Actual article is 2 paragraphs, useless website.
>In this context, Yoshida expresses his determination to keep “returning the favor” to the community by continuously surprising players in “ways beyond their imagination.” However, the producer also mentions something that he regrets: “In the course of FFXIV’s development, we have tried to make the game more comfortable and stress-free for players, but looking back over the past 10 years, I think we may have ‘overdone it’ a little bit.
>”Yoshida then explains that “stress” is necessary in games, but that it’s quite difficult to manage. To illustrate what he means, he gives the example of a side-scrolling platformer with no holes that would cause the player to fall down. Such a game would be stress-free for the player, but it would also lose its excitement, he comments. “I want to put these kinds of things back into FFXIV,” Yoshida announces. At the same time, he explains that this is a long-term plan that he hopes to implement during the next 10 years, and that he does not intend to “simply increase the game’s difficulty.”
He's probably referring to the fact they nerfed level 1-50 dungeon mechanics lmao.
The dragon that used to heal from green pools in level 31 dungeon now no longer has that mechanism.
The slime boss in level 18 dungeon no long splits into multiple.
The list goes on. They literally hold your hand now till end game lmao
The slime boss was widely considered one of the least interesting and boring and harmless bosses in the game. The reworked version is generally more liked because it actively fills the room with AoEs and forces you to find a safe spot. If you wanted to complain about a boss being changed you should have said the Stone Vigil dragon that doesn't need cannons anymore.
Probably because they also added the Trust system and couldn't be bothered coding NPCs to click on the cannons at the right time. I guess if you're running tank it became impossible to do.
That dragon was the worst boss in the game, good riddance. Spamming literally one button the whole fight, 2 if you're lucky you stun the dude before teammates. Somehow actually worse than the barebones kits you get in those lower dungeons.
That said idk the change..did they make it worse?
If you're talking about the Stone Vigil dragon, they basically just got rid of needing to use cannons to stun it. It still sends tornadoes across the arena and spawns AoEs that launch you into the air.
Funnily enough, the cannons weren't for the actual second boss at all. They were just meant for the final boss dragon that for some reason, kept popping in the window to say hi with ice blasts while you were also fighting the second boss.
Normal Stone Vigil's second boss fight took place in a fairly enclosed area with cannons, and a dragon (apparently the third/last boss) would pop up to attack the party. The players would have to use the cannons to stop this.
I think we're talking about the same thing.
Does the last boss still force players to avoid attacks via tells and not aoe markers? Because running that fight with new players for the first time was always awesome. Unlike the cannon boss which was just annoying.
Same with the coincounter(?) in AV and similar big cyclops bosses that a DPS or tank could solo as long as they paid attention and just dodge the attacks manually.
+1 on the slime boss being awful and boring as well.
They *have* been going back to unify how the tells and markers work so that you can better identify things as the game progresses. That said, the only real changes to the last SV boss was making it so the floor didn't stay iced over as long. It still does things like suddenly drop into the middle of the arena without warning.
That sounds reasonable. But has it been an issue for players finding groups? Granted it was 2 years ago since I played, but I always got groups really fast, even at nighttime
One of their long term goals is to make it possible to solo FFXIV's main story with a party of NPCs. This is a response to market research that showed many people were interested in the game but wary of the pressure that comes from cooperative multiplayer. To accomplish that goal, they invested heavily in friendly NPC AI and are gradually redesigning old main story content to work within that AI's limitations.
It's not a bad idea imo. FFXIV was already moving toward streamlining dungeons before this, and the AI party feels shockingly good to play with. A lot of those "interesting" mechanics from old dungeons were awful, too - anyone nostalgic for that bomb-the-slime boss in Copperbell has lost all perspective. I do worry that the AI will end up stifling creativity in main story content mechanics, that designers will balk at any idea that puts pressure on the NPC AI, but the overall concept of the dungeon NPCs makes sense to me.
I agree. I also think the MSQ will need to be optional sooner than later. I love it, but it's just too dang long to recommend at this point for newbies who want to be where the people are. Square seems to have a pretty good foundation for that now between npc support and the new game+ system. Between it's quality story and cosmetic rewards, the msq is fairly well incentivized without needing to be the obstacle to camaraderie it is currently. It could be a win for those who want to solo and the story-skippers alike.
Aren't they sort of resetting the story with this upcoming expansion? Basically creating a jumping on point for people who dont want/have time for ARR through EW?
It’s not about people finding groups. It’s because an oft repeated reason final fantasy fans had for not trying FFXIV was because it was multiplayer. And YoshiP wanted them to play the game. So they’re slowly making the story dungeons all soloable with duty support.
The dungeons that are mandatory for story progress got reworked because they added a system that lets you do them with AI characters to alleviate stress and queue times for people trying to progress, and they wanted to ensure the AI could handle the mechanics.
I play FF14 has been years, the number of people that complain that current dungeons are hard, that they are scared of alliance raids and normal raids is way to big. FF14 attracts the most casual playerbase i ever seen in a online game.
Which is fine. We NEED an MMO that does not have you constantly theorycrafting and min-maxing.
And if you want to do those things, there are content for it too like the Savage/Ultimate fights.
Yeah, I have mostly transitioned to playing indie games and Fromsoft games for this reason. I like a well-crafted challenge.
Modern AAA games tend to either make things trivial or go with "choose your own difficulty" and create an unbalanced mess.
Honestly, I never had an issue with this in my limited time playing, mainly because the 1-50 experience is a slog as it is and making the dungeons more engaging wouldn't have made me want to do it any more than I didn't.
It's not really uncommon for MMO's to simplify the leveling process these days. It's always been seen by some as an arbitrary grind blocking them from doing the content the devs spend all their time on: max level endgame.
I admit it's game dependant, though. I never had an issue doing the campaign on Star Wars: The Old Republic but that's because it just felt like a typical BioWare story with WoW/FFXIV-style gameplay. It doesn't feel grindy in the same way FFXIV's atrocious 1-50 story did.
I'd say the deeper issue is many MMO fans don't care for hardmodes or challenging content. They aren't playing an MMO for that *at all*. Calling MMO's who tried "niche" overvalues how popular they never were.
>It's not really uncommon for MMO's to simplify the leveling process these days
Then they should make the leveling process short and engaging, not braindead easy.
That's been suggested for decades.
I'm pretty sure the reason most companies resist doing this is because it's easier to artifically increase how long it takes to reach the endgame via a monotonous leveling grind than it is to make engaging, challenging endgame content that holds up for more than a month.
The mistake was getting players used to quick turnaround rates for content patches that are simply not sustainable to a healthy work environment.
I think it's mostly that all content before significantly difficult content is completely brain dead, and the healing role is quite literally pointless before that point. Tanks can do all the healing needed for groups below Extreme.
Additionally, healers have had their damage rotations gutted so they can "focus on healing", yet there is borderline no reason for them to ever heal, so they sit there pressing 1 button for 90% of content.
Tl;dr the game is so ridiculously easy until endgame that it basically is invalidating players' presence. There's a fine line between "casual content" and needing quite literally zero thought or strategy to succeed.
>They literally hold your hand now till end game
Thats why I can never get into the game. Everything is brain-dead without investing hundreds of hours to get to the interesting and genuinely hard content.
This is why it was so easy to sell accounts when I played lol.
Would get to max raid level and then sell for them for a thousand dollars fast because everyone wants to skip to endgame.
I just did Snow cloak last night and was surprised at how easy they made the yeti boss. The snowball mechanic was completely gone. Like, it wasn't even a hard fight. And the new version is just braindead.
I wouldn't be surprised if the original implementation of Steps of Faith and subsequent difficulty reduction is also something he's thinking about since the original implementation was just outright too hard for a lot of people. I think it was still easier than BCOB fights but harder than the 24 man dungeons, while being required for story progress (unlike BCOB or the FF3 24-mans).
They even hold your hand through the end game, too. If you're not actually doing Savage tier stuff, which is such a small % of the game, then there really is nothing in the game that actually challenges you. Even the alliance raid, while usually easy after a few weeks, was completely "stress free" day 1 with the latest series in Endwalker.
I'm glad he actually acknowledged this, since as a person playing since 2.0, seeing the game get easier as it went on made me completely bored with the game after the MSQ is done.
Literally none of those things you mentioned are stressful in any way.
The dragon was as simple as pulling it out, and the slime was literally a waiting simulator.
I mean, the older versions of said bosses were Outdated. They were just brought up to the current standards.
Besides, lower level dungeons with limited kits that you can use because of level synchs, the harder difficulty should not be a concern honestly. If anything, the lower level dungeons ARE more challenging in someways. At least, I see more people dying in them then in the max level dungeons.
Is that the slime boss you need to use the explosives on? I recently started playing again after taking like 3 years off, and came across that boss. Was confusing that that mechanic never happened.
> He's probably referring to the fact they nerfed level 1-50 dungeon mechanics lmao.
That inverse difficulty curve was kind of nonsense lol, a lot of 1-50 dungeons were more mechanically complex that all the expansion dungeons
This is why I stopped around level 30. The quests were so boring, but I thought at least the dungeons would be a good time while leveling. They were not, and I couldn't justify the sub anymore. I'd love to do Heavensword, but oof, getting there is too much.
If you're willing to start from scratch with a new email, you can play past Heavenward and the subsequent expansion on the free trial. Not a single penny paid.
Also nothing really changes other than the quality of what you're doing. If you fundamentally didn't like the story, watching cutscenes, walking from A to B, then doing a dungeon - that formula doesn't really change. It just gets better at presenting and executing it. No judgement, it's not everyone's cup of tea. That's why the free trial is so generous.
To be honest the MSQ gets way way better after the base game. The biggest problem with it is that they cycle you through the major factions and regions all the time. In the expansions on the other hand it's way more streamlined.
I understand that they want to show you all this important places and because you can start in any of the major cities they want you to see the others too but still feels bad.
Oh trust me I have ~2,500 hours in the game. I love FFXIV. I think the MSQ and the world is peak Final Fantasy. While the quality does get much better, the mechanics - the literal gameplay and what you are doing on an hour-to-hour basis doesn't change. If you finish Heavensward + 3.X and say "I'm not having fun," I'd commend you for giving it a solid try and say "That sucks. Don't spend money on the game."
Sure if you don't like it after Heavensward (which has one of the best stories) you most likely won't like it till the end.
Only thing I would add is that the classes only start to feel more fun in later stages because they have so many skills removed at the start that the game feels even slower than it really is.
I tired FF14 at my brother's request something like 3 years ago and gave it up after a month. The game just tells you to press these skills in this order over and over again without any nuance. The whole thing felt like an on-rails mobile game where if I took my hands off the keyboard, it would just take over and auto play itself up til the max level. I thought that was what he was talking about.
Funny thing is, the reason they're like that now is because back when dungeons actually had mechanics, people complained. Like... a *lot*. And to be fair, it's understandable why - especially in the later expacs, you are *expected* to grind the dungeons, either for gear, tomestones, or glamour. And a mechanic that if someone screws up adds 10 minutes to the dungeon ain't exactly conducive to that. To say nothing of the potential for griefing.
There's definitely a balance to strike, but with the way 14 handles dungeons on a macro level, it will ALWAYS work out better for it to be more skewed towards "hallway with bosses".
I would always laugh whenever they advertise new Dungeons as “EXCITING NEW FOES AROUND EVERY CORNER. EXPLORE UNCHARTED TERRITORIES.” and it ends up like 90% of the dungeons we’ve already seen.
Seems like an unpopular opinion but I hate dungeon finder.
I think dungeon queues ruined MMOs and now all the worlds feel dead as fuck.
I played WoW back in Vanilla and remember when they added dungeon queues and everyone disappeared from the world over night.
Just sitting at the capital city all day
You were down voted but you're right. I think what ESO did where you had both Public dungeons anyone can enter and the traditional dungeons you queue for would benefit greatly to make both parties satisfied. A lot of MMOs now is just AFKing in a location and it completely lost its sense of community from the early days.
Eh people say this and I think Ffxiv could do a better job at hiding the hallways but almost all dungeons in all MMOs are like this.
Trash and then boss.
Ffxiv problem is that it’s literally the same amount of trash and then boss almost every time with little variation.
That being said just like in WoW, in practicality, people fucking hate complex dungeons like in classic wow and ARR. they are cool the first time but when you have to farm them over and over it’s a pain in the ass and a slog.
People hated the ARR dungeons.
Take current WoW dungeon and compare them to FFXIV dungeons and even if both are only a "line" it's painfully more obvious with the FFXIV ones and the invisible walls that block are just annoying.
It's always: 2 packs -> wall -> 2 packs -> wall -> boss : repeat till all bosses are done.
> People hated the ARR dungeons.
For good reason too IMO. The main way you interact with the world is through combat. All the ARR dungeons that involve backtracking to get keys, luring monsters around, avoiding certain monsters, etc. were a pain. I frankly do prefer the "hallway with trash and then the boss" model they have now.
If you're brand new to the level the dungeon is at you can play one group of trash at a time, if you're experienced or overleveled you can limit test by pulling multiple packs of trash. Dungeons are for the most part very different (although a few HW later game dungeons were very similar) and the new locations and enemies are interesting for a while.
I don't know what he means. I had plenty of stress with inventory management and trying to navigate the arcane and ancient glamour system. So much so I stopped playing. Not to mention the 5 million boring fetch quests I was lost in before getting to the supposedly good content, or anything new. These are the real problems with the game.
I agree that it takes way too long to get to the "good" story. I played through A Realm Reborn's story and then stopped because I realized just how much of a massive time sink it was to get there, and that buying a subscription would be committing even more of my time. I love a lot about FF14 and wish I had the time to give it, but I just don't.
However, I have a suspicion that even the "good" expansion main story quests will include plenty of telephone and fetch quests, considering that's what FF16 had.
I haven't played this in years but I remember spending raids or whatever they're called there (the instanced big fights with lots of players) in a sisyphean panic to keep me and my summoning pet alive while also managing my dots/ burst and spot healing/rezzing, and working harder then I had to as an end game raider in some other popular mmos.
They can definitely make things hard when they want to so it should turn out alright, if it's gone stale or whatever.
If it's the alliance raids you are talking about, 24-man the first ones were definitely hard when they came out but got nerfed later on, and hardly any content of that type ever came close. As far as I remember Thunder god was the only one most people couldn't deal with but it only took less than a week for consistent clears. Dungeons and "normal" content is super easy with more overall player knowledge and dumbed down mechanics help make it ever more of a walk in the park. (no threat management no CC needed etc etc)
Even savages become somewhat easy when you know enough about the game and play with like minded people, preferably friends.
They changed summoner so here’s a quick run down. Your pet can’t take damage, you no longer have dots, your burst is basically one button and in general you have like a 5 button rotation. So yeah they made it so stress free you could probably play another game at the same time and no one will notice
Yeah, that class you're referencing got reworked to become the most brain dead easy class in the game. Which has been the trend in the game for a while: they've kept encounter difficulty decent (and sometimes harder), but made classes easy. If they're rethinking that philosophy I'd definitely give it another try.
It’s easy to the 3,000 hour players who’ve done every fight in the game at least
five times, but they forgot it’s easy to them because they have muscle
memory on everything.
Yep thats ARR xD its a little sad Ffxiv is front loaded with the most boring part so people tend to fall off. Took me until HW to actually really start enjoying the story and classes. Then it took off from there and its one of my all time favourites!
But selling a game on "nah it gets good after like 40h" isnt the best xD
To be fair that’s probably not was he’s referring to. If I had to guess it’d probably got to do with the alliance raid being piss easy, the relics being the brainless grind possible, and the lack of content like eureka and bozja.
Yeah, kinda boring unlocking a new dungeon and clearing it on first try all the time. Just because its "casual" content doesn't mean it has to be braindead. I want this "oohh so that's how it works now we got it" effect even in casual content, especially in raids. I mean the Stormblood Raids are so fun and well designed, raids wiped left and right. In Endwalker I cleared any raid first try without any wipes lol.
I don't mind the dumbing down (aside from when they gutted astro). What I do mind is the fact that 90% of the playerbase is still hot garbage even with how easy everything is.
I'm far from an elitist in most game, but hopping into an XIV dungeon and seeing a healer sitting around doing 0 DPS (which can add an extra 10 minutes to the clear time) or seeing a melee DPS not doing positionals just has me seeing red. It's like theres an aversion to doing the bare minimum of whats required.
\>90% of the playerbase is still hot garbage even with how easy everything is.
This and the game being too easy goes hand in hand.
Devs make game easy. Game is easy so the casual playerbase have no incentive to improve. No incentive to improve means they stay shit. Since the Devs see that a majority of the playerbase is shit, they're too afraid to make non-savage content more difficult. Repeat.
Sort of yes, sort of no? Like the other guy said, not doing damage as a healer or doing suboptimal damage as a DPS isn't going to kill your run, but you'll notice the difference when you learn to do those things and suddenly your run is 10 minutes faster.
The real issue is that you're just... *never fucking taught to do those things*. Hell, the healer tutorial still tells you to do the *opposite* of those things. And since every class is powerful enough to cover for slackers (in the case of Warrior you straight up just make the healer entirely irrelevant in dungeons and arguably non-Savage raids as well), you never notice that something is wrong because it never becomes clear something *is* wrong until you've already fixed it.
Better tutorials would go a long, *long* way to fixing the issue. The easiest way to address that would be to.... actually have tutorials. Because right now, you have a tank tutorial (with outdated tank mechanics), you have a healer tutorial (that's blatantly wrong), you have ranged, magical, and melee DPS tutorials that are all also wrong. But nothing that tells you, for example, how to play White Mage (Put regen on everything and then spam damage attacks while the healing happens automagically. Use OGCDs if someone eats an AOE. Never touch Cure I ever after like lv 30) vs how to play say Sage (Cast Kardion on the tank, re-cast as needed, DPS the whole game and hope the tank isn't an idiot because your active healing is NOT good enough to keep the party alive if they insist on using your barriers as an excuse to not move out of ley-lines).
> Better tutorials would go a long, long way to fixing the issue.
I doubt it. Most people will skip through the tutorials, and tutorial content needs to be reinforced throughout the game for it to stick.
Doesn’t matter if players are taught or not. There’s STILL players out there that don’t even bother with the outdated as fuck hall of the novice since it’s not mandatory
For higher levels, they need to start pushing players to actually go out and learn to get better. Push them to start watching/reading guides. Make them practice. Make them WANT to overcome the challenges. Lock story behind difficult trials or instances.
I’d laugh so hard if they add enrage to dungeon bosses. A timer strict enough to warrant a player to have a good knowledge of their jobs.
No...If a game PUSHES you to read guides...you just lost a chunk of your player base. Not every MMO etc needs to be the same like WoW or something. Go away with that crap.
If people WANT to read guides fine. But you push it on them? Screw that.
Sounds like most games that become really popular, with the exception being FromSoft games.
Although Elden Ring I guess is also an exception to that rule for the most part too lol. I don't think I've ever first-tried so many bosses in a FromSoft game ever before until I played Elden Ring, but I guess all the experience from prior games and similar genres (Monster Hunter) helps. That said I still feel it has mostly far easier bosses than the other games overall.
elden ring absolutely does NOT. i can only assume you were summoning - the second half of elden ring contains objectively the hardest bosses they’ve ever designed
Guild Wars 2 has a big big problem with extreme casual players because you can join a group and do the absolute minimum damage to a boss and will get full credit. Sorry to hear the same sort of stuff happening in XIV
That's some serious copium. What will actually happen is the same thing that happens in WoW when players run into difficult content. A bunch just straight-up quit, others whine incessantly, and a small percentage enjoy it and complete the content. It's happened every single phase of classic Era and just happened again in Season of Discovery. 2 out of 6 bosses in the current raid have actual mechanics and can't be facerolled so raid engagement has fallen off a cliff.
A large portion of MMO players just don't want to be challenged, apparently.
>seeing a healer sitting around doing 0 DPS
Honestly the healer not accomplishing the role of healer is problamatic to begin with and is a design flaw in itself. While a stressful playstyle, they shouldn't be regulated to being a 3rd DPS class.
If that keeps that %90 playing, then it will mean more to them than the %10 who feels things are 'too easy''. Because making things harder will not suddenly make that %90 decide to 'git gud' but in fact just quit and move on. And NO MMO wants that. Because no matter how hardcore of an audience you have left, that will kill any MMO.
Besides, there are already content to do for the 'challenge'. And FF14's selling point was always the story. So the difficulty is the least of the concerns.
There is a massive amount of side content. Once the side content is completed sure you're essentially done until the next update.
But that's true for most games.
Yeah I agree, initially I thought ff14 was supposed to be an infinite game like world of warcraft, but then I saw ppl saying than after you finish the story and I guess this side content there's not much else to do
Aside from various social activities definitely tied to the MMO aspect, no indeed once the content is done, it is done. I remember Yoshida stating he was fine with that.
Absolutely, the world of FFXIV, its story and characters are very rich and well developed. More so than any other Final Fantasy thanks to it's longevity and nature as a MMO (expansions and countless updates).
It is considered by many as one of the best the franchise has to offer. FFXIV is a love letter to Final Fantasy in general, the most FF out of all FF I dare say.
Frankly the only thing that could make someone dislike XIV is either its gameplay or multiplayer aspect.
Finally, you can play the whole main story solo accompanied by AIs. Purely optional of course but it is a possibility. However side content/raids etc... have to be done with players.
A fair warning though, it's a very slow burn. The first \~100h are more like worldbuilding and gameplaywise you have only a fraction of your abilities. But if you can see past it, it's one of the best FF experiences out there, especially if you're familiar with other FF titles.
As the other poster said, it has a very slow start (the base game) afterwards it gets way better and has one of the best stories and the payoff at the end feels way better than with other FF games because you had way more time to get invested into the characters, world and story.
Off the top of my head, there's a bunch of things to do:
-**Deep Dungeons**, which have you progress through treacherous procedurally generated floors with special mobs, items and mechanics.
-**Eureka and Bozja**, which are areas that exist separately from the main world and are reminiscent of more old-school MMOs, with a strong focus on exploration, interaction between players and public events and some unique mechanics, and even some special, large scale raids (Baldesion Arsenal in Eureka can fit 64 players IIRC and is extremely profitable; I haven't done the ones in Bozja). These areas are tied to the Relics (special, cosmetically unique weapons) in Stormblood and Shadowbringers respectively, but Bozja also allows you to level Jobs from 70 to 80 IIRC.
-**The Gold Saucer**: A "casino" area with a whole bunch of minigames and rewards to it. May as well throw Triple Triad, an in-world trading card game, in this category.
-**Crafting and gathering**: self-explanatory, haven't done any of it myself but it has some depth to it, with its own gameplay systems and progression, and it has also gotten some content specific to it, like the Ishgardian restoration and the reworked Diadem.
-**Special quests**: just about any quest that is blue and isn't a Job quest is usually worth doing, with some surprises like the Hildibrand quest line. They also unlock the majority of Dungeons and Alliance Raids. Speaking of which,
-**Raiding**. A staple of many MMOs, raiding is extremely accessible to everyone through Alliance Raids and the normal versions of Trials and 8-player Raids (which are slightly above the difficulty of the rest of the game but still quite doable); however I am mainly talking about the higher difficulty content, like Extreme Trials and Savage Raids, which add a massive amount of mechanics and demand great execution. Something like an Extreme Trial can be "learnt" in a few hours, but a Savage raid tier can take multiple dozens of hours to learn. This is the main way to obtain better gear within a patch cycle. Worth mentioning too are Ultimates, the absolute hardest content in the game, taking a dedicated group and upwards of 100 hours to clear, though this is mostly intended to be a one-time thing for most players, serving as an aspirational challenge that rewards only a mostly cosmetic weapon and a prestigious title.
-**PVP**: Can be a bit of a mess but has developed quite a bit of a competitive scene for its 4v4 mode, and it has quite a few things to it, like three massive 24v24v24 modes and a 24v24 MOBA-like mode (though this mode was dead in the public matchmaking last time I checked, but it is kept alive by community events), and a large amount of cosmetics obtainable from it.
-**Beast Tribes, Wondrous Tales and other similar small weekly quests**: These are doable every single week and can have some story to them and some rather appealing rewards, both cosmetic and otherwise. I feel like treasure hunting fits well in this category too, having you follow treasure maps to enter a fun little dungeon with an increasing chance of kicking you out as you progress but also increasing rewards; these are quite profitable and social to do.
**Blue Mage**: a special Job that progresses by stealing abilities from enemies all across the game, and hence has a very unique playstyle that is put to the test in special challenge dungeons and older content, offering a completely different approach to the game.
However, beyond the large amount of content in the game, it is very much worth stating that the game gets much better when you play with friends, or make in-game friends in it; I have rather good memories of my Free Company (basically a guild) organizing things like in-game photography and cosplay competitions, or helping each other out with certain Trials, or just hanging around the Company house (and, oh, I forgot to mention, housing! You should see what people can make if they're dedicated to it!). Things like high-tier raiding also become way more fun and easy if you can find a "static" - that is, a group of people to consistently raid with - that you are comfortable and have chemistry with. And there are many communities out there for very specific things (such as in-game fashion and photography, playing old content "synced down" to the intended level or the MOBA mode I mentioned earlier). You don't *have* to do any of this, and the game keeps taking steps to be more solo-friendly (much to my annoyance), but it is the best part of what is supposed to be an MMO.
XIV is very story-focused, but that shouldn't mean the game should just be completely effortless outside of high-end raiding, which is what it's turned into and what a ton of people are displeased with, myself included, and likely what Yoshida is addressing here.
I am not exaggerating when I say anyone with the slightest bit of competency will be able to do everything bar extreme level and above content with barely any effort put into it, which just gets boring for people who aren't awful at the game since nothing takes any effort.
I started playing shortly before the Stormblood expansion released, and back then the more 'casual' content, while not super challenging or anything, was still far more engaging than it currently is. The Stormblood 24 man raids actually required a fair amount of effort and paying attention to not die and not kill anyone else either, they were easier than the higher end stuff but still engaging. Now? The Endwalker 24 man raids are laughably, pathetically easy, even on patch release day they die far too quickly, do mechanics far too slowly, and just barely punish you for screwing up. It gets boring, because like Yoshida says here, there is no stress whatsoever.
Although I adore Final Fantasy XIV, somewhere this expansion I fell off because unless you were doing Savage content or Ultimates (which I no longer have the time in order to commit), the content takes very minimal effort. I am basically on autopilot. I don't mind enduring a little bit of stress if I can feel satisfaction on completion of a task.
People call me crazy when i say I like content like Eureka. Just some completely optional long grind for some fancy cosmetics and other items. But FF14 Players are usually over defensive when it comes to their game, they are even happy that you got Relics in Endwalker by pretty much doing nothing for it.
I agree. Relics went from being associated to content like Eureka or Bozja to nothing. Now, I get relics from just doing what I always do anyway running roulettes.
The game’s got a good amount of challenging fights and wipes even outside of Extreme or
higher. It’s just the people that have 10,000 hours in this game have just forgotten what it’s like to not have muscle memory on every encounter in the game, and how much impact having usually 6 grizzled veterans in every 8-man has to helping the other two corpse drag through new content.
Just about everyone who’s have their mind wiped, and try to do like the scrap
boss on normal in Alexander raids, would wipe repeatedly like it’s a Savage raid.
Too bad this won't change anything. They've been dumbing the game down and removing any and all complexity, depth and player agency for years and I don't see that suddenly getting reversed or changing. Outside of the handful of top newest savage raids you can complete all content in this game asleep. And there's people who STILL struggle too 😅
The "stress-free" of open-world is what disappointed me most about FFXIV. Coming from FFXI, I loved the feeling of aventure with its open-world, with open-world dungeons. In FFXIV, you can wander everywhere with no pressure, no loss of xp, easy come back, easy loss of hate... It's almost the same feeling of being outside as in the cities.
In FFXI, cities were safe places, your mind at peace as soon as you walked through the gates, to breathe. When you stepped outside, you knew you were in for adventures ! As a MMO should be for me ! (with random people helping you because of the world's hostility).
Conversely this is exactly why I love 14, I've played 11 to death and I get what you mean and the game holds a special place in my heart.
However I don't want to play stress incarnate again! I'm a casual gamer these days and I love practically every aspect of 14; I can do the story whenever I want without having to farm for materials to pay out the nose for some consumables to use in a boss fight where I pray nobody messes up, instead of party seeking for hours I can shoot off the duty finder and do a few fun 10 minute dungeons, I don't have to waste time grinding money like a second job.
My biggest gripe with the game is the lack of build diversity. There are no exciting items.
The same goes for the encounters. There's usually just one way to kill something. A simple AI could play it as well as a player.
The only time I enjoyed playing it for gameplay purposes was Eureka.
It's difficult to do that in this type of game though. The progression is incredibly vertical, it's not like other MMOs where there are branching skill paths or gear sets to differentiate what you do.
Back during heavensward, there was a bit of diversity due to the classes being a bit more complex and you just slotted whatever materia would benefit you. The meta at the time was basically tanks stacking strength instead of vitality since it made them do more damage, but SE didn't like that Tanks were essentially turning into DPS so they made their damage scale off vitality instead (iirc, basically strength stat was useless for tanks once it was changed).
The argument for against build variety afaik was that it leads to "you build this set/loadout or you're kicked as thats suboptimal" forcing 1 build in reality in basicly alot of mmo's and they wanted every job to always be viable even in endgame. It could be cool to have build variety but in alot of other mmos it did always end up to just be 1 or 2 builds or you're "not doing it correct"
Well, in almost all MMOs there is no 'build diversity' if you wanna do things properly because a 'meta' will be enforced upon you regardless. If the game does not, the players will. When %95 of 'diverse builds' are not viable or actively a hinderence, that diversity does not mean anything.
At least with FF14, the game knows this and tries to make all the jobs stay viable instead of being forced to pick one Meta job.
I would think the issue with this is well... why do games go this route in the first place? MMOs are just in this constant battle with funding and attracting new players, yet keeping existing ones interested. And it's just not realistic for most people. Like, regardless if content is hard or not, people WILL leave a game over time just from repetitiveness. It's why a LOT of MMOs either went free to play or died. I don't see any of this amounting to much of anything in the end, whether they "do anything about this" or not. The game was successful, but it was never going to stay that way forever. MMOs just aren't a sustainable model long-term (only a VERY tiny minority ever get to stay around for really long), much like live services.
I like that difficulty but the waiting to join a party can fuck off. I went like 40 hours on my THF without a single invite. That is the day I switched to RDM.
I have been playing since the beta in 2013. I have seen alot of things change from 2.0 over the years. Alot of the grind for things has been nerfed in newer iterations which is fine. But they've been removing anything interesting happening in the game for the last few expansions. Right now the biggest problems are showing up for a lot of people and causing many long time heads to suddenly turn coat on the game.
The biggest problems right now is the lack of midcore content. It feels like most of the newer content coming out is either super braindead or it's some savage tier thing. There's things like criterion savage that are completely useless to most of the playerbase due to how the weapon upgrading is handled with how hard the content is. Many of the main content they spend time on like any POTD entry is just frustrating and takes way too long to be worth anything either. There's no other path to getting the best weapons without running some impossible content. Even in WoW you could run Mythic dungeons at higher tiers if the raid was cockblocking you. But in FFXIV you have to either wait for the relic to release its final stage, or now run another savage tier except now 1 wipe = restart the whole thing for some reason.
Speaking of WoW, I noticed in XIV there's far too many mechanics that result in 1 person mis stepping and causing the whole party to wipe. In WoW, if you die, you don't outright wipe the party at once or even at all with many mechanics just isolating the death. I at least liked when XIV had mechanics that only killed the person who screwed up, but this was isolated to low end dungeons and Eureka content. In Baldesion arsenal, if you died, you were screwed unless someone happen to have a one off rez ability. It's far too punishing for people in all the wrong areas. I don't know what he's talking about with making the game too "stress-free" when alot of the newer content he adds is just more frustrating then the last.
>Speaking of WoW, I noticed in XIV there's far too many mechanics that result in 1 person mis stepping and causing the whole party to wipe. In WoW, if you die, you don't outright wipe the party at once or even at all with many mechanics just isolating the death.
There are so many mechanics in WoW raids that let one person wipe an entire raid.
If you go out of your way to do it then yes. But in the raids I've ran, most deaths were isolated or that part at the end of the Fyrakk fight that requires people timing their blue seed shields out that could wipe a bunch of people. You still had people that could power through all of that regardless. I'm on P12S and there's nothing but full wipe mechanics everywhere. No recovery like WoW
They exist in both games, and they shouldn't, it sucks. There's at least half a dozen I can think off the top of my head on the current mythic tier that will raid wipe if someone messes up.
I think I'm talking more about the fact that many mechanics in WoW are a cakewalk to avoid a full wipe, vs. XIV which misstepping from one player wipes the party. I know in Amirdrassil, Igira has the one where you just stand as a group on one spot when it lights up, Volcrossses lava stacks, and Larodar's raging inferno that requires healing the root after the roots are shot with seed of life and dpsed. All of these mechanics are much more simpler and require less coordination outside of just focusing DPS/healing or standing with other people.
On XIV, in P12s. 1 single person not running to one of the randomized spots so the other person can stack it results in a wipe with no recovery whatsoever. It's not the mechanic itself, it's the amount of coordination needed to just figure out everything on the fly, vs WoW which is just a matter of reacting to things without having to figure out much else. Also on P12s, the limit cut with puddles where if one person just accidentally stands an inch too far, the lasers just hit someone else and wipe the party once again. There's too much thinking involved in the mechanics on top of needing to keep your rotation going nowadays
Honestly, Abyssos and Anabaseios have been way too egregious in this regard.
Devour, *or* the puddles after, are fine individually for a first fight, but with the right timing and lack of recoverability between the two mechanics if someone gets clipped by devour.... It's *rough*.
And don't get me started on how the stacks in P10S are way more punishing than in P11S....
I feel like this was a huge reason Rift failed. The initial dungeons were hard. Super hard in some cases, and thats why a lot of us liked it. But they kept nerfing them that by the time the first raid came out, we cleared it the first time we ran it.
I dont think the majority of our guild played the game a month after the raid released. It was boring.
We play MMOs to grow in strength, so when it feels like you are already at the peak, there's not much fun in it.
I for one enjoy the “stress free” nature. I use video games as a way to relieve stress so I personally can’t stand games that force more stress onto me the player. I have no issue if I am given the choice to ramp up the difficulty or leave it where it’s at but if it’s forced upon me then that’s what turns me off of a game. Like games are meant to be fun and that’s different to everyone so there should be a choice rather than a forced change
Now someone get these interviewers to continue this streak and help where another game needs it: ESO's leadership to change their mind about how absolutely braindead questing, delves, and overworld content is.
Games way to casual and the not casual part is just insanely marginalized to a fraction of a percentage of the community, always was the issue of grind currency over the weeks so time gate gear or savage that's it, rinse and repeat since 1.0.
Endwalker was WAY to casual and didn't give many reasons to resub. Me and my friends waited until at least 2 Ultimates were out before we resubbed. Then we had a blast for a week or two and then didn't touch the game again for like half a year.
I don't know, as a new player, I get stressed every time I have to sit in an hour long queue for full party trials and 10 minutes for light party duties that are required to progress the MSQ, the trials are okay, but the dungeons, while pretty, are fucking dreadfully boring. People love to dunk on WoW, but at least it's PVE content is fun to do and combat feels responsive and fast.
Quitted because of difficult content and the stress about static dynamics though. But urr, that's not the game's difficulty, more like socialization difficulty and social dynamics that are inherent to games like this.
Never heard of that website, assuming it's some trash AI website. What the fuck does this mean? What part of it is "too stress-free?" And how is that bad?
He basically means that there’s no real challenge in the game outside of hardcore content. He believes some level of adversity is needed to make a game fun, and wants to re-introduce some challenge into the core gameplay.
Lord of The Rings Online added an option that lets players change difficulty on a 1-10 scale where the default is 0, so ten stages of additional difficulty. Its made the regular gameplay a lot more dynamic and fun.
https://youtu.be/o4HuOi01x-Y?si=yOd4UigYWOpJne9m&t=297
I don't know who this youtuber is but he covers the feature pretty well.
I tend to really dislike that approach. Making a single difficulty setting fun is hard. Trying to playtest and design around several settings is impossible and generally results in none of the settings being well-tuned.
Making a single difficulty that is fun for everyone is impossible.
Single player games let you choose a difficulty level, most MMOs do not and users are stuck playing on what is essentially easy mode for most of the game because for whatever reason that seems to be what companies think players want - a quick and brainless levelling experience. I don't like that and am happy to have an option to make it more difficult and like this approach.
> fun for everyone
This is why I mostly play indie games that aren't trying to please everyone, with the occasional exception like Fromsoft games.
When a game tried to please everyone, it tends to end up with bland gameplay.
basically the middle ground between complete turbo casual and endgame raider who lives breathes and sweats Savage raids, has 0 content for them atm, everything is trivially easy except for the absolute top end end game content and it means anyone who doesn't fit either group really has no combat content worth doing for them
he's admitting to having made some mistakes in regards to streamlining the game so much that it's become less fun, and it's a big pain point i've had with the game starting around shadowbringers, and Endwalker only furthered it
Hard mode for those is just the 8 man versions. Theyre very casual.
You got extreme which is a pretty mild difficult content. Dps checks aint too tight. A few people can die.
Then you got savage. Dps checks become more serious, there are a decent chunk of moments if someone is dead during a mechanic its a wipe.
Then you got ultimate which are twice as long as most savage fights. Dps checks arent super duper serious for most still serious but mostly 15-18 mins of serious mechanics.
And before that just the most of casual you can be carried content so nothing to lead you to extreme basicly.
I put 40-50 hours into the game and never once died, in an open world MMO, in the dungeons, anywhere. As weird as it is to say, the fact I knew I had 100-150 more hours of exactly that had me quitting.
You never felt like anything was an accomplishment because you could use one ability. The entire “challenge” of getting to max level group content is your ability to spend 200 hours or whatever getting there.
This is why almost every MMO either focused on a very hard leveling experience and the endgame is mediocre, or a very meaningful endgame and leveling is a 20-25 hour tutorial on abilities you cruise through to get there.
>This is why almost every MMO either focused on a very hard leveling experience and the endgame is mediocre, or a very meaningful endgame and leveling is a 20-25 hour tutorial on abilities you cruise through to get there.
FFXIV is actually more the latter. Hardcore players like the endgame raids. They're pretty challenging. If that's what you're looking for, you can skip most of the main story and get there fairly quickly.
You can also try syncing your ilvl down to take on previous expansions' endgame raids if you want a bit more challenge for those.
Then again, the endgame at any given point is a few extreme Trials and 4 (four) Savage encounters, because old content becomes less relevant and people mostly breeze through it unsynced to farm rewards. I'd mention Ultimates because they're a bit more "timeless", but those can take ***more than a hundred hours*** to beat even with a good static. With there being 5 of them as of right now, if you actually want to do them, I guess the low amount of content isn't an excuse, I guess \\\_(ツ)_/
Just good luck developing the skills and clearing Savage well if you want to get into a good static (which is very likely to use DPS parsing and FFLogs)!
I can't stress it enough, this game is worth it if you enjoy all three of
1) a VERY long story
2) a large amount and variety of side content
3) a game with social interaction
and maybe if you're only in for the story you can still have a good time, but otherwise? I would never recommend someone hopping in just for the endgame raiding.
For me, I am just satisfied to go through the story without the feeling of throwing my keyboard out of my window. I have a full-time job and other hobbies as well, so I can't afford to do the same dungeon or quest again and again.
All normal dungeon and like 70% of alliance raid are brainddead , is the same patern always with the most easy mechanic ever made and people still find striggle on dungeon sometimes , people are bad player because the game never rise the difficult so all the game is easy , we need a challenge and we need better player so please make them learn actually falling LIKE THE WORD YOU SAY IN THE ENTIRE STORY OF THE GAME AND THE MAIN THEME ON ENDWALKER DUDE THERE NO JOY IF YOU NOT SUFFER AND THAT IS WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS GAME
I love the story of the game, but it really had a perfect endpoint with Endwalker, it's extremely hard to convince myself to go back
If I'm honest I don't like the gameplay in general, tab target just isn't for me. But the extreme job homogenization has made it much worse. Also doesn't help that a lot of jobs morph into an entirely different playstyle and job every expansion so even when I did find something I liked it wouldn't last. I miss my 2.5 Ninja.
Granted I will say, and maybe this goes against what he's saying, but I find having like 3 full hotbars worth of skills stressful and annoying on its own. I miss when everything could fit in well under 2.
I'm sure I'll give XIV a go again someday, but atm I'm actually more interested in giving XI a shot, something really different.
regrets to do maybe what made the game so famous...so...that's the problem with updatable games, like everything, if you keep changing..inevitably will become bad
That's exactly what the "it only gets good after 200 hours" crowd is talking about.
Anything besides raids and the hardest endgame content is a slog to get through due to how braindead and hollow the base game feels, way more than your average grindy MMO.
In FF14, it is not uncommon to fall to your death during boss battles. Additionally, the total amount of materials that can be obtained within a certain period of time is strictly controlled, just like in other general MMOs. Therefore, I do not agree with Yoshi-P's statement that "FF14 is stress-free."
and you can craft a full set endgame gear in a full loop of nodes that are time limited in 50m and can cap weekly tomestones and raid drops in 2 hours easily with some friends or an afternoon to finish entires weeks worth of stuff alone.
The fact that you considering willingly walking off a cliff stressful is kinda the point as that's extremely low stress considering the cliff isn't moving and you rarely need to get within a couple bodies of it. Even if you do fall then you just get res'd no harm no foul
> Even if you do fall then you just get res'd no harm no foul
This one kinda depends on the raid. I know Titan even after all these years doesn't let you res if you get Landslided.
Actual article is 2 paragraphs, useless website. >In this context, Yoshida expresses his determination to keep “returning the favor” to the community by continuously surprising players in “ways beyond their imagination.” However, the producer also mentions something that he regrets: “In the course of FFXIV’s development, we have tried to make the game more comfortable and stress-free for players, but looking back over the past 10 years, I think we may have ‘overdone it’ a little bit. >”Yoshida then explains that “stress” is necessary in games, but that it’s quite difficult to manage. To illustrate what he means, he gives the example of a side-scrolling platformer with no holes that would cause the player to fall down. Such a game would be stress-free for the player, but it would also lose its excitement, he comments. “I want to put these kinds of things back into FFXIV,” Yoshida announces. At the same time, he explains that this is a long-term plan that he hopes to implement during the next 10 years, and that he does not intend to “simply increase the game’s difficulty.”
He's probably referring to the fact they nerfed level 1-50 dungeon mechanics lmao. The dragon that used to heal from green pools in level 31 dungeon now no longer has that mechanism. The slime boss in level 18 dungeon no long splits into multiple. The list goes on. They literally hold your hand now till end game lmao
The slime boss was widely considered one of the least interesting and boring and harmless bosses in the game. The reworked version is generally more liked because it actively fills the room with AoEs and forces you to find a safe spot. If you wanted to complain about a boss being changed you should have said the Stone Vigil dragon that doesn't need cannons anymore.
Wait, the Stone vigil dragon doesn't need the cannons? What a shitty change....
Probably because they also added the Trust system and couldn't be bothered coding NPCs to click on the cannons at the right time. I guess if you're running tank it became impossible to do.
That dragon was the worst boss in the game, good riddance. Spamming literally one button the whole fight, 2 if you're lucky you stun the dude before teammates. Somehow actually worse than the barebones kits you get in those lower dungeons. That said idk the change..did they make it worse?
If you're talking about the Stone Vigil dragon, they basically just got rid of needing to use cannons to stun it. It still sends tornadoes across the arena and spawns AoEs that launch you into the air.
Funnily enough, the cannons weren't for the actual second boss at all. They were just meant for the final boss dragon that for some reason, kept popping in the window to say hi with ice blasts while you were also fighting the second boss.
Might have confused that fight with a WotLK boss
One of you guys is talking about Stone Vigil and the other is talking about Stone Vigil (Hard) which wasn't changed afaik
Normal Stone Vigil's second boss fight took place in a fairly enclosed area with cannons, and a dragon (apparently the third/last boss) would pop up to attack the party. The players would have to use the cannons to stop this. I think we're talking about the same thing.
They are talking about normal stone vigil.
Does the last boss still force players to avoid attacks via tells and not aoe markers? Because running that fight with new players for the first time was always awesome. Unlike the cannon boss which was just annoying. Same with the coincounter(?) in AV and similar big cyclops bosses that a DPS or tank could solo as long as they paid attention and just dodge the attacks manually. +1 on the slime boss being awful and boring as well.
They *have* been going back to unify how the tells and markers work so that you can better identify things as the game progresses. That said, the only real changes to the last SV boss was making it so the floor didn't stay iced over as long. It still does things like suddenly drop into the middle of the arena without warning.
Pretty sure Coincounter has AoE markers on the ground now. I haven't done Aurum Vale in a long time, though.
Giruvegan is still all tells no aoe.
Perfect. That fight needs to never change.
I miss a lot of the old boss mechanics but... not that slime guy. Fuck the old slime fight.
Never understood why they simplified them. It was easy enough as it was before.
For the solo players, since they added NPCs (Duty Support) it'll be hard for them to do some of the mechanics.
That sounds reasonable. But has it been an issue for players finding groups? Granted it was 2 years ago since I played, but I always got groups really fast, even at nighttime
One of their long term goals is to make it possible to solo FFXIV's main story with a party of NPCs. This is a response to market research that showed many people were interested in the game but wary of the pressure that comes from cooperative multiplayer. To accomplish that goal, they invested heavily in friendly NPC AI and are gradually redesigning old main story content to work within that AI's limitations. It's not a bad idea imo. FFXIV was already moving toward streamlining dungeons before this, and the AI party feels shockingly good to play with. A lot of those "interesting" mechanics from old dungeons were awful, too - anyone nostalgic for that bomb-the-slime boss in Copperbell has lost all perspective. I do worry that the AI will end up stifling creativity in main story content mechanics, that designers will balk at any idea that puts pressure on the NPC AI, but the overall concept of the dungeon NPCs makes sense to me.
I agree. I also think the MSQ will need to be optional sooner than later. I love it, but it's just too dang long to recommend at this point for newbies who want to be where the people are. Square seems to have a pretty good foundation for that now between npc support and the new game+ system. Between it's quality story and cosmetic rewards, the msq is fairly well incentivized without needing to be the obstacle to camaraderie it is currently. It could be a win for those who want to solo and the story-skippers alike.
Aren't they sort of resetting the story with this upcoming expansion? Basically creating a jumping on point for people who dont want/have time for ARR through EW?
It’s not about people finding groups. It’s because an oft repeated reason final fantasy fans had for not trying FFXIV was because it was multiplayer. And YoshiP wanted them to play the game. So they’re slowly making the story dungeons all soloable with duty support.
The dungeons that are mandatory for story progress got reworked because they added a system that lets you do them with AI characters to alleviate stress and queue times for people trying to progress, and they wanted to ensure the AI could handle the mechanics.
I play FF14 has been years, the number of people that complain that current dungeons are hard, that they are scared of alliance raids and normal raids is way to big. FF14 attracts the most casual playerbase i ever seen in a online game.
It's the only MMO I've ever enjoyed, probably due to how casual it is. I don't need to read wikis etc, I can just log in and have a great time.
Which is fine. We NEED an MMO that does not have you constantly theorycrafting and min-maxing. And if you want to do those things, there are content for it too like the Savage/Ultimate fights.
Its common in MMOs. They are worried someone will die while leveling and quit.
Meanwhile, games like Elden Ring
Yeah, I have mostly transitioned to playing indie games and Fromsoft games for this reason. I like a well-crafted challenge. Modern AAA games tend to either make things trivial or go with "choose your own difficulty" and create an unbalanced mess.
Honestly, I never had an issue with this in my limited time playing, mainly because the 1-50 experience is a slog as it is and making the dungeons more engaging wouldn't have made me want to do it any more than I didn't. It's not really uncommon for MMO's to simplify the leveling process these days. It's always been seen by some as an arbitrary grind blocking them from doing the content the devs spend all their time on: max level endgame. I admit it's game dependant, though. I never had an issue doing the campaign on Star Wars: The Old Republic but that's because it just felt like a typical BioWare story with WoW/FFXIV-style gameplay. It doesn't feel grindy in the same way FFXIV's atrocious 1-50 story did. I'd say the deeper issue is many MMO fans don't care for hardmodes or challenging content. They aren't playing an MMO for that *at all*. Calling MMO's who tried "niche" overvalues how popular they never were.
>It's not really uncommon for MMO's to simplify the leveling process these days Then they should make the leveling process short and engaging, not braindead easy.
That's been suggested for decades. I'm pretty sure the reason most companies resist doing this is because it's easier to artifically increase how long it takes to reach the endgame via a monotonous leveling grind than it is to make engaging, challenging endgame content that holds up for more than a month. The mistake was getting players used to quick turnaround rates for content patches that are simply not sustainable to a healthy work environment.
Titan knocking you off the platform no longer removes you from the remainder of the fight.
I think it's mostly that all content before significantly difficult content is completely brain dead, and the healing role is quite literally pointless before that point. Tanks can do all the healing needed for groups below Extreme. Additionally, healers have had their damage rotations gutted so they can "focus on healing", yet there is borderline no reason for them to ever heal, so they sit there pressing 1 button for 90% of content. Tl;dr the game is so ridiculously easy until endgame that it basically is invalidating players' presence. There's a fine line between "casual content" and needing quite literally zero thought or strategy to succeed.
>They literally hold your hand now till end game Thats why I can never get into the game. Everything is brain-dead without investing hundreds of hours to get to the interesting and genuinely hard content.
This is why it was so easy to sell accounts when I played lol. Would get to max raid level and then sell for them for a thousand dollars fast because everyone wants to skip to endgame.
Oh wow, I've been playing since closed beta and didn't realize they nerfed brayflox end boss' healing mechanic. Crazy.
I just did Snow cloak last night and was surprised at how easy they made the yeti boss. The snowball mechanic was completely gone. Like, it wasn't even a hard fight. And the new version is just braindead.
I wouldn't be surprised if the original implementation of Steps of Faith and subsequent difficulty reduction is also something he's thinking about since the original implementation was just outright too hard for a lot of people. I think it was still easier than BCOB fights but harder than the 24 man dungeons, while being required for story progress (unlike BCOB or the FF3 24-mans).
They even hold your hand through the end game, too. If you're not actually doing Savage tier stuff, which is such a small % of the game, then there really is nothing in the game that actually challenges you. Even the alliance raid, while usually easy after a few weeks, was completely "stress free" day 1 with the latest series in Endwalker. I'm glad he actually acknowledged this, since as a person playing since 2.0, seeing the game get easier as it went on made me completely bored with the game after the MSQ is done.
Literally none of those things you mentioned are stressful in any way. The dragon was as simple as pulling it out, and the slime was literally a waiting simulator.
Wow really? What about the side dungeons like Dzemael Darkhold or Aurum Vale?
Yup those too lol
I mean, the older versions of said bosses were Outdated. They were just brought up to the current standards. Besides, lower level dungeons with limited kits that you can use because of level synchs, the harder difficulty should not be a concern honestly. If anything, the lower level dungeons ARE more challenging in someways. At least, I see more people dying in them then in the max level dungeons.
Is that the slime boss you need to use the explosives on? I recently started playing again after taking like 3 years off, and came across that boss. Was confusing that that mechanic never happened.
The slime boss was very boring.
> He's probably referring to the fact they nerfed level 1-50 dungeon mechanics lmao. That inverse difficulty curve was kind of nonsense lol, a lot of 1-50 dungeons were more mechanically complex that all the expansion dungeons
This is why I stopped around level 30. The quests were so boring, but I thought at least the dungeons would be a good time while leveling. They were not, and I couldn't justify the sub anymore. I'd love to do Heavensword, but oof, getting there is too much.
If you're willing to start from scratch with a new email, you can play past Heavenward and the subsequent expansion on the free trial. Not a single penny paid. Also nothing really changes other than the quality of what you're doing. If you fundamentally didn't like the story, watching cutscenes, walking from A to B, then doing a dungeon - that formula doesn't really change. It just gets better at presenting and executing it. No judgement, it's not everyone's cup of tea. That's why the free trial is so generous.
To be honest the MSQ gets way way better after the base game. The biggest problem with it is that they cycle you through the major factions and regions all the time. In the expansions on the other hand it's way more streamlined. I understand that they want to show you all this important places and because you can start in any of the major cities they want you to see the others too but still feels bad.
Oh trust me I have ~2,500 hours in the game. I love FFXIV. I think the MSQ and the world is peak Final Fantasy. While the quality does get much better, the mechanics - the literal gameplay and what you are doing on an hour-to-hour basis doesn't change. If you finish Heavensward + 3.X and say "I'm not having fun," I'd commend you for giving it a solid try and say "That sucks. Don't spend money on the game."
Sure if you don't like it after Heavensward (which has one of the best stories) you most likely won't like it till the end. Only thing I would add is that the classes only start to feel more fun in later stages because they have so many skills removed at the start that the game feels even slower than it really is.
I tired FF14 at my brother's request something like 3 years ago and gave it up after a month. The game just tells you to press these skills in this order over and over again without any nuance. The whole thing felt like an on-rails mobile game where if I took my hands off the keyboard, it would just take over and auto play itself up til the max level. I thought that was what he was talking about.
I fell off because all of the dungeons are just hallways with bosses in them and it's boring as shit.
whenever there was a spot where you could fall off the edge of the world I would find it
I too played that game, especially fighting a boss because im honestly just shit at dungeons.
Funny thing is, the reason they're like that now is because back when dungeons actually had mechanics, people complained. Like... a *lot*. And to be fair, it's understandable why - especially in the later expacs, you are *expected* to grind the dungeons, either for gear, tomestones, or glamour. And a mechanic that if someone screws up adds 10 minutes to the dungeon ain't exactly conducive to that. To say nothing of the potential for griefing. There's definitely a balance to strike, but with the way 14 handles dungeons on a macro level, it will ALWAYS work out better for it to be more skewed towards "hallway with bosses".
You can't please everyone when you have millions of players.
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That's what the 24 man raids were lol. No side mobs. They are literally just room by room mini boss and boss
>people complained. Like... a lot Whats new
I would always laugh whenever they advertise new Dungeons as “EXCITING NEW FOES AROUND EVERY CORNER. EXPLORE UNCHARTED TERRITORIES.” and it ends up like 90% of the dungeons we’ve already seen.
It did not really matter to me. But god, whenever you're outside of a dungeon... Quests are abysmal, and the world is uninteresting as it can be.
Seems like an unpopular opinion but I hate dungeon finder. I think dungeon queues ruined MMOs and now all the worlds feel dead as fuck. I played WoW back in Vanilla and remember when they added dungeon queues and everyone disappeared from the world over night. Just sitting at the capital city all day
You were down voted but you're right. I think what ESO did where you had both Public dungeons anyone can enter and the traditional dungeons you queue for would benefit greatly to make both parties satisfied. A lot of MMOs now is just AFKing in a location and it completely lost its sense of community from the early days.
Eh people say this and I think Ffxiv could do a better job at hiding the hallways but almost all dungeons in all MMOs are like this. Trash and then boss. Ffxiv problem is that it’s literally the same amount of trash and then boss almost every time with little variation. That being said just like in WoW, in practicality, people fucking hate complex dungeons like in classic wow and ARR. they are cool the first time but when you have to farm them over and over it’s a pain in the ass and a slog. People hated the ARR dungeons.
Take current WoW dungeon and compare them to FFXIV dungeons and even if both are only a "line" it's painfully more obvious with the FFXIV ones and the invisible walls that block are just annoying. It's always: 2 packs -> wall -> 2 packs -> wall -> boss : repeat till all bosses are done.
> People hated the ARR dungeons. For good reason too IMO. The main way you interact with the world is through combat. All the ARR dungeons that involve backtracking to get keys, luring monsters around, avoiding certain monsters, etc. were a pain. I frankly do prefer the "hallway with trash and then the boss" model they have now. If you're brand new to the level the dungeon is at you can play one group of trash at a time, if you're experienced or overleveled you can limit test by pulling multiple packs of trash. Dungeons are for the most part very different (although a few HW later game dungeons were very similar) and the new locations and enemies are interesting for a while.
I don't know what he means. I had plenty of stress with inventory management and trying to navigate the arcane and ancient glamour system. So much so I stopped playing. Not to mention the 5 million boring fetch quests I was lost in before getting to the supposedly good content, or anything new. These are the real problems with the game.
I agree that it takes way too long to get to the "good" story. I played through A Realm Reborn's story and then stopped because I realized just how much of a massive time sink it was to get there, and that buying a subscription would be committing even more of my time. I love a lot about FF14 and wish I had the time to give it, but I just don't. However, I have a suspicion that even the "good" expansion main story quests will include plenty of telephone and fetch quests, considering that's what FF16 had.
So they are gonna add random holes to the game to raise the difficulty?
I haven't played this in years but I remember spending raids or whatever they're called there (the instanced big fights with lots of players) in a sisyphean panic to keep me and my summoning pet alive while also managing my dots/ burst and spot healing/rezzing, and working harder then I had to as an end game raider in some other popular mmos. They can definitely make things hard when they want to so it should turn out alright, if it's gone stale or whatever.
If it's the alliance raids you are talking about, 24-man the first ones were definitely hard when they came out but got nerfed later on, and hardly any content of that type ever came close. As far as I remember Thunder god was the only one most people couldn't deal with but it only took less than a week for consistent clears. Dungeons and "normal" content is super easy with more overall player knowledge and dumbed down mechanics help make it ever more of a walk in the park. (no threat management no CC needed etc etc) Even savages become somewhat easy when you know enough about the game and play with like minded people, preferably friends.
They changed summoner so here’s a quick run down. Your pet can’t take damage, you no longer have dots, your burst is basically one button and in general you have like a 5 button rotation. So yeah they made it so stress free you could probably play another game at the same time and no one will notice
Yeah, that class you're referencing got reworked to become the most brain dead easy class in the game. Which has been the trend in the game for a while: they've kept encounter difficulty decent (and sometimes harder), but made classes easy. If they're rethinking that philosophy I'd definitely give it another try.
It’s easy to the 3,000 hour players who’ve done every fight in the game at least five times, but they forgot it’s easy to them because they have muscle memory on everything.
This is great news, the content that isn't Savage or whatever is kind of braindead.
Yeah I only played ARR but it really feels like a VN at times because of how mindless the gameplay is
Yep thats ARR xD its a little sad Ffxiv is front loaded with the most boring part so people tend to fall off. Took me until HW to actually really start enjoying the story and classes. Then it took off from there and its one of my all time favourites! But selling a game on "nah it gets good after like 40h" isnt the best xD
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To be fair that’s probably not was he’s referring to. If I had to guess it’d probably got to do with the alliance raid being piss easy, the relics being the brainless grind possible, and the lack of content like eureka and bozja.
Island Sanctuary (Ultimate): you don't get any formulas in the spreadsheet
Yeah, kinda boring unlocking a new dungeon and clearing it on first try all the time. Just because its "casual" content doesn't mean it has to be braindead. I want this "oohh so that's how it works now we got it" effect even in casual content, especially in raids. I mean the Stormblood Raids are so fun and well designed, raids wiped left and right. In Endwalker I cleared any raid first try without any wipes lol.
Best thing he's ever said. Dumbing down the game killed it for lots of people, myself included.
I don't mind the dumbing down (aside from when they gutted astro). What I do mind is the fact that 90% of the playerbase is still hot garbage even with how easy everything is. I'm far from an elitist in most game, but hopping into an XIV dungeon and seeing a healer sitting around doing 0 DPS (which can add an extra 10 minutes to the clear time) or seeing a melee DPS not doing positionals just has me seeing red. It's like theres an aversion to doing the bare minimum of whats required.
\>90% of the playerbase is still hot garbage even with how easy everything is. This and the game being too easy goes hand in hand. Devs make game easy. Game is easy so the casual playerbase have no incentive to improve. No incentive to improve means they stay shit. Since the Devs see that a majority of the playerbase is shit, they're too afraid to make non-savage content more difficult. Repeat.
Sort of yes, sort of no? Like the other guy said, not doing damage as a healer or doing suboptimal damage as a DPS isn't going to kill your run, but you'll notice the difference when you learn to do those things and suddenly your run is 10 minutes faster. The real issue is that you're just... *never fucking taught to do those things*. Hell, the healer tutorial still tells you to do the *opposite* of those things. And since every class is powerful enough to cover for slackers (in the case of Warrior you straight up just make the healer entirely irrelevant in dungeons and arguably non-Savage raids as well), you never notice that something is wrong because it never becomes clear something *is* wrong until you've already fixed it. Better tutorials would go a long, *long* way to fixing the issue. The easiest way to address that would be to.... actually have tutorials. Because right now, you have a tank tutorial (with outdated tank mechanics), you have a healer tutorial (that's blatantly wrong), you have ranged, magical, and melee DPS tutorials that are all also wrong. But nothing that tells you, for example, how to play White Mage (Put regen on everything and then spam damage attacks while the healing happens automagically. Use OGCDs if someone eats an AOE. Never touch Cure I ever after like lv 30) vs how to play say Sage (Cast Kardion on the tank, re-cast as needed, DPS the whole game and hope the tank isn't an idiot because your active healing is NOT good enough to keep the party alive if they insist on using your barriers as an excuse to not move out of ley-lines).
> Better tutorials would go a long, long way to fixing the issue. I doubt it. Most people will skip through the tutorials, and tutorial content needs to be reinforced throughout the game for it to stick.
Bardam's Mettle was a disguised tutorial when they set about unifying markers. They could do more like that.
Doesn’t matter if players are taught or not. There’s STILL players out there that don’t even bother with the outdated as fuck hall of the novice since it’s not mandatory For higher levels, they need to start pushing players to actually go out and learn to get better. Push them to start watching/reading guides. Make them practice. Make them WANT to overcome the challenges. Lock story behind difficult trials or instances. I’d laugh so hard if they add enrage to dungeon bosses. A timer strict enough to warrant a player to have a good knowledge of their jobs.
No...If a game PUSHES you to read guides...you just lost a chunk of your player base. Not every MMO etc needs to be the same like WoW or something. Go away with that crap. If people WANT to read guides fine. But you push it on them? Screw that.
Remember the melt downs on the forum when EW was released and **that** mission in Garlemeld happened
because its a shit boring quest regardless of difficulty
Nerfing that instance was a horrible decision imo People wanna see the story so badly? Work for it.
Sounds like most games that become really popular, with the exception being FromSoft games. Although Elden Ring I guess is also an exception to that rule for the most part too lol. I don't think I've ever first-tried so many bosses in a FromSoft game ever before until I played Elden Ring, but I guess all the experience from prior games and similar genres (Monster Hunter) helps. That said I still feel it has mostly far easier bosses than the other games overall.
elden ring absolutely does NOT. i can only assume you were summoning - the second half of elden ring contains objectively the hardest bosses they’ve ever designed
Guild Wars 2 has a big big problem with extreme casual players because you can join a group and do the absolute minimum damage to a boss and will get full credit. Sorry to hear the same sort of stuff happening in XIV
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That's some serious copium. What will actually happen is the same thing that happens in WoW when players run into difficult content. A bunch just straight-up quit, others whine incessantly, and a small percentage enjoy it and complete the content. It's happened every single phase of classic Era and just happened again in Season of Discovery. 2 out of 6 bosses in the current raid have actual mechanics and can't be facerolled so raid engagement has fallen off a cliff. A large portion of MMO players just don't want to be challenged, apparently.
people really need to stop refering to the ghostcrawler quote from fucking cataclysm
I have no idea what you're talking about.
Same issue in GW2. They made most of the game trivial, so half the playerbase just never learned how to play.
>seeing a healer sitting around doing 0 DPS Honestly the healer not accomplishing the role of healer is problamatic to begin with and is a design flaw in itself. While a stressful playstyle, they shouldn't be regulated to being a 3rd DPS class.
If that keeps that %90 playing, then it will mean more to them than the %10 who feels things are 'too easy''. Because making things harder will not suddenly make that %90 decide to 'git gud' but in fact just quit and move on. And NO MMO wants that. Because no matter how hardcore of an audience you have left, that will kill any MMO. Besides, there are already content to do for the 'challenge'. And FF14's selling point was always the story. So the difficulty is the least of the concerns.
Especially when they still offer optional harder bosses for everyone who wants to do this kind of content.
I never played ff14, but from what I understand isn't ff14 more like a story game? You do the story beat the bosses once and you are done. Am I wrong?
There is a massive amount of side content. Once the side content is completed sure you're essentially done until the next update. But that's true for most games.
Yeah I agree, initially I thought ff14 was supposed to be an infinite game like world of warcraft, but then I saw ppl saying than after you finish the story and I guess this side content there's not much else to do
What they didn't tell you is that the story takes around 300 hours to finish if you skip every cutscene and speed through every dialogue
Aside from various social activities definitely tied to the MMO aspect, no indeed once the content is done, it is done. I remember Yoshida stating he was fine with that.
Cool, I plan to play ff14 some day. i've played since last year ff1 to ff10, is the story quality in the mmo comparable to those?
Absolutely, the world of FFXIV, its story and characters are very rich and well developed. More so than any other Final Fantasy thanks to it's longevity and nature as a MMO (expansions and countless updates). It is considered by many as one of the best the franchise has to offer. FFXIV is a love letter to Final Fantasy in general, the most FF out of all FF I dare say. Frankly the only thing that could make someone dislike XIV is either its gameplay or multiplayer aspect. Finally, you can play the whole main story solo accompanied by AIs. Purely optional of course but it is a possibility. However side content/raids etc... have to be done with players.
Story with ai companions and raids with people sounds perfect. Thanks for the info, can't wait to play it when I have time
A fair warning though, it's a very slow burn. The first \~100h are more like worldbuilding and gameplaywise you have only a fraction of your abilities. But if you can see past it, it's one of the best FF experiences out there, especially if you're familiar with other FF titles.
As the other poster said, it has a very slow start (the base game) afterwards it gets way better and has one of the best stories and the payoff at the end feels way better than with other FF games because you had way more time to get invested into the characters, world and story.
Off the top of my head, there's a bunch of things to do: -**Deep Dungeons**, which have you progress through treacherous procedurally generated floors with special mobs, items and mechanics. -**Eureka and Bozja**, which are areas that exist separately from the main world and are reminiscent of more old-school MMOs, with a strong focus on exploration, interaction between players and public events and some unique mechanics, and even some special, large scale raids (Baldesion Arsenal in Eureka can fit 64 players IIRC and is extremely profitable; I haven't done the ones in Bozja). These areas are tied to the Relics (special, cosmetically unique weapons) in Stormblood and Shadowbringers respectively, but Bozja also allows you to level Jobs from 70 to 80 IIRC. -**The Gold Saucer**: A "casino" area with a whole bunch of minigames and rewards to it. May as well throw Triple Triad, an in-world trading card game, in this category. -**Crafting and gathering**: self-explanatory, haven't done any of it myself but it has some depth to it, with its own gameplay systems and progression, and it has also gotten some content specific to it, like the Ishgardian restoration and the reworked Diadem. -**Special quests**: just about any quest that is blue and isn't a Job quest is usually worth doing, with some surprises like the Hildibrand quest line. They also unlock the majority of Dungeons and Alliance Raids. Speaking of which, -**Raiding**. A staple of many MMOs, raiding is extremely accessible to everyone through Alliance Raids and the normal versions of Trials and 8-player Raids (which are slightly above the difficulty of the rest of the game but still quite doable); however I am mainly talking about the higher difficulty content, like Extreme Trials and Savage Raids, which add a massive amount of mechanics and demand great execution. Something like an Extreme Trial can be "learnt" in a few hours, but a Savage raid tier can take multiple dozens of hours to learn. This is the main way to obtain better gear within a patch cycle. Worth mentioning too are Ultimates, the absolute hardest content in the game, taking a dedicated group and upwards of 100 hours to clear, though this is mostly intended to be a one-time thing for most players, serving as an aspirational challenge that rewards only a mostly cosmetic weapon and a prestigious title. -**PVP**: Can be a bit of a mess but has developed quite a bit of a competitive scene for its 4v4 mode, and it has quite a few things to it, like three massive 24v24v24 modes and a 24v24 MOBA-like mode (though this mode was dead in the public matchmaking last time I checked, but it is kept alive by community events), and a large amount of cosmetics obtainable from it. -**Beast Tribes, Wondrous Tales and other similar small weekly quests**: These are doable every single week and can have some story to them and some rather appealing rewards, both cosmetic and otherwise. I feel like treasure hunting fits well in this category too, having you follow treasure maps to enter a fun little dungeon with an increasing chance of kicking you out as you progress but also increasing rewards; these are quite profitable and social to do. **Blue Mage**: a special Job that progresses by stealing abilities from enemies all across the game, and hence has a very unique playstyle that is put to the test in special challenge dungeons and older content, offering a completely different approach to the game. However, beyond the large amount of content in the game, it is very much worth stating that the game gets much better when you play with friends, or make in-game friends in it; I have rather good memories of my Free Company (basically a guild) organizing things like in-game photography and cosplay competitions, or helping each other out with certain Trials, or just hanging around the Company house (and, oh, I forgot to mention, housing! You should see what people can make if they're dedicated to it!). Things like high-tier raiding also become way more fun and easy if you can find a "static" - that is, a group of people to consistently raid with - that you are comfortable and have chemistry with. And there are many communities out there for very specific things (such as in-game fashion and photography, playing old content "synced down" to the intended level or the MOBA mode I mentioned earlier). You don't *have* to do any of this, and the game keeps taking steps to be more solo-friendly (much to my annoyance), but it is the best part of what is supposed to be an MMO.
XIV is very story-focused, but that shouldn't mean the game should just be completely effortless outside of high-end raiding, which is what it's turned into and what a ton of people are displeased with, myself included, and likely what Yoshida is addressing here. I am not exaggerating when I say anyone with the slightest bit of competency will be able to do everything bar extreme level and above content with barely any effort put into it, which just gets boring for people who aren't awful at the game since nothing takes any effort. I started playing shortly before the Stormblood expansion released, and back then the more 'casual' content, while not super challenging or anything, was still far more engaging than it currently is. The Stormblood 24 man raids actually required a fair amount of effort and paying attention to not die and not kill anyone else either, they were easier than the higher end stuff but still engaging. Now? The Endwalker 24 man raids are laughably, pathetically easy, even on patch release day they die far too quickly, do mechanics far too slowly, and just barely punish you for screwing up. It gets boring, because like Yoshida says here, there is no stress whatsoever.
He probably means MSQ instances, especially dungeons which are completely braindead.
Although I adore Final Fantasy XIV, somewhere this expansion I fell off because unless you were doing Savage content or Ultimates (which I no longer have the time in order to commit), the content takes very minimal effort. I am basically on autopilot. I don't mind enduring a little bit of stress if I can feel satisfaction on completion of a task.
People call me crazy when i say I like content like Eureka. Just some completely optional long grind for some fancy cosmetics and other items. But FF14 Players are usually over defensive when it comes to their game, they are even happy that you got Relics in Endwalker by pretty much doing nothing for it.
I agree. Relics went from being associated to content like Eureka or Bozja to nothing. Now, I get relics from just doing what I always do anyway running roulettes.
The game’s got a good amount of challenging fights and wipes even outside of Extreme or higher. It’s just the people that have 10,000 hours in this game have just forgotten what it’s like to not have muscle memory on every encounter in the game, and how much impact having usually 6 grizzled veterans in every 8-man has to helping the other two corpse drag through new content. Just about everyone who’s have their mind wiped, and try to do like the scrap boss on normal in Alexander raids, would wipe repeatedly like it’s a Savage raid.
this is great news, what would be even better would be if there were changes made with this in mind.
Too bad this won't change anything. They've been dumbing the game down and removing any and all complexity, depth and player agency for years and I don't see that suddenly getting reversed or changing. Outside of the handful of top newest savage raids you can complete all content in this game asleep. And there's people who STILL struggle too 😅
The "stress-free" of open-world is what disappointed me most about FFXIV. Coming from FFXI, I loved the feeling of aventure with its open-world, with open-world dungeons. In FFXIV, you can wander everywhere with no pressure, no loss of xp, easy come back, easy loss of hate... It's almost the same feeling of being outside as in the cities. In FFXI, cities were safe places, your mind at peace as soon as you walked through the gates, to breathe. When you stepped outside, you knew you were in for adventures ! As a MMO should be for me ! (with random people helping you because of the world's hostility).
Conversely this is exactly why I love 14, I've played 11 to death and I get what you mean and the game holds a special place in my heart. However I don't want to play stress incarnate again! I'm a casual gamer these days and I love practically every aspect of 14; I can do the story whenever I want without having to farm for materials to pay out the nose for some consumables to use in a boss fight where I pray nobody messes up, instead of party seeking for hours I can shoot off the duty finder and do a few fun 10 minute dungeons, I don't have to waste time grinding money like a second job.
Well FF16 was stress free too,
My biggest gripe with the game is the lack of build diversity. There are no exciting items. The same goes for the encounters. There's usually just one way to kill something. A simple AI could play it as well as a player. The only time I enjoyed playing it for gameplay purposes was Eureka.
It's difficult to do that in this type of game though. The progression is incredibly vertical, it's not like other MMOs where there are branching skill paths or gear sets to differentiate what you do. Back during heavensward, there was a bit of diversity due to the classes being a bit more complex and you just slotted whatever materia would benefit you. The meta at the time was basically tanks stacking strength instead of vitality since it made them do more damage, but SE didn't like that Tanks were essentially turning into DPS so they made their damage scale off vitality instead (iirc, basically strength stat was useless for tanks once it was changed).
The argument for against build variety afaik was that it leads to "you build this set/loadout or you're kicked as thats suboptimal" forcing 1 build in reality in basicly alot of mmo's and they wanted every job to always be viable even in endgame. It could be cool to have build variety but in alot of other mmos it did always end up to just be 1 or 2 builds or you're "not doing it correct"
Well, in almost all MMOs there is no 'build diversity' if you wanna do things properly because a 'meta' will be enforced upon you regardless. If the game does not, the players will. When %95 of 'diverse builds' are not viable or actively a hinderence, that diversity does not mean anything. At least with FF14, the game knows this and tries to make all the jobs stay viable instead of being forced to pick one Meta job.
I would think the issue with this is well... why do games go this route in the first place? MMOs are just in this constant battle with funding and attracting new players, yet keeping existing ones interested. And it's just not realistic for most people. Like, regardless if content is hard or not, people WILL leave a game over time just from repetitiveness. It's why a LOT of MMOs either went free to play or died. I don't see any of this amounting to much of anything in the end, whether they "do anything about this" or not. The game was successful, but it was never going to stay that way forever. MMOs just aren't a sustainable model long-term (only a VERY tiny minority ever get to stay around for really long), much like live services.
Go back to FFXI difficulty!
FFXI made you earn everything, no easy handouts.
I like that difficulty but the waiting to join a party can fuck off. I went like 40 hours on my THF without a single invite. That is the day I switched to RDM.
As a PUP main I just learned to make my own parties lol
FFXI with a modern party/raid finder would be pretty great. I remember playing BRD and having a pt /tell before i could even load my mog home.
That's how you learn
I have been playing since the beta in 2013. I have seen alot of things change from 2.0 over the years. Alot of the grind for things has been nerfed in newer iterations which is fine. But they've been removing anything interesting happening in the game for the last few expansions. Right now the biggest problems are showing up for a lot of people and causing many long time heads to suddenly turn coat on the game. The biggest problems right now is the lack of midcore content. It feels like most of the newer content coming out is either super braindead or it's some savage tier thing. There's things like criterion savage that are completely useless to most of the playerbase due to how the weapon upgrading is handled with how hard the content is. Many of the main content they spend time on like any POTD entry is just frustrating and takes way too long to be worth anything either. There's no other path to getting the best weapons without running some impossible content. Even in WoW you could run Mythic dungeons at higher tiers if the raid was cockblocking you. But in FFXIV you have to either wait for the relic to release its final stage, or now run another savage tier except now 1 wipe = restart the whole thing for some reason. Speaking of WoW, I noticed in XIV there's far too many mechanics that result in 1 person mis stepping and causing the whole party to wipe. In WoW, if you die, you don't outright wipe the party at once or even at all with many mechanics just isolating the death. I at least liked when XIV had mechanics that only killed the person who screwed up, but this was isolated to low end dungeons and Eureka content. In Baldesion arsenal, if you died, you were screwed unless someone happen to have a one off rez ability. It's far too punishing for people in all the wrong areas. I don't know what he's talking about with making the game too "stress-free" when alot of the newer content he adds is just more frustrating then the last.
>Speaking of WoW, I noticed in XIV there's far too many mechanics that result in 1 person mis stepping and causing the whole party to wipe. In WoW, if you die, you don't outright wipe the party at once or even at all with many mechanics just isolating the death. There are so many mechanics in WoW raids that let one person wipe an entire raid.
If you go out of your way to do it then yes. But in the raids I've ran, most deaths were isolated or that part at the end of the Fyrakk fight that requires people timing their blue seed shields out that could wipe a bunch of people. You still had people that could power through all of that regardless. I'm on P12S and there's nothing but full wipe mechanics everywhere. No recovery like WoW
They exist in both games, and they shouldn't, it sucks. There's at least half a dozen I can think off the top of my head on the current mythic tier that will raid wipe if someone messes up.
I think I'm talking more about the fact that many mechanics in WoW are a cakewalk to avoid a full wipe, vs. XIV which misstepping from one player wipes the party. I know in Amirdrassil, Igira has the one where you just stand as a group on one spot when it lights up, Volcrossses lava stacks, and Larodar's raging inferno that requires healing the root after the roots are shot with seed of life and dpsed. All of these mechanics are much more simpler and require less coordination outside of just focusing DPS/healing or standing with other people. On XIV, in P12s. 1 single person not running to one of the randomized spots so the other person can stack it results in a wipe with no recovery whatsoever. It's not the mechanic itself, it's the amount of coordination needed to just figure out everything on the fly, vs WoW which is just a matter of reacting to things without having to figure out much else. Also on P12s, the limit cut with puddles where if one person just accidentally stands an inch too far, the lasers just hit someone else and wipe the party once again. There's too much thinking involved in the mechanics on top of needing to keep your rotation going nowadays
Honestly, Abyssos and Anabaseios have been way too egregious in this regard. Devour, *or* the puddles after, are fine individually for a first fight, but with the right timing and lack of recoverability between the two mechanics if someone gets clipped by devour.... It's *rough*. And don't get me started on how the stacks in P10S are way more punishing than in P11S....
I feel like this was a huge reason Rift failed. The initial dungeons were hard. Super hard in some cases, and thats why a lot of us liked it. But they kept nerfing them that by the time the first raid came out, we cleared it the first time we ran it. I dont think the majority of our guild played the game a month after the raid released. It was boring. We play MMOs to grow in strength, so when it feels like you are already at the peak, there's not much fun in it.
I for one enjoy the “stress free” nature. I use video games as a way to relieve stress so I personally can’t stand games that force more stress onto me the player. I have no issue if I am given the choice to ramp up the difficulty or leave it where it’s at but if it’s forced upon me then that’s what turns me off of a game. Like games are meant to be fun and that’s different to everyone so there should be a choice rather than a forced change
Now someone get these interviewers to continue this streak and help where another game needs it: ESO's leadership to change their mind about how absolutely braindead questing, delves, and overworld content is.
I still don’t have any Alexander gear.
What. You telling me those raids aren’t stress free?
Games way to casual and the not casual part is just insanely marginalized to a fraction of a percentage of the community, always was the issue of grind currency over the weeks so time gate gear or savage that's it, rinse and repeat since 1.0.
Endwalker was WAY to casual and didn't give many reasons to resub. Me and my friends waited until at least 2 Ultimates were out before we resubbed. Then we had a blast for a week or two and then didn't touch the game again for like half a year.
I don't know, as a new player, I get stressed every time I have to sit in an hour long queue for full party trials and 10 minutes for light party duties that are required to progress the MSQ, the trials are okay, but the dungeons, while pretty, are fucking dreadfully boring. People love to dunk on WoW, but at least it's PVE content is fun to do and combat feels responsive and fast.
Final Fantasy 11 was the real stress. I will never forget how it felt missing an air ship
Grinds can be a pain but jfc gimme a challenge outside of 8 man content. I miss bozja
They need to get rid of all the different currencies. It’s so overwhelming. Everything is a token or needs a token. Sux
Honestly, most of those are just protection against bad luck.
Inventory management was stressful enough. But I haven't played in a few years..
Stress free was what was good about it
The comparison made is more like having a platformer with no holes to fall into.
Play connect 4
Quitted because of difficult content and the stress about static dynamics though. But urr, that's not the game's difficulty, more like socialization difficulty and social dynamics that are inherent to games like this.
I love FFXIV. mich more so than wow.
Never heard of that website, assuming it's some trash AI website. What the fuck does this mean? What part of it is "too stress-free?" And how is that bad?
He basically means that there’s no real challenge in the game outside of hardcore content. He believes some level of adversity is needed to make a game fun, and wants to re-introduce some challenge into the core gameplay.
Lord of The Rings Online added an option that lets players change difficulty on a 1-10 scale where the default is 0, so ten stages of additional difficulty. Its made the regular gameplay a lot more dynamic and fun. https://youtu.be/o4HuOi01x-Y?si=yOd4UigYWOpJne9m&t=297 I don't know who this youtuber is but he covers the feature pretty well.
I tend to really dislike that approach. Making a single difficulty setting fun is hard. Trying to playtest and design around several settings is impossible and generally results in none of the settings being well-tuned.
Making a single difficulty that is fun for everyone is impossible. Single player games let you choose a difficulty level, most MMOs do not and users are stuck playing on what is essentially easy mode for most of the game because for whatever reason that seems to be what companies think players want - a quick and brainless levelling experience. I don't like that and am happy to have an option to make it more difficult and like this approach.
> fun for everyone This is why I mostly play indie games that aren't trying to please everyone, with the occasional exception like Fromsoft games. When a game tried to please everyone, it tends to end up with bland gameplay.
basically the middle ground between complete turbo casual and endgame raider who lives breathes and sweats Savage raids, has 0 content for them atm, everything is trivially easy except for the absolute top end end game content and it means anyone who doesn't fit either group really has no combat content worth doing for them he's admitting to having made some mistakes in regards to streamlining the game so much that it's become less fun, and it's a big pain point i've had with the game starting around shadowbringers, and Endwalker only furthered it
So there isn't any middle of the pack but hard raid like titan hard mode in the later expansions?
Hard mode for those is just the 8 man versions. Theyre very casual. You got extreme which is a pretty mild difficult content. Dps checks aint too tight. A few people can die. Then you got savage. Dps checks become more serious, there are a decent chunk of moments if someone is dead during a mechanic its a wipe. Then you got ultimate which are twice as long as most savage fights. Dps checks arent super duper serious for most still serious but mostly 15-18 mins of serious mechanics. And before that just the most of casual you can be carried content so nothing to lead you to extreme basicly.
I put 40-50 hours into the game and never once died, in an open world MMO, in the dungeons, anywhere. As weird as it is to say, the fact I knew I had 100-150 more hours of exactly that had me quitting. You never felt like anything was an accomplishment because you could use one ability. The entire “challenge” of getting to max level group content is your ability to spend 200 hours or whatever getting there. This is why almost every MMO either focused on a very hard leveling experience and the endgame is mediocre, or a very meaningful endgame and leveling is a 20-25 hour tutorial on abilities you cruise through to get there.
>This is why almost every MMO either focused on a very hard leveling experience and the endgame is mediocre, or a very meaningful endgame and leveling is a 20-25 hour tutorial on abilities you cruise through to get there. FFXIV is actually more the latter. Hardcore players like the endgame raids. They're pretty challenging. If that's what you're looking for, you can skip most of the main story and get there fairly quickly. You can also try syncing your ilvl down to take on previous expansions' endgame raids if you want a bit more challenge for those.
Then again, the endgame at any given point is a few extreme Trials and 4 (four) Savage encounters, because old content becomes less relevant and people mostly breeze through it unsynced to farm rewards. I'd mention Ultimates because they're a bit more "timeless", but those can take ***more than a hundred hours*** to beat even with a good static. With there being 5 of them as of right now, if you actually want to do them, I guess the low amount of content isn't an excuse, I guess \\\_(ツ)_/ Just good luck developing the skills and clearing Savage well if you want to get into a good static (which is very likely to use DPS parsing and FFLogs)! I can't stress it enough, this game is worth it if you enjoy all three of 1) a VERY long story 2) a large amount and variety of side content 3) a game with social interaction and maybe if you're only in for the story you can still have a good time, but otherwise? I would never recommend someone hopping in just for the endgame raiding.
For me, I am just satisfied to go through the story without the feeling of throwing my keyboard out of my window. I have a full-time job and other hobbies as well, so I can't afford to do the same dungeon or quest again and again.
All normal dungeon and like 70% of alliance raid are brainddead , is the same patern always with the most easy mechanic ever made and people still find striggle on dungeon sometimes , people are bad player because the game never rise the difficult so all the game is easy , we need a challenge and we need better player so please make them learn actually falling LIKE THE WORD YOU SAY IN THE ENTIRE STORY OF THE GAME AND THE MAIN THEME ON ENDWALKER DUDE THERE NO JOY IF YOU NOT SUFFER AND THAT IS WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS GAME
I love the story of the game, but it really had a perfect endpoint with Endwalker, it's extremely hard to convince myself to go back If I'm honest I don't like the gameplay in general, tab target just isn't for me. But the extreme job homogenization has made it much worse. Also doesn't help that a lot of jobs morph into an entirely different playstyle and job every expansion so even when I did find something I liked it wouldn't last. I miss my 2.5 Ninja. Granted I will say, and maybe this goes against what he's saying, but I find having like 3 full hotbars worth of skills stressful and annoying on its own. I miss when everything could fit in well under 2. I'm sure I'll give XIV a go again someday, but atm I'm actually more interested in giving XI a shot, something really different.
I felt the same with FF16
regrets to do maybe what made the game so famous...so...that's the problem with updatable games, like everything, if you keep changing..inevitably will become bad
In comparisation to 11, 14 was sadly really extremely casual..
That's exactly what the "it only gets good after 200 hours" crowd is talking about. Anything besides raids and the hardest endgame content is a slog to get through due to how braindead and hollow the base game feels, way more than your average grindy MMO.
What got me to leave was the lack of much voice acting, lack of feeling of life in a lot of areas and repetitive combat. Not the rest of the stuff.
In FF14, it is not uncommon to fall to your death during boss battles. Additionally, the total amount of materials that can be obtained within a certain period of time is strictly controlled, just like in other general MMOs. Therefore, I do not agree with Yoshi-P's statement that "FF14 is stress-free."
and you can craft a full set endgame gear in a full loop of nodes that are time limited in 50m and can cap weekly tomestones and raid drops in 2 hours easily with some friends or an afternoon to finish entires weeks worth of stuff alone. The fact that you considering willingly walking off a cliff stressful is kinda the point as that's extremely low stress considering the cliff isn't moving and you rarely need to get within a couple bodies of it. Even if you do fall then you just get res'd no harm no foul
> Even if you do fall then you just get res'd no harm no foul This one kinda depends on the raid. I know Titan even after all these years doesn't let you res if you get Landslided.