"Playing as someone else" missions still need work

Dear SE,

You can't just dump everything onto hotbar 1 and not let us move anything around for the parts where we're controlling another character. A lot of PC players' personal button mapping isn't set up to comfortably support that. It's incredibly unwieldy, especially when dealing with 5+ skills, and makes the fights far more frustrating than they are fun.

This is not to mention that making someone play as someone other than the character they've specifically built to suit them, and forcing them to play on a class they may not like the mechanics of, is a non-trivial design and storytelling misstep. As was said by someone else when the subject was brought up during Shadowbringers: "I'm here to play my character, not the yours."

This is especially frustrating when playing a character with a similar role to your main. It's a pain having to get used to a different hotbar location for skills that are otherwise second-nature to you at this point.

An intuitive and savvy company might make it an option to play as yourself OR some other character that you know nothing about :)

I think they should just have a guide at the beginning of any given Roleplay segment that gives a quick overview of what everything on your bar does, like it does with Thancred's segment in EW. For Alphinaud's segment, I eventually figured it out well enough that I cleared in 1 try, but I still wasn't 100% on what each heal ability exactly did.

I will say I do hope they lean into more difficult missions now that they've added difficulty options. I actually enjoyed that one mission in EW that's become rather divisive. It wasn't perfect (stealth would be better if enemies could actually deagro when you get caught if you run away), but the relatively higher difficulty fit the narrative beat perfectly. So I say have normal difficulty have some actual challenge to it, and then have the easier difficulties for those who just wanna see the story.

My biggest problem is still the controls; everything locked in place on hotbar 1 isn't a good solution; it can work for 2 or 3 skills, like when you're on a mount, but anything past that and it quickly gets un-fun on PC.

Or make a it aisde quest with a good reward

Playing another role was a bit of an overkill in this expansion. I don't mind it being thrown in once maybe twice, but doing it more than that takes the fun right out of it.

The only missed thing is the skip button for those crap play as someone else missions. I really like endwalker, but those missions are very bad.

I agree they need work...be worked right out of the game.

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Originally Posted by Valavaern

Dear SE,

You can't just dump everything onto hotbar 1 and not let us move anything around for the parts where we're controlling another character. A lot of PC players' personal button mapping isn't set up to comfortably support that. It's incredibly unwieldy, especially when dealing with 5+ skills, and makes the fights far more frustrating than they are fun.

This is not to mention that making someone play as someone other than the character they've specifically built to suit them, and forcing them to play on a class they may not like the mechanics of, is a non-trivial design and storytelling misstep. As was said by someone else when the subject was brought up during Shadowbringers: "I'm here to play my character, not the yours."

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I agree they should at least let us move the skills around. When the instance comes up in EW where you have to

play as Alphinaud on SGE

I kept misclicking because the buttons are not mapped where I have mine mapped—so muscle memory was getting in the way. I eventually just slowed down and made a very deliberate effort to press the right button, but it would still be nice to be able to shift them around.

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Originally Posted by Arazehl

Playing another role was a bit of an overkill in this expansion. I don't mind it being thrown in once maybe twice, but doing it more than that takes the fun right out of it.

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The dev team definitely has a tendency to overdo it when they come up with new gimmicks. These kinds of quests and the new sort of escort missions/quests that were introduced in EW were way overused, imo. They’re neat and cute the first couple of times, but don’t let them wear out their welcome.

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Originally Posted by HyoMinPark

The dev team definitely has a tendency to overdo it when they come up with new gimmicks. These kinds of quests and the new sort of escort missions/quests that were introduced in EW were way overused, imo. They’re neat and cute the first couple of times, but don’t let them wear out their welcome.

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It wasn't just overuse. It was also timing.

This was the culmination of an 8 year story arc and they disrupted it with new game mechanic gimmicks instead of letting us focus on the story.

They should have either introduced them in the side quests or waited until post-6.0 MSQ stories.

worst part for me is I've wanted the 1-2-3 non branching combo button forever and every npc seems to have one.

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Originally Posted by Atamis

worst part for me is I've wanted the 1-2-3 non branching combo button forever and every npc seems to have one.

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Role play battles use them because you can’t expect every single player to know the basics of every other job so that they can execute other character’s combos, especially if we can’t move buttons around to where they make sense to us. On your own character you have the advantage of being able to set up your bars in a meaningful and convenient way to you. Role play battles don’t offer that kind of comfort, so they have to simplify the combos.