Naoki Yoshida recent interview

[SQBoard]

What I really don't like about the interview is this:

We don’t think of the total gameplay time that will be required. Instead, we try to calculate how many hours per day or per week that something will require, and then base our designs on that figure.

The roulette, the weekly caps, the timed nodes, they are all the results of this design process. It tries to "train" the players into a routine and that is what the MMO genre in the end is all about, and that's why MMOs will never create better content than offline games. The aim of all of the designs in FFXIV is to fill your playtime with tasks.

I've always disliked these caps. If someone has the time to play 20 hours a day, let them.

That excerpt from the interview you pointed out is slightly out of context and you're pointing out game elements that don't relate to that context.

Here's a bit more of that excerpt:

Yoshida：Ultima Online technically went on indefinitely. The game was developed by Richard Garriott（※21）, who basically gave players a bare-bones set of rules and a place to play the game. You started with a choice of 64 skills, and the rest was up to you. There was no clear objective or goal; you could literally sink an endless number of hours into that game. EverQuest came after that, and due to its monthly payment structure（※22）, all the time requirements for various quests and objectives had to be calculated beforehand. Once World of Warcraft（※23） came out, the though process became：“How many hours will I play today?” Developers had to consider that casual gamers could most likely only afford to play 1 or 2 hours per day. This applies to our development process as well. We don’t think of the total gameplay time that will be required. Instead, we try to calculate how many hours per day or per week that something will require, and then base our designs on that figure.

Yoshida makes no secret that he wants to get casual players into this game. But it's not just him. It's the general sense in the industry that a very large chunk of the current generation of the gaming public fits the demographic of people who can't (or won't) play games for too long in one sitting.

That's why mmo have shifted away from 5+hour raiding or having a leveling curve that takes years to hit cap or 20min wait on boat rides just to get to travel to another zone. Also things like duty/party/dungeon finders instead of camping in a specific area and wait for people interested to show up, quick travel options like teleports and even solo-oriented gameplay alternatives because having your game progress completely stopped if you can't find people to party with is a problem for people with only 2 hours to play.

(Played old EQ and believe me, having the possibility of doing nothing but waiting for a team or get into a camp waiting list and end up not getting in before logging back out happened way too much for my taste back then...sorry old gripe)

Supply and demand.

There's a big demand for abbreviated gaming experiences where you can feel you achieved something in about an hour when back in old Everquest days, it might take you that long just to travel and get your corpse back after death.

You're comparing the wrong things in reference to that excerpt when you mention weekly caps and dailies and such since it has nothing to do with that. The 1-2 hours a day description has more to do with being able to "finish" a dungeon run in 30minutes instead of 3 hours and other such design considerations.

The thought process for things like weekly/daily caps is BECAUSE of the people you described of having 20 hours a day, not the people who can only play 1-2 hours a day.

Content development takes months to release and it's a problem when people "finish" all of that in 2 weeks and have nothing to do for the next 10 weeks in a quarterly content publishing cycle.

The alternative to weekly caps is to substantially ramp up the grind so that even if you play 20 hours a day, it would still take you 3 months to finish everything before the next round of content is pushed out.

You can try sandbox-like player-made content like dungeon creators and such but i've seen those end up being farm generators or just generic throwaways once the novelty wears off.

There are good player-made content but the percentage of players who want to create is small compared to people who want to just use pre-made content. That's part of why you don't see big sales numbers from sandbox mmo like you would from triple-a themeparks (another reason why there's so many themeparks). Too many people want to jump in and play exciting content instead of spending hours trying to figure out what to do (create).

For themeparks specifically, the ideal alternative is to be able to crank out content on a weekly basis but that isn't that great an option because most likely, the content being released in that schedule are low-hanging fruit that are probably akin to copy/paste content. Other games try to have a hastened churn rate for content but they can't sustain it...either the quality goes down or they eventually hit delays.

[KisaiTenshi]

That's why mmo have shifted away from 5+hour raiding or having a leveling curve that takes years to hit cap or 20min wait on boat rides just to get to travel to another zone. Also things like duty/party/dungeon finders instead of camping in a specific area and wait for people interested to show up, quick travel options like teleports and even solo-oriented gameplay alternatives because having your game progress completely stopped if you can't find people to party with is a problem for people with only 2 hours to play.

(Played old EQ and believe me, having the possibility of doing nothing but waiting for a team or get into a camp waiting list and end up not getting in before logging back out happened way too much for my taste back then...sorry old gripe)

Believe me, there was some fun in "taking forever" to get back to something, because that left your corpse lootable, so you needed to get back ASAP or abandon it. Largely though the entire "wait around for something to do" is awful, and it's something that "business interests" don't care about. Businesses are more than happy to let players login, do 1-2 hours worth of play and logout, because it costs them less money. However RMT completely takes advantage of this. So the less "Active players" on simultaneously can cause instances where 50% of the active players sit around one zone, and all the remaining zones are filled up with RMT bots because nobody is actually watching. I can't tell you how often I've seen this outside of FFXIV.

"New feature" is announced, Bots immediately occupy all capacity for doing it (ugh the "public farms" in Mabinogi were completely free money to RMT because of this) and thus players then demand it to be nerfed or made "harder" thus destroying any incentive to actually do it.

You're comparing the wrong things in reference to that excerpt when you mention weekly caps and dailies and such since it has nothing to do with that. The 1-2 hours a day description has more to do with being able to "finish" a dungeon run in 30minutes instead of 3 hours and other such design considerations.

I'd rather have a "3-5 hour" dungeon experience broken up where the "boss rooms" are broken up like Alexander/Coil is, but 2-3 hours of it is actually "Solving" the dungeon (Wizardy Online did this) the first time as a form of progression. Think "The sunken temple of Qarn" but you have to find segments of the map, unlock floors by completing 1-2 "boss" rooms (Wizardy had as many as 8 "boss" rooms on a floor, and you weren't solo'ing any of it when it was new content.) This allows you to either form a party and solve it quickly, or play it solo and use traps/dungeon-mechanics to deal with the mobs.

But overall, the pace of existing dungeon "party" content is fairly good. I miss the "outdoor dungeon" aspect because it made the dungeon's seem larger and less empty seeing other players trying to solve it too. FFXIV V1.0's dungeons actually were seamless (Shposhae was an "outdoor" dungeon, and was replaced with Satasha in V2.0, both being level 15 content.)

[SQBoard]

Businesses are more than happy to let players login, do 1-2 hours worth of play and logout, because it costs them less money. However RMT completely takes advantage of this. So the less "Active players" on simultaneously can cause instances where 50% of the active players sit around one zone, and all the remaining zones are filled up with RMT bots because nobody is actually watching.

Not sure why this came up, RMT has nothing to do with design considerations for casual game elements.

I'd rather have a "3-5 hour" dungeon experience broken up where the "boss rooms" are broken up like Alexander/Coil is, but 2-3 hours of it is actually "Solving" the dungeon (Wizardy Online did this) the first time as a form of progression.

Yes, i'm sure you would rather have that 3-5 hour dungeon run. But as i mentioned, that's not reflective of the marketshare "today". Your example of Wizardry Online is probably a good example of this since it was shut down on 7/31/14.

Like it or not, the market changed and so followed the suppliers. Not saying there's absolutely zero demand for such old school hardcore gameplay. There's still games being developed with some of those elements in mind. But as it stands now, they'll most likely be niche in comparison but if their devs plan for that, they could be fine.

And who knows, the market changed before, it could change again. Or one of those indie projects could strike gold. Still curious how star citizen will do, it got a lot of funding but it seems to come from a small number of contributors on kickstarter. Will be interesting to see how that turns out at launch.