It’s August, which means Gamescom 2012 is in full swing in Germany, showcasing a ton of different games across genres. Once again I wish I could attend, but that would involve having money, and I spend all of that on MMO subscription fees.

There are four MMORPGs I am currently following, so I’ve been checking out the news for each. What are they? Well:

1) Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn — longterm readers of this blog will know my thoughts and feelings on FFXIV 1.0 and what was wrong with the game on release. I’ve actually been playing it again recently, and there have been many changes for the better. But it is still not a good game; I can’t pick it up and feel like I’m using my time wisely. Nor do I feel like I’m having any degree of fun with it. More on this in a moment.

2) RIFT: Storm Legion — I’ve gone on record several times as saying that Trion have really upped the ante in terms of the sheer amount of product updates they’ve pushed out for RIFT over the last year and a half. I don’t play the game as much anymore, and there are reasons for that, but my hat is well and truly off to them if they can deliver something impressive for their first full expansion.

3) The Secret World — I’ve got to admit, my time in The Secret World is almost at an end. The game has high quality content, but there simply isn’t enough of it to warrant my subscription fee. Sure £12 a month isn’t a lot of money, but I feel like I’m grinding in TSW now, and I just don’t want to grind in games anymore: I could be playing something else, something more fun, instead.

4) Guild Wars 2 — GW2 doesn’t have much of a presence at Gamescom simply because the game launches in a week (or 10 days if you didn’t prepurchase) and the ANet team are actively working on polish. Therefore there has been little news from Gamescom about the game.

Opening Thoughts

I’ve never really enjoyed FFXIV 1.0. Through alpha, beta, and release, the one criticism that Saikyo and myself constantly come up with is that the game really isn’t fun. Sure, it’s beautiful — if you like various barren landscapes full of different shades of rock — but in terms of actual gameplay the only thing that it had going for it was the ability-combining Armoury system. A system that, I’ll hasten to add, The Secret World does better and right.

In fact, the only thing FFXIV 1.0 has going for it currently is sheer graphical fidelity. TSW does aesthetic, atmosphere, game systems, levelling… everything else, better!

But news and information is starting to trickle out of Gamescom about FFXIV 2.0, and it is… well… I don’t want to say “intriguing” because I’m fully expecting another letdown thanks to crazy Japanese design choices. I’m just keeping an eye on it.

You see, FFXIV 2.0 is rooted in “2012 gaming” according to its developers, who have said that they basically told their dev team to go and play other MMOs and then come back to create a “master document” of features good MMOs have.

This is interesting to me, and I’d absolutely love to get my hands on (a translated version of) that list.

My List

I’ll be honest: I’ve seen some of the phone-shot footage of FFXIV 2.0 and I can state that it clearly looks more interesting than 1.0 ever did, both in terms of the new graphics engine and UI, but also in the hints about combat and systems in the game, even if we’ve got very little info at this point.

But what I’m not so taken on is what I call the “MMO Legacy” systems: holy trinity, quest-based levelling, hotbar bloat, etc.

The so-called “second generation” MMOs — World of Warcraft, RIFT, Age of Conan, Aion, and pretty much every MMO that’s tried to carve out a piece of WoW’s pie — share many common features. Some of them I still believe there is a place for. Some, now, I perceive as very “last generation”. Especially in light of how GW2 does certain things.

I don’t want to hold GW2 up on a pedestal as perfection. It isn’t. Nothing is. But it does a lot of things right, including:

Cooperative Gameplay:

In the 105 hours worth of GW2 I’ve played in the various betas and stress tests (according to Raptr, which admittedly tracks time I spend patching/updating the game too) there hasn’t been a single instance where I’ve been pissed off seeing another player. In fact, while GW2 is very playable on your own, just running around the playfield with someone is great fun. Everyone who helps kill a mob gets XP, regardless of if they’re in the same party or not.

I don’t believe there is anything wrong with party-based gameplay, by the way. I just think that concepts of “kill stealing” and “node stealing” need to disappear out of the window, quickly followed by ideas of “griefing” and “trolling” — one can but wish.

FFXIV‘s “guildleve” content had potential in the sense that the mobs for these quests were instanced to members of the party. It is yet to be seen how a focus on “quest-based” levelling in FFXIV 2.0 will change things up, especially since I assume they’re still going to keep the Armoury System where you level up all your jobs individually. How is that going to work with traditional MMO quests? Are they going to work on a TSW-timer system where you can repeat a quest after a cooldown? It’s the only way I can think of it working, just as it is the only way it could work in TSW — especially given that game’s lack of content.

TERA, for all it’s awesome combat and visuals, was a sore letdown for me by its “traditional” questing that prompted killstealing. FFXIV needs to take a look at the failings of that game and others and move past that to a more GW2-style.

At the end of the day, Massively Multiplayer games should be massive and multiplayer: not hundreds of people in the same area doing identical activities all on their own. Hot-joinable groups like RIFT has, or no groups necessary at all like GW2 — perhaps with scaling objectives — need to be the future.

Dynamic Levelling

I get it: not everyone likes levelling. For me, it’s the primary purpose for playing MMOs and, along with Story, RPGs in general. I love that “ding” feeling upon level up. So I like my levelling experience to be fun and engaging, and no game has done that as well as The Secret World and Guild Wars 2 — albeit in totally different ways.

Consider these differences: a mission-based structure, heavily reliant on narrative, that can tell big stories across huge distances; and the smaller dynamic event style of content, where almost any area on the map could have something happening.

Both styles have their merits. Both get you moving, exploring. GW2‘s style is more suited to short burst play if that’s your thing — though the bigger “meta events” are there for people who want to follow a grander story through a zone too. TSW‘s style is more involved, but cleverly hides any kind of grind behind several tiers of content.

My biggest fear for FFXIV 2.0 is that it will go back to that familiar “fill the quest log” style of hub-based gameplay that WoW and RIFT rely on.

Content Variety

PvE. sPvP. WvW. Minigames. Crafting. Jumping puzzles. Achievement hunting. Personal story. Vistas. Points of Interest. Probably half of the content you could spend your time doing in GW2 isn’t about levelling. It’s about fun. Exploring. Finding stuff. Looking at the views.

This is something that GW2 does hands down better than any other MMO out there. Sure, WoW may be trying to diversify it’s playerbase with pet battles and even Harvest Moon/Farmville-style farming in Mists of Pandaria, but so very few modern MMOs offer the kind of varied content that GW2 does.

Interestingly enough, FFXIV 1.0 has quite a lot of different content styles: Hamlet Defences, Chocobo Escorts, Grand Company Quests, Story Quests, Job Quests… But they are pretty much all there because FFXIV 1.0 had no other way to level and lacked any real variety of content when it launched.

TSW on the other hand has… errr… Well, what does it have? It has missions. It has PvP. It has Lore and Achievement hunting. Aaaaand that’s it?

FFXIV 2.0 will continue to charge a subscription fee at release: for me to pay that, it has to have a variety of content. Fun content. Because at the end of the day, GW2 has a massive variety of fun content and there’s no sub fee.

It will be interesting to see how Trion and ANet measure up to each other in the coming months: RIFT‘s massive schedule of updates may be tough to beat, and they keep on churning out new features and new content and new world events. Will GW2 be able to keep up/match up? Does Square Enix and FFXIV 2.0 have even a chance?

In Closing

I want to believe FFXIV 2.0 could be great. I have room for two MMORPGs in my life — one will be GW2; one will be sub-based, unless a second AAA MMO with no sub fee comes along.

TSW has been a real blast to play but I don’t think they can put out content fast enough to keep me busy. This brings it down to RIFT 2.0 or FFXIV 2.0. RIFT has the stronger foundation and the better reputation by far.

But when it comes to Final Fantasy I can’t help but look at it through rose-tinted spectacles, of the joyful times I had with my linkshell in FFXI, and that nostalgia keeps me interested in FFXIV 2.0 and hoping that it will turn out amazing. I grew up on the series. Crystals and chocobos and black mages are part of my gaming history, my foundation!

I was gutted when FFXIV 1.0 tanked so badly. Not for the company, who clearly hadn’t played any MMOs in the last decade and had no idea how to create an evolution in MMO gaming, but for myself and my friends who wanted to get back together ingame and relive old times in a new world.

That new world, as it turns out, will be Tyria — so many of my friends are signed on for Guild Wars 2 — but maybe, one day, we could meet up in Eorzea too?

Can Square Enix learn from the mistakes of FFXIV 1.0? Can they successfully look to other games and move towards the future? For all my cynicism and scepticism about FFXIV, I can’t help but hope that they can!