The game itself is indeed quite average. Not worth any real scorn beyond the over-hyping it got. About par for the course with the biggest AAA titles these days, I’m afraid.

We’ll threaten the readers during this week’s podcast. I’ll set the building on fire. I will.

Translated: “Not Lusipurr. Please, not Lusipurr.” TOO BAD.

“At first the system was fine, and it remains understandable, but once I got to the end of the content it turned into a waiting game for new excuses to log back in. I guess this is just par for the course with MMOs”

Yes… –to varying degrees. Final Fantasy XIV can provide us a case study in some ways. At its initial launch, there was hardly any content at all. Okay, fair enough, it was a botch. They asked for a re-do and got it, which they delivered upon. But even then, several months after, you know how I fared: I completed the game: every quest, every job, multiple atma and zenith weapons, the best gear available from the highest level raid content, etc. There was nothing left for me to do. And how long did it take? Less than two months of not-very-dedicated less-than-daily play with a couple semi-casual linkshells for the raiding stuff.

Now, if that is one of the better examples (and I assert that it is), imagine what other MMOs are like. I have no interest in going back to XIV or WoW (I’ve learned, long ago, that seasonal MMO events give you pointless items and are just designed to squeeze another $15 out of you for what amounts to $2 of content and 50¢ of enjoyability), but these are some of the better examples of content delivery. (That said, I do realise that WoW hasn’t had a significant content update in more than a year. It’s dead, for serious MMO fans, and Metzen pooping out a half-finished, already-hobbled Draenor isn’t going to change that.)

It’s for this reason that I’ve more or less gone off of MMOs. If XIV isn’t the last one I ever play, it’ll only be because some future MMO completely revolutionises the way that the genre functions. At present, even the best examples are a series of repetitive chores which are only made bearable in the long-term by doing them with friends. But I have plenty of genuinely fun things that I can do with friends, so I’m going to play those things instead.

With the larger problem of games as a service, this is driven by two things: indolence, and greed. If companies can do less work for the same monetary reward, they will. This is how businesses operate: at margins. Less work is less money spent, hence greater profit margins if the income is unchanged. As gamers, we have an obligation not to support endeavours such as these and, I think, most of the readers and staff of this site act accordingly. The problem, then, is the great unthinking mass of uncritical gamers who, driven by social and commercial pressure, buy into everything their corporate overlords serve up, often to the disadvantage of the industry as a whole.

As I play FF7, and love every moment of it, I occasionally think to myself that such a game could not be made today–could not be delivered like this, today. Every side quest would be DLC. Every weapon would be DLC. The extra characters would be DLC. I wouldn’t be able to sit down SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER, on a device several generations removed, to play it whole, complete, and entire. These profit-driven innovations are the tools by which our narrative, art, and history will be made inaccessible.

And that is what worries me about the future of this industry most of all.