JP interviews [pre-6.5]

[Noumenon]

From: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus...ws_65_edition/

It's that time again, patch leadup time, time for me to machine translate articles and paraphrase them to give you all vaguely correct interpretations of what Yoshi says. This time we have Famitsu and Dengenki. I'll just go through what I personally feel is relevant stuff to bring up, but do see the full articles for all the context.

There's "more stuff" planned for the gap between 6.55 and 7.0 than they covered at NA Fan Fest. They'll talk more about it at the EU one. They need to spread out announcements and stuff since there are 3 Fan Fests again now.

Zero as a character was planned from the start of Endwalker, but was left as a patch-only thing. One of the first main characters developed just through patch content. Different writers write different patch scenarios though, so they've needed some oversight from Oda and Ishikawa to keep things consistent.

Zeromus will be a more "physical" fight instead of a "brain-training" fight (Note: These are machine learning translation terms that come up all the time when talking about XIV interviews. The closest thing is that brain-training means "puzzle-y"). Yoshi did have to ask for them to amp it up a bit during production, though.

They've changed up their pre-production process for fights since 6.0. Now section leaders just do a preliminary check where they give feedback about the fight concepts and mechanic ideas, and then a final check once everything is done to make sure it all works and the numbers are good. In the past, leaders were a lot more hands on with iterative feedback which was a huge workload (for Yoshi in particular).

His Zermous Extreme feedback was that it was a bit too "honest" and to amp it up a bit.

Asura will be implemented as a trial in-game some time after JP Fan Fest.

Yojimbo (back in 2019 Fan Fest) was seen as too hard for a Fan Fest trial due to the situation you're put in there (control scheme, UI, strangers, unfamiliar job), so they re-evaluated what their goals were for Asura and felt that the completion rate was where they wanted it to be this time.

The last Alliance Raid might be stronger than usual this time.

Both the scenario writer and battle team for Myths of the Realm were made up mostly of younger/newer people.

They have adjusted the rewards of Alliance Raid Roulette to be consistent with how much time you'd spend in a given instance to make up for the ilevel-cheese removal.

Yoshi and some development staff did feel bad at times for changing/removing mechanics for Trust support, but felt that it was important both in terms of maintainability and playability in the future as well as giving a better on-boarding process should 4 new players all match into the same dungeon.

Trust implementation and management was very hard and usually took a skilled veteran on the development team to do.

No concrete plans on making old 8-man content doable with Trusts. It's easier to do Trusts for 4-man content, so some of those fights might have to be made 4-man if it ever happened, but Yoshi feels strongly about having the final boss trials always be 8-man. No firm decisions here yet.

Their data says a huge number of people have engaged with Variant Dungeons in their own way.

The 6.51 Criterion dungeon will receive an increase in rewards compared to the past two. They will consider feedback on this before determining the 7.x Criterion rewards.

There will be a title for clearing all 3 Criterion dungeons from 6.x, but they are considering how else they could reward that to see if they can get it in in time.

6.55's relic step will be tomes again.

They settled on tomes due to looking at data for how many weapons were made by players in past relic content. Yoshi acknowledges though that: "However, there are some people who say that this reinforcement method is ``sloppy'', so it's difficult... Some people may dislike doing elaborate things like the old weapon enhancement content, while others may feel that the enhancement methods like this one are not enough. I think this is probably not compatible."

They settled on tomes as these days playing multiple jobs is much more common, and they think tomes being something that naturally accumulates as you play makes it best suit your individual playstyle.

The Manderville Relics have the highest completion rate of any relic so far. The more elaborate they make the relic content/grind, the fewer people make one.

There is an inherent conflict between people that "enjoy weapon enhancement as content" and people that "want a system that makes it easy to obtain weapons". Satisfying both is very hard.

They will take feedback into account for 7.x's relic series.

The crafter/gatherer relic final step will be difficult, but not required for any 6.x crafts.

PvP iteration will continue into 7.x, including CC, Frontlines, and Rival Wings.

Island Sanctuary will get small updates in 7.0, but there are no plans for that to continue through 7.x. They have other lifestyle content in mind instead. If feedback is different, they might reconsider.

The Allied Beast Tribe catboy will show up again.

Getting Phil on stage was not easy, but Yoshi really wanted it since Phil was one of Microsoft's biggest advocates for getting XIV on the platform.

The Fall Guys collab will be limited time, periodic content and not a permanent fixture.

---------------------------------

There's "more stuff" planned for the gap between 6.55 and 7.0 than they covered at NA Fan Fest.

I am extremely skeptical these will have much substance at all, perhaps a new Leap of Faith map at best, but we shall see.

They've changed up their pre-production process for fights since 6.0. Now section leaders just do a preliminary check where they give feedback about the fight concepts and mechanic ideas, and then a final check once everything is done to make sure it all works and the numbers are good. In the past, leaders were a lot more hands on with iterative feedback which was a huge workload (for Yoshi in particular).

I think this is an extremely bad decision, and it is perhaps why the raids feel so unexciting and even why it is so buggy at times (like TOP). (And sorry but as customers I don't think "huge workload" is a valid excuse; improve your management process or hire more people then instead of reducing your work).

Both the scenario writer and battle team for Myths of the Realm were made up mostly of younger/newer people.

This sounds harsh but I don't think they did a good job. The raids were very, very bland, and Euphrosyne in particular is the most boring alliance raid, possibly even more boring than Syrcus Tower in terms of mechanical complexity and innovation.

Yoshi and some development staff did feel bad at times for changing/removing mechanics for Trust support, but felt that it was important both in terms of maintainability and playability in the future as well as giving a better on-boarding process should 4 new players all match into the same dungeon.

Then those 4 players can have fun wiping a few times and figuring out the fight. This is a video game, not a visual novel. Failure should be a thing in video games, as long as the player can eventually succeed. The changes to these dungeons mean that failure is now not even a remote possibility.

They settled on tomes due to looking at data for how many weapons were made by players in past relic content. Yoshi acknowledges though that: "However, there are some people who say that this reinforcement method is ``sloppy'', so it's difficult... Some people may dislike doing elaborate things like the old weapon enhancement content, while others may feel that the enhancement methods like this one are not enough. I think this is probably not compatible."

They settled on tomes as these days playing multiple jobs is much more common, and they think tomes being something that naturally accumulates as you play makes it best suit your individual playstyle.

The Manderville Relics have the highest completion rate of any relic so far. The more elaborate they make the relic content/grind, the fewer people make one.

There is an inherent conflict between people that "enjoy weapon enhancement as content" and people that "want a system that makes it easy to obtain weapons". Satisfying both is very hard.

They will take feedback into account for 7.x's relic series.

Disappointing. What is the problem of having fewer people making a relic? It should be something you are proud of, not some welfare check you receive. Should we also give Savage weapons to everyone now for 1000 tomes? Or let everyone get <The Necromancer> by doing PotD 51-60 5 times? While getting a relic does not take combat skill, it does take effort, and effort is apparently not something that SE wants to reward nowadays.

"Want a system that makes it easy to obtain weapons". That is called tomestone weapons, which are higher ilvl than relics until the last patch of the expansion.

And it means that there isn't much hope for 7.x's relic series to be better, since they are adamant about their position being correct.

The Fall Guys collab will be limited time, periodic content and not a permanent fixture.

I think this is extremely disappointing, but I understand there are possible licensing concerns.

And finally, a comment from the Reddit thread that is prescient:

This is not the first time they've used player engagement as a metric for successful content and it won't be the last. Yoshi-P has mentioned in the past that he sees more players completing the content as a good thing, which I guess is obviously fair, but the flipside of that is that completion rates are always directly correlated with a lack of effort required. If your only metric is player engagement, then the most logical thing to do is to turn the effort required to 0 and maximize your perceived success.

[SaberMaxwell]

Disappointed but not surprised to hear about the new approach to fight design.

[MisterNublet]

I already didn't have any high expectations with Dawntrail, but reading this made me extremely concerned about the future with the next expansion.

Also. Lol @ Island Sanctuary. What an absolute waste of dev time that was.

[Jeeqbit]

Thank you.

[VentVanitas]

There is an inherent conflict between people that "enjoy weapon enhancement as content" and people that "want a system that makes it easy to obtain weapons". Satisfying both is very hard.

why is this a challenge for them? this is a problem they already solved before EW even dropped. tomestone weapons are right there, make them easier to obtain more frequently if you must- but leaving literally nothing for people who liked grinding relics isn't a solution.

[Atelier-Bagur]

why is this a challenge for them? this is a problem they already solved before EW even dropped. tomestone weapons are right there, make them easier to obtain more frequently if you must- but leaving literally nothing for people who liked grinding relics isn't a solution.

Again, its because not many players obtained more than one weapon and I can vouch for that statement because yeah...past relic chains were such a grind that it was a huge chore to do multiple ones, even when you try to do many of them at the same time, its just not appealing to do unless you are just THAT BORED in the game.

Whats frustrating about his statement is that I completely agree with him. I also think its bad that not many people complete multiple relics in previous expansions because yeah the grinds were too stupid with a lot of the steps, but the issue is that he went into the far other extreme were the relic grind is too simple, the exact same and boring. I understand the philosophy behind the tomestone idea because you can theoretically get them via multidud avenues but when all you have to do is your daily duty roulettes to get the 3 same materials at the same price in less than a single day the we have a problem.

I really wish they could go back to form and take a page of some of the less grindy steps from the ARR relic chain where you had to do a unique trial, or had a book that required you to run certain content or go on a treasure hunt, or do Fates where you only needed one item per zone (rather than the bullshit 20 of 3 types of memories like in the Shb relic....) Like literally give us SOMETHING different and a tad long lasting rather than making it too boring and quick to get or making it too boring and grindy to get a single one. There has to be a sweet middle and he's not aiming for that.

[ForteNightshade]

Again, its because not many players obtained more than one weapon and I can vouch for that statement because yeah...past relic chains were such a grind that it was a huge chore to do multiple ones, even when you try to do many of them at the same time, its just not appealing to do unless you are just THAT BORED in the game.

I'm going to quote my response from reddit:

Nobody is really asking for an exact copy of ARR or HW relic grinds though. Running Gordias normal 600 bazillion times wouldn't be fun either.

People want a middle ground between two awful extremes. We went from absurdly tedious to so laughably easy they may as well be free. Eureka and Bozja were that middle ground for a lot of people despite neither being without flaws. It seems the dev team has conflated players not getting every relic with it being too hard.

But let's put all that aside. Why can't they be innovative? Take the old book phase from ARR but instead of making it awful, borrow from Wondrous Tales.

They could also scale down Criterion slightly, toss in all the Lost Actions and let us build our relic in there. Make it like a harder Variant, and the actions help balance out the difficulty. You could also have Variant reward these relic "tokens" or whatever but simply less of them.

And just like that you've fixed V/C's terrible reward structure and made the relic step not "lazy."

That's the issue people have. They didn't even bother doing anything with the relic this time around. It's one step away from mailing it to you after downloading the patch.

I don't know why but this dev team seems to only operate in massive extremes. Yeah, previous relic steps were a slog. That doesn't mean do a 180 and make them an absolute joke. Making it so everyone can get them with virtually zero effort devalues the whole purpose of getting them in the first place. Instead of being able to show off this cool weapon you've worked hard on, you'll pop into Limsa and see 50 other players with the exact same weapon because y'all logged in with 2,000 tomes capped.

"We already have tomestone weapons"

No, we don't. We have tomestone/raid weapons. Which would be fine, except that the drops from normal raids are limited to once a week. I'd like to get an upgrade to my green gear on all four jobs I play without having to wait a literal half year. So either keep relics as they are or uncap the drops from normal raids.

The tome weapon is better though. If they unlocked it, not only would it completely invalidate the relic until the very last patch but basically every other weapon that isn't Savage. Speaking of which, you have options to upgrade your gear. Go do Golbez. He offers the exact same ilvl was the relic just with slightly less substats. That "green gear" of yours, assuming it's crafted, is only 5 ilvls below the relic. Why do you need to upgrade it so desperately that the relic should be sacrificed into a welfare weapon? Full i640 is already hilariously overgeared for any content that isn't Savage or Ultimate.

[Iscah]

Making it so everyone can get them with virtually zero effort devalues the whole purpose of getting them in the first place. Instead of being able to show off this cool weapon you've worked hard on, you'll pop into Limsa and see 50 other players with the exact same weapon because y'all logged in with 2,000 tomes capped.

"Oh noes, other people have the same shiny thing! However will I show off my superior dedication to pouring hours of my life into a videogame?"

I couldn't care less about what other players have or not. I'll get the thing if it looks good to me.

[ForteNightshade]

"Oh noes, other people have the same shiny thing! However will I show off my superior dedication to pouring hours of my life into a videogame?"

I couldn't care less about what other players have or not. I'll get the thing if it looks good to me.

Who said anything about superiority? People like to show off their accomplishments just like they like showing off a cute outfit. It doesn't necessarily mean they're dunking on everyone else. When said thing has no accomplishment, or has that accomplishment reduced to pretty much nothing. Yeah, it might be a little upsetting.

I mean, think about it. This whole relic step exists because people on the other side were upset they couldn't get something another person had despite it being readily available... provided they put in the same effort. They just didn't want to. So why do they get to complain but the people who want to work for something should just suck it up and stop caring?

[Zairava]

"Oh noes, other people have the same shiny thing! However will I show off my superior dedication to pouring hours of my life into a videogame?"

I couldn't care less about what other players have or not. I'll get the thing if it looks good to me.

Yeah, how dare people feel good about accomplishments they sunk hours into and show the fruits of their efforts.

Absolutely none of this is about superiority. It's not about bragging that "I sunk hours into pixels on a screen and you didn't". It's "Hey I took the time to get this cool thing and I want to show you what it looks like"

It's the same with EX mounts and rare items from treasure maps and new glamours. You aren't doing it to feel superior to others, you're doing it to feel good about getting it and sharing it with others.