I miss HW

[Renathras]

Legitimately sorry for the length, but I really care about this topic:

Aight, you know what? ....I kinda have to agree with this. The game has somehow managed to lose that sense of "dread" or "entropy" it had in the days when Dalamud was a serious consideration. Ditto for Nael and OG Gaius being pretty underrated.

Perhaps it's because I was around to hear Answers - Reprise fill the zones as Dalamud burned in the sky? Whatever the case, I found ARR's whole "feel" was far better than what we have now, and a large part of that was knowing what kind of threat Bahamut actually posed to the world. The player-character(s) have gone on to face much greater threats than he, but somehow the "feeling" was lacking. Even the Final Days and lead-up to the Endsinger did not stir any kind of feelings within me at all.

Heavensward was two or three steps removed from that feeling, but there was still a sense of urgency with the threats posed by Alexander and the Warring Triad. Although the former turned out to be benevolent, his mere presence could've killed the planet. The latter were of course primals that very much lived up to their hype as gods, and any one of them would've been basically unstoppable by modern man if allowed to regain its former strength. Admittedly, my interest in the Warring Triad in this regard may have stemmed in part from FF6 having been one of my favorite Final Fantasies to date, but still.

Dalamud burning in the sky; the hymn of dalamud filling the zones only to be replaced by answers reprise later on created a sense of overwhelming dread that they have failed to capture again even with threats bigger than Bahamut, dalamud was present in every zone, the music filled every corner, you couldn’t escape it and you knew what was coming

The first visit to kholusia came close but the final days completely failed to replicate the feeling and I think it’s because dalamud made the world dangerous, superbosses spawned, hamlet defence became harder, beloved NPC’s that had necessary functions in the world died and never came back, nothing in ShB or EW made me feel like “I” was in danger

And still coils makes me feel that, even going in as a level 90 character coils fills you with a sense of dread and makes you feel like you are actually in danger

Dalamud was just so perfect in how it affected the world it’s sad that 1.15-1.23b are just lumped in with the rest of trashy legacy and forgotten

I get this...but I think the problem here is that you really can't have that (well) with games in general. Lukile from Speakers Network (the "Fall and rise of FFXIV" series - fantastic if you've never watched them - on YouTube) said of the end of 1.X that, for all 1.X's faults, it did something that very few games manage to do in terms of it's feel. And as I've said before myself, it's because games generally don't plan to destroy themselves, so they don't do crazy things like have creepy awesome music play in all zones at the same time (the only other game I ever saw do this was Eve Online with Caroline's start...which come to think of it I never DID hear how that resolved itself other than it was theorized by players it was the destruction of the entire Jovian Jumpgate network and I think it had something to do with Thera appearing in Wormhole/K-Space?), spawning a bunch of enemies and sieging normally safe player areas (the only other game I can recall doing this was WoW's Undead invasion before Wrath and Burning Legion invasion before the Legion expansion).

And while Lukile says, and I think most 1.X veterans agree, "It may sound hipster, but you just had to be there", I think I get a sense of the "feel"; one other game I've played nailed it. Crisis Core. When you enter Nibelheim and hear the Nibelheim music, it just slamed me with a sense of foresight-induced deja vu of "something really bad's going to happen, and this is the epicenter of it". Granted, I had played FF7, but it still hammered the feeling. It's super rare, both in gaming and out (in the Star Trek: The Next Generation finale, All Good Things, when they find out the origin of the space anomaly that is ripping through the past and wiping out all life on ancient Earth, it's definitely a goosebump inducing moment).

So to a point, you can't really blame FFXIV (EW or otherwise) for lacking that since it's REALLY hard to cultivate. 1.X nailed it, but it also had totally free reign to do whatever it wanted because the game was shutting down. The kinda stuff they did like spawning hordes of monsters in Ul'Dah is what you only ever get in some Alpha/Beta tests of MMOs. For a similar reason - once the test is over, the server goes away, and it's expected the players are fine with dying over and over and random shenanigans at that point.

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ARR could kind of have it because the world was still new, and ShB when you first arrive in Norvant and fist go to the first couple zones also had it. It's that "new MMO feel" which definitely IS a thing people chase because of how rare it is. It's also a feeling I got first going into Eureka and (to a FAR lesser extent, Bozja)

The problem is, you eventually know more. You know more of the world's lore. You know more of the characters. You know more of the gameplay mechanics. And you also get the Dragonball Z problem of "power level creep". ("Power levels are b******t!")

It's hard to find things like Golbez foreboding when you've traveled to the edge of a universe and punched the literal embodiment of the concept of despair in the face. It's like Avengers: What do you do after Endgame? After you've saved literally all (or half of all) of the universe, in debateably two (or more than two) timelines?

Or to use another game example: Kingdom Hearts. KH1 was mystery. KH2 was mystery and history. But where do you go from there? Even Nomora had issues with that one. His solution was "everywhere (and everywhen) else, a decade prior with Birth By Sleep, hundreds(questionmark?) of years with Union Cross, a hundred or so (Dark Road), before finally settling on Dream Drop Distance (using prior game assets and settings and a post-Union Cross REALLY disturbing lore for the Dream Eaters once you finished UC and figured that one out) to explain Sora getting a power nerf for KH3 (where even Pete is openly mocking his weakness), just to end up saving the multiverse - again - in the end. And where do you go from THAT? Well, other than an alternate "better/true canon ending" DLC and a musical recap game with a tiny hint at the end - we don't know, since KH4 is still in progress...and Missing Link, in addition to being MIA, is ALSO going to be in the past! XD

I think that's why they want to do a soft-reboot of FFXIV with DT, to get back to more...non-universe levels of threats. More grounded. More exploration and mystery (maybe) with the New World. (And PROBABLY why they're holding off Meracydia for now...call that a prediction, but I bet it's a valid one...)

As much as I'm not a fan of "beach vacation: the expansion", I do kind of hope they succeed on that front.

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Though Coils specifically...

I think part of it is the Coils aesthetic.

Absolutely this.

The music, the art, the environment; it just has this kind of claustrophobic and dangerous feel to it. The closest thing to that I've experienced otherwise is actually Delubrium Savage. It gives the feeling of being in some ruined and unstable ancient ruins with dangers around every corner...somewhat helped by the perma-death (for the instance) if you get KO'd and not raised within 10 mins.

PotD solo runs KIND of have this feeling, but also don't because of how the floors/maps are generated and laid out and the stakes are more "you lose the run if you KO before getting to that bench at 200". Oddly, HoH doesn't have this feel at all to me, I think it's the setting/scenery. Though I DID like the really big open floors...

THAT is something they absolutely could work on more.

The problem is modern raid encounters are just the boss room...because players have increasingly complained when they aren't. People don't like Fausts or 3rd Coils. They want to zone in, start punching a boss after the preliminary light party/stack/spread marker business, and then leave.

It's why I find 24 mans far more enjoyable than Savage raid fights, and stuff like Delubrium and Dalriada (even the non-Savage DR) as much more enjoyable and foreboding. DR/Dal do feel like a proper dungeon crawl completely with getting kicked out if you all die/wipe, and 24 mans at least feel like you have a bit of travel between bosses, even the Pantheon ones that have largely been hallways with a miniboss or random trash pack. That's STILL more.

Something I remember form doing some raiding in WoW back in the Wrath/Cata days is you feel like you're assaulting an enemy stronghold. Savage just feels like you're teleporting to bosses for a boxing match.

[Absimiliard]

The problem is modern raid encounters are just the boss room...because players have increasingly complained when they aren't. People don't like Fausts or 3rd Coils. They want to zone in, start punching a boss after the preliminary light party/stack/spread marker business, and then leave.

It's an unfortunate state of affairs. Those fights lose something when you don't have to fight tooth and nail just to reach them, I feel. There's no passing through a vast technological complex or the crumbling ruins of a city. They're basically just glorified trials.

[VentVanitas]

I can't help but feel the same. As much as a pleasant surprise the story was for Pandaemonium, I still feel like that it just doesn't compare to the heights of other raid series in both design and setting. Maybe it's just my overall fatigue of ancients/ascians but despite liking the story it just couldn't hook me the same way other raid series did. As others has stated, even when it's outdated content, the Coils is still truly in a league of its own. Spiral is still one of my favourite tracks in the whole game even after hearing it for the first time years ago in PotD before I unlocked Coils.

[Supersnow845]

^ a ren post I 100% totally agree with and also very well written

I agree that the fall of dalamud can’t be repeated because it was meant to cap off a dying game so it was a situation that EW was never really going to achieve and it’s why I don’t dock that many points from EW (on the other hand I do dock points from EW for being wholly inferior to kholusia). The way it capped off the dying game though was fantastic and I’m truly sad that most modern players will only know it as the failure of legacy and that weird but of janky nael lore they do in second coil

As for coil I agree, coils is easily the raid that had the best feel of space in the game and it isn’t even remotely close, take like T8 for example; you just killed a whole bunch of mobs on the way to melusine in T7 and then you descend down, you make it to the main deck and alisae is horrified to see the same hallways full of monsters from T7 reaching all the way out of sight back up towards the upper levels; it felt claustrophobic, dangerous and that you were trapped with no way to go but down

If people don’t want the T1 style dungeon raid back that’s fine but please attempt to return the feeling of space that coils had that made everything feel so dangerous and threatening, I feel like T8 was a good middle ground in this sense

[Shurrikhan]

The problem is modern raid encounters are just the boss room...because players have increasingly complained when they aren't. People don't like Fausts or 3rd Coils. They want to zone in, start punching a boss after the preliminary light party/stack/spread marker business, and then leave.

I'm not so sure it had to be either-or, though.

They could have gone with a more WoW-like design (ICC comes to mind, though there are of course other examples) with some serious trash fights that act as still-challenging encounters but with a greater/different degree of player agency (with the "boss" toolkit being reducible by killing or suppressing the particular mobs responsible for those particular actions or auras, kind of like pre-nerf Mog Ex without the King himself) and typically more intuitive parts.

And they could have still kept the core fights separately queuable atop that, for those who lacked the time. All they really needed to do was (A) provide commensurate rewards for the rest of the raid, and (B) to allow players both to queue into the raid and directly to the boss fights, where any full-raid matchmade group that had reached a boss but had players drop could optionally refill from those doing queuing just for that specific fight.

I would love to see a return of full raids, ideally with a good 6-12 rewarding and challenging non-boss fights across the 4-floor tier.



Heck, another great way to keep those raid experiences fresh would just be to reward minimum item level runs and move that from being a hidden option to being a mainstay one (e.g., a second checkmark, alongside the first, with both being queuable simultaneously). Say, the more your ilvl is reduced, the greater portion of rewards you get; where the bonus rewards are time-gated or have already been capped, comparable value is given through non-time-gated rewards.

So, if you want to actually challenge yourself doing the Normal Mode raids (or, the full raid together)... that's a ton of a gil and tomes while they're still time-gated, or you can catch/gear up quite a bit faster atop some bonus tomes after the time-gating has been removed (since your party would have a proportionate chance to additional loot-table items).



And with that, players could get a truer-to-form/intent challenge with commensurate reward --regardless of how many weeks it's been since the tier's release-- and without any chance of feeling like a burden to their party over being late-comers... or they could just speedrun through the time-locked stuff, to be done as a cohesive experience or just piecemeal, as they please.

[vetch]

I think that's why they want to do a soft-reboot of FFXIV with DT, to get back to more...non-universe levels of threats. More grounded. More exploration and mystery (maybe) with the New World.

Transitioning from a world-ending threat that feels like nothing to a nothing that feels like nothing, so they can hopefully build back up to a world-ending threat that feels like nothing again.

[OliverQ]

Do the Devs actually read these threads and take notice of what people have issue with? I feel like no matter how much people complain, they're not going to change things.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

It's an unfortunate state of affairs. Those fights lose something when you don't have to fight tooth and nail just to reach them, I feel. There's no passing through a vast technological complex or the crumbling ruins of a city. They're basically just glorified trials.

The problem with the journey in raids is that if the journey provides no rewards, people will skip it. People got a DRG or NIN to skip T10 journey to boss. People sac pulled T1 to get to boss. People skipped T3 entirely. People immediately ran to boss room in T8, skipping as many adds as possible.

I'm sure many skipped by getting shortcut carries off other groups.


They can't make trash give drops, because people will just farm trash. And if they make the trash actual fights, then you need longer in the instances because you have to prog multiple fights, or clear multiple longer fights. If every floor has a "door" fight and a "boss" fight its just a big mess IMO.



Just look at Alex and the plethora of Fausts.

[Supersnow845]

Something like T2 holds up in its pre fight exploration (I guess since the enrage cast starts when you pull the first node like A6 it’s technically all the boss but eh), T2’s only weakness is that killing the node that taught allagen rot gave the boss such an OP ability you had no choice but to kill the rot node which limited the choose your own path somewhat

I would say with criterion the best middle ground would be take T1, keep the door boss mostly the same (it was a legit interesting boss with week 1 gear) replace the T1 trash with criterion trash then leave the boss as is, 1 raid 3 distinct prog points each one of those three could give one of the three items we usually attribute to floor 1, 8 could be redesigned that you need to kill 2 ADS nodes and their spawned trash to unlock the door to avatar but the nodes you fight all have different patterns and you can choose where you engage and which nodes that will entail and how long your “enrage” is till a third node enters the space and makes the fight harder

3 I agree without a boss is a pointless instance: 3 should have just been 4’s pre boss trash but otherwise I think the original design of coils could be modernised and it would be better than what we have now, most of the problems with coils, like how 10 is cheesable by having a NIN sneak past the trash to open the shortcut is just things that could be blocked from working

Fausts were just bad because they were boring as hell, like what A1’s Faust just stood there and tankbustered getting slowly stronger, A5’s you killed one that was a clone of 1 and you got…..2 more that were also clones of 1, 9’s was kinda okay but 9 was the best and still weaker as a fight than T1’s doorboss

[Renathras]

I'm not so sure it had to be either-or, though.

I mean...this is modern gaming.

For better or for worse, we're not in the era where MOST players enjoy "the experience" of a dungeon crawl. Criterion is only one step up from "hallway", but people don't want to do it for "the experience"; they want rewards and they want greater rewards for more time spent. So the Devs are going to lean more towards the less time spent instead. (It's a similar though distinct argument to the "I demand more reward for more work" "Okay, so we're going to reduce your work, happy now?" situation)

And the thing is, this gets even worse when it's content that's consumed repeatedly. Coils was neat. But can you imagine most raiders today enjoying having to go through the hallways (even if we skip out Turn 3 weirdness)? We had Fausts in HW and people complained about it, and some of them were kinda tough. It being "serious trash fights" would only be novel for a bit before people felt it was a slog. "WHY do these TRASH MOBS have so much health and mechanics?" "Can't we just go to the boss and get our loot already?" "SE isn't respecting our time! This is an insult!" "The point of this raid is the boss fights, right? Why are we having to spend so much effort on this stupid trash?"

...and so on.

And you know this. People complain if a Tank isn't doing wall-to-wall pulls. Trash would have to be borderline boss fights (note the Pantheon minibosses have some boss-lite mechanics), and if they're too hard, people are going to complain because they aren't getting rewards and it's a "waste" of time keeping them from the boss. Especially once fights are on farm.

I DO think it would be better if they did this, mind you, but I'm telling you why they won't. Because people that raid would absolutely complain about it. Yeah, a lot of people would probably find it novel and enjoyable at first, but after several weeks of farm, MOST would probably be complaining about it. That's why they shifted to the "boxing match" format in the first place. Because people complained when they didn't.

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All your solutions are "make it more difficult", but I contend it wasn't the difficulty that makes Coils what it is - as Snow and others have said, it retains this feel even going in unsynced at level 90 - it's the environment ITSELF. "more challenge" isn't the answer. Sure, more danger can help, but just making trash that plasters the average party isn't going to give the Coils-like experience, I don't think.

Honestly, I think the best form of this is legitimately Eureka/Bozja raids. The boss mechanics are interesting, they're challenging but fair, BA and DR Sav have "perma-death", etc. They feel like you're delving into a dangerous dungeon, even after having done it a couple times, and they seem to have good staying power with the community. The answer is right there.

The problem with the journey in raids is that if the journey provides no rewards, people will skip it. People got a DRG or NIN to skip T10 journey to boss. People sac pulled T1 to get to boss. People skipped T3 entirely. People immediately ran to boss room in T8, skipping as many adds as possible.

I'm sure many skipped by getting shortcut carries off other groups.


They can't make trash give drops, because people will just farm trash. And if they make the trash actual fights, then you need longer in the instances because you have to prog multiple fights, or clear multiple longer fights. If every floor has a "door" fight and a "boss" fight its just a big mess IMO.



Just look at Alex and the plethora of Fausts.

...basically, this.