People Enjoy hard Games

[CidHeiral]

This scenario already played out in WoW. The devs tried to make normal dungeon content more difficult in Cataclysm, hoping that players would rise to the occasion, but instead players just gave up and complained until everything was nerfed into the ground.

You could say that's a different game and a long time ago, but the same thing has played out here in Orbonne Monastery. Orbonne was not hard, at all, but players found it so incredibly difficult many would just bail on the raid the second they saw that it popped. This eventually led to the echo buff being added and Thunder God being heavily nerfed. 90% of the Thunder God fight is just looking at the boss and standing at the front or back at the right time, but that was too much to ask for a lot of people.

Heck, half the reason people ilvl cheese alliance raids in general is because they can't do mechanics. I once had a dude begin an Orbonne run by saying "oh shit I forgot to take my gear off" and he spent the entire rest of the raid dying to literally every mechanic, every time it happened, all while constantly complaining in party chat about "OMG THIS IS SO HARD" and "I JUST WANT MY TOMESTONES WTF!!"

I would personally love if standard content were more difficult and I had the same outlook as OP years ago, but unfortunately the reality is to the contrary. The system we have now is probably the best approach, where most content is pretty easy but there are more difficult alternatives if that's what you're looking for.

[CelestiCer]

I much prefer XIV taking the direction to increase the " Skill-Ceiling " of Jobs while keeping the " Skill-Floor " where it is for friendly barrier of entry and go from there. This allows the player... to choose how well they wish to master a Job to its limits beyond what is required to clear/farm/grind any piece of content. Skill-Expression is a big appeal to many players that stays with us as any piece PvE combat content? is not all appealing to every single person... but you always will need to take a Job to said PvE combat content near 100% of the time.

While more difficult content is not automatically well received if we just universally demand it to be raised? How say dungeons are currently setup feels more like a theme-park tour then anything else as we mow down a pack of mobs towards a boss repeat process and that's it, only in Endwalker it has become worse with how Square has homogenized so much more of our Jobs that it's boring on-top of boring... Which is fine for players who want a laidback game, true...but at some point? Players do wish to have the option for excitement. If you like all your food 95% bland and unseasoned? great, players will be happy for you... but there should be an option for all of us to experience flavor, depth, nuances, complexity from either our Job gameplay? the content or both. And the excuse that we only get to get a slither of this at the last 5% of PvE Combat at Extreme/Savage? is not a good one if you ask me. The good ole line from Yoshi-P " Just go play Ultimate " did not age well for a good reason...

Have played other MMORPG's and the route to take either extreme's of to casual or to hardcore usually doesn't go well. XIV at least has the benefit of not having P2W features to outright power-tune your character. But XIV has become for me at least Jobwise? way to bland to really love the content as much as I used to, mhm

[Macleod]

I'd actually like to see content getting tougher as levels go up

Ah, but you see, therein lies the problem. The longer the game lasts, they can't just keep making content harder and harder as the level cap increases, because it will eventually become too hard...even though the gigachad gamers will never admit it.

I, for one, couldn't care less about game difficulty. I play easy games. I play hard games. I play games I find fun, difficulty has no bearing on fun in my mind.

[Supersnow845]

I’m fine with the baseline content being clearable by a toddler, the problem is none of the jobs have any skill expression, dungeons are scaled so a cure 1 spammer can clear them, great if you are a cure 1 spammer, what is someone who actually has enough brain cells to rub together to play healer at any sort of competent level……1111111111111111111111

They need to stop having the skill ceiling being the skill floor and you might get veterans engaged with casual content again

[CidHeiral]

I much prefer XIV taking the direction to increase the " Skill-Ceiling " of Jobs while keeping the " Skill-Floor " where it is for friendly barrier of entry and go from there. This allows the player... to choose how well they wish to master a Job to its limits beyond what is required to clear/farm/grind any piece of content. Skill-Expression is a big appeal to many players that stays with us as any piece PvE combat content? is not all appealing to every single person... but you always will need to take a Job to said PvE combat content near 100% of the time.

Agreed.

Easy content isn't a slog if your class is still fun to play, but if the content is easy and your job is braindead as well, that's a bad time. I think having a range of jobs from simple to complex is good for the game, but it does concern me how they've all been going down the simplification track recently. Job design is one of the things that attracted me to this game to begin with and most of my favorite jobs are the "busier" ones. If they all got turned into Summoner I would just quit.

[WaxSw]

I don't think that difficulty plays a bigger role than world building/design and player expression/immersion.

Both Elden Ring and Baldur's gate let players try different builds, different paths, and all of them without feeling wrong or meaningless thanks to its world bulding and world design. This wide array of options let players have different experiences, gets them more into the game and makes them feel like a part of it, those invested players are very likely to speak highly of the game and more sales come from those recommendations (sounds familiar considering XIV case)

In XVI however you dont have that freedom, everything is extremely streamlined and deviating from the main story more often than not reward the players with boring fetch quests. It all makes you feel like tourist that is only there for the story and not a part of the world. This is also where difficulty comes into play because usually difficult battles make the players change their gameplay and develop strategies increasing their investment in the game, BG and ER aren't afraid to challenge you while XVI seems really scared to do it.

I feel that XIV could learn a lesson or two in how ER and BG handle their content, allowing for more player/skill expression in their systems instead of streamlining everything and making sure that not even the lowest common denominator feels slightly challenged

[Nizzi]

I really just think job design needs to improve. I don't care if "casual content" is easy because the game already allows us to form into different groups and do the type of content we want, which is great. I don't want to force someone who is just wanting to chill after work and farm glams from an alliance raid to have to smash their head against it, wipe after wipe, for 2 hours just to clear; but the gutting of the skill ceiling on jobs means I have to do high end content to get any enjoyment out of the gameplay of the game anymore... so basically I play once a week on Tuesday reclears and then don't have anything else to do.

Making an encounter harder doesn't make your job more engaging, and the job is how you interact and engage with the encounter. If your job is fun to play at a baseline in all content, then all the content you want to do becomes fun.

[Rolder50]

The recent success of Baldur's Gate 3 really shows this off. Sure it has variable difficulty settings, but even on the lower settings there are still TONS of options for how you want to play your character, set up your party, all that fun jazz. They don't dumb it down even if you pick easy.

[Jeeqbit]

People Enjoy hard Games

SOME people enjoy hard games. Some people like easy games and just want something easy to occupy their attention or to relax with. That is why I believe games are best when they have a "hard mode" and an "easy mode" (that you can choose from the very beginning).

The issue with FFXIV is that this hard mode is only available by unlocking the extreme, savage and ultimate modes and people only do these with a pre-formed party. You usually can't just queue for them, so a lot of people just end up doing the easy versions most of the time through roulettes.

An alternative way to do it would be to make the "hard" mode a client setting where you can disable telegraphs in the character config, so that orange telegraphs and tank buster indicators don't appear even in normal modes. Then the players that aren't very good with mechanics can keep the indicators on and the people who want a challenge can disable the indicators.

I find it interesting that everyone criticizes forum posters asking for harder content and they dismiss us for being the vocal minority on these forums but to be honest we may be somewhat of the silent majority with a few outspoken people.

There are a lot of people that like hard content, sure. It is pretty split.

Most of the people who want to do hard content don't actually end up doing it because of anxiety. I made a linkshell back in Heavensward catered to such people and within 2 days it had filled to 128 people and a lot of them told me they wanted to do this content but PF looked toxic so they didn't. Many of them were women.

It's a lot better now because there is cross-world PF, a [Practice] tag and the [Duty Complete] tag replaced the "2 chests, no bonus" toxic description we used to use. But I think it's most likely still a big issue.

So that is one of the challenges. A lot of people want to do it but never actually will. The other factor is they want to but they are too busy to put a serious focus on it because of work and real life.

The game has repeatedly doubled down on making itself easier because it has been under the false impression that people calling for an easier game were in fact the majority.

Majority or not, they exist and I remember Koji once said in response to people saying content is too easy that "easy is good... for us". A blunt response that a lot of people knew already. Easy is good for their statistics and people feel like they beat hard content when they win, even though it was in fact easy. He was usually translating for Yoshi-P then, so it may have actually been Yoshi-P.

they both outperformed FFXVI which is a story game with incredibly easy gameplay.

It was PS5 exclusive. If streams are anything to go by, tens of thousands of people per streamer watched the archived streams of FF16, obviously because plenty of people don't want to get a PS5.

[Ath192]

I don't think that difficulty plays a bigger role than world building/design and player expression/immersion.

To me it does to some extent, a problem I feel is that after a dungeon or any multiplayer experience of the "Casual" variety doesn't feel special. It never feels like we did something meaningful together. We didn't need to talk, the boss just dropped dead and now everyone move along pls, next instance.

We are just mindlessly doing things. So perhaps more collaboration needed would feel more immersive. Just my 2 cents on that.