Excluding the story, what exactly makes FFXIV "good"?

Excluding the story, what exactly makes FFXIV "good"?

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The rest of the game.

It sucks

it's not wow

That makes FFXIV worse though

>appeals to lots of player types (raiders, chatroomers, completionists, housing people, story/lore people, RPers, solo grinding autists) so there's a solid population
>can play all jobs/classes on one character so there's no need to juggle alts
>old content mostly remains relevant thanks to duty roulettes and level sync
>lalafells are cute
>I made friends while playing it and like to hang out with them

Honestly for me it's the fact that they included every single good life simulator feature from other mmos on top of having a great art style and competent graphics (on pc) and music. It should be f2p with the item shop prices though and they could easily sustain the game with those profits. The sub is the single greatest filter and Achilles heel for the game. I know people who enjoy the game but leave for months because the sub just isn't worth it for roulettes and pvp.
Know your place blizzsissy.

maybe some of the characters but thats it, the good thing is the story

the fishing

>I know people who enjoy the game but leave for months because the sub just isn't worth it for roulettes and pvp.
That's what the producer wants them to do, being a hopeless addict that feels a desperate need to log in every day to complete daily quests or grind an endless number, which, failing to do so means you're falling behind the pack and will perform worse than your friends, that kind of game design is unhealthy for everyone involved and the developers know it.
They don't want you to play hardcore for months and months, they want you to take a break and play other games or spend some time with your family instead.
Raiding is fun, and challenging, but the barrier to entry is extremely low so anyone can easily return to the game after a break and get back into the game.
I think that's one of the biggest strengths of XIV over certain competitors in the market. That and Job Change.

If you play as a healer you can decide whether or not you keep your party alive.

I don't know about that, I play WAR and regularly out-heal the healers.

Its a decent JRPG but a lacking MMO with probably the best story in all of vidya

It's interesting going back and playing ARR dungeons. They didn't really decide on dungeons being streamlined, cinematic experiences until some time between HW and SB. The old Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak had different ways of acquiring the photo cells and different paths you could take to reach the end. Qarn has a puzzle in it that if solved properly unlocks hidden rooms with additional loot.
Unfortunately, all that additional side content causes friction between new players who want to explore and do everything and people just doing roulettes, so all the dungeons are pretty streamlined now. I have wanted something with more exploration, like a huge dungeon I can just explore and almost get lost in (like some FFXI dungeons), and it seems they may be delivering with the Variant dungeons. I suppose there's PotD/HoH, but randomly generated will never be as good as hand-crafted.

The music and art design are consistently great, it's very populated, there's a wide range of activities to do which will suit most players.

They've changed a bunch of old dungeons to make them more in line with the modern game design, Toto-Rak and Copperbell Mines are far more straightforward now.
Qarn wasn't really changed much because it's a non-critical side dungeon, but they did change the first boss to make the doom and solution a bit more obvious to help new players learn a mechanic that will reappear later on in raids.

it’s just going to be route a and route b my dude. do route a, watch cutscenes, do route b, watch cutscenes and you’re finished. don’t get your hopes up

the extreme and savage difficulty won’t have routes because xiv devs are lazy niggers and anything that makes it even 1% more difficult to balance for them is culled. they’d rather make boring shit than fun shit that makes their job as gamedevs difficult

I'm so glad they changed that first Copperbell boss where enemies gradually trickle out of the ceiling. I didn't even mind the other two, but that first one just felt like a waste of time.
I think the second one had a neat if gimmicky idea, but it unfortunately meant everyone just sat around waiting for another bomb to spawn.
The third I think they should have kept and just made it harder but with a smaller arena. Make it so you can't just ignore the adds spawning or they'll overwhelm you and cause a wipe.

i don’t know what they did with the slime in copperbell
i kept waiting for it to do a new mechanic besides circle aoes and it never did

You know, after all this time I've started appreciating Stormblood. It was actually pretty good.

>yfw Endwalker might as well be a visual novel

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The combat is comfy. The music is great. The art is decent to in some places noteworthy..