6.55 relic is more tomes lmaooo
I wish I could find those early early posts where we first got the tomes and everyone just assumed it'd stop after the first step. "The first step is always easy!" we thought. "Surely they won't do tomes for an entire expansion," we thought. ahahahahaha. and their justification for this is just "well, more people do it when we design it this way" yup, I guess they do. Turns out when you basically give stuff away for free, plenty of people can get it. crazy. loving these candid responses; it's telling me everything I need to know about how dawntrail's gonna look. meanwhile, even less of a hands on approach towards fight design because of course. one of the things this game still had going for it was its fights felt like they were crafted by a person who at least played the game a little bit. but sure, tone that down because it's difficult. y'know, to hell with it. just mail people savage bis in dawntrail. that way a LOT of people will have it, and that's all that really matters, right? "We found that when we didn't mail people raidgear, less people had raidgear! But now everyone has raidgear!" With this accessibility approach in mind, I'm genuinely surprised there's not a way for players to just hit a button and skip A Realm Reborn, since lots of new players quit around that step and--- oh, right, then they wouldn't be able to sell you a skip in the cash shop.

not gonna lie, this interview kind of kills my hope that dawntrail will be any good from a gameplay perspective. all they seem to care about is eliminating work for themselves while increasing accessibility at the cost of player enjoyment. This tells me that Square is still refusing to grant more funding/staffing to the XIV team despite its consistent success, and it also tells me that cbu3 is hyperfocused on mass appeal even if it makes the game suck. Our fight design going forward is probably going to look like variants of the things we've all seen before, and if the next alliance raid isn't super well received they'll just throw some more "young developers" under the bus.