that I have. I want a game with comfy base building, really good combat, dungeons, and cool fun poo poo to do. I was thinking maybe Archeage Unchained but all the reviews on steam are dumping on it for going to pay 2 win, having big problems, etc. Like 500 people play at peak hours, which is disconcerting. Sounds like New World. The upcoming MMO in two months that's the first "big budget" MMO in almost a decade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5GtzABfP6U
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Jun 27, 2021 04:58
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New World doesn't have base building afaik. A guild can "own" a city on the map but they don't get to place the buildings and stuff. They just get to set the tax rates there, and post community quests to upgrade poo poo. If enough people turn in the 10 bear asses to the guild quest board then hey your city now has a level 4 armor-crafting station or level 2 fortifications during pvp events.
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Jun 27, 2021 07:48
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:New World doesn't have base building afaik. Yeah. It used to have base building of some sort back when it was a lovely Life is Feudal clone. I don't know why people are upset it went away from that. Like 11 people play Life is Feudal, New World splitting that player base would have never worked.
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Jun 27, 2021 13:41
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vandalism posted:No current MMOs are scratching the itch that I have. I want a game with comfy base building, really good combat, dungeons, and cool fun poo poo to do. I also want this, though I could even lose the base building as long as there are enough non-combat activities to partake in that don’t happen 100% in a crafting window with only lists and buttons to interact with. At least give me a mini game to hit my blacksmith hammer at the right moment for an extra .02 damage on a sword or something. New World is probably the last big budget MMO we’ll see for a long while, so we all better goon rush the poo poo out of it while it lasts. Alternatively, I’d be 100% down to pick an old game as a group and dump everyone in this thread into it until we all get bored.
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Jun 27, 2021 14:08
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vandalism posted:No current MMOs are scratching the itch that I have. I want a game with comfy base building, really good combat, dungeons, and cool fun poo poo to do. I was thinking maybe Archeage Unchained but all the reviews on steam are dumping on it for going to pay 2 win, having big problems, etc. Like 500 people play at peak hours, which is disconcerting. the entire ARR section of XIV is in dire need of a complete revamp, the story quest pruning helped a bit but it's still not great also you hit the most common issue that i've seen with new players to the game - it takes too long for it to get good that you buy a skip and now nothing makes sense and you don't know anything about the characters so you quit, this has happened to 3 of my friends then I just stopped trying to convince people to play it which sucks because Shadowbringers is probably the best story that a Final Fantasy game has told, assuming you've experienced all the groundwork laid out by the previous 8000 hours of story content
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Jun 27, 2021 14:41
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I think ARR is while not great, but tolerable if you don't view the game as "trying to get to the very end" like you would WoW or any other modern MMO where the game only starts at max. Viewing it purely as an obstacle is bound to make you frustrated.
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Jun 27, 2021 15:15
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vandalism posted:I know that FFXIV is really growing in popularity, but I can't get into the story, the characters, etc. I got so bored of it I got the MSQ skip and that ruined it for me completely because I had no idea what was going on. Welp. I got to level 30 before I quit and skipped every cutscene so it was pretty funny making myself not know what was happening. I think MMOs having cutscenes/plot/main story like Old Republic miss the point of the genre (just my opinion) and was trying to rush through to play with buddies but I couldn't do the running back and forth anymore. I got recommended a video about the 20 reasons EQ was the best game ever after I looked up a music compilation when people were talking about music in here. I've usually agreed with the rose tinted glasses take about the older MMO but listening to the video made me question that stance. There's nostalgia since you can't go back to that but I think EQ is much better designed than any more recent MMO I've played. I wouldn't agree with the video creator it was the best game ever (I can't imagine how much it would suck playing a Rogue, Warrior, or Ranger on launch and I would've definitely picked a different class than I did if I knew more) but it was interesting how despite him being someone who made it to the endgame (I maxed out around 32-33) a lot of his examples of how great the game was were things I had personally experienced. Something about camping a spawn with buds for the night was so much better than running all over to do the main quest in FFXIV mostly because the latter felt like I was playing a single-player game with lots of people in it. Groovelord Neato fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Jun 27, 2021 |
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Jun 27, 2021 15:33
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I have a decently decoration filled plot and at least one character at max level in FFXIV. That being said, I legitimately can't bring myself to enjoy much of it outside of loving around in town or with guildmates, or really heavily play it or level another character up again. It feels like it's nothing but cutscene after cutscene, walking from A to B, then B to A, then A to C, ... times a million. Most of the experience was walking or cutscenes. I haven't purchased any MSQ skips and played through ARR. The cutscenes and every single transition is slow as hell, feels unresponsive, and the fade in and out of every cutscene feels like forever. The combat feels very plain, oddly slow, and feels a bit weird seeing giant exploding lines or whatever other excessive visual effect when you just push an identical button on a 3 second cooldown. A normal raid means you can be asleep at the keyboard with everyone else in your randomly assigned dungeon finder group all be relatively new to it and still finish within 1-2 attempts, probably with avg 1.25 or so. A hard raid means the boss mashes their one shot kill wipe everybody restart from the beginning AOE skill frequently. The UI is one of the worst I've experienced and feels like everything is intended for console play. It's very.. Japanese? I don't know how else to describe it. I've done UI/UX for several years now and there's a design recurring theme that feels very Japanese. Mogstation is the same thing, it's a modern web application much like IE 7 is a modern web browser. The FFXIV launcher throws a handful of actual IE errors on launch if you have ad blocking and forgets the saved username half the time. I never got to play EQ or UO but I can't help but feel like they actually let you do something outside of the extreme boundaries of the theme park. Impotence fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Jun 27, 2021 |
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Jun 27, 2021 15:54
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Biowarfare posted:I never got to play EQ or UO but I can't help but feel like they actually let you do something outside of the extreme boundaries of the theme park. Someone with more experience than me would have to give a definitive answer, but EQ was extremely limited wasn't it? You rolled a character, fought mobs in the world very slowly either alone or in a group, moved to new zone, rinse repeat. A group of friends would obviously make that less tedious, but in terms of things to do there wasn't much, was there? Like there were quests that would yield cool trinkets or gear but the game didn't have a ton of systems if I remember right. It's been a minute and I haven't taken a plunge into Mischief yet
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Jun 27, 2021 16:25
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Yeah, Everquest was / is a lot simpler than people remember. What people are actually remembering is that the game didn't hold your hand through anything, you didn't know which NPCs gave quests, and you had to run around zones, and sometimes do quests to obtain skills / spells etc. There was very limited bag space, and a bunch of realism mechanics that made the game very unapproachable and challenging. But the actual list of things to do was extremely limited. World of Warcraft is actually a far more fleshed out gameworld, and mechanically way more complicated and engaging.
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Jun 27, 2021 16:43
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I am hopeful for New World. The no base building thing isn't a big deal because it looks like there are a lot of cool little hamlets to explore. The gameplay looks great. Combat has weight that other mmo games simply don't have. I have heard great things and the outlets that are discussing the game seem positive. The setting looks neat. The crafting also seems pretty good. Anyway, I will play it starting July 20th to see if it is good. I am also gonna pick up Swords of Legends Online. The gameplay videos look solid and it will have dungeons and raids and poo poo. Also it is buy to play and the cash shop is aesthetics only. Both of these games not having a subscription is nice. I hope they don't suck incredible rear end like other recent mmos. Also, yeah, all of the things cited above about ffxiv are problems for me, too. I respect the passion that went into creating the game and the turnaround that they made, but the game very much isn't for me. That is ok. I am just desperate for a good, non-dead MMO. I played shadowlands at launch and made it to the second to last raid boss then dropped it completely. 9.1 looks like a complete shitshow. I don't see how they can keep loving up so tremendously at Blizzard.
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Jun 27, 2021 16:50
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FFXIV ARR is some of the worst story-telling I have ever suffered through. I pushed all the way to the first level cap because people kept telling me it got better. Instead it just kept getting worse and worse. It's a shame, because the game provided almost everything else I want out of an MMO, but they way it kept punishing me narratively while simultaneously wasting my time eventually made me drop it. FFXIV fans often claim it's gotten better since, but it was the seasonal event that sent me ping-ponging back and forth between the same location I'd just been and the other side of the world that convinced me FFXIV would never stop wasting my time. If one or the other hadn't been true, I'd have muscled through it to keep playing with the people I liked in-game, but both at once was too much.
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Jun 27, 2021 16:52
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i enjoyed the ARR story all the way through, before they did any of the story adjusting. I'm glad you get ana mazing single player game on top of having some really good MMO stuff too. its dope. im trying 11 now tho and its really neat in an old game way
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Jun 27, 2021 17:00
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FFXIV has a beautiful gameworld, and each job is fun to play and unique. But I agree that the story isn't actually good at all on any of the expansions, and the game is too restrictive and controlling in what you can and cannot do.
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Jun 27, 2021 17:02
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I love Final Fantasy, but I was pretty miserable going through the FFXIV MSQ. Part of that is that MMOs are just like that in many ways, but the number of fetch quest really rotted my brain in particular. At least a lot of those have been pruned.
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Jun 27, 2021 17:40
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FFXIV gets better in the sense that your combat rotation fills out, the writing improves, and the cutscenes get more cinematic, but at the end of the day Endwalker is still going to be like 80 hours of linear cutscenes with a few weeks of dungeons and hotbar MMO dance fights sprinkled in. It is what it is, and it's unlikely to change since they've been pumping out content with the exact same blueprint for like six years now. Altho I guess people change, I was pretty aggressively down on FFXIV up until like two years ago when I finally made it into Heavensward, started enjoying the story, opened my heart back up to the animes, and accepted my bunny girl destiny.
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Jun 27, 2021 17:47
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The quest mechanics and structure is definitely the low point of FFXIV. Every quest boils down to going to a point, clicking something, having two mobs spawn that you have to kill, and returning to where you came from. WoW quests have advanced so far beyond FFXIV quests it's not even funny. Too bad Blizzard sucks and hates their players.
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Jun 27, 2021 18:08
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I said come in! posted:But the actual list of things to do was extremely limited. World of Warcraft is actually a far more fleshed out gameworld, and mechanically way more complicated and engaging. My favorite thing about Everquest was just existing in that world, and the relative simplicity/opaqueness is part of what made that. There was less mechanical engagement with video game but that just meant it was easy to chat with people you were camping with. MMOs don’t tend to be super engaging in terms of mechanics anyway, so I’d sooner they lean more into creating compelling worlds. The reason I can’t get into any current MMO except for kinda GW2 is that the massive world they create is mostly wasted.
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Jun 27, 2021 18:13
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The best way I've found to look at what makes is to use a comparison of someone's work like Gene Wolfe to Brandon Sanderson. On reading Wolfe my take on his style is you are creating your own world just as much as he is telling a story in one. The vagueness and mystery causes you to fill in the blanks. This reminds me of EQ in that while the gameplay is simple, the meta makes the world take on it's own character and feel lived in. Sanderson has everything spelled out and all the interactions of magic completely mapped out, so there isn't much of a mystery with it. This is how I view these newer games that feel very on the rails and are pushing you to an endpoint. I had never played EQ until I tried p99 red in 2014 and was near instantly hooked. It provided something I had been looking for in a game, but had never found. Anyways, that is my two cents and take it as you will.
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Jun 27, 2021 18:34
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I'm playing both FFXI and FFXIV and both games compliment each other so well. It's crazy how Square-Enix makes such good MMOs and only now seems to be getting the commercial success they truly deserve. While FFXIV is definitely a "theme park" (I hate that term), there are definitely still strong aspects of player interactions and cooperation if you are willing to look for it. Things such as Blue Mage Quests, Hunting Logs, scouting players for unsynced content, etc. It certainly isn't a two hour trek across the wilderness like in Final Fantasy XI, but it's still entertaining.
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Jun 27, 2021 20:05
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I hate modern MMO quest design- you can see it in XIV, SOLO. Retail WoW has it too a little even though not as bad, and the quests are much fancier and more varied. They want you to consume some atom of narrative, so they do that, and then go "oops, forgot to put in gameplay!" and then have you like kill 3 things or touch three interactibles. It's always 3. They never want a quest to take longer than like 60 seconds of actual gameplay and all the time played is buffered out by travel time and cutscenes and quest text. The result is that you have like 100 hours of gameplay and it's mostly travel and reading. Retail wow's particular variant of this is a massive percentage of your time spent on weird scripted minigames. Classic wow's quest length is correct- you actually spend most of your time playing the game! Just chilling out mass-murdering bears for their asses, that's what I got into this for. If we're going to have narrative theme park where I go from place to place passively absorbing the story, maybe the quests could be designed by someone who doesn't hate their own game's gameplay.
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Jun 27, 2021 20:05
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They still do that minigame poo poo in retail WoW? I thought they learnt their lesson from the simon says daily quest bullshit in TBC and all those vehicle quests in WotLK.
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Jun 27, 2021 20:10
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punk rebel ecks posted:I'm playing both FFXI and FFXIV and both games compliment each other so well. It's crazy how Square-Enix makes such good MMOs and only now seems to be getting the commercial success they truly deserve. Wasn't initial XIV a disaster? I have no clue what it was like but I do remember it having to relaunch and it is heartening to see it rise from the grave even if I don't care for the design. shirunei posted:The best way I've found to look at what makes is to use a comparison of someone's work like Gene Wolfe to Brandon Sanderson. On reading Wolfe my take on his style is you are creating your own world just as much as he is telling a story in one. The vagueness and mystery causes you to fill in the blanks. This reminds me of EQ in that while the gameplay is simple, the meta makes the world take on it's own character and feel lived in. Sanderson has everything spelled out and all the interactions of magic completely mapped out, so there isn't much of a mystery with it. This is how I view these newer games that feel very on the rails and are pushing you to an endpoint. I had never played EQ until I tried p99 red in 2014 and was near instantly hooked. It provided something I had been looking for in a game, but had never found. Anyways, that is my two cents and take it as you will. This is a really good way of putting it. Speaking of red I can't imagine playing on a PvP server back in the day considering how unbalanced the classes (and races) were and there being virtually nothing online about how the game worked. I accidentally rolled on one at launch and jumped to a normal server when a classmate told me he also played. I actually forgot about turning in your book to the Priest of Discord to convert to a PvP character on a normal server until I watched that video about why EQ was the best game ever. I could probably count the number of red names I saw on one hand. Groovelord Neato fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Jun 27, 2021 |
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Jun 27, 2021 20:25
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shirunei posted:The best way I've found to look at what makes is to use a comparison of someone's work like Gene Wolfe to Brandon Sanderson. On reading Wolfe my take on his style is you are creating your own world just as much as he is telling a story in one. The vagueness and mystery causes you to fill in the blanks. This reminds me of EQ in that while the gameplay is simple, the meta makes the world take on it's own character and feel lived in. Sanderson has everything spelled out and all the interactions of magic completely mapped out, so there isn't much of a mystery with it. This is how I view these newer games that feel very on the rails and are pushing you to an endpoint. I had never played EQ until I tried p99 red in 2014 and was near instantly hooked. It provided something I had been looking for in a game, but had never found. Anyways, that is my two cents and take it as you will. so not an MMO, but I get this feeling from Morrowind. I havent truly enjoyed an Elder Scrolls game as much as Morrowind, and I can't explain why. Morrowind just feels unique and different. Yeah it's clunky and the systems are jank and it's ugly as sin, but the world feels so mysterious and fleshed-out. I loved just wandering in a random direction, reading books, and figuring out objectives from text. I'd love an EQ or FFXI-style MMO that doesn't make me smack critters for umpteenth hours or turn in 40 bone chips to earn 1/4 of an exp bar. Basically give me all of the worldbuilding, NPC interaction, dungeon delves, and land-spanning epic quests without the massive time sink of just auto-attacking creatures. So not an MMO I guess, lol
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Jun 27, 2021 21:16
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Even as a kid I knew I wanted to avoid Everquest as my first MMO in the same way I'd want to avoid trying heroine or getting a gambling addiction, every story of people playing it always seemed sad. All the rose-tinted glasses talk about how great Everquest was always seems to involve some form of "actually waiting 20 hours in the same spot to be the first to take a rare spawn built a sense of community and made the world feel bigger unlike these "modern" games that have you actually play a game"
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Jun 27, 2021 21:18
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TheHoosier posted:so not an MMO, but I get this feeling from Morrowind. I havent truly enjoyed an Elder Scrolls game as much as Morrowind, and I can't explain why. Morrowind just feels unique and different. Yeah it's clunky and the systems are jank and it's ugly as sin, but the world feels so mysterious and fleshed-out. I loved just wandering in a random direction, reading books, and figuring out objectives from text. I didn't know until recently that the place Oblivion takes place is was supposed to be almost as weird as Morrowind but Todd wanted it to be more generic fantasy because Lord of the Rings was big at the time. Ra Ra Rasputin posted:Even as a kid I knew I wanted to avoid Everquest as my first MMO in the same way I'd want to avoid trying heroine or getting a gambling addiction, every story of people playing it always seemed sad. I don't have the type of personality that gets hooked on MMOs (like I posted before I only made it halfway to max level unlike my brother who became a hardcore raider and would fall asleep playing) but I had a buddy from school who camped some spawn for over a day and when he told me I said I'd ditch it after like an hour or two if I didn't get lucky enough and never go back. But I do miss poo poo like chilling for a few hours a night with another buddy camping Upper Guk. Groovelord Neato fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Jun 27, 2021 |
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Jun 27, 2021 21:27
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punk rebel ecks posted:While FFXIV is definitely a "theme park" (I hate that term), there are definitely still strong aspects of player interactions and cooperation if you are willing to look for it. Things such as Blue Mage Quests, Hunting Logs, scouting players for unsynced content, etc. It certainly isn't a two hour trek across the wilderness like in Final Fantasy XI, but it's still entertaining. There's lots of non-gameplay stuff to do as well, like bard performance and player housing. Lots of community-driven events like theatre plays, blitzball tournaments, and fashion shows. Lots of people making their own fun. XIV is definitely a themepark MMO, but it has a very robust sandbox side to it as well.
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Jun 27, 2021 22:42
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Groovelord Neato posted:Wasn't initial XIV a disaster? I have no clue what it was like but I do remember it having to relaunch and it is heartening to see it rise from the grave even if I don't care for the design. It was so bad it nearly sank the company. Yoship and everyone who worked on ARR are legitimately miracle workers for turning it around.
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Jun 27, 2021 22:45
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs0yQKI7Yw4 is a really drat good documentary on it.
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Jun 27, 2021 23:09
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I actually liked what Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 had become by the end of its life. Its final few major updates really improved the game and turned it into a pretty satisfying grindy MMO. It felt like old school FFXI but with a large graphical overhaul, and completely solo friendly.
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Jun 28, 2021 00:05
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Fister Roboto posted:There's lots of non-gameplay stuff to do as well, like bard performance and player housing. Lots of community-driven events like theatre plays, blitzball tournaments, and fashion shows. Lots of people making their own fun. One could easily argue that it takes pages from Merdian 59's vision of a MMORPG than say Ultimate Online or EverQuest.
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Jun 28, 2021 00:29
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I'm somewhat more ok with at least a minigame, but god drat do I hate "walk in one direction for 15 minutes and then right click on ten items, each item requiring a ten second long channel timer" as the entirety of the interactivity
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Jun 28, 2021 01:59
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The gryphon bombing run minigame that was the first (or almost first?) quest in BC in WoW was one of the high points of the game for me. Simon Says in that same expansion was awful. Mostly because it was a daily, and if you do anything every day for 2 months because you have to, to get a macguffin, it's going to become unfun. WoW used to have weeklies. Those were a lot more tolerable than dailies. Is there any MMO that still does longer duration repeatables or is it all once a day? LLSix fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Jun 28, 2021 |
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Jun 28, 2021 02:50
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^ Even MapleStory has minigames, how can you go lower than that bar? Oh man. That just reminded me of the obnoxiousness that is FFXIV's daily/weekly capped progression gating (though to be fair that's every MMO these days). It was terrible for me when I could "grind out a few days" when I had less work, completely nullifying that.
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Jun 28, 2021 02:54
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I'm not sure if MMO quests are really that bad, or if it's just the fact that I'm expected to do the same stuff over and over. When I leveled a bunch of alts in wow, which I actually enjoyed, I used the dungeon finder thing and did quests or pvp in between to change it up a bit. They recently made the xp for dungeon grinding way worse, essentially forcing you to level via questing. Solo questing is the antithesis of MMORPG, I think. Why would I wanna go do quests when I can group up with some homies and kill big bad guys for cool stuff?
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Jun 28, 2021 03:41
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Ra Ra Rasputin posted:Even as a kid I knew I wanted to avoid Everquest as my first MMO in the same way I'd want to avoid trying heroine or getting a gambling addiction, every story of people playing it always seemed sad. I honestly like doing this because I'm doing it with other people and we're just hanging out during it. It's like playing a "beer & pretzels" style D&D game. The game isn't really the main attraction in those moments, it's just a pretense to gather a bunch of people you like together in one spot for a while.
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Jun 28, 2021 03:44
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It is kind of weird that FF14 has regular quests, which are boring 'click two objects, kill three monsters' things, and FATEs, which are public events that can be a bit more exciting and are stuff like "kill monsters and hand in their drops while protecting the NPC" yet there's very few quests that just spawn a FATE. Otherwise FATEs are basically not worth doing at all unless you really want to level XP (pretty inefficiently) with them. If FATEs actually gave reasonable XP for their level then DPS could use them to level and the open world would actually be populated instead of alts just throwing themselves endlessly into the Deep Dungeons.
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Jun 28, 2021 05:10
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FATEs used to be the only way to level up alt jobs because dungeons gave poo poo xp and there was no deep dungeon or roulette system. It loving sucked! Sure it was neat to see giant hordes of people standing motionless in town waiting for one to spawn but in practice in was not good. Bozja has basically a good version of this though. FATEs lead to Critical Engagements which are like dungeon boss fights and then if you complete certain ones without getting hit by a mechanic a single time you qualify for a duel which is a tough as nails one on one fight with one of the big bad guys from the area. It's cool! Loved every minute I spent in Bozja.
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Jun 28, 2021 05:18
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Ibram Gaunt posted:then if you complete certain ones without getting hit by a mechanic a single time you qualify for a duel Oh is that how it works? No wonder I've been qualified like once lmao
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Jun 28, 2021 05:31
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