Future direction of FFXIV

[MikkoAkure]

The game is largely drive by a single personality in Yoshi-P who won't be around forever.

He's said very recently and many times before that he's in it for the long haul, this is his life's work, and he has at least 10 years worth of content planned, so he's sticking around.

He's also more involved in FFXIV than FFXVI, here he is both director and producer, there he's just producer.


Also, while there were ideas for another Garlean-focused expansion, they said that the plot flow didn't change much from what we got. EW Spoilers:

------ Yoshida goes on to explain that around the time of Stormblood, the team didn’t really think about how the story would continue long term. When making Shadowbringers, it was said that about 80% of the plot points have been revealed, and he thought after ShB it may be possible to keep things going from 1-2 more expansions. Looking at the fan response immediately after ShB, he felt that there should be one more expansion.

Interviewer: If the story had been 2 expansions and continued up to 7.0, what was the planned structure?

Ishikawa: We expected that there’d be 1 expansion about Garlemald. The idea was that Anima would be the boss, then the next expansion you’d fight against Hydaelyn, Zodiark and so on.

Oda: So the flow of the story itself didn’t change too much.

------ Oda explains that the devs seek to balance delivering on players’ expectations and also having unexpected developments. Players were already expecting to fight Hydaelyn and
Zodiark, so it was debated among the devs whether to deliver the fights straightforwardly, or have a surprise development where one of them would take over the other and fight you. In the end, the team decided to go for the straightforward route, and the last boss would be something unexpected.

Yoshida: At the residential no one thought Hydaelyn or Zodiark should be the last boss.

[SamsaraTrickstar]

For 7.0 to be a hit I strongly think that yoshi need to step down. This will let new ideas to see life. As of now we getting same content for 5 expansion. Each time cut Abit more. Same loop of dungeon (used to mere but at 1 each time it's trash) , raid, bigger raid pvp ,some form of new map full of fates. And some times a deap dungeon.
This loop need to see a real shake up and as long as yoshi is the lead this won't be a thing.
He deserves respect but it's the time to move on.

[SamsaraTrickstar]

as things goes on , i don't see the healer role staying in the game and might even be abandoned/deleted later down the line.(both by devs and players)
they don't seems to address any of their issues, make bad implementation of their skills and leave it there for an entire expansion, healers among themselves are poorly balance to the point that identical skills(identical in every aspect of design and potencies) have 1 job cast them faster and less mp while another have them cast slower and cost much more mp(looking at ast and whm) not to mention current design is 1 button press most of the time when no healing is required which is most of the time in casual content(going from level 1-90 having only 1 dps button and 1 dot through the entire leveling experience), while having said content be done without a healer role in a party easily right now and such issue was not even addressed by the devs with evidences showing relevant content can be done without them (including current harder content that should not have been cleared without healers).

and tanks are in not much more good place. out side of looks there no reason to take any thing but war. DARK is in such a strange place i be better if they just remake it as dps. but its not totally on the devs as its hard to make 4+ tanks and healers that are different but as good. i hope they remake the hole game to be more like GW2 where there no tanks and healers per say.

"When did you stop beating your wife?"

The writer for EW also wrote ShB.

so? the same peopel that did GoT season 1 did season 8. as some point they was ordered to finish it here and now make senesce or not. and it did not.

[Slatersev]

Maybe a little late on the subject of Garlemald. They never say an expansion focusing on it was cut. They said it was considered if they decided to do another expansion before EW.

Now that might seem like semantics, but its really not. Expansions take tons of time, effort and pre production. And cutting one already planned out would be a huge money loss. There is no indication a Garlemald Expansion ever existed outside of and idea for if they decided to do two expansions instead of one.

Which honestly should be pretty obvious, I mean Varis was dead by the end of base SHB. They pretty clearly weren't planning to have Garelmald go on for much longer as a functioning faction at that point

[Jeeqbit]

As always the content is good, great even but the spread is just miserable. It is simply unreasonable to try and manage an end game group with four bosses, no dungeons and no other form of content or growth.

There are also at least 2 extreme trials to farm 99 times and occasionally an ultimate.

It's intentional that it alternates between 1 raiding patch (6.0, 6.2, 6.4) and 1 casual player patch (6.1, 6.3, 6.5), because both types of players exist and Yoshi-P wants to cater to both.

The people who really enjoy this game enjoy both the raiding content and the casual content. When you only play a certain piece of content and not everything else, of course you will experience long gaps of time where you are bored unless you play other games.

How ever I will say they need to stop giving into to some player feed back particularly from NA. IMO a good example of this is the introduction of soloing the story from 1 - 90 through a newly implemented trust system. This takes a lot of dev time for something to appease what I would consider a smaller portion of the player base. I could understand if the game was designed differently or if this was to ensure new players could complete the story.

The Trust system is not being implemented to "appease a small portion of the player base". In fact, it is being implemented into ARR to convince millions of people who play the single player FF games to try out this game by telling them it is soloable.

[Raikai]

as things goes on , i don't see the healer role staying in the game and might even be abandoned/deleted later down the line.(both by devs and players)
they don't seems to address any of their issues, make bad implementation of their skills and leave it there for an entire expansion, healers among themselves are poorly balance to the point that identical skills(identical in every aspect of design and potencies) have 1 job cast them faster and less mp while another have them cast slower and cost much more mp(looking at ast and whm) not to mention current design is 1 button press most of the time when no healing is required which is most of the time in casual content(going from level 1-90 having only 1 dps button and 1 dot through the entire leveling experience), while having said content be done without a healer role in a party easily right now and such issue was not even addressed by the devs with evidences showing relevant content can be done without them (including current harder content that should not have been cleared without healers).

That's an interesting point... I wonder how that would fare into the game's systems. They would have to fundamentally change how the encounters happen while also giving reliable ways of sustain to every job out there, which seems in theory interesting. At least back in the day in GW2 I thought this concept was. This also would make non-dps related utility, like defensives, extremely more valuable.

But then, looking in retrospect, they would have to retroactively adjust all previous encounters to accomodate that and it seems to be a huge undertaking.

[Raikai]

Towards the OP, my biggest concern with the future is actually job design...

I feel that in 7.0 they might try to equalize the roster with a phys ranged and a magic ranged dpsers, but after that... I keep asking myself how many new jobs can be added without mechanically overlapping what we have already with redundant gameplay? That is an even bigger concern with tanks and healers, those are the most homogenized roles of all three of them. I remember being VERY excited for Sage's announcement as it seemed really unique, but in the end... in practice it's very similar to the other healers.

That is also a consequence of how cemented the combat mechanics and design are... Which makes me think it's part of how the game is programmed, and that I'd love to see that structure upgraded so future jobs (and changes to existing ones) could tread into more out-of-the-box spaces.

Thinking about examples... What if the combat engine finally permitted very responsive pets and we could see a Beastmaster tanking with a pet? Or an Apothecary healer that heals with a combo system? Combat code that made channeled actions good enough to be a job's main mechanic?

So yeah, I feel that many of the design constraints are due to the game's structure and I would love to see it improved to see what it could be done in the long run.

[SamsaraTrickstar]

Maybe a little late on the subject of Garlemald. They never say an expansion focusing on it was cut. They said it was considered if they decided to do another expansion before EW.

Now that might seem like semantics, but its really not. Expansions take tons of time, effort and pre production. And cutting one already planned out would be a huge money loss. There is no indication a Garlemald Expansion ever existed outside of and idea for if they decided to do two expansions instead of one.

Which honestly should be pretty obvious, I mean Varis was dead by the end of base SHB. They pretty clearly weren't planning to have Garelmald go on for much longer as a functioning faction at that point

and it made things lame. think for how long they was the main problem. then all we get for them is 1 map?

[KizuyaKatogami]

Maybe a little late on the subject of Garlemald. They never say an expansion focusing on it was cut. They said it was considered if they decided to do another expansion before EW.

Now that might seem like semantics, but its really not. Expansions take tons of time, effort and pre production. And cutting one already planned out would be a huge money loss. There is no indication a Garlemald Expansion ever existed outside of and idea for if they decided to do two expansions instead of one.

Which honestly should be pretty obvious, I mean Varis was dead by the end of base SHB. They pretty clearly weren't planning to have Garelmald go on for much longer as a functioning faction at that point

Tbf, they easily could’ve done a “oh yeah he’s dead….totally.” And then have him come back in some other form whether it be Anima or whatnot. it seems pretty obvious to me one was cut and it seems fairly last minute. Never forget the slideshow for ShB where on of the slides said we’d be taking the fight to garlemald and then…it just never happened lmao. People seem to think the devs plan everything in advance though and they’ve basically confirmed they don’t, and they do change things pretty last minute it seems. This is an excerpt from an interview done around 5.4,5.5 in regards to Endwalker and…it didn’t age well let’s just say that.

“We don’t like adlib in terms of like, ‘Oh, this character is going to go or this character is going to die.’ It’s not random, either. At the same time, yes, people might notice that those in the core cast may not have died over the course of the story,” he explains. Since Final Fantasy XIV constantly depicts wars, conflicts, and battles, he says it’s “unrealistic to not have any sort of sacrifices even on the ally side. So I mean, I don’t mean to scare you… this is not, by any means a threat of any sort, but don’t get too comfortable knowing that, ‘Oh, these characters are safe’ because you might be in for quite a shock.”

[Equitable_Remedy]

I see you say this a lot but this is pretty much invalidating imo, since people that post in those sites are mostly the more active fanbase of the game.

I say it a lot because it's both true and constantly misunderstood. It's invalidating to the extent that an argument is premised on a self-selecting minority being representative of the majority. It's a very common, understandable mistake, but it is a mistake.

Consider the following: you don't actually have any evidence that "people that post in those sites are mostly the more active fanbase of the game." You reason from being the most vocal to being the most active, but even then, what is the significance of being the most active? It's not really relevant to the discussion at hand.

If the question is as to the attitudes of the player base as a whole, taking a small, self-selecting minority (the most vocal players, the most active players, etc.) doesn't actually tell you much about what most players think. The self-selecting aspect of posters on forums/Reddit/Twitter is important precisely because you should expect their opinions to differ from most other players.

tl;dr Twitter isn't real life.