MMOs that you played?

[whybmonotacrab]

1 hour ago, Dasha W. Frost said:

About MMORPGs. Within last few years my husband and myself played: Tera Online (yikes), BDO, Guild Wars, Ragnarok Online, TES Online (started all over twice), D&D Online, and maybe something else that I don't even remember because not worth it.

But nothing ever, EVER took us so dearly and sincerely as Final Fantasy XIV. Most games like that are just bland or boring, but FF is... breathtaking. Not to mention that was the one and only MMORPG that I was willing to pay monthly subscription for. Totally worth it, every cent you spend, I think. The world is amazingly detailed, everything is very well made (not that you would expect something else from SqEnix), character customization is pretty decent. The world is living and breathing, creatures are interesting, mini games are entertaining; and most importantly: absolutely no toxic community. People are friendly and helpful, even doing dungeons in groups of 4 (meaning we two had to play with two other random people) was very, very nice. Peck, I even befriended a person I met in this game later in Discord, and now we're chatting every now and then outside the game :)

Then we decided to take a break and stopped for a while. But looking forward to go back into the game, refreshed and energized :)

A new DLC is going to be available shortly in the beginning of December, so we're very excited! We'll definitely get to play it again soon.

I love FFXIV but I do find it super hard to recommend to my friends. I don't think I would have made it through the base game if I didn't have a friend to laugh at the early game dialogue (and the cry at the later stuff) with. It's such a slog until you hit the pre-heavensward patch and the story and dungeons start getting really good. But it takes a good hundred or so hours to get to that point. 

 

 I also don't think its world is as good as ESO, GW2, or WoW. Even though I like FFXIV more than WoW, Classic Wow's zones just have such a thick atmosphere that I don't think most of FFXIV's zones have, and it doesn't reward your exploration as much as ESO or GW2. 

 

 Anyway, it is still an amazing game, it just comes with a few problems. What class/race are you playing btw?

[BaileyTW]

There was a short bit I played I think it's called Wildstar, some like mmo that was free and I'm poor so I decided to play it. Maybe it's good or maybe not, I mean aside from the writing and presentation which did suck, but I was too shy to actually interact much with the MMO part of this MMO and stopped playing it when playing it as a single player game wasn't feasible and I got bored.

 

With how much my friend group talks about FFXIV I basically play FFXIV. Yah my laptop suck and also I am a bit too poor to play any subscription-based game so I ain't touching it.

 

[Dasha W. Frost]

@whybmonotacrab yeaaaah, the story in FFXIV is something that I could not grasp very well, something feels lacking in it, for sure. That's what a lot of people are saying, and I agree with that... But the rest of the game is just spectacular (to me anyway). I think I'm very impressed with overall style of it, and how the world is created, and designs of the creatures in it that the main story is not that important to me, LOL. It's fun to travel around though and explore the world, do whatever you feel like, and there's enough freedom for the players when it comes down to destinations and activities. We've been doing almost all available side quests for our character levels until nothing new was left, and it was quite an adventure, indeed :) Of course, we always played together side by side, so that for sure was a good factor contributing to overall fun from playing.

 

17 hours ago, whybmonotacrab said:

What class/race are you playing btw?

I am a Lalafell Paladin and also Fisher, Botanist and Culinarian for extra activities.

Was also considering to switch to Dark Knight or Samurai later on, but not sure just yet.

[whybmonotacrab]

11 hours ago, Dasha W. Frost said:

I am a Lalafell Paladin and also Fisher, Botanist and Culinarian for extra activities.

Was also considering to switch to Dark Knight or Samurai later on, but not sure just yet.

Nice! I'm Au Ra White Mage. Don't usually go healers in these types of games, but playing a healer in FFXIV has been one of the most fulfilling experiences in an mmo. It's nowhere near as difficult as I thought it would be, but it feels so satisfying helping my team through a tricky dungeon - especially since WHM is very good at dealing damage too. I've definitely been tempted to roll a Lalafel though since I feel like every single one of my favourite characters have been one (Tataru is amazing).

 

 The story does get straight up phenomenal. Like, we're talking some of the best writing in gaming levels of awesome, it just takes a loooong time to get there. It feels like you're watching 3 seasons of mediocre tv before it gets really good. How far in are you btw?

[Bucket]

Extensively - I've played Everquest Online Adventures for PS2, Final Fantasy 11 for PC, and Star Trek Online for PC. I've tinkered with Guild Wars, Everquest, Meridian 59, PlaneShift, Runescape, Neverwinter, Ragnarok Online, and probably a bunch more that I don't remember.

 

I currently only play Star Trek though it's been a pointless time sink for years now. I don't see myself getting into another MMO once that one inevitably shuts down.

[lazygecko]

The only MMOs I have played with some degree of regularity are WoW and ESO.

WoW has been in a real dire state for a while now. Ever since the success of Legion they've really doubled down on the whole "borrowed power" design philosophy where each successive expansion is built around its own self-contained power progression systems, which are then tossed into the trash never to be seen again when it's time for the next expansion and its own little contained skinner box. As a result the game feels more ephemeral than it has ever been before (especially with how these systems manifest as class skills/abilities that you slot into your combat rotation, and you know they're just going to disappear within 2 years or so).

This is also on top of another similar long term issue the game has had with its design where each expansion just funnels you into its own narrow set of content, rendering the previous expansion's content irrelevant and really fuels the infamous "content drought" between updates that has been a big reason behind the bleeding subscriber base. People keep saying WoW has a big head start over the competition with the sheer amount of content added since launch, but that hardly matters when Blizzard is only interested in keeping you exclusively engaged with a mere fraction of said content.

 

ESO is a lot better on that front. The way they've designed it is that every part of the world has a unique armor bonus set, cosmetic reward, crafting/trading items, unlockable skill line, etc behind it. It will always be relevant to the playerbase and most of the world will always be populated by people doing stuff in it. A new expansion or DLC does not invalidate anything they added previously.

Unfortunately I am not really a fan of the game's combat loop. It offers a lot of open ended flexibility in how you want to build and customize your character/class, but at the end of the day if you want to play effectively you're going to converge around a pretty small set of homogenous playstyles. The gameplay being structured around constantly bar-switching between 2 sets of 5 different hotkeys which I find aggravating (and I think there's some latency issues with the bar switch mechanic which really throws me off and frustrates me sometimes). A lot of those limited set of bars are also going to be taken up short duration buffs/debuffs and DoTs that you constantly have to maintain upkeep on as well which I just find to be a frustrating chore rather than engaging gameplay (I know some WoW classes/specs effectively work the same way, but I think there's much more variety there in finding a spec that suits your tastes). Actually pretty similar reason to why I dislike playing Doom Eternal.

[Lizardcommando]

The only one I played was some shitty Pirates of the Carribean MMO with my brother. We spent most of the time trolling random players. We ended up giving up when we found out you had to pay real money to play the storyline missions. Fuck that noise.

[june gloom]

ESO has eaten my brain. It's all I think about.

[Dasha W. Frost]

On 11/28/2021 at 12:31 AM, whybmonotacrab said:

Nice! I'm Au Ra White Mage. Don't usually go healers in these types of games, but playing a healer in FFXIV has been one of the most fulfilling experiences in an mmo. It's nowhere near as difficult as I thought it would be, but it feels so satisfying helping my team through a tricky dungeon - especially since WHM is very good at dealing damage too. I've definitely been tempted to roll a Lalafel though since I feel like every single one of my favourite characters have been one (Tataru is amazing).

 

 The story does get straight up phenomenal. Like, we're talking some of the best writing in gaming levels of awesome, it just takes a loooong time to get there. It feels like you're watching 3 seasons of mediocre tv before it gets really good. How far in are you btw?

 

Cool! Au Ra people looked very interesting to me; I was even considering to choose one to play as, but then decided to become a cute tiny Lalafell instead, LOL. When I play RPGs, I tend to choose tankier character builds almost all the time, and I really like swords but not quite keen on axes and other stuff, so I basically had to choose Gladiator as a starting class. But I'm sure very happy about it :) It sure is very nice though that you can choose any other job/switch class later on in the game if you so desire. 

And yeah, I agree with you: Tataru is incredibly cute!

 

I'm gonna be looking forward to get to the juiciest parts of the story then. I think we still got a loooong ways to get there though... I'm Lv.37 right now. Mostly I've been trying to get my Culinarian and Fisher up the last time I played, so I don't even remember where exactly in the main story I am, LOL...