The only MMO I've played is WoW, how different is this?

[Pike]

I'll be jumping in for the first time very shortly and seeing as I never played FFXI or anything I have no idea what I'm in for. What should I know? Any major differences between this and WoW?

[Loony BoB]

One character can do pretty much everything, you just switch weapons. I'm told this game is a lot more WoW-styled than FFXI & FFXIV 1.x. I haven't played too much WoW myself, though, so it's hard for me to judge... but going by what I hear from other players, the community of FFXIV tends to be a little more, uh... educated? Friendly? Dunno, as I say, it's all hearsay for me.

[theundeadhero]

The word you're looking for is casual. The players and environment are far more casual.

Took me a bit adjusting to using a controller instead of a keyboard, but after that I was fine. It did remind me a lot of my FFXI days though.

[Carl the Llama]

I sincerely hope that XIV doesn't turn casual, thats one of the things that ruined wow in my opinion.

As for how much like WoW XIV is I can say the gameplay is reasonably similar but its the final fantasy elements that make it that much better, the scenery is just simply gorgeous (obviously) the character creation is very detailed (though a customisation for Miqo'te ears would be nice) and on the whole since the community is all about testing the game we have yet to pick up the irritating morons who are completely selfish and generally ruin the gaming experience for others trolls, so The Game (hehe) as soon as it goes live will be the best it will ever be so I feel now is the best time to play.

[Pike]

I actually want something casual.

After months of nonstop raiding in TBC and WotLK I got myself all hardcore'd out and years later I still am. Eff that. I don't ever want to do MMO endgame again.

[Loony BoB]

I dunno about this casual/hardcore nonsense. Fat Chocobos are a bunch of happy chatty people who do what we want to do when we want to do it. We do endgame, but we're not hardcore at all. Some of us have a load of special weapons, some of us have none (hi). So long as we enjoy partying up and doing whatever, we're happy. :D Number one rule: Have Fun.

[Aulayna]

It's, on a basic level, WoW in Final Fantasy.

The combat is the WoW affair of using abilities, moving out of circles on the ground and standing still and pressing buttons based on your buffs/debuffs.

The main difference between this and WoW is that one character can do everything. So you don't need to make an alt when you want to try out a different class - you'll still start over from level 1 but it means you don't lose precious things like titles, cheevos, soulbound vanity items like you would in WoW if you made an alt.

There's also a few side-quest style ways of levelling such as the Hunting Log (go kill X of certain kinds of mobs), LeveQuests (basically daily quests, but more fun), GuildHeists (group dailies), dungeons - and you also can chain kills together of mobs your own level and get increasing XP until the timer runs out.

The only major difference is that there aren't Graveyards. So if you die you go to your Return point (which basically is your Hearthstone location) - that can be a major kick in the teeth sometimes. Oh and it's not a seamless world either. Every zone is effectively "instanced" so there's no big continents like Kalimdor that you can spend 20 minutes flying from one end to the other of without a loading screen as each zone has a mini-loading screen.

The crafting system is a little bit more indepth too.

But for the most part, mechanics wise, it's pretty much WoW, sans-LFG, in a prettier world. As I said in my BETA impressions thing, not much about it is particularly revolutionary but what's there is generally polished enough that it's enjoyable.

Honestly I think you'd enjoy it, it's like WoW but without the massive focus on endgame at the expense of everything else.

[Pike]

Honestly I think you'd enjoy it, it's like WoW but without the massive focus on endgame at the expense of everything else.

Good.

And yes I've been playing it and enjoying it :D

[Loony BoB]

The only major difference is that there aren't Graveyards. So if you die you go to your Return point (which basically is your Hearthstone location) - that can be a major kick in the teeth sometimes. Oh and it's not a seamless world either.
It should be noted that it was pretty rare in 1.x that I had to wait that long for a raise. Also, when in dungeons, you return to the start of the dungeon, not your home point.

As for how much focus there will be on endgame, it's entirely down to the person. Some people will be very endgame focused while others will just enjoy doing pretty much anything else. I know people of both kinds, but we all get along so it's all good.

[Madame Adequate]

>people claim FFXIV is a more casual experience
>at level 20 Ifrit will fucking murder you

[Bierhumpen_Kukki]

>people claim FFXIV is a more casual experience
>at level 20 Ifrit will smurfing murder you

ifrit only did that once per party from what i experienced and after that he usually gets his ass kicked.^^

[MontyPython]

I don't know about this casual mumbo jumbo but this game is pretty sexy.

[comma]

We do endgameCan you explain what this means? I know there is an ending, apparently, but I don't get what you mean.

This is the first MMORPG I'm playing aside from Guild Wars 1 and Ragnarok Online (which were a long time ago), so I don't really know the MMO slang.

[Pike]

"Endgame" is a term for the types of things you do once you reach max level. It usually refers to things like raiding or PvP.

[comma]

Thanks.

I remember PvP in Guild Wars. Was scary. How do you think PvP will fare in ARR? Are we talking parties vs. parties?

[Bierhumpen_Kukki]

Thanks.

I remember PvP in Guild Wars. Was scary. How do you think PvP will fare in ARR? Are we talking parties vs. parties?

according to rumors there will be party pvp as well as 1 on 1 duels. but im wondering how many members the parties will have. also...isnt cnj/whm kinda screwed for pvp? i have trouble imagining how that would work especially against a tank like gld/pld or mrd/war. :/

[comma]

That's what I'm saying. How would 1v1 work? Gladiators would probably win the most because they're the most self sufficient. I could see PvP working better with parties.

[Elpizo]

"Endgame" is a term for the types of things you do once you reach max level. It usually refers to things like raiding or PvP.

I only hope endgame will be a bit more accessible than it is in WoW. I played WoW for a while during the Cataclysm expansion, and while I got up to lv 85 and did every solo quest en dungeon there was to do, I never got into any raids, save for 2 vanilla ones at lv 85, so I practically solo'd them. Endgame in WoW is, for the lack of a better term, scary for MMO newcomers, if mostly because the community is not the best. Make a mistake and see how you get treated. Not my idea of fun.

That, and the concept of the raids just didn't seem so very appealing. "Here you have these dungeons you have to beat with this many people. Here are your bosses, and you have to do these strategies to beat them. Make one mistake and you wipe. Repeat until you eventually win." That just doesn't sound fun at all. It's very newcomer and non-hardcore-uber-expert player unfriendly, causing a lot of player to miss out on the conclusions to storylines they might want to see. I never got why raids can't allow some margin of error. It's not as if in single-player RPGs the games punish you for one mistake, part of the fun (and challenge) is coming back from a bad situation and win, or coming up with new strategies to beat a boss just for fun.

In WoW raids, to me it always sounded like: "This strategy, and nothing else or you wipe. No mistakes, or you wipe. Repeat over and over in the same way over and over just so you have a chance for that 0.3% drop of elitist gear you need to beat the next boss that you have to use this strategy for and no other, with no mistakes or you wipe, and so on and so on..." You pretty much had to prepare by reading up strategies and boss details in order to win. It sounds so tedious and boring. Simply going in, with no knowledge of what was ahead of you, was impossible, even though overcoming unexpected challenges is part of the fun in any good RPG.

So when it comes to that, I'm hoping XIV will do things differently. I'm not sure they will, though. I haven't played any other MMO aside from WoW, so people are free to correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like WoW's raids design is pretty normal for MMO's. If that's true, chances are XIV will do it like this as well. Which pretty much means no endgame for me.

[Del Murder]

In WoW raids, to me it always sounded like: "This strategy, and nothing else or you wipe. No mistakes, or you wipe. Repeat over and over in the same way over and over just so you have a chance for that 0.3% drop of elitist gear you need to beat the next boss that you have to use this strategy for and no other, with no mistakes or you wipe, and so on and so on..." You pretty much had to prepare by reading up strategies and boss details in order to win. It sounds so tedious and boring. Simply going in, with no knowledge of what was ahead of you, was impossible, even though overcoming unexpected challenges is part of the fun in any good RPG.

So when it comes to that, I'm hoping XIV will do things differently. I'm not sure they will, though. I haven't played any other MMO aside from WoW, so people are free to correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like WoW's raids design is pretty normal for MMO's. If that's true, chances are XIV will do it like this as well. Which pretty much means no endgame for me.
Yeah, don't bet on it being much different. Outside the box thinking doesn't seems to be in SE's plans for this MMO. I hope to be proven wrong because I hate that trout too.

[Ouch!]

You'll be disappointed if you think you'll ever be able to run a dungeon or a primal battle without any consideration for strategy beforehand and walk out victorious. Each dungeon and boss requires a specific strategy that you're not going to be able to figure out on the fly. Certain attacks are avoided or mitigated with certain action, and the only way to really learn is either trial and error or doing some research beforehand (you're going to have a bad time against phase three of Garuda if you don't know how to avoid the tornados on the battle field when she summons the Southern Wind, for example).

That said, the punishment for failure isn't as brutal in FFXIV as it was in FFXI (timing out of Dynamis, for example, meant you couldn't re-enter for three more days). If you lose to Ifrit, you can keep trying with the same key item until you win. Drop rates are also considerably better than in some other games (notably FFXI which was notoriously stingy). Aside from higher drop rates, in primal battles like Ifrit they introduced Infernal Totems which are an item with a slightly higher drop rate than the other items which can be exchanged in groups of ten for one of the Ifrit weapons of your choice. Yoshi-P cited the existence of more of such items since he wants the difficulty to be in the battle itself and not in the luck-of-the-draw piss-poor drop rates. Primal fights in 1.x also granted every person their own loot pool.

However, from the descriptions they've given us for The Crystal Tower and The Great Labyrinth of Bahamut (the two new 24-man dungeons introduced in ARR), it does sound like there will be barriers to entry for upper-tier endgame content. Based on Yoshi-P's statements, it sounds as though The Crystal Tower will be very difficult to tackle if you don't have weapons from primal battles, and The Great Labyrinth of Bahamut will be equally difficult if you don't have gear rewards from The Crystal Tower. That said, it does appear that there will be crafted gear that bridges the gap between tiers of dungeon gear, so that should help some. It does sound like those two dungeons at least will not be very pick-up-and-go friendly.

On the other hand, Yoshi-P has also said that they will be monitoring completion rates of various contents by the community at large, and after a period of time, some content may be made less difficult so that larger groups of people get to experience it. The hardcore players who keep up on the best gear and the latest strategies will get the chance to run the content and be the first to complete it and get the rewards, and then when new content is created and they move on to it, older content will be eased for everyone else who hasn't been able to make a run at it yet.

[Carl the Llama]

"Endgame" is a term for the types of things you do once you reach max level. It usually refers to things like raiding or PvP.

I only hope endgame will be a bit more accessible than it is in WoW. I played WoW for a while during the Cataclysm expansion, and while I got up to lv 85 and did every solo quest en dungeon there was to do, I never got into any raids, save for 2 vanilla ones at lv 85, so I practically solo'd them. Endgame in WoW is, for the lack of a better term, scary for MMO newcomers, if mostly because the community is not the best. Make a mistake and see how you get treated. Not my idea of fun.

That, and the concept of the raids just didn't seem so very appealing. "Here you have these dungeons you have to beat with this many people. Here are your bosses, and you have to do these strategies to beat them. Make one mistake and you wipe. Repeat until you eventually win." That just doesn't sound fun at all. It's very newcomer and non-hardcore-uber-expert player unfriendly, causing a lot of player to miss out on the conclusions to storylines they might want to see. I never got why raids can't allow some margin of error. It's not as if in single-player RPGs the games punish you for one mistake, part of the fun (and challenge) is coming back from a bad situation and win, or coming up with new strategies to beat a boss just for fun.

In WoW raids, to me it always sounded like: "This strategy, and nothing else or you wipe. No mistakes, or you wipe. Repeat over and over in the same way over and over just so you have a chance for that 0.3% drop of elitist gear you need to beat the next boss that you have to use this strategy for and no other, with no mistakes or you wipe, and so on and so on..." You pretty much had to prepare by reading up strategies and boss details in order to win. It sounds so tedious and boring. Simply going in, with no knowledge of what was ahead of you, was impossible, even though overcoming unexpected challenges is part of the fun in any good RPG.

So when it comes to that, I'm hoping XIV will do things differently. I'm not sure they will, though. I haven't played any other MMO aside from WoW, so people are free to correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like WoW's raids design is pretty normal for MMO's. If that's true, chances are XIV will do it like this as well. Which pretty much means no endgame for me.

Hmm... it seems to me you were majorly unfortunate when it came to raiding in WoW, I started in vanilla and never experienced the trouble your mentioning, and I never read a single strategy till Mists of Pandaria, and only then because I was Tanking and Raid Leader, I would learn the tactics, then I would pass that knowledge on through mumble/teamspeak and sure it would take us a number of tries to get it right, but people in my guild/raid never seemed to have a problem with wipes.

Really the hardest boss I ever fought on WoW was Elegon... cant tell you how many times I wiped on that bastard!

[theundeadhero]

I wiped on the dogs when you go in more than any other boss. Twice as many times as Elegon. It's all different for different people.

[Bierhumpen_Kukki]

endgame could also mean, you focus on crafting or gathering to make money. there are so many possibilities and enough classes to lvl that no one should be bored for at least one or two years. well...there are of course ppl that already have every class at 50 so all they have left is to enjoy all the new content.

[Loony BoB]

It will probably have "do it this way or wind up dead" kind of stuff, sadly, but I've seen people do things differently and still win on YouTube... every new strategy has to be invented at some point.

If you don't like doing dungeons for endgame, though, I really wouldn't worry. Fat Chocobos spent most of their fighting time doing random high level quests, grinding, helping each other out on various party-required quests, stuff like that. We made our own fun, basically.