Korean FanFest Yoshida Interview

Korean Fanfest was a few days ago and they did an interview with YoshiP, during this interview, Yoshida said that he believes FFXIV will continue to grow simply because "other games don’t have the weight of 10 years of growth behind them." This statement is concerning to me, as it seems he believes the game will keep being successful despite everything we have now (questionable story, tedious jobs, lack of content).

He also said that the current state of the jobs is due to fans complaining about the difficulty in Heavensward And that he already has the story for 10.0 ready. He hopes to continue FFXIV for another 20 years.

You can find the full interview below, note that it must be translated if you dont speak korean.

https://www.gameinsight.co.kr/news/a...ml?idxno=33448

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Originally Posted by Talael

Korean Fanfest was a few days ago and they did an interview with YoshiP, during this interview, Yoshida said that he believes FFXIV will continue to grow simply because "other games don’t have the weight of 10 years of growth behind them." This statement is concerning to me, as it seems he believes the game will keep being successful despite everything we have now (questionable story, tedious jobs, lack of content).

He also said that the current state of the jobs is due to fans complaining about the difficulty in Heavensward And that he already has the story for 10.0 ready. He hopes to continue FFXIV for another 20 years.

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Honestly, it is less concerning to me. Reading through the interview through an online translator it seems like Yoshi-P does want the game to continue moving forward because it already has a long history, not despite the issues we currently feel. And imho, a producer who still wants to create something is definitely better than someone who has given up. Despite some of my other posts in here, i wish for FF14 to be the best game ever.

I do kinda hope we get to see epic patches leading up to 10.0, though only time will tell if SqEx can deliver on their promises.

Google-Translated Link here, beware of possible inaccuracies.

Yes, we know that people who can't be bothered to learn to play have been complaining about it for a long time. The question is why on earth would you listen to people who don't want to learn to play your game? Just because they log in for a couple of months and spend their money on the cash shop doesn't mean dumbing down the game for them is good for it in the long term.

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Originally Posted by Talael

He also said that the current state of the jobs is due to fans complaining about the difficulty in Heavensward

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Well, there goes any hope for the supposed job reworks for 8.0 then.

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Originally Posted by AlucaDragonheart

Well, there goes any hope for the supposed job reworks for 8.0 then.

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To be fair, the awful state of encounter design was also because of people complaining over the years and they successfully reversed course on that this expansion. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt for 8.0 but a lot of their job related decisions in Dawntrail haven't filled me with a ton of confidence.

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Originally Posted by Talael

He also said that the current state of the jobs is due to fans complaining about the difficulty in Heavensward

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Now that has to be a freaking joke..

He's not wrong to say that the game has a 10 year advantage over new MMORPGs. It's just the truth. Countless MMORPGs were presented as the one that would kill WoW and didn't manage to even survive in many cases, in part due to not being able to match its decade or more of content (and sometimes due to an uninteresting IP).

Now, should they address the fact veteran players feel bored? Of course. But that doesn't mean he's wrong to say that the game has a 10 year advantage over others. It just does. Even the new MMORPGs that everyone was hyped about seem to have run into this issue where they just don't have the backlog of things to do even for new players and that will just take time.

In this game you can see new players go through 10 years worth of MSQ or sidequest lore, get lost in crafting/gathering, the gold saucer, old field operations, extremes, savages and ultimates, old grinds or all the 100ish dungeons at this point and 22 jobs, or get lost in a decade worth of glam and house decorations and so on. Again, I get many veteran players already did all of this that interests them and are bored, but all this being around for new and returning players is still an advantage so it is a fair point for him to make.

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Originally Posted by AlucaDragonheart

Well, there goes any hope for the supposed job reworks for 8.0 then.

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Current state, not future state!
(hopefully)

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Originally Posted by Ath192

Yes, we know that people who can't be bothered to learn to play have been complaining about it for a long time. The question is why on earth would you listen to people who don't want to learn to play your game? Just because they log in for a couple of months and spend their money on the cash shop doesn't mean dumbing down the game for them is good for it in the long term.

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If said people outnumber you 10:1, as a business you'd be stupid not to listen to them. Especially when their cash shop habits are also paying for the subs of players who no longer play.
Square-Enix is a business, as people like to forget, and their current model has brought them insane success much to the chagrin of many doomsayers.

There's a reason the entire video game industry has been trending towards casualization for many years now. It's where the money is.

Who complained about the difficulty of the jobs in Heavensward? Those people never existed, we just had pld and whm crying their jobs were underperforming

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Originally Posted by Fourbestintoner

Who complained about the difficulty of the jobs in Heavensward? Those people never existed, we just had pld and whm crying their jobs were underperforming

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People complained about the difficulty of Gordias, apparently Yoshi P thought it was fine and they were all just bad at pushing their buttons so he took away the buttons, and then he was visited by the ghost of Heavenswards past every expansion or something because he kept taking more buttons away each expansion.

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Originally Posted by Fourbestintoner

Who complained about the difficulty of the jobs in Heavensward? Those people never existed, we just had pld and whm crying their jobs were underperforming

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I mean yeah, for really good reason. WHMs mana situation was a damn joke and Paladin had no aoe gcd at all. We had trash mobs at the time, the DPS gap was kinda insane between the 3 jobs really.

Black mage also had the Enochian refresh to do (which was kinda annoying) and.. well, I guess that's about it.

Also, Gordias was unbeatable without healer damage, and this was very close to killing the raid scene entirely, but this was but a shallow nightmare past Midas.

20 years more of this simple looking game?. Mr. Yoshida must be joking.

I could play for another 10 years but Yoshida is not catering to players like me who want more alt friendliness and/or convenience.

I've been waiting years for houses to be shareable between all characters under the same world/data center but is yet to be done.

Another huge thing is to allow us to share the MSQ between characters, we shouldn't need to do it individually, things have to change.

Mr. Yoshida recently said they are looking into adding more options in the character creator, I hope he means new body models because the current ones are really bad, the head has most polygons but the bodies are PS3 era still.

20 years more are laughable, I want the next Final Fantasy MMO in 5 years at most.

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Originally Posted by Fourbestintoner

Who complained about the difficulty of the jobs in Heavensward? Those people never existed, we just had pld and whm crying their jobs were underperforming

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There are people complaining about job difficulty now when the jobs are the most simplified they've ever been, it's not a stretch to imagine people complaining when the jobs were significantly more involved.

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

People complained about the difficulty of Gordias, apparently Yoshi P thought it was fine and they were all just bad at pushing their buttons so he took away the buttons, and then he was visited by the ghost of Heavenswards past every expansion or something because he kept taking more buttons away each expansion.

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I mean we can all agree gordias week 1 was an absolute shit show because it wasn’t balanced for week 1 like they do since midas. Like gordias was the old way of ff 14 raids. Also the difficulty spike was insane from the A1s and A2s being completely brain dead free and 3 just kicking your teeth in, in comparison.

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Originally Posted by Talael

He also said that the current state of the jobs is due to fans complaining about the difficulty (...)

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Yeah dude, totally, every single decision was made because we asked for it. You guys remember the countless topics asking the devs to make Tenka Goken into a circle the size of Canada? Or the very loud, very persistent forum movement to simplify VPR when the job wasn't even a goddamn month old? That change was almost as well-received as the highly requested BLM rework!

Christ they gotta stop changing jobs for the people who don't even play them

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Originally Posted by Daeriion_Aeradiir

There's a reason the entire video game industry has been trending towards casualization for many years now. It's where the money is.

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That‘s why I love Fromsoft they develop for their usual Players.
Complaints about game being too hard? Here have another poison swamp.

At topic:
He is not wrong in that FF14 has the advantage of many years behind it and I also don’t think that is a bad thing.

What I find interesting is that in this and previous interviews he repeatedly says that there exist different kinds of players and that they can’t be ignored for the other.
The positive side in me hopes that he means the complains of those who want more interesting jobs again. The pessimist sees it as a signal that ultra casuals and new players are the target.

One thing puzzling me is the expansions comment.
How can they already work on things after 8.0 when they know that the story of DT wasn’t liked? Shouldn’t they be more careful here and actually look how people react to the patches first?

Anyway good news for Korea all in all but they also will probably have the same reception to DT as the rest of the world.

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Originally Posted by Fourbestintoner

Who complained about the difficulty of the jobs in Heavensward? Those people never existed, we just had pld and whm crying their jobs were underperforming

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there are people who complain about everything in the game, everything require second thought they will complain about and Yoshi listen to them despite use who loved how we can have a game that respect out intelligence.


Do I see this interview positive? not yet I wouldn't believe them until I see something, words is easy, DRG rework? nope, AST rework? worst iteration.

I can't believe they will change things to a better state until I saw it.

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

To be fair, the awful state of encounter design was also because of people complaining over the years and they successfully reversed course on that this expansion. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt for 8.0 but a lot of their job related decisions in Dawntrail haven't filled me with a ton of confidence.

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Successfully? What now?

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Originally Posted by Valence

Successfully? What now?

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The uptick in difficulty has been pretty universally praised. Your mileage may vary I suppose.

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Originally Posted by Fourbestintoner

Who complained about the difficulty of the jobs in Heavensward? Those people never existed, we just had pld and whm crying their jobs were underperforming

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I recall lots of ppl mad at the "bow mage" and my main job at the time, DRG, suffered for quite a low magical defense that made fighting Phoenix in Final Coil a pain in the ass, cause of the constant flames of rebirth.

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Originally Posted by Talael

Korean Fanfest was a few days ago and they did an interview with YoshiP, during this interview, Yoshida said that he believes FFXIV will continue to grow simply because "other games don’t have the weight of 10 years of growth behind them." This statement is concerning to me, as it seems he believes the game will keep being successful despite everything we have now (questionable story, tedious jobs, lack of content).

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I can understand him to a degree, as people obviously develop an emotional attachment to their characters and the game and have established friend groups, but that didn't stop apathy from setting in and droves of people walking away from WoW during Warlords of Draenor(10-12 year mark), Battle for Azeroth, and Shadowlands.

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And that he already has the story for 10.0 ready. He hopes to continue FFXIV for another 20 years.

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If he's being genuine, that sounds completely delusional.

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Originally Posted by Voidmage

What I find interesting is that in this and previous interviews he repeatedly says that there exist different kinds of players and that they can’t be ignored for the other.

The positive side in me hopes that he means the complains of those who want more interesting jobs again. The pessimist sees it as a signal that ultra casuals and new players are the target.

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I think that as he says, he wants to satisfy all sides. Which is what I'd expect to hear from someone running an MMORPG. But that means he has to split the workflow between them, resulting in both feeling like there's not enough of their type of content.

That said, raiders have never had it so good - between extreme, unreal, savage, criterion and its savage, ultimate and any other little challenges some of them like such as deep dungeons or duels, and now we're getting Chaos Raids and more Field Ops that could potentially include lots of CEs and another DRS (remains to be seen). And then there's BLU raiding. The scales tipped quite far to the high-end raid side.

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How can they already work on things after 8.0 when they know that the story of DT wasn’t liked? Shouldn’t they be more careful here and actually look how people react to the patches first?

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If it's decided, it was probably decided after all the backlash, because they were saying they were going to wait and see the reaction before it released. When they say they have an idea of the story up to there, it's a very vague idea and it can be significantly changed and reshaped based on feedback over time.

They don't really begin working on the expansion until after the .3 patch usually, by which time they've had chance to bounce ideas and flesh out the story and features.

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Originally Posted by Talael

I recall lots of ppl mad at the "bow mage" and my main job at the time

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Right but that wasn't because it made it "difficult" (which to be fair it kinda did because you had to master stance dancing). It was more because running around while attacking was fun and a unique thing about Bard that distinguished it from other ranged jobs.

I don't remember people complaining about job difficulty, but let's just say they avoided jobs due to the difficulty or played them extremely poorly and this would have been easy for the developers to notice, since it was obvious. An average person could enter a duty and let Blood of the Dragon expire, lose opportunities to use important attacks that affect their DPS, combos expire after just a few seconds or when using ranged attacks, procs could get overwritten easily wasting DPS, etc. None of which people have to navigate around now for the most part.

Questions about the difficulty were certainly brought up in interviews at least. I remember questions about "what jobs he'd recommend to people who want something simple" and he made his list and each time he was asked a question like this I saw the mentality shifting to where we are now, to where he'd pondered just making them all hard to mess up.

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Originally Posted by Daralii

didn't stop apathy from setting in and droves of people walking away from WoW during Warlords of Draenor(10-12 year mark), Battle for Azeroth, and Shadowlands

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It felt to me like the types who came over had only played several years. They were pretty invested, but hadn't necessarily been there since the start so it wasn't quite the same.

What changed with the awful misconduct media surrounding Blizzard is it gave the people who'd been there since the start the reason they needed to overcome the sunk-cost fallacy that was keeping them there. Some of them obviously just went back now, too, showing that they still just go back anyways.

Given the amount of Returners, that does happen with this game, just look out for all those flower icons in the game.

The only way I can see Yoshi's promise/dream can be realize is they need to put more people on this team. At the very least, they need a custodian team whose focus is not on creating new content but to address issue and solve problem in a timely manner, thing like Viera hat, adding beard to character maker, or class change have no business taking as long as they do and still nothing come out. For example the AST change, they knew it needs a rework and promised they would do it in ... 6.3 almost a year later. Than 6.3 came and they just handwave it away "nah, we'll do it in the next expansion please wait". Sure, 7.0 AST is nice ... but does it look like something I should have to waited almost 2 years to see happen? Absolutely not. Whether because they're are arrogant, or taking players for granted, or simply disconnect, it's bonker to see they thought it's not a big deal to tell people to wait for such a long time on a problem they acknowledge. It's the samething with things like Viera's hat, sometime I think the people who meme "small indie companies" are actually being too polite.

Like, this is a time where their competitors are constantly engaging the player base for feedback. I think this months I have filled out a few in-game survey for other games, and usually you can see these feed back reflected into the game 2-3 months down the line, comparing to FF14 where you shout at the them with a megaphone just to have them acknowledge it after a year, than maybe see it addressed after another year if you're lucky.

- If this is a mentality thing, that mentality has to change - pronto.

- If they don't have enough people, they need to hire more. If they have to hire a new designer whose job is solely to remodel all of the hat for Viera, that's what they must do.


The idea of a custodian team is to break the rigidness of the current development circle, and help address player's feedback as well as handle issues with more fluidity than current. And hopefully that'll allow the core team focusing on just creating new content and thus reduce the time between patches. Because I'm done with waiting 4-5 months in between. And no, I have no interest in his excuse about "we already have a lot of people or our staffs already overwork or we're trying to hire but can't find any", those are his problem, not mine. They have let this cashcow starve for so long, they have to feed it at any cost before the undernourishment cause permanent damage. Some would say it already did.

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Originally Posted by Raven2014

The only way I can see Yoshi's promise/dream can be realize is they need to put more people on this team. At the very least, they need a custodian team whose focus is not on creating new content but to address issue and solve problem in a timely manner, thing like Viera hat, adding beard to character maker, or class change have no business taking as long as they do and still nothing come out. For example the AST change, they knew it needs a rework and promised they would do it in ... 6.3 almost a year later. Than 6.3 came and they just handwave it away "nah, we'll do it in the next expansion please wait". Sure, 7.0 AST is nice ... but does it look like something I should have to waited almost 2 years to see happen? Absolutely not. Whether because they're are arrogant, or taking players for granted, or simply disconnect, it's bonker to see they thought it's not a big deal to tell people to wait for such a long time on a problem they acknowledge. It's the samething with things like Viera's hat, sometime I think the people who meme "small indie companies" are actually being too polite.

Like, this is a time where their competitors are constantly engaging the player base for feedback. I think this months I have filled out a few in-game survey for other games, and usually you can see these feed back reflected into the game 2-3 months down the line, comparing to FF14 where you shout at the them with a megaphone just to have them acknowledge it after a year, than maybe see it addressed after another year if you're lucky.

- If this is a mentality thing, that mentality has to change - pronto.

- If they don't have enough people, they need to hire more. If they have to hire a new designer whose job is solely to remodel all of the hat for Viera, that's what they must do.


The idea of a custodian team is to break the rigidness of the current development circle, and help address player's feedback as well as handle issues with more fluidity than current. And hopefully that'll allow the core team focusing on just creating new content and thus reduce the time between patches. Because I'm done with waiting 4-5 months in between. And no, I have no interest in his excuse about "we already have a lot of people or our staffs already overwork or we're trying to hire but can't find any", those are his problem, not mine. They have let this cashcow starve for so long, they have to feed it at any cost before the undernourishment cause permanent damage. Some would say it already did.

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It already did,
I lost faith and I cannot trust Yoshi P team anymore until I see changes with my own eyes

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

The uptick in difficulty has been pretty universally praised. Your mileage may vary I suppose.

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Ah, that makes sense if the sorry state of encounter design was merely about difficulty in casual dungeons I guess..

I'm actually quite pleased to hear he has plans for at least 3 more expansions. It's exciting to think this game will continue for that long.

While every decision doesn't line up exactly with how I'd love to experience the game you're never going to please everyone. My only recent complaint is the new raid series was a little too easy, but other than that it's been great.

Please don't lose hope devs, for every person complaining there's 20 of us who are content with where the game is. <3

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Originally Posted by Talael

I recall lots of ppl mad at the "bow mage" and my main job at the time

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Well that was due to how silly of a design that was, not because it was too difficult to play. Who plays a ranger, sorry "bard", and wants casting bars added to basic pew pew attacks? Esp considering archer/bard did not have them in 1.0 or 2.0 which made it a shock and completely changed the way the job was played, and not in a good way.

They have a tendancy to make extremely bad design choices, that anyone who has played rpgs at all would look at and say, 'that is not good, don't do that' and then blame the players for negative feedback and act confused by what we want.

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Originally Posted by AnimaAnimus

Well that was due to how silly of a design that was, not because it was too difficult to play. Who plays a ranger, sorry "bard", and wants casting bars added to basic pew pew attacks?

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Me, actually. I really enjoyed that slidecasting part of the job back in the day, but having almost-total mobility in ARR to being anchored in the span of two years wasn't a good idea. I significantly prefered it on MCH when you just had to charge the 1st shot, and the current PvP kits where you can move while shooting. Even if you get to move slower, it is great imo. I want more of that.

It takes money to make money.

It's quite obvious this game needs more staff, and more talent. A custodian team solving issues they've left in the game for years would be a major first step in solving the communities grievances. But the second step I think they need to take is more clearly communicating with the community, and not just giving us snipets of information in highly curated interviews. There is a clear disconnect between the developers, and directors (Yoshi P) and the general sentiment of the communities who play this game. The raiders aren't being listened to, Healers aren't being listened to, PvP players aren't being listened to, it seems like they only care to pander to the casual audience of this game who started the game within the last 3 years and still are catching up with much content left to do. Everyone else is no longer that target audience, and thus they do not care what veteran players think so long as they have new players to replace them. Fill the game with an extremely casual audience, and keep replacing those who reach the end of the content cycle.

i wonder when they realize new players arent infinite... and also... all that story new players have to go through is fine... but for gods sake at least make it enjoyable. a good story doesnt save an anticlimatic slog

No offense to Yoshida, but I don't see this game lasting to 10.0

He is letting the current problems be continuously stacked with no end in sight; for me personally I've been playing much less because I was disappointed how the DT content was the same old song and dance and constantly on very easy mode.

I like stories having some actual challenge rather than being regulated to optional content.

I was especially pissed off how the story version of the final Endwalker Boss was such a pushover (I heard it was re-worked, but I have not tested it out yet), I was like "REALLY?" The very final boss of this story arc is such a chump?