I find it bizarre to praise a mandatory sub game for minimizing its cash shop and not considering empty zones to be a serious content issue. (Particularly infamously copy-pasted empty zones.) Or that horrible combat wasn't an absolutely fundamental issue that prompted a total redesign of all gameplay like Anthem might need. Or that a game has grown very much around raiding isn't a live service. Its just a live service done right, after it was done very poorly on release and became a ghost town that would've been even more deserted if they had maintained the subscription during that period. I don't know that Anthem can ever be as "good" as FFXIV but it just goes to show that you can recover absolute disasters with sufficient resources, vision, and a bit of humility.
https://gbatemp.net/threads/bioware...-substantial-reinvention.557919/#post-8944272
>Bizarre to praise a mandatory sub game for minimizing its cash shop.
Name an MMO that don't have one as an alternate revenue method since WoW. One that hasn't died already. I'll wait. Go on. Now name one that doesn't have that store mentioned in-game at all.
>
and not considering empty zones to be a serious content issue. (Particularly infamously copy-pasted empty zones.)
>
Or that horrible combat wasn't an absolutely fundamental issue that prompted a total redesign of all gameplay like Anthem might need.
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XIV's problems were a horrible combat engine, graphics that were overkill/murder even by some of this generation's standards (POTS AS DETAILED AS A FULL CHARACTER),
and it was EMPTY ZONES. Hell, their problem wasn't even Cash Shop!"
>"Or that a game has grown very much around raiding isn't a live service."
Y'know every MMO, every subscription game, is a "live service", right? The issue here isn't games as a service, but the approach there-in.
>"Its just a live service done right, after it was done very poorly on release and became a ghost town that would've been even more deserted if they had maintained the subscription during that period."
Now, I may be reading this wrong, but XIV 1.0 launched in September 2010.
They suspended subscriptions as of December 2010.. Yoshida took over the same month and announced 2.0 a year later in December 2011..
AT THE SAME TIME as of January 2012 they continued subscriptions because they had no choice if they hoped for XIV 2.0/ARR to launch.
So no, people did not desert more, they did eventually continue the subscription model.
>"I don't know that Anthem can ever be as "good" as FFXIV but it just goes to show that you can recover absolute disasters with sufficient resources, vision, and a bit of humility."
The humility part's the problem. XIV is humble. They realized their failures early on in 1.X, quickly aimed to resolve them and brought in Yoshida in ~3 months after launch and agreed to a massive relaunch within a month of that when ARR started hard development (January 2011).
They didn't keep their subscriptions going until necessary. They never had their cash shop front and center. They at most had merchandise sales front and center (I got a fat cat plushy for my lil sis, waiting for her to leave the hospital, to make a point). They would constantly apologize for the smallest problem, and sometimes go above and beyond to add little things like UMBRELLAS. I ain't saying they're perfect, and it may be a cultural difference, but Anthem has a 0% chance of success afterwords. At most you'll get some hardcore fans, and people will drop off it like a brick due to being exhausted of cash shop functions. Y'know what game is also like that? Destiny/2.
They're basically going the way of Destiny 2, watch. They'll start with decent amounts more content, then over patches they'll invest more and more content into the cash shop until you get maybe 1/5th if not 1/10th the amount of loot you use to from major content releases because all of it's cash shopped.
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