FFXIV is pretty bad in a bunch of ways. The monotony of going through the main story and only experiencing meaningful combat once every three or four hours is pretty dire and indefensible. A lot of the subsystems are terribly convoluted too. The process of applying and extracting materia doesn’t need to be anywhere near as much of a garbage fire as it is, for example.
GW2 has its problems too. Mounts sold to us as important features of expansions or LWS being locked behind obnoxious grinds, LWS being locked behind paywalls, the generally mediocre and unappealing story and NPCs, the aesthetics available to players that allows most players to turn their character into blindingly radiant and immersion-breaking abominations unlike anything seen in most other MMORPGs, and Tangled Depths.
Yes, the mere existence of Tangled Depths is a black mark against GW2. It is the worst zone ever designed in any MMORPG that I’ve ever played.
Don’t know what you mean. Three days straight nothing but fetch quests paired with the worst piano classes I have ever seen anywhere make FF14 a fun game. Also the RP scene. I mean… night clubs? Oh yes!
I loved playing through FFXIV whereas I couldn’t manage to do the same thing with GW2. That doesn’t mean either is objectively better or worse, they just appeal to people differently. If someone says that one is superior in an objective sense, then they’re not correctly understanding what the term means.
It doesn’t compute to me either. I haven’t actually seen any profiles that were written by generative AI, but I’d treat it the same way that I do generated images – I won’t engage with the player. I’m not going to give them unsolicited advice because I have better things to do, so keeping my distance from something I find disagreeable is my only option.
Hey, it’s the negativity thread, so I’m gonna stick to that theme and not bring up what I see as the good bits of FFXIV.
But to point out some more bad parts of GW2, that game has a bad habit of stuffing its story full of obnoxious missions with ridiculous gimmicks, from puzzles to stealth segments, as though it’s embarrassed of its combat system.
And there are problems with that combat system, it just feels very floaty and spammy. For the most complex builds, it’s a hectic mess of smashing every button as it comes off cool-down and swapping between stances and weapons as you roll around. For the simplest builds, you have to keep on constantly hammering 1 because the game will use any excuse it can get to cancel auto-casting. All the while, you’ve got to constantly be dodging around because being stationary in that game is basically death in any challenging content.
I much prefer games with a GCD where you need to put more thought into which buttons you press and in what order.
There is RP, just not on the European side. That’s sadly been regimented so hard into a cabal it would be the envy of any would be ‘da vinci of roleplay’ on Argent Dawn.
There´s also the fact that WoW is made by Americans, who speak English, which doesn´t use accents, even in names that originally have them (and they often don´t even pronounce them).
Good example are trappers from Grizzly Hills, many of whom use Americanized version of East Slavic names: https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Trappers#Members
The biggest surprise of all to me is the fact that not one of them is called Varg! Seemed like an obvious thing to do but maybe it was just a bit too obvious.
As someone who has finished FFXIV’s story, I have to say that loads and loads of main plots and sub-plots are very much worthy of criticism to say the least, but more often than not it’s shielded by a community where people who accidentally spoil the story are demonised far more than outright nasty individuals, and thus, any criticism that holds weight beyond saying that it’s too long to play through is outright silenced.
I starkly remember someone mentioning how ‘insensitive’ Battle for Azeroth’s story was, (even though I had quit weeks before the launch of it, but, people in said community hear you used to play Warcraft and decide to profile you,) right as I was playing through Stormblood where the Sultana of Ul’dah, to cheerful music, consults a casino owner about how to deal with refugees torn away from their homeland by warfare, before cheerfully settling down on the decision of deporting them to their still war-torn country, and making them work in indentured service in factories which would be made by Ul’dah, with them receiving most of the profits until their ‘debt’ was paid off.
There’s also the whole ‘colonialism is only good if it’s a human samurai doing it on a culture of steppe-dwelling people!’, where those who resist this movement are made out to be chauvinistic savages that need to be bested in combat. This is a main plot of Stormblood, by the way.
Let´s also not forget the time in EW when Garlean legate asked “If you like unity so much, why did you resist our conquest?”, wasn´t rebuffed, and then his death was portrayed as some sad thing
For me, one of the big issues with all FFXIV expansions is the “every high must come with a low” pacing style.
No, Square Enix, just because you gave us a dramatic revelation and an exciting twist and an important development that the story has been building up to for a while, that does not mean that it needs to be followed by three hours of comic relief, tedious busywork or some other sort of milquetoast distraction from the real meat of the story.
I’ve almost lost count of the number of times when my enthusiasm was being built up and it felt like the story was building up toward a climactic point only for the tension and the momentum to suddenly drop like a rock.
I’m really sorry but I’d rather turn into a member of the PCU and become friends with Perroy than have to deal with that hillariously terrible and quite frankly, toxic (while operating under the mask of fake wholesome positivity of course) community.
Not that the game’s actual community is any better. FF14 has the misfortune of being attached to a fandom of a pretty popular series that cannot handle any criticism of their beloved entry. The game has a laundry list of massive problems that I doubt will ever get adressed because the core audience is satisfied with getting another visual novel esque by the numbers expansion.
Terrible pacing which just feels like modus operandi for japanese writing that puts more of a highlight on other issues like abysmal quest design. As good as the story can be -at parts- it does not excuse that the way it is delivered to the player is objectively (yes loras) bad.
I can say that I “finished” the story too and I’m not really interested in experiencing more of it because I know it’s going to be the same - travel to new area, learn of their problems, watch a 20 minute cinematic as your party discusses those problems because the writing team apparently does not trust you the player to pay attention to anything, repeat.
I was already fed up with Endwalker and how obvious it was they had no idea how to stick the landing for the ending and instead banked on numerous [please feel emotions] and [remember this? remember them?] scenes.
i just pretend the garlemald portion of the story never happened, easily the most embarassing part of that expansion
The GW2 aesthetic turning from the vanilla 2012 concept art-rooted to one that’s rife with neon angel wings and magitech (these were present and balanced before) + the Charr being neutered to wholesome chonkers for no discernible gain aside fromsolving their exceedingly in-depth military culture i.e their 1# appeal and selling point, because Arenanet is set on avoiding anything resembling faction conflict or tension.
It’s still got supersolid tab-targeting combat, and it’s absolutely uncontested for world content/exploration (the original journey through Orr, all of Heart of Thorns I still think of fondly). WoW’s still struggling to properly iterate on world events like we’re witnessing in this Pre-Patch.
I mean as a former card carrying member of the PCU myself I would too.
→ Lets add a dye system but not address the inventory management problems
→ Lets make it so you can’t change your transmog outside of rest areas
→ Lets make professions a ponzi scheme
And more.
Garlemald became a weird nihonese war crime apologia and its frankly telling that your die hard ‘fans’ have nothing to say about it.
Let’s not kid ourselves, now. FFXIV is so thematically inconsistent that even IF it could provide decent rp experiences beyond the billboard-buying epstein-coded nightlife sims for people who haven’t stepped out of the house past 9pm in their lives such writing would make the MCU appear to be the peak of cinema.
Then again, isn’t it wonderful how spewing bile about other communities brings us together in this place?
Ahem.
I’m still pissed about peacecraft. It grinds my gears. Really rustles my jimmies. To further the topic of negative-posting.
It means that Elden Ring is better than Dark Souls. It is the fifth of August, year of our Lord Two thousand and twenty four and Loras continues to contribute nothing to the forum discussions.