Future direction of FFXIV

[Jeeqbit]

Yeah you're giving them waaay too much credit. There was a recent Famitsu interview with Yoshi-P, Ishikawa, and Oda and the translation is on reddit. Ishikawa rewrote the Endwalker ending in late 2019 during the middle of Shadowbringers, "the team didn’t really think about how the story would continue long term" back in Stormblood, and the backstory of the Ascians was only planned in the leadup to ShB. This particular snippet from the interview blows my mind:

Frankly I'm amazed they managed to even finish the damn story, but they did and it came across feeling pretty half-assed to have "the Sound from within the earth" turn into a sentient version of Twitter deciding that humanity is shit and deserves to die.

Whether they only decided to do it later on or not, the amount of accuracy in that 3.2 cutscene shows a vague outline was there all along that was eventually followed. Heavensward even began the idea that Minfilia had gone to the First. Whether or not it was always outlined in storyboard form, they decided to follow the outline that had been created in their previous cutscenes.

[KageTokage]

XIV in general likes leaving a lot of plot threads so it can pick them up later if they feel like it, and Yoshi explicitly mentioning that they're willing to just drop some of those entirely was honestly really discouraging when it comes to making speculation about future content and story direction, as it feels like now it's only worth thinking about things that either the narrative or writers/directors themselves are specifically trying to draw attention to.

[IdowhatIwant]

Yoshi-P actually denied this and said it was the plan all along since Emet-Selch was created as a character.

He can deny it, but it does not mean I believe him. This is coming from the man that has said that all fights have been designed for healers to only heal, but I have never seen a DPS check be met with a healer not dpsing.

I'm not sure what you mean by "good amount of complaints." A handful of vocal haters complained that things aren't going the way they want them to. Most of us are perfectly happy with the game's direction and have the utmost confidence in the current team's ability to continue performing at a high level.

There are plenty of people with complaints about the game. Most people are not perfectly happy with the games direction which has been fairly obvious since Stormblood with the amount of complaints on class design alone. Being ignorant does make issues disappear.

As someone who took various statistics courses on the way to getting their bachelor's degree, I'd say it's efficient. You don't need to sample 100% of any given population to obtain accurate results. You'd be surprised with how small of a sample you can get away with while still getting really close to the actual result. The fact that you personally weren't picked as part of their random sample doesn't invalidate their study.

As some one who has taken various statistics courses, and has a bachelors degree, I would say it is not efficient, perhaps you should study more or lie better but when you don't even have parameters around the data you are gathering then you are just gathering random data which becomes useless. But keep trying to sound educated, you have to fake it to make it.

[HyoMinPark]

I'm not sure what you mean by "good amount of complaints." A handful of vocal haters complained that things aren't going the way they want them to. Most of us are perfectly happy with the game's direction and have the utmost confidence in the current team's ability to continue performing at a high level.

Do you have any statistical data to back up that “most of us” are happy with the game? Are you assuming that “the silent majority” are satisfied? Silence does not equate to satisfaction. Just because someone doesn’t voice their complaints doesn’t mean that they are “perfectly happy”.

[Lyth]

Official forums are where highly invested players go to publish their manifesto of demands. If you don't do as I say, then I'll unsub. The catch being, of course, that you need to have logged on to your character with an active sub within the past 14 days as price of admission.

I think that the overall design direction for FFXIV is sound, and they've been very clear and open about their future goals. The biggest issue is going to be how they grow their talent base. It sounds like a good portion of their 'A team' has been moved to focus on FFXVI while functioning in a more advisory position to develop their junior staff. That's probably the dream, getting to leave your mark on the next mainline FF game, and its well deserved. How effectively they hit the balance on that is going to determine the future success of this game.

[DrWho2010]

XIV in general likes leaving a lot of plot threads so it can pick them up later if they feel like it, and Yoshi explicitly mentioning that they're willing to just drop some of those entirely was honestly really discouraging when it comes to making speculation about future content and story direction, as it feels like now it's only worth thinking about things that either the narrative or writers/directors themselves are specifically trying to draw attention to.

If you invest yourself into going down a rabbit hole of speculation and theory crafting about how YOU think the story will go, you're always going to be disappointed when the result is inevitably different from your personal head-canon. I find it's best to not even bother coming up with your own theories sometimes because more often than not, you will be wrong because hey, you're not in charge of this thing lol.

[Kolsykol]

I really dislike SE.
I love the current FFXIV dev team.

If Yoshida gets replaced I'd be very scared for the future of the game.

[KageTokage]

If you invest yourself into going down a rabbit hole of speculation and theory crafting about how YOU think the story will go, you're always going to be disappointed when the result is inevitably different from your personal head-canon. I find it's best to not even bother coming up with your own theories sometimes because more often than not, you will be wrong because hey, you're not in charge of this thing lol.

It's not being wrong that bothers me so much as the potential for things straight up just being red herrings.

A great example being Zenos' visions of the Final Days, which ended up being so insignificant they were willing to just dismiss it outright in the live letter Q&A with an extremely hand-waved explanation that very much made it feel like one of those mentioned points they thought they could go somewhere with initially but just gave up on it.

Yoshi basically going "Wait, people actually care about that?" in response to the mentions of things like the remaining Paragons and whatever the heck Azem was up to after first Final Days was rather disheartening. He might not be the writer, but he's ultimately the one who approves the final story drafts so if he's out of touch with what the playerbase is interested in, he can potentially influence it in ways that won't sit well with many, which I find all the more concerning when he also mentioned being surprised how deeply people think about the plot in general.

It leaves me curious about how the initial drafts for Endwalker posed by Ishikawa differ from the one he ended up approving.

[SturmChurro]

I really dislike SE.
I love the current FFXIV dev team.

If Yoshida gets replaced I'd be very scared for the future of the game.

Singleplayer elements being added feels like future proofing to put the game on some sort of 'maintenance mode' at some point in the future. I wouldn't be surprised if that would end up being the case. I've heard there is a lot of talent being moved off this game.

[Jandor]

Singleplayer elements being added feels like future proofing to put the game on some sort of 'maintenance mode' at some point in the future. I wouldn't be surprised if that would end up being the case. I've heard there is a lot of talent being moved off this game.

It does make a lot of sense to future proof an MMO like FFXIV though, especially as moving from beginning to end-game is such a long and linear process.

You at least want your 50 plus hour main story to be something players can progress through at a steady pace without 20 to 30 minute queues constantly bogging it down.