We Really Need To Talk About The State And Path Of FFXIV

[Kalise]

One of the Main Problems is SE themself.

In the end, no matter how much Money the Game makes, SE will not reinvest into the Game if they can use the Money to develop other Games.

Yeah, it's a particular decision that makes little sense.

Given that we have literal evidence how how incredibly profitable an MMO that is properly funded and worked on can be.

Literally, WoW before the Activision merge was one of the most popular games of all time and literally dominated the market for years. It wasn't until Activision started the "Less Work, More Profits" style of of development that it started dying.

SE seems to have just skipped that stage of becoming insanely successful and gone straight to the "Less Work, More Profits" development style.

Which just doesn't make much sense from even the viewpoint with basic understanding of economics. Yes, this style makes more short term profit which looks good now. But it stifles growth and makes profits uncertain because you don't have a large loyal playerbase that you can rely on to keep paying for expansions and subs. While investing into the game allows for growth and as such the best long term profits at the cost of not being immediately the best on your quarterly earnings reports.

But from my View, Eureka was not a good way to expand the Game. For some it might sound weird, but I think less but more high Quality Content would serve the Game much better, than taking something and strech it as far as possible.

Honestly, I think Eureka was a good idea, but misplaced. Like, the overall idea of having an overworld that meant something is great. Having cross-server open worlds is great. Having less reliance on AFK in a City while you queue into DF to actually do anything is a massive boon, given that style of gameplay is often touted as one of WoW's largest mistakes - When they killed the world and community by causing everything to be able using LFD tool to rush content.

I just don't think that it necessarily needed to be put into its own isolated content designed independently of the actual games overworld that continues to be dead content on release, only existing to let you run through it while you do your handful of MSQ's per zone and then going back to gather stuff for crafting.

The Devs are like a Part of the Problem. I don't hate Yoshida, but his Vision for the Game becomes more and more lackluster, by trying to mimik the Past and being Retro for the sake of being Retro.
I would not say, that he needs to leave, but he needs somebody being super honest with his Visions.
Somebody who is not feared to rip his Ideas apart, tell him, when something is not great or just to shallow as a full Concept.

True... The way that his concept of Limited Jobs got shredded by the community definitely suggests that there definitely needs to be some sort of person in play to stop and go "Sure, that's cool. But how is it fun?"

Especially when there are time and resource restrictions. I've no doubt "Limited Jobs" could be fun, provided they create a plethora of content for them to do and keep it updated. But given they already struggle to create the core content of the game to a quality standard without diverting time and resources to side attractions, it comes back down to "Sure, that's cool. But how is it fun?"

And the RE Devs did a good Job with the RE2 Remake from my View. But the first thing they dropped was the fixed Camera, because it was neccesary back then, but not like the Fans would want it back if the Devs can make something more modern and better.

Though, in this particular case, I'd argue that dropping the fixed camera because they can isn't necessarily the best decision. Since, the fixed camera in the early games actually provided more than just "This is literally all we're capable of doing". It added to the tension of the game by removing the control you had, which allowed you to be put in difficult and stressful situations that kept you on the edge of your seat.

Literally, you'd always clench when you had to move to a new screen because you had no idea what to expect on the other side, even if it was you moving back to a screen you've previously cleared, you could have an empty room or you could have like 15 zombies all up in your face that only react once you enter that screen.

So, in this sense going "Retro" with RE5/RE6 could have improved the game by creating that tension again (That, and you know... Not giving you like 5 guns with a billion ammo each on every level...)

Though, it's a similar argument that you're making. Retro mechanics for the sake of being retro and nostalgic doesn't fare well. Retro mechanics because they provide actually interesting gameplay opportunities are good.

And here I think, they should have invested time into Quality, not Quantity.
A MMO with 10 Classes that feel super unique and are all super fun to play is better, than 20 Classes and the half of them feel rushed.
You can clearly feel how some of the Jobs feel super lackluster and are just not fun to play.

Yeah, there's also class theme to consider.

Like, I really dislike how they removed a lot of the WAR skills that I liked in SB. Things like making Bloodbath into a mDPS Role Action and removing Mercy Stroke. While adding things that just muddy the feeling of a WAR such as making all tanks have similar defensive CD's (Many of which are just Role Actions with generic animations).

While alongside this messing with the theme of the class, it has had balance ramifications too, with a lot of PLD/DRK players complaining about how WAR now just has all the stuff that used to be unique to their class on top of their base kit.

Streamlined to a Point, that puts all the Mastery into theorycrafting of Stats, instead of Gameplay.
The MCH Mastery is mostly just about looking into Math Charts in a Document as soon as you are able to play the Basic Rotation.
But the mastery of a Class should happen in the Game not outside of it.

To be fair, this pretty much always happens though. Every MMO is about learning the basic rotation and then it's a simple spreadsheet to determine stat priorities and skill priorities.

Streamlining merely makes the basic rotation far easier to learn while making the low levels (Thus new player retention) garbage...

Which is something they need to address. They need to capitalize on their existing systems to frontload classes skills into the lower levels to make actually leveling up interesting. Then rely on their Trait system to upgrade these "Core" skills into their more interesting and powerful higher level versions.

Since, the game is already on the backfoot in terms of MMO leveling by the fact that it uses a base 2.5 second GCD. Most MMO's use 1.0-1.5s GCD's. This means that outside of oGCD skills, combat is SLOW, especially before you can actually gear and meld for SkS/SpS to improve it and before you get your full suite of oGCD's.

So they need to ensure that from level 1 that classes are entertaining to play. To make it interesting to level up and to also make it feel less frustrating when you jump into a roulette and get Sastasha and you have like 2 skills to use, so you don't even have a full combo let alone interesting combat.

Which is a super weird way to develop a Story from my View.
They needed to rush Stormblood to write Shadowbringer, to finish the whole Main Story with 5.0, to again rush it, because they need to write 6.0, when 5.0 hits the Shelf.

True, I think one of WoW's (Many) failings was that they got into a situation where they just relied on fixed Expansion releases.

While I think one of the major successes from Vanilla and TBC was that they weren't subject to this "We need to release an expansion every X years!". Vanilla was constantly updated until they felt that it was a good time to expand and enter TBC, including being when they'd finished designing TBC so it was ready to go out.

WotLK might have also been a similar thing, if on a faster schedule. But then after? They kept coming out like clockwork. With the worst case being WoD > Legion. Where they literally just stopped working on WoD in the middle of the expansion and said they were just going to work on the eventual Legion release instead...

I feel that this could end up with a similar problem in FFXIV. Wherein they feel the need to release a new expansion every 2 years. So they have to design every expansion so the story starts and ends within this 2 year period while leaving room to set up for the next expansion.

As opposed to working on an expansion and its story until they reach a satisfactory and natural end in their plan and then start working on the next expansion.

Of course, this is further exacerbated by their reluctance to do any significant balance changes within an expansion and would rather just band-aid fix stuff until the 2 year wait is over for a rework in the newest expansion.

Like, so long as they don't leave it too late before starting the next expansion and start having to add a bunch of fluff filler content (See: That awful MSQ grind at the end of ARR...) they should be able to dynamically release expansions when it's ready to do so.

So that they don't run into time issues that forces them to rush stuff or cut out content. Like how we worked our way towards the liberation of Doma and had a bunch of story surrounding Yotsuyu and then afterwards we spend like 2 minutes and we had punched Zenos in the face and Ala Mhigo was free. Or how we had the interesting development of Alphinaud deciding to travel to Garlemald and the beginnings of an arc with Shadowhunter, then 5.0 was close so they had to scrap that.