Final Fantasy XIV Hot Takes

[Shurrikhan]

I think the game invests too little time in getting side-content (outside of perhaps GS mini-games) done right (both in polish and, especially, base concept and its technical affordances). Most initial attempts are painfully barebone, as if attempting to recoup player hours played per dev hour spent even in that first go-around. Even after feedback has come in, there is minimal improvement between iterations, largely because the initial design was so unambitious.

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Hotter still:

A central side-content form that ties the rest together would actually be good for a given expansion; it just has to be done well.

For instance, imagine if instead of just another Diadem-rehash, an utterly disjointed alliance raid, and another 2 years of just the same old Expert Roulette spam and isolated tiers, we had actually gone off to revitalize the Light Waste, using the connections between Stasis (Light) magic and Echo/timespace travel to join those elements together. For instance, rather than the Light Waste being a small vista from which to access Eden cutscenes, we could actually go out to explore, using the evolving Eden to echo the pre-apocalyptic world as to rediscover and (through defeating monsters and absorbing their aether), resituate, and repopulate it. NieR, in that context, could actually make sense, and open-world and instanced content could actually share an interesting, synergetic connection.