Quote:
But the evolution of FFXIV demonstrates that choice is largely an illusion. Even with the limited options of Black Mage, just try casting Freeze in a Full Party sometime and watch as half the group gives you the "You should never use Freeze" speech. There's no end to people telling you how to do your job the "right way" no matter how tactically sound or creative your move was. Giving you more options only provides avenues of being looked down upon for making the wrong choice, and ultimately everyone gravitates to "best in slot" for both abilities and equipment. It's only when the boundaries are clear that any sort of variety can be introduced.
Choices
done right are good, Choices
done wrong are illusions.
Someone mentioned WoW a post or two above the one I'm quoting here and Warlocks.
Using Demonology, Affliction, or Destruction is the good kind of choice -- if you want to be Demonology instead of Affliction or Destruction (which plays very different), you can do that in 99.9% of the game's content.
Or, Rogue. If you like Combat instead of Assassination, you can be Combat in Raids and nobody cares in 99.9% of the content. Warriors. You can be Arms or Fury in the same 99.9% of the content; nobody cares.
Why do these choices work? Because the difference between these choices is
less than 10%. Some of them, the difference is less than 5%. They have very different playstyles, but do nearly identical DPS under similar gear levels and conditions, making it a
true "choice".
Now, when something is
not a choice, is when 1 "choice" is far superior than the other "choices".
THAT is Choice Done Wrong. Let's say that Demonology Warlocks did 25% more DPS than Affliction or Destruction. Then, it no longer becomes a "Choice" which spec of Warlock to play, right? Showing up as Affliction or Destruction is going to get you laughed at and it would indeed fit under the "Illusion of Choice" Definition you supplied here.
The problem is, not all game developers are particularly good at game balance to have such fine lines between "Choices" so that they can be real "Choices" and not "Illusions of Choice".
In FFXIV, Being a Gladiator vs being a Paladin.... there's not really any "Choice" there, is there? You can gain a wider range of abilities from other jobs being a Gladiator.......that you're probably not going to use. Paladin, however, gives you a lot of useful abilities for Tanking that you would actually probably use, and still allows you to access a few cross-job abilities you were probably going to pick anyways. So the "Choice" of deciding not to equip the PLD soulstone is... not really a "Choice" at all.
Now... if... they had made other jobs' abilities (the ones you cannot use as a PLD) actually competitive with the things you get as PLD, to the point where GLA and PLD would perform almost exactly as good, and if PLD and GLA played a bit more differently, then you would have a
true "choice" -- it really would be up to you if you decided to go GLA or PLD.
I'm not saying this is a realistic thing to do; that's just purely hypothetical obviously; this is meant to further explain the difference between Choice and Illusion of Choice.
EDIT: And even if they added
more soulstones, the
current way in which soulstones seems to work tells me that some classes might have challenge really finding a whole heck of a lot of variety when equipping them. Again, GLA/PLD as an example... the PLD soulstone gives you a few extra abilities, but basically you're still playing GLA with a few "light" type abilities on your hotkey bar (Sword/Shield Oath, Cover, etc). If they gave GLA another Soulstone, it'd still be GLA... with a few extra abilities themed to something other than "light magic sword&board warrior", but it'd still play very similar unless they change soulstones to actually modify your base rotation.
Edited, Jul 25th 2014 9:14am by Lyrailis