People Enjoy hard Games

[LilimoLimomo]

If we take a look at Baldurs Gate and Elden ring both of them became main stream hits despite being more difficult titles to beat, and they both outperformed FFXVI which is a story game with incredibly easy gameplay.

We could argue that using the PS5 platform only hurt them however, it doesn't change the fact that making an engaging and difficult game DOES NOT mean you are reducing your playerbase and hurting the games bottom line.

In short, XIV is too easy, and recent commercial successes reveal there is no reason to dumb the game down to where it is today.

So here's the thing: while some people do think Elden Ring and Dark Souls games are hard, they're really not. From Software has more than a decade of experience making games that feel challenging, while at the same time bending over backwards to give players feedback and an excess of tools with which to succeed. And it's no surprise that after doing that for so long, Elden Ring is easily their most accessible game to date. They are masters at their craft.

The same can't be said for FF14; the game is just not very good at teaching people to play it, nor does it give players any variety of tools or methods with which to succeed. Credit where credit is due, most non-Ex/Sav fights have gotten pretty good at introducing boss abilities at a cadence where players can fail the first deployment of a new mechanic without wiping so they can learn from it on-the-go, and I really love that about FF14. But after a full decade, there's still nothing that teaches players how to effectively use the only tool they have to actually beat a fight: their kit.

Creativity is rewarded in Elden Ring. You can beat the same boss in wildly different ways depending on your build, the tools you use, and the way you approach the fight. FF14 offers none of this. FF14 asks you to dance a specific dance, and if you are at-level there are generally no alternative steps you can take. FF14 has right answers and wrong answers, and sometimes a continuum between them along which you can be more or less right. Creativity can help you find the solution, but it can't help you find a meaningfully different one.

In addition, Elden Ring lets you over-level. As an MMO, that's simply not an option that FF14 will ever be able to provide its players. I mean, you can wait a handful of updates until there's gear with a higher iLevel, but that's wildly different from taking an hour or so to grind some runes and giving the fight another go.

If you just have difficulty, but you don't offer players an accessible variety of ways to tackle challenges, your game will never be anywhere close to the success that Elden Ring is. Elden Ring is where it's at because the people who made it are experts at crafting games that give players every possible advantage so that they can overcome content that would otherwise be difficult. It would take a drastic pivot for FF14 to even approach Elden Ring's success in that arena.

(And beyond that, I'd say you can't really compare the sales numbers of an MMO with a non-MMO, as there are plenty of people who won't play an MMO just because it's an MMO, or they'll drop it because it's a really big ongoing commitment, or they can't afford to pay monthly for a game, etc. There are simply other factors that need to be taken into consideration to do a fair comparison.)

[Kansene]

I enjoy many games that are considered difficult.

I do not however, enjoy the way FFXIV's difficult content is designed, so I play the easy bits because they're fun.

[Rolder50]

Creativity is rewarded in Elden Ring. You can beat the same boss in wildly different ways depending on your build, the tools you use, and the way you approach the fight. FF14 offers none of this. FF14 asks you to dance a specific dance, and if you are at-level there are generally no alternative steps you can take. FF14 has right answers and wrong answers, and sometimes a continuum between them along which you can be more or less right. Creativity can help you find the solution, but it can't help you find a meaningfully different one.

FFXIV Gameplay in a nutshell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz8ssH7LiB0

[Brightamethyst]

This is one of the problems inherent to MMOs. While a single player game can just be whatever it is, the goal of an MMO is to have a little bit of something for everyone. That's why there are so many different types of content in the first place. Problem is, people like what they like and tend to see everything else a waste. You have people who want hard content complaining that things like islands and variant dungeons are "catering to the casuals", while simultaneously people who don't like hard content complain about how any resources go into things like ultimates that relatively few players even engage with, let alone clear.

The devs can't win here and it's pointless for them to even try, which is why they generally don't engage in conversation on the topic.

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.

To be fair, some of the Cata dungeons were actually broken at launch. Ashbury was literally unkillable if LFD put you into a group without the right CCs/interrupts, etc. Some of the early Cata "it's too hard" complaints were justified.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Someone should force the devs to replay the story as Healer. It's incredibly tedious, easy and boring.

Don't forget: they should also do it as a Hrothgar + AST.

No job swapping allowed.

[ChonkGoblinSuprem]

> has someone else tell them the mathematically calculated best way to play this game

> complains this game is too easy

lollers

[CelestiCer]

Here's another thing I could note... XIV has been designed to not encourage players to improve from the get go.

Job wise you do not need to know what the hell you're doing. Square will drag your dead bodies through the finish-lines in casual content. And while this can be relaxing and Fun, this also creates an environment where players do not wish to strife because there is no urgency to, the complete opposite of the message in the Endwalker MSQ. Why would you ever wanna improve when you can Echo-Unsync brute force it later anyways? Then once the players are met with an ounce of difficulty or hurdle to overcome? they already been conditioned to find it to much of a hassle, a challenge to much and avoid it. Nowadays? reading Tool-Tips of the Jobs they play being is burden to heavy... The Jobs are so hollow that they essentially play themselves. Between Black Desert login rewards and feeding my workers beer? there's literally no difference for me between that and an Expert roulette. At least not in feel for me... and that's terrible...

Keep casual content or 95% of FFXIV's content below Extreme easy? sure. But don't hollow out both the content and the Jobs we play, even the optional complexity we can master. Like one or the other. Yet Square seems to go to the direction of both if all these simplifications we have been hit with isn't a sign... then not just Yoshi P but everyone can just tell us to " Just go Play Ultimate ". I do not enjoy doing the hardest mechanics of having the mechanics be so astronomically difficult that we have to spend a full week bashing our heads into it, with hopefully a scheduled Static instead of a sporadic party-finder you have to constantly find or create... I do not see the fun in this, not me. I had more fun when my Job had more complexity. I used to love doing roulettes and dailies. I really spammed the crap out of Experts just for the hell of it... it was relaxing to do because it was Fun. But not anymore, now because it's so easy? its so unfun... that it becomes stressful, because I don't feel any excitement like I used to for playing well. In fact I feel like the game is just playing itself which is horrible... made worse when I know Square can do better because they have done better, mhm.

[kaynide]

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.

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.

If anything, market trends have telling data that a games difficulty is actually something gamers enjoy. If we take a look at Baldurs Gate and Elden ring both of them became main stream hits despite being more difficult titles to beat, and they both outperformed FFXVI which is a story game with incredibly easy gameplay.

We could argue that using the PS5 platform only hurt them however, it doesn't change the fact that making an engaging and difficult game DOES NOT mean you are reducing your playerbase and hurting the games bottom line.

In short, XIV is too easy, and recent commercial successes reveal there is no reason to dumb the game down to where it is today.

I mean, if I wanna play hard games there is a smorgasbord of them ready for me to play.

It’s not wrong/bad to want more midcore/hardcore content in FFXIV, but it is folly to want this one game to be every possible game and cater to every possible want a gamer might have.

The devs have the data on what sells and keeps subs high, and they are going to build the game in that direction to the Nth degree; they absolutely know they will lose, say, 100 people who want a harder game…but they also know that loss will keep the 500 or so candy-crush moms who just wanna chill/faceroll the game.

So, they try to cater to everyone like mentioned above, but generally speaking the bulk of resources are going to be put towards whatever people engage in/burn game time on.

[VentVanitas]

Someone should force the devs to replay the story as Healer. It's incredibly tedious, easy and boring.

just finished doing it on an alt. specifically, I did as much of the MSQ I could purely solo just to see what it was like. it is quite possibly the worst experience anyone could deliberately put themselves through in this game. duty support NPCs deal laughably weak damage which pads out dungeons, yet they don't take enough damage either so you're not actually healing that much unless you pull more yourself (which doesn't even make some dungeons go by faster since the NPCs don't do enough AoE damage). on top of healers already doing low damage, it grinds every single encounter in the game to an agonizing crawl to the point where some solo instances can stretch out to almost 10 minutes, all the while, you only have one damage spell and a DoT to use. for all 90 levels, for every single fight.

someone might say "that's your own fault for choosing to play alone in an MMORPG" which is partly true, but it does not excuse that the MSQ healer experience is still absolutely miserable compared to a tank/DPS playthrough.

[Supersnow845]

If nothing else for the sake of the MSQ it would be so easy to add a “cleric stance” you could toggle in solo duties that turns your oGCD heals into damage spells

You’d still be spamming your nuke and DOT but at least you’d have 4-5 oGCD’s a minute to juggle