New story writer for 7.0

[MikkoAkure]

My confidence in Yoshi has dropped significantly over time as this game has gone through numerous controversies starting with Blue Mage when it became clear that it was his interests he was putting first instead of stopping to think, "Wait, would this actually work for this playerbase or does it fly in the face of what we've delivered on in the past?" Then the limited races happened (which he had no intention of updating until other people proactively took on those tasks in spite of his instructions) and his recent attempt to get into storytelling helped spark a 700+ page thread criticizing the end of a 10 year arc.

If he wants to stay on, he isn't exactly giving me the impression that would be in the interest of people who want content and the sort of storytelling that falls outside his wants. And now with 6.25 set to give us a beast tribe that has us dancing on the Crater of Martyrs while Ivalice/Bozja was dropped in favor of Hildibrand relics, this game is in dire need of course correction by a firm, unwavering hand that holds fast to mature, fantasy-oriented storytelling. Not what we saw in Endwalker's 6.0-6.1 MSQ.

From the time Yoshi-P came in to take over FFXIV back in 1.0, he set it up to be a "Final Fantasy Theme Park" and began first introducing FF content (classic FF jobs with their more fantastical-looking armor) into what was otherwise a super medieval, realistic, and mature setting. ARR ended up doubling-down on that and it's in the DNA of the game now. He's gone on record multiple times to describe the game as his life's work and he's never leaving, despite other projects being added to his load like FFXVI. While there are some mature moments, the thematic direction of FFXIV has been very apparent since then and it's a bit late to complain about it now 10 years later.


Blue Mage is what it is because of player expectations for spell hunting. That mechanic works for a job in FFXI where the jobs didn't get spells automatically at level-up anyway, but doesn't work in FFXIV where things are more regimented. Otherwise people would get upset about BLUs joining their parties with wrong spell setups or even missing spells. So it got spun-off into its own content, which I don't agree with, but some people I know really enjoy it and at least they were doing something different. If everything in FFXIV had to be compared against "what we've delivered on in the past", then everything will just be even more samey than it is now with jobs becoming more homogenized and patch schedules that are extremely predictable in the type of content that will be delivered, with said content generally being what we've had before in other expansions with a new coat of paint on it.


As far as Ivalice/Bozja, Matsuno himself said that Bozja's storyline is already finished. There's nothing left for us to do there, the country has been liberated. Dalmasca could have been explored further with side-content in a new expansion but the Bozja content apparently had a negative reception among the Japanese playerbase and even to this day I think the way they did Castrum and Dalriada was stupid and I'm still waiting for them to change those. I don't see how Ivalice has anything to do with us doing Hildebrand relics though. SB and ShB relics had nothing at all to do with any relic storylines before them except "Gerolt is there", and the first Ivalice content was alliance raids, not relics.



Edit: Sidenote, I'm a little confused by your signature. Garlemald and Garlean-associated terminology are full of the Latin language, not Russian. The Hrothgar use Russian/Slavic. The word "glory" in your signature is even called out by the dev in this forum who posted the Hrothgar naming conventions: "Hrothgar forenames are similar to old Slavic names, though certain lexemes differ─most notably, the Hrothgar word for “glory” is “thgar” rather than “slav,” so the former proliferates where one might be used to seeing the latter in real-world names (e.g. “Vladithgar”)".