Yoshida's latest interview, Comic Exhibition Taiwan 2025

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

It's not, but my point is it's never just been a couple of elements and that going through the game seeing all these references, then suddenly having a problem with it in Dawntrail is a surprised pikachu moment.

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I might not have expressed myself clearly here since you seem to misunderstand my picture as a whole. My point isn't that they use elements of other games. My point is that Dawntrail feels to me like they are building a new game without the investment of making a new game.

I do think though that we can stop discussing since you don't seem to be interested in understanding my view and just want to argue for the sake of it. Have a good day.

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Originally Posted by Hallarem

and pushing the dumb DT "vacation" angle.

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Aren't you supposed to have fun on a vacation?

I think they forgot the "fun" part of this whole thing.

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Originally Posted by Hallarem

I believe Smile was specifically requested by Ishikawa. And thus we have the "Gospel Train Bomb" and everyones jaws collectively dropped in disbelief.
SE chases trends far too much, it's even more visible from all the outside of FF references. It dillutes their own world most of the time.

Don't get me wrong "stealing" from other MMO is what made WoW so popular, not because they 1 for 1 copied things, but they copied something and made it better. While FFXIV struggles to even make an INITIAL VERSION of something let alone improve something on arrival.

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I'm gonna be honest, I thought that was the most hilarious moment in the entire expansion, and then I saw Todd trying to discard the music for it, and the despair of not being able to, I was just rolling at that point.

As for trends, yes, I agree they do tend to chase them when they are way past their prime, and they have 0 playerbase that is interested in them. You can absolutely do trends, but all trends are pursued based on rigorous market research and their viability in it. I did hear something about the past CEO having an obsession with NFTs..

Regarding WoW casual copy, they did a pretty good job considering they were the only ones that pulled it off. I don't think it's wrong to look at other MMOs and copy/ adapt into what can work for your MMO, but; big BUTs, you HAVE to have enough innovation and uniqueness to differentiate you from your competitor, because you will never get their slice just because you copied. For the most part, they did achieve that; however, gamers got smart, and they got a lot more competition.

They cannot release half-hearted slop and get away with it. Look at the industry as a whole. A lot of huge companies that thought they could not be challenged got extremely humbled and destroyed lately.

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Originally Posted by yesnt

I might not have expressed myself clearly here since you seem to misunderstand my picture as a whole. My point isn't that they use elements of other games. My point is that Dawntrail feels to me like they are building a new game without the investment of making a new game.

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They actually view each new expansion they make as a "whole new game". They have actually described it that way in the past with those words exactly (this was many expansions ago they said this). The resources they put into a new expansion are intended to be like making a new game out of the same engine and reusing some assets, with the only caveat being how it makes references to prior expansions.

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Originally Posted by Kohashi

Maybe I remember wrong, but I believe he mentioned in the past that they wanted to appeal to a different age group/player base with DT.

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They did mention they want to appeal to younger players but the thing is that they already do. There are places to see age ranges that play this game and while plenty of them are 30-50, plenty of them are also 18-29. It's not really true that somehow 18 year olds aren't getting into MMORPGs, because they are this one.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

They did mention they want to appeal to younger players but the thing is that they already do. There are places to see age ranges that play this game and while plenty of them are 30-50, plenty of them are also 18-29. It's not really true that somehow 18 year olds aren't getting into MMORPGs, because they are this one.

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I am not sure, but probably they do mean like 16-24 max, that's why all sunshine and unicorns. Some themes that appeared in EW are very hard to relate to for people who have very little life experience or have not experienced a great deal of hardships.

Wuky was like a typical teen. Clueless, happy-go-lucky, sheltered by parents, with little knowledge of the outside world. The exact profile of a teen. Everyone goes through that..

However, their playerbase in the vast majority sits around 28-32 y.o so of course they got annoyed by this little brat...

https://x.com/aitaikimochi/status/1522925478893391872 (source)

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Originally Posted by Hallarem

Funniest part though is how the "Garlemald was never planned" people get finally silenced in this by, I quote:

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So, like, 2 people? I don't recall there ever being any kind of major push to claim otherwise. Just the random person here or there that will always exist with a playerbase this size.

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I’ve been thinking about this. FFXIV, as we knew it, really ended with Endwalker. But they can’t just walk away from the game, it’s a major cash cow. Still, it seems like they’d rather focus on creating new titles than building on what’s already there. So what do they do? They sideline the existing lore, shift the setting to a new continent, and act like everything before Dawntrail essentially doesn’t matter. That way, they can effectively make a new game without the effort of developing an entirely new MMO.

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This x100. The main FFXIV story is done. If this was a movie/novel/etc., the climax has passed. Everything else is falling action from this point onwards. If your expectation is for things to be as "good" as ShB or EW, you're in for disappointment, b/c those were only as "good" as they were due to the previous multiple expansions of story they built on. If you recognize that and gauge your expectations appropriately, you can still be very satisfied and have a lot of fun with DT and whatever comes afterward.

I highly, highly doubt we'll get a new FF MMO. The "golden age" of MMO's is long past at this point, and the amount of resources needed to develop one compared to the lukewarm potential "reward" just makes it nowhere near sensible to do.

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Instead of expanding the story meaningfully, they recycle plotlines from other Final Fantasy games, reuse old assets, and rely on the loyalty of the playerbase to keep things going.

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This, however, has been normal for FFXIV since the beginning and has been explicitly stated as part of its purpose. Many of the key areas and plotlines since ARR have come from previous FF games (Crystal Tower is FFIII, Garlemald is the "Empire" from FFVI, heck Omega was all about just pulling bosses from previous games, etc.).

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

They actually view each new expansion they make as a "whole new game". They have actually described it that way in the past with those words exactly (this was many expansions ago they said this). The resources they put into a new expansion are intended to be like making a new game out of the same engine and reusing some assets, with the only caveat being how it makes references to prior expansions.
They did mention they want to appeal to younger players but the thing is that they already do. There are places to see age ranges that play this game and while plenty of them are 30-50, plenty of them are also 18-29. It's not really true that somehow 18 year olds aren't getting into MMORPGs, because they are this one.

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They are so full of crap then. The fact anyone still believes half of what comes out of Yoshida's mouth is unbelieveable. They absolutely do NOT make a 'whole new game' with every FFXIV expansion. You know how I know that? Because I've played WoW and that IS a whole new game with every expansion, for better or worse. I've often criticized WoW for taking a "throw the baby out with the bathwater" approach. They have a bad record of completely redesigning power progression, skill systems and even gearing with every single expansion, even if the system in question functioned well, and all for what feels like a weird methodology of just changing things because they feel like it.

The FFXIV team's statement is a hot lie. Everything is SO predictable, down to exactly what tomestone is coming in what patch and what ilvl the gear will be. Hell, we're still operating on the loot system designed for Alexander that was supposedly only a placeholder til they "come up with a better system."

Also they didn't just say they wanted to "appeal" to a younger audience, they literally said DT was written for a younger audience.

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Originally Posted by Kohashi

I am not sure, but probably they do mean like 16-24 max, that's why all sunshine and unicorns.

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I think this is actually because the prior expansions were overly depressing and they wanted to inject some positivity. Dawntrail was actually a pretty depressing expansion itself - it was about a natural disaster that had almost ended the Alexandrians and their Endless, who you had to finish off by turning off the switch. Even the first part had a whole battle area in Yak T'el where people had died and were ash. Add to that, Zoraal Ja did experiments on people in a lab and killed lots of them to be able to make use of beast souls which resulted in one of the S ranks. He killed people in Solution Nine and Tuliyollal. There was death all over the place.

Despite how depressing Dawntrail is, they portrayed it as if it wasn't, with Wuk Lamat's constant positivity and hope, the bright sunny colors of Tuliyollal, Urqopacha, Yak T'el and Shaaloani, the bright and thriving Solution Nine and the initially quite lit up Living Memory, and music like Smile.

Ultimately, I think they just wanted to make the story less depressing for a bit but since they couldn't, they achieved this aesthetically with the music, colors and characters instead.

And you have to think about it a bit. Shadowbringers was pretty bleak. The world was on the brink of ending. Its heroes were gone. Even if you saved it, there wasn't much left anyways. Then Emet came and told you this big story of how he killed whole worlds of people, that everyone isn't real because they are meant to be fragments of Ascian souls. And how everyone was a mistake resulting from the Final Days which we are given a grand tour of.

Then Endwalker comes along and is a story about depression and despair itself, making sure you go through an area where your hope diminishes, and even with a light turned on it still feels like a pretty depressing expansion over all. Then you tackle the thirteenth, a world where they're all dead but none of its people can die so they endlessly devour eachother's souls.

The depressing themes don't stop, so it seems they tackled it by switching up the aesthetics and music to make it seem more positive than it was.

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Some themes that appeared in EW are very hard to relate to for people who have very little life experience or have not experienced a great deal of hardships.

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It's possible. It's true that the longer you've lived the more likely you will have experienced hardships. But plenty of young people will also go through depressions or lose someone.

I vaguely recall Yoshi-P said, regarding FF16, that younger people are more wised up about things. They learn about things adults would rather they didn't at very young ages, so he felt tackling the dark and depressing themes he did in FF16 would work for young people.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Ultimately, I think they just wanted to make the story less depressing for a bit but since they couldn't, they achieved this aesthetically with the music, colors and characters instead.

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They did not achieve anything with that.

I just honestly feel like Yoshi P is out of touch with storytelling in general