Yoshida is not as directly involved as he used to. He's in charge of the entirety of Creative Studio 3, who are working on 2 projects unrelated to Final Fantasy XIV.
Printable View
Yoshida is not as directly involved as he used to. He's in charge of the entirety of Creative Studio 3, who are working on 2 projects unrelated to Final Fantasy XIV.
That and despite being on the board, he's the youngest there. In JP the youngest basically has no say. If someone above him says "hey, let's do this" you just nod your head in agreement and do it. Not saying that YoshP is perfect or anything but between being very busy and probably having to agree to shit without really thinking on it...yeah.
Everything good has to come to an end I suppose.
If this reddit post of a translated article is to be believed, he doesn't like being on the Board of Directors but he's stuck there anyway. https://www.reddit.com/r/FFXVI/comme...ares_board_of/
I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't even get to play much of Dawntrail at all before it released. He's not in the same position he was five years ago and doesn't have time to personally review games and give his feedback anymore.
Square execs see that CBU3 or CS3 or whatever it is now is the team that made their cash cow, but rather than invest back into it, they just pick off senior staff member to go work on other projects expecting another masterpiece, because they're business execs who have no idea how artistry works, and we're seeing the results now.
For the MSQ I could see it's poor quality being due to FFXVI since they start writing the next expansion properly around the launch of the current expansion. I haven't played FFXVI yet due to no pc release however from what I've heard it seems very Heavensward-esque in tone so I wouldn't be surprised if the main writers for the HW-ShB era of XIV weren't available for EW and DT so we got less experienced writers with at most an outline from the main writers.
As for the job changes, yeah 90-100 is terrible but this is less of the fault of new blood and more of the fault of the old bloods fear of experimenting anymore. ARR and HW had the best most interesting job design and it was unbalanced and had a lot of people arguing. Stuff like Dark Arts on DRK was such an interesting system for a tank that it has had people still divided on it and talking about it 9 years later, cleric stance as well and the old job identies such as the WoW warlock Summoner and support melee DPS Ninja.
However these systems did divide the player base and had constant back and forth pull of people really hating jobs while others really loving them, people used to view FFXIV healers as some of the most engaging healers ever in an MMO because of how much of a balance between DPS and healing there was. But this led to healer being hard to approach, tanks all had stance dancing which made tanks hard to approach.
All these engaging systems were culled for homogenisation and simpler more approachable design and a more balanced game (though not completely.)
It started in SB was completely shoved into our face in ShB and has been reinforced in EW and DT. It attracted new conflict now, new players who prefer the homogenised style vs old guard who prefer old job design.
CBU3 is scared of displeasing the new players and are afraid of having ARR & HW balance. 90-100 all being traits confirm this, they want jobs to feel the same as SHB/EW because they're afraid of dividing people again by completely changing a job outside of a rework.