The reason FFXIV is lacking content is because of casualization.

[Connor]

Maybe I’m wrong, and really any post here is just feeding the troll lol, but I don’t think it’s the quantity of content that’s went down; it’s the quality. We have the same amount of content…it’s just paper thin this time lol, so it feels like nothing.

Also as an aside it feels like they’re really pushing the ‘play for a day or two then don’t log in for 4 months but keep paying your sub’ model lol. Content now is always mechanically simplistic, almost wholly built from pre-existing designs, entirely superficial (expert dungeons are the most egregious example, they’re corridor sims that look nice and nothing else lol), and either so easy to clear that you’re done with it in a day or two, or there’s a weekly lockout to forcibly prolong the time players will engage with specific content.

[Gemina]

I mean at this point why not just make the tome weapon be the glowy weapon and drop the concept entirely?

Because it is a reward for participating and completing the Manderville questline up to the current patch. This really shouldn't have to be spelled out, and it doesn't need to be when you stop listening to the echoes of the relic weapon simply requiring tomes. If you haven't done the questline, then 1500 tomes isn't buying you jack.

[Soge01]

They don't do it because they probably know how the internet works. Meaning yar har fiddly tee dee, people will pirate it, so may as well make as much money as you can on it first.

The thing is people will still pirate their games. There's always going to be some mad lad out there that buys whatever game they make and emulate it onto PC for other PC users to play. Though them trying to get as much sales on their exclusivity deals, can't really blame them for it. Money comes first above all, after all.

I mean I'm not going to argue with that logic. I would love that the game were released multi-plat on the same date but thats not how things work unfortunately.

True that. Though, since PCs are coming closer and closer to just being glorified half baked PCs, maybe someday in the near future we will get those exclusives on actual PCs. Microsoft have already thought way ahead of Sony in making their games accessible through their Xbox pass system on PC.

Given the number of issues we've seen on PC ports of games that were originally designed to run on a console. You'd at least hope they'd use that exclusivity period to help make sure the port doesn't follow that trend.

Yeah, you'd think. But these are modern day gaming companies, unfortunately. They're more concerned about getting as much money as they can out of us and think about the quality of the products they sell and resell to us last.

Though this might be sort of a dark thought, hopefully the recession will financially starve these multiple gaming companies into forcing them to give us high quality video games not just on PC ports, but right out of the gate when they're released on consoles as well. No more unfinished buggy messes like Fallout 76, Cyberpunk 2077, CoD 2042, Pokemon Sword/Shield and Scarlet/Violet.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Maybe I’m wrong, and really any post here is just feeding the troll lol, but I don’t think it’s the quantity of content that’s went down; it’s the quality. We have the same amount of content…it’s just paper thin this time lol, so it feels like nothing.

Also as an aside it feels like they’re really pushing the ‘play for a day or two then don’t log in for 4 months but keep paying your sub’ model lol. Content now is always mechanically simplistic, almost wholly built from pre-existing designs, entirely superficial (expert dungeons are the most egregious example, they’re corridor sims that look nice and nothing else lol), and either so easy to clear that you’re done with it in a day or two, or there’s a weekly lockout to forcibly prolong the time players will engage with specific content.

Which is true, but Ive stated that the content such as IS and Variant/Criterion are investment setups for it to be fully fleshed out systems for the foreseeable future of the game. Same thing goes with the graphical update which is another big ongoing project theyre working on. So the whats happening is that we're in the middle of this awkward transition period between this next big chapter of the game were they're trying to slowly implement these content systems little by little so that they can easily gauge what works and what doesnt work along the way so that come the next expansions of FFXIV it'll hopefully be something worthwhile. It makes sense for them to do this considering how ARR-EW was supposedly a whole big arc and they seem they're trying to move on with ambitious things coming into 7.0. But like I said, its not a transition that many of us are willing to accept and while I can understand the mentality I know I'm being patient enough to see what this all actually is going to wind up being.


And before anybody likes to be smart saying "lol such copium" you do realize that even WoW which came off with one of their biggest downfalls with Shadowlands is finally coming out strong with Dragonflight so if WoW can have its comeback so can FFXIV and they already did so before, who's to say they wont deliver coming in the future?

[Amarande]

But the community has pushed back heavily against it. Any form of pain point, a staple of MMO as you need to work for something to get it, is shunned and seen as a negative that needs to be excised. The entire philosophy behind trusts and duty support exists around this community philosophy: "do not force me to be involved with people if I don't want it.". And this ultimately ended up in our situation when you have very little to do if you're not a raider whereas we had Ishgardian Restoration and Bozja in ShB.

The trouble is it's not just that, it's that plenty of people who are willing or even want to play with other players find a lack of opportunity for various reasons.

Maybe (especially with optional endgame content, with its chronic boom/bust and/or gatekeeping problems in most parts of the genre) the other players aren't interested in playing that content, or in having them along (particularly, again, if it's endgame content and they're "late" to the party, the definition of which often is of ad absurdum degrees of late).

Sure, there's out-of-game communities. But the fact that you might need to reach out so heavily outside the game in order to get things done is a less than perfect circumstance of itself; there is also the fact that this relies heavily now on mainstream social media platforms with their attendant bugaboos (the latest being Discord's foot-in-mouth regarding privacy policy changes) - and, more importantly, their TOS.

This is a bad thing for several reasons.

1. Social media TOS tend to be massively stricter than those of direct hosting providers (if you get kicked off of one of those, it probably means you either couldn't afford the bill or you actually did something beyond the pale).

2. You're also far more likely to get reported to the platform (it usually only takes one troll or somebody with a fit of pique to get into the crosshairs, especially with how contentious large gaming communities often get), and that assumes you even need to be reported (platforms are often monitored by still very imperfect AIs, who often do not understand context - this can be a particularly serious issue with gaming as well due to problems like the robo-mod not knowing the difference between real and fictional violence. Had a friend once get suspended from a major SM platform for "death threats" against an FFXIV NPC, for instance ...).

3. If you're reported, you are massively more likely to be actioned on social media than on a hosting provider (again, if you get dehosted, and it wasn't because the bill was unexpectedly unaffordable, you probably actually did something really problematic, if not outright illegal). Oftentimes, that action can even be automatic (and it can only take a relatively small number of trolls in a large community to trip the auto-action) and again at the mercy of the aforementioned often very imperfect robots.

4. Hosting providers tend to have proper support, so if something does happen, there's likely going to be back and forth between you and the company. Social media companies almost never do; e.g., Discord is notorious for letting ban protest emails languish until the account has already been auto-deleted and unrecoverable regardless of the outcome, and Facebook apparently stopped letting people appeal "Facebook Jail" (which people can be put in for a month at a time over a single post, often one that many reasonable humans wouldn't even bat an eye at) at all unless they're one of the small percentage of high society that are actively given special lenient treatment.

The trouble here is then twofold:

A, only a certain subset of gamers can reasonably meet the moderation requirements for SM based communities - especially for hobbies like this where you can't practically monitor the community and partake in the hobby simultaneously, which pressures towards the (generally in fact observed) tendency for popular gaming communities (the ones large enough to usefully bring like minded players together) to be almost entirely O&O by very hardcore players, often ones not burdened by the time constraints of a real life job (full time workers, meanwhile, are forced to decide if they want to play the game or moderate a community for the game and as most tend to choose the former, they normally do not spawn communities larger than a single guild or static that is usually not open to the public). These players are usually not interested in supporting the casual community, who they frequently perceive as a drag upon the game experience, and tend to enforce the hardcore min-max mindset as the only acceptable one to express in the community - leading to the "toxic elitism" perception being massively amplified.

B, communities not based in mainstream social media go pretty much nowhere anymore, even if you have the tech savvy to start one. It is not difficult to set up an IRC server, for instance (nor is it expensive; ircd, at any level below the largest nets like Freenode or Libera Chat, is an extremely lightweight service both in bandwidth and processor resources). Getting anyone to use it, on the other hand? Nah. It's not a Discord or FB group, so almost nobody will. Same with TeamSpeak (even before considering the fact that you'll pay out the nose for licensing for even the equivalent of a mid-large Discord) or Mumble.

So the upshot is that many players that are group minded, especially if they are not elite and/or do not play during primetime or right at content launches, are pushed out of the visible communities to the point that many probably just give up - and if MMOs did not provide adequate solo options, would probably quit altogether.

And that's not good for business, so here we are.

[VelKallor]

That as well lol, I know for sure I aint going to buy a PS5 to play FF16

Dont quote me on this, but there have been whispers about a PC port. When, I dont know, but it has been mentioned.

[Krotoan]

Dont quote me on this, but there have been whispers about a PC port. When, I dont know, but it has been mentioned.

There is a contract of exclusivity for the PS5 release. Yoshi stated they were unconcerned with optimizing for a PC port at the moment and he seems pretty sure most people's PCs cannot handle the game as it is meant to be played. This does not mean never and the language he used did hint that it was not out of the question, just not a priority or being simultaneously worked on so they could focus on hitting the PS5 release with the original vision intact. However I would be surprised as heck if after that exclusivity period ended an announcement that the game was being released on PC wouldn't be shortly after.

[RitsukoSonoda]

There is a contract of exclusivity for the PS5 release. Yoshi stated they were unconcerned with optimizing for a PC port at the moment and he seems pretty sure most people's PCs cannot handle the game as it is meant to be played. This does not mean never and the language he used did hint that it was not out of the question, just not a priority or being simultaneously worked on so they could focus on hitting the PS5 release with the original vision intact. However I would be surprised as heck if after that exclusivity period ended an announcement that the game was being released on PC wouldn't be shortly after.

Yeah I came across something claiming that the FFXVI devs claimed only the PS5 could handle the game's combat.

High end Gaming PC's can outperform a PS5 provided they're configured properly. However there are lots of PC gamers out there with mid to low end systems or ones that follow all the "advice" they see on reddit for system configurations.

[RyuDragnier]

Yeah I came across something claiming that the FFXVI devs claimed only the PS5 could handle the game's combat.

High end Gaming PC's can outperform a PS5 provided they're configured properly. However there are lots of PC gamers out there with mid to low end systems or ones that follow all the "advice" they see on reddit for system configurations.

Considering the team's experience with working with FFXIV, hopefully when the PC port for FFXVI finally comes, it will be heavily optimized and have a good launch.

[Jojoya]

I sometimes want a meaningful grind also. Like grinding for a powerfull weapon and then being proud of my achievment. And then I can use my new powerful weapon to grind even better. No idea why only savage raiders think they need stronger weapons...

But why do casual players want to have the relic? Also just for the sake of it?

Because the relics are intended for casual players so they can work toward getting a BiS weapon over the course of an expansion if they want.

Out of curiosity, what makes something a grind to you and what else does it required to be a meaningful grind? A lot of the reactions I've been seeing here in the forums seem to come down to "if I'm not forced to do content I wouldn't choose to do on my own, it's not a worthy grind".

I look back at other relic weapon steps and the non-Light farm steps in those grinds haven't really been any worse that what you have to do to get 1500 Astronomy. I will say it looks like there will be fewer total steps this expansion unless 6.45 and 6.55 add in more stages than the x.45 and x.55 patches from the last couple of expansions had.

But if you want to grind, there's nothing stopping you from grinding out The Minstrel's Ballad: Zodiark's Fall, The Minstrel's Ballad: Hydaelyn's Call and The Minstrel's Ballad: Endsinger's Aria 10 times each, or Aglaia 15 times, or do 150 Timeworn Saigaskin maps, or whatever combination of content you want to reach the 1500 tomestones in whatever you consider a grindworthy form.

Try going to back to the stages in the previous relic series and add up how many tomestones would have been rewarded during each stage (if the required content rewarded tomestones). Were all of them really that much more repetitive?

fun fact, most casual players complain that they don't have time to grind relic weapons but somehow they do have time for every level 90 job.

If you're trying to refer to me, I guess I need to ask how you define casual. Is it based on the type of content they do, or how much time they spend playing the game, or some other factor?

I have tons of time on my hand. If I wanted to grind out every relic, I could. The relics don't interest me enough to bother.

Think that's just some excuse and that I just don't want to have to do a grind? Feel free to take a look at my achievements. I've got the Pteranodon (that's from Castle in the Sky if you're not familiar with the crafting/gathering achievements).

I always get amused by the "casuals killed my favorite game" discussions because it seems like no one can agree on what a casual is. If we can't agree what a casual is, how can we claim they killed anything?