I liked Eureka

[BillyKaplan]

I haven't seen any statements from SE that they were mad at players for using Anemos "wrong" to indicate that they had any reason to want revenge.

They're never going to admit that sort of thing explicitly, obviously. But it's impossible to look at Pagos and not wonder if it was in response to Anemos. Because they could've easily donet this in Anemos from the start, and could've stayed with it in Pyros, too. But they took away what made Anemos work for people, Pagos flopped, and people didn't bother with Eureka again until Pagos was nerfed and Pyros offered something different. I don't need too big a tinfoil hat to see what's going on here.

So rather than continue making *more* braindead easy content for the zerg train

So they made easy, braindead content for full parties instead. You'll forgive me for not thinking this is an improvement. I joined an anubys party yesterday and it wasn't the most engaging, rewarding content I've ever ran.

from my perspective they stuck it out despite the negative feedback and made something that works for an underserved audience.

Sticking to your guns when hefty portions of your playerbase hate it isn't admirable. It's a bad business decision. Especially for something that wasn't meant to be niche content but one of the expansion's selling points.

[Adrestia]

Oh yeah, it’s definitely possible and I certainly wouldn’t put it past them. I just think from our point of view, “try to force small group content, fail, throw a fit, anger your players beyond your tolerance level, and then give up and go back to the train” looks exactly the same as “try to force small group content, fail, try a lot harder, anger your players beyond your tolerance level, and then give up and go back to the train.”

So I don’t feel confident their motivation was malice, even though it’s possible. I saw it more as determination (or hubris, depending on how you feel about whether their plan for Eureka was a good plan in the first place).

[Gralna]

Pagos wasn't made the way it was to spite players, it was already planned to be the way it was before Anemos even hit.

By time devs started getting feedback on Anemos, Pagos was already mostly finished and ready to go. In a recent interview Yoshi said they thought about putting some feedback into Pagos, but it would of required so many changes that it would of possibly delayed Pyros coming out. So they launched it as is with plans to change it down the road, and put majority of the player feedback into Pyros which was initially intended to be more similar to Pagos.

Q: We heard from the last interview with Mr. Yoshida that Pagos was developed without the feedbacks from Anemos.
Y: Yes; Pagos was already close to complete by the time we announced Anemos…


Q: So what feedbacks from Anemos were reflected in Pyros’ direction in development?
N: Probably the most was the overdone recreation of the classic MMO experience, even including the parts that made harsh. Some extremes to the point we thought, “will this be okay?”

Q: Compared to Anemos, it felt more close to “explore and pick a good hunt spot” just like classic MMO.
N: Absolutely. We kept that in mind throughout. The landscape was heavily inspired from Urugaran Mountains from FFXI and the size in comparison to Anemos was huge. While some players including myself enjoyed that, I must apologize right now that many players were greatly stressed about that. I’m sorry for not fulfilling many players’ feedbacks from Anemos.

Y: As Mr. Nakagawa said, there were far more adventurers delved into Anemos than expected. We initially expected the Eureka playerbase to be mostly limited to people who are comfortable with the attribute of repetition or MMO players who are active communications. Pagos was basically the content that aimed this narrow “elite” player-base to go deeper. It was our fault to not expect that there would be much more casual players along as well.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...6GzIzadxA/edit

[BillyKaplan]

Hubris we can all agree on. Why they thought it would work when people actively shyed away from it in Anemos is beyond me, but them's the facts.

[Elladie]

I loved all of Eureka, even Pagos. It's pretty much all I've been doing since it came out, apart from the MSQ. Like other people have mentioned, I've enjoyed the sense of an actual community for once and people working together. I've also loved the XI nostalgia - one of my biggest thrills since I started playing this game was getting the scorpion harness drop. I laughed at myself for squealing so loud when I got it, but that delight was still real. I agree there are things that need work - level sync definitely so you can help friends and FC members who have fallen behind - but I really hope to see more of this kind of content in 5.0

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

I endured Anemos and after that experience I had no intention of entering the rest of Eureka. It's just not content meant for me...

And that would have been fine if the relic and multiple patches worth of story had not been gated behind it.

Eureka is not like Diadem where I could simply ignore it without missing out on anything significant and that was almost certainly the intent. To lure people in with the carrot of the relic and patches worth of story that I will ultimately only get to experience via youtube videos because of how awful I felt Eureka was and refuse to subject myself to any further than I already did.

It's like SE wanted to get FFXI elements into FFXIV but wanted to ensure the content wouldn't be rejected so they looked at Diadem and decided the problem with it was that it wasn't rewarding enough to entice players in and figured that putting the relic there would do the trick. For some people it was enough to get them in the door, but not me. I have a limit to what I will suffer through to get things I want. Anemos was that limit for me. I won't give Pagos or the other Eureka zones a second thought.

Eureka isn't just a grind. It's a grind you can't do at your convenience because you're beholden to the groups available. It's a grind that requires not just grinding the stages of the relic but through an entirely separate leveling system that is made complicated by the element system/hidden spawn conditions and made punitive if you're solo or your group has a slower kill speed. It's a grind that syncs your ilvl so you can never overpower it no matter how good your gear is. It's a grind that goes out of its way to make every little thing inconvenient and relies on the relic carrot to make you suck it up and "enjoy it" to get your relic weapon done. Well this bunny decided that this particular carrot isn't worth hopping into a meat grinder to get. Pagos was dead on arrival to me and now Pyros is as well. Eureka might as well not exist because it is not "content" I want anything to do with.

Honestly, if not for the relic I could have just written Eureka off as content that was not designed for me and, aside from some annoyance at how much dev resources were invested in it (and continue to be invested in it), I would probably not have complained much. I mean I still wrote off Eureka as "content not designed for me", but the relic being locked behind it is a real sticking point for me. I was looking forward to SB's relic... until the first time I set foot in Anemos. And while I managed to get my relic out of Anemos, it was far too painful for me to even consider doing any further Eureka stuff. I made that decision even before Pagos came out. Eureka is not designed for me, and not all content has to be, but having the relic gated behind Eureka essentially "removed" content that should have been for me (a long term relic questline). Bottom line Eureka sucks, and it sucks more because ignoring Eureka also means not getting to do the relic questline.

If SE does Eureka-like content again in the next xpac I will likely stop playing FFXIV. I play games to have fun, not give myself paper cuts and then pour salt on them. Eureka constitutes such a significant portion of Stormblood's development, and available content, that repeating this horror of a design philosophy would basically turn FFXIV into a game I won't want to play anymore. Making content isn't enough. You have to make content I WANT to do that I feel is WORTH doing. Eureka is neither of those things.

[Reynhart]

But it's impossible to look at Pagos and not wonder if it was in response to Anemos.

It's very easy to do that, since Pagos was already completed when Anemos was released (They stated that numerous times). So, there was no Anemos feedback (good or bad) taken to tweak Pagos.

[BillyKaplan]

It's very easy to do that, since Pagos was already completed when Anemos was released (They stated that numerous times). So, there was no Anemos feedback (good or bad) taken to tweak Pagos.

See, the thing with that is, that it disheartens me even more. Because I look at Pagos even with the nerfs... and someone there thought it was good, legitimate content. I'm glad Pyros seems to be a lot more Anemos oriented, but ultimately hope we'll never see anything along these lines in the game ever again. If they're already investing this much in open world areas, I hope it's for the actual game's own open world.

[Theodric]

I like Anemos and Pyros. They're not perfect, though they accomplished what they set out to do without being too strenuous.

Pagos is the part I dislike most. The map is awkward to navigate, very bleak looking and there's too much RNG stacked on top of RNG.

[Alexandre_Noireau]

Eureka is a massive failure from the design perspective. Boring, bland, repetitive and irrelevant.
Honestly, is not much better than the diadem, to have so many resources dumped onto it, and as we arrive the end of stormblood, im left wondering: Where did the budget go?

Aside the clear stagnation of content, where everything is already a more than tried over and over formula, im wondering how is that, with so much resources and "playerbase loyalty" the best new content we got in this expansion was.... Nothing. Eureka is just a convoluted mess of a map that uses FATEs. Or the diadem, just more confusing, obtuse and grindy. Heaven on High is just Palace of the Dead.... Just in another direction, besides, proceduraly generated content is basically the cheapest (and laziest) way to create "content", it barely counts as content, let alone new. Raids... Yeah, basically random reuse of the franchise with nothing new or innovative to them, save a few mechanics here and there and the storyline that for the most part has been just a terrible attempt to give any sense or reason to this cheap excuse of a fanservice anime filler episode in the form of raids (yeah, both omega and ivalice)... Trials? No... Dungeons... Got slimmed down again. Monster Hunts, checked. What was new? Basically all content this expansion has been a reskin of previous expansions content with even more unnecesary stuff on top just to fake a sense of "new" and "content".

I feel like there was a terrible mistake in resource allocation of this whole expansion, and if Shadowbringers doesn't come in with server issues at launch, it will just means that XIV has finally begun its downfall... And i blame on a large part, Eureka for it. Way too many resources dropped into such a terrible set of repeated content.
I would have taken those maps, and release a new overworld map each patch, full of more diverse challenges, quests, moving the main scenario forward with each patch, kinda what GW2 does. Content like eureka needs to never be repeated again, not a single yen must be ever spent again in such an atrocity.

Eureka is an emblem to this game stagnated design philosophy, a testament, that after 8 years of existence, FFXIV knows only 2 tricks: Overly convoluted game systems unnecesarily restrictive and FATEs. Is like absolutely nothing about Eureka is new, yet is siphoned so much of the devteam, is like, going crazy, kinda like giving flowerpots the same number of polygon and shader counts that player character...