Endgame Fugue State

I’ve been on hiatus for about a week from FFXIV. I'm nearing the end of the main story and all I have left is two back to back raids. As much as I love the game, I’ve been musing on the future I have with it. Playing MMO’s is always a bit of a love/hate relationship for a gamer. There are parts of MMO’s that everyone dislikes. Somepeople hate to grind or the inclusion of PVP, and others hate quest-hubs or tab-targeting. For me I’ve always disliked endgame.

Even in World of Warcraft I shied away from tanking in raids, and I was actually fairly good back then. Endgame personifies everything I dislike about gaming with other people, the point where a game stops being fun and starts being work. If The Old Republic had been more successful long-term I really feel like we would have gotten huge story expansions every year or two, and I would have loved to see a endgame that grew away from the Raid-R-US that MMO’s have become. And I don’t want to harp on raids as endgame. Raids can be quite fun for those that enjoy them and quite frankly they need to be there.

When Guild Wars 2 tried to turn away from raids, even its most fervent supporters were hesitant to back the move. Even when raids are only seen by 10 or 20 percent of the gaming population, this minority group tends to be the core and very vocal group of gamers that cannot be so easily dismissed. Endgame is here to stay; it has been and likely will always be the carrot to the stick of MMO leveling. All that aside however, I’m still no closer to deciding how I’ll approach endgame in FFXIV, only time will tell I suppose.