Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

XIV is designed for ease of access on a patch by patch basis(major patches that bring new gear). It's very easy to put down and pick back up. It's very easy to get on and do "relevant" content. It's very easy to catch up. It's very easy(mind numbingly unforgiving raid system aside). Combat is conceptual, and each job that fulfills a role is basically the same but just different enough that to play each job to its potential you have to learn new/different tricks. Essentially, once you reach a certain level, that's all there is to playing the game. All that actually changes ahead of you is fight complexity or a need for higher mathematical advantage(gear). Lore and storyline wise, the Storyline got better in Heavensward, but the lore of everything just feels like it's the husk of 1.0 from what I've seen. Almost like a, "Did you do the summer reading?" kind of feel. A large portion of the playerbase doesn't even care about the story. They skip all cutscenes, which you can do thanks to the quest marker system, and then complain later when the game bores them.

XI, as most of you know, at least until recently, had almost zero structure or objective conveyance. The specifics of the battle system's math took years and numerous testers and people to figure out. There are no quest markers. There are very few instances. Until recent years, traversing the world took time, even if you had outpost warps. Gear swaps were possible and pivotal. Some jobs required more gear to do their job than others. Gear was all that mattered for job performance, but the way I've always viewed it is, is that the gear that you got that let you farm and fight for the best gear was good enough to beat those opponents, so all you were actually gearing for in XI was fight efficiency(the same can be said for XIV, but this largely depends on the individual care/skill level of your static or party and is largely out of your control). XI was largely played for an almost cinematic kind of enjoyment. No skipping cutscenes(though I know there were some people who mashed confirm to scroll the dialogue afap). No duty finder. No party finder. Less replaceable roles(both good and bad thing), more value per player character than in XIV. Almost every zone had a unique musical theme(more true in later expansions). Of course, it's never been a game of convenience. I always thought their intention with things like lottery spawns, timed spawns, and all that, was to purposely lower the amount of people with NM items/make NM encounters wildly exceptional. Players being players of course, figured out the timers, lotteries, placeholders, and all that jazz and would sit to farm NMs(regardless of the usually miniscule advantage the items offered). Since the playerbase wasn't uniform in its ethnicity and nationality(no NA server groups or EU server groups), everyone was expected to do their best and usually did(Elitism culture). It was and is a game of commitment(which is why I always laughed at the warning statement on login that basically TLDRs to "Don't forget about real life").