Quote Originally Posted by Lanadra View Post
Seems that you are one among few 'high end raiders' who gets why things like Ultimate are such an easy decision to either can or delay.. exactly because the time developing it is already hard to justify as it is.

Funny enough I'm.. well, not necessarily the opposite as I certainly don't play all games on easy, but I am someone who will never touch Savage and certainly not Ultimate.. and while I can see why it would appeal to some, like Starflake and indeed you as well, from my point of view it really is development resources wasted on extreme minority content that probably only about 1% of everyone will get to experience and even less than that get to complete it.

I think it's also why a lot of people tend to be quick to feel disdain when they see 'high end raiders' like the OP in particular have a go at content that the vast majority of this game's player base primarily plays.
I disagree on the resource argument, if only because the devs have outright said 90-95% of Ultimate is reused assets; TEA being the exception. Rather, I suspect it's a lack of manpower and desire. As I said in an earlier post. They give off the impression of simply disliking Ultimate. Even with infinite resources, developer time and the like, it still requires a persona that enjoys designing content that will intentionally frustrate and infuriate players. Take a company like FromSoftware. Their actual advertising slogan for Bloodborne was "You'll die, then you'll learn" or something to that effect. Likewise, they flat out refused to make an easy mode difficulty option for Sekiro despite a large demand for one given how immensely hard that game supposedly is. They clearly enjoy watching players attempt their games, struggle for however long it takes before succeeding. And they're satisficed with losing players who give up. Conversely, FFXIV's team seems far more content developing smaller scale things, or simply lifestyle activities.

None of this I say in a negative light. Both are perfectly fine design philosophies, considering they both work.

My only real complaint with FFXIV's approach is more along what Absurdity brought up. You don't necessarily need extremely difficult content to enjoy it. In fact, I prefer a mixture of everything since I don't always want to log in and throw myself at UCoB or TEA. I do, however, feeling far too much has been dumbed down—specifically job wise. It isn't exactly engaging to play healer when all we do is spam Glare, or that Dark Knight is practically a clone of Warrior. Bard had its whole identity siphoned onto Dancer and so forth. There's a balance I feel they could strike, and they just haven't.