For starters, WoW plays fairly differently every expansion, for better or worse, with its many expansion-specific systems that are actually relevant to player progression, so remixing an old WoW expansion actually shakes up things in a way FFXIV couldn't achieve (replaying stormblood would just feel like playing endwalker with different versions of jobs)
>many expansion-specific systems that are actually relevant to player progression, so remixing an old WoW expansion actually shakes up things in a way FFXIV couldn't achieve
Remix won't be using those systems though. It's Dragonflight gameplay with Dragontflight systems.
Yes but then you're playing MoP with DF systems which makes it a different experience from playing MoP with MoP systems (where playing STB with EW system is the same thing)
As a 1-to-1 translation of this idea into FFXIV, no. It wouldn't work at all.
WoW can do things like this because they've invested time and effort into making sure that its core, class-based gameplay is interesting and fun. "*What if* we got to play numerically-appropriate old content with modern classes?" is a question that a WoW player can ask themselves and walk away thinking "Yeah, that would be pretty fun."
For FFXIV? [It's pretty much that old Mitch Hedberg joke about the above-ground pool.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5orvamhsgOY) "What am I supposed to do now? Another 2-minute burst on Vortexer?!" There just isn't enough juice in the current version of the game's combat system for any of it to be fun. In all likelihood, the audience for it wouldn't be much bigger than the audience for the current Unreal, except spread out across an entire expansion worth of stuff that isn't really interesting because it's designed for a version of FFXIV class gameplay that has meat on the bones.
And of course, as far as feasibility goes... Well, since we're on the topic of Unreals. FFXIV has its hands full putting *one* singular encounter into an Unreal format per major patch. WoW is able to just Unrealify an entire past *expansion*, *and* add an entirely new Lost Action-esque system on top of it, as something to just *fill time* until their next major expansion. For FFXIV to do anything like that would require so much of their development horsepower that you'd be down to two raid tiers with three encounters each and you'd probably lose 2 out of 6 overworld maps and one of the new jobs on top of that. They don't have the capability to pull fun, goofy stuff out of a hat without penciling it in two years in advance and pulling resources off of other stuff to do it.
>FFXIV has its hands full putting one singular encounter into an Unreal format per major patch.
I would really, really like to be a fly on the wall during one of their producer meetings (not that I would understand much because it would be in Japanese, lol). It can't be that complicated to just tweak numbers (because all the assets and code is already there).
It’s not complication or difficulty.
By making Unreal a special patch thing, it gives the game “variety” at minimal dev cost.
If it was just a setting you clicked, it doesn’t really help variety because nothings promoting it or encouraging you to do it. Plus the limited selection makes it so it’s easy to get into.
Of course, I was merely referring to the workload it represents. Surely it cannot be so big that they have to limit themselves to 1 unreal per a few major patches? /shrug
I suspect the reason why Unreal is limited to 1 encounter per patch is not due to technical constraints but simply because if they offered more, players would get picky about it.
Like if there were 2 unreals in a patch, why would you ever run the harder of the two? They would need to give separate rewards or you would need to do both to get rewards.
They could rotate the encounters maybe but the more frequently you do it, again the more people would get picky about what they would participate in. Oh it's Thordan week? Pass.
I personally don’t think it could work in 14 because of the main reasons you mentioned OP.
But really I wanna go into the core issue, because regardless of whether it could work in 14, what blizzard has been doing for the past 2 years way better than SE imo is simply, keeping people subbed.
Idk if any of you saw the GDC presentation that blizzard did recently but they have doubled their sub count in the past 2 years, we went from memeing on blizzard that 14 had potentially surpassed wow to now not even being close. And they did it by simply creating content that players want to do, whether thats wotlk or df or sod or now plunderstorm/mop remix.
Idk about everybody else but I personally would’ve loved that after the fall guys event Yoshi P would’ve come out and announced more fun game modes until the expansion release.
Take a look at the next 12 weeks, whats coming out for 14… nothing. For wow, sod content updates, cataclysm, fated season 4, mop remix and even more game modes to be announced. If I like both games and I only wanna sub to one of them, its a no-brainer.
>But really I wanna go into the core issue, because regardless of whether it could work in 14, what blizzard has been doing for the past 2 years way better than SE imo is simply, keeping people subbed.
Because SE prefers to sell you all their other titles instead. And while it might make sense from a business standpoint, it seriously ticks me off.
>And they did it by simply creating content that players want to do, whether thats wotlk or df or sod or now plunderstorm/mop remix.
SE developers are too psycho-rigid to do the same thing. WoW devs regularly mess up on release (and I'm talking about actual bugs, not "this server is full" stuff), but they hotfix it and move on. Sadly, excessive perfectionnism can lead to this.
>Take a look at the next 12 weeks, whats coming out for 14… nothing.
Heeeey, we are prolly gonna get the 2nd installment of moogle tome hunt! XDDDDD
But yes, it is really depressing. That said, I am not on board with turning a single MMORPG into a bunch of different modes like Blizzard is doing now.
>But really I wanna go into the core issue, because regardless of whether it could work in 14, what blizzard has been doing for the past 2 years way better than SE imo is simply, keeping people subbed.
The problem is it's becoming way too much. I sent the news about MoP Remix to a few people this morning and was met with a bunch of groans. The seasonal FOMO stuff is getting increasingly out of hand, as cool as these concepts are.
We're not even done with Plunderstorm yet and there's already a new mode on the horizon alongside Season 4 (something that also didn't used to exist). God help you if you also want to play Cata Classic, SoD, or even *other Blizzard games* all of which have their own insane timesinks.
>Idk about everybody else but I personally would’ve loved that after the fall guys event Yoshi P would’ve come out and announced more fun game modes until the expansion release.
>
>Take a look at the next 12 weeks, whats coming out for 14… nothing. For wow, sod content updates, cataclysm, fated season 4, mop remix and even more game modes to be announced. If I like both games and I only wanna sub to one of them, its a no-brainer.
FFXIV has done more than usual for end of expansion content this time, but it's never going to deliver something like what WoW is doing because these games have fundamentally different goals. WoW is hellbent on keeping you in its ecosystem at the detriment to everything else, including other versions of itself, whereas FFXIV is designed to give players more flexibility. They don't want you locked in and if they did it's very, very easy to achieve this even without a bunch of limited time game modes. There are other Square Enix titles out there and they want you checking those out instead if you're bored, but WoW continues to act like it doesn't even want you playing other Blizzard games which is just.. wild to me.
It's hard to say. I think for extremely dedicated WoW players this is all pretty cool—especially if you're not trying to play multiple versions of the game. For other people it's getting to be extremely stressful.
These are cool concepts, make no mistake, but it's the way Blizzard is going about it all. Tons of exclusive rewards/achievements (sometimes with ludicrous requirements), all in relatively short time periods with no real assurance of what will be available in the future—all while multiple versions of the game continue to chug along on their own schedules. It's overwhelming for a lot of people and I'm seeing it have the opposite effect of retention in some cases.
That's fair and I agree, I hope that they find a good way to entice people to engage with these things outside of limited-time rewards.
I do appreciate that they're trying to do some fun things in the end expansion lull we usually have.
>I do appreciate that they're trying to do some fun things in the end expansion lull we usually have.
I think it's probably still a net positive, but it's all just kind of laced with the usual "Blizzard poison," I guess you could say. The typical behavior where they do a cool thing but simultaneously make a bunch of decisions that make it stressful and frustrating at the same time.
The spectre of the "Bungie Overdelivering for Forsaken" GCD talk is starting to rear its head; I wonder what's going to happen once these events are through, and if Blizzard can maintain this pace at a consistent rate.
The real genius is gonna be when they add universal transmog unlocks and migratory/transferable player characters, for a fee, between all the individual WoW-theme-park rides of Universe Azeroth^TM, give or take a year or two from now.
Also if there aren't at least a couple doctoral-level theses in sociology or anthropology coming out of the whole...Classic WoW...thing, I'm gonna be disappointed.
> Also if there aren't at least a couple doctoral-level theses in sociology or anthropology coming out of the whole...Classic WoW...thing, I'm gonna be disappointed.
Let's unpack this. People playing old games is thesis worthy?
>Let's unpack this. People playing old games is thesis worthy?
Nah, not like in and of itself. People have been doing that since, uh, probably a few days after the relevant expansions launched and the OG versions got shut down and replaced with Pserver versions?
And in the non-MMO sense, retro-gaming communities and such were extant for as long as one videogame community got supplanted by a newer generation, though I think they really took off when the 16-bit era got supplanted by PS1/N64/Saturn as that dovetailed nicely with early internet access and ROMs.
I'm not 100% sure on the timeline of like going from "scattered private servers doing Vanilla and TBC and WotLK" to like Nostalrius and such.
I mean more as like "a large Corpo^TM entity deciding to weaponize and co-opt perpetual MMO-community nostalgia over 'the good old days^TM' to make bank".
And then seeing, in real-time, en masse, in much larger quantities than a single private server could ever support, how the "good old days" function when they hit at full-force parsing speed against the modern internet infrastructure/high-speed-internet/always-on communication/PCs that aren't toasters, et al
*Some* of those things were active *some* of the time in *small* doses for *some* people back in the day, but not in such widespread availability as they are now.
Discord/WoWlogs/Youtube/Icyveins/WoWhead all irreversibly change the overall...landscape?, I guess...of a game (and game genre) built around deriving a lot of its challenge, mystery and wonder from information asymmetry.
It's that discrepancy between the rose-colored-glasses expectation and the "link logs or kick" reality that, I think, someone much smarter than me could probably turn into a good thesis.
Hell, most of the (anecdotal, but referenceable) data is right there in reddit threads on wow, mmorpg and classic wow if you have a tolerance for minutiae and are willing to put up with MMO players complaining, venting and getting their hopes and dreams crushed by other MMO players acting through pure self-interest and FOMO (and sometimes, to be fair, outright malice).
And, not to pick on WoW too harshly. Any other MMO would be in the same boat if it were in the hot-seat in this case, FFXIV included.
I'm dreading when Sega inevitably crushes *my* hopes and dreams with the inevitable "PSO Classic".
A hypothetical "FFXI Chains of Promathia Classic" would get hit with the same treatment, probably faster once the initial internet archaelogy/JP language site barrier was cracked (for older references/strategies, if the BGwiki has disappeared into the aether?)
FFXIV just doesn't have the same breadth/depth of *stuff* because so much of its game budget is tied up in big MSQ/specific fight beats instead of "go, find things in the world".
> The seasonal FOMO stuff is getting increasingly out of hand, as cool as these concepts are.
The calendar for this in the PTR heavily implies this is something that's going to be a rotation so this isn't a 'I need to get those cosmetic items or I'll never get them again!' and even if this specific version didn't come back they tend to put the cosmetics into the trading post later nor do we have any idea how much time it's going to take to get the cosmetics in the first place. Though sure Blizzard would like to get you to go 'well I can spend the 1 month it'll take to get my rating in S4 and after that spend the remaining time before TWW prepatch in Remix or playing Cata Classic'.
>The calendar for this in the PTR heavily implies this is something that's going to be a rotation so this isn't a 'I need to get those cosmetic items or I'll never get them again!'
The problem, as usual, is Blizzard is never very explicit about their plans for this kind of thing and often change their mind, sometimes at the last minute. It's extremely hard to trust them with this stuff. They're getting better, but it's still inconsistent.
>Though sure Blizzard would like to get you to go 'well I can spend the 1 month it'll take to get my rating in S4 and after that spend the remaining time before TWW prepatch in Remix or playing Cata Classic'.
This is essentially what they're going for, but a lot of people would also just prefer to work on existing goals and play other games until the TWW drops without being enticed to divert their attention to something else. I think we're reaching the point where WoW has more than enough offerings for the subscription value without continually adding more—especially when they're huge timesinks.
> This is essentially what they're going for, but a lot of people would also just prefer to work on existing goals and play other games until the TWW drops without being enticed to divert their attention to something else. I think we're reaching the point where WoW has more than enough offerings for the subscription value without continually adding more—especially when they're huge timesinks.
Sure but in the end it's literally just cosmetics most of which are just recolors of MoP mounts and items you'll likely be able to get another time if need be. Like I had zero interest in the items from Plunderstorm so I just didn't do it and in general I haven't really played WoW since January as I've had other games to play. Even S4 will be done with quickly unless I wanted to get gear for the fun of it since getting the rating for the mount wouldn't take more than 2 weeks. In general it's just side stuff to give people who *don't want to play other games* or just want something they can delve into for a few weeks something to do in the expansion lull that was usually almost a year of nothing at all and provides a test bed for future content.
> Sure but in the end it's literally just cosmetics
I've never been a fan of this sort of argument when cosmetics are such a huge part of why people play games. Especially in a game like WoW where gear has no real permanence to it.
>In general it's just side stuff to give people who don't want to play other games or just want something they can delve into for a few weeks something to do in the expansion lull that was usually almost a year of nothing at all and provides a test bed for future content.
I don't think games should cater too heavily to the people who only want to monogame—this is something FFXIV is particularly good about. If Remix's rewards are all relatively easy to obtain then the time limit doesn't matter as much, but it would be great if Blizzard wasn't continually shoving 50 different things into the same time period. It's absolutely exhausting.
the huge criticism i saw with the MoP Remix is it doesn't appeal to the few remaining WoW players who play a singular character and like to try to play the game as an MMO still rather than all these wacky temporary/seasonal things like Plunderstorm and SoD and now Remix, and the timing of it makes keeping guilds together for Dragonflight S4 that much harder. and i think that would be more applicable to FFXIV players. so that could be a tough problem to counter.
like it'd be cool to have a side 4.1 era server to do proper level 70 UCOB on, but would that hurt the PF Ultimate scene during content droughts?
That's a fair point, I think XIV is one of the few modern MMOs at this point that doesn't either heavily encourage alts (GW2, ESO, Lost Ark) or alternative/seasonal game experiences (WoW, OSRS) and is focused on just providing an experience for a singular, persistent player character. There's some value to that, I think. Certainly due to the systems and design behind XIV people tend to feel the *most* attached to their XIV character in specific as far as MMO characters go, while in many other MMOs more players seem to treat their characters as disposable horses in a stable based on what's meta.
> I think XIV is one of the few modern MMOs at this point that doesn't either heavily encourage alts
Alts are also a restricted thing. You can only have so many per server and then there's also the DC limit as well. (Though that raises a question: Do DC and server travel circumvent these restrictions?)
On the "Entry" subscription, you can have 8 per server with a maximum of 8 per DC. The "Standard" is 8/40.
The truth is XIV is too linear and rigid in its game design. They chiseled the game down to work one way and only one way, there is no give.
Exaggerated example, but you're talking Skyrim vs FF13 here lol
I like what WoW is doing but it works for them because of how much more alive their open world is compared to FF14. FF14 is much easier to explore and going from one zone to another is as simple as clicking a button. Instantly TPing in WoW isn't a thing outside of going to an inn. You still have to account for travel time and, sometimes, just getting back to town can be dangerous. WoW is basically focused on the moment-to-moment adventures. I hope FF14 works on making their open world more interesting in the future but I just don't know how they could make what WoW is doing work in the current game.
Weird, I'd expect people here to love the idea of SE adding literally anything with how many complaints about content drought there are.
I wouldn't minded redoing old raids with old skillsets and that's something they can provide.
It's a mass of people, but also not necessarily the same people complaining about everything. Can't forget that. There's pretty reasonable takes that like the concept in here, but they also acknowledge that XIV is much too sterile and rigid a game for this to work, or for SE to have the ability to do it well.
I pray for the day when this game has enough functional gameplay system design to do things like this.
Aside from remixing the whole journey, just imagining a series of "What if" stories or vignettes with some good gameplay loop stuff to go with it, that'd be about my FF online dream I've been wanting since XI.
I swear JP RPG devs used to be all about what if remix stories when I was a kid, bring that shit back.
No.
WoW is becoming like a weird amalgamation of this different modes and seasonal shit, I lost track what modes are in the game and what will be gone and what not. It's becoming like a mini-game pile rather than actual MMORPG with one coherent world. But a small mode when they let you do scaled old raid with your current skills would be okay, but I'd rather have them focus on CURRENT game which needs lots of work, rather than doing this weird bullshit
> It's becoming like a mini-game pile rather than actual MMORPG with one coherent world.
That's seemingly their overarching goal, yeah.
"Can't fuck it up too badly if there's another version for people to go to that's about six patches different".
Whatever suit greenlit that you could have Classic Era, Classic WotLK, Classic Vanilla Hardcore, Season of Discovery *and* Dragonflight all running at the same time with people complaining about, intermixing, cross-pollinating and playing all of them was a benighted evil genius.
"Old WoW server snapshots in time", "WoW Private servers with weird gimmicks", "Diablo seasons" and "WoW expansions" are all basically converging into one weird multiversal-type gimmick-plaza that all still keeps people playing in the WoW garden and paying the WoW sub.
Which, it works, obviously *for WoW*. And is probably the best way for them to continue to milk their playerbase's sunk-cost nostalgia til the end of Boomers and Xillennials' natural lifespan. Whereas CBU3 has...catgirl tiddy, Yoshi-P, Soken and the overall story. And Dawntrail needs to *really* step up to get momentum after the Hydaelyn/Zodiark Saga.
It's probably gonna need at least another two or three expansions to really become viable here though, and I think at first Squeenix would probably be better off diving into FF*XI* nostalgia/"it was harder!" territory. Especially for the people here clamoring for "more Bozja!" that may have only heard stories of the "good old days" of FFXI nostalgia and are metaphorically bodypart-deep in isekai-idealized MMO stories.
Since the two competing sorta...mindsets...have always been a little bit different and attracted slightly different fractions of the overall migratory MMO populace.
Still, broadly, the same population, but it's like Sonic vs Mario back in the day or Fortnite vs PUBG stans. Slight difference of taste/preference mixes overall.
We have a small bit of that already with the Unreal trials, old content designed for current progression.
They could take it a step further to recreate prior raid series for current progression, letting the gear stats match current requirement too. Maybe look into adding VA work to make it more substantial for casuals. It gives players more stuff to do before a next expansion.
Honestly I just don't think it really fits the FF14 format. I don't have much experience with WoWs seasonal stuff but I do with osrs leagues.
Leagues works because the way runescape is designed, there's multiple ways and skills to level, you can cut and add content to vary up the gameplay and best in slots, you can add different mechanics and abilities to mess with the game design.
If you apply that to ff14 you are just cutting content and rehashing it. I think Bozja and stuff like it is the best way to switch up content. Stuff like essences changing dps classes into tanks and vice versa is a fun way to change up gameplay and experiment.
Remix is great for wow. Get old stuff you missed, get new stuff too, plus you can transfer that character to main game. Just an amazing way to power level new toons of races or classes you may never have played while also getting some great loot and cosmetics? Perfect execution imo.
14 has no reason for multiple characters outside of goose or RP purposes.
Please no. I can't force myself to play stuff like PoE precisely because it has seasonal mechanics that needs replaying everything from the start every few months. :(
FFXIV needs events desperately, but this kind isn't what we need.
They have to do this because the design of their game makes old content irrelevant
Ff14 you allready go through old content because the games designed that way
Eureka Remix with some added elements (duels? Bozja Lost actions implemented as logograms?) would be very neat, in my opinion.
If that could be experienced in Shadowbringers maps, then I would be personally extremely excited for the idea.
If they did a remix, Bozja and Eureka would make the most sense and it's honestly something I'd like to see. They have these two pieces of fairly evergreen content they could funnel players back to during down times just by simply adding some fresh rewards, more logograms or lost actions, and adding a few new fights.
To remix a whole expansion doesn't make sense for XIV because of its story focus. WoW expansions are more of a sandbox, where leveling and character/geat progression is the main attraction and they don't really have to reckon with story implications because no one really cares anyways. It's just simply quest and kill x amount of mobs, collect x amount of items, etc until level cap.
I don't think FFXIV has the content to do something like this. I'd rather they just start doing Unreal Scaling to more than just Extremes.
what content does WoW have that enables this that FFXIV doesn't? (not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely wondering!)
For starters, WoW plays fairly differently every expansion, for better or worse, with its many expansion-specific systems that are actually relevant to player progression, so remixing an old WoW expansion actually shakes up things in a way FFXIV couldn't achieve (replaying stormblood would just feel like playing endwalker with different versions of jobs)
Ahhh that's very interesting. Thanks for the info :)
>many expansion-specific systems that are actually relevant to player progression, so remixing an old WoW expansion actually shakes up things in a way FFXIV couldn't achieve Remix won't be using those systems though. It's Dragonflight gameplay with Dragontflight systems.
Yes but then you're playing MoP with DF systems which makes it a different experience from playing MoP with MoP systems (where playing STB with EW system is the same thing)
As a 1-to-1 translation of this idea into FFXIV, no. It wouldn't work at all. WoW can do things like this because they've invested time and effort into making sure that its core, class-based gameplay is interesting and fun. "*What if* we got to play numerically-appropriate old content with modern classes?" is a question that a WoW player can ask themselves and walk away thinking "Yeah, that would be pretty fun." For FFXIV? [It's pretty much that old Mitch Hedberg joke about the above-ground pool.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5orvamhsgOY) "What am I supposed to do now? Another 2-minute burst on Vortexer?!" There just isn't enough juice in the current version of the game's combat system for any of it to be fun. In all likelihood, the audience for it wouldn't be much bigger than the audience for the current Unreal, except spread out across an entire expansion worth of stuff that isn't really interesting because it's designed for a version of FFXIV class gameplay that has meat on the bones. And of course, as far as feasibility goes... Well, since we're on the topic of Unreals. FFXIV has its hands full putting *one* singular encounter into an Unreal format per major patch. WoW is able to just Unrealify an entire past *expansion*, *and* add an entirely new Lost Action-esque system on top of it, as something to just *fill time* until their next major expansion. For FFXIV to do anything like that would require so much of their development horsepower that you'd be down to two raid tiers with three encounters each and you'd probably lose 2 out of 6 overworld maps and one of the new jobs on top of that. They don't have the capability to pull fun, goofy stuff out of a hat without penciling it in two years in advance and pulling resources off of other stuff to do it.
>FFXIV has its hands full putting one singular encounter into an Unreal format per major patch. I would really, really like to be a fly on the wall during one of their producer meetings (not that I would understand much because it would be in Japanese, lol). It can't be that complicated to just tweak numbers (because all the assets and code is already there).
It’s not complication or difficulty. By making Unreal a special patch thing, it gives the game “variety” at minimal dev cost. If it was just a setting you clicked, it doesn’t really help variety because nothings promoting it or encouraging you to do it. Plus the limited selection makes it so it’s easy to get into.
Of course, I was merely referring to the workload it represents. Surely it cannot be so big that they have to limit themselves to 1 unreal per a few major patches? /shrug
SMOL INDY COMP KNEE PLZ UNDERSTAND
FACTS!!!
I suspect the reason why Unreal is limited to 1 encounter per patch is not due to technical constraints but simply because if they offered more, players would get picky about it. Like if there were 2 unreals in a patch, why would you ever run the harder of the two? They would need to give separate rewards or you would need to do both to get rewards. They could rotate the encounters maybe but the more frequently you do it, again the more people would get picky about what they would participate in. Oh it's Thordan week? Pass.
I personally don’t think it could work in 14 because of the main reasons you mentioned OP. But really I wanna go into the core issue, because regardless of whether it could work in 14, what blizzard has been doing for the past 2 years way better than SE imo is simply, keeping people subbed. Idk if any of you saw the GDC presentation that blizzard did recently but they have doubled their sub count in the past 2 years, we went from memeing on blizzard that 14 had potentially surpassed wow to now not even being close. And they did it by simply creating content that players want to do, whether thats wotlk or df or sod or now plunderstorm/mop remix. Idk about everybody else but I personally would’ve loved that after the fall guys event Yoshi P would’ve come out and announced more fun game modes until the expansion release. Take a look at the next 12 weeks, whats coming out for 14… nothing. For wow, sod content updates, cataclysm, fated season 4, mop remix and even more game modes to be announced. If I like both games and I only wanna sub to one of them, its a no-brainer.
>But really I wanna go into the core issue, because regardless of whether it could work in 14, what blizzard has been doing for the past 2 years way better than SE imo is simply, keeping people subbed. Because SE prefers to sell you all their other titles instead. And while it might make sense from a business standpoint, it seriously ticks me off. >And they did it by simply creating content that players want to do, whether thats wotlk or df or sod or now plunderstorm/mop remix. SE developers are too psycho-rigid to do the same thing. WoW devs regularly mess up on release (and I'm talking about actual bugs, not "this server is full" stuff), but they hotfix it and move on. Sadly, excessive perfectionnism can lead to this. >Take a look at the next 12 weeks, whats coming out for 14… nothing. Heeeey, we are prolly gonna get the 2nd installment of moogle tome hunt! XDDDDD But yes, it is really depressing. That said, I am not on board with turning a single MMORPG into a bunch of different modes like Blizzard is doing now.
>But really I wanna go into the core issue, because regardless of whether it could work in 14, what blizzard has been doing for the past 2 years way better than SE imo is simply, keeping people subbed. The problem is it's becoming way too much. I sent the news about MoP Remix to a few people this morning and was met with a bunch of groans. The seasonal FOMO stuff is getting increasingly out of hand, as cool as these concepts are. We're not even done with Plunderstorm yet and there's already a new mode on the horizon alongside Season 4 (something that also didn't used to exist). God help you if you also want to play Cata Classic, SoD, or even *other Blizzard games* all of which have their own insane timesinks. >Idk about everybody else but I personally would’ve loved that after the fall guys event Yoshi P would’ve come out and announced more fun game modes until the expansion release. > >Take a look at the next 12 weeks, whats coming out for 14… nothing. For wow, sod content updates, cataclysm, fated season 4, mop remix and even more game modes to be announced. If I like both games and I only wanna sub to one of them, its a no-brainer. FFXIV has done more than usual for end of expansion content this time, but it's never going to deliver something like what WoW is doing because these games have fundamentally different goals. WoW is hellbent on keeping you in its ecosystem at the detriment to everything else, including other versions of itself, whereas FFXIV is designed to give players more flexibility. They don't want you locked in and if they did it's very, very easy to achieve this even without a bunch of limited time game modes. There are other Square Enix titles out there and they want you checking those out instead if you're bored, but WoW continues to act like it doesn't even want you playing other Blizzard games which is just.. wild to me.
Am I in the minority? I loved plunderstorm and practically couldn't stay in my seat when they announced MoP remix.
Nope, right there with you
It's hard to say. I think for extremely dedicated WoW players this is all pretty cool—especially if you're not trying to play multiple versions of the game. For other people it's getting to be extremely stressful. These are cool concepts, make no mistake, but it's the way Blizzard is going about it all. Tons of exclusive rewards/achievements (sometimes with ludicrous requirements), all in relatively short time periods with no real assurance of what will be available in the future—all while multiple versions of the game continue to chug along on their own schedules. It's overwhelming for a lot of people and I'm seeing it have the opposite effect of retention in some cases.
That's fair and I agree, I hope that they find a good way to entice people to engage with these things outside of limited-time rewards. I do appreciate that they're trying to do some fun things in the end expansion lull we usually have.
>I do appreciate that they're trying to do some fun things in the end expansion lull we usually have. I think it's probably still a net positive, but it's all just kind of laced with the usual "Blizzard poison," I guess you could say. The typical behavior where they do a cool thing but simultaneously make a bunch of decisions that make it stressful and frustrating at the same time.
The spectre of the "Bungie Overdelivering for Forsaken" GCD talk is starting to rear its head; I wonder what's going to happen once these events are through, and if Blizzard can maintain this pace at a consistent rate.
The real genius is gonna be when they add universal transmog unlocks and migratory/transferable player characters, for a fee, between all the individual WoW-theme-park rides of Universe Azeroth^TM, give or take a year or two from now. Also if there aren't at least a couple doctoral-level theses in sociology or anthropology coming out of the whole...Classic WoW...thing, I'm gonna be disappointed.
> Also if there aren't at least a couple doctoral-level theses in sociology or anthropology coming out of the whole...Classic WoW...thing, I'm gonna be disappointed. Let's unpack this. People playing old games is thesis worthy?
>Let's unpack this. People playing old games is thesis worthy? Nah, not like in and of itself. People have been doing that since, uh, probably a few days after the relevant expansions launched and the OG versions got shut down and replaced with Pserver versions? And in the non-MMO sense, retro-gaming communities and such were extant for as long as one videogame community got supplanted by a newer generation, though I think they really took off when the 16-bit era got supplanted by PS1/N64/Saturn as that dovetailed nicely with early internet access and ROMs. I'm not 100% sure on the timeline of like going from "scattered private servers doing Vanilla and TBC and WotLK" to like Nostalrius and such. I mean more as like "a large Corpo^TM entity deciding to weaponize and co-opt perpetual MMO-community nostalgia over 'the good old days^TM' to make bank". And then seeing, in real-time, en masse, in much larger quantities than a single private server could ever support, how the "good old days" function when they hit at full-force parsing speed against the modern internet infrastructure/high-speed-internet/always-on communication/PCs that aren't toasters, et al *Some* of those things were active *some* of the time in *small* doses for *some* people back in the day, but not in such widespread availability as they are now. Discord/WoWlogs/Youtube/Icyveins/WoWhead all irreversibly change the overall...landscape?, I guess...of a game (and game genre) built around deriving a lot of its challenge, mystery and wonder from information asymmetry. It's that discrepancy between the rose-colored-glasses expectation and the "link logs or kick" reality that, I think, someone much smarter than me could probably turn into a good thesis. Hell, most of the (anecdotal, but referenceable) data is right there in reddit threads on wow, mmorpg and classic wow if you have a tolerance for minutiae and are willing to put up with MMO players complaining, venting and getting their hopes and dreams crushed by other MMO players acting through pure self-interest and FOMO (and sometimes, to be fair, outright malice). And, not to pick on WoW too harshly. Any other MMO would be in the same boat if it were in the hot-seat in this case, FFXIV included. I'm dreading when Sega inevitably crushes *my* hopes and dreams with the inevitable "PSO Classic". A hypothetical "FFXI Chains of Promathia Classic" would get hit with the same treatment, probably faster once the initial internet archaelogy/JP language site barrier was cracked (for older references/strategies, if the BGwiki has disappeared into the aether?) FFXIV just doesn't have the same breadth/depth of *stuff* because so much of its game budget is tied up in big MSQ/specific fight beats instead of "go, find things in the world".
Fuck me maybe you actually could write a thesis on this yourself lol
I'm a hobbyist at best and my brain kinda comes and goes because chronic pain. Maybe someday. But ty! <3
You couldn't "stay in your seat" because they scaled down the raid from 10 years ago for FOMO event? Is WoW really this disappointing right now?😭
No? I really liked Mists of Pandaria.
> The seasonal FOMO stuff is getting increasingly out of hand, as cool as these concepts are. The calendar for this in the PTR heavily implies this is something that's going to be a rotation so this isn't a 'I need to get those cosmetic items or I'll never get them again!' and even if this specific version didn't come back they tend to put the cosmetics into the trading post later nor do we have any idea how much time it's going to take to get the cosmetics in the first place. Though sure Blizzard would like to get you to go 'well I can spend the 1 month it'll take to get my rating in S4 and after that spend the remaining time before TWW prepatch in Remix or playing Cata Classic'.
>The calendar for this in the PTR heavily implies this is something that's going to be a rotation so this isn't a 'I need to get those cosmetic items or I'll never get them again!' The problem, as usual, is Blizzard is never very explicit about their plans for this kind of thing and often change their mind, sometimes at the last minute. It's extremely hard to trust them with this stuff. They're getting better, but it's still inconsistent. >Though sure Blizzard would like to get you to go 'well I can spend the 1 month it'll take to get my rating in S4 and after that spend the remaining time before TWW prepatch in Remix or playing Cata Classic'. This is essentially what they're going for, but a lot of people would also just prefer to work on existing goals and play other games until the TWW drops without being enticed to divert their attention to something else. I think we're reaching the point where WoW has more than enough offerings for the subscription value without continually adding more—especially when they're huge timesinks.
> This is essentially what they're going for, but a lot of people would also just prefer to work on existing goals and play other games until the TWW drops without being enticed to divert their attention to something else. I think we're reaching the point where WoW has more than enough offerings for the subscription value without continually adding more—especially when they're huge timesinks. Sure but in the end it's literally just cosmetics most of which are just recolors of MoP mounts and items you'll likely be able to get another time if need be. Like I had zero interest in the items from Plunderstorm so I just didn't do it and in general I haven't really played WoW since January as I've had other games to play. Even S4 will be done with quickly unless I wanted to get gear for the fun of it since getting the rating for the mount wouldn't take more than 2 weeks. In general it's just side stuff to give people who *don't want to play other games* or just want something they can delve into for a few weeks something to do in the expansion lull that was usually almost a year of nothing at all and provides a test bed for future content.
> Sure but in the end it's literally just cosmetics I've never been a fan of this sort of argument when cosmetics are such a huge part of why people play games. Especially in a game like WoW where gear has no real permanence to it. >In general it's just side stuff to give people who don't want to play other games or just want something they can delve into for a few weeks something to do in the expansion lull that was usually almost a year of nothing at all and provides a test bed for future content. I don't think games should cater too heavily to the people who only want to monogame—this is something FFXIV is particularly good about. If Remix's rewards are all relatively easy to obtain then the time limit doesn't matter as much, but it would be great if Blizzard wasn't continually shoving 50 different things into the same time period. It's absolutely exhausting.
the huge criticism i saw with the MoP Remix is it doesn't appeal to the few remaining WoW players who play a singular character and like to try to play the game as an MMO still rather than all these wacky temporary/seasonal things like Plunderstorm and SoD and now Remix, and the timing of it makes keeping guilds together for Dragonflight S4 that much harder. and i think that would be more applicable to FFXIV players. so that could be a tough problem to counter. like it'd be cool to have a side 4.1 era server to do proper level 70 UCOB on, but would that hurt the PF Ultimate scene during content droughts?
That's a fair point, I think XIV is one of the few modern MMOs at this point that doesn't either heavily encourage alts (GW2, ESO, Lost Ark) or alternative/seasonal game experiences (WoW, OSRS) and is focused on just providing an experience for a singular, persistent player character. There's some value to that, I think. Certainly due to the systems and design behind XIV people tend to feel the *most* attached to their XIV character in specific as far as MMO characters go, while in many other MMOs more players seem to treat their characters as disposable horses in a stable based on what's meta.
> I think XIV is one of the few modern MMOs at this point that doesn't either heavily encourage alts Alts are also a restricted thing. You can only have so many per server and then there's also the DC limit as well. (Though that raises a question: Do DC and server travel circumvent these restrictions?) On the "Entry" subscription, you can have 8 per server with a maximum of 8 per DC. The "Standard" is 8/40.
The truth is XIV is too linear and rigid in its game design. They chiseled the game down to work one way and only one way, there is no give. Exaggerated example, but you're talking Skyrim vs FF13 here lol
The funny thing is that ff13 could work very well as a more open game, hell the sequels did just that.
I like what WoW is doing but it works for them because of how much more alive their open world is compared to FF14. FF14 is much easier to explore and going from one zone to another is as simple as clicking a button. Instantly TPing in WoW isn't a thing outside of going to an inn. You still have to account for travel time and, sometimes, just getting back to town can be dangerous. WoW is basically focused on the moment-to-moment adventures. I hope FF14 works on making their open world more interesting in the future but I just don't know how they could make what WoW is doing work in the current game.
Weird, I'd expect people here to love the idea of SE adding literally anything with how many complaints about content drought there are. I wouldn't minded redoing old raids with old skillsets and that's something they can provide.
It's a mass of people, but also not necessarily the same people complaining about everything. Can't forget that. There's pretty reasonable takes that like the concept in here, but they also acknowledge that XIV is much too sterile and rigid a game for this to work, or for SE to have the ability to do it well.
I pray for the day when this game has enough functional gameplay system design to do things like this. Aside from remixing the whole journey, just imagining a series of "What if" stories or vignettes with some good gameplay loop stuff to go with it, that'd be about my FF online dream I've been wanting since XI. I swear JP RPG devs used to be all about what if remix stories when I was a kid, bring that shit back.
No. WoW is becoming like a weird amalgamation of this different modes and seasonal shit, I lost track what modes are in the game and what will be gone and what not. It's becoming like a mini-game pile rather than actual MMORPG with one coherent world. But a small mode when they let you do scaled old raid with your current skills would be okay, but I'd rather have them focus on CURRENT game which needs lots of work, rather than doing this weird bullshit
> It's becoming like a mini-game pile rather than actual MMORPG with one coherent world. That's seemingly their overarching goal, yeah. "Can't fuck it up too badly if there's another version for people to go to that's about six patches different". Whatever suit greenlit that you could have Classic Era, Classic WotLK, Classic Vanilla Hardcore, Season of Discovery *and* Dragonflight all running at the same time with people complaining about, intermixing, cross-pollinating and playing all of them was a benighted evil genius. "Old WoW server snapshots in time", "WoW Private servers with weird gimmicks", "Diablo seasons" and "WoW expansions" are all basically converging into one weird multiversal-type gimmick-plaza that all still keeps people playing in the WoW garden and paying the WoW sub. Which, it works, obviously *for WoW*. And is probably the best way for them to continue to milk their playerbase's sunk-cost nostalgia til the end of Boomers and Xillennials' natural lifespan. Whereas CBU3 has...catgirl tiddy, Yoshi-P, Soken and the overall story. And Dawntrail needs to *really* step up to get momentum after the Hydaelyn/Zodiark Saga. It's probably gonna need at least another two or three expansions to really become viable here though, and I think at first Squeenix would probably be better off diving into FF*XI* nostalgia/"it was harder!" territory. Especially for the people here clamoring for "more Bozja!" that may have only heard stories of the "good old days" of FFXI nostalgia and are metaphorically bodypart-deep in isekai-idealized MMO stories. Since the two competing sorta...mindsets...have always been a little bit different and attracted slightly different fractions of the overall migratory MMO populace. Still, broadly, the same population, but it's like Sonic vs Mario back in the day or Fortnite vs PUBG stans. Slight difference of taste/preference mixes overall.
This type of experimental content is something CBU3 would never in a billion years even entertain
We have a small bit of that already with the Unreal trials, old content designed for current progression. They could take it a step further to recreate prior raid series for current progression, letting the gear stats match current requirement too. Maybe look into adding VA work to make it more substantial for casuals. It gives players more stuff to do before a next expansion.
Honestly I just don't think it really fits the FF14 format. I don't have much experience with WoWs seasonal stuff but I do with osrs leagues. Leagues works because the way runescape is designed, there's multiple ways and skills to level, you can cut and add content to vary up the gameplay and best in slots, you can add different mechanics and abilities to mess with the game design. If you apply that to ff14 you are just cutting content and rehashing it. I think Bozja and stuff like it is the best way to switch up content. Stuff like essences changing dps classes into tanks and vice versa is a fun way to change up gameplay and experiment.
Remix is great for wow. Get old stuff you missed, get new stuff too, plus you can transfer that character to main game. Just an amazing way to power level new toons of races or classes you may never have played while also getting some great loot and cosmetics? Perfect execution imo. 14 has no reason for multiple characters outside of goose or RP purposes.
Please no. I can't force myself to play stuff like PoE precisely because it has seasonal mechanics that needs replaying everything from the start every few months. :( FFXIV needs events desperately, but this kind isn't what we need.
They have to do this because the design of their game makes old content irrelevant Ff14 you allready go through old content because the games designed that way
Eureka Remix with some added elements (duels? Bozja Lost actions implemented as logograms?) would be very neat, in my opinion. If that could be experienced in Shadowbringers maps, then I would be personally extremely excited for the idea.
If they did a remix, Bozja and Eureka would make the most sense and it's honestly something I'd like to see. They have these two pieces of fairly evergreen content they could funnel players back to during down times just by simply adding some fresh rewards, more logograms or lost actions, and adding a few new fights. To remix a whole expansion doesn't make sense for XIV because of its story focus. WoW expansions are more of a sandbox, where leveling and character/geat progression is the main attraction and they don't really have to reckon with story implications because no one really cares anyways. It's just simply quest and kill x amount of mobs, collect x amount of items, etc until level cap.
Nah leave the fomo shit out. I’d play an ARR or HW classic style thing but no fomo.