That's a scary thought and I hope it's not true. Listening to Twitter of all things...uuuh...*shivers*
This is like a death sentence to media.
Probably overworked, getting older, and has to be focused on too many things at once. CBU3 was more successful than they ever thought, and they had the chance to work on lot more stuff (XVI and 2 other ongoing projects I think ?), but it comes with the price of not being able to pay the same attention to every single project.
Of course I realize it's not a one-man job and there was, and still is, several people involved, but even then the observation is still the same.
I feel like Yoshida might have mentally checked out after the conclusion of 6.0 Endwalker. He did what he set out to do, he turned the sinking ship around, saved the legacy of Final Fantasy, kept the game growing, successful and wildly profitable for over a decade. That's incredible and anyone would be tired, as a creator. That said, if he doesn't have the energy or time to spare to maintain the quality of FFXIV, then I think he should step down and let someone else take over. I know that is basically blasphemy to say, but nothing lasts forever and sometimes we have to move on, even if it's heartbreaking.
Leaving FFXIV to others sounds like a scary thought. With the amount of cash it makes, FFXIV is going to be the pie everybody wants a cut. We might see more mess up and unorganized Expansion with even more monetization and out of touch decisions.
I mean not really as far as I have seen.
Even the Shitpost has quite a number of memes about the story and criticism is just used to… well shitpost.
There is quite a number of people also criticizing.
But the shitpost sub is not good to get an overview of opinions.
On the r/ffivx there are a quit a number of people implying they were defending the game before vehemently. And there was actually lots of downvoting on healerstrike posts and job critique.
It did such a 180 that they are downvoting the few opinions approving of the story.
DT actually has managed to unite the official forum of English and Japanese and both Reddit subs
That’s quite the accomplishment tbh.
I haven’t looked into content creator feedback yet because I hate twitch but let’s see.
I don't know how anyone can say it's the vocal minority with a straight face.
DT is unanimously criticized on each FFXIV reddit and across each regions forums. The main sub is notorious for silencing any criticism immediately, but that's not happening anymore.
DT currently is the lowest rated expansion of FFXIV (including ARR) on both Steam and Metacritic. The Metacritic score is even going down over time as more and more people finish.
The only place I've seen with an overwhelmingly positive response to DT is Twitter, but how much of it is because the people with larger followings are controlling the narrative there? Twitter is very unfriendly to small accounts, whereas other sites aren't and everyone's opinion can be seen equally.
At what point is it not a vocal minority? Seems like a pretty substantial chunk of people to me considering how much filled every platform with discourse. Not even Stormblood was this bad.
An aside - I wonder what it's going to be like once KR and CN get a hold of DT. They can be absolutely savage sometimes.
A vocal minority becomes the majority when they start saying something I agree with.