[GAMES] The devil in the detail (Final Fantasy XIV & MMORPGs)

- Video version of the following post HERE-

As I finished the Final Fantasy XIV review, I realized there were a few things I didn't quite cover. The problem with MMORPGs, the good ones at least, is that they offer so much and so diverse a content, it's hard to pin down when reviewing. The MMORPG scene is a fairly rich one and also one with great variety that doesn't often get recognised as such. The reason is, largely, because after the success of World of Warcraft, the majority of companies tried to copy Blizzard's formula and become the "WoW killer". The result of that was a market saturated by essentially the same game with a different skin on. It didn't help that practically all the terminology and basic mechanics of current MMOs are based on WoW. Though free-to-play did create a market within that market of poorer, half-finished and imbalanced games, many people tend to forget that the model also bolstered creativity out of necessity. Without the same massive amount of financial investment in the games, developers had the chance -and often the obligation- to try out new formulas with less of a risk.


This isn't to say that the f2p market offers better games or that it hasn't had failures. The nature of the beast allows it long-term survival even at moderate-to-low numbers of concurrent users and even the ones that don't survive at least try out new ideas; that's not counting the many formerly-subscription-based games that turned to the model to survive themselves.

FFXIV truly is a gorgeous game, for the genre's standards.

I did this long introduction to provide some context, especially to those not particularly well-versed in the genre. The reason why I found Final Fantasy XIV hard to review was because while I enjoyed the game as a whole, at the same time I felt like I couldn't possibly get the most out of the money I was paying for it on a monthly basis.

I'm not begrudging Square for using the subscription model; even for the consumer, it ensures good service, quick updates and a steady influx of content. This also means greater investment for the company and an aversion to wildly veering off the tried and true and for good reason; there are countless MMORPGs that innovated and either shut down (e.g. Tabula Rasa) or switched to the free-to-play or buy-to-play models to survive (Age of Conan, Wildstar, RIFT etc). However, it also creates a subconscious obligation for the player to play as much of the game as they can, because they literally pay 50 cents a day for it. This in itself is an investment for the player, as the trial month of a game may not be representative of it in the long term; and MMOs are long-term investments.

So, it comes down to what a player looks for in a game. Though this is the case with every game, within the MMO genre, the subtle differences are key. Lineage II became free-to-play a few years ago, but outside of WoW and Final Fantasy XI, it was the longest-running sub-based MMORPG and it was one that offered a completely different experience to WoW and its competitors/copy-cats. But when looking at a game like FFXIV (and, presumably, FFXI before it), the distinction is harder to make.

What makes FFXIV work, when AION or RIFT -both of which are clones of WoW- didn't? Wildstar may have come at a bad time and was forced off the stage, but City of Heroes survived for a very long time and it was the only MMORPG, to my knowledge, which was killed at the hands of its parent company despite a strong user-base. The Secret World innovated a lot and found its loyal audience, but not before dropping the subscription and switching to Guild Wars' buy-to-play model; just like The Elder Scrolls: Online.  The Old Republic may not have innovated much, but it's a solid game with the Star Wars license and yet, it had to resort to the f2p model far too soon in its lifespan.

Outside the obvious (like company loyalty to the product) and the inarguable boost that its console release provides (FFXI survived largely because it held a near-monopoly in console MMORPGs back in its day), I can't answer this question. I don't think many, not involved in the industry in some capacity, can. I do know my experience, though and how important the subtle differences between the games are.

As I was playing FFXIV (at the time of writing, I still have about a month of game left), Blizzard gifted me a week of World of Warcraft, including the latest expansion (Warlords of Dreanor, not the upcoming Legion) to get me back into the game. It was not the first time, as I rarely pay for that game, Blizzard often tries to entice me into returning. I was never a huge fan and when I played in a previous free-week, I ended up wasting too much time accomplishing very little. I had decided it wasn't my kind of game.

But even so, as I was playing a little bit of my free time in WoW, I felt a lot more absorbed than I ever did in FFXIV. That was the primary point of difficulty when reviewing Square's latest MMO entry; I find FFXIV the superior game, but I lost myself in WoW. One of the issues, for me, is linearity. FFXIV is a very linear MMORPG; it relies on an expansive storyline, it doesn't offer much in terms of RPing (like different dialogue options) and the side-quests are a distraction that appears right when you're about to tackle the next step of the storyline. As I said in the review, these side-quests do help a great deal with fleshing out the world of the game; most of the quest-givers have several lines of dialogue and they're very colorful.

Really, really interesting NPCs for the side-quests. Disturbingly so.

Don't take this compliment lightly, either; I just sat through three paragraphs of a non-essential quest-giver telling me of the trauma of losing his company in battle 3 decades ago and it was absolutely glorious. The writing in this game is stellar. But the way the system is set-up, it gets in the way of the storyline and after the first several levels, the side-quests only end up reinforcing that aftermentioned feeling of duty to play the game and do everything that's offered, even if you're not actively having fun with it.

RIFT also suffers from this, because it operates on the same principle. There is a main story-quest and the moment the story sends you to a new area, another bundle of side-quests, irrelevant to the story, pop up around you. The Old Rebublic does the same, but perhaps it gets away with it, because of the voice acting and the dialogue options radial key, which at least provides some RPing atmosphere, however basic. The problem with this system is that, for one thing, the linearity makes the game almost automated. From some point on the player stops reading the quest descriptions and just goes ahead to complete the objectives time and again, ad nauseum. When you enter a new city or village or camp and you get bogged down with five new side-quests, all of which involve engaging with the same formulaic, unimpressive, boring combat mechanics and for reasons that outright distract you from the main story, the game stops being something you play and it starts being a routine desk job.

FFXIV is driven by a very interesting story, but the player remains passive in it.

This process is a given for all traditional MMORPGs and even WoW does it; but where WoW and Lineage II get away with it is the huge, open world that draws you in. In the end, that's what turned me off from FFXIV, as well as other games before it (like Neverwinter). The locales in the game are very diverse, but the maps are all fairly small hubs. Planning routes and methods to travel as part of the game is far less enjoyable than just putting on your boots and hiking a mountain to your objective, in the way for which you may encounter gorgeous vistas or terrifying abandoned fotresses or quirky little side-quests. In FFXIV, the roads are too narrow and the mobs are all around you. Rarely will you leave the paved street during travel, just because your eye caught something interesting in the distance; for one thing, your eye will likely never catch any such thing and for another, it's not worth dealing with the mobs that are too close to one another for comfort. Even the ones that aren't aggressive (and there are a lot of them) are so many and so concentrated in the same area that the illusion of a breathing world breaks apart and the incentive to just look around flies out the window. It's at that point that you are no longer an adventurer living in Eorzea, but simply someone passively carrying out tasks for others in a virtual box.

In WoW and Lineage mobs roam the streets and valleys and they feel like part of the natural habitat. Their population is never too dense and they rarely become a hindrance in exploration. Because of this set-up and because of the art-direction that makes the aesthetic timeless, the environment becomes absorbing and immersive; Azeroth becomes real. FFXIV's Eorzea is gorgeous to look at, but the somewhat jarring switch between the various levels and its somewhat bare backstory, as well as the small spaces that serve for the maps, make the world feel fake; manufactured. A good place to start understanding this comparison is City of Heroes. The game world was split in hubs (much like FFXIV), but not only were they huge on their own right, they also felt alive; both because of the friendly NPCs that roamed the streets of Paragon City, but also because of the enemy mobs, most of which were some variant of human. When City of Heroes threw you in an abandoned area (like the Hollows or Overbrook), the tonal shift created much-needed juxtaposition, a change of pace that made the world of the game feel layered and injected the game with life far more effectively than most other MMORPGs.

As a counter-point, RIFT actually does offer a huge map with a number of world events to participate in (the titular 'rifts'). This game, however, often fails to embue Telara, its own world, with life, because the questing system is just as automated and its overworld feels awfully manufactured. So, looking at the various titles in the genre out there, we can see that success (either for the developer or the customer/player) doesn't rely on a single directorial decision, but rather the sum of them and how well the ideas gell off of one another.

For all its beautiful, diverse environments, FFXIV offers very little space for exploration.

A huge, immersive world with continuously changing and diverse environments, which feel alive all contribute to the one thing that FFXIV failed to do for me: role-playing. This is largely, I find, the reason why even though I really like Square's game, I'm finding it hard to convince myself to renew my subscription again. The best reason to play a subscription-based game is to lose yourself in it, to pay for the privilege of perpetuating a fantasy existence outside this mundane world. Gameplay is important, obviously, but in this stage and with this wealth and variety of titles in the genre (many of which don't require the player spends a dime on them to try out indefinitely), the focus often needs to shift elsewhere to maintain a strong, consistently paying user-base. That 'elsewhere' may be a community, friends that just hang out and occasionally partake in sports together; only they do it under the mask of a Night Elf and that sport is killing critters in a dungeon.

It's the classic "adventurer" trope; you are required to do tasks, but your primary goal is to see the world around you, to take it all in, to get rich and to make new friends. This works best within the context of WoW or Lineage II than it does in FFXIV. In FFXIV you are an adventurer (people remind you of that all the time), but you're a passive recepient of everybody else's whims and desires. Single-player RPGs tend to be linear as well, but they rely on other tropes of the genre to assimilate the player into their world. Ultima Online and Runescape provide the blueprint for the wandering adventurer, as they are MMORPGs without direction, where the player is required to go out in the world and discover things for themselves. The starting villages that used to be provided in older MMORPGs helped differentiate between the races and classes and gave the illusion of uniqueness to the player's avatar. Most MMO characters don't have dialogue, so it's best to let the players speak directly, which is hard to do when the player needs to be directed from point-A to point-B constantly without the freedom to just stop and do something else.

WoW's huge world feels lively at every turn, despite the occcasional stillness of its NPCs.

Furthermore, exploration leads to nice little discoveries that promise XP and coin.

When everything moves too fast into a single direction, even the travel time is a chore. This is what characterizes FFXIV, which has you walk back and forth or even in other maps simply to talk to a single person and then requires you to return. This is clearly artificially lengthening the game, which in a game like this can seem like wasting the player's time. WoW does a lot of the same, but the downtime in its huge, open environment adds to the immersion.

Despite its massively rich content, in the end FFXIV requires you to pay for menial, repetitive tasks that fall into a routine far too early. You may eventually guild up and do one of its many dungeons, levemetes, guildhests and whatnot, but probably not before you cap your first character, which boils down to entire months of playtime.

WoW does a better job at convincing you to pay the subscription, because while it's no stranger to the same menial tasks, it provides a level of freedom that FFXIV doesn't. Lineage II does the same. So does Lord of the Rings: Online, which is the closest I've played to an actual WoW-clone with a different skin and it's a game that would have done better, if it either came out earlier or turned to the buy-to-play model, instead of its current f2p. If anything, Lord of the Rings: Online is a great example of a game that did everything WoW did, just as well, but failed to draw players to it, because it offerred nothing new. FFXIV dodged that bullet with its setting, its name recognition, as well as the influx of players from FFXI and an overall stellar product at a time when WoW has started losing players.

Even though it faced difficulties, LOTRO successfully copied WoW's huge environments and focus on art-direction over visual fidelity.

I realize all this is hard to explain and it's all very subjective; I'm not making any definitive statements within the context of "do's and dont's". This is purely down to looking into the nuances that define my experience with these games. After all, FFXIV has a very big user-base; I have yet to log in and see the servers empty, even in the slow times of the day there are several people playing and the chat is constantly active. This means that the game has found its audience and that, in the end of the day, perhaps a solid, polished game is more important than the small details that set it apart from the others.

Coming full circle, that's really the point I was getting at; if FFXIV was buy-to-play, with a small cash shop for some expansions and/or items, I would be lauding it as the pinnacle of the genre. The high entry-point that the subscription imposes, however, creates conditions and requirements that cannot be satsified by and satisfy all the players that happen upon it. When something gets tiring, exhausting, overly repetitive, you'll need to take a break. It usually just sucks if your break results in costing you money. For me, FFXIV doesn't offer enough of what I look for in a game to renew my subscription right now. It offers just enough to reconsider in the future, though. It's a great game, but like with all of its competition, the devil is in the details.

Oh, if only I could go to that monstrosity, explore it and find something interesting...