OC is a soulless cash grab designed for sub retention and is not fun

To me, it feels soulless because its first iteration came out seven years ago, and the new version didn't try to deviate from it much. In fact, most of the changes feel like downgrades, with FATE timers and (especially) Forked Tower being widely disliked by players. Of course, this was all expected, in a game where every dungeon has 2 add packs leading into 2-minute bosses with fixed rotations.

Even as a sub retention tool, it seems doomed to fail. Grinding for gear is something players have been requesting for years, but the armor upgrades are pointless outside of Occult Crescent. They are useful for Forked Tower, which most players are going to avoid. The same goes for phantom jobs. And it seems the relic grind will consist of steps that can be completed within a week (a day or two if rushed). After that, it's just more tomestone farming.

Meanwhile, the ever-present sub retention: lockouts tied to high-end content artificially extending it, housing demolition systems, and seasonal FOMO events with rewards that have been getting worse with time and will cost real money in the near future.

Got the airship. Got out. Gameplay was the same fategrind with some fancy dressings on top. Seems I avoided an annoying needlessly weirdly designed raid too.

Kinda cute for SE to think they can pull raid numbers like that. But they design things like 5 years in advance so no wonder it feels dated and uninnovative. Change the team and director or just pull the plug into maintenance non-sub mode. Please

They had the perfect opportunity of using Phantom Freelancer merely as a recipient for Phantom Job customization, by letting you allocate specific actions and traits. This is exactly how Freelancer works in FF5, and the goal of using the job later on. Instead, the Freelancer's 'uniqueness' is treasuresight which could've been a Phantom Thief feature. Chemist already does have a revive.

I agree with the Mastery thing. It should've been tied to something else. Zadnor had the perfect method. You know what would be great for mastering a job? Getting their set as a cosmetic glamour. Yes, there's a lot of jobs to design items after (and make Arcanaut sets something else). I would gladly grind every single one of them for those items.

There's also the terrible thing about not having a sustaining common potion available (not the Chemist one) or something similar to it. This means that as a DPS player you're completely reliant on either Ph knight or Ph chemist to live through damage, or another person healing you.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

It was a little awkward seeing that there was a bigger player count spike for cosmic exploration then there was for OC according to the steam figures.

I can't help but wonder if the former turning out to just be a glorified levequest grind just made people jaded enough to not want to bother with the latter.

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Not even joking when I say Cosmic Exploration had me more invested into it the OC does currently.

I really wish they would take practices from forays and implement them into overworld fates in 8.0. Go back and make all older fates have new mechanics. Give every fate gemstones and give way more rewards for gemstones. There should be a gemstone mount every single patch.

I wouldn't call it a cash grab

But yea, it did feel soulless.

It's soulless (lets be honest: FATE grind with mostly recolored mobs is pretty much the most low-effort content any DEV can design) and the time requirements are severely overcooked.

I'll be burned out of the boredom waaay before managing to get these 18 relic drops.

On top of that: open world mobs instagibbing you with XP penalty just pisses me off.

I wonder are all the idiots that asked for no tome grinding for relic weapons this time happy? Monkey paw much?

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Originally Posted by Astronema

I wonder are all the idiots that asked for no tome grinding for relic weapons this time happy?

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Yes. I'm happy. Grinds to do, the CEs are fun, doing content with "lots of other people there" is what an MMO is all about. As I was doing Occult the other day, I was thinking how much I had missed content like this. How silent Endwalker was in comparison. We should always have a Field Operation as a base, whatever its individual mechanics, just purely because it is a large-scale content that has lots of players doing things together. It always feels alive.