Rift vs FFXIV

[quannum]

is this the new ffxi vs wow?

the times, they are a-changin

we went from "which is better ffxi or wow?" to
"which is worse ffxiv or rift?"

[Maaglin]

Play neither. Enjoy sunlight. Wait for Diablo 3. Never see the sun again.

Correct answer.

[niwaar]

*10 instances (regular versions for leveling and expert versions which unlock their 2nd half at 50)
*5-man expert Rifts
*10-man open world raid Rifts
*2 separate 20-man raids
*4 PVP instanced maps
*32 classes divided into 4 archetypes (not counting 4 pvp classes)
*11 open world zones that actually look different
*Large scale zone events
*Achievements for completionists
*Artifact hunting
*Appearance tabs (coming in a week)
*Jumping and swimming (a few underwater quests also)

Lol 32 classes? No, just plain no. There are 32 different souls. There are 4 different classes with 32 different trees to combine. This is the fallacy that Trion wants you to keep believing. Yes you can "customize" a tiny bit with soul combinations, but they are not classes.

As for XIV, there is no real comparison between the two games. Yes, XIV looks better in everything that is character models. However, that is ALL it has on any other MMO. Not just Rift.

[Nevex]

When in doubt, pick the game with the "Final Fantasy" name on it. It's almost always better than everything else.
At least it has always worked for me.

[Kuya]

lol

This thread is great

[Kipling]

I didn't like either. Took about a week and a half of XIV before the uninstall, about 3 days for Rift.

Waiting for TERA NA launch.

[Bardlet]

I played WoW and quit not long after Cataclysm released (it didn't help that my original guild quit right before Cata, and then the guild I joined all quit for Rift). Decided to give Rift a try, played the 30 day trial... and turned off subscription after that. Honestly, it doesn't do anything genre-breaking compared to WoW; it's just slightly different classes/rules/world with the basic MMO game play. It was pretty, but I wasn't impressed, honestly.

You couldn't pay me to touch XIV currently. SE effed up big time with it, and while I am pleased to see them actively trying to fix everything that's "wrong" with it, it still is only like half of an MMO.

Been playing Wakfu off and on, but after the latest NA wipe, the devs didn't fix the biggest problem in the game right now. The entire server is basically circle-jerking around 3 groups of mobs on a timed (3 min, I think) spawn. If I wanted to camp things, I'd play FFXI again.

So... I reactivated my FFXI account. Talk about going full circle.

Basically just marking time until D3 comes out, or until SW comes out and my boyfriend decides he wants to play MMOs again.

[altwight]

Uh.. No. You're wrong and here's why. I hate WoW. Fucking despise it couldn't get past level 20 because it drove me insane.

Rift on the other hand, I was easily able to get to level 50 in a month and have fun with it the whole time. No grinding, just questing. Never had to grind once. The reason I was able to get farther was probably the role swapping(think being able to change classes on the fly like in FFXI except you had to stay within your class, rogues, warriors, clerics, or mages).

But after I got to 50 pretty much the only thing to do was expert dungeons and if you're a DPS rogue no one wants you(cue THF).

There are no good MMOs right now. Play something else and wait for Tera or wait for FFXIV to good.

Sorry I enjoy Rift too but the bold made me cringe. Grinding is doing something repetitive by definition. Questing to 50 is a grind. There is no MMO out as of now that doesn't involve a grind. Guild Wars II looks very promising when it comes to doing away with "grinding" but saying there's a difference in mindlessly killing things until level 50 and mindless doing repetitive quests until 50 are the same thing. For example: "Go kill 10 monsters for 10 of their horns that have a 1/3 drop rate." aka go kill 30 mobs come back and get a reward. The reward forces players to believe they're actually accomplishing something when in fact they're simply grinding.

Players who argue about grinding are always guaranteed to not have a clue what they're talking about.

On the topic of Rift vs XIV, play Rift. If you enjoyed WoW the you will enjoy Rift. People say it's a downgrade from WoW but the playerbase is slightly better as it doesn't have as big of an elitest crew with nine 85s thinking they're hot shit.

Rift needs a bit of touching up but judging by Trion's quickfast hotfixes and feedback support it'll be pretty golden in no time at all.

[Lucavi]

Grinding in every MMO. Nobody needs to sugarcoat any particular MMO to try to finagle around this essential fact. Shit, you might as well say there's grinding involved in every RPG, period. I grinded plenty in every FF, DQ, WA, and every other RPG I played. CRPGs count too - who didn't grind in Diablo II? I even tried to grind in the Dungeon Siege series.

Can you make the grind fun? That's the only relevant question, aside from "can you make the grind invisible"? which more often than not, you cannot.

[Kurokikaze]

Getting exp doesn't just have to be pulling a mob to camp, killing it and repeating ad nauseum. You could do quests that don't even require you to kill mobs, anything else to give the illusion that you're not grinding. Do some mid-range dungeons; the mobs would reward some decent (not too high) SP while bosses give more. Add in some quests that require killing the boss in a certain dungeon for mass SP rewards.

I mean really... Other games do it and they do it well. Would it be so bad for this game to learn from its peers?

Currently we have: grind the same set of leves from 22 to 50 or grind mobs because quests don't give us SP and Guild Tasks ranks are too low.

Again, it's all about making it seem like you're not really grinding. You could be having fun doing random shit and all of a sudden "oh hey I got 2 ranks." This in itself shortens the grind without touching the exp/sp tables (which would be a quick SE fix).

Thats where FFXIV needs to be in terms of SP acquisition.

I posted this on 14 forums but its relevant here I suppose. Bolded part.

[Alderaan]

I posted this on 14 forums but its relevant here I suppose. Bolded part.

This is the point i always try and make with XIV players, but as we all know they're too stubborn most of the time, so thank you.

I can honestly say that while out questing, or trying to close Rifts, or running dungeons with my group in Rift, that exp gain never entered my mind. I'd be out doing these things and all of a sudden realize that i'm 2 levels higher than when i started. Sure the "grind' was there, as with any MMO, but hell if i realized it. That's the difference.

When you're more focused on the amount of exp or SP you're getting, than the actual task you're asked to complete, then there's a problem with content. SE and many Korean devs have not learned this yet, although i hear TERA may have. The focus needs to be on content, which is expensive to create. I'm still debating whether SE wasn't willing to spend the 50mil it takes to create a content rich MMO or they were so out of the loop of what constitutes content that they didn't know. I'm still debating.

I'll say this though; If XIV had Rifts content and combat mechanics along with XI's class system, then i'd have found my MMO for the next 10 years. Someone make this happen.

[Cyn]

XI's class system? The one with almost 0 customization and where you could only change classes in town? If anything it's the other way around. XI had a great combat system and content with a somewhat bland class system. (To be fair, XI's class system was ahead of the curve when it came out, but when Trion gets the souls in Rift balanced more, Rift will have the best class system I've seen)

[Alderaan]

I should have been more specific. I absolutely loved the classes themselves in XI, along with the subclass system. Trion has taken that a step further with allowing you to pretty much spec into 3 at one time. The combat system of building TP and using 1 weapons skill, i didn't enjoy that much. While the idea was there for mixing and matching skills in XIV, the problem i had was that i really didn't like any of the classes. I actually prefer the way Trion went about splitting up the 4 archetypes and not allowing skills outside of those to be mixed.

[Lucavi]

I posted this on 14 forums but its relevant here I suppose. Bolded part.

Stop copying my shit, Kuro. :3

Edit: The class system in XI was fine for its limited level of depth (as always, the player-base itself deepened the level of depth that the game offered), but it was never the "abilities" (all 5 of them anyway) that made me happy while playing the game. It was simply the fact that I was playing traditional FF classes in a MMO. Nothing more. Nothing less.

You really break the job system down, especially in the old days with melees having roughly 3 abilities to use at a given time, a handful of useless WSes that boiled down to really only using 1-2, long-ass cooldowns on even the simplest of abilities and a 2-hour system designed not to use the abilities, but to save them for a "critical moment" that may never arrive, and you had a pretty slow and shallow design that even the developers couldn't really keep track of. I use blink tanking as an example of players themselves expanding on shallow design and the devs begrudgingly and eventually expanding to incorporate the unofficial style into game design.

The game was slow, and while that's just what MMOs were back in the day (God love em), that's not what the future of MMOs need. XIV is "faster" in the sense of attacks, but the combat feels eerily similar, especially the pacing of the fights. I may be swinging my lance more in XIV compared to XI (and even that's debatable when you get to end-game), but I'm still killing things solo at around the same speed, given the difficulty of the mobs compared to my character.

I'd have to give Rift the title over XIV as they stand right now. One came out of the gate polished and tried to refine the tried-and-true modern MMO standard to a shine, while putting their own innovative spins on the genre (which, of course will burn out quickly, but an attempt is an attempt). The other was horribly unpolished, delivered on maybe 15% of the original promises and designs, had terrible community support at launch, and had to switch its design model (for payment) within 2 months.

If we're talking potential, then I like XIV's "potential", based on what I'd like to play in the future. If we're talking believability, then I have to go with Rift, because I have absolutely no faith in SE to actually turn the ship around. All we can reliably use to predict the future is the past, and past evidence shows that SE is horrible at taking advice from anyone outside of themselves. You need to have not only thick skin, but also open ears to survive and thrive as a MMO company. SE only listened to themselves when designing XIV, despite giving all of us some nice, stiff Japanese lip-service while showing us screenshots of the European Pre-Alpha and concept designs.

[tol]

I feel like the MMO genre in general right now is failing hard and I don't see some savior of a game on the horizon.

[Lucavi]

I had a post on the Rift forums about that. I feel the same way.

[Kipling]

I feel like the MMO genre in general right now is failing hard and I don't see some savior of a game on the horizon.

I would agree. However, even though I haven't played it yet (Though I hope to, soon) I really feel like TERA could definitely be that game.

[Lucavi]

TERA's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for a MMO hybrid of Dungeon Siege, Diablo II/III, WoW-Rift, AoC, and GW/GW2. It probably sounds complicated, and it kinda is. The targeting in TERA sounds good, but the visuals don't do it for me, nor does the same focus on progression. Its not like every MMO out there, sure, but it still follows suit, and I'm ready to be taken in another direction.

[tol]

I would agree. However, even though I haven't played it yet (Though I hope to, soon) I really feel like TERA could definitely be that game.

I think that TERA has huge potential, and having played K-TERA up to the mid-high 30's I can say that it's definitely a fun game. They sound like they have EPIC plans for the future which is great. My biggest concern (and maybe the concern lies within myself) is that I will become bored of anything thrown at me in the MMO-sphere because I've been playing since EQ in '99. Its mostly novelty mechanics or some throwaway shit that makes each subsequent MMO appear a little different but I just think I may have grown "out" of MMORPG's. That makes me sad, I think the genre needs a lot of innovation.

I just see a lot of MMO devs throw around "groundbreaking" and "innovative" as terms to describe what they are trying to achieve with their next-gen xxxyyy MMO but it's really just re-hashed, copy pasta, cleverly disguised tried and true mechanics/lore/achievements/blahblah that every MMO since the birth of the genre has applied. :/

[Kurokikaze]

I think the only game that has a shot really is whatever Blizzard is working on. They have the huge fanbase and the experience needed to succeed in the MMO industry imo.

TERA, Blade and Souls and possibly ArcheAge have some potential. TERA more than the others of course just due to the combat system.