New story writer for 7.0

[Cleretic]

They may be leaving it to fester for it to come back up later. A case of "Oh yeah, you know how you were busy with this? Well trouble started happening in Landis and Nagxia. We're gonna need your help."

Honestly, that could really work. It's basically a version of the approach they took for the Endwalker role quests: 'we left some unaddressed but largely niche, messy problems that don't really make for a good story in a combat-centric game in our process of constantly moving on to the next new cool part of the world, let's have the problem get violent and then circle back'.

[KageTokage]

I guess it is a bit soon for anything monumental to have happened in regards to the political situation in Ilsabard. We know Corvos was seized by the rebels after the Final Days drove out the Garlean populace and that the legions are staking their claims to provinces, but that's about the extent of it.

I feel like this "great change" that's going to kick off 7.x would be more likely force us into action somewhere closer to home then on another overseas continent, though. We really have gotten scarcely any development pertaining to the New World or Meracydia in the MSQ proper so I have a hard time imagining they'd be shoving us off to those places after only a single patch's worth of build-up.

[thegreatonemal]

I guess it is a bit soon for anything monumental to have happened in regards to the political situation in Ilsabard. We know Corvos was seized by the rebels after the Final Days drove out the Garlean populace and that the legions are staking their claims to provinces, but that's about the extent of it.

I feel like this "great change" that's going to kick off 7.x would be more likely force us into action somewhere closer to home then on another overseas continent, though. We really have gotten scarcely any development pertaining to the New World or Meracydia in the MSQ proper so I have a hard time imagining they'd be shoving us off to those places after only a single patch's worth of build-up.

Where did you see that the missing legions are laying claim to regions? The only thing we heard for sure is that all former Garlean regions are in open revolt with fighting being most intense in Corvos. There's not much to say in my opinion, those regions will free themselves or be freed off screen if we ever do go to these places it will be after they are free and hopefully dealing with problems or issues that don't have anything to do with the Garleans other than "We let some Garleans live here instead of kicking them back up north."

[MonsutaMan]

Blue Mage is what it is because of player expectations for spell hunting.

Nah, XI has spell hunting, and BLU is perhaps the most balanced job in that game.....while being a full time participant in group content.

Yoshi and his team, no disrespect intended....... with all due respect, are terrible with job design. We are a decade in folks....XIV is by no means a new mmo.

[RyuDragnier]

Nah, XI has spell hunting, and BLU is perhaps the most balanced job in that game.....while being a full time participant in group content.

Yoshi and his team, no disrespect intended....... with all due respect, are terrible with job design. We are a decade in folks....XIV is by no means a new mmo.

The difference between FFXI and FFXIV is that FFXIV shoehorns all jobs to fit into specific rules that must be followed. Rules that BLU cannot follow without completely destroying BLU's identity. FFXI runs by a different set of rules, which BLU can shine in simply because every job in that game can be unique and break the game in some manner or another. You can't really compare the two because FF14 keeps any potential ability that can be OP on a leash, which means BLU would have been impossible to implement as it normally is if not for the Limited Job aspect.

[MikkoAkure]

Nah, XI has spell hunting, and BLU is perhaps the most balanced job in that game.....while being a full time participant in group content.

Yoshi and his team, no disrespect intended....... with all due respect, are terrible with job design. We are a decade in folks....XIV is by no means a new mmo.

As I said in the rest of the quote that you cut off, FFXIV jobs are more defined than FFXI ones and spell hunting won't work in the current job environment. From an old interview with Yoshi-P on BLU:

With Blue Mage, for example, we run in to the issue where learning monster actions is the main pillar of the job, but we can potentially see a huge disparity in power between Blue Mages depending on the blue magic they have learned—even if their job level is the same. In other words, too large of a disparity in the number of blue magic abilities learned would create issues if Blue Mages were able to queue normally for duties.

With spell hunting, you get into a scenario like marauders being in high level content, people joining your roulette or queueing for a raid while missing spells that could limit their potential compared to other DPS. How would that be balanced in FFXIV? Would you need to balance the job based on a BLU that has all of its spells? Then there's the fact that there would always be a meta on which spells to take and everything else would be weaker so it would be an illusion of freedom anyway and you would need to grind to be considered equal to a RDM who only needs to level up to be on par with everyone else.

I would have personally preferred a BLU that didn't spell hunt and got a limited spell list through leveling up, but at this point they're not going to change it and I have friends who are SUPER into how BLU is right now and have the Marbol mount and everything. There was a different interview where they said that they had to chose between keeping spell hunting and making it limited, or making it the same as all the other jobs but not having spell hunting and they knew some people were going to get upset no matter which route they took and they chose the former instead of the latter. I admit that despite wanting it, if we did get a BLU that had normal spell count and progression with no hunting I don't really see it as being different enough from other DoM jobs to make it worthy of its own existence. RDM already does the melee + spells thing.


Later on in the same interview, he says that the difference between FFXI and FFXIV is that XI was a first generation MMO based on a "time to win" model that requires a lot of your time. The industry, the amount of other media, and players themselves have changed since the first MMOs and it can be argued that a brand new game like FFXI can't exist and be a successful pay-to-play MMO today. To tie this all back into the original topic, Yoshi-P made specific decisions when he took over in 1.0, and they're in the DNA of the game now. Full freedom is exchanged for ease of leveling and being able to immediately jump into content or travel across the game world with a press of a button. The story from ARR onward is a theme park that relies more heavily on nostalgia and "remember this?" moments more than other FFs do. He's not going away, has said multiple times he's not going away, and unless the game tanks again, I don't see SE making him go away.

As much as people want to spit on Endwalker, it was still a commercial and critical success and is still carrying SE so they're not going to fire Yoshi-P any time soon.

[KageTokage]

Where did you see that the missing legions are laying claim to regions? The only thing we heard for sure is that all former Garlean regions are in open revolt with fighting being most intense in Corvos. There's not much to say in my opinion, those regions will free themselves or be freed off screen if we ever do go to these places it will be after they are free and hopefully dealing with problems or issues that don't have anything to do with the Garleans other than "We let some Garleans live here instead of kicking them back up north."

The latest Tales from the Shadows mentioned that there were rumors of the occupied provinces pushing for independence while simultaneously not making any moves towards reviving the empire, which suggests they are still under the jurisdiction of the Garlean legions.

It feels unlikely any of those regions are going to just free themselves considering what it took to get Werlyt and Corvos out of Garlean hands, though that may not even be necessary at this point. I could totally see them just deciding that maybe it's better to not govern in an oppressive manner that promotes uprisings and attracts the ire of the Eorzean alliance and the free provinces they're allied with now that the legions stand totally divided.

[Cleretic]

The difference between FFXI and FFXIV is that FFXIV shoehorns all jobs to fit into specific rules that must be followed. Rules that BLU cannot follow without completely destroying BLU's identity. FFXI runs by a different set of rules, which BLU can shine in simply because every job in that game can be unique and break the game in some manner or another. You can't really compare the two because FF14 keeps any potential ability that can be OP on a leash, which means BLU would have been impossible to implement as it normally is if not for the Limited Job aspect.

Not only that, but remember the potential low end as well as the high end. When you go into a particular duty in FFXIV, you can assume that the other three/seven/thirty-one people also in there with you have a baseline level of job functionality (with, granted, no way to account for player competency). You can assume that any tank you're on a team with has tank stance, an AoE, a provoke, an interrupt; every healer has a single-target heal, a multi-target heal, depending on the level probably a raise and a number of oGCD heals to use whenever anyone gets low. The same is true of DPS, with variously shifting forms of their staples.

But you know what you can assume that any Blue Mage you walk past has at max level, as a standard, baseline level?

Water Cannon. That's it. And if you get lumped into a dungeon with a Blue Mage who thinks they're a healer and has nothing but Water Cannon... well, you ain't gonna finish that dungeon, are you?

[SentioftheHoukai]

And for every person who says this, there's 10 people pointing out that they love EW, are extremely proud of it, and are entirely pleased with the current direction of the game. You might not feel that way, by acting like some almighty arbiter of truth when you're giving a personal opinion just comes off as very immature. Personally, I hope Yoshi-P continues his involvement as he's been doing. There's a reason EW has the highest playerbase, highest late-patch retention, and is usually ranked among the Top-2 expansions (along with ShB).

I struggle to see what precisely you believe yourself to be accomplishing with this stagnated, near constant party line. Maybe I'm an immature overlord arbiter of truth, maybe I'm not. But it doesn't matter. I disagree with you, you disagree with me and frankly I'm not gonna waste the time and energy arguing that nonsensical point with you. I come here to say what I came to say and leave, not to convince or be convinced by others whose authoritarian behaviour really doesn't reflect much better on them than what they perceive mine to.

Do you have any other snarky responses than one single image, or is your entire discourse stuck in early 90s teenage edginess?

I'll get a new image when he gets a new line. This one still fits too well.

When the other person lacks creativity so that they constantly regurgitate the same party line, they aren't WORTHY of any extra effort they themselves refuse to engage you with, Cleretic. As for your honored self, it may behoove you to reflect on if it truly makes you appear to be some righteous moral paragon if your only discourse can be quoted as '90s teenage edginess'. You can't convince anyone if you can be best described as '90s Hermione-style holier-than-thouness'. Such fails to convince anyone, humans don't respond well to it.

I'd certainly really enjoy that story, but I think we're in a weird place to approach it. The angle for post-6.0 seems to be that to do whole new stories that aren't tied too heavily to everything that came before (with the Thirteenth being a uniquely strong position for transitioning there, since it's technically an old loose end but one that's never really gotten explored), which is completely fair and probably smart, but it leaves certain parts of the story in weird states, and the Empire and their previously-occupied territories is probably the biggest. Yeah, they're in a position where an epilogue would probably be interesting, but it kinda can't be the main story if they want to do a clean break that people don't have to worry too much about pre-existing info for.

Which honestly I think is probably better, because there's not much that story could do that wasn't already done by 4.x and Bozja, especially if it's a 'main' story that therefore has to somehow incorporate a large amount of combat; Bozja was already retreading a lot of the same notes as Stormblood. Garlean stuff is best suited for the sideline right now, the sort of content that actually is completely fine with centering stuff that isn't combat or broad audience appeal. We've wrung 'Garlemald and occupied territories as a core for combat content' dry, but we haven't really tapped into it for crafting and gathering content, nor for 100% story-driven content like Hildibrand or The Paths We Walk; the closest we got to the latter was Omega's 6.1 questline, but that didn't dwell on them long.

See, that's the crux of the issue though. Square clearly can't decide if they actually WANT to have a 'clean break' from pre-existing plotlines and threats and the post-EW patches proves this. We very well COULD HAVE had new adventures, new plotlines, and perhaps most importantly new and differing and diversive cast members, but instead we're stuck with at least three Scions at any given time and are already right back to pre-existent, high-stakes threats in the Void. As it is, 'Newfound Adventure' lasted for like.... 3 quests of a single patch.

If Square wants us to believe we're getting any Newfound Adventure, they're failing at it SO HARD right now. It comes off as more of a convenient excuse, which is a really shitty precedent that Endwalker established as prevalent that it would benefit them to break from.

[Slatersev]

I struggle to see what precisely you believe yourself to be accomplishing with this stagnated, near constant party line. Maybe I'm an immature overlord arbiter of truth, maybe I'm not. But it doesn't matter. I disagree with you, you disagree with me and frankly I'm not gonna waste the time and energy arguing that nonsensical point with you. I come here to say what I came to say and leave, not to convince or be convinced by others whose authoritarian behaviour really doesn't reflect much better on them than what they perceive mine to.





When the other person lacks creativity so that they constantly regurgitate the same party line, they aren't WORTHY of any extra effort they themselves refuse to engage you with, Cleretic. As for your honored self, it may behoove you to reflect on if it truly makes you appear to be some righteous moral paragon if your only discourse can be quoted as '90s teenage edginess'. You can't convince anyone if you can be best described as '90s Hermione-style holier-than-thouness'. Such fails to convince anyone, humans don't respond well to it.



See, that's the crux of the issue though. Square clearly can't decide if they actually WANT to have a 'clean break' from pre-existing plotlines and threats and the post-EW patches proves this. We very well COULD HAVE had new adventures, new plotlines, and perhaps most importantly new and differing and diversive cast members, but instead we're stuck with at least three Scions at any given time and are already right back to pre-existent, high-stakes threats in the Void. As it is, 'Newfound Adventure' lasted for like.... 3 quests of a single patch.

If Square wants us to believe we're getting any Newfound Adventure, they're failing at it SO HARD right now. It comes off as more of a convenient excuse, which is a really shitty precedent that Endwalker established as prevalent that it would benefit them to break from.

Perhaps you struggle with counting, and if so apologies, but we spent all of 6.2 with exactly 2 Scions. One character introduced in base EW, and one new character who was only properly introduced in 6.2 itself. None of the other Scions showed up at all.