SE, no effort anywhere lately.

[Striker44]

Good for you, but most of us don't have such a low standards, especially from a game that is most known for its story.

Ah, and now we get the (insert words here) who have grown up on VA games and think it's necessary for there to be a good story. News flash - some of the best games in existence that have been praised for their stories were made before VA was even a thing at all in video games. You don't need VA to have a quality story. Time to mature a little and join the real world.

[CStrife912]

Ah, and now we get the (insert words here) who have grown up on VA games and think it's necessary for there to be a good story. News flash - some of the best games in existence that have been praised for their stories were made before VA was even a thing at all in video games. You don't need VA to have a quality story. Time to mature a little and join the real world.

I mean I wasn't on the nose as you were but you make a point I would of made haha. I get it like VA can really add and bring a story to life...but so can our imagination...it seems lost these days.

[Aneshda]

I was just making an example is all when it comes to map given in a patch. If they nail the island sanctuary expansion in 6.4 which is a new area as well and it’s core features then great if they don’t nail it il be in your camp of opinion. Also yeah mounts and minions are 1 time items but they are tied to the content… you have to interact with the content to get it. If you want to get the mounts and minions from island sanctuary faster you have to utilise the workshops for instance. You want those tank mounts you got to tank more… you have to partake in aspects of the game.

My question for you is what would be deemed content? Content in itself is such a broad term everyones view on the term will be different.

Content that lasts for a while and not just every 4 months 3-5 quests and some boring story with no meaning.
Even the new dungeons are boring. I went into the last dungeon twice and never again.
The 12 gods are boring, the story isn't exciting, you could have made a lot more out of the gods after all these years. But no, now they are a meaningless raid with an 0815 Story I can't even remember.
Every 4 months there is new gear, which usually only has new names, some new colors otherwise we had this stuff before in old dungeons / raids. The armor doesn't even look good.
The new DoH / DoL gear ... 1x farmed the material, crafted it and my motivation for the tools just isn't enough to craft them too, because it was so boring. We'll get new tools in 2 days anyway, so why even bother?
So where is the content? New minions, mounts, gear, a boring meaningless story, 1 0815 dungeon and some ugly glamour that looks the same every 4 months since Endwalker? That's all?
Where's the persistent content? Yoshi said the team needs time to recover after all the hard work...I don't see the hard work...maybe he meant working on Final Fantasy 16 because it can't have been Final Fantasy 14.
If the team and Yoshi can't think of anything new, please make room for people who have new ideas and who can tell stories in a more exciting way.
Since Endwalker, the story has been told so boringly that I wonder what's going on.
Most of the "new" items we get aren't even new, just new colors. The best example is the next mount ... how do we know that? Ah yes from the Ananta.
Jesus, why waste time on a recolor at all? It looks ugly either way.
Is the money that millions of players pay every month for the game + retainers + item shop no longer enough for new items?
You can't work on 2 projects at the same time because one of the projects will always suffer from the other and thus not be good enough.

[Velvet_Lunarfang]

Let's be honest here. Only reason this MMO gets away from ridicule is for 2 things. One it has Final Fantasy slapped onto it. If this wasn't Final Fantasy this MMO would of died out years ago. Number 2 many of the community whole heartily defend Yoshida despite lackluster content and bugs upon bugs especially in this expansion but he gets a pass because of his name. This game let's be real is mediocre at best lately. PVP is a dismal state of affairs. If you took away tomes and XP PVP would be dead. If you have been in any PVP matches people just run all over and not think before doing. Content has become so easy to feed to casual play that it has become a mind numbing experience.

FFXIV has become stale over the years and became less exciting. Nothing innovated has come out for this game in 5 years. Everything is rinse and repeat. The engine is outdated, character customization is bare bones, outfits start becoming recycled variants. The gearing up is such a drag and they know its a issue but rather you grind once a week for tomes to get something instead of addressing the needs. I want more out of this game not half-assed content and expect to be happy.

It will be a matter of time when a new MMO comes out and will overshadow FFXIV. Then Yoshida would of wished they implemented better content and QoL changes into FFXIV. Yoshida has become complacent and thinks this game is perfect and nothing new is needed. Why do you think people use shaders? Have you seen the colors in this game it's horrible and bland.

[CStrife912]

.....

I will give you some points in that if it weren't called Final Fantasy it may well be dead by now or already long into a maintenance mode, you see here on these forums that not everyone agrees with Yoshi P...I don't agree with everything he's done (Healers being abandoned, job homogenisation and too easy to level crafter and gatherers to name a few) I wouldn't say its mediocre because it wouldn't survive on those merits of namesake even if it was mediocre its already been proven with other games they've made like FF7 first soldier on mobile...surely the name would keep it a float but alas it did not. Name doesn't always carry the sails of success you still need to create a good product for it to enhance. PVP I feel in terms of the CC mode is almost there it needs some more balance and some minor changes to be in a good place...frontlines needs a rework on how its structured. There have been bugs more so in this one...but they have been quick to fix or hold their hands up and admit fault for the most part. Try getting that out of the WoW devs.

If the game has become stale over the years how did each expansion after stormblood continue with a consistent rise of player count and that's before the wow exodus. If something was wrong and the numbers showed decline we would of seen them steer course by now but clearly that is not the case. The engine isn't outdated as proven with FF16 looking quite the looker, so hopefully some of that tech transfers in some capacity to FF14. Character customisation I will agree needs a complete rework or a drastic increase in features for the player to pick from, beards, eyebrows, tails, ear types, eye types you name it, it could use them. Try playing WoW or ESO of GW2 they all recycle gearsets or recolour them along with mounts....its just something that happens and heck you could say FF14 has done it since day 1 with their extreme mount being colour variants.

To say nothing innovated has come out is an outright lie, sadly it wont be a matter of time before something comes out to overshadow.. the only real ones coming out that visually look nice and have flashy gameplay are Korean centric MMOs which hey we know how they end up.. then you have Ashes of creation which looks ok and sounds great on paper but will only cater to a small percentile of players. Regarding shaders...I don't mind how the game looks, its peoples taste but you are right they are addressing it with the visual update from what we can see so far. I personally think some shaders make it look like ass but its peoples tastes at the end of the day.

What in your opinion is better content? Ive asked this already and they just respond with well not what they're doing...give me an example of something you'd want to do in the game that would keep you invested.

[Deo14]

Ah, and now we get the (insert words here) who have grown up on VA games and think it's necessary for there to be a good story. News flash - some of the best games in existence that have been praised for their stories were made before VA was even a thing at all in video games. You don't need VA to have a quality story. Time to mature a little and join the real world.

Back in ma' days, we ain't got all these movin' pictures and internets, ya spoil't brats need to learn that good ol' story doesn't need all that crap. Just read ye good olde books. I ain't speaking about them picture books either, just words made out of black ink on stained paper. Only this is how ya tell the real story.

[Kaurhz]

Just another thought on this particular topic, I don't think it's low effort, and nor do I necessarily consider it lazy, but they have had a change in philosophy for the longevity and replay-ability of content and the required investment therein. In a sense, they've gone with a more streamlined approach, in that you do the content, you complete it then you have little incentive to actually go back and do it again, bar maybe 5-minute weeklies.

Frankly speaking, no amount of effort will ultimately address this if their underlying philosophy is 'appealing' to those that don't necessarily have a greater deal of time. Greater incentives behind content like Criterion dungeons would have gone a long way. - I don't really want to approach Island Sanctuary wholly yet until it's had more updates - Eureka suffered from this exact same problem in that it was very barebones (and arguably more so than the original Diadem of Heavensward, in fact, I would argue that Diadem was the baseline concept for exploratory content) at least until it came to Pyros where they actually introduced the logos system. I will argue this to the death, Anemos and Pagos were only so widely 'successful' because of the relics, not despite them. It wasn't really until Pyros when we had something 'decent', and then actually solidified in Shadowbringers.

I do wish though, that they would look at ways for incentivizing people to actually continue doing the content in the long term, with potentially more proactive efforts on nerfing as time goes by, so that it doesn't necessarily become unfriendly to play, or catch-up with later on. As it stands, we do have a lot of content, but it's unfortunate because this volume of content doesn't necessarily give a great deal of replay value.

[CStrife912]

Just another thought on this particular topic, I don't think it's low effort, and nor do I necessarily consider it lazy, but they have had a change in philosophy for the longevity and replay-ability of content and the required investment therein. In a sense, they've gone with a more streamlined approach, in that you do the content, you complete it then you have little incentive to actually go back and do it again, bar maybe 5-minute weeklies.

Frankly speaking, no amount of effort will ultimately address this if their underlying philosophy is 'appealing' to those that don't necessarily have a greater deal of time. Greater incentives behind content like Criterion dungeons would have gone a long way. - I don't really want to approach Island Sanctuary wholly yet until it's had more updates - Eureka suffered from this exact same problem in that it was very barebones (and arguably more so than the original Diadem of Heavensward, in fact, I would argue that Diadem was the baseline concept for exploratory content) at least until it came to Pyros where they actually introduced the logos system. I will argue this to the death, Anemos and Pagos were only so widely 'successful' because of the relics, not despite them. It wasn't really until Pyros when we had something 'decent', and then actually solidified in Shadowbringers.

I do wish though, that they would look at ways for incentivizing people to actually continue doing the content in the long term, with potentially more proactive efforts on nerfing as time goes by, so that it doesn't necessarily become unfriendly to play, or catch-up with later on. As it stands, we do have a lot of content, but it's unfortunate because this volume of content doesn't necessarily give a great deal of replay value.

Yeah if you look at the special sites for what they put in from 5.1-5.5 and compare them to 6.1-6.3 outside of no 'exploratory zone' they have tried more risks with the content like variant/criterion and island sanctuary. Heck even a complete rework of PvP as a whole which has been received mostly well granted some much needed balance etc is required. It is just more rewards to run things but then you could turn that into one variant once a week and get a currency and get 10 gets you a mount or 5 gets you a minion like that's what tends to happen. I mean it would get people to run them more but its not a run out of want more like a run out of sheer will haha. But I'm glad to see someone more level headed in all this.

[Amenara]

What in your opinion is better content? Ive asked this already and they just respond with well not what they're doing...give me an example of something you'd want to do in the game that would keep you invested.

I think any repeatable gameplay content for the current expansion would be better content. I think that SE intended criterion dungeons to be the expansion's repeatable content but forgot there has to be any reason at all for people to repeat the content which is why we ran into the issue where criterion dungeons were a one and done thing. We will see what happens with the relic weapon quests this week and whether the grind is something that can be enjoyable or if we are going to go into timegated content that you do once a week like everything else has been so far.

[Kaurhz]

Yeah if you look at the special sites for what they put in from 5.1-5.5 and compare them to 6.1-6.3 outside of no 'exploratory zone' they have tried more risks with the content like variant/criterion and island sanctuary. Heck even a complete rework of PvP as a whole which has been received mostly well granted some much needed balance etc is required. It is just more rewards to run things but then you could turn that into one variant once a week and get a currency and get 10 gets you a mount or 5 gets you a minion like that's what tends to happen. I mean it would get people to run them more but its not a run out of want more like a run out of sheer will haha. But I'm glad to see someone more level headed in all this.

Honestly, they have taken more risks with this expansion than they have with any previous one - It's just unfortunate because some of these risks have equally been a slap in the face for some players, understandably - That being said, I would have liked for it not be 'at the expense of something else' type deal - Granted, development resources aren't infinite, but it would be nice, for example, to get newer content without it necessarily coming at the expense of older, and more well-received content (e.g., Deep dungeon in ShB, or lack thereof)

That said, I have also recently replayed through the story up to Stormblood to accompany a friend, and honestly, I can appreciate where some of those resources have gone, especially when I think back to how soul-sucking the experience of ARR used to be. I wouldn't want to wish that experience on anyone else, especially if there is a '10-year plan' - Though sure, it sucks that the resources are being pulled from elsewhere.

T;DR - I think they just need to reconsider their development philosophy - For whom are they developing the content, and to what end? - There's a bit of a paradigm shift, in that they're shifting too far away from any form of time sinks, which to a degree is a bad thing if they stray too far from it. Equally, I do think they need a larger team. Again, newer content shouldn't necessarily come at the expense of expanding on older content.