Despite Great World and Controls, Shallow Gameplay Hurt Long Term

Good World and Controls

It’s hard to quantify what makes FFXIV so immediately appealing, moreso than other MMOs that have released recently. It’s really the world and polished game mechanics that all come together to form a fun, easy to dive into world.

The Secret World had a great, immersive world, but the controls were cumbersome and the systems we overwhelming.

Fallen Earth also had an immersive, unique world, but it suffered from bugs and bad controls.

FFXIV gets both the world right, and the controls right. It’s too bad that for an MMO, it feels shallow.

Shallow Game

The main issue that FFXIV will have in the longevity department is similar to the problem that SWTOR had: not enough content at launch, and not enough content after the first patch. A major part of the content for FFXIV is leveling different jobs. This typically has to be done via the hunting log (slaying set amounts of specific mobs) or FATEs (public quests).

The problem with this is that all this content takes place in the same areas and in the same ways for each job you level. Although it’s interesting (I hesitate to label it as fun) to max out as many jobs as you can on your character, it holds the same long term interest as TOR’s alt centric content approach: leveling alts or jobs aren’t different enough for it to feel like new content.

Moreover, the subsequent leveling of jobs begins to get very grind-y. Now, frankly all MMO’s have (and some would argue must have) a grind element to keep people playing over extended periods of time. Again, for this to work, the grind elements must be different from each other to keep players interests, and in FFXIV that simply isn’t the case.

Leveling all of the crafts and gathering jobs are very similar to each other, and require a lot of mouse clicking that isn’t very involving. I am consistently surprised at how these new MMO’s release with such a short path to the level cap. There will always be those players who can focus their time and get to the level cap very quickly, but if your average player (few hours a day, 5+ days a week) can get to level cap before your first major content patch, you will always be behind in keeping the player base happy.