endwalker was an unacceptable unfished product

[Avoidy]

The way they revamped SMN perfectly captures how Endwalker feels in microcosm.
Something new was tried by revamping SMN. On the surface, in the initial livestreams, it looked good. It generated a lot of hype. And for a lot of people, it was good enough. It was certainly popular! Most played caster for a while, might still be. But when discerning players peeled back the layers, they found there wasn't much to keep them going back to it. So there's a segment of people who hope to god that things change in dawntrail, but there are also a lot of people who enjoy it as it is and think it's fine to have a caster with 2 actual casts who moves around like a rangedphys and has like 10 buttons that stay the same for 40 levels. They're fine with this because they don't play SMN extensively; they just play it once a month and so the formula doesn't feel bad for them. When SMN mains air their grievances with how shallow their favorite job has become, it's these people who tell those old SMN mains to just play a different job.

Same with DT. It was very popular! Won some awards. Got good scores from review writers. And to be sure, we got a whole lot of new stuff and they tried some bold things. We saw an end to the 10 year story. We got our own private island. We got revamped 4man content in the form of variant/criterion. But most of it was pretty shallow or lacked any incentive to go and do it more than once (if that). For some people, one-and-done content is perfectly fine and they feel great about spending 15 a month on a few hours of content once every 4 months, but for the people who aren't fine with that, they're submitting feedback and hoping to god that things change in dawntrail.

In that vein, I wouldn't say EW feels unfinished. I'd say it feels rushed and very shallow. There are some people who will deny this forever, but I really think pulling staff members to work on XVI had an impact on EW's post-game content. For example, recently Yoshi admitted that CBU3 had some "young guys" (I take it to mean they were new/relatively inexperienced) designing the Myths of the Realm alliance raid, and ... well, it shows! I mean, some of the setpieces/aesthetics are great, but mechanically it feels like it was made by someone who didn't have a decade of encounter-design experience backing them up. In the past, alliance raids were a cool way to explore new/grand concepts in a silly environment where the stakes were fairly low. We sort of saw them pushing the envelope in Aglaia, where you fight on a giant hand and there are mechanics utilizing that setpiece to fun effect, but we quickly went back to the big-square-arena setup with mechanics that felt like dumbed down normal raid mechs. Where's the person who designed TG Cid? Or the person who designed Diabolos Hollow? Or the person who designed that second fight in Rabanastre that still holds up and sometimes turns people into paste? Why weren't these people supervising the "young guys" as they designed myths of the realm? Were those people pulled to help with XVI? Or maybe they don't work with CBU3 anymore? It's a mystery. But it's just one area where the rushed/superficial element immediately comes to mind. It looks great on the surface, but after you do it once, it's not something you're itching to go back and do. It's the same with most jobs. What'd they do for dawntrail? In the best case scenario, your job got a couple of new skills that you hit every 2 minutes, and maybe a new trait. In the worst case, your job was totally revamped and no longer resembles the thing you once enjoyed. Either way, everyone falls into the shallow 2 minute meta and feels like an iteration of some other job in the same role. The devs said this was done because of feedback and to make the game easier for them to balance, but it created something that's boring as hell after you figure it out because it's so shallow. Everyone just does their own thing until the 2 minute egg timer buzzes; then you press a buff and use all your stored up resources during that time period. Every class wants to be able to do this to play optimally, and it's boring. It's repetitive. It's superficial. And it feels like they did it without thinking about how boring and superficial it would be. For people who don't play this game often, none of this matters much; but for people who really really enjoy playing this game and want things to do and reasons to do it and jobs that feel fun to play over and over, EW was kind of awful.

I'm tired of writing. Basically EW is just new-SMN. It's "good enough" for most people so we'll probably see more of it in the future, but for people who want to enjoy it extensively it's boring and shallow and it hints that the people on staff were either phoning it in, were splitting their attention, or were all hella new and lacking guidance from people who had decades of experience to draw upon. If anyone actually reads this who can affect change, here's a cool concept taken from another mmo: if your jobs are fundamentally enjoyable, your content can actually get away with being boring. But you can't have boring jobs AND boring content.