On Difficulty/Accessibility: Looking Ahead to Crystal Tower and Bahamut's Labyrinth
After listening to the Letter from the Producer LIVE VIII, it was tough to not be disappointed by the delay of Crystal Tower, but we understand that tuning raid content is a huge logistical problem. It wasn't until reading the official transcript that we felt severely underwhelmed:
Quote:
The Crystal Tower is content that can be undertaken by a 24 person party. I don’t think that difficulty is really that hard, and we’ve adjusted it so it’s something that can be enjoyed by everyone.
However, for anyone out there who was similarly disappointed, one of our members, Sirius Taco, has a friend who provided an alternate take on the translation, adding in some details that had been left out:
On BL:
Quote:
Yoshida: "So basically we've got players all over the company who are exceptionally skilled (Sirius's friend's note: I know some of these guys, they’re hardcore) and we’re testing DPS outputs and so on, crazy math. We can’t actually talk about what bosses are going to be in but as for gimmicks, I can give an example.. hmm, stuff like if you don’t move in a proper pattern, or if you don’t group up properly on time. Bosses have a lot of different phases, and as you might expect, each have requirements on the player in terms of skill, damage output and survivability. Something like, "okay we got this phase down but the next one is too hard! What do we do!"
It’s pretty hard, pretty hard indeed. There are parts where you’ll have to divide your party in half and do separate things mid-boss-fight. Lots of DPS checks, basically if you can’t keep up the DPS (which the requirement will be elevated in successive phases) you’ll be unable to progress. Things like "gear checks" will be a common phrase here. Bahamut's Labyrinth will naturally get more and more difficult as you progress and we intend to keep updating it as it’s got a lot of planned content. One of the things I forgot to mention was something we’re calling shared damage so, for example you have 1 player standing doing something and if he gets hit by attack x, he’ll be one-shot. So we’ll require 2 or 3 players to group up to mitigate damage. There are concepts like channelling too, where a boss might attach a tether to someone and "something bad" will happen so you have to sever it quickly, and so on."
On CT:
Quote:
Yoshida: "Crystal Tower is a 24-player - "alliance" as we’re calling it - type raid. Actually it’s basically 100% finished and we intended to put it in with Bahamut's Labyrinth but we thought it was far too difficult. So we've started to retune it and hopefully it’ll become something you can enjoy rather than fail repeatedly. We’re going to put it in patch 2.1 and we hope you’ll try it out."
For us as an FC, though we consider ourselves hardcore gamers, we have lives and we have no qualms about accessibility. At the same time, we think it's possible to compromise without diluting the achievement of tackling the hardest content possible. Difficulty, to us, doesn't mean we're throwing ourselves at brick (Demon?) walls over and over again and it takes three months to clear something -- rather, we simply hope that the complexity is there in the encounter design.
So, looking ahead to the Bahamut dungeons and Crystal Tower, we hope that Yoshida and the battle team err on the side of difficulty, particularly when it comes to hard-modes, and we hope that Crystal Tower gets a hard-mode as well. We're all for everyone having a chance at the content; we want it to sustain all levels of the playerbase, from the 2-hour-a-week player to the I-eat-danmaku-for-breakfast-then-win-EVO-for-dinner player (none of us are that good, sadly).
