SE, no effort anywhere lately.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Yes I'm aware.

Just because he was assigned something potentially outside of his own will, doesn't mean I don't feel somewhat abandoned and confused.
Also, I doubt he'd run with a project if he wasn't at least somewhat happy to do it. You think XVI would be half as good as it looks if Yoshi hated the idea of working on it?

And even if he only did the media rounds, advertisement, and event touring with XVI - Considering how completely wiped out from XIV he seems to be sometimes, I can't imagine he has any valuable time for his MMO outside of critical engagements.

We're on an anime mmo game forum, everything we say is cringe. lol

All am saying is, its starting to feel like people see Yoshida and FFXIV as their mommy and daddy and he went to go have an affair with FFXVI.

Anyway again, your point for even bringing up FFXVI looked as if your blaming him working on another project is causing FFXIV to suffer. Have we as a community become this jaded?

[R041]

Anyway again, your point for even bringing up FFXVI looked as if your blaming him working on another project is causing FFXIV to suffer. Have we as a community become this jaded?

Yeah I do believe that - It's unfortunately a thing we think about. Especially when we do see Yoshi as both our mommy and our daddy, and we're stuck in a stale formula. I'm a scared child. lol

Yoshi has been built as the Daddy Firewall for all things good and bad, so when that Firewall of approvals isn't around, it's kinda obvious. Maybe Variant and Island Sanctuary wouldn't have been approved in their current state if he actually had time to test them out. Does he have time to even verify that things are 'fun'? Probably not.

Also, I don't think it was just Yoshi - Didn't we lose some other team members for the period of XVI? So it seems like we kinda lost a chunk of dev overall.
https://www.fanbyte.com/games/news/y...ongside-ffxiv/

So yes, knowing all of that, I do feel like we're put to the side. Don't you? It's not just Yoshi. It's Creative Business Unit III as a whole.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Yeah I do believe that - It's unfortunately a thing we think about. Especially when we do see Yoshi as both our mommy and our daddy, and we're stuck in a stale formula. I'm a scared child. lol

Yoshi has been built as the Daddy Firewall for all things good and bad, so when that Firewall of approvals isn't around, it's kinda obvious. Maybe Variant and Island Sanctuary wouldn't have been approved in their current state if he actually had time to test them out. Does he have time to even verify that things are 'fun'? Probably not.

Also, I don't think it was just Yoshi - Didn't we lose some other team members for the period of XVI? So it seems like we kinda lost a chunk of dev overall.
https://www.fanbyte.com/games/news/y...ongside-ffxiv/

So yes, knowing all of that, I do feel like we're put to the side. Don't you? It's not just Yoshi. It's Creative Business Unit III as a whole.

If you actually read through that interview, you will realize that him directing two big games didnt compromise one or the other. If anything they've been trying to bounce back after the lackluster content of Shadowbringers's entire expansion (with its only saving grace being its MSQ)

If we're going to be arguing over the shift of direction with FFXIV, then this really started way before FFXVI's production. You can clearly tell the signs of them doing so ever since the first expansion, Heavensward.

[Jojoya]

Maybe step back a bit before you need your blood pressure medication. lol

When everything except for Relic Weapons take at best a week to finish for a casual player, adding the relic on top of it and saying "Look, the content lasts longer than a week if you squint at just the right angle in just the right time of day" doesn't make the rest any better.

Considering combat itself is now dull, farming Relic is going to be just as dull. We're now missing the whole engaging part of the game, and adding more on top of the pile of content that never gets cycled into roulette doesn't make this at all enjoyable.

But WoW has the same problem. You could take all the content and have it done in a week if there was no timegating. It does have multiple difficulty levels to choose from for some content but players tend to beeline right into the difficulty level appropriate to their skill and ignore the rest.

After the week is done, it's you either want to repeat the content or you don't. WoW has tried to tie players by using borrowed power systems the last few expansions and that has backfired on them. The game stopped being a game and turned into an unpaid job in the eyes of many. Without those borrowed power systems, there really isn't much to keep players repeating the content more than a couple of weeks after release other than the player actually enjoying the content.

From looking at the responses I'm seeing in this thread, there are two problems at work for most of those who are unhappy. They have been playing the same game too long and need to be playing something different, or they're very unhappy with the changes made to job design over the years. The first is something that the player has to solve for themselves. The second is one that is worthy of conversation with the developers in charge of job design, and the start of the conversation should be why were the changes made? What feedback had they been getting back from the general player base that influenced those changes?

Disagree. They address bugs, balance jobs as far as dps, started creating ultimates to give raiders more to do, etc. Are they perfect? No. Do they take feedback and address it? Sure. There's evidence of that throughout the FFXIV 2.0+ project.

If I'm to be honest, I think the core of the problem is the demand for job balance. It's difficult to come up with engaging job designs when you also are also expected to make each of those jobs perform at roughly the same level when in the hands of equally skilled players.

A choice has to be made - do you want interesting RPG job design, or you do want competitive balanced job design? The first requires the player base to stop obsessing over individual job performance and welcome all jobs into their parties regardless of what is the best performing. The second requires the player base to accept that jobs are going to get "dumbed down".

[ZJyn]

All am saying is, its starting to feel like people see Yoshida and FFXIV as their mommy and daddy and he went to go have an affair with FFXVI.

Anyway again, your point for even bringing up FFXVI looked as if your blaming him working on another project is causing FFXIV to suffer. Have we as a community become this jaded?

To be honest, we can be constructive while still seeing this happening in front of us. I love the game. I love YoshiP's work. But the fact that XVI is having an impact on it seems pretty obvious at this point. Getting help from other teams isn't even uncommon in the industry during the final days of pushing out a product as big as it is.

The most obvious example actually happened recently. We normally get a live letter before the big midway patch. We didn't this time. What happened at the same time? Media blitz for XVI. It's all over youtube and the gaming news sites. They just didn't have the time for both.

Beyond that, though, there are examples of systems and features releasing that were a little halfbaked. The systems are still *good*. They're well designed. They have the hallmarks that we expect and hope for when pushing them out. There are just things that you'd expect them to have at release that they don't. Criterion without a good reward structure is a really good example of this. Island Sanctuary lacking certain obvious customization options is another.

They're also not as agile as they used to be when it comes to player feedback as they used to be.

Meanwhile... we're in the home stretch of an impending AAA release that carries a lot for the team's legacy beyond XIV. It's CBU3's second baby. Of course they're going to make sure it ships the right way. I understand that.

But I also see cracks starting to form outside of XVI, and it's a little worrying.

Right after the game releases, we have Fan Fest. Let's hope that it's a turning point, because Stormblood and Shadowbringers' patch content was sterling (outside of Nier's story). Endwalker... needs a little love, and that's clearly going elsewhere right now. They are only people after all. They can only push themselves so hard and spread themselves so thin.

My constructive counter to the back and forth

[R041]

If you actually read through that interview, you will realize that him directing two big games didnt compromise one or the other. If anything they've been trying to bounce back after the lackluster content of Shadowbringers's entire expansion (with its only saving grace being its MSQ)

If we're going to be arguing over the shift of direction with FFXIV, then this really started way before FFXVI's production. You can clearly tell the signs of them doing so ever since the first expansion, Heavensward.

Yes, I did read it. It didn't sound good. I don't believe it didn't have an impact - He said he TRIED to lessen the impact yet also says he pulled core members from XIV over to XVI, but of course he won't admit how impactful that was. So that means we're either missing a chunk of Dev in XIV, or they had to train new people. He was also worried that it would cause problems, and knowing SE - You believe that transition was perfect and nothing was impacted through XIV?

Pulling Dev and COVID both happening did have an impact, it's very obvious. You just can't have a studio working on 2 whole ass games with 0 impact. They can lessen the impact, but they can't prevent it entirely.


Edit:
Just imagine any normal job. Management tells you they're going to start up a new project and they need people from your team. Immediately, you know you're basically a skeleton crew already because that's just how corporations work.

Every week they pull 1 person from the team and you're forced to train a new guy. Even just training someone is strenuous and takes away from normal activity. How many did they need to train, how many did they transition? These things don't just level out in a week or even a month. Then on top of that, your Team Lead also leaves you but says they're managing both. You know he's focusing on making sure this new project is running smoothly, so you try your best not to bother them.

Also this is during COVID. So imagine how crazy that is. If you've started a new team during COVID you know it's been painful. New people don't catch on as quickly because it lacks the nuance of engaging daily activity. No easy way to just look over at what other people are doing, or know if that person is actually available to help you with something.

[Lium]

FFXIV nominated for Best Evolving Game at the 2023 BAFTAs! Grats Yoshi-P!

https://www.bafta.org/games/awards/2023-nominations

[Denhith]

If you actually read through that interview, you will realize that him directing two big games didnt compromise one or the other...

Its also worth noting that while Yoshi-P is the Director and Producer of FFXIV, he is NOT the Director of FFXVI--that responsibility lies with Hiroshi Takai. Yoshi-P is the Producer. Nothing more, nothing less.

[Denhith]

The first requires the player base to stop obsessing over individual job performance and welcome all jobs into their parties regardless of what is the best performing...

I would argue this scenario you're describing is blown completely out of proportion.

What I mean is...a very small percentage of the 14 player base engages with Savage and Ultimate content. And even smaller percentage will ONLY accept jobs based on the current "meta", etc.

And how many times has a certain small crowd of people cried that "job X is severely underperforming" only to find that job being more than capable in the world first race?

[TomsYoungerBro]

I would argue this scenario you're describing is blown completely out of proportion.

What I mean is...a very small percentage of the 14 player base engages with Savage and Ultimate content. And even smaller percentage will ONLY accept jobs based on the current "meta", etc.

And how many times has a certain small crowd of people cried that "job X is severely underperforming" only to find that job being more than capable in the world first race?

You do realize Machinist got quite a number of buffs because of the complaining and the buff cap "issue" on P3 caused the switch from dancer...right?