Linear, linear, linear

[Shurrikhan]

It's been pretty divisive I think.. It has a lot of good things, but also made a lot of sweeping changes to core systems and completely gutted a lot of personal expression in favor of streamlining everything. When you compare Heavensward to Endwalker, they're night and day of personal expression and RPG elements. But the same can be said for ARR to Heavensward.

I personally think they should have stayed on the path that ARR was heading, and they could have made the QoL changes we wanted in doing so. It was their own fault for locking critical abilities behind other secondary classes, so instead of balancing things out or making that experience easier - They opted to just destroy systems and put nothing in their place. This was the start of culling player self-expression, build capabilities, and RPG systems.

So, real quick... not a single ARR ability was pruned in Heavensward. Nor did HW prune Additional Actions or Additional Attributes. That all didn't happen until Stormblood.

Moreover, "bad because CBU:III didn't balance them" is somewhat inherent to that particular system. A Fracture balanced for Monk, who needed an additional GCD fill per 18|21|30s (dependent on SkS threshold) and had a 40% damage bonus via Twin+GL, wasn't about to also be balanced also for Dragoon, unless you broke the whole point of the Additional Actions as being... a shared pool of actions (rather than individually job-tailored, at which point you have unique job skills that just occasionally share name, VFX, and animation).

I preferred a more horizontal progression approach and would have FAR preferred the Additionals (Actions, Attributes) be reiterated upon (by very different means) over abandoning the project after a single attempt, absolute. But, in practice, losing Additional Actions wasn't some huge loss to gameplay nor complexity (outside of that GCD gap not being filled for MNK until 4.3 via TK rotations, reducing its GCD speed options). Nor was losing Additional Attributes noticeable to anyone but BLM (from Piety tiers). (For everyone else, they were all non-choices.)

Also the flying everywhere is absolutely egregious. You go from walking everywhere, and sometimes it takes a long time. To flying everywhere and it literally taking LONGER than it ever did walking in ARR. Because the maps are way too large.

Agreed, though possibly for slightly different reasons.

I have absolutely no issue with maps being bigger. I felt most ARR zones were damn near immersion-breakingly claustrophobic. Even the likes of Gyr Albanian's Peaks zone doesn't seem too large, to me -- but merely underutilized.

But, the inclusion of flying, itself, was both jarring and lackluster. Give me a physics-based model of flight with limited Stamina and those 'Aether Currents' being real things that slightly highway the map (especially around tighter canyons, passes, etc.), and I'm sold. But instead we got the most basic form of flight possible, gated by a really jank gimmick (even if I do appreciate the exploration requirement prior to that unlock).

[Shurrikhan]

I feel what FFXIV really needed was a talent system, which brings its own set of problems, but nothing that was impossible to overcome.

Here's the thing: Customization (especially the likes of "Talent systems" outside of few exceptions like Rift) has historically almost always constrained gameplay options --replacing that gameplay with menu-play-- rather than expanding them. And I don't just mean this in a sense of "all choice is illusion" or similar BS; we don't all just play the 'best' job per sub-role.

Consider it this way. A game has n undermechanics that it must support player interaction with. Now, if there's limited button-counts and button-efficiency (e.g., Stormblood/Shadowbringers level button-bloat, where virtually none of the obvious opportunities for consolidation were taken), that can be bad, because each job's kit has to be able to engage with those undermechanics, even if with varying ease or directness, and that may leave less room for depth*.
*(Or, in XIV's case, sets of 3+ buttons to use all together or in rigid sequence as basically one action, which is more akin to rhythm-gaming than actual depth, but still.)

So, in this pre-specialized design scheme, every job, regardless of role, would want to be able (from within virtually any composition, without any prior role-allocation) to take some part in...

• manipulating enemy behavior,
• intercepting/thwarting attacks for allies at greater risk,
• crowd control,
• Stagger,
• suppression,
• timely defensives,
• Elemental systems,
• coordinating bursts of damage,
• knowing when at-cost uptime (standing in fire) is worth that cost,
• manipulating the costs of engagement,
• providing the resources to enlarge the range of viable options,
• etc., etc.

And while that may leave less room for your separate Senei and Guren, Shoha and Shoha II, Ikishoten and Namikiri buttons, etc... the job would tend to therefore have more that it can do and play with.

Now, let's specialize those jobs. A "Tank" becomes so much better than the rest at manipulating enemy behavior and defensives that everyone else's capacity for such becomes redundant as is trimmed shortly thereafter, regardless of their potentially serving a double-purpose; at best, only tiny little rhythmic bonuses remain (via Third Eye, Feint, etc.). A "Healer" makes so much better use of restoration that intercepting/thwarting attacks for more at risk allies, providing others with the resource for sustained or broader action, etc., likewise becomes, in majority, redundant.

The various gameplay elements that previously made a party-wide mechanic of reducing damage taken while maximizing output ("tanking") then becomes replaced by "a Tank exists". Matters of sustain and risk-calculation (with consequence) are largely replaced by "a Healer exists" (and simply the cost to their offensive ppgcd, since there will always be resource enough to heal you).

In pruning those now redundant 'versatility' tools, arguably there'd be room for more complex layering of one's rotation... but I have yet to see that ever be the result of pruning.

Now, that specialization would usually be called Roles, ofc, but that is essentially the endgame of customization: to be the best at something, which in turn tends to make everyone less "best"... redundant, essentially snapping any at-cost options towards very particular norms that section off gameplay.

That customization typically means no more of everyone having access to A, B, and C to any degree that'd promote coordination (as opposed to each working individually, but in proximity to each other -- without the weight of, say, this healing then being more or less worth on any basis but whether otherwise fatal damage would immediately follow, etc., etc.). Instead, A goes to Tanks, B goes to Healers, and C goes only to Damage-dealers.

Similarly, whenever Talent-based or similar customization allows for remotely excessive specialization, you end up with shit like... Single-target Execute damage goes to the Assassin builds of Ninja, forcing them for this particular fight A and out of B and C; Super-Flare build takes add fight B, but is barred from A and C; etc., etc.

Customization has, in short, a pretty fine edge between even slightly increasing net gameplay choice and significantly decreasing it, especially when concerned at all with what may be made obligatory (or, how many of those "choices" will, in practice, be non-choices). Part of why its so expensive to develop is exactly that: unless limited from the start to largely cosmetic changes, it can slip quickly from any sort of benefit to a net loss, which is not normally something desirable for a system that itself would come at significant development cost.

And yet, despite all that, I would like some further customization in this game. It's just very worth knowing how and why it can go wrong, often to the point of (relative to other models of gameplay expansion) letting players choose what little they want to keep, instead of choosing what they'd like to add.

That said, I don't think a Talent system (unless you're imagining it rather differently from the likes of WoW, GW2, Rift, etc.) would be a remotely efficient investment. I would suspect instead that a "All Jobs on One Character" game ought to leverage that for its customization, rather than creating a ton of sub-jobs (via those different builds) in isolation from each other.

[R041]

So, real quick... not a single ARR ability was pruned in Heavensward. Nor did HW prune Additional Actions or Additional Attributes. That all didn't happen until Stormblood.

Yeah I wouldn't say Heavensward destroyed classes exactly - It mostly added abilities for the individual classes, but then ignored the possibility of expanding the cross-class system itself. They kinda just stopped working on it altogether. It was the start of the formfactor we have today.

So Heavensward changed the environment, exploration systems, and dungeons mostly, then Stormblood finished it off with the class adjustments and cross-class destruction.

It was like a 1, 2 punch. lol

[Shurrikhan]

Yeah I wouldn't say Heavensward destroyed classes exactly - It mostly added abilities for the individual classes, but then ignored the possibility of expanding the cross-class system itself. They kinda just stopped working on it altogether. It was the start of the formfactor we have today.

So Heavensward changed the environment, exploration systems, and dungeons mostly, then Stormblood finished it off with the class adjustments and cross-class destruction.

It was like a 1, 2 punch. lol

Ahhh. Okay. Just because I didn't consider "leaving it to fizzle" as quite a change in itself, that didn't quite register for me. I get yah now.

I feel like even if they wanted to salvage those systems, though, it would likely have felt to them too late to do anything particularly well, as they had already removed Character Levels (where class/job Ranks were instead horizontal progression) and never mapped out any sort of criteria for proficiency growth (where XP in playing DRK might bleed slightly into experience also with other Tanks, other sword-users, etc.).

I'd still have loved to see it given a further shot that capitalized on the "All Jobs on One Character" aspect, though, yeah, by perhaps lowering the grind walls and increasing casual/midcore content engagement and longevity in their place.