Final Fantasy 14 was the perfect blend of story and leveling. As you did the story and the chapters you gained XP, but it didn't feel like a grind. I wasn't going to the forest to kill 20 rabbits to get food to feed the starving children in the village. It wasn't the boring do this task to kill X amount of mobs and then come back and I will give you 40 similar tasks.
Final Fantasy 14 was the perfect blend of story and leveling. As you did the story and the chapters you gained XP, but it didn't feel like a grind. I wasn't going to the forest to kill 20 rabbits to get food to feed the starving children in the village. It wasn't the boring do this task to kill X amount of mobs and then come back and I will give you 40 similar tasks.
I can't really say I have heard anyone with good things to say about FFXIV's leveling over any other MMO.
My understanding is that it is not horribly monotonous like GW2's, but it isn't exactly varied and exciting either. It isn't as fast as Archeage, but it can still be completed in days.
I skipped but I agree. I didnt see the point for the analysis.
I think 45 days is not enough time to fully enjoy the progression of your character, the new skills of your class and your weapon, as well, spare time to partake in the economy and craft your gear, while also taking in the scenery of the world. Dont forget that PvP will be unavoidable plus nodes need to be developed.
It cant be done in 45 days, unless the game is that easy, which will be dissapointing.
I think we need at least three months with 4-6h a day. Make the journey harder. 45 days seems easy and rushed without feeling the achievement of it all when we get there.
It's a new mmo. Let us take our time IS, and by that I dont mean "play at a casual pace".
I don't think Steven made that as a hard cap that it would only take 45 days when he talked about it in the video. Even if your character was level 50 in 45 days that does mean you're wearing all legendary gear sitting on your throne looking down at the masses. I think the consensus of this thread is that artificial time gating is a bad idea. Also, not everyone who plays an MMO is for exploration. Maybe I want to just be a level 5 adventurer, but a master weaponsmith who makes the finest weapons in the land, and it will take me 18 months to get there. What's fun for you may not be fun for others. It's not fair for you to impose your definition of "fun" or "good MMO" on the community. Some people may just want to get to max level so they can do castle sieges each week.
Final Fantasy 14 was the perfect blend of story and leveling. As you did the story and the chapters you gained XP, but it didn't feel like a grind. I wasn't going to the forest to kill 20 rabbits to get food to feed the starving children in the village. It wasn't the boring do this task to kill X amount of mobs and then come back and I will give you 40 similar tasks.
Please.................
Name another MMO that didn't a better job with leveling and character development. I am not an FF14 fanboy. I played it and didn't like the endgame raiding, so I stopped playing it. I played World of Warcraft for 15 years and am waiting for Alpha 2 for this game. However, I have been playing MMO games for 22 years.
Everquest, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, Horizons: Empires of Istaria, Dark Age of Camelot, SWTOR, Star Wars Galaxies, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Tubala Rasa, Eve Online, FF14, Age of Conan, just to name a few.
Final Fantasy 14 was the perfect blend of story and leveling. As you did the story and the chapters you gained XP, but it didn't feel like a grind. I wasn't going to the forest to kill 20 rabbits to get food to feed the starving children in the village. It wasn't the boring do this task to kill X amount of mobs and then come back and I will give you 40 similar tasks.
Please.................
Name another MMO that didn't a better job with leveling and character development. I am not an FF14 fanboy. I played it and didn't like the endgame raiding, so I stopped playing it. I played World of Warcraft for 15 years and am waiting for Alpha 2 for this game. However, I have been playing MMO games for 22 years.
Everquest, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, Horizons: Empires of Istaria, Dark Age of Camelot, SWTOR, Star Wars Galaxies, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Tubala Rasa, Eve Online, FF14, Age of Conan, just to name a few.
I literally got annoyed at leveling in FFXIV which sucks because I wanted to try their raids... Swtor leveling was more enjoyable... i still miss wild star...
I can't really say I have heard anyone with good things to say about FFXIV's leveling over any other MMO.
My understanding is that it is not horribly monotonous like GW2's, but it isn't exactly varied and exciting either. It isn't as fast as Archeage, but it can still be completed in days.
I'll explain FFXIV leveling for anyone who is curious.
Fist, MSQ(Main Story Quest) is MANDATORY and will take you to cap on your first Job(class). You basically just walk around and talk to people, maybe do a dungeon or boss ever few levels. Easy stuff, but it takes about 1-2 days per expansion for the average person not watching the cutscenes.
If you don't do MSQ you can't access any of the end game. Other than that, you can grind "deep dungeons", dungeons, or shitty zones full of world events from old expansions(bozja). Every job lower than your highest gets a huge bonus to leveling xp so it's easy to cap alts.
Unless you watch the 6000 cutscenes and read all of the dialog, MSQ is a suck fest, but a straight path to cap. Apparently the story is good, but I if you just want to play a damn MMORPG just skip every cutscene and watch a lore video.
I have never had any fun leveling in FFXIV because it requires zero effort. The fun is all in doing the end game raids. I actually enjoyed leveling in FFXI and Lineage 2 because getting anything in those games required effort.
Final Fantasy 14 was the perfect blend of story and leveling. As you did the story and the chapters you gained XP, but it didn't feel like a grind. I wasn't going to the forest to kill 20 rabbits to get food to feed the starving children in the village. It wasn't the boring do this task to kill X amount of mobs and then come back and I will give you 40 similar tasks.
Please.................
Name another MMO that didn't a better job with leveling and character development. I am not an FF14 fanboy. I played it and didn't like the endgame raiding, so I stopped playing it. I played World of Warcraft for 15 years and am waiting for Alpha 2 for this game. However, I have been playing MMO games for 22 years.
Everquest, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, Horizons: Empires of Istaria, Dark Age of Camelot, SWTOR, Star Wars Galaxies, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Tubala Rasa, Eve Online, FF14, Age of Conan, just to name a few.
I literally got annoyed at leveling in FFXIV which sucks because I wanted to try their raids... Swtor leveling was more enjoyable... i still miss wild star...
Just fucking skip it, the raids are worth it. There are plenty of lore videos out there to watch while you are playing if you really want to know what is happening.
Final Fantasy 14 was the perfect blend of story and leveling. As you did the story and the chapters you gained XP, but it didn't feel like a grind. I wasn't going to the forest to kill 20 rabbits to get food to feed the starving children in the village. It wasn't the boring do this task to kill X amount of mobs and then come back and I will give you 40 similar tasks.
Please.................
Name another MMO that didn't a better job with leveling and character development. I am not an FF14 fanboy. I played it and didn't like the endgame raiding, so I stopped playing it. I played World of Warcraft for 15 years and am waiting for Alpha 2 for this game. However, I have been playing MMO games for 22 years.
Everquest, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, Horizons: Empires of Istaria, Dark Age of Camelot, SWTOR, Star Wars Galaxies, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Tubala Rasa, Eve Online, FF14, Age of Conan, just to name a few.
Even bdo was more fun.
Seriously, the only thing I liked about ff14 besides my dragon was the fact that people enjoyed that game.
It wasnt a game for me but the others made it fun, although I had minimal intetraction with others due to lack of challenge.
Ff14 should not be an example about mmorpgs. It's a story driven game. Not player driven.
Name another MMO that didn't a better job with leveling and character development.
EQ2.
You could level 6 characters in that game without repeating a single piece of content - yet each of them have developed stories, and provide adequate character development.
Should leveling in an MMO take long enough that it will turn people off the game? Well, no, obviously.
Never said it should.
Just look at it from this perspective first tho:
If somebody wants to rush to max level, he is just going to rush to max level and leveling taking longer will just be a very temporary inconvenience for him, but he is going to enjoy the rest of his time in the game (be it months or years).
If somebody wants to re-live that classic magic of have ''the journey'' and leveling is too easy and you're always overleveled making the story quests too easy, his whole experience is going to be ruined.
So making leveling more of a journey is the right choice because yes, you're not going to please everyone.
That's never going to happen.
But if you have two options
1. minor and temporary inconvenience for half of the players and a satisfying experience for the other half.
and
2. no minor and temporary inconvenience for half of the players but a ruined experience for the other half.
1 is obviously the right choice.
I understand it might be hard to understand for some, for the same reason PvE-focused content is hard to understand for me, a PVP-RPer, but the game dev's job is to make sure as many people are satisfied (in a healthy way) in the end, as possible, and yes, 1 is the right choice.
, then it would stand to reason that about 6.5% of all content in Ashes should be leveling content, with the rest being content for those at max level.
How do you define leveling content?
Maybe there's an agreed upon definition and I just wasn't aware/maybe my english is failing me but please let's clarify because to me, leveling content is all the content that is there exclusively/mostly to facilitate leveling.
That's a whole lot of quests, a massive part of the story, a lot of instances, a lot of NPCs, a lot of locations, not under 10% of the game content.
So yeah, maybe I misunderstood, let's clarify please.
Leveling can be well done, and still many people won't even reach max level.
Yes but again we got two scenarios.
A) leveling is well done and 4 players never reach max level.
leveling is badly done and 400 players never reach max level.
The hype trap will be real
Let me repeat, there has probably never been a game into which players will jump with such high expectations (especially since the decline of mmo-s seems to be accelerating, not slowing down).
Gaming in general is in decline with corporate greed and corruption growing in the industry, not weakening.
It was boring, repetitive and just not fun. But, it only took 5 hours or so to get to the cap. Not surprisingly, not all that many people dropped the game before reaching the level cap.
I'm not familiar to Archage and the reason why few people quit while leveling could come down to a very large amount of factors.
I am however familiar with Vanilla World of Warcraft where leveling was the journey I'm talking about and yeah, we all know how well that mmo-rpg went. Legendary even to this day when people demanded Classic servers, one of the major reasons, noted in all essays on the matter being that leveling was the journey I talked about earlier.
Meanwhile, let's look at Retail. Leveling can be instant (I still got a free max level click on my account, never used it) and the game is in huge decline.
The fact is, each game is a story of its own and AOC's story will come down to how polished it is when it launches and people will realize that it is or not polished based on leveling content. This will decide this game's future.
Since we are talking about the total time players spend at not max level, vs total time players spend at max level, we can just assume that we are talking about the ratio of all content not at the level cap vs all content at the level cap.
If you want to define that content set using a different term, I really don't care. You understand the parameters.
A) leveling is well done and 4 players never reach max level.
B ) leveling is badly done and 400 players never reach max level.
Except this isn't true.
There is no data at all to suggest that any factor causes players to leave a game before reaching max level, other than the time it takes to reach max level.
As such, these two scenarios here are fanciful, as opposed to representative of anything real.
People will and do leave a game if it takes too long. EVE is a fantastic game, but it takes so long to get to the point where you are useful that very few new players make it.
In reference to WoW, the major thing you are overlooking is the fact that to almost every WoW player, it was their first MMORPG. Leveling was the journey to many in that game because they were experiencing an MMO for the first time and had no concept of what playing at the level cap would be like. People that had played MMO's before were leveling to the cap in two weeks (or less, 10 days was the fastest time to 60 iirc).
As I hinted at above, you are looking at things from your own perspective and assuming it is the only perspective.
Excellent point you brought up.... and as you can see I am late to the chat and or party.....why? Life, other priorities, etc. Many people are not simply going to be able to play 6 hours a day. I would say on avg most of my Guild mates play 3 hours a day... so by that math, they will take 2, possibly 3 months just to get to max level. That is not unreasonable for a lot of the player base. The content will be much more than rushing to max level and that is what is going to help with the longevity of the game.... not dragging out how long it takes to get to max character level.
Comments
Please.................
My understanding is that it is not horribly monotonous like GW2's, but it isn't exactly varied and exciting either. It isn't as fast as Archeage, but it can still be completed in days.
I don't think Steven made that as a hard cap that it would only take 45 days when he talked about it in the video. Even if your character was level 50 in 45 days that does mean you're wearing all legendary gear sitting on your throne looking down at the masses. I think the consensus of this thread is that artificial time gating is a bad idea. Also, not everyone who plays an MMO is for exploration. Maybe I want to just be a level 5 adventurer, but a master weaponsmith who makes the finest weapons in the land, and it will take me 18 months to get there. What's fun for you may not be fun for others. It's not fair for you to impose your definition of "fun" or "good MMO" on the community. Some people may just want to get to max level so they can do castle sieges each week.
Name another MMO that didn't a better job with leveling and character development. I am not an FF14 fanboy. I played it and didn't like the endgame raiding, so I stopped playing it. I played World of Warcraft for 15 years and am waiting for Alpha 2 for this game. However, I have been playing MMO games for 22 years.
Everquest, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, Horizons: Empires of Istaria, Dark Age of Camelot, SWTOR, Star Wars Galaxies, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Tubala Rasa, Eve Online, FF14, Age of Conan, just to name a few.
I literally got annoyed at leveling in FFXIV which sucks because I wanted to try their raids... Swtor leveling was more enjoyable... i still miss wild star...
I'll explain FFXIV leveling for anyone who is curious.
Fist, MSQ(Main Story Quest) is MANDATORY and will take you to cap on your first Job(class). You basically just walk around and talk to people, maybe do a dungeon or boss ever few levels. Easy stuff, but it takes about 1-2 days per expansion for the average person not watching the cutscenes.
If you don't do MSQ you can't access any of the end game. Other than that, you can grind "deep dungeons", dungeons, or shitty zones full of world events from old expansions(bozja). Every job lower than your highest gets a huge bonus to leveling xp so it's easy to cap alts.
Unless you watch the 6000 cutscenes and read all of the dialog, MSQ is a suck fest, but a straight path to cap. Apparently the story is good, but I if you just want to play a damn MMORPG just skip every cutscene and watch a lore video.
I have never had any fun leveling in FFXIV because it requires zero effort. The fun is all in doing the end game raids. I actually enjoyed leveling in FFXI and Lineage 2 because getting anything in those games required effort.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
Just fucking skip it, the raids are worth it. There are plenty of lore videos out there to watch while you are playing if you really want to know what is happening.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
Line][Age
Seriously, the only thing I liked about ff14 besides my dragon was the fact that people enjoyed that game.
It wasnt a game for me but the others made it fun, although I had minimal intetraction with others due to lack of challenge.
Ff14 should not be an example about mmorpgs. It's a story driven game. Not player driven.
You could level 6 characters in that game without repeating a single piece of content - yet each of them have developed stories, and provide adequate character development.
Never said it should.
Just look at it from this perspective first tho:
If somebody wants to rush to max level, he is just going to rush to max level and leveling taking longer will just be a very temporary inconvenience for him, but he is going to enjoy the rest of his time in the game (be it months or years).
If somebody wants to re-live that classic magic of have ''the journey'' and leveling is too easy and you're always overleveled making the story quests too easy, his whole experience is going to be ruined.
So making leveling more of a journey is the right choice because yes, you're not going to please everyone.
That's never going to happen.
But if you have two options
1. minor and temporary inconvenience for half of the players and a satisfying experience for the other half.
and
2. no minor and temporary inconvenience for half of the players but a ruined experience for the other half.
1 is obviously the right choice.
I understand it might be hard to understand for some, for the same reason PvE-focused content is hard to understand for me, a PVP-RPer, but the game dev's job is to make sure as many people are satisfied (in a healthy way) in the end, as possible, and yes, 1 is the right choice.
How do you define leveling content?
Maybe there's an agreed upon definition and I just wasn't aware/maybe my english is failing me but please let's clarify because to me, leveling content is all the content that is there exclusively/mostly to facilitate leveling.
That's a whole lot of quests, a massive part of the story, a lot of instances, a lot of NPCs, a lot of locations, not under 10% of the game content.
So yeah, maybe I misunderstood, let's clarify please.
Never said or expected it should.
I said it should be a main pillar of the game however, statement by which I stand for.
Yes, the hype trap is real, I agree it's bad, I'm not driven by it but I'm aware a huge part of the playerbase will be.
Yes but again we got two scenarios.
A) leveling is well done and 4 players never reach max level.
The hype trap will be real
Let me repeat, there has probably never been a game into which players will jump with such high expectations (especially since the decline of mmo-s seems to be accelerating, not slowing down).
Gaming in general is in decline with corporate greed and corruption growing in the industry, not weakening.
If the content is fun, people won't quit.
It's just that simple.
What makes it complicated for AOC is the hype trap, which will only grow, not lower.
I'm not familiar to Archage and the reason why few people quit while leveling could come down to a very large amount of factors.
I am however familiar with Vanilla World of Warcraft where leveling was the journey I'm talking about and yeah, we all know how well that mmo-rpg went. Legendary even to this day when people demanded Classic servers, one of the major reasons, noted in all essays on the matter being that leveling was the journey I talked about earlier.
Meanwhile, let's look at Retail. Leveling can be instant (I still got a free max level click on my account, never used it) and the game is in huge decline.
The fact is, each game is a story of its own and AOC's story will come down to how polished it is when it launches and people will realize that it is or not polished based on leveling content. This will decide this game's future.
If you want to define that content set using a different term, I really don't care. You understand the parameters. Except this isn't true.
There is no data at all to suggest that any factor causes players to leave a game before reaching max level, other than the time it takes to reach max level.
As such, these two scenarios here are fanciful, as opposed to representative of anything real.
People will and do leave a game if it takes too long. EVE is a fantastic game, but it takes so long to get to the point where you are useful that very few new players make it.
In reference to WoW, the major thing you are overlooking is the fact that to almost every WoW player, it was their first MMORPG. Leveling was the journey to many in that game because they were experiencing an MMO for the first time and had no concept of what playing at the level cap would be like. People that had played MMO's before were leveling to the cap in two weeks (or less, 10 days was the fastest time to 60 iirc).
As I hinted at above, you are looking at things from your own perspective and assuming it is the only perspective.