maybe people would hate it less if it was actually fun to play
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The thing is, most of the post patches are chock full of un-needed quests for the sake of padding out a patch.
What should have happened was any post x.0 patch should be completely side stories and optional. So if you only did 6.0 and quit until 7.0 you shouldn't need to do the boring side stuff.
I hate boring quests purely for exposition to keep people entertained.
It's not even about specifically making the MSQ more challenging though. Look at the erratic difficulty of dungeons throughout the years. Some dungeons have some eye watering trash pull to the point where the bosses (not trash pulls sorry!) are often the breather. And then you hit the level cap, get a few bits of gear and the challenge all but evaporates.
A well designed and executed game will have a difficulty curve that is reasonably smooth and consistent overall. FFXIV's is akin to a drunk stumbling through wet concrete before promptly faceplanting into the lamppost that is Extremes.
too many difficulties for the same fight dilutes any sense of achievement.
I have played every final fantasy game, and many games that have a so called "MSQ". All these games slowly amp up the difficulty of the game up until the end where everything I have learned is finally put to a test. Why can't the games MSQ do this? I feel that is a pretty normal things for a video game. FFXIV MSQ feels more like a 200 hour visual novel than a video game which is what scares new players off more than a challenge. I don't think there is anything wrong with the MSQ presenting a challenge every now and than, in fact it sounds like what a normal video game would do. I feel a lot of people have never played a video game outside of FFXIV.
This thread is actually just full of FFXIV players. You know ARR required you to do hard mode trails and ex trails to unlock Coil, which only had a normal mode version which was on par with savage raids? I think many forget that this game started off very difficult and people did it back then.
That is absolutely something I would love to see. Especially since that gradual design allows you to ramp up difficulty in a good manner.
I have honestly not bothered with potd/hoh much due to lack of rewards like those and the fact that I was told that getting to max floor as certain melee classes is not possible unless you use the "spinning" around mob circle to cancel their auto attack which honestly sounds like bad design, that is not kiting, it is not positioning, it is doing something incredibly specific to bug out a mob so it stops auto attacking.
Instead auto attack damage should be survivable(as long as you dont take too long) for dps assuming good use of your personal health/leech skills and obviously not getting hit by mechanics and dealing with adds appropriately.
Also the fact that Potd is stuck at lvl 50 is another issue since classes feel very boring and simple at that level
This is basically what made me completely lose interest in Endwalker's story, but I already knew it would happen. The MSQ and it's associated fights are sometimes so bafflingly easy, the possibility of failure so nonexistent, that it destroy any impact the story could've potentially had for me.
"Oh no this incredibly ancient and unbelievably powerful evil is threatening our entire world" and then you get to the boss and it's a 5 minute fight that you oneshot, where the ancient all-powerful menace... tickles you, throws out a few "dungeon boss"-level mechanics and then falls over.