Linear, linear, linear

[Shurrikhan]

It would be fine if it fully committed to being the best action game it could be. But it's also linear in the dimensions where action games don't want to be linear in, such as enemy combat, skill choices, weapon customization etc.

This. An Action game having little customization among its RPG elements is potentially... totally fine. But then it actually needs to have, to satisfying degree, the kinds of nuances and depth we'd expect from an Action game, rather than trash just being a carpet rolled out for their 'and then they all spontaneously combust' near-CS via Eikon skill.

If the game had difficulty modes, from the start, beyond just Easy, Easier, and Easiest, trash wasn't just a joke, and what few systems it carries for depth and skill-gap actually mattered... sure, that'd be fine.



And analogs abound in XIV itself: What is the point of Materia, if the only stat with gameplay ramifications is, 90+% of the time, to be avoided? What is the point of having all jobs available on a single job, if lockouts force you onto a single armor class when it matters and the jobs of any given role (and perhaps the roles themselves), apart from a 'flavor' and 'loser' of a given patch, play increasingly similar to one another?

It's fine to prioritize different things. I'd just rather the product of those shifted priorities not be half-assed thereafter.

No you could not. The Tonberries with the oil are in specific places and the levers you need the oil for are also in set places, this creates an optimal path through the area.

To be fair, the larger factor was in the very next sentence that you left out: in non-optimal situations, the contextually optimal path shifted, because you'd arrive at different times relative to the Tonberry's patroling position.

And they could easily force variance (rotating which path is essentially barred, which will proportionately often include the path that'd be most time-efficient if the patrol did not exist) by just varying the patrol's starting position on dungeon start.

They could also have just had more opportunities for the oils to drop (with still only the original number being required, and no further drops occurring after you had acquired enough). The means of creating non-linear pathing in that dungeon were right there, even if they weren't yet implemented in a way that'd last through wholly optimized play.

In short, I don't think you guys are in as great of disagreement as you seem to think, Mikey?