4.2 Updates from Q&A with Yoshida

[Paladinleeds]

Hence you are limited

While I can agree it is an owner's problem with a cheap PC/laptop (though by the way, most all-in-one desktop PCs, which seem to be gaining ground, which are still technically PCs as are laptops, are soldered in components), and you can upgrade to it, are most people going to upgrade over it? Doubtful. It's why it still provides some limitations by its very means of market forces. Now, SE can quite easily say to PS4 users and PCs with lower specs "We don't want your custom anymore until you get a beefy PC" (see FFXIV 1.0, from what I read, it had problems running out the wazoo). Business-wise, it causes limitations because you have to weigh up do you want to cut those people out of the loop, or try and work around their PCs. It's a limitation, albeit a more indirect limitation.

[Tridus]

And Steps of Faith.

The problem with Steps of Faith was that people would get it and instaquit, which made it hard to get groups to complete, which turned into a MSQ block. They don't like MSQ blocks. Despite the complaints, Shinryu normal didn't get nerfed because people *didn't* abandon it en masse and, although a challenge for a lot of people, it didn't turn into a MSQ brick wall.

DF balancing is always tricky because the tipping point between "this is faceroll for organized people" and "groups of randoms will not have the coordination to do this at all" is pretty thin and somewhat blurry. So if it's content they expect random DF formed groups to be able to clear, there are limits on what they can do that don't exist in Savage and especially in Ultimate.

Added to that, lots of "casual" players are playing for the story and such. Those folks pay and don't complain on the forum a whole lot, but they want the whole story. That's why you don't have story gated behind high end duties anymore: those people would be unable to do it and would likely quit in response, which means lost revenue, which is bad for the budget, which is bad for everyone. Hence the model of all story content being in normal modes, and Ex/Savage/Ultimate being for players that want a greater challenge.

Is it perfect? Not at all. Expert Roulette is a freaking joke right now and it's become its own problem due to being so easy that it's not preparing anyone for what comes later. But I think the overall design methodology is sound given the constraint that the market places on them.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

Well not only that but SE/Yoshida himself has clearly stated that they don't intend to make "daily" content tougher. Reasons being that for the players that have less time than others to play (this actually includes myself as of lately), they don't wish to impede them any more than necessary.

Reasonable, and I can't argue with that, as I understand it's a business decision as well as a QoL one. But we can't deny that the refusal to raise the bar (or rather the odd occasion that it is raised causing an uproar) is making for a rather, um, spongy community, no? Challenge is one thing, and there are times I kinda wanna take it easy too. But removing every pebble from the path to make sure no one stumbles really does more harm than good in the long run. The players I looked up to while a lowbie are all gone now, all bored with the way things turned. Don't even get me started on PVP. . .

[Tridus]

as a CPU, the Cell is superior. the GPU and memory is what held the PS3 back in modern applications.

There are still some ps3 games that look better than modern titles.

Again... no, it's not. On paper it's a great CPU. But it's design makes it very hard to actually bring all that power to bear. Getting all six SPEs in use at once was a really challenge in games when each one only has 256KB of RAM to work with and many game tasks don't parallelize well. That's why it did so well in HPC environments that can be paralleized extremely effeciently. (If a SPE had to go to main memory frequently it needed the main CPU to do that, which killed performance.) The Air Force loved PS3s because they could do a lot of heavy lifting with commodity parts, but the Air Force wasn't using a cluster of them to try and run a game.

Sony used to say in the early days "nobody has unlocked the full power of the PS3 yet!" as if that was a good thing. It was because the workloads didn't lend themselves to it, whereas PC and Xbox 360 CPUs could be slower by GFLOPS measurements but actually run games faster because they could keep more hardware active more often and all their CPUs could access main memory without needing to wait on another one.

That's one of several reasons why the PS4 looks a lot like a PC internally. Typical game workloads need faster single thread performance over being able to do a zillion parallel operations. That's also why Intel CPUs beat AMD CPUs at games despite how great Ryzen and Threadripper are at other tasks: FFXIV and stuff like Civ VI don't benefit from having 8 cores because they don't have enough parallel workload. They benefit tremendously from a few faster ones.

As for how something looks, that's largely down to artistic direction. A good art director can make a little look like a lot. But you couldn't make 4k HDR Horizon Zero Dawn on the PS3's CPU. You simply don't have the horses to do it.

[Moomba33]

The problem with Pharos was it was harder than the other dungeons added at the same time (Copperbell Hard Mode and Haukke Manor Hard Mode). So people would instantly leave it or not unlock it at all since they could get the same rewards with less effort (SE changed it so unlocking the roulette required unlocking all the dungeons in it after this).
Upping the difficulty of dungeons a bit could work but it would have to be consistent so all the current dungeons took about the same amount of effort and time to complete.

I'm somewhat surprised that the next Savage will be about the same difficulty as the current one. I thought an earlier interview said they were planning on ramping up slowly throughout Stormblood?

[Azper]

I'll just say I enjoyed the difficulty level of Deltascape and am happy to hear Sigmascape will be of a similar challenge.

[Ghastly]

It's funny how bad information is passed around by the "ps4 limitations" people when there are people running 32 bit computers and computers from 2010 and laptops. Yet ps4 is the limitation right?
Take a look in the mirror people (btw I play on pc). Upgrading isn't easy and some computers you just can't upgrade. A video card better than ps4's is around close to $300 and then when you consider a computer from 2010 maybe needs a better cpu then that's probably another $300. Yeah ps4 isn't the problem, let's first wait until people stop using 32bit computers (as Yoshida said) before we start blaming consoles.

[Claviusnex]

What's this about?

Probably people complaining about certain mounts like Alte Roite not having special music.

Might also be to allow us to select our BGM while riding as some players have requested.

[LalaRu]

Which is complete bullshit. There are PCs, especially the older ones, that are far behind PS4. And noone ever says anything about them keeping the game back.

Because we all know who owns an old PC must trash it and get one new. I'm today barely 30fps@720p and Rabanastre + anything underwater is now 15fps.

To me, today is already "get a new pc or goodbye new content" doomsday.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Is it perfect? Not at all. Expert Roulette is a freaking joke right now and it's become its own problem due to being so easy that it's not preparing anyone for what comes later.

It's sad how the most efficient way to clear all the bosses in each Expert dungeon is to ignore everything they do.

- Pony pulls you into the puddles? Eh, does nothing.
- Boss summons bomb minions. Ignore them
- Yojimo tosses coins around the area. Do it only to speed up the fight as failing the mechanic doesn't even do half your HP

The only boss worthy of notice is the second one in Temple of the Fist.