That's like saying raiding wouldn't be as popular if it didn't give gear. Exp is part of the content.
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Regarding exploratory content not being present in EW, it seems clear from the acquisition method of that expansion's relics (which in the prior two expansions were tied to the exploratory zones) that it was just a cutting corners/minimal effort measure.
You see this in other aspects of the game as well in DT, such as the hyped up double dye channel. Many in-game sets (including WHM/BLM ARR Artifact Armor set) were skipped over getting their second channel despite funnily enough the dyeable cash shop items all getting second dye channels.
I was also hoping(coping?) that DT, being the first expansion where Hrothgar/Viera are finally fully implemented with both male and female available; that the new headgear for Artifact Armor would work on them. Sadly they were left out again. The future in regards to the hrothgar/viera hats front seems bleak, because if anything we seem to have regressed in having gear work with particular racial features. We've been seeing Miqote ears being lopped off of gear for a bit, but now its not only extended to their tails being chopped off on some gear, but also elezen and lalafell are losing their ears as well.
Same reason ShB lacked a Deep Dungeon and EW had one, they wanted to use the budget on other content. Seriously they have answered this in an interview before when Deep Dungeon was missing in ShB. Both take a lot of development time and money.
Here is the google translated part of the interview if you do not believe me (Source-Here):
COVID happened during this and also probably delayed some of that.Quote:
--I'd like to ask a few questions about future content. Are there plans to implement the "Deep Dungeon" content that was well received in 3.X and 4.X in patch 5.X?
Yoshida: Sorry, but we've been making a lot of new content, so we don't have the production budget to put towards this. To be honest, I wanted to have it ready as a leveling area for when the next expansion pack comes out... Although the plan is complete, we can't currently generate the funds to complete it, so we're thinking of taking a break from Deep Dungeon for now. Instead, we're preparing the farm-like gameplay we've been talking about for a while, and we're planning to prepare a lot of content centered on daily life from patch 5.3 onwards.
As far as I've checked the forum, nothing really. Think the only part that got any real buzz was the FFXI AR thread in more or less the same way the english thread did. I think they were expecting the usual PR given it was at TGS and knew it wasn't going to go over adjustments or system-level updates, which he did clarify will be in the next one.
Per Lucky Bancho's census data:
- Completion of Normal Abyssos across Level90 characters is 44.69%
- Acquisition of the Island Mandragora Mount across Level90 characters is 21.69% (16.04% of total active)
- Percentage of Level70+ characters that went at least to Eureka Pagos is 34.55% (30.38% of total active)
- Percentage of Level70+ characters that reached Elemental Level 60 is 18.93% (16.65% of total active)
- Percentage of Level80+ characters that went at least to Zadnor is 47.14% (38.67% of total active)
- Percentage of Level80+ characters that reached Resistance Rank 25 is 34.80% (28.55% of total active)
- Percentage of active character that completed the MSQ is 69.35%
So this "largely unpopular content" saw nearly 50% of the entire playerbase reach at least Zadnor. For comparison sake, the only other singular piece of content with that level of engagement is the MSQ. The supposedly unequally unpopular Eureka saw nearly 20% make it all the way to level 60, which is only obtainable by both unlocking and participating in the last zone.
Now Eureka did see a noticeable drop in participation primarily due to Pagos being widely disliked due to changes nobody really asked for. Despite those changes, nearly as many people continued to grind Eureka over Island Sanctuary. Which kind of highlights how big a flop that content was.
So... yes, by the metrics we have, they dropped what was the most popular content in Endwalker given 47% of the playerbase made it to the second zone. However, I don't ever recall Yoshida being surprised or even commenting on Bozja outside the usual. So where exactly are you getting this idea he was surprised by the supposed sudden turn around in opinion on exploratory zones?