the absolute worst of “games”
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The closest we got to that was Withered army training. But to me what you’re experiencing is the same as me playing Fall Guys… It’s just Total Wipeout in a video game but has nothing that gives you an advantage over another player, the skillcap is rather low with a combination of good luck and practice for victory. The only extrinsic reward are skins and they’re on a rotation with some being seasonal but ever rotating.
I don’t play the game because I feel some FOMO or the big carrot, I play it because I feel like it. WoW is forever kneecapped by you being the MAU-walker.
I really enjoyed it, but it’s not exactly something I would say comes to mind for this subject. It had a very clear sense of progression and I didn’t really feel tempted to return once I thoroughly completed it.
I can’t help but imagine that the novelty is part of the reason you enjoyed that so much. I remember camping a gnome mage in STVietnam for 3 and a half hours one evening. Sure, you could argue the marginal honour gain acted as my figurative carrot in that instance, but I would have done it regardless. There were plenty of times I had played WoW for fun alone, and most of them involved some kind of player interaction. The sad thing about the game’s direction is that it’s pulling away from design that encourages spontaneous player interaction.
As for my pet peeve, I’ll run with an FFXIV one, as is the current fashion. The way the story is delivered. I have never enjoyed visual novels and, had I not played SWTOR before playing FFXIV, it is more than likely that I would have felt differently. The minimal amount player input in the story is something that was a thorn in my side from the very beginning of ARR. It is also why I’ve stopped playing. Even if I didn’t have meaningful dialogue choices that alter quest outcomes, I would have been happy with my character being even remotely responsive in regard to the situation he’s facing in those darned cutscenes. But he’s not responsive, because he’s not really there. His deeds - and mine by extension - are not what drive the story. At the very least, it doesn’t feel like it. I am an observer, a tourist in my own fantasy tale. I am here to witness the amazing writing and the amazing characters the devs have come up with. Oh, the ******* is dead, what a great twist. And how does my character react to this? Well, he doesn’t. The ********** *** is over. Who is its tragic hero? Not my character.
Every arc of the story seems to have a protagonist of sorts, and it is never ME! :<
Yeah pretty much. I’m not sure Wow has the engine or the means to implement a something something that is both fun and doesn’t demand a reward or progression sticked onto it.
Besides, let’s be real… In the context of WoW, everything is about rewards, we’ve been thoroughly trained to expect something out of our invested time that is a shiny gizmo. Unfortunately it became a double edged sword for WoW. Players are either apathetic to these rewards or require more to get their fix.
I feel they did a good job at making your character emote and do more things in cutscenes as time went on.
It’s always a difficult line to walk. They can’t make your character do too much or people will get upset it conflicts with their perception of their own character (I’ve already seen some salt about what’s already there, amazingly, not a lot but it’s there). And while they can add options, that can quickly run away with the complexity.
One of the reasons why some people praise Shadowbringers is because it subverts this, after a base game and two expansions of being the muscle for someone else who effectively serves as the main character in your stead.
… But it’s not worth over a hundred hours of being muscle for the ‘true’ protagonists, if that’s a particular peeve of yours. Especially since Endwalker goes back to making someone else (arguably an entire group) the focus of the story and the protagonist instead of you.
It’s always really hard to try and make a deep story-focused game when the centered protagonist is a narrative black hole who can’t grow as a character, have any real dialogue, etc.
It’s why they’ve usually had other characters fill the same narrative purpose (notably Alphinaud) with you mostly acting as muscle. It really tries both in Shadowbringers and Endwalker, and it honestly probably pushes the limit of what it can do there, but it’s something they can’t really circumvent. Even in Shadowbringers, your story is almost entirely defined by what others do to you, not what you yourself do. Narratively you are more or less a force of nature who gets things done, but the person, that is something you project in yourself.
Which is not to say anything negative about ShB and EW in that regard. It’s hard to look back at our robotic ARR selves now!
They set out some defined things - for example, the player is an adventurer, they are very selfless, they are overall morally good (though may sometimes be snarky) - but they really prefer to err on the side of leaving the player undefined in favour of letting the player decide what their own character is like, and all this is a consequence of that.
It helped shape my WoL character as a warrior who feigns being a himbo sometimes to put people at ease, so there’s that.
A lot more characterisation the further in you go, which isn’t ideal but is nice to see
I adore the way they start to drop hints here and there, and then leave it for you to disregard or run away with them as you please.
It’s not their style to add outright references to romance for example, but as someone who headcanons a romance between the WoL and a certain red-haired lad, they knew exactly what they were doing with some Endwalker scenes. I cackled like a madman.
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That sounds like a rationalisation. I’m quite convinced they haven’t committed to any progress on this front because it’s simply easier, and cheaper, not to.
Indeed it isn’t, which is why I quit. Not to say I didn’t have fun with the game while I played it.
I am quite fine with RPing whatever it is I want to be for myself, and interpreting the game’s events in a way that supports the internal logic of who my character is. But I simply could not forgive the 100th time that I sat there, watching something play out and shouting for my character not to just stand there and do nothing.
They prefer cheapening out on this segment of the game, is what they prefer. And hey, if that helps them polish the rest of the game to an excellent standard - great. It’s just not my cup of tea.
As an additional pet peeve, I also dislike how hypocritical some players aboard the recent FFXIV Refugee Hype Train have been, in the way they regard Square Enix over Blizzard. As though the Enix folks are a batch of benevolent geniuses amid a sea of foul, corporate video game corruption.
My WoL:
But I do agree it is a very delicate line, too much subverts peoples own personification of who their WoL is vs too little puts it more in a backseat or a more apathetic character to everything going on around them.
does hand punching emote
that’s it, that’s all the characterisation I need
I mean if they had infinite dev time and money I am sure they could add in options for every conceivable thing, but I think you are looking to find malice where there is none. It’s no coincidence that games that let you fully customise your character’s species, appearance, gender etc tend to not have that character be the strongest element of the story - martially perhaps, but not narratively.
Lord of the Rings would read very differently if Frodo and/or Sam couldn’t be given any more than the barest kind of characterisation or dialogue, is what I am saying, and if it had to be written to account for them being of any imaginable species.
Have they? As far as I can tell, no one I have seen has hesitated to call out SE for, say, the NFT post. It’s a profit-driven company in a capitalist society where success is measured by profit only, so of course it has everything that comes with that.
If you mean specific people like YoshiP and Natsuko Ishikawa, then that’s different - while all people are flawed in some way, there hasn’t really been any reason so far to think they are anywhere near as bad as the current suspects over at Blizzard. They could turn out to be (I hope not!) but so far it doesn’t seem so.
He might be talking about stuff like Koji fantasizing about smelling the hair of a colleague (in an official article no less), Soken’s public infatuation with knee-socks and the women who wear them, and Yoshi-P’s sole comment on a cosplayer’s outfit being the crass remark of “step on me please.”
It’s the first I’ve heard of it, so I can’t comment at length, but if it’s true, that does sound bad. Nothing even remotely in the same dimension as what Blizzard’s been doing, of course, but I guess what I had seen so far had been ‘too good to be true’.
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Here you go then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47F4V-or73s
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/blog/000788.htmlHmm. Are you sure he’s not joking? ‘Step on me’ is a pretty dead/tired/unfunny meme, so no points to him there, but
SB spoilers
With the context of the cosplay being of Yotsuyu, who in the story literally does step on Gosetsu in that fishing village scene, it feels like a double-reference joke.
Idk. Unfunny, sure, but I don’t really get the feeling that it was intended to be malicious.
This afaik was him acknowledging a Yotsuyu meme, given that this is who the cosplayer was cosplaying. Maybe in poor taste to some, but I don’t think any creeper thought was behind it.
Not sure about the socks thing, but the hair smelling is kinda 
They were in the same article.