While i agree, the man's PR. Don't forget "we will spare no expense" announcement sometime during ShB followed by Endwalker and all it entailed, the only expense being adding trusts to more dungeons and the rest staying pretty much as rote as it used to be.
To be fair, EW had a lot of work go into it that isn't widely appreciated (apologies if that comes off as pretentious). The PvP rework in 6.1, and Duty Support for every MSQ dungeon were massive resource sinks. Though I think we're all in agreement we'd prefer duty support to have been something sprinkled out over future expansions, with more resources going into EW endgame.
If there is one thing that's been consistent for the entirety of EW it's people just....not thinking the MSQ reworks took the thousands of collective man hours they would have taken because from their perspective it's only a small thing that doesn't really affect them.
Those reworks do not matter for older players.
Sure they're great for the game, but a vast majority of people are done with ARR. Sinking thousands of hours into fixing those at the cost of older player's experience isn't the greatest of the ideas.
But it might help with retention of new players. ARR is often the first major roadblock for many players by fixing some of the problems you keep retention. This is more likely a hindsight sort of thing that might take awhile to see its effects.
While it undoubtedly will have some impact, the actual roadblock that causes a lot of players to lose interest hasn't been changed much whatsoever. That being 2.1 onward. It's still 80+ quests which can feel like a slog when you're between expansions. Especially because it's not exactly highlighted by strong gameplay.
The story is more subjective but I, personally, argue it's not great either. Good but not nearly as strong as it becomes.
Regardless, I don't nearly enough new players offset the frustration for older ones.
The PVP rework was amazing, and not at all like the rest of your comment. CC single handedly revitalised the PVP scene in ways that people have been asking for since it was introduced in ARR. Actually having consistent reasons for playing (series), quick and dynamic matches that are addictive, and a dedicated ranking system have seen PVP go from an activity with 30 minutes queues, to one with 2 minute queues.
I play all dungeons on Duty Support because I want to see the NPC interactions
On Duty Support, if you fail the mechanic and die, it's a wipe. There's no healer rezz to save the player. They have to run back and try again
I also always run Duty Support when I go through MSQ. I know it's going to be a joke anyway, may as well go full casual and just enjoy all the lore and extra NPC comments.
Well, they did replace almost every region's server equipment, added oceanic servers, expanded NA, JP, EU servers, and developed an Xbox version of the game at the same time as EW's post patch content. Also experimenting with cloud servers. Not to mention the impending graphics engine upgrade.
Perhaps this is what he meant? I know it didn't translate to content for players, but they've seemed to do all of the most expensive things you could do for an MMO.
The game needs to have both. I don’t know why we keep talking like the entire dev team can only work on one thing at a time.
You keep releasing ultimates and other hard content so players who are already at the endgame don’t leave and the negative attitude from having no content at their skill level doesn’t start filtering all the way down to players who are just starting endgame.
You simultaneously rework casual content to be more challenging and rewarding, so you don’t bleed new players from getting bored of 500 hours of no challenge, with the remaining players suddenly getting punched in the face after MSQ with a relatively massive spike in difficulty.
I feel having 16 hours of voice acting over shadowbringers 9 hours counts as a pretty serious expense all things considered. Perhaps it hasn't shown in terms of game activities but they substantially increased production values on map and background environment design, unique models, visual effects, cutscene directing, more elaborate solo duties, and so on.
If you think Endwalker didn't have a lot more money put into it than other expansions, then you have a serious problem with viewing things objectively outside of your own enjoyment.
>it is quite fast, so it requires quite a technical aspect of it ...
...it's not like an endurance thing. You don't build and build and build and unleash at one time, but it's quite fast so I think playstyle is quite different from what we had previously, compared to any of the existing jobs
* Yoshi-PR (live-translated), talking about RPR before EW launch.
Lol, lmao even.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSGdMv72ghI&t=10320s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSGdMv72ghI&t=10320s)
around 5.3 release, in a interview he was talking about how the quests got better with time, how they avoid "fetch quests", etc.
https://ffxiv.jeuxonline.info/actualite/58307/interview-naoki-yoshida-parle-remaniement-realm-reborn#english
The first main quests of 5.3 are literally "fetch some grapes" and "kill some bats"
https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/In_the_Name_of_the_Light
https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Heroic_Dreams
>The first main quests of 5.3 are literally "fetch some grapes" and "kill some bats"
I mean, 5.3's MSQ is so gorgeous that you have forgotten that by the end of the patch quests.
On the other hand, in 6.0, when you are about to embark on a journey to the end of the universe and have to spend time to chase down some scientists... Or when you are about to finish SHB and get a "lol no, you must finish the job questline first" message...
Call me crazy, but I think 16 getting a lot of the same criticism of 14 (bad open zones, poor pacing, weak rpg elements, normal mode too easy) probably made Yoshi p and CBU3 take a closer look at how 14’s doing
God I hope so. It really shouldn't be a thing that tanks don't have to work together. That healers never have a reason to use a single GCD and or don't even have a reason to use half of their ogcds cause noone takes dmg, or that dps can do 1/5th of their supposed dps and still clear everything.
Even if the content wouldn't get harder in itself, just some ways to show people how bad they actually are would go a long way. I don't mean dps meters here, but something like slight enrages of normal raid bosses or so would go a long freaking way(sth like alphascape 4.0)
>Yoshida: For example, in a side scrolling game, if there aren’t any holes you can drop down into if you miss a jump, ofcourse the game would lose its stress, but it would also lose its fun.
I really hope it translate into making casual content more engaging, like when I do a w2w pull in EW most of the time I can play like shit as a tank and still be VERY far from dying, theres very few risk in those, I feel like I'm on autopilot when a w2w should be something "hard" because you're taking twice the "intended" damage
> I feel like I'm on autopilot when a w2w should be something "hard" because you're taking twice the "intended" damage
I have a feeling W2W pulls are actually the norm when they're designing & developing dungeons. Which would mean that they normalized it and if you're not doing it you're punished instead of being rewarded for doing it.
So basically, I would be okay with W2W pulls being butt clenching if and only if it makes you go faster than the current template they have for clearing with all W2W pulls.
Agree. Nothing like getting absolutely clapped by an ultimate tankbuster with 10% health left after using your mits because the healer forgot shields, and you're sitting there absolutely sweating and praying they have something for you because that next auto coming in .5 seconds will 100% kill you.
That's the high I live for as a tank...
I'm a tank and *I* die from sheer boredom because I'm pretty much never at risk. That's top of enmity generation being braindead and crowd control non-existent. Ditto as a healer. It's just spam AoEs and throw out a couple Lustrates. There's really just no room for meaningful expression of skill in this game aside from seeing higher damage numbers.
I've gotten to the point if I'm queued with a healer (or playing healer) where I'll literally just eat AoEs on some bosses and pulls for better/easier uptime. You still don't need any GCD heals if the healer has half an idea of what their tools do because the damage is so non-threatening.
Some of them feels good to AoE optimally (like rpr or mch) but at the same time I believe they're also bored af since I've had runs where I clear a pack at like 50s on the timer and other where its at like 70s
Fun ~~sad~~ fact about that. On the last boss of Aetherfont; the kraken thing. I deliberately got 8 vuln stacks and stood in three intersecting aoes. Even with zero cooldowns I _still_ didn't die. It did slightly over 100k. And on WAR, I can just heal it all back up on my own.
I know they want dungeons on the easy side but that's utterly ridiculous. Why even dodge attacks when I'm literally unkillable?
I don't know how tanks can have anxiety as they can fail most mechanics, and take like 10% of their hp in damage and in the end there's absolutely nothing they do that would prevent others from dying anyway, i m basically a melee dps pressing one mit every 15 sec
w2w pulls in early dungeons are no joke and actually take more than 2 braincells.
By EW even though the content is piss easy the fear of god remains lol
I try to play multiple DPS Jobs just so I don't get bored. Worked for a bit, but the main issues is the boss fights in EW dungeons are extremely boring.
Variant Dungeon bosses are more interesting :/
I don’t know how i survived all the lvl 90 roulettes as a healer in EW. All the tanks became cracked at mitigation and self sustain, especially WAR, that i felt useless during trash pulls, which is most of dungeons. Boss fights are so simple too and needed a few aoe heals or hots and then were solved
I think a lot about that has to do with ilvl. When the expansion is fresh and you are doing a dungeon with all first timers, having barely enough ilvl for the instance and not having memorized the mechanics, it's an actual fun experience. You can wipe, you can't be carried by a couple of people, and everyone has to do their part.
Not like they are hard or anything on release, but that slight difficulty is completely lost when you get higher ilvls, which is what ends up happening for everyone who doesn't play an expansion on the first week it releases. And it doesn't help how you do the content over and over on roulettes forgetting any initial sense of difficulty you might have felt.
My personal ideal for dungeon trash pulls would be a combination of Bardam's Mettle and The Twinning as the design target.
Bardam's Mettle can cause some sweat on some of the pulls if the tank or healer is bad because the damage is relatively high and can be pretty spiky due to mob crits. If both are bad, the DPS start to sweat. If neither are bad, then it just requires them to, you know, not play poorly. And with The Twinning, as long as you're not gearsynced, those pulls actually do require some engagement because you have a huge variety in enemies and shit to dodge. Hell, even if you *are* gearsynced, one of the critters in the second or third pull has a cone that actually one-shots DPS if they try to greed it (I think it's the Kaliya clone).
I'm not interested in my tomestone farm being an absolute nightmare to get through each week such that I'm looking to other methods of grinding but it would be nice to have to actually think about what I'm doing.
When I first saw this, I assumed it was YoshiP's usual "this trial/raid/EX/etc is going to be the hardest ever!" thing he does every patch. However, looking at it again, this does read like a lead looking at his creation and thinking "...shit." I can only hope this signals good things in the future.
I think he's refering to the casual side. Very much doubt they're going to tune savage and ultimate any harder than they currently are. At best maybe spice up the jobs a bit by making them more unique and less homogenized
I think that would be perfect.
I'm perfectly content with Extremes and Savage raids, but we have really needed some work on everything below that for a while now.
Even as a new player, I was wishing there was something below the difficulty extremes that would make you sweat a bit.
Fixing homogenization feels like a separate type of thing but I am totally down for that any day.
I don't mind that normal raids are basically story mode fights, but if they're gonna just be story fights I wish they'd add some sorta set dressing to walk through or something to differentiate it from 'Trials' (but just remove the fluff in Savage).
LIke how they did with the Alexander raids with the short pipes you'd go through or elevator you'd take.
I really hope they start giving us some jobs that feel unique and not continue their trend of making them all feel more and more homogenized to "balance" them.
This last couple years have made every single tank feel exactly the same. To the point they all have almost identical hotbars with stuff in the same spot that does the same thing, just under a different name.
words are cheap, we've heard many other things in the past that never came to be. vague, could literally mean anything, a word in the passing.
I still fully expect nothing changing in DT beyond official slideshows, they dont want their cash cow to dry out, they wont risk it.
Genshin has sidequests and puzzles all over the map, with a lot of lorebuilding and at times emotion or mystery put into them. When's the last time you took a quest in FF14 that wasn't within spitting distance of an aetheryte or a chocobo porter?
Melees actually have to work for uptime now? Wow! Now im interested in the eden ultimate as i was gonna assume theyre gonna make shiva's hitbox the size of axekick (coping) 😂
Who would've thought that making a game require zero brainpower in 99.99% of the content would be a bad idea? I'm glad they recognize it but damn this isn't Candy Crush, how'd they even entertain the idea?
I mean, I asked the question, 'why are we changing the game to attract people who don't like MMOs?', and the large response I got was, 'what are you talking about? More people equals a better game!'
Yeah, ok.
They can't: every other single player FF game actually ask you to at learn the basics mechanics and not press a single button (yes even ff13, you still need to team swap and stuff). FF10 would just break them etc. So yeah, they hide behind "it's made to be easy like a single player FF" while they just want to be carried cuz a single player FF is too hard
FFXIII is funny enough one of the hardest FF games. It's balanced around "playing itself" and thus if you are not building proper paradigms you just get destroyed. The late-game bosses required actual understanding of the underlying systems.
oh yeah, the optional bosses are like that, and you often have to chose the right commands too if I recall right (it's been a hot minute but I did the full trophy back then xD)
> They can't: every other single player FF game actually ask you to at learn the basics mechanics and not press a single button
FF16 unironcally doesn't and it's another Yoshida game.
FF7Rebirth thankfully reverses that decision and actually has customisation and a bit of thought process (elemental weakness, using assess to find out how to stagger an enemy etc) involved.
> FF7Rebirth thankfully reverses that decision
Hard to say "reverses that decision" when they're made by completely different teams and it shows in every single respect possible. FFVII's team never "made that decision" in the first place to reverse it.
So much of ff16's marketing made a huge deal out of "we have a DMC developer!" and then they made a combat system so watered down that the only DMC dna left is having stinger and enemy step, which you usually ignore in favour of just mashing cooldowns when they come up.
Much respect to Yoshi-P and the CBU3 team but I honestly really dislike their approach when it comes to difficulty. FF7 has an extremely large casual fanbase but even on normal difficulty Remake and Rebirth can actually be super challenging if you don't take it seriously
This lol. You have 14 mainline singleplayer FF games to choose from, before even counting spin-offs and sequels, let this one be an MMO as it was made to be.
It's still not enough for people who TRULY want it to function like a single-player game, too. I knew a person who quit the moment she hit a trial because she had to stop doing trusts and play with other people.
In an MMO.
Isn't that exactly what the devs don't want? I don't remember where exactly but I remember the reasoning given for Duty Support was that people were skipping 14 when they played FF games because they didn't want to play online.
And that led to a simplification and homogenisation of duties to account for the npcs. Those people are still online anyway, it's an mmo, and they're forced to play with others eventually for raids
I don't see the point in trying to cater your online game for people who don't want to play online and altering the experience for the rest. Not everything has to be for everyone.
I cannot imagine anyone being satisfied with FFXIV as a single player game because at that point it's a visual novel with a monthly subscription with 20ish minutes of actual combat gameplay every several hours. Eventually when the game starts dying down it makes sense to future proof it by making it soloable, but at the height of its popularity it feels like a massive waste when those resources could have been spent keeping the current playerbase engaged in the game.
> at that point it's a visual novel with a monthly subscription with 20ish minutes of actual combat gameplay every several hours.
A sizeable amount of RPG players, particularly in this scene, effectively want this. They often refuse to admit it, but the amount of importance placed in story over gameplay that actually tries or let alone succeed at anything it does try to do is baffling. Not to mention the silent majority which don't talk much about it.
Number go up and enemy not kill much good, number need me actually think and enemy no die fast bad.
> A sizeable amount of RPG players, particularly in this scene, effectively want this.
That's basically it. The thing that's kept me invested has been the story. That's why I'm doing all the major side content, that's why I'm leveling every job, that's why I've put two thousand hours into this game. I ain't a hardcore raider or anything, I don't do RP, I just really care about the story and that's why I've stuck around. It's why FFXIV grabbed me where tons of other MMOs didn't.
Given that 95% of series retrospective I've seen online have nothing to say about XIV other than "it sucked before and now it's good" and do the equivalent of TV static when XI comes up does suggest that there are more potential players out there, yeah. And to be fair, I've started to see more conventional channels have an actual opinion and analysis of XIV (from a non-MMO player's perspective) post-ShB and EW so part of it is working in that regard.
Sort of. Yoshida's said a few times he's had fans of the franchise tell him they're interested in playing FFXIV but not playing an MMO. On a more high level viewpoint, makes sense for SE to want to tap into that potential playerbase. FFXIV's 10 years old at this stage, any new players it gets will likely come from newcomers to the genre as a whole, and that's a completely unknown figure. SE's lucky in that they can guarantee some new players from the wider franchise by lowering the biggest barrier to entry for those people; the multiplayer aspects.
> any new players it gets will likely come from newcomers to the genre as a whole
So they have 2 options.
Piss off the veterans will who would stay or try to get newbies on who might not stay anyway.
He should stick with the people who have been paying his pay check for the past 10 years. They are at least dedicated customers.
Yep every single player gamer I've seen try the game or have tried to help doesn't make it past HW cause the game is boring as hell, like this game just isn't gonna appeal to them since those guys are used to games with actual gameplay during its first few hours and not like 3 expansions in.
Doesn't really work when "the people" are the director and producer himself getting his feelings hurt over long term series fans ignoring his entry. Even after he got to make a single player game for those fans.
>getting his feelings hurt over long term series fans ignoring his entry.
Yoshi's remarks on how shocked he was at the vitriol and hatemail XVI got really made me realize how the dude probably operates in a bubble most of the time.
Like obviously hate mail and death threats are over the line and the people who pull that shit need to seek help & touch grass, no one's gonna argue that. But when he brings up how people saying "This isn't a real Final Fantasy" or "If I wanted to play DMC I'd play DMC" hurt to hear it's like... Dude. Not everyone is gonna love your game, and you can't force them to.
Plus no matter how much they make XIV 'single player' it's still gonna fundamentally be a tab target MMO with zero stakes combat outside of bleeding edge level cap hard mode content so like... those people will still probably not give a fuck after trying it. The fact that half the game is basically entirely free to play now really says a lot in that regard.
More people can equal to better game, especially in MMORPG, he ain't wrong about that. But in that case, why didn't those changes increase the numbers? We are back at pre-wow exodus numbers, the little new players we got didn't offset all the older players leaving, nor the WoW players who didn't stick with the game.
Who greenlighted the idea of attracting single player gamers without making sure veterans are happy first? It doesn't even make sense, long standing issue that FF players have with FFXIV is that it's simply too expensive for what it is. Someone who never played MMORPG gets disinterested the moment they see that they need to buy expansion and then pay $15 per month, all of that for 10 years old game that isn't even fully voice acted and cutscenes are for the most part just NPCs emoting.
> Who greenlighted the idea of attracting single player gamers without making sure veterans are happy first?
I remember someone on here positing that SE fell victim to a "trust thermo-somethingIcan'tremember". Basically they assumed that the playerbase being hunkydory with the game's trajectory, but in truth people were only hanging on due to sunk cost fallacy. When they finally hit a point that those people who were hanging on said "screw it" and left, SE were too invested in the current path to easily course correct.
The [trust thermocline](https://every.to/p/breaching-the-trust-thermocline-is-the-biggest-hidden-risk-in-business). Basically the idea that, like frogs in a pot of boiling water, customers have inertia of rest, and will stick around in spite of changes they disapprove of until the conditions become intolerable, and then will leave in droves and can't be enticed back by simple reversions.
> Who greenlighted the idea of attracting single player gamers without making sure veterans are happy first?
Cross-pollination is a major company-wide initiative at the moment. Not only does Yoshida talk about it frequently, but also the DQX dev team (a core ethos of that game since day 1), and it's frequently brought up in the results briefings. It's a core strategy with all of Square Enix's major live services, primarily the MMOs, as they come from traditionally single player franchises.
The stated idea is that making the game more appealing to traditionally offline-only customers will increase the subscriber base to better fund their other projects—considering the MMOs are such a huge and consistent source of revenue. They want to lean into that harder.
This also works the other way around. Who do they want buying these newly funded projects? Well, everyone interested in their IP—as many people as possible. Square Enix's MMOs have been reducing grind and leaning away from retention in order to better free players up and encourage them to buy other games. This goes hand in hand with the previous strategy, since they obviously don't want those newly established MMO subscribers suddenly not buying the new titles their subscription just funded.
Square Enix wants their single player customers playing their MMOs and their MMO subscribers buying their other games during downtime. This core idea is primarily responsible for a lot of the decision making the last few expansions.
Maybe they should cross-pollinate to other platforms. All recent SQEX games that I was interested in (except FFXIV, obviously) were or still are PS exclusives. Trying to cross-pollinate MMORPG market which is dominated by PC players (even in FFXIV, only about 30% are on PS), to a single player console exclusive is just dumb and ineffective.
The delays and other bullshit happening around PC release just makes me not want to buy them. No way I'm buying FF7R after they pulled that triple dipping Epic exclusive bullshit. No way I'm buying FF16 at full price after I've heard the complaints. But if these games released on PC immediately, I wouldn't mind, I would buy them immediately or even preordered few days before release.
This isn't even a new thing: FFXIV has shifted from "okay we need to have larger, longer things to keep people in (cough cough ARR Relic Grinds with intent of "X hours of grind")" to "wait a minute, we can have them enter and leave because we have a massive list of other things they can play". It's been a *bit* too far this expansion, but the intent has been pretty clear since SB, at minimum.
Yeah, it's definitely not a new thing. Yoshida was only worried about retention during ARR/HW because they were still building that critical mass of players. He's even said that they were unsure if anything past Heavensward would be greenlit at all, so they *really* needed people to stick around. Come Stormblood there was essentially nothing to worry about anymore and they started massively dialing down the retention and friction until they reached where they are now.
More people equals a better game if the new people interact with the rest of the player base, otherwise they might as well just be bots the rest of the community don't care about. Single player was a mistake.
It be nice, one of the strangest things to me is that FFXIV has the worst dungeon gameplay of basically any game on the planet, and its the overwhelming majority of content in the game, and they all play the exact same and they're painfully dull, to the point where I dont touch dungeon roulettes.
What's interesting is I recently just finished FFXVI, the other game Yoshi was involved in, and the "combat areas" are literally just FFXIV's dungeons. The _exact same design_ of just 3 - 5 basic combat encounters, then a boss fight in a circular arena, and then repeat until the final boss, with the whole thing just being a linear path forward with a very occasional branch off for a treasure chest.
Dude is definitely in a rut with a lot of his design. That's _far_ from the only thing that was brought over wholesale from FFXIV as well.
No no no, he's absolutely right. There's so much "influence" of 14 felt throughout the FF16 you kinda feel like it's a singleplayer version of 14 with a bit better combat
Yep. And if you play FF7Rebirth you can tell how different it is to FF16, since it's obviously a different set of developers. The XIV devs are pretty bad at single player games and XVI is the outcome. They need to stick with developing MMOs or stop and look at how Rebirth is handling it.
Rebirth needs to be the template going forward for SE.
If there's one thing you should know about japanese game design, it's that the director steers the ship no matter what.
Every last design decision is greenlit by them. If there's a XIV-type design in the game, it's because the director was okay with it.
He may not have drawn the literal outline of the area and placed every prop in the scene, but it's inaccurate to pretend the director of a game is somehow oblivious to what the game's dungeons play like.
Really it's been a recent problem with Endwalker. I was doing leveling dungeons and 50-80 roulette with a friend for more tomestones, while they are still fairly straightforward and boring, it felt like there was more variety in boss mechanics back in the day. Even some of the more recent SHB dungeons like Heroes' Gauntlet or Anamnesis have genuinely rough mechanics that require a touch of thinking, or heck some of the EW leveling dungeons Tower of Zot and Vanaspati will get sketchy too.
Nowadays especially with Expert and Level 90 roulette, it's just the same 4-5 indicators that you loop through in different orders, with a visual skin on top, and if you get hit you are basically never at risk of dying.
I think level 81 dungeons battle mechanic should be the gold standard with a few more punishing mechanics on top. This way any expert dungeons would force any players to be decent. But sadly you cannot force people to git gud, they will just leave the game feeling frustrated and quit. Especially in video games, you cannot make them to do things they don’t want to do in the first place.
I have felt pretty disjointed between the game outside and inside of the newer ultimates. It's either zero stress or maximum stress. Nothing in between.
This seems like the classic PR/politics move of speaking in vague generalities with the hope that your audience will project their own hopes onto whatever you're saying. Criticism up until launch will be stifled by the true believers who point to the quote and go "He's aware of the problem and is trying to fix it, will you chill out?" And then if it launches and there's little to no substantive change, that criticism gets silenced again, because no specific promises have been made, and you were clearly insane *the whole time* for believing the things these statements are intended to make you believe.
Nail on the head right there. Few people have mastered the art of being just vague enough to give a little hope while saying nothing substantive like Yoshi-P. And then the true believers can gaslit anyone who got their hopes and dares being disappointed by saying "he never said that". And then around and around it goes, in the most bad faith discussion possible.
I'm still mad on what they did post-SB and removed the 2 expert dungeon release per patch schedule for 1 "high quality, high polish" expert dungeon only to see subsequent releases degrade over the years.
We lost that, optional level cap dungeons, and HM version of old expac dungeons. And what do we get out of it; same expert roulette 50/50 coin flip of current + previous experts, eye candy dungeons where layout + bosses follow the same cookie cutter cook book recipe formula, and V&C content which the V is one and done and the C is DoA.
My favorite excuse is always "There's so many dungeons in the game already, we can't keep adding them."
Okay but only the most relevant dungeons give the most relevant currency, Yoshi. Maybe look into "unreal"ing older dungeons? "No just do hunts or 24 mans or raids or anything else to get your tomes!"
I think the fact dungeons aren't actually "dungeons" anymore (and haven't been for a while) and are just MSQ railcar rides is what really grinds my gear. A setpiece MSQ dungeon here and there is fine. But don't knock out all the optional ones that don't fit into the main narrative, and don't hyper fixate on making them an 'experience' that falls flat after the first time.
Like doing Amaurot and Dead Ends for the umpteenth time just rings hollow, because they're supposed to be gassed up, emotional events to cap off an entire story. But now you're just wall to wall pulling, brainlessly burning everything down while the set pieces fire off on script and have the impact of a wet noodle since you've seen it a million times now. Vanaspati in particular is *really bad* in this regard, between the Vrtra part in the beginning and the Matanga family later on, because not only is the emotional/narrative impact lessened but it makes something you're expected to do repeatedly for EXP/glamour tedious as hell and take even longer.
Of all the 90 dungeons, the only ones I liked and didn't mind piloting 3 deadweights through are Smileton and Stigma Dreamscape and both were optional dungeons. 80 dungeons, Twinning and Akadaemia Anyder themes slapped while all the boss fights were actually engaging even if it required some brain usage in the process.
EW MSQ related dungeons fell down the slope and turned into cinematics and style over combat and substance and I just don't vibe well with it. Like how did the game go from Tower of Zot with our thematic version of Magus Sisters and Tower of Babil with Anima fight which were both brilliantly done to like...Kraken 2.0 in Aetherfont and Golbez the demon core slicer in Lunar Subterrane?
Their data probably suggest that taking out expert dungeons and making the five minimum works fine. People don’t really care much about dungeons and would rather do other new things, hence variant + criterion, Ishgard restoration, island sanctuary, exploration content is much more preferable. The lack of exploration content is what hurt Endwalker since Eureka Ortos, Island Sanctuary and Variant + Criterion- all failed to scratch that itch. Plus the lack of reward longevity literally killed Variant dungeons from becoming evergreen content.
What annoys me most about that fucking quote is people don't remember the context of it. It was said in regards to grinding, and how he's not a fan of endgame grinds being a like a second job just to not fall behind other players. It's why our endgame power only increases twice during an expansion, rather than every patch.
I took a break in 6.2 cause there wasn't anything for me and people told me to take one or whatever. I came back around like July 2023 for 6.4, a little under a year and I still didn't have anything to do so of course my frustration with that was met with go take a break you're burned out, would be funny if it wasn't so annoying.
If FF16 is any indication he's forgotten/doesn't know how to make a game difficult anymore, and I have little hope for it returning to FF14 outside of ultimates.
Even if he does make things more difficult, he will walk it right back when reality hits.
But on the bright side, the people who have been raving about "braindead" this and "braindead" that can sleep soundly knowing that their feedback has been heard.
Unfortunately words are just that. Words. I’ll resub for the drop. Play the story, maybe even dip into an EX. But I won’t stay subbed until I know the patches bring something I’m interested in. The “gear grind” is just boring and seeing numbers get bigger does nothing for me. Even the real endgame, glamour no longer draws me in. Not trying to doom and gloom. But Yoshi P is a big on saying stuff and then just straight up delivering something different.
My only fear would be that making things harder in a game is usually met with a **lot** more resistance than making things easier. It's human nature. People don't like to be given things, then have them taken away and be told to work for it. Once the damage is done, it's very hard to reverse.
Of course, it's a positive and good to see him acknowledge it. It gives me a little hope for the future of the game. I'll keep an eye of things and see if it leads to anything in the future, but I won't rush to resub just yet.
I can see why Yoshida wanted to create a stress free game. It's admirable in theory, just misplaced kindness. He's created a sort of "comfort bubble" environment in the game that isn't quite healthy. Like wrapping someone in bubblewrap to protect them from anything that might upset them, instead of helping them overcome those situations. This has lead to community divide where some people react aggressively toward any suggestion that might threaten their bubble and others get frustrated because they don't want to be "protected".
~~Personally, I'd love if the content became more difficult to the point that bad players couldn't just get carried and~~ *~~had~~* ~~to actually learn how to play their job. As the game is now, MSQ content is so easy that you can still make it through any given roulette with an auto-attacking reaper, or a dancer who doesn't dance, or a healer who doesn't DPS, or a tank who doesn't AOE, or a story-skipper who didn't spend even a little bit of time at a training dummy to figure out what their job does.~~
~~I'm not saying everything needs to be difficult to the point that everyone needs a gold parse, but it would be nice if content was designed around the assumption of a full party who actually push their buttons and know the basics. It would be really fucking nice to not have to put up with 45-minute Holminster Switch / Tower of Zot runs with story-skipping raiders from other games who think all their skills are transferable.~~
Actually this post sucks. It's gatekeeper shit and would result in *more* 45-minute runs of Holminster Switch and Tower of Zot instead of less. Forced tutorials are a much better idea.
I will never understand this viewpoint and it really just seems like it's targeted at the completely bullshit idea that if you make content that the bottom 25% of your playerbase feels compelled to do but can't beat that they'll "get good" rather than simply quitting. They actually quit. WoW has a ton of data on this. They quit and probably tell all of their friends to not try the game because it's bullshit and asks you to no life the game just to beat.
As much as I don't agree with Asmongold on a lot of things, there is one thing he is completely right about that he talks about all the time when talking about WoW. Players in the aggregate do things because your game incentivizes them to do those things. Why does FFXIV have a famously patient community in casual content? Well, because Square Enix bans the true problem children (which would ironically include old Asmongold) and everybody knows it's not that hard. You're definitely going to clear in short order even if the first pull is a really fast wipe, so why get mad? You're not staring down the gun of either quitting and having your clear eaten for the week or sticking it out and having a miserable 4 hour play session like you often do in WoW. I don't see why you would possibly want to get rid of this to still have dungeons and MSQ trials being mind numbingly easy and boring because bad players do in fact exist and something they can clear would in fact be trivial to somebody who is even seriously thinking about doing savages.
The sad thing is you're not wrong, but the bottom who struggle with this game and then still get funneled into playing with the rest of us are *REALLY* bad.
I'm not an elitist. I don't do Ultimates, I don't even do Savage. I do most of the Extremes, at best. But the bottom of the game is BAD. I will always remember when one of the Sadu solo Duties came out and so many people lost their minds about being unable to complete it.
I don't know where we find a balance here.
You can't. The only way for the people who are good at the game and want a minimum level of play to get what they want is for that bottom 10-15% to go away and never be seen again.
> I will always remember when one of the Sadu solo Duties came out and so many people lost their minds about being unable to complete it.
This is the audience they have crafted over the years though. It's kinda their own fault at this point. Should've told the crybabies to leave if they dont like it rather than pander to them
Honestly let's make dicisple of war and job quests as hard as they were back in ARR again. Never forget the thamaturge NPCs casting FIRE II and olitberating our health. That gatekept a lot of people who were bad and had no intention of trying to get better.
This is dope, but the biggest stress to me is trying to get new players in. Asking them to pay for a skip or bang out 5 games worth of content to catch up is a little too much.
"Hey friends, come play this game with me! By the way, you need to spend \~200 hours going through the story by yourself with only rare moments where I can do a dungeon with you.
Wait, where are you going?"
This has honestly made it impossible for me to recommend the game to new players. If my friends start and get through ARR I'm excited and ready to go. But honestly it's just as you described, hundreds of hours of gaming just to get caught up and I can only join in spurts here or there.
Yeah I think Yoshi probably should focus on tackling this massive hurdle first then daydreaming about increasing difficulty since this game is extremely hostile to new players who don’t want to invest 600 hours to complete the story to reach the endgame. It’s also why the free trial is increased to Stormblood and probably Shadowbringers as well by 2025-26. This is his way to say, hey look, play for free as long as you want, no rush, no need to pay, until you reach the last two expansion then its pay or no access. They should give people options to skip the entire storyline and start at the current expansion and provide summary for each story beat up to that point. Now that we have new game plus, this should not even be a problem since people can replay the story part of the game - if they accidentally hit skip button.
It's closer to 600 hours now. I started in the middle of Shadowbringer and took me 500 hours of mainly focusing on the MSQ to finish. My friend, took 1000 hours, doing more of the side content along the way. It's too long to recommend to new players. Most people simply don't have the time to ever catch up in a realistic time frame.
It's gone way beyond just being too easy, the problem is cbu3 competence. The game just doesn't make any sense, the progression curve is all over the place (if it even exists), "healing" barely mean anything any more, their idea of difficulty is archaic "die and retry" one-shot (or archaic multi-layered random, for example rare fish), players can afk and get reward in trial/raid24/frontline, they still use QTE, and a lot of other small things (for example, to complete a EW relic quest, the player needs to be on the job, but the relic can't be equipped, so we need another weapon just to complete the quest..... and cut-scenes can't be skipped because of the useless stats allocation thing)
The jump from normal to extreme is the only difficulty curve that doesn't make sense. You go from braindead easy content that doesn't punish you at all for being incomptent to suddenly getting one shot by a spread mechanic cause it had no aoe indicator that gave a magic vuln, and you stood on top of someone. You go from dungeon bosses that loop mechanics infinitely until the instance timer runs out, to bosses that have a hard enrage at 10 mins. There needs to be something in between to bridge that gap between normal and extreme, but more importantly, an incentive for players to willingly improve
Normal to EX made a *bit* more sense when 24mans (in SB/ShB) were starting to go beyond what the rest of normal content was doing. But that came crashing down this expac too.....
> but the relic can't be equipped, so we need another weapon just to complete the quest
This part boggles my mind so much I can't even :(
Especially since there isn't a lot of spare room in the main hand armory chest...
You know what it is? I can tell you exactly what it is.
Weapon = Job, there is no state for a weaponless player character, nothing is ever actually 'upgraded' in this game, rather the old thing is removed from the players inventory while the new, totally separate, thing is added. Every solution comes with issues.
There is a state for weaponless characters though. Adventurer. It's happened a couple times over the years. It's not something really intended to be seen but it definitely exists and has happened on retail servers a couple of times. Is it suitable to fix this? Probably not but to say there's no fallback just isn't true
Not used on purpose but it's happened substantially more than once. https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/hhiij4/tfw_the_game_bugs_and_wipes_all_your_gear/ Here's it happening a couple years back. It happened a few times during shb's chinese release as well. I'm sure it's happened times other than those but those are ones i've seen.
With the advent of job crystals, it just further solidifies how archaic and irrelevant the armory system as a gimmick of "weapon swap = class swap!" is for the game now. Especially since they keep pussyfooting over the Class situation and how they've sunk too much into keeping it for the sake of legacy players but clearly don't care for it or want it around anymore with the fact no new classes have been added since HW and no classes factor into ANY post ARR job.
the fact that Aurum Vale is still discussed as one of the hardest dungeons for players after 10 years of release is so telling how piss easy casual content is in 14.
Eh, I'll believe it when I see it. Right now, I literally only log in to get my alt through MSQ and level them up, I'm dragging my heels because ShB dungeons are fun to heal. They actually hurt, but I know that when I finish post ShB(I'm at Anyder), I'll be back to dungeons that tickle. Zot and Vanaspati are the only 2 I'm looking forward to, maybe Dead Ends since its chaotic but everything else will be a slog. I like the game, but it's WAY too easy and there's nothing to do socially. I'm literally just replaying an easy single player rpg at this point, it's not very engaging which is a shame because I do like the game. It's just got no content that I want to do, nothing co-op, except Bozja and Eureka, and I've already milked those 2 to death.
So what happens to the "it's good for the health of the game" "not everything needs to be hard you're just a sweaty elitist" "stop doomering about how easy the game has gotten" "just go play wow" crowd now?
Be very careful about anything yoshi-p says regarding difficulty and challenge in ffxiv. He is very good at his job, but there is a disparity between what he says difficulty will be and what it really ends up being.
I really want to believe, but it's better to not get your hopes up. At the very least, what constitutes a challenge for yoshi-p seems to be different from this sub's definition of it, and sometimes the raiding community in general.
between this and the relic comments I'm genuenely positive about the future, although I have had heavy criticism about the current state of the game I actually trust the devs and believe they want the best for the game. I don't mind stress-free content, but there has to be a range, and right now there's too much of a difficulty gap between casual content and anything above that
I hope this means DT will be more difficult. At least have the Alliance Raids be as difficult as Ivalice, where messing up mechanics can wipe the alliance and not just do some damage.
I have a lot of opinions about the homogenization and streamlining of story content, but I think the main thing FF14 needs is more in the middle. Casual players have plenty to do. Hardcore players probably need *more frequent* things to do, since tiers are so much longer now than they were in the past, but they also got 2 of the hardest Ultimates yet this expansion.
But if you don't have the time commitment or skill level to get into Savage+ content, there's really nothing for you to do in this game to white your knuckles on. You can farm one Extreme trial every 4 months for the mount, but that's about it. Even then, the difficulty gap between 90% of the content in this game and an Ex is too wide. A lot of casual players who want to try harder content will find Ex trials to be *too* hard, or too intimidating to get into.
My dumb ass really thought this is what Variant Dungeons would be. I actually like Variant Dungeons. I love the branching paths, the lore, the conversations with NPCs, how boss mechanics can change depending on how you interact with the dungeon, etc. Honestly, I wish all dungeons were designed like this. But I expected them to be harder. I'm disappointed they weren't.
I really hope the DT exploration zone brings with it a good dose of midcore content to engage with.
you could kinda feel this coming with how yoshi-p was talking about the recent alliance raid, telling the dev teams they have to up the difficulty. they didn't succeed, as thaleia is probably worse than void ark is for being undertuned and lacking in mechanical difficulty, but it did show they were slowly becoming aware of the problem.
i don't expect casual content to reach the heights of wiping city, ivalice, or on content the vault, but if they can bring back cognitive function to this game's casual content i would be content with this game again. ultimates and savage have kept me here, but shouldn't be the only things requiring a pulse
I feel like some people interpret this as a vocal few wanting the game to be crazy difficult but I think for a lot it'd just be nice to have some common content that was between somewhere cannot lose and one mistake = lose.
I think this could be a good thing, depending on how they see this.
Increasing complexity(note: complexity is not the same as difficulty) is almost universally good for optional content. Relics like the Zodiac weapons, or Eurekan, are just much better than Anima or (at its worst) Hildibrand. Synchronising them with the extra content (normal/alliance) raid to motivate more people to unlock them is even better.
However, if they were to see this as adding (more) trancient / timed content that could be a very big mistake. Things like Mor Dhona, Idylshire, and Diadem are exceptional memories and experiences for the people that had the chance to experience them, but the fact that new players can't is sad. I feel like they should consider similar systems to some of the Beast Tribes with partial instancing of zones, rather than full instancing that just proggreses a zone once the new patch drops.
As a whole, content in FFXIV is timeless. You see it all the time, people get told to enjoy their journey. Don't rush to the end, everything will be there once you get there. There's nothing you *truly* miss.
That's a core tenet that should be held as best as they can because it's a big reason why everyone is so relaxed. Why get salty if you miss an A-rank? There'll be another, and the rewards aren't going to disappear. Why rage if you don't get that fish in this window? Or if someone is slow in a dungeon, meaning you can't finish all your roulettes today because you need to sleep? Content will be there. It's not going anywhere.
The moment they make it so that content *can* be missed, that it *does* go away? That'll negatively impact player behaviour as a whole.
> The moment they make it so that content can be missed, that it does go away? That'll negatively impact player behaviour as a whole.
For example, this weekend my server's NN was just a bunch of sprouts freaking out "can I still get the car?!" and just how many people rushed the 100 Fall Guys wins despite Yoshida saying it would be coming back.
Yeah, that's a perfect example of it happening in a vacuum with things that are not impactful in a real way. Now imagine that with glam, or timed achievements+title (cleared the savage in the first week!), and what it would do to people.
Or, even worse, a 'savage' or 'ultimate' that'd just permanently disappear after a month or two.
The game needs a grind, a reason for people that WANT to pay monthly to be ABLE to login and actually do something and progress. They're very much underserving people that actually want to pay to play their game, but can't because there's nothing meaningful to do.
Literally, you will find more people doing Eureka or Bozja nowadays than any other EW content simply because there is no grind or long term loop when it comes to their rewards.
Probably the Duty Support for every MSQ dungeon. Every other time they bring it up they mention it's a right pain in the balls to get working properly, and they've added to an average of what, 5 dungeons a patch since mid ShB?
Yeah, Island Sanctuary and Variant Dungeon since you can complete all 3 of them solo.
As an example, the Island Sanctuary version of Dawntrail is fully coop, which is a pretty cool idea imo
Agreed, he's clearly talking about the content difficulty floor here. There's zero "stress" on the low end of the content difficulty spectrum which both doesn't ramp you up for "stress" in the mid difficulty contents. Relics are cut scene locked by essentially handed to you being quest/tome based is just one example.
Pendulum swung too far to casual and its a good thing its starting to swing back.
Hopefully that pendulum doesn't smack into anything battle rez related too hard. Yoshida's had SMN and RDM rez in the nerf sights for a while now, all cause he doesn't like them being the defacto rezzers when there's between 1 and 6 healers up and about in whatever casual content you're doing.
not even savage. my Unreal Thordan PFs this weekend wiped to enrage twice. players aren't good at the game. no amount of MSQ pitfalls will make healers learn how to GCD heal when appropriate or teach ranged dps what boss relative north is.
we'll see.
the reason im not subbed now is because the game is so easy, you can login now and get everything done in a week, a day if youve kept up.
and for a game that needs a sub paid thats just bad design, im not saying make it a slogfest, but bring back content that justifies playing for awhile and the price paid, thats what eureka did, the goalpost were far but the journey to em was quite fun.
> and for a game that needs a sub paid thats just bad design
I agree. It's really bad that you can catch up so quickly, especially when it's a 30 day sub. I have subscribed a few times and caught up to a whole patch within maybe 3 hours?
Please fucking god let this not just be a passing thought but something that actually happens.
I think that, with the immense popularity of games like all the Souls games, as well as more hardcore MMOs such as Black Desert Online, it's undeniable that there is a very large market in people wanting a bit of a challenge. While it's unrealistic to expect anything near that level for XIV, as XIV is, at its core, a casual-focused MMO, it does feel pretty awful that it has seemingly abandoned people who want a more compelling experience on the gameplay side. Just sequestering all players wanting a slight challenge off into Savage/Ultimate content feels like a pretty lame way to handle this issue.
He's not *wrong* about stress/difficulty, so it'll at least be interesting to see where this goes. I still expect MSQ to be figuratively a cakewalk, but maybe the trials will be a kick upwards. We'll see at release.
Hopefully Dawntrail doesn’t become the Cataclysm of FFXIV where half the playerbase washes out on dungeons because they require just a little more effort than AoEing every trash pull like it was in WotLK aka “the best expansion ever”.
That... sounds genuinely kind of promising. The first step on the road to improvement is to admit there is something to improve.
While i agree, the man's PR. Don't forget "we will spare no expense" announcement sometime during ShB followed by Endwalker and all it entailed, the only expense being adding trusts to more dungeons and the rest staying pretty much as rote as it used to be.
To be fair, EW had a lot of work go into it that isn't widely appreciated (apologies if that comes off as pretentious). The PvP rework in 6.1, and Duty Support for every MSQ dungeon were massive resource sinks. Though I think we're all in agreement we'd prefer duty support to have been something sprinkled out over future expansions, with more resources going into EW endgame.
If there is one thing that's been consistent for the entirety of EW it's people just....not thinking the MSQ reworks took the thousands of collective man hours they would have taken because from their perspective it's only a small thing that doesn't really affect them.
It's hard to see the reworks when you've already done the content to be fair...
Those reworks do not matter for older players. Sure they're great for the game, but a vast majority of people are done with ARR. Sinking thousands of hours into fixing those at the cost of older player's experience isn't the greatest of the ideas.
But it might help with retention of new players. ARR is often the first major roadblock for many players by fixing some of the problems you keep retention. This is more likely a hindsight sort of thing that might take awhile to see its effects.
While it undoubtedly will have some impact, the actual roadblock that causes a lot of players to lose interest hasn't been changed much whatsoever. That being 2.1 onward. It's still 80+ quests which can feel like a slog when you're between expansions. Especially because it's not exactly highlighted by strong gameplay. The story is more subjective but I, personally, argue it's not great either. Good but not nearly as strong as it becomes. Regardless, I don't nearly enough new players offset the frustration for older ones.
The PVP rework was amazing, and not at all like the rest of your comment. CC single handedly revitalised the PVP scene in ways that people have been asking for since it was introduced in ARR. Actually having consistent reasons for playing (series), quick and dynamic matches that are addictive, and a dedicated ranking system have seen PVP go from an activity with 30 minutes queues, to one with 2 minute queues.
>Duty Support for every MSQ dungeon That goes under "*we've overdone that a bit*", I'm afraid.
I play all dungeons on Duty Support because I want to see the NPC interactions On Duty Support, if you fail the mechanic and die, it's a wipe. There's no healer rezz to save the player. They have to run back and try again
I also always run Duty Support when I go through MSQ. I know it's going to be a joke anyway, may as well go full casual and just enjoy all the lore and extra NPC comments.
Well, they did replace almost every region's server equipment, added oceanic servers, expanded NA, JP, EU servers, and developed an Xbox version of the game at the same time as EW's post patch content. Also experimenting with cloud servers. Not to mention the impending graphics engine upgrade. Perhaps this is what he meant? I know it didn't translate to content for players, but they've seemed to do all of the most expensive things you could do for an MMO.
Yes but I am a redditor armchair developer, clearly they are lazy for not making me another ultimate
The last thing this game needs is another ulti. They need to reconsolidate the foundation first.
The game needs to have both. I don’t know why we keep talking like the entire dev team can only work on one thing at a time. You keep releasing ultimates and other hard content so players who are already at the endgame don’t leave and the negative attitude from having no content at their skill level doesn’t start filtering all the way down to players who are just starting endgame. You simultaneously rework casual content to be more challenging and rewarding, so you don’t bleed new players from getting bored of 500 hours of no challenge, with the remaining players suddenly getting punched in the face after MSQ with a relatively massive spike in difficulty.
I feel having 16 hours of voice acting over shadowbringers 9 hours counts as a pretty serious expense all things considered. Perhaps it hasn't shown in terms of game activities but they substantially increased production values on map and background environment design, unique models, visual effects, cutscene directing, more elaborate solo duties, and so on.
If you think Endwalker didn't have a lot more money put into it than other expansions, then you have a serious problem with viewing things objectively outside of your own enjoyment.
>it is quite fast, so it requires quite a technical aspect of it ... ...it's not like an endurance thing. You don't build and build and build and unleash at one time, but it's quite fast so I think playstyle is quite different from what we had previously, compared to any of the existing jobs * Yoshi-PR (live-translated), talking about RPR before EW launch. Lol, lmao even. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSGdMv72ghI&t=10320s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSGdMv72ghI&t=10320s)
around 5.3 release, in a interview he was talking about how the quests got better with time, how they avoid "fetch quests", etc. https://ffxiv.jeuxonline.info/actualite/58307/interview-naoki-yoshida-parle-remaniement-realm-reborn#english The first main quests of 5.3 are literally "fetch some grapes" and "kill some bats" https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/In_the_Name_of_the_Light https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Heroic_Dreams
>The first main quests of 5.3 are literally "fetch some grapes" and "kill some bats" I mean, 5.3's MSQ is so gorgeous that you have forgotten that by the end of the patch quests. On the other hand, in 6.0, when you are about to embark on a journey to the end of the universe and have to spend time to chase down some scientists... Or when you are about to finish SHB and get a "lol no, you must finish the job questline first" message...
The most jarring for me was when you go to Thavnair because the world is literally ending, but you need to help an elephant sell some fish first
Call me crazy, but I think 16 getting a lot of the same criticism of 14 (bad open zones, poor pacing, weak rpg elements, normal mode too easy) probably made Yoshi p and CBU3 take a closer look at how 14’s doing
I'll believe it when I see it.
God I hope so. It really shouldn't be a thing that tanks don't have to work together. That healers never have a reason to use a single GCD and or don't even have a reason to use half of their ogcds cause noone takes dmg, or that dps can do 1/5th of their supposed dps and still clear everything. Even if the content wouldn't get harder in itself, just some ways to show people how bad they actually are would go a long way. I don't mean dps meters here, but something like slight enrages of normal raid bosses or so would go a long freaking way(sth like alphascape 4.0)
I would like him to be more specific.
"Please look forward to it" XDDDD
>Yoshida: For example, in a side scrolling game, if there aren’t any holes you can drop down into if you miss a jump, ofcourse the game would lose its stress, but it would also lose its fun. I really hope it translate into making casual content more engaging, like when I do a w2w pull in EW most of the time I can play like shit as a tank and still be VERY far from dying, theres very few risk in those, I feel like I'm on autopilot when a w2w should be something "hard" because you're taking twice the "intended" damage
> I feel like I'm on autopilot when a w2w should be something "hard" because you're taking twice the "intended" damage I have a feeling W2W pulls are actually the norm when they're designing & developing dungeons. Which would mean that they normalized it and if you're not doing it you're punished instead of being rewarded for doing it. So basically, I would be okay with W2W pulls being butt clenching if and only if it makes you go faster than the current template they have for clearing with all W2W pulls.
Agree. Nothing like getting absolutely clapped by an ultimate tankbuster with 10% health left after using your mits because the healer forgot shields, and you're sitting there absolutely sweating and praying they have something for you because that next auto coming in .5 seconds will 100% kill you. That's the high I live for as a tank...
I think dungeons are also too formulaic. Two mob pulls, miniboss, two mob pulls, miniboss, two mob pulls, boss. ARR dungeons are unique at least.
I play tank and I don't know how DPS don't die from shear boredom, since they're pretty much never at risk.
I'm a tank and *I* die from sheer boredom because I'm pretty much never at risk. That's top of enmity generation being braindead and crowd control non-existent. Ditto as a healer. It's just spam AoEs and throw out a couple Lustrates. There's really just no room for meaningful expression of skill in this game aside from seeing higher damage numbers.
I've gotten to the point if I'm queued with a healer (or playing healer) where I'll literally just eat AoEs on some bosses and pulls for better/easier uptime. You still don't need any GCD heals if the healer has half an idea of what their tools do because the damage is so non-threatening.
Some of them feels good to AoE optimally (like rpr or mch) but at the same time I believe they're also bored af since I've had runs where I clear a pack at like 50s on the timer and other where its at like 70s
Yup, I don't track time exactly but I know when my CD come back up again and the pack isn't dead that the DPS be slacking.
They're at more risk than the tanks, who can safely ignore every single boss mechanic while a DPS will die if they try that.
Fun ~~sad~~ fact about that. On the last boss of Aetherfont; the kraken thing. I deliberately got 8 vuln stacks and stood in three intersecting aoes. Even with zero cooldowns I _still_ didn't die. It did slightly over 100k. And on WAR, I can just heal it all back up on my own. I know they want dungeons on the easy side but that's utterly ridiculous. Why even dodge attacks when I'm literally unkillable?
I don't know how tanks can have anxiety as they can fail most mechanics, and take like 10% of their hp in damage and in the end there's absolutely nothing they do that would prevent others from dying anyway, i m basically a melee dps pressing one mit every 15 sec
w2w pulls in early dungeons are no joke and actually take more than 2 braincells. By EW even though the content is piss easy the fear of god remains lol
I try to play multiple DPS Jobs just so I don't get bored. Worked for a bit, but the main issues is the boss fights in EW dungeons are extremely boring. Variant Dungeon bosses are more interesting :/
I don’t know how i survived all the lvl 90 roulettes as a healer in EW. All the tanks became cracked at mitigation and self sustain, especially WAR, that i felt useless during trash pulls, which is most of dungeons. Boss fights are so simple too and needed a few aoe heals or hots and then were solved
personally i consider tanking to be the most boring dungeon role because there's fewer aoe damage buttons so im feeling the opposite
I think a lot about that has to do with ilvl. When the expansion is fresh and you are doing a dungeon with all first timers, having barely enough ilvl for the instance and not having memorized the mechanics, it's an actual fun experience. You can wipe, you can't be carried by a couple of people, and everyone has to do their part. Not like they are hard or anything on release, but that slight difficulty is completely lost when you get higher ilvls, which is what ends up happening for everyone who doesn't play an expansion on the first week it releases. And it doesn't help how you do the content over and over on roulettes forgetting any initial sense of difficulty you might have felt.
My personal ideal for dungeon trash pulls would be a combination of Bardam's Mettle and The Twinning as the design target. Bardam's Mettle can cause some sweat on some of the pulls if the tank or healer is bad because the damage is relatively high and can be pretty spiky due to mob crits. If both are bad, the DPS start to sweat. If neither are bad, then it just requires them to, you know, not play poorly. And with The Twinning, as long as you're not gearsynced, those pulls actually do require some engagement because you have a huge variety in enemies and shit to dodge. Hell, even if you *are* gearsynced, one of the critters in the second or third pull has a cone that actually one-shots DPS if they try to greed it (I think it's the Kaliya clone). I'm not interested in my tomestone farm being an absolute nightmare to get through each week such that I'm looking to other methods of grinding but it would be nice to have to actually think about what I'm doing.
When I first saw this, I assumed it was YoshiP's usual "this trial/raid/EX/etc is going to be the hardest ever!" thing he does every patch. However, looking at it again, this does read like a lead looking at his creation and thinking "...shit." I can only hope this signals good things in the future.
I think he's refering to the casual side. Very much doubt they're going to tune savage and ultimate any harder than they currently are. At best maybe spice up the jobs a bit by making them more unique and less homogenized
I think that would be perfect. I'm perfectly content with Extremes and Savage raids, but we have really needed some work on everything below that for a while now. Even as a new player, I was wishing there was something below the difficulty extremes that would make you sweat a bit. Fixing homogenization feels like a separate type of thing but I am totally down for that any day.
I just hate that normal raids are a snooze fest but savage is an entirely different game lmao
I don't mind that normal raids are basically story mode fights, but if they're gonna just be story fights I wish they'd add some sorta set dressing to walk through or something to differentiate it from 'Trials' (but just remove the fluff in Savage). LIke how they did with the Alexander raids with the short pipes you'd go through or elevator you'd take.
I really hope they start giving us some jobs that feel unique and not continue their trend of making them all feel more and more homogenized to "balance" them.
This last couple years have made every single tank feel exactly the same. To the point they all have almost identical hotbars with stuff in the same spot that does the same thing, just under a different name.
words are cheap, we've heard many other things in the past that never came to be. vague, could literally mean anything, a word in the passing. I still fully expect nothing changing in DT beyond official slideshows, they dont want their cash cow to dry out, they wont risk it.
I hope we'll get some G in this RPMMO
The G went on holidays after the Peacekeeper fight in Dead Ends. Came back for a bit when it heard Barbariccia was moving in.
still waiting for the other letters too
I would like the world itself to not feel like a glorified backdrop between my objectives and a reason to explore and dangerous places to go
"Woah woah woah, stop it right there. What do you think it is, Genshin Impact or something?" - YoshiP, probably.
Implying genshin has a reason to explore or dangerous places kekw
Well, there's reason to explore (free primogems babeyyyy) but not dangerous places
I mean there is plenty reasons to explore and you got optional content like world quest that incentives even more reason to explore.
Genshin has sidequests and puzzles all over the map, with a lot of lorebuilding and at times emotion or mystery put into them. When's the last time you took a quest in FF14 that wasn't within spitting distance of an aetheryte or a chocobo porter?
Melees actually have to work for uptime now? Wow! Now im interested in the eden ultimate as i was gonna assume theyre gonna make shiva's hitbox the size of axekick (coping) 😂
Wait until the melee has to deal with cleaves and DPS pressure... XD
Who would've thought that making a game require zero brainpower in 99.99% of the content would be a bad idea? I'm glad they recognize it but damn this isn't Candy Crush, how'd they even entertain the idea?
I mean, I asked the question, 'why are we changing the game to attract people who don't like MMOs?', and the large response I got was, 'what are you talking about? More people equals a better game!' Yeah, ok.
I'll never understand the people who want this to function like a purely single player game. Go play literally any other FF game
They can't: every other single player FF game actually ask you to at learn the basics mechanics and not press a single button (yes even ff13, you still need to team swap and stuff). FF10 would just break them etc. So yeah, they hide behind "it's made to be easy like a single player FF" while they just want to be carried cuz a single player FF is too hard
FFXIII is funny enough one of the hardest FF games. It's balanced around "playing itself" and thus if you are not building proper paradigms you just get destroyed. The late-game bosses required actual understanding of the underlying systems.
oh yeah, the optional bosses are like that, and you often have to chose the right commands too if I recall right (it's been a hot minute but I did the full trophy back then xD)
> They can't: every other single player FF game actually ask you to at learn the basics mechanics and not press a single button FF16 unironcally doesn't and it's another Yoshida game. FF7Rebirth thankfully reverses that decision and actually has customisation and a bit of thought process (elemental weakness, using assess to find out how to stagger an enemy etc) involved.
> FF7Rebirth thankfully reverses that decision Hard to say "reverses that decision" when they're made by completely different teams and it shows in every single respect possible. FFVII's team never "made that decision" in the first place to reverse it.
So much of ff16's marketing made a huge deal out of "we have a DMC developer!" and then they made a combat system so watered down that the only DMC dna left is having stinger and enemy step, which you usually ignore in favour of just mashing cooldowns when they come up.
Much respect to Yoshi-P and the CBU3 team but I honestly really dislike their approach when it comes to difficulty. FF7 has an extremely large casual fanbase but even on normal difficulty Remake and Rebirth can actually be super challenging if you don't take it seriously
This lol. You have 14 mainline singleplayer FF games to choose from, before even counting spin-offs and sequels, let this one be an MMO as it was made to be.
It's still not enough for people who TRULY want it to function like a single-player game, too. I knew a person who quit the moment she hit a trial because she had to stop doing trusts and play with other people. In an MMO.
Probably because their friends are here and playing with friends is at least half the reason to play a mmo for many people.
Unless I'm misreading, people wanting to play the game with their friends are unlikely to be the same people wanting single player, no?
Isn't that exactly what the devs don't want? I don't remember where exactly but I remember the reasoning given for Duty Support was that people were skipping 14 when they played FF games because they didn't want to play online.
And that led to a simplification and homogenisation of duties to account for the npcs. Those people are still online anyway, it's an mmo, and they're forced to play with others eventually for raids I don't see the point in trying to cater your online game for people who don't want to play online and altering the experience for the rest. Not everything has to be for everyone.
I cannot imagine anyone being satisfied with FFXIV as a single player game because at that point it's a visual novel with a monthly subscription with 20ish minutes of actual combat gameplay every several hours. Eventually when the game starts dying down it makes sense to future proof it by making it soloable, but at the height of its popularity it feels like a massive waste when those resources could have been spent keeping the current playerbase engaged in the game.
> at that point it's a visual novel with a monthly subscription with 20ish minutes of actual combat gameplay every several hours. A sizeable amount of RPG players, particularly in this scene, effectively want this. They often refuse to admit it, but the amount of importance placed in story over gameplay that actually tries or let alone succeed at anything it does try to do is baffling. Not to mention the silent majority which don't talk much about it. Number go up and enemy not kill much good, number need me actually think and enemy no die fast bad.
> A sizeable amount of RPG players, particularly in this scene, effectively want this. That's basically it. The thing that's kept me invested has been the story. That's why I'm doing all the major side content, that's why I'm leveling every job, that's why I've put two thousand hours into this game. I ain't a hardcore raider or anything, I don't do RP, I just really care about the story and that's why I've stuck around. It's why FFXIV grabbed me where tons of other MMOs didn't.
Given that 95% of series retrospective I've seen online have nothing to say about XIV other than "it sucked before and now it's good" and do the equivalent of TV static when XI comes up does suggest that there are more potential players out there, yeah. And to be fair, I've started to see more conventional channels have an actual opinion and analysis of XIV (from a non-MMO player's perspective) post-ShB and EW so part of it is working in that regard.
Sort of. Yoshida's said a few times he's had fans of the franchise tell him they're interested in playing FFXIV but not playing an MMO. On a more high level viewpoint, makes sense for SE to want to tap into that potential playerbase. FFXIV's 10 years old at this stage, any new players it gets will likely come from newcomers to the genre as a whole, and that's a completely unknown figure. SE's lucky in that they can guarantee some new players from the wider franchise by lowering the biggest barrier to entry for those people; the multiplayer aspects.
> any new players it gets will likely come from newcomers to the genre as a whole So they have 2 options. Piss off the veterans will who would stay or try to get newbies on who might not stay anyway. He should stick with the people who have been paying his pay check for the past 10 years. They are at least dedicated customers.
Yep every single player gamer I've seen try the game or have tried to help doesn't make it past HW cause the game is boring as hell, like this game just isn't gonna appeal to them since those guys are used to games with actual gameplay during its first few hours and not like 3 expansions in.
Doesn't really work when "the people" are the director and producer himself getting his feelings hurt over long term series fans ignoring his entry. Even after he got to make a single player game for those fans.
>getting his feelings hurt over long term series fans ignoring his entry. Yoshi's remarks on how shocked he was at the vitriol and hatemail XVI got really made me realize how the dude probably operates in a bubble most of the time. Like obviously hate mail and death threats are over the line and the people who pull that shit need to seek help & touch grass, no one's gonna argue that. But when he brings up how people saying "This isn't a real Final Fantasy" or "If I wanted to play DMC I'd play DMC" hurt to hear it's like... Dude. Not everyone is gonna love your game, and you can't force them to. Plus no matter how much they make XIV 'single player' it's still gonna fundamentally be a tab target MMO with zero stakes combat outside of bleeding edge level cap hard mode content so like... those people will still probably not give a fuck after trying it. The fact that half the game is basically entirely free to play now really says a lot in that regard.
More people can equal to better game, especially in MMORPG, he ain't wrong about that. But in that case, why didn't those changes increase the numbers? We are back at pre-wow exodus numbers, the little new players we got didn't offset all the older players leaving, nor the WoW players who didn't stick with the game. Who greenlighted the idea of attracting single player gamers without making sure veterans are happy first? It doesn't even make sense, long standing issue that FF players have with FFXIV is that it's simply too expensive for what it is. Someone who never played MMORPG gets disinterested the moment they see that they need to buy expansion and then pay $15 per month, all of that for 10 years old game that isn't even fully voice acted and cutscenes are for the most part just NPCs emoting.
> Who greenlighted the idea of attracting single player gamers without making sure veterans are happy first? I remember someone on here positing that SE fell victim to a "trust thermo-somethingIcan'tremember". Basically they assumed that the playerbase being hunkydory with the game's trajectory, but in truth people were only hanging on due to sunk cost fallacy. When they finally hit a point that those people who were hanging on said "screw it" and left, SE were too invested in the current path to easily course correct.
The [trust thermocline](https://every.to/p/breaching-the-trust-thermocline-is-the-biggest-hidden-risk-in-business). Basically the idea that, like frogs in a pot of boiling water, customers have inertia of rest, and will stick around in spite of changes they disapprove of until the conditions become intolerable, and then will leave in droves and can't be enticed back by simple reversions.
> Who greenlighted the idea of attracting single player gamers without making sure veterans are happy first? Cross-pollination is a major company-wide initiative at the moment. Not only does Yoshida talk about it frequently, but also the DQX dev team (a core ethos of that game since day 1), and it's frequently brought up in the results briefings. It's a core strategy with all of Square Enix's major live services, primarily the MMOs, as they come from traditionally single player franchises. The stated idea is that making the game more appealing to traditionally offline-only customers will increase the subscriber base to better fund their other projects—considering the MMOs are such a huge and consistent source of revenue. They want to lean into that harder. This also works the other way around. Who do they want buying these newly funded projects? Well, everyone interested in their IP—as many people as possible. Square Enix's MMOs have been reducing grind and leaning away from retention in order to better free players up and encourage them to buy other games. This goes hand in hand with the previous strategy, since they obviously don't want those newly established MMO subscribers suddenly not buying the new titles their subscription just funded. Square Enix wants their single player customers playing their MMOs and their MMO subscribers buying their other games during downtime. This core idea is primarily responsible for a lot of the decision making the last few expansions.
Maybe they should cross-pollinate to other platforms. All recent SQEX games that I was interested in (except FFXIV, obviously) were or still are PS exclusives. Trying to cross-pollinate MMORPG market which is dominated by PC players (even in FFXIV, only about 30% are on PS), to a single player console exclusive is just dumb and ineffective. The delays and other bullshit happening around PC release just makes me not want to buy them. No way I'm buying FF7R after they pulled that triple dipping Epic exclusive bullshit. No way I'm buying FF16 at full price after I've heard the complaints. But if these games released on PC immediately, I wouldn't mind, I would buy them immediately or even preordered few days before release.
This isn't even a new thing: FFXIV has shifted from "okay we need to have larger, longer things to keep people in (cough cough ARR Relic Grinds with intent of "X hours of grind")" to "wait a minute, we can have them enter and leave because we have a massive list of other things they can play". It's been a *bit* too far this expansion, but the intent has been pretty clear since SB, at minimum.
Yeah, it's definitely not a new thing. Yoshida was only worried about retention during ARR/HW because they were still building that critical mass of players. He's even said that they were unsure if anything past Heavensward would be greenlit at all, so they *really* needed people to stick around. Come Stormblood there was essentially nothing to worry about anymore and they started massively dialing down the retention and friction until they reached where they are now.
More people equals a better game if the new people interact with the rest of the player base, otherwise they might as well just be bots the rest of the community don't care about. Single player was a mistake.
Halle-fuckin'-lujah
It be nice, one of the strangest things to me is that FFXIV has the worst dungeon gameplay of basically any game on the planet, and its the overwhelming majority of content in the game, and they all play the exact same and they're painfully dull, to the point where I dont touch dungeon roulettes.
What's interesting is I recently just finished FFXVI, the other game Yoshi was involved in, and the "combat areas" are literally just FFXIV's dungeons. The _exact same design_ of just 3 - 5 basic combat encounters, then a boss fight in a circular arena, and then repeat until the final boss, with the whole thing just being a linear path forward with a very occasional branch off for a treasure chest. Dude is definitely in a rut with a lot of his design. That's _far_ from the only thing that was brought over wholesale from FFXIV as well.
Linear flat hallway design has been a critique of ff games since 13
I seriously doubt the game director is personally designing dungeons.
Dude, FFXVI feeling too MMO-y has been one of the most common complaints since it came out. If it isn't Yoshi, it's CBU3's team in general.
No no no, he's absolutely right. There's so much "influence" of 14 felt throughout the FF16 you kinda feel like it's a singleplayer version of 14 with a bit better combat
Yep. And if you play FF7Rebirth you can tell how different it is to FF16, since it's obviously a different set of developers. The XIV devs are pretty bad at single player games and XVI is the outcome. They need to stick with developing MMOs or stop and look at how Rebirth is handling it. Rebirth needs to be the template going forward for SE.
If there's one thing you should know about japanese game design, it's that the director steers the ship no matter what. Every last design decision is greenlit by them. If there's a XIV-type design in the game, it's because the director was okay with it. He may not have drawn the literal outline of the area and placed every prop in the scene, but it's inaccurate to pretend the director of a game is somehow oblivious to what the game's dungeons play like.
Really it's been a recent problem with Endwalker. I was doing leveling dungeons and 50-80 roulette with a friend for more tomestones, while they are still fairly straightforward and boring, it felt like there was more variety in boss mechanics back in the day. Even some of the more recent SHB dungeons like Heroes' Gauntlet or Anamnesis have genuinely rough mechanics that require a touch of thinking, or heck some of the EW leveling dungeons Tower of Zot and Vanaspati will get sketchy too. Nowadays especially with Expert and Level 90 roulette, it's just the same 4-5 indicators that you loop through in different orders, with a visual skin on top, and if you get hit you are basically never at risk of dying.
I think level 81 dungeons battle mechanic should be the gold standard with a few more punishing mechanics on top. This way any expert dungeons would force any players to be decent. But sadly you cannot force people to git gud, they will just leave the game feeling frustrated and quit. Especially in video games, you cannot make them to do things they don’t want to do in the first place.
I have felt pretty disjointed between the game outside and inside of the newer ultimates. It's either zero stress or maximum stress. Nothing in between.
This seems like the classic PR/politics move of speaking in vague generalities with the hope that your audience will project their own hopes onto whatever you're saying. Criticism up until launch will be stifled by the true believers who point to the quote and go "He's aware of the problem and is trying to fix it, will you chill out?" And then if it launches and there's little to no substantive change, that criticism gets silenced again, because no specific promises have been made, and you were clearly insane *the whole time* for believing the things these statements are intended to make you believe.
Nail on the head right there. Few people have mastered the art of being just vague enough to give a little hope while saying nothing substantive like Yoshi-P. And then the true believers can gaslit anyone who got their hopes and dares being disappointed by saying "he never said that". And then around and around it goes, in the most bad faith discussion possible.
I'm still mad on what they did post-SB and removed the 2 expert dungeon release per patch schedule for 1 "high quality, high polish" expert dungeon only to see subsequent releases degrade over the years. We lost that, optional level cap dungeons, and HM version of old expac dungeons. And what do we get out of it; same expert roulette 50/50 coin flip of current + previous experts, eye candy dungeons where layout + bosses follow the same cookie cutter cook book recipe formula, and V&C content which the V is one and done and the C is DoA.
My favorite excuse is always "There's so many dungeons in the game already, we can't keep adding them." Okay but only the most relevant dungeons give the most relevant currency, Yoshi. Maybe look into "unreal"ing older dungeons? "No just do hunts or 24 mans or raids or anything else to get your tomes!" I think the fact dungeons aren't actually "dungeons" anymore (and haven't been for a while) and are just MSQ railcar rides is what really grinds my gear. A setpiece MSQ dungeon here and there is fine. But don't knock out all the optional ones that don't fit into the main narrative, and don't hyper fixate on making them an 'experience' that falls flat after the first time. Like doing Amaurot and Dead Ends for the umpteenth time just rings hollow, because they're supposed to be gassed up, emotional events to cap off an entire story. But now you're just wall to wall pulling, brainlessly burning everything down while the set pieces fire off on script and have the impact of a wet noodle since you've seen it a million times now. Vanaspati in particular is *really bad* in this regard, between the Vrtra part in the beginning and the Matanga family later on, because not only is the emotional/narrative impact lessened but it makes something you're expected to do repeatedly for EXP/glamour tedious as hell and take even longer.
Of all the 90 dungeons, the only ones I liked and didn't mind piloting 3 deadweights through are Smileton and Stigma Dreamscape and both were optional dungeons. 80 dungeons, Twinning and Akadaemia Anyder themes slapped while all the boss fights were actually engaging even if it required some brain usage in the process. EW MSQ related dungeons fell down the slope and turned into cinematics and style over combat and substance and I just don't vibe well with it. Like how did the game go from Tower of Zot with our thematic version of Magus Sisters and Tower of Babil with Anima fight which were both brilliantly done to like...Kraken 2.0 in Aetherfont and Golbez the demon core slicer in Lunar Subterrane?
Their data probably suggest that taking out expert dungeons and making the five minimum works fine. People don’t really care much about dungeons and would rather do other new things, hence variant + criterion, Ishgard restoration, island sanctuary, exploration content is much more preferable. The lack of exploration content is what hurt Endwalker since Eureka Ortos, Island Sanctuary and Variant + Criterion- all failed to scratch that itch. Plus the lack of reward longevity literally killed Variant dungeons from becoming evergreen content.
"The developers said go play other games" all over again.
That line is nails on a chalkboard
What annoys me most about that fucking quote is people don't remember the context of it. It was said in regards to grinding, and how he's not a fan of endgame grinds being a like a second job just to not fall behind other players. It's why our endgame power only increases twice during an expansion, rather than every patch.
I took a break in 6.2 cause there wasn't anything for me and people told me to take one or whatever. I came back around like July 2023 for 6.4, a little under a year and I still didn't have anything to do so of course my frustration with that was met with go take a break you're burned out, would be funny if it wasn't so annoying.
“ffxiv respects your time”
Which sort of misses the actual context behind that line.
sounds too vague, not buying it
Yeah bullshit, I don't believe him, when it comes to Yoshi-P's remarks on difficulty the only thing consistent is what he says about it being wrong.
If FF16 is any indication he's forgotten/doesn't know how to make a game difficult anymore, and I have little hope for it returning to FF14 outside of ultimates.
Even if he does make things more difficult, he will walk it right back when reality hits. But on the bright side, the people who have been raving about "braindead" this and "braindead" that can sleep soundly knowing that their feedback has been heard.
Or, he made the game too easy, and he is currently walking it back.
Make healers do something outside of ultimates then
Unfortunately words are just that. Words. I’ll resub for the drop. Play the story, maybe even dip into an EX. But I won’t stay subbed until I know the patches bring something I’m interested in. The “gear grind” is just boring and seeing numbers get bigger does nothing for me. Even the real endgame, glamour no longer draws me in. Not trying to doom and gloom. But Yoshi P is a big on saying stuff and then just straight up delivering something different.
My only fear would be that making things harder in a game is usually met with a **lot** more resistance than making things easier. It's human nature. People don't like to be given things, then have them taken away and be told to work for it. Once the damage is done, it's very hard to reverse. Of course, it's a positive and good to see him acknowledge it. It gives me a little hope for the future of the game. I'll keep an eye of things and see if it leads to anything in the future, but I won't rush to resub just yet. I can see why Yoshida wanted to create a stress free game. It's admirable in theory, just misplaced kindness. He's created a sort of "comfort bubble" environment in the game that isn't quite healthy. Like wrapping someone in bubblewrap to protect them from anything that might upset them, instead of helping them overcome those situations. This has lead to community divide where some people react aggressively toward any suggestion that might threaten their bubble and others get frustrated because they don't want to be "protected".
Right, there's already some people in my ffxiv discord groups telling others to grind jobs now before they make it harder.
~~Personally, I'd love if the content became more difficult to the point that bad players couldn't just get carried and~~ *~~had~~* ~~to actually learn how to play their job. As the game is now, MSQ content is so easy that you can still make it through any given roulette with an auto-attacking reaper, or a dancer who doesn't dance, or a healer who doesn't DPS, or a tank who doesn't AOE, or a story-skipper who didn't spend even a little bit of time at a training dummy to figure out what their job does.~~ ~~I'm not saying everything needs to be difficult to the point that everyone needs a gold parse, but it would be nice if content was designed around the assumption of a full party who actually push their buttons and know the basics. It would be really fucking nice to not have to put up with 45-minute Holminster Switch / Tower of Zot runs with story-skipping raiders from other games who think all their skills are transferable.~~ Actually this post sucks. It's gatekeeper shit and would result in *more* 45-minute runs of Holminster Switch and Tower of Zot instead of less. Forced tutorials are a much better idea.
I will never understand this viewpoint and it really just seems like it's targeted at the completely bullshit idea that if you make content that the bottom 25% of your playerbase feels compelled to do but can't beat that they'll "get good" rather than simply quitting. They actually quit. WoW has a ton of data on this. They quit and probably tell all of their friends to not try the game because it's bullshit and asks you to no life the game just to beat. As much as I don't agree with Asmongold on a lot of things, there is one thing he is completely right about that he talks about all the time when talking about WoW. Players in the aggregate do things because your game incentivizes them to do those things. Why does FFXIV have a famously patient community in casual content? Well, because Square Enix bans the true problem children (which would ironically include old Asmongold) and everybody knows it's not that hard. You're definitely going to clear in short order even if the first pull is a really fast wipe, so why get mad? You're not staring down the gun of either quitting and having your clear eaten for the week or sticking it out and having a miserable 4 hour play session like you often do in WoW. I don't see why you would possibly want to get rid of this to still have dungeons and MSQ trials being mind numbingly easy and boring because bad players do in fact exist and something they can clear would in fact be trivial to somebody who is even seriously thinking about doing savages.
The sad thing is you're not wrong, but the bottom who struggle with this game and then still get funneled into playing with the rest of us are *REALLY* bad. I'm not an elitist. I don't do Ultimates, I don't even do Savage. I do most of the Extremes, at best. But the bottom of the game is BAD. I will always remember when one of the Sadu solo Duties came out and so many people lost their minds about being unable to complete it. I don't know where we find a balance here.
You can't. The only way for the people who are good at the game and want a minimum level of play to get what they want is for that bottom 10-15% to go away and never be seen again.
> I will always remember when one of the Sadu solo Duties came out and so many people lost their minds about being unable to complete it. This is the audience they have crafted over the years though. It's kinda their own fault at this point. Should've told the crybabies to leave if they dont like it rather than pander to them
Honestly let's make dicisple of war and job quests as hard as they were back in ARR again. Never forget the thamaturge NPCs casting FIRE II and olitberating our health. That gatekept a lot of people who were bad and had no intention of trying to get better.
He's said he wants to do this in the past with mob incoming damage so healers can actually heal something. It never happened.
This is dope, but the biggest stress to me is trying to get new players in. Asking them to pay for a skip or bang out 5 games worth of content to catch up is a little too much.
"Hey friends, come play this game with me! By the way, you need to spend \~200 hours going through the story by yourself with only rare moments where I can do a dungeon with you. Wait, where are you going?"
This has honestly made it impossible for me to recommend the game to new players. If my friends start and get through ARR I'm excited and ready to go. But honestly it's just as you described, hundreds of hours of gaming just to get caught up and I can only join in spurts here or there.
Even then the "gaming" is mostly walking and watching dialogue. Or cutscenes of dialogue.
Yeah I think Yoshi probably should focus on tackling this massive hurdle first then daydreaming about increasing difficulty since this game is extremely hostile to new players who don’t want to invest 600 hours to complete the story to reach the endgame. It’s also why the free trial is increased to Stormblood and probably Shadowbringers as well by 2025-26. This is his way to say, hey look, play for free as long as you want, no rush, no need to pay, until you reach the last two expansion then its pay or no access. They should give people options to skip the entire storyline and start at the current expansion and provide summary for each story beat up to that point. Now that we have new game plus, this should not even be a problem since people can replay the story part of the game - if they accidentally hit skip button.
It's closer to 600 hours now. I started in the middle of Shadowbringer and took me 500 hours of mainly focusing on the MSQ to finish. My friend, took 1000 hours, doing more of the side content along the way. It's too long to recommend to new players. Most people simply don't have the time to ever catch up in a realistic time frame.
It's gone way beyond just being too easy, the problem is cbu3 competence. The game just doesn't make any sense, the progression curve is all over the place (if it even exists), "healing" barely mean anything any more, their idea of difficulty is archaic "die and retry" one-shot (or archaic multi-layered random, for example rare fish), players can afk and get reward in trial/raid24/frontline, they still use QTE, and a lot of other small things (for example, to complete a EW relic quest, the player needs to be on the job, but the relic can't be equipped, so we need another weapon just to complete the quest..... and cut-scenes can't be skipped because of the useless stats allocation thing)
The jump from normal to extreme is the only difficulty curve that doesn't make sense. You go from braindead easy content that doesn't punish you at all for being incomptent to suddenly getting one shot by a spread mechanic cause it had no aoe indicator that gave a magic vuln, and you stood on top of someone. You go from dungeon bosses that loop mechanics infinitely until the instance timer runs out, to bosses that have a hard enrage at 10 mins. There needs to be something in between to bridge that gap between normal and extreme, but more importantly, an incentive for players to willingly improve
Normal to EX made a *bit* more sense when 24mans (in SB/ShB) were starting to go beyond what the rest of normal content was doing. But that came crashing down this expac too.....
> but the relic can't be equipped, so we need another weapon just to complete the quest This part boggles my mind so much I can't even :( Especially since there isn't a lot of spare room in the main hand armory chest...
You know what it is? I can tell you exactly what it is. Weapon = Job, there is no state for a weaponless player character, nothing is ever actually 'upgraded' in this game, rather the old thing is removed from the players inventory while the new, totally separate, thing is added. Every solution comes with issues.
There is a state for weaponless characters though. Adventurer. It's happened a couple times over the years. It's not something really intended to be seen but it definitely exists and has happened on retail servers a couple of times. Is it suitable to fix this? Probably not but to say there's no fallback just isn't true
That true? Where exactly has it been used? I can't imagine they ever want resort to giving the player this state.
Not used on purpose but it's happened substantially more than once. https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/hhiij4/tfw_the_game_bugs_and_wipes_all_your_gear/ Here's it happening a couple years back. It happened a few times during shb's chinese release as well. I'm sure it's happened times other than those but those are ones i've seen.
With the advent of job crystals, it just further solidifies how archaic and irrelevant the armory system as a gimmick of "weapon swap = class swap!" is for the game now. Especially since they keep pussyfooting over the Class situation and how they've sunk too much into keeping it for the sake of legacy players but clearly don't care for it or want it around anymore with the fact no new classes have been added since HW and no classes factor into ANY post ARR job.
Lets be real the reason they don't touch classes is because nobody wants to deal with handling the true separation of SCH/SMN.
the fact that Aurum Vale is still discussed as one of the hardest dungeons for players after 10 years of release is so telling how piss easy casual content is in 14.
It’s just a meme. Even at its height it just wasn’t that difficult.
Given his example, I think he just means adding back that one wipe mechanic bosses used to have, like "kill this add in time or wipe".
Eh, I'll believe it when I see it. Right now, I literally only log in to get my alt through MSQ and level them up, I'm dragging my heels because ShB dungeons are fun to heal. They actually hurt, but I know that when I finish post ShB(I'm at Anyder), I'll be back to dungeons that tickle. Zot and Vanaspati are the only 2 I'm looking forward to, maybe Dead Ends since its chaotic but everything else will be a slog. I like the game, but it's WAY too easy and there's nothing to do socially. I'm literally just replaying an easy single player rpg at this point, it's not very engaging which is a shame because I do like the game. It's just got no content that I want to do, nothing co-op, except Bozja and Eureka, and I've already milked those 2 to death.
So what happens to the "it's good for the health of the game" "not everything needs to be hard you're just a sweaty elitist" "stop doomering about how easy the game has gotten" "just go play wow" crowd now?
Cool, cant wait to see it in 7.55
Be very careful about anything yoshi-p says regarding difficulty and challenge in ffxiv. He is very good at his job, but there is a disparity between what he says difficulty will be and what it really ends up being. I really want to believe, but it's better to not get your hopes up. At the very least, what constitutes a challenge for yoshi-p seems to be different from this sub's definition of it, and sometimes the raiding community in general.
"Myths of the Realm will be Ivalice difficulty"
Yeah but people still manage to be dogshit even at SMN in dungeons.
thank the twelve i hope this means they'll start taking more risks rather than playing it safe constantly
between this and the relic comments I'm genuenely positive about the future, although I have had heavy criticism about the current state of the game I actually trust the devs and believe they want the best for the game. I don't mind stress-free content, but there has to be a range, and right now there's too much of a difficulty gap between casual content and anything above that
I hope this means DT will be more difficult. At least have the Alliance Raids be as difficult as Ivalice, where messing up mechanics can wipe the alliance and not just do some damage.
I'll believe it when I see it
Nice. I thought I had quit forever but now there's a chance I come back. I'll keep an eye on it.
2.2 and 3.2 patch style stress let’s gooooo
I have a lot of opinions about the homogenization and streamlining of story content, but I think the main thing FF14 needs is more in the middle. Casual players have plenty to do. Hardcore players probably need *more frequent* things to do, since tiers are so much longer now than they were in the past, but they also got 2 of the hardest Ultimates yet this expansion. But if you don't have the time commitment or skill level to get into Savage+ content, there's really nothing for you to do in this game to white your knuckles on. You can farm one Extreme trial every 4 months for the mount, but that's about it. Even then, the difficulty gap between 90% of the content in this game and an Ex is too wide. A lot of casual players who want to try harder content will find Ex trials to be *too* hard, or too intimidating to get into. My dumb ass really thought this is what Variant Dungeons would be. I actually like Variant Dungeons. I love the branching paths, the lore, the conversations with NPCs, how boss mechanics can change depending on how you interact with the dungeon, etc. Honestly, I wish all dungeons were designed like this. But I expected them to be harder. I'm disappointed they weren't. I really hope the DT exploration zone brings with it a good dose of midcore content to engage with.
you could kinda feel this coming with how yoshi-p was talking about the recent alliance raid, telling the dev teams they have to up the difficulty. they didn't succeed, as thaleia is probably worse than void ark is for being undertuned and lacking in mechanical difficulty, but it did show they were slowly becoming aware of the problem. i don't expect casual content to reach the heights of wiping city, ivalice, or on content the vault, but if they can bring back cognitive function to this game's casual content i would be content with this game again. ultimates and savage have kept me here, but shouldn't be the only things requiring a pulse
I feel like some people interpret this as a vocal few wanting the game to be crazy difficult but I think for a lot it'd just be nice to have some common content that was between somewhere cannot lose and one mistake = lose.
I think this could be a good thing, depending on how they see this. Increasing complexity(note: complexity is not the same as difficulty) is almost universally good for optional content. Relics like the Zodiac weapons, or Eurekan, are just much better than Anima or (at its worst) Hildibrand. Synchronising them with the extra content (normal/alliance) raid to motivate more people to unlock them is even better. However, if they were to see this as adding (more) trancient / timed content that could be a very big mistake. Things like Mor Dhona, Idylshire, and Diadem are exceptional memories and experiences for the people that had the chance to experience them, but the fact that new players can't is sad. I feel like they should consider similar systems to some of the Beast Tribes with partial instancing of zones, rather than full instancing that just proggreses a zone once the new patch drops. As a whole, content in FFXIV is timeless. You see it all the time, people get told to enjoy their journey. Don't rush to the end, everything will be there once you get there. There's nothing you *truly* miss. That's a core tenet that should be held as best as they can because it's a big reason why everyone is so relaxed. Why get salty if you miss an A-rank? There'll be another, and the rewards aren't going to disappear. Why rage if you don't get that fish in this window? Or if someone is slow in a dungeon, meaning you can't finish all your roulettes today because you need to sleep? Content will be there. It's not going anywhere. The moment they make it so that content *can* be missed, that it *does* go away? That'll negatively impact player behaviour as a whole.
> The moment they make it so that content can be missed, that it does go away? That'll negatively impact player behaviour as a whole. For example, this weekend my server's NN was just a bunch of sprouts freaking out "can I still get the car?!" and just how many people rushed the 100 Fall Guys wins despite Yoshida saying it would be coming back.
Yeah, that's a perfect example of it happening in a vacuum with things that are not impactful in a real way. Now imagine that with glam, or timed achievements+title (cleared the savage in the first week!), and what it would do to people. Or, even worse, a 'savage' or 'ultimate' that'd just permanently disappear after a month or two.
many pvp rewards was kinda always that and yes it is bad.
The game needs a grind, a reason for people that WANT to pay monthly to be ABLE to login and actually do something and progress. They're very much underserving people that actually want to pay to play their game, but can't because there's nothing meaningful to do.
Literally, you will find more people doing Eureka or Bozja nowadays than any other EW content simply because there is no grind or long term loop when it comes to their rewards.
between this and them admiting they leaned in too hard into the whole singleplayer stuff in endwalker I'm genuinely excited for Dawntrail ngl
What single player stuff? Island Sanctuary? I hope they didn’t refer to the solo instances of Endwalker MSQ, those were great
Probably the Duty Support for every MSQ dungeon. Every other time they bring it up they mention it's a right pain in the balls to get working properly, and they've added to an average of what, 5 dungeons a patch since mid ShB?
Yeah, Island Sanctuary and Variant Dungeon since you can complete all 3 of them solo. As an example, the Island Sanctuary version of Dawntrail is fully coop, which is a pretty cool idea imo
Please no more savage and ultimate choreography
Aurum Vale (Hard) incoming
God I hope that means that jobs get their unique feeling back, rather than being the same job with a different skin
If it goes like it was in stormblood I am honestly for it. However, I hope Yoshi doesn’t equals annoying with actually challenging.
This game seriously needs a bridge between casual content and savage raids.
First white pill I’ve had since EW’s launch. This is refreshing!
Not enough stress? PFing p10s the first few weeks is more than enough stress
I think YoshiP references casual content more so than Savage/Ulti :)
Agreed, he's clearly talking about the content difficulty floor here. There's zero "stress" on the low end of the content difficulty spectrum which both doesn't ramp you up for "stress" in the mid difficulty contents. Relics are cut scene locked by essentially handed to you being quest/tome based is just one example. Pendulum swung too far to casual and its a good thing its starting to swing back.
Hopefully that pendulum doesn't smack into anything battle rez related too hard. Yoshida's had SMN and RDM rez in the nerf sights for a while now, all cause he doesn't like them being the defacto rezzers when there's between 1 and 6 healers up and about in whatever casual content you're doing.
not even savage. my Unreal Thordan PFs this weekend wiped to enrage twice. players aren't good at the game. no amount of MSQ pitfalls will make healers learn how to GCD heal when appropriate or teach ranged dps what boss relative north is.
we'll see. the reason im not subbed now is because the game is so easy, you can login now and get everything done in a week, a day if youve kept up. and for a game that needs a sub paid thats just bad design, im not saying make it a slogfest, but bring back content that justifies playing for awhile and the price paid, thats what eureka did, the goalpost were far but the journey to em was quite fun.
> and for a game that needs a sub paid thats just bad design I agree. It's really bad that you can catch up so quickly, especially when it's a 30 day sub. I have subscribed a few times and caught up to a whole patch within maybe 3 hours?
Please fucking god let this not just be a passing thought but something that actually happens. I think that, with the immense popularity of games like all the Souls games, as well as more hardcore MMOs such as Black Desert Online, it's undeniable that there is a very large market in people wanting a bit of a challenge. While it's unrealistic to expect anything near that level for XIV, as XIV is, at its core, a casual-focused MMO, it does feel pretty awful that it has seemingly abandoned people who want a more compelling experience on the gameplay side. Just sequestering all players wanting a slight challenge off into Savage/Ultimate content feels like a pretty lame way to handle this issue.
He's not *wrong* about stress/difficulty, so it'll at least be interesting to see where this goes. I still expect MSQ to be figuratively a cakewalk, but maybe the trials will be a kick upwards. We'll see at release.
lol lmao spent 3 expansions fucking everything up to appeal to braindead casuals. time to spend 3 expansions unfucking everything huh
Yoshi P In a future Job update. "Black Mage Ley Lines now randomly moves across the battlefield"
Queue the article 4-6 years later saying that Yoshi-P intends to make FFXIV more stress-free citing player unhappiness and frustration.
Hopefully Dawntrail doesn’t become the Cataclysm of FFXIV where half the playerbase washes out on dungeons because they require just a little more effort than AoEing every trash pull like it was in WotLK aka “the best expansion ever”.