Final Fantasy: XIV

Disclaimer: I want to start off by saying that despite my hatred for what the game has become and in some ways always was, I don't want to take away your joy from it if you do play and find joy in it. I also want to say that it's just a toy. All games are just digital toys, they're ultimately not real and the only things that matter is what they contribute to your life.

This isn't going to be a unique story, it's one you've likely heard many times before. I started seeing what the game truly was and at the same time it started changing for the worse.

When you first get into something, like a game you don't know anything about it. Learning about something is fun, and a big part of why I love trying new things.
One of the many things you don't know is the history and the context of it. However, as you get into it more and spend longer, you follow it as new history is being made.
You get to be there for it all, whatever that may be. Often times that's fun and it really has been, but sometimes it's less fun.
When I started playing and for the first few years I didn't notice a lot of the issues this game has but over time they started showing themselves to me, and eventually they killed what love I had for this game.

Lies and Greed

We were always told that Yoshi-P (lead director) stood in the way of the greedy Square Enix in their attempts to suck the players dry of money.
Hell, he even calls the person who handles the online store "mogstation baroness"! Surely he must have our best interests in mind.

The rest of this will talk about their Lies and their Greed, which is killing what I used to love.

Patch cycle

So over the years, the patch cycle has gotten longer and longer. For a long time they would delay patches and content, saying it would come out at one date, then when that time came, it would be delayed for a week or even a month.
The cycle used to be 3 months, now it's 4, but they're still doing constant delays, in time it'll be come 5 months. Maybe even 6 one day.

Every month, millions of people pay money, a fee to be allowed to play a game they paid for. We pay for the base game and each expansion, that adds up quickly and in spite of that we are still forced to pay a monthly fee when the developers fail, time and time again to deliver.
Each expansion is a promise of content, the stuff that comes out in the initial patch, X.0 and everything that follows until the next one. Each expansion also comes with a price, that price, an up front cost and then a monthly after that, because how are you going to play the expansion when you don't have a sub? And each month they delay adds another month that people are paying their fee to get the content they already paid for.

Frankly, the entire system is deeply evil. But for the developers to constantly delay and delay, lie about why and ultimately increase the patch cycle to still only deliver half-baked content is another kind of evil. At least gatcha games don't lie to you, they just try to lure you in with shiny objects.

The content

Endwalker. This is the expansion that started my hatred. The story was fine. The way I explain what I think of the story is the same every time, "It's good but it's also the worst they could've possibly done with the groundwork they had laid".
What I mean by that is that, they had built such strong momentum through stromblood and shadowbringers that it was almost impossible for them to fail with endwalker which was to be the ending of a decade long story. However I think they did about as bad as they could've in doing so.
The story played it safe and they refused to take any bold risks or major steps and just ended up with a half hearted story about how you should never give up or whatever you want to read into it.

Although the story was not what started it all, it was the content, or rather lack of it. Each expansion always brings a few things, dungeons, raids, alliance raids, Ultimates, and relics.
Dungeon wise, it was fine.
Raid wise, it was also fine.
Alliance raid wise? Still fine.
Ultimate wise? Pretty good actually, I like The Omega Protocol a lot actually.

The relics however. The relics were bad to put it lightly. Relics are usually a long grind build into some new systems to keep people playing for the expansion and to give you something fun to do.
In EW(Endwalker) however they were currency hand-in. Each day you had to do your usual roulettes which is just playing 2-10 year old content for 2-3 hours then hand in the 'tomestones' you get for rocks, then hand in enough of those rocks for a shiny weapon.
Yep that's right! What had always been a cornerstone of each expansion had now become a repetitive loop of playing incredibly old content for hours on end, something we have already been doing for a by now.

Okay, well what about the other content? EW also introduced variant/criterion dungeons that were.. Fine. Unremarkable with no reason to do them. It also introduced Island Sanctuary! Which was advertised as animal crossing or stardew valley!.. What it really was, was shitty Factorio.
Once a week you picked out resources you need for next week. Then you went to an NPC and picked out what items they should make during this week and then you never touched it again for the rest of the week.

Note: Dawntrail has better content but not by much. The story was great tho despite what women hating incel redditors say.

more Lies

I quickly wanted to mention some more lies, one in particular. Viera and Hrothgar hats.

Viera and Hrothgar are playable races who for a very long time weren't allowed to wear hats because they have ears ontop of their heads. We were told it's because of their head meshes, however we know better.
This game has a massive modding community and I'm part of it. It's extremely easy to open up the game files and find that each hat model has a toggle to allow it to be shown on viera and hrothgar characters.
So what happens if we turn it on, for a hat that doesn't normally show? Simple, it looks mostly fine actually. There is one issue however, your hair clips though it (and ears of course). The ears clipping isn't an issue, Miqo also have that issue and often you just turn on another toggle that hides all ears.
So that leaves the hair. The only actual issue with hats for these races is the hair. So why is it an issue for these races but not the others?
Simple. Each race has 2 hair models, a normal one and a "tucked" one, were your hair is tucked in for hats. These hair models just simply don't exist on Viera or Hrothgar. They didn't bother making them, so they lied.

These lazy fucking assholes have been lying for the better part of 6 years about why Viera and Hrothgar don't have hats and it's as simple as they don't want to make more hair models. This is a game we pay money for and the devs can't even do their fucking job.

This is just one out of THOUSANDS of cases were they lie so that they don't have to spend the money on development to fix their own fucking issues.

Sandblasting of personality

This is what broke me. This is what caused me to quit. This is what caused me to not just dislike the state of the game but to actively hate it.

Over time the game has gotten easier and more streamlined. Any depth in how you play has gotten removed and everything has started to feel and play the same. Dungeons all work the same, the only difference is in the bosses and that's barely.
The classes all feel the same now. They're constantly reworked to be closer and closer to each other. Monk used to have lots of positionals, now it has 2 like all other melees. Black Mage used to have slow casts and it stood still a lot, now it plays like a healer with short cast times and tons of movement. Healers all have the same buttons but renamed, same goes for tanks.
Speaking of tanks, they made warrior effectively immortal so you have no reason to play the others unless someone else already picked warrior for your raid group.

The content is as hard in new expansion as it was in the base game. Despite players getting better all the time, the content stays the same if not easier. Not only do they add in NPC parties so you can play the entire game solo if you wanted to, but they make the content as frictionless as possible, god forbid a story player can't play on super-easy for a change.
Because fuck you if you want to play an MMO. FFXIV and FFX are the only MMOs in the series but even this game is being forced into becoming a visual novel. Constant removal of multiplayer aspects and constant introductions of ways to avoid it has sapped away so much from the game

Summoner and Black Mage

I mentioned earlier that Black Mage changed, another class that has is summoner. Summoner used to be my main, what I played all the time. I played it because I enjoy a challenge. It was THE hardest class to play, and now it's the easiest. Any 5 year old could master it in a week. So I swapped to Black Mage.

Black Mage used to be the hardest class to play, long cast times and lack of movement meant you had to plan out everything and play perfectly to be good, now you can move whenever you want and you don't really have cast times at all.

The death of Black Mage is when I quit. 7.2. I have had enough of this.