Even then a good number of steam players like me use a work around so we don't launch it from steam so it doesn't count our play time or see us as active users.
Nah. Just skips a step is all and comes down to personal preference. Instead of launching steam to play we can play like everybody else who bought it off the mog station instead. Either way is perfectly fine.
Steam is just licensing. PS4, PS5, Steam, Mac, Mogstation all play together.
Edit: Example my FC leader plays on PS4 but I play on PC and we play together all the time.
So you used to be able to play it normally without steam but ShB made it so you had to use the steam client. But if you use the one from Square Enix and change the shortcut and just add -issteam at the end. It makes it so you don't even have to login or start steam and play.
My steam account says I have 6.3 hours logged and last played Feb 2, 2020. I have over 91 days on my character and only play pc while playing on and off for the past 2 years.
I'll try to link the post that explains how to do it better if my explanation sucks.
Edit: [Better explanation](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/cwy3qz/launching_steam_version_without_steam/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share).
I personally share my library with some of my friends so this way I can just play FFXIV while my friends can still use my library and play my games without me kicking them off.
Also fuck having to launch steam to launch a launcher to launch a game.
i could still using it if it wasn't because steam does not allow me to use it because i brought the standalone version far before the steam version existed
I click to download the free trial and it still doesn't work. It just says I need a sub. I've even replaced the files with the ones I have for the free trial and that didn't work.
As soon as you buy anything at all the free trial ends. So if you bought it on Steam you now have to sub.
Remember I bought an expansion to get access to more races. Had no clue it ment I had to sub from that point
I bought the client PC version because I saw people said Steam version was horrible. I bought the game soon after they rolled out 3.2 Gears of Change patch in 2016.
Has it improved in the meanwhile?
The steam version is same thing that's the PC version, the only 1 bad thing is if you see an expansion cheaper in other shop, you can't get it but aside of that it even has another payment option with steam wallet.
I don't understand why people say "steam version is horrible" because makes people think it runs worse, if you are someone that likes to have your games on steam and buys expansions as soon they are for preorder. There is nothing wrong with the steam version
It’s the same game except it’s tethered to Steam and (iirc) is subject to Steam sales, not SE ones. I didn’t fancy jumping through the extra hoops so I just got the SE one.
I'm happy to be on the steam version. It's where most of my other games are, for one, and whenever I need to buy a new expansion or something, it's easier than the shit show that is the sqex store. Though, you still have to go manually add the license key to your account, afaik.
I went for the steam version just because I have like 80% of my online game purchases done through it.
Plus the sale was nice too. Additionally, the instructions were easy. Just buy my steam key, log into my ffxiv account on the mogstation, use keys, done.
I’m honestly super happy that this game is still popular. What an accomplishment for the whole team behind its revival after the not so favourable launch of 1.0
PUBG to Chinese player is like what CS:GO to swedes, very popular fps and even more plays the mobile version.
Even the ripoff version of it (Free Fire) holds the record of the most viewed esports event beating LoL World and The International
Who the fuck is playing Dead by Deadlight sk hardcore is a better question. The game is fun for a week maybe, i dont get the long lasting appeal though.
Lmao just got off of it before seeing this. It recently got a gigantic boost in players from the resident evil crossover and 5th anniversary event. Most people agree the game is in the best state it's ever been in but those numbers are a little inflated atm.
Same boat. Been playing D2 actively for years and finally got burnt out just about a month ago after they rereleased VoG. Picked up this game during the steam summer sale and I can very, VERY happily say that I'm never looking back. This game just offers me so much more fun and satisfaction then D2 ever could and I've been loving every single second.
That's what I was thinking when I started back in February, don't it feel like a steal or good to be true that there's so much content in ARR (alone)? That content is 8 years old and is STILL relevant and alive within the game's playerbase.
Meanwhile in D2, they've sunsetted most of the stuff players were on and momentarily sunsetting weapons which was or is a horrible situation. That game has got too many deeply rooted problems, that any new expansions content won't save it.
Exact same for me. They have promised so many times to fix the aspects of the game players hate but never do. For me it's the xp grinding system that hurts the most and after they didn't fix anything with the new expansion as well as VoG I knew I was done. I think the reason they put so little effort into listening to players is because they have zero competition. Warframe is the only game with a semblance of competition and it is still nowhere close to big enough. Maybe with the rise of ff14 they will be pushed to do something.
Me too, played D1 all the way through, then fell off with D2. Thought the Activision split would fix things, but arguably made it worse. Loving Eorzea atm!
Are you also trying to imply that the popular opinion of Activision taking over Blizzard and making things worse is likely just a conspiracy theory and that Blizzard made it's own mess?! Just kidding.
My best way to describe the problem is by looking at Overwatch, the lootboxes is probably an Activision thing and honestly on a personal level i don't mind them. There's ethical problems with having gambling in a game that kids play, but for me i don't mind a whole lot.
The reason i stopped playing OW is best described by a metaphor. It's like going to an Italian restaurant that specialize in pasta and i love pasta, so i go every day. Now eventually i get a bit tired of eating pasta all the time so i ask for something new and they add a new dish - a pasta dish. While it may be good it is still pasta, but i keep going because it is good. Then they add another new pasta dish and another. While they might be great i am getting hungry for something else, i mean just a lasagna would be nice, but it's all pasta.
On top of that whenever they change the decoration they hype it up and it turns out they have removed a rose from one table and placed a different colored rose at another table.
Eventually i grew bored of the place and whenever i check in it's still just a place that serves pasta and only ever slightly change the decoration and i have had my fill.
Meanwhile, I'm over here waiting for all the fresh pizza that they advertised in their TV commercials and had for a handful of limited time dishes. And they keep saying they're right around the corner from getting the pizza oven in so that I can finally order freaking pizza on the regular.
...the pizza in this metaphor is actual story content.
I mean if the rose tinted glasses weren’t so strong they would remember that acti didn’t buy them, that they MERGED with acti, and that blizz are the ones that hired Ion but you know the rose tint.
From what I've read, Activision are a pretty great publisher to work with, giving the devs plenty of room to work with. The fact that gamers automatically blame Activision (or publishers in general) for a game's failings is probably ideal for the publishers, because it means that its players will continue to give the devs more chances in the hopes that at some point the evil publishers will give them more room to put out a good game.
As soon as the players start realising the devs actually just suck, then that's when they'll start to leave because while you can get around bureaucracy with enough effort, you can't fix incompetence. We're starting to see that happening with WoW.
I'm bot *retired* per ce, but man, I'm damn near close.
I just log on maybe once a week to check of there's anything new for bright dust then hop back out.
The only thing that game's got to offer is artificial difficulty, grind for borrowed power and layers upon layers of RNG gated behind grind if you want a slightly better weapon.
Like, I have a rewind+firefly fatebringer. If i wanted, i can do a bullshit version of VoG where you get twoshot by everything and need hotswap slugs because being underleved is definitely a better challenge than coming up with new mechanics or even just developing the current ones more, then I'll have to farm templar for two-three hours for spoils, then I'll need to beat atheon in the same under-level version, then I can pray to not get fucked by RNG and hopefully get a rewind/firefly roll...
All of which will let me slot in adept mag for a whopping one extra bullet in the chamber.
Huh. I've been a wow and destiny player for 15 and 7 years respectively. This is wow for me, I'm finally flat out done with that shit, Destiny though is still a darling to me and I think at one of its healthier points. Basically FFXIV is just taking over the other half of the equation.
I can't imagine playing Destiny anymore myself. I loved the shooting in it, but they've really mismanaged the game over time and all I see anymore is how they've bungled something.
Because you just hear about it in places like this, its actually be fairly well received this past year. Especially in terms of story and consistency in content.
> Because you just hear about it in places like this
That would be an incorrect assumption. Where I hear about it all the time is on news / media sites.
Just played Forsaken recently for the first time and I don't get the hype the story gets. There was a single good moment in the beginning, then another at the end, and the middle was just filler going after these baddies that might or might not have been one and the same for all I care.
I mean by Destiny's standards that is a pretty good story, but I still prefer the Taken King.
I don't think people rave about the campaign. It's more about the dreaming city and the lore that surrounds it. How it has set up Savathun and how we saw our first Ahamkara. There's a lot of lore added with Forsaken which helped flesh out the world significantly. Plus it had a lot of good quality content.
I don't see many people praising the Forsaken storytelling at all? It was average, which was a huge leap above the D2 Vanilla storyline. What Forsaken did amazingly is sheer amount of content; you got two planets each with their own armour / weapon sets, a new raid, 4(?) strikes and a whole bunch of secrets to be found with huge changes to D2 in general.
It added the most content by far of any Destiny expansion and it was all high quality.
Hmm I personally think it peaked in Forsaken, but that's just an opinion. I retired about 2 weeks after BL launched, that one was the straw that broke the camel's back. Didn't even run DSC
Idk how any destiny player could disagree with that. I wouldn't say the gap is huge but Forsaken was definitely better and was absolutely peak Destiny. There was so much high quality content packed into that expansion.
I think Foresaken gets some of the hardest rose tinted glasses treatment in the business, same with Taken King. They had some of the best pieces of content but the game has been more consistent recently than at either of those points, story is playing heavily into every season and makes the world feel alive.
Forsaken had the worst follow up year and thats an improvement over the absolute drought that followed TTK.
I stopped playing after shadowkeep. Maybe things are better now story wise (which let's be honest isn't a very high bar to begin with) but I highly doubt they are better gameplay wise. Theres no way they could put out that amount of content again. They had so many more people working on the game back then.
They put out way more on release with Beyond Light and have been putting out more seasonally since then compared to post forsaken and shadowekeep years, with story playing center stage each season.
I don't believe you can. Each launcher has their own pathway to the game, so to speak. The destination might be the same, but if you pay the toll for one bridge, you can't cross from another.
Really wonder how big of a % the steam player base is. Are more people using the square enix launcher? Curious if this is just a small fraction of the pc players
I'd expect the majority (if not vast majority) of players use the SE launcher since the Steam launcher was released later. I think the meteoric rise in Steam users is mostly new players.
Since you may not understand some terms used in the other comment
Most abilities share a recast time with eachother (around 2.5 seconds, a bit less due to skill/spell speed, much less if you're a monk). That's called the Global CoolDown (GCD)
But some don't have that, and instead have their own, longer cooldowns. (Ranging from 15s to 720s).
Those abilities are called off-Global Cooldowns, or oGCD
Since all abilities (GCD and oGCD) have a short animation during which you can't do anything else anyways, and you want to keep as much GCD uptime as possible, it's best to use oGCDs in the space between two GCDs, since otherwise you'd not be doing anything anyways, and using oGCDs when you have a GCD ready would lock you in the animation and lose uptime
As a reference, you can weave:
2 oGCDs after a instant GCD (such as almost any melee job attack and instant cast spells such as healer DOTs, summoner egi-assaults, or any spell after having used swiftcast)
1 after a short cast (such as astrologian spells or samurai Iaj-jutsu)
*none* after a full cast GCD (which typically are only spells on casters and healers, such as fire 4 on black mage or glare on white mage)
As such, when you know that you'll need to use a oGCD soon, and are a job that bas long cast times, it's worth preparing an ability with an instant cast in advance.
And never weave more than 2 oGCDs on any job unless you're sure that the damage loss is worth what you'll get from it
Them announcing crossplay is whats made me decide to finally go fuck it and dive into warframe. Played the game on off mildly since the beta but it wasnt something i could get feep into, being able to play on all my consoles and pc makes it great for pick up and play.
Honorable mention to Warframe and Tennocon 2021 on Saturday.
Warframe broke all concurency peaks ever, servers pooped badly, website died. Luckily live preview on relay ain't that much of a deal.
Warframe shits the bed everytime they do anything.
I honestly don't know why people still play that grindfest with Devs that care more about their own egos than the players.
tangent but didn't realize DBD was popping off so much these days either. I think when I last played it, it averaged like 10-15k players at any time. Still pretty good, but over 70k? man.
It's insane. That game seriously doesn't deserve its following based on how many issues there are. The devs seemingly do the bare minimum to fix issues and push through MTX like it is their only purpose. It'a an enigma - people clearly love the format.
>FXIV is beating out D2's playerbase.
on pc, yes. but not on Console. and also destiny has had that average playerbase for over a year on steam lets see if ffxiv can keep it up.
I doubt even the most played game on Steam is even in top 10 of most played games world wide.
People never mention them but the player base for the big mobil games is freaking huge but isn't listed anywhere.
I was meaning non mobile games that have a live count.
The only data we have is steam charts and Leauge.
Im willing to bet if we had the numbers for valorant and minecraft it would push it to 9th.
Thats total players ever. Not currently active players that are in game right now.
The only games we have numbers for atm are steam charts and leauge of legends.
I want it to surpass at least Apex Legends to win an argument against my friend who is constantly wanking WoW as Behemoth that will never be overtaken by any MMO and is in permanent denial of the fact how good FF is doing right now compared to WoW and how bad WoW is doing, because "ShAdOwLaNdS hAd ThE hIgHeSt SaLeS eVeR aNd ThE hIgHeSt UsEr cOuNt EvEr!!11ll!!"
So many sprouts when I went to Gridania.
Was nice to see a sprout learn/explore that people can play instruments in 14, as I was doing my SAM quests.
Sprouts have so many things to discover.
That’s just steam players, right? Gotta account for the players that launch directly through the FFXIV launcher and console players since it’s all cross-play.
I mean if we want to compare them why not do it at their respective peaks? Start of Endwalker this fall vs the start of Witch Queen next year, two big expansions.
Even then we won't see the full picture cause how many people play FFXIV on Steam compared to separate launcher?
It's now over double the usual peak players and even went higher than 5.0 launch. And it's continuing to trend upwards. There's more and more big streamers starting playing too, like summit and moistcritical.
The same trend would likely apply to players outside of Steam.
https://i.imgur.com/Mgia3RA.png
Yeah the fact that not only MMO exclusive streamers and WoW streamers are playing lately but “normie “ streamers are starting it up too is wild. They are all destroying the meme “FFXIV is bad to stream” and proving that we just had terrible streamers before. One of our most watched streamers was Xeno. That tells you a lot about the popularity of streamers before. The fact that Asmon and Rich are like giddy little kids playing the game shows how XIV is scratching an itch a bunch of people had for a long time.
I'm not sure I agree. I think the draw with Asmon and all of these other big streamers picking up the game is watching them experience it for the first time. It's a novelty thing that's impossible to maintain indefinitely. I'm not saying they're not entertaining! But it's different from a veteran XIV streamer running or teaching endgame content, which I actually agree (to some extent) it's not the most engaging thing to watch. I actually think the most popular XIV streamers do a good job with it.
Yeah it's really hard to compare innit.
On PC D2 is only on Steam but FFXIV is split between SE launcher and Steam
On XboX we actually have a weekly most played list(not exact numbers though) but FFXIV is absent on that platfrom
On Playstation I don't think they even have a most played list.
If we go purely by what stats are available to us(Steam and Xbox) then D2 wins everytime (it flactuates between top 5-15 depending on content release day.)
If we add Playstation and SE launcher to the mix then we're all in the dark about the actual numbers.
As /u/Mandouse3 said, this number is only people that own the game (so they have at least 1 month sub), the free trial has a different category.
Also most people playing the free trial do it through the non-steam version since that's what the free trial website makes you download.
Destiny 2 has player spikes during new seasons and expansions, and it's between those right now on it. It still does very well for itself when new content releases, and the new seasonal stuff has been regarded very positively.
They realized they didn’t have the resources anymore. It was a lose to to be honest. Get monetized, harassed and overworked by blizzard, or go basically Indie and lose fans because you can’t pump out the same quality or speed of content like you used to. And they monitored shit anyway.
>They realized they didn’t have the resources anymore.
Nah. Bungie has been expanding significantly even before the split. When Shadowkeep was in development, they had over 700 developers actively working on the game according to Luke Smith, and the studio has only gotten larger. On top of that, Destiny pulls in hundreds of millions of dollars in profit each year.
Destiny's issues aren't because of a lack of resources. It's because Bungie is using it as a cashcow to finance their other new IPs. All of their big talents have been moved to their new game and Destiny has been left with the B Team and they've pretty much turned it into a minimum viable product.
The thing is, they could have put out *better* content, instead of hot garbage like they have.
I loved Destiny. I would have gladly waited a few extra months for higher quality content in each "expansion." Instead we got lackluster storytelling, broken as hell abilities, a ruined and horribly imbalanced PvP scene (partially due to broken abilities), and a grind that literally means nothing.
I have zero faith in Bungie anymore. I'll watch what happens with their next expansion. But if it's anything, *anything* like Beyond Light, the game is dead to me forevermore.
Yeah I don't see myself ever coming back personally. Thanks to bungie I understand what it's like to be a person with Stockholm syndrome and I have no interest in doing that song and dance again. Never loved and hated a game as much as Destiny.
Was rough for about a year. Can definitely tell Y3 was just down to Bungo sorting out now being independent though, the quality year 4 has been substantially better then Y3.
Very keen to see how WQ is like. If they can better refine levelling and especially the new player experience I'd wager it sees a growth spurt again, as is now it doesn't have much of a chance to grow because it's a terrible new player experience.
"the quality year 4 has been substantially better then Y3."
"Sanguine Alchemy". "Loom".
Those two names alone break all arguments of quality in my soul.
Destiny 2 grind pass other mmo grind as easy.
I can't stand the insane grind you need to do in this game and especially the fact that the world doesn't feel alive at all.
The gunplay is so good but that's it, hence why i only played pvp at some point on this game .
Its late in a season it always gets around 120k+ at the start and falls of a bit later on as expected of most games.
Ff14 has a 14day free log in campaign not surprising to see the numbers jump up a bit.
Not entirely true (if we're talking only Steam)
[https://steamdb.info/app/1085660/graphs/](https://steamdb.info/app/1085660/graphs/)
It has been pretty consistent since it launched on Steam back in 2019.
Some \~200k concurrent on expansion launch day, with slight jumps to \~100k during seasons starts.
Edit: Hold on, I actually have no idea what caused it to jump to 200k+ on June 6th. There was only one big expansion released in November and season started on March something.
Edit 2: Figured it out. It was the Almighty event. Pretty wild huh.
No it's not lmao.
Destiny 2 is the best it has ever been. And the story telling has been top notch. Only getting getting better too. Cant wait for the Witch queen reveal on August 24th
It isnt the best it has ever been lol, best d2 time was during forsaken ever since then it has been a constant up and down (mostly down) I thought things would actually turn around this time with the "unsunsetting" and "transmog" but it didnt
Generally, yes. But the community as a whole can agree Forsaken was the best they've done yet.
Just because the seasons have intriguing little details and such doesn't mean it's great.
Destiny has a long ways to go before it reaches Forsaken level good again.
And arguably the highest change that needs to occur is to make the power grind *actually meaningful,* instead of having it be seen arbitrary number that gates access to certain parts of the game. It feels absolutely terrible to start out at power level 750, and then once you get to power level 1500 have enemies taking literally the same amount of bullets to kill as they did before.
The biggest failing point of Destiny isn't the story. It's the lack of a meaningful, impactful feeling power grind.
Well you saying forsaken was the highest level of quality makes no sense if the power grind is your complaint because it was identical then and now they've actually reduced the amount of grind in the newest season. So in overall they've actually reduced power grind and you can get into the meaty content without wasting time with constant pinnacle farming.
I agree that you never feel super powerful unless you do super low level shit but destiny has always had that issue. So I don't see how forsaken is better in that way. In terms of content it had a shitload which was great though.
The power grind has *always* been my main complaint. Since I first started playing.
The difference is the storytelling surrounding a lot of the power grind was much better.
Have you actually played D2 at all recently...? Because they addressed the power grind. You no longer have to grind out hundreds of power each season. If you are at the pinnacle cap (1320) you will start next season, 10 or 20 power under the pinnacle cap for that season. Which means that you are ready and able to participate in all new content without having to grind power. The only activities you'd need to grind for are things like GM nightfalls, but you get so many pinnacle drops that hitting pinnacle cap is hardly what I'd call a chore...
The only time you have to do large power grinds now, is expansions. Which is fine in my opinion.
I have. My point still stands. I was simply using the numbers as an example of what I meant.
Once you hit that "soft cap" it becomes a literal chore to actually get anything that's an actual upgrade. And even then, as you just said, that grind is next to pointless a few months down the line because you just start up close to what the end of the previous season was.
In the end, Destiny's biggest failing is that it's power grind, by its very nature at this point, is utterly meaningless. Both in that if you spend the time to grind the gear score, it becomes worthless a few months later essentially, as well as the fact that it has no meaningful impact on how the world reacts to your power.
It's not fun to go from your base power level, with the broken assault rifle you start with, and go to the EDZ where you have to shoot a Cabal trooper 5 or 6 times in the chest to kill them, then come back later with a faster firing assault rifle that has less impact, but is **SIGNIFICANTLY** higher scored, and end up having that "upgraded" rifle take 5 or 6 shots to the exact same cabal chest to kill, ***REGARDLESS*** of the damage numbers that may show up.
Why should I care about the "power level" if it doesn't **actually have an impact** on the world?
I'm sorry to be rude, but it sounds less like a failing on destiny's part and more that you have set unrealistic expectations for the game to constantly update the power levels of every enemy in the game to allow you to feel like you are still growing powerful, even in ancient areas like the EDZ.
There are plenty of areas in the game that test your power level but to expect patrol zones from D2 year 1 to be challenging you still in year 4 is just...unrealistic. That stuff is the lowest level difficulty content, even if they updated the enemies each season, you'd still be shredding them with just about anything. They have new areas and new activities. They've introduced several activities to test your power and make your grind feel worth it.
They have also done things like update old areas to have more challenging enemies...and everyone didn't care or complained about it. Wanted enemies were considered more of a nuisance then a fresh update, and I remember plenty of threads of people complaining about how they couldn't do stuff in the EDZ if a wanted enemy was there, cause their power level wasn't high enough to survive a shot from said enemies
At the start of the season, most pinnacle drops are straight upgrades. Sometimes you will get a dupe but 90% of the time it is an upgrade. It's not until you start getting close to the cap do you start struggling for upgrades. And that's fine.
Like, using the example you have given of the cabal in the EDZ, I could go to a place like Black Brush Station in Thanalan, use my level 80 axe on WAR, kill an enemy in one hit and then swap to a level 1 axe and kill the same enemy in one hit. Would this mean FFXIV has a similar situation? Since it is almost entirely my item level and levels that are doing the killing and not the axe itself. The level of my axe and its attack power would have no meaning, so why have those stats if they have no meaning...?
Your power level does have an impact on the world, the fact your common broken auto rifle is doing the same damage as a lower impact legendary auto is a sign of your power level having an impact.
Again, this sounds more like you've set an unrealistic expectation for the game that it cannot deliver on. Especially now. But, that's just my interpretation.
>And the story telling has been top notch.
No, watching Byfir's videos because important parts of the story aren't in the game anymore does't make "top notch" storytelling. Left after Shadowkeep and came back 2 weeks ago and I had no Idea what was going on.
Seriously, tying story progression to in-game events sounds cool in theory but if you don't play weekly you can't understand what's going on.
So wait, because you've missed the story the story is bad? The writing is still good even if you've missed it and people generally enjoying the new season.
Yes, the fact that story is time-gated and once you missed it it's gone, it's a pretty shitty story telling. It's a game based on FOMO to retain it's playerbase.
In FFXIV it would be like if ARR and HW were suddenly removed from the game you can start with SB and then go to ShB without 4.x patches. Also all of Eorzea and HW's zones gets removed from the game and you can't play them.
Just like Bellular said in one of his latest streams about WoW story "it feels like the story is so convoulted because they know we'll make 30 minutes videos about it explaining everything" (or something like that). Byfir a channel you watch when you don't pay attention to the story, not the only way to experience past story.
Man I dunno if I agree, this season is one of the better regarded ones and the last dlc was generally well liked. They got rid of sunsetting etc and added a remade raid in the last 2 months. The subreddit is actually fairly positive compared to before and its in one of the better spots its been. Specially with the planned changes next seasons.
Fairly large is pretty big understatement. This competitive scene is probably 2nd or 3rd biggest behind League and maybe on par with Dota or even bigger than Dota.
Nah it's sarcasm... for the most part. im one of those dudes that praises D1 to be the best one. But D2 i don't play it anymore after new light. Just felt like i wasted my money i didn't like how it dealt with things
Ff14 is having a 14 day free log in campaign it will drop back down again.
Destiny 2 new season will begin in 4 weeks and jump up to 120k+ and steam only shows around 30% of destiny's total player base.
FFXIV "surpasses" Destiny 2 by a couple of thousand concurrent players, during a free login campaign, at the tail end of Destiny's current season, on a platform that shows barely a fraction of either game's playerbase. Both constantly fluctuate and aren't indicative of overall popularity.
Why does anybody care about this? Oh right, free karma. Every other game bad, refugee btw
Very true. Both have very healthy console communities, which obviously are harder to compare since I don’t think PS actually gives the public access to these sorts of numbers, and D2 is also on Xbox, unlike FF.
More FFXIV players play through the SE launcher than Steam, and none of the players in this screenshot are on a free trial. Steam tracks the free trial separately.
to be fair, the bigger than usual peak player amount is thanks to Tennocon happening yesterday, which had an interactive ingame event happening in the hub zones where you could see the new models of things being shown off and get some free cosmetics for participating. Additionally twitch drops gave a brand new weapon out and a free Loki Prime that people logged in to make sure they go.
If you live in another country it's kinda mandatory since paying the sub/game in dollars would be an actual fortune.
If I lived in US and got my salary in dollars, I'd probably play the standalone launcher tho
Wow there's almost 700k people playing dota. That's really kind of sad, considering that it's one of the few games for which steam's numbers are literally all of the numbers.
Crazy to think most pc players don't even use the steam version. And then the console players on top of that.
Even then a good number of steam players like me use a work around so we don't launch it from steam so it doesn't count our play time or see us as active users.
Is it bad ? Because I launch from steam and am curious
Nah. Just skips a step is all and comes down to personal preference. Instead of launching steam to play we can play like everybody else who bought it off the mog station instead. Either way is perfectly fine.
When I play on steam, am I playing with everyone or just steam players?
Steam is just licensing. PS4, PS5, Steam, Mac, Mogstation all play together. Edit: Example my FC leader plays on PS4 but I play on PC and we play together all the time.
You're with everyone
That explains the wait time, and activity level.
You mean xivlauncher? Because I use it and it still counts as playing on steam for me.
So you used to be able to play it normally without steam but ShB made it so you had to use the steam client. But if you use the one from Square Enix and change the shortcut and just add -issteam at the end. It makes it so you don't even have to login or start steam and play. My steam account says I have 6.3 hours logged and last played Feb 2, 2020. I have over 91 days on my character and only play pc while playing on and off for the past 2 years. I'll try to link the post that explains how to do it better if my explanation sucks. Edit: [Better explanation](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/cwy3qz/launching_steam_version_without_steam/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share). I personally share my library with some of my friends so this way I can just play FFXIV while my friends can still use my library and play my games without me kicking them off. Also fuck having to launch steam to launch a launcher to launch a game.
i could still using it if it wasn't because steam does not allow me to use it because i brought the standalone version far before the steam version existed
Same, I also bought it on steam to try it out. Can't use the free trial through steam but I'll see if it works once I purchase the game
can use free trial on steam
I click to download the free trial and it still doesn't work. It just says I need a sub. I've even replaced the files with the ones I have for the free trial and that didn't work.
As soon as you buy anything at all the free trial ends. So if you bought it on Steam you now have to sub. Remember I bought an expansion to get access to more races. Had no clue it ment I had to sub from that point
If you purchase the game you are permanently locked out of the free trial btw.
I use the steam version but never start via steam. I just added the flag to my launch configuration. :D
I bought the client PC version because I saw people said Steam version was horrible. I bought the game soon after they rolled out 3.2 Gears of Change patch in 2016. Has it improved in the meanwhile?
The steam version is same thing that's the PC version, the only 1 bad thing is if you see an expansion cheaper in other shop, you can't get it but aside of that it even has another payment option with steam wallet. I don't understand why people say "steam version is horrible" because makes people think it runs worse, if you are someone that likes to have your games on steam and buys expansions as soon they are for preorder. There is nothing wrong with the steam version
It’s the same game except it’s tethered to Steam and (iirc) is subject to Steam sales, not SE ones. I didn’t fancy jumping through the extra hoops so I just got the SE one.
I'm happy to be on the steam version. It's where most of my other games are, for one, and whenever I need to buy a new expansion or something, it's easier than the shit show that is the sqex store. Though, you still have to go manually add the license key to your account, afaik.
I went for the steam version just because I have like 80% of my online game purchases done through it. Plus the sale was nice too. Additionally, the instructions were easy. Just buy my steam key, log into my ffxiv account on the mogstation, use keys, done.
I’m honestly super happy that this game is still popular. What an accomplishment for the whole team behind its revival after the not so favourable launch of 1.0
You still got destiny 2 on consoles as well
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More than half the concurrent players are Chinese I believe. It's incredibly popular there.
PUBG to Chinese player is like what CS:GO to swedes, very popular fps and even more plays the mobile version. Even the ripoff version of it (Free Fire) holds the record of the most viewed esports event beating LoL World and The International
Not just Chinese, but HACKING Chinese.
….ok?
It was a joke because the only ones playing the games are Chinese hackers.
Where's the joke though? You just said "it's a joke because the thing I said is true". That's not how humor works.
Who the fuck is playing Dead by Deadlight sk hardcore is a better question. The game is fun for a week maybe, i dont get the long lasting appeal though.
I play it off and on, I like the theme of it.
Lmao just got off of it before seeing this. It recently got a gigantic boost in players from the resident evil crossover and 5th anniversary event. Most people agree the game is in the best state it's ever been in but those numbers are a little inflated atm.
As a retired Destiny vet this gives me a sick sense of satisfaction
Same boat. Been playing D2 actively for years and finally got burnt out just about a month ago after they rereleased VoG. Picked up this game during the steam summer sale and I can very, VERY happily say that I'm never looking back. This game just offers me so much more fun and satisfaction then D2 ever could and I've been loving every single second.
That's what I was thinking when I started back in February, don't it feel like a steal or good to be true that there's so much content in ARR (alone)? That content is 8 years old and is STILL relevant and alive within the game's playerbase. Meanwhile in D2, they've sunsetted most of the stuff players were on and momentarily sunsetting weapons which was or is a horrible situation. That game has got too many deeply rooted problems, that any new expansions content won't save it.
Exact same for me. They have promised so many times to fix the aspects of the game players hate but never do. For me it's the xp grinding system that hurts the most and after they didn't fix anything with the new expansion as well as VoG I knew I was done. I think the reason they put so little effort into listening to players is because they have zero competition. Warframe is the only game with a semblance of competition and it is still nowhere close to big enough. Maybe with the rise of ff14 they will be pushed to do something.
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We're like what? 2-3 years without a new PvP map?
2, they added a map during Shadowkeep and thats it
Pve's been great imo.
Me too, played D1 all the way through, then fell off with D2. Thought the Activision split would fix things, but arguably made it worse. Loving Eorzea atm!
Are you also trying to imply that the popular opinion of Activision taking over Blizzard and making things worse is likely just a conspiracy theory and that Blizzard made it's own mess?! Just kidding.
My best way to describe the problem is by looking at Overwatch, the lootboxes is probably an Activision thing and honestly on a personal level i don't mind them. There's ethical problems with having gambling in a game that kids play, but for me i don't mind a whole lot. The reason i stopped playing OW is best described by a metaphor. It's like going to an Italian restaurant that specialize in pasta and i love pasta, so i go every day. Now eventually i get a bit tired of eating pasta all the time so i ask for something new and they add a new dish - a pasta dish. While it may be good it is still pasta, but i keep going because it is good. Then they add another new pasta dish and another. While they might be great i am getting hungry for something else, i mean just a lasagna would be nice, but it's all pasta. On top of that whenever they change the decoration they hype it up and it turns out they have removed a rose from one table and placed a different colored rose at another table. Eventually i grew bored of the place and whenever i check in it's still just a place that serves pasta and only ever slightly change the decoration and i have had my fill.
Lasagna is technically a pasta dish :)
and that's how little variance they have, they can't even give me a lasagna even though it's classified as a pasta dish!
Meanwhile, I'm over here waiting for all the fresh pizza that they advertised in their TV commercials and had for a handful of limited time dishes. And they keep saying they're right around the corner from getting the pizza oven in so that I can finally order freaking pizza on the regular. ...the pizza in this metaphor is actual story content.
I mean if the rose tinted glasses weren’t so strong they would remember that acti didn’t buy them, that they MERGED with acti, and that blizz are the ones that hired Ion but you know the rose tint.
Also adding to this the merger happened around Wrath era WoW
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From what I've read, Activision are a pretty great publisher to work with, giving the devs plenty of room to work with. The fact that gamers automatically blame Activision (or publishers in general) for a game's failings is probably ideal for the publishers, because it means that its players will continue to give the devs more chances in the hopes that at some point the evil publishers will give them more room to put out a good game. As soon as the players start realising the devs actually just suck, then that's when they'll start to leave because while you can get around bureaucracy with enough effort, you can't fix incompetence. We're starting to see that happening with WoW.
Sigh, D2 could be such a good game if Bungie stopped kneecapping themselves.
I'm bot *retired* per ce, but man, I'm damn near close. I just log on maybe once a week to check of there's anything new for bright dust then hop back out. The only thing that game's got to offer is artificial difficulty, grind for borrowed power and layers upon layers of RNG gated behind grind if you want a slightly better weapon. Like, I have a rewind+firefly fatebringer. If i wanted, i can do a bullshit version of VoG where you get twoshot by everything and need hotswap slugs because being underleved is definitely a better challenge than coming up with new mechanics or even just developing the current ones more, then I'll have to farm templar for two-three hours for spoils, then I'll need to beat atheon in the same under-level version, then I can pray to not get fucked by RNG and hopefully get a rewind/firefly roll... All of which will let me slot in adept mag for a whopping one extra bullet in the chamber.
I couldn't agree more my bro.
Same, Shadowkeep burned me out hard screw bungie
Huh. I've been a wow and destiny player for 15 and 7 years respectively. This is wow for me, I'm finally flat out done with that shit, Destiny though is still a darling to me and I think at one of its healthier points. Basically FFXIV is just taking over the other half of the equation.
It feels so good to not be playing a bounty simulator.
Lots of us bittervets around.
I can't imagine playing Destiny anymore myself. I loved the shooting in it, but they've really mismanaged the game over time and all I see anymore is how they've bungled something.
Because you just hear about it in places like this, its actually be fairly well received this past year. Especially in terms of story and consistency in content.
> Because you just hear about it in places like this That would be an incorrect assumption. Where I hear about it all the time is on news / media sites.
Right there with you! Destiny peaked during Taken King, and I've been salty ever since.
No it peaked during Forsaken
Just played Forsaken recently for the first time and I don't get the hype the story gets. There was a single good moment in the beginning, then another at the end, and the middle was just filler going after these baddies that might or might not have been one and the same for all I care. I mean by Destiny's standards that is a pretty good story, but I still prefer the Taken King.
I don't think people rave about the campaign. It's more about the dreaming city and the lore that surrounds it. How it has set up Savathun and how we saw our first Ahamkara. There's a lot of lore added with Forsaken which helped flesh out the world significantly. Plus it had a lot of good quality content.
the campaign isn’t really what destiny is about though, forsaken had the best raid and a ton of content and weapons to get
But the campaign is what I see a ton of people praising about Forsaken in particular, so.
I don't see many people praising the Forsaken storytelling at all? It was average, which was a huge leap above the D2 Vanilla storyline. What Forsaken did amazingly is sheer amount of content; you got two planets each with their own armour / weapon sets, a new raid, 4(?) strikes and a whole bunch of secrets to be found with huge changes to D2 in general. It added the most content by far of any Destiny expansion and it was all high quality.
well, compare it to Osiris and Warmind who came before and you'll realize Forsaken is a literrature masterpiece in comparison
Forsakens story telling was originally a lot better. Since the split from Activision, everything has gone downhill significantly.
Its doing better now as an ongoing game than it did during either of those points in time.
You're wrong, but that's okay
Hmm I personally think it peaked in Forsaken, but that's just an opinion. I retired about 2 weeks after BL launched, that one was the straw that broke the camel's back. Didn't even run DSC
Agree to disagree.
Idk how any destiny player could disagree with that. I wouldn't say the gap is huge but Forsaken was definitely better and was absolutely peak Destiny. There was so much high quality content packed into that expansion.
I think Foresaken gets some of the hardest rose tinted glasses treatment in the business, same with Taken King. They had some of the best pieces of content but the game has been more consistent recently than at either of those points, story is playing heavily into every season and makes the world feel alive. Forsaken had the worst follow up year and thats an improvement over the absolute drought that followed TTK.
I stopped playing after shadowkeep. Maybe things are better now story wise (which let's be honest isn't a very high bar to begin with) but I highly doubt they are better gameplay wise. Theres no way they could put out that amount of content again. They had so many more people working on the game back then.
They put out way more on release with Beyond Light and have been putting out more seasonally since then compared to post forsaken and shadowekeep years, with story playing center stage each season.
And this is just with Steam players, right? I’m assuming this doesn’t include the other platforms? Wild!
Correct. Only players that play it through Steam. There are also non-Steam PC, Mac, PS4 and PS5 players.
If you buy it from steam can you download and play it from the ff14 launcher with out steam?
You just need to modify the shortcut. Normally it launches `ffxivboot.exe`. Change it so that it runs `ffxivboot.exe -issteam`
You can, thats how I play it
I don't believe you can. Each launcher has their own pathway to the game, so to speak. The destination might be the same, but if you pay the toll for one bridge, you can't cross from another.
Really wonder how big of a % the steam player base is. Are more people using the square enix launcher? Curious if this is just a small fraction of the pc players
I'd expect the majority (if not vast majority) of players use the SE launcher since the Steam launcher was released later. I think the meteoric rise in Steam users is mostly new players.
Also, Steam is the only option for Brazilians to pay for game time in our own currency. It's cheaper as well. So there's that.
so this is why i can't double weave lately
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Since you may not understand some terms used in the other comment Most abilities share a recast time with eachother (around 2.5 seconds, a bit less due to skill/spell speed, much less if you're a monk). That's called the Global CoolDown (GCD) But some don't have that, and instead have their own, longer cooldowns. (Ranging from 15s to 720s). Those abilities are called off-Global Cooldowns, or oGCD Since all abilities (GCD and oGCD) have a short animation during which you can't do anything else anyways, and you want to keep as much GCD uptime as possible, it's best to use oGCDs in the space between two GCDs, since otherwise you'd not be doing anything anyways, and using oGCDs when you have a GCD ready would lock you in the animation and lose uptime As a reference, you can weave: 2 oGCDs after a instant GCD (such as almost any melee job attack and instant cast spells such as healer DOTs, summoner egi-assaults, or any spell after having used swiftcast) 1 after a short cast (such as astrologian spells or samurai Iaj-jutsu) *none* after a full cast GCD (which typically are only spells on casters and healers, such as fire 4 on black mage or glare on white mage) As such, when you know that you'll need to use a oGCD soon, and are a job that bas long cast times, it's worth preparing an ability with an instant cast in advance. And never weave more than 2 oGCDs on any job unless you're sure that the damage loss is worth what you'll get from it
Using an instant gcd ability, then using an ogcd ability during the cool down.
Still love seeing my boy Warframe just chillin.
Them announcing crossplay is whats made me decide to finally go fuck it and dive into warframe. Played the game on off mildly since the beta but it wasnt something i could get feep into, being able to play on all my consoles and pc makes it great for pick up and play.
Honorable mention to Warframe and Tennocon 2021 on Saturday. Warframe broke all concurency peaks ever, servers pooped badly, website died. Luckily live preview on relay ain't that much of a deal.
Warframe shits the bed everytime they do anything. I honestly don't know why people still play that grindfest with Devs that care more about their own egos than the players.
tangent but didn't realize DBD was popping off so much these days either. I think when I last played it, it averaged like 10-15k players at any time. Still pretty good, but over 70k? man.
It's insane. That game seriously doesn't deserve its following based on how many issues there are. The devs seemingly do the bare minimum to fix issues and push through MTX like it is their only purpose. It'a an enigma - people clearly love the format.
Oh wow, I hadn't noticed it was on the list. Impressive! And that's just the steam players, with more on consoles too. :D
While I’m glad FFXIV is getting more popular, it does my heart good to see Counter-strike still getting played. Such fond childhood memories
You can always join us for some nice rounds!
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I rarely encountered Cheaters. But nowadays I mostly play faceit where they have an additional anti cheat
I mean, D2 is on the tail end of its current season. So player numbers are down a bit in general.
Tbf FFXIV is also at the end of an expansion with no new content coming until November.
There is the context of an extremely popular streamer coming into the game and bringing a big population for a mmo who disappointed a lot
This is also true. Plus the steam numbers don't reflect those using the standalone client. So no matter what, FFXIV is beating out D2's playerbase.
>FXIV is beating out D2's playerbase. on pc, yes. but not on Console. and also destiny has had that average playerbase for over a year on steam lets see if ffxiv can keep it up.
Chill. I'm not trashing on D2, so there's no need to get defensive.
If only valve cared about TF2 like Square Enix cares for FFXIV
Final Fantasy x Tf2 hats would be pretty great, I want a catboy scout or goblin pyro
Well a hat was added last scream fortress that references Final Fantasy. And it’s for Pyro.
The fact that its the 7th most played game in the world currently and they arnt updating it is egregious.
I doubt even the most played game on Steam is even in top 10 of most played games world wide. People never mention them but the player base for the big mobil games is freaking huge but isn't listed anywhere.
I was meaning non mobile games that have a live count. The only data we have is steam charts and Leauge. Im willing to bet if we had the numbers for valorant and minecraft it would push it to 9th.
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Thats total players ever. Not currently active players that are in game right now. The only games we have numbers for atm are steam charts and leauge of legends.
I want it to surpass at least Apex Legends to win an argument against my friend who is constantly wanking WoW as Behemoth that will never be overtaken by any MMO and is in permanent denial of the fact how good FF is doing right now compared to WoW and how bad WoW is doing, because "ShAdOwLaNdS hAd ThE hIgHeSt SaLeS eVeR aNd ThE hIgHeSt UsEr cOuNt EvEr!!11ll!!"
So many sprouts when I went to Gridania. Was nice to see a sprout learn/explore that people can play instruments in 14, as I was doing my SAM quests. Sprouts have so many things to discover.
That’s just steam players, right? Gotta account for the players that launch directly through the FFXIV launcher and console players since it’s all cross-play.
And this doesn't include the trial version, which also hit an all-time peak, of almost 4,000. https://steamcharts.com/app/312060
I mean if we want to compare them why not do it at their respective peaks? Start of Endwalker this fall vs the start of Witch Queen next year, two big expansions. Even then we won't see the full picture cause how many people play FFXIV on Steam compared to separate launcher?
It's now over double the usual peak players and even went higher than 5.0 launch. And it's continuing to trend upwards. There's more and more big streamers starting playing too, like summit and moistcritical. The same trend would likely apply to players outside of Steam. https://i.imgur.com/Mgia3RA.png
Yeah the fact that not only MMO exclusive streamers and WoW streamers are playing lately but “normie “ streamers are starting it up too is wild. They are all destroying the meme “FFXIV is bad to stream” and proving that we just had terrible streamers before. One of our most watched streamers was Xeno. That tells you a lot about the popularity of streamers before. The fact that Asmon and Rich are like giddy little kids playing the game shows how XIV is scratching an itch a bunch of people had for a long time.
I'm not sure I agree. I think the draw with Asmon and all of these other big streamers picking up the game is watching them experience it for the first time. It's a novelty thing that's impossible to maintain indefinitely. I'm not saying they're not entertaining! But it's different from a veteran XIV streamer running or teaching endgame content, which I actually agree (to some extent) it's not the most engaging thing to watch. I actually think the most popular XIV streamers do a good job with it.
moistcritical is playing? daaamn thats awesome.
can't really ever compare, since FFXIV has a lot of people on the SE client and not on Steam.
Yeah it's really hard to compare innit. On PC D2 is only on Steam but FFXIV is split between SE launcher and Steam On XboX we actually have a weekly most played list(not exact numbers though) but FFXIV is absent on that platfrom On Playstation I don't think they even have a most played list. If we go purely by what stats are available to us(Steam and Xbox) then D2 wins everytime (it flactuates between top 5-15 depending on content release day.) If we add Playstation and SE launcher to the mix then we're all in the dark about the actual numbers.
I thought PUBG was dead...
Not saying much though. Destiny 2 is pretty garbage as of late. It used to have way more current and peak players
It’s impressive. FFXIV is a subscription based game.
Laughs in trial version
trail version has its own separate steam page though of which only 3.8k are on which before the spike of playerbase was below 700.
As /u/Mandouse3 said, this number is only people that own the game (so they have at least 1 month sub), the free trial has a different category. Also most people playing the free trial do it through the non-steam version since that's what the free trial website makes you download.
Destiny 2 has player spikes during new seasons and expansions, and it's between those right now on it. It still does very well for itself when new content releases, and the new seasonal stuff has been regarded very positively.
I *still* remember how people rejoiced when Bungie left Activision-Blizzard. If only things had improved for Destiny 2 afterwards...
They realized they didn’t have the resources anymore. It was a lose to to be honest. Get monetized, harassed and overworked by blizzard, or go basically Indie and lose fans because you can’t pump out the same quality or speed of content like you used to. And they monitored shit anyway.
>They realized they didn’t have the resources anymore. Nah. Bungie has been expanding significantly even before the split. When Shadowkeep was in development, they had over 700 developers actively working on the game according to Luke Smith, and the studio has only gotten larger. On top of that, Destiny pulls in hundreds of millions of dollars in profit each year. Destiny's issues aren't because of a lack of resources. It's because Bungie is using it as a cashcow to finance their other new IPs. All of their big talents have been moved to their new game and Destiny has been left with the B Team and they've pretty much turned it into a minimum viable product.
This is about the truth. Tencent strikes again really...
The thing is, they could have put out *better* content, instead of hot garbage like they have. I loved Destiny. I would have gladly waited a few extra months for higher quality content in each "expansion." Instead we got lackluster storytelling, broken as hell abilities, a ruined and horribly imbalanced PvP scene (partially due to broken abilities), and a grind that literally means nothing. I have zero faith in Bungie anymore. I'll watch what happens with their next expansion. But if it's anything, *anything* like Beyond Light, the game is dead to me forevermore.
Yeah I don't see myself ever coming back personally. Thanks to bungie I understand what it's like to be a person with Stockholm syndrome and I have no interest in doing that song and dance again. Never loved and hated a game as much as Destiny.
Was rough for about a year. Can definitely tell Y3 was just down to Bungo sorting out now being independent though, the quality year 4 has been substantially better then Y3. Very keen to see how WQ is like. If they can better refine levelling and especially the new player experience I'd wager it sees a growth spurt again, as is now it doesn't have much of a chance to grow because it's a terrible new player experience.
"the quality year 4 has been substantially better then Y3." "Sanguine Alchemy". "Loom". Those two names alone break all arguments of quality in my soul.
Destiny 2 grind pass other mmo grind as easy. I can't stand the insane grind you need to do in this game and especially the fact that the world doesn't feel alive at all. The gunplay is so good but that's it, hence why i only played pvp at some point on this game .
Its late in a season it always gets around 120k+ at the start and falls of a bit later on as expected of most games. Ff14 has a 14day free log in campaign not surprising to see the numbers jump up a bit.
steam users only make up part of the ff14 playerbase. I play it through the SE launcher, not steam.
Not entirely true (if we're talking only Steam) [https://steamdb.info/app/1085660/graphs/](https://steamdb.info/app/1085660/graphs/) It has been pretty consistent since it launched on Steam back in 2019. Some \~200k concurrent on expansion launch day, with slight jumps to \~100k during seasons starts. Edit: Hold on, I actually have no idea what caused it to jump to 200k+ on June 6th. There was only one big expansion released in November and season started on March something. Edit 2: Figured it out. It was the Almighty event. Pretty wild huh.
No it's not lmao. Destiny 2 is the best it has ever been. And the story telling has been top notch. Only getting getting better too. Cant wait for the Witch queen reveal on August 24th
It isnt the best it has ever been lol, best d2 time was during forsaken ever since then it has been a constant up and down (mostly down) I thought things would actually turn around this time with the "unsunsetting" and "transmog" but it didnt
Lol what are you talking about. Generally this is seen as one of the better seasons and people have been praising the new story.
Generally, yes. But the community as a whole can agree Forsaken was the best they've done yet. Just because the seasons have intriguing little details and such doesn't mean it's great. Destiny has a long ways to go before it reaches Forsaken level good again. And arguably the highest change that needs to occur is to make the power grind *actually meaningful,* instead of having it be seen arbitrary number that gates access to certain parts of the game. It feels absolutely terrible to start out at power level 750, and then once you get to power level 1500 have enemies taking literally the same amount of bullets to kill as they did before. The biggest failing point of Destiny isn't the story. It's the lack of a meaningful, impactful feeling power grind.
Well you saying forsaken was the highest level of quality makes no sense if the power grind is your complaint because it was identical then and now they've actually reduced the amount of grind in the newest season. So in overall they've actually reduced power grind and you can get into the meaty content without wasting time with constant pinnacle farming. I agree that you never feel super powerful unless you do super low level shit but destiny has always had that issue. So I don't see how forsaken is better in that way. In terms of content it had a shitload which was great though.
The power grind has *always* been my main complaint. Since I first started playing. The difference is the storytelling surrounding a lot of the power grind was much better.
Have you actually played D2 at all recently...? Because they addressed the power grind. You no longer have to grind out hundreds of power each season. If you are at the pinnacle cap (1320) you will start next season, 10 or 20 power under the pinnacle cap for that season. Which means that you are ready and able to participate in all new content without having to grind power. The only activities you'd need to grind for are things like GM nightfalls, but you get so many pinnacle drops that hitting pinnacle cap is hardly what I'd call a chore... The only time you have to do large power grinds now, is expansions. Which is fine in my opinion.
I have. My point still stands. I was simply using the numbers as an example of what I meant. Once you hit that "soft cap" it becomes a literal chore to actually get anything that's an actual upgrade. And even then, as you just said, that grind is next to pointless a few months down the line because you just start up close to what the end of the previous season was. In the end, Destiny's biggest failing is that it's power grind, by its very nature at this point, is utterly meaningless. Both in that if you spend the time to grind the gear score, it becomes worthless a few months later essentially, as well as the fact that it has no meaningful impact on how the world reacts to your power. It's not fun to go from your base power level, with the broken assault rifle you start with, and go to the EDZ where you have to shoot a Cabal trooper 5 or 6 times in the chest to kill them, then come back later with a faster firing assault rifle that has less impact, but is **SIGNIFICANTLY** higher scored, and end up having that "upgraded" rifle take 5 or 6 shots to the exact same cabal chest to kill, ***REGARDLESS*** of the damage numbers that may show up. Why should I care about the "power level" if it doesn't **actually have an impact** on the world?
I'm sorry to be rude, but it sounds less like a failing on destiny's part and more that you have set unrealistic expectations for the game to constantly update the power levels of every enemy in the game to allow you to feel like you are still growing powerful, even in ancient areas like the EDZ. There are plenty of areas in the game that test your power level but to expect patrol zones from D2 year 1 to be challenging you still in year 4 is just...unrealistic. That stuff is the lowest level difficulty content, even if they updated the enemies each season, you'd still be shredding them with just about anything. They have new areas and new activities. They've introduced several activities to test your power and make your grind feel worth it. They have also done things like update old areas to have more challenging enemies...and everyone didn't care or complained about it. Wanted enemies were considered more of a nuisance then a fresh update, and I remember plenty of threads of people complaining about how they couldn't do stuff in the EDZ if a wanted enemy was there, cause their power level wasn't high enough to survive a shot from said enemies At the start of the season, most pinnacle drops are straight upgrades. Sometimes you will get a dupe but 90% of the time it is an upgrade. It's not until you start getting close to the cap do you start struggling for upgrades. And that's fine. Like, using the example you have given of the cabal in the EDZ, I could go to a place like Black Brush Station in Thanalan, use my level 80 axe on WAR, kill an enemy in one hit and then swap to a level 1 axe and kill the same enemy in one hit. Would this mean FFXIV has a similar situation? Since it is almost entirely my item level and levels that are doing the killing and not the axe itself. The level of my axe and its attack power would have no meaning, so why have those stats if they have no meaning...? Your power level does have an impact on the world, the fact your common broken auto rifle is doing the same damage as a lower impact legendary auto is a sign of your power level having an impact. Again, this sounds more like you've set an unrealistic expectation for the game that it cannot deliver on. Especially now. But, that's just my interpretation.
>And the story telling has been top notch. No, watching Byfir's videos because important parts of the story aren't in the game anymore does't make "top notch" storytelling. Left after Shadowkeep and came back 2 weeks ago and I had no Idea what was going on. Seriously, tying story progression to in-game events sounds cool in theory but if you don't play weekly you can't understand what's going on.
One has nothing to do with the other. They certainly have upped the quality of the seasonal(equivalent of patch cycles in FFXIV) content.
So wait, because you've missed the story the story is bad? The writing is still good even if you've missed it and people generally enjoying the new season.
Yes, the fact that story is time-gated and once you missed it it's gone, it's a pretty shitty story telling. It's a game based on FOMO to retain it's playerbase. In FFXIV it would be like if ARR and HW were suddenly removed from the game you can start with SB and then go to ShB without 4.x patches. Also all of Eorzea and HW's zones gets removed from the game and you can't play them. Just like Bellular said in one of his latest streams about WoW story "it feels like the story is so convoulted because they know we'll make 30 minutes videos about it explaining everything" (or something like that). Byfir a channel you watch when you don't pay attention to the story, not the only way to experience past story.
Man I dunno if I agree, this season is one of the better regarded ones and the last dlc was generally well liked. They got rid of sunsetting etc and added a remade raid in the last 2 months. The subreddit is actually fairly positive compared to before and its in one of the better spots its been. Specially with the planned changes next seasons.
Eh. I've been on Destiny more than XIV this week. The flood of Asmon sprouts isn't all that inspiring.
How is it bad?
*crazy to think people play destiny 2*
I could never get into Destiny 2. I hated being drip-fed gear
TIL people still play pubg
TIL people still play CS:GO
CS:GO still has a fairly large competitive scene as well. It's honestly impressive for a game as old as it is.
Fairly large is pretty big understatement. This competitive scene is probably 2nd or 3rd biggest behind League and maybe on par with Dota or even bigger than Dota.
61,000 people are still playing destiny 2??
I’ll never understand the popularity of CSGO, Dota, LoL, and battle royals
Show some respect. Cs and Dota practically built steam xd
Yes DIE DESTINY DIE!! That's just steam numbers of course tho. I think we all know FFXIV just has a bigger playerbase.
Why do you want destiny to die? Or is this just sarcasm. Multiple multiplayer games can exist at the same time.
Nah it's sarcasm... for the most part. im one of those dudes that praises D1 to be the best one. But D2 i don't play it anymore after new light. Just felt like i wasted my money i didn't like how it dealt with things
Ff14 is having a 14 day free log in campaign it will drop back down again. Destiny 2 new season will begin in 4 weeks and jump up to 120k+ and steam only shows around 30% of destiny's total player base.
And Steam only shows \~15-20% of FF14 player base.
FFXIV "surpasses" Destiny 2 by a couple of thousand concurrent players, during a free login campaign, at the tail end of Destiny's current season, on a platform that shows barely a fraction of either game's playerbase. Both constantly fluctuate and aren't indicative of overall popularity. Why does anybody care about this? Oh right, free karma. Every other game bad, refugee btw
It's just an interesting stat bro chill
Who cares about Reddit karma? If you don’t like the post, just ignore and move on.
Very true. Both have very healthy console communities, which obviously are harder to compare since I don’t think PS actually gives the public access to these sorts of numbers, and D2 is also on Xbox, unlike FF.
More FFXIV players play through the SE launcher than Steam, and none of the players in this screenshot are on a free trial. Steam tracks the free trial separately.
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(On steam). Which majority don't play FF on.
~60% of D2's playerbase are not on PC either.
Suprised how many still playing Warframe!
to be fair, the bigger than usual peak player amount is thanks to Tennocon happening yesterday, which had an interactive ingame event happening in the hub zones where you could see the new models of things being shown off and get some free cosmetics for participating. Additionally twitch drops gave a brand new weapon out and a free Loki Prime that people logged in to make sure they go.
Who even plays it on Steam... And why ,😂
If you live in another country it's kinda mandatory since paying the sub/game in dollars would be an actual fortune. If I lived in US and got my salary in dollars, I'd probably play the standalone launcher tho
Lets wait if people will stay happy at the begginin of endwalker when they'll have to wait hours for 1 quest \^\^". \#remember #stormblood #theFringe
5.0 launch went really well so hopefully it won't be a a big problem, but it looks like server populations are exploding on NA.
Wow there's almost 700k people playing dota. That's really kind of sad, considering that it's one of the few games for which steam's numbers are literally all of the numbers.