endwalker was an unacceptable unfished product

[Jojoya]

Dang you really had to go far down to cherry pick that definition didn't you?

First description:

"A person engaged in covert advertising. The shill attempts to spread buzz by personally endorsing the product in public forums with the pretense of sincerity, when in fact he is being paid for his services."

So who here is getting paid for what they post?

[Lunalepsy]

now please understand, you may not share these sentiments, but they are mine and so valid. they are here to help the game thrive again. not bash it. if you cant understand that this thread may not be for you

its now been exactly 2 years since the (delayed) release of endwalker.
the exasion price was 49.99GBP ( you can translate that in your own currency) and the monthly sub is 7.99. x24 = 191+50 meaning in total weve paid 240 to experience endwalker.

i want to talk, now that the expansion (thankfully) is almost over a

starting with msq - ok look. some wont agree with me here. but i loved 6.0. i really did. but post 6.0 i absolutley hate it. i had been desperate to go to the void since 2.0 alliance raid and the completly ruined it for me. the best character ZERO was absolutley ruined and betrayed at the end by changing her from a rpr to a pld, and her darkness to light. it felt like "build a WOL" not.. accept people for who they are. i absolutley hate the ending golbez got and the four fiends were lierally just wondow shopping from ff4.. even the themes were 1/1. so, honestly.. the post msq. was aweful. not only is it a decline from 6.0 but even arr could be more compelling than this... it felt like it was trying to ride of the writing of other expansions because i had nothing original.

Moving onto the Dungeons. id argue theyre the worst of every expansion; heres why. are they cinematic. yes. pretty. yes. but thats where it ends. you remember shb bosses could literally wipe you if you didnt pay attention.. all the gear in the newer dungeons was all reskinned. the dungeons for 6.1 quest and onward are lets be real BGM to raid to.

The trails. RUBICANTE EX - enough said. only 2 good trails came out of this tier. Barbarriccia EX and Hydaelyn ex, with golbez a close 3rd.

Savages - p3s and p4s are horrible. the glam was nice, unique and worth going for.

P5-8 yea.. ngl this was a failure of a tier. 8 was the only good thing and 8 was hell.

p9-12 okay. look. i hate this tier even more.. i despise it. the gear is ugly. the weapons suck and the bosses are frutstating... 11 was the only good fight

relics - what relics. i guess we got criterion... yey? no. its a repeatable mess that doesnt offer anything unique. the rewards require weeks of savage clears to actually obtain

JOb design - okay this started in shb but i wont act like endwalker didnt make things 100% x worse..the 2 minute meta which i dont hate it. understand why it exists. its created a job rigidity that makes the game feels like a giant dance rehersal...

Community - ugh this is where i feel less and less welcome on this game. its gotten so bad and so toxic.. PF/DF/PVP/Novice/ultimate all seam to have gotten way more toxic than ever before.. i blame this on people leaving out of boredum..

Cash shop - can i bring this up.. it got really bad in Endwalker.. in the last 2 years.. the exploitation and ignorance to players needs. and rediculous charges of items

Island Sanctuary - im bound by character climit. but this content failed. completly.

so overall. compared to shb.. this expansion is honstly just unifhsed.. we really deserved better. there are some things i have liked to expand on but there is a character limit here

It is, so what? It's a cookie-cutter game. Don't expect a lot from it.

[DPZ2]

"A person engaged in covert advertising. The shill attempts to spread buzz by personally endorsing the product in public forums with the pretense of sincerity, when in fact he is being paid for his services."

Yup. And you had to ignore what I've highlighted in boldface in order to make the word somehow "fit" posters on the forums.

[Jeeqbit]

people quit, people get moved to different projects, but thats not something new for any game studio or development team. Yet it is brought up to deflect as to why the team is still so small

The credits don't agree with the assessment that the team is small.

why content is fewer and further between.

There have been games with less content with further between. I remember reading players complaining about that for SWTOR. My understanding is that Blizzard had to buy an entire game studio because of a similar problem - the time it takes to recruit and train people faster than they leave or retire. People who live in the vicinity of their workplace, which this studio did, by sheer chance.

The team working on FFXIV should not be working on anything else

They aren't because when they left for FF16 they became the FF16 team.

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 is for me too.

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

It's just how people play games now. I remember always looking at my Steam list and seeing everyone play the newest game, or the game that just released DLC, for a few days and then moving onto the next game. SE is just designing content around how people play games.

but for the people who aren't fine with that, they're submitting feedback and hoping to god that things change in dawntrail.

Most likely the issue here is that they are a relative minority. I think it is still a huge amount of players but relatively speaking, the casual audience that would just login for the DLC and then leave after a few days is massive. I don't think they completely ignore people that want content to last longer. They make raid content that takes many players weeks or months to progress through and add rewards such as mounts and glamour for spending an extended period of time.

I really think pulling staff members to work on XVI had an impact on EW's post-game content.

This is just flat out untrue because XVI was in development since 2015. That means that staff have been "pulled away" since Heavensward. There was plenty of indication the game was planned for release much earlier in EW but got delayed due to covid, so most of the work was probably already done by EW release. They have only admitted so far that Soken, Koji and 1 English localization person worked on both and obviously Yoshi-P oversees the spreadsheets and resource allocation and logistics for it because he oversees that for the whole of CBU3, but he wasn't the director who oversaw the creative process.

mechanically it feels like it was made by someone who didn't have a decade of encounter-design experience backing them up

The mechanics were actually really good, what was different was they were more telegraphed than normal. If you got the same mechanics, but didn't have the indicators, they would probably wipe alliances a lot. They wouldn't have them in Heavensward. To this day, Weeping City is not very intuitive and people die to lots of random things because of a lack of indicators, such as avoiding the death area and then later standing in it, or virtually all of Ozma's mechanics that involve just knowing what the different animations mean. Now imagine that they got those fights and telegraphed them as well as they do Oschon's bow. You can get that on the first try because of how extremely well-telegraphed it is. This has been a design they have applied retroactively to older MSQ dungeons as well, to make mechanics intuitive aka obvious on the first playthrough.

They actually ask people to design a dungeon boss fight as part of the job application that has the same difficulty as a modern dungeon. So when hiring new people they were obviously satisfied with their design ability.

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?

I think it is just a decision from the top to telegraph them better or make them less punishing. I think that if Yoshi-P said "make them brutally difficult" they could just as easily make them like DRS or an ultimate alliance raid.

It looks great on the surface, but after you do it once, it's not something you're itching to go back and do.

I think the Byregot and Nald'thal fights was were great conceptually as well, it is just them not withstanding current gear. I looked forward to doing Aglaia week after week, personally.

[sindriiisgaming]

I have multiple accounts, I already paid for your 9 months leave like 30 times by now.

It's my pleasure.

Cool! Now go do that for all 90 members of my fc who quit

[Stormpeaks]

Cool! Now go do that for all 90 members of my fc who quit

Sure buddy lmao

[DPZ2]

Cool! Now go do that for all 90 members of my fc who quit

As opposed to the 324 members of your fc who have not quit at this point in time?

[Sebazy]

The credits don't agree with the assessment that the team is small.

Are you sure about that though? Have you compared FFXIV's credits to some other big league MMOs?

Spoiler, I already did. Years ago. It's not good reading and it's certainly not gotten any better in recent years.

TLDR FFXIV's core creative team (The job design, raid design etc) is tiny even when compared to far less successful and enduring MMOs.

FFXIV has 4 job designers credited currently as of Endwalker, it's stayed at this mark since ARR with 1 member getting replaced and Kei Sato getting promoted to a director position in that time frame.

WoW released back in 2004 with 6 class designers and it's important to note that many of the quest writers also had quite significant input in class design matters (See J Kaplan as an example of this).

Even Wildstar had a broader team with 6 core class combat designers along with an additional 4 PvP systems designers.

Ok cool, I'd like to think that FFXIV's job design team woes are well understood by now, but what about the rest of the team? Content designers and quest writers?

FFXIV has 26 quest writers, 13 battle content designers and 8 non battle content designers for a total of 47 content designers

Blade & Soul lumped their content designers into 1 single group, which has 46 staff named with their 2016 release....

Now BnS is hardly a small fry, but it's also not even remotely close to being of the same kind of scale and scope as FFXIV either nor was it ever likely to be quite as big given how saturated it's market was at the time. Do you think NCSoft over invested in BnS? Or are SE underinvesting in FFXIV?

the time it takes to recruit and train people faster than they leave or retire.

Again, I was pointing this out as an old hand of the industry literally over 4 and a half years ago at this point. The signs were clearly visible from the outside looking in so it absolutely would have been a known thing internally, yet nothing was being done about it and as such, here we are listening to you say 'it takes time' when action really needed to have been taken years ago.

They have only admitted so far that Soken, Koji and 1 English localization person worked on both and obviously Yoshi-P oversees the spreadsheets and resource allocation and logistics for it because he oversees that for the whole of CBU3, but he wasn't the director who oversaw the creative process.

You do realise that a bunch of team leads from XIV were working on XVI as well right?

From FFXIV:
Lead quest designer: https://www.mobygames.com/person/196...shiaki-suzuki/
Lead game designer: https://www.mobygames.com/person/278...utoshi-gondai/
Lead game designer: https://www.mobygames.com/person/108...ichi-murasawa/
Art team lead: https://www.mobygames.com/person/34376/shinya-ichida/
Art team lead: https://www.mobygames.com/person/384846/yusuke-mogi/
Lead character concept artist: https://www.mobygames.com/person/384846/yusuke-mogi/
UI art lead: https://www.mobygames.com/person/247127/yoichi-seki/
Lead engineer: https://www.mobygames.com/person/265...suru-kawahara/
Lead engineer: https://www.mobygames.com/person/279000/keisuke-tanaka/
Client systems engineering supervisor: https://www.mobygames.com/person/89869/mamoru-oyamada/
Project manager: https://www.mobygames.com/person/933560/kei-iwamiya/
Project manager: https://www.mobygames.com/person/805298/yuko-mizoguchi/

And that's just a selection of creative and systems leads. I've not touched the rank and file.

I think the Byregot and Nald'thal fights was were great conceptually as well, it is just them not withstanding current gear. I looked forward to doing Aglaia week after week, personally.

I appreciate that it's subjective and all, but as someone who endured Everquest's original Ragefire camp twice, Aglaia had me alt F4ing in boredom and frustration as a healer, the later fights were passable but Byregot was unforgivable trash. I imagine it could look cool to a spectator who had no idea what was actually happening and the floor gimmick was neat but man, don't make me tap the damage taken sign. It made Stone Sky Sea look exciting and by comparison, even Alte Roite was a decent boss because at least it did something.

[Jeeqbit]

WoW released back in 2004 with 6 class designers

I remember someone who worked on WoW saying that 1 person designed lots of the classes. I don't remember in what timeframe that was for because I don't play that game but it does seem that, in general, a single designer can handle lots of classes.

Again, I was pointing this out as an old hand of the industry literally over 4 and a half years ago at this point.

I appreciate you taking the time to explain your position because most people who say this just throw it out in a sentence as if it's not well thought out and without any evidence.

The signs were clearly visible from the outside looking in so it absolutely would have been a known thing internally, yet nothing was being done about it and as such, here we are listening to you say 'it takes time' when action really needed to have been taken years ago.

Well what I meant was they may have been recruiting back then (especially as many of their jobs always seem open any year that I've looked and they have, for years even advertised some of them in live letters), so if their team is still small despite that then maybe they don't manage to recruit them or they lose more than they recruit to other game projects, retirement or quitting.

As you pointed out, they have 47 content designers, if we are being less generic, maybe they are recruiting a lot for certain areas (like content) but not for other areas (like job design). However, that brings us back to the WoW class argument, where you've said lots of people worked on them but I saw something different in a video I watched some time ago.

I think that part of the problem is they are recruiting in Japan when if they opened development teams from their regional offices they could be working with people outside of Japan as well. There are countless developers that would want to work for them but aren't about to move to another country.

You do realise that a bunch of team leads from XIV were working on XVI as well right?

I didn't, particularly, because I have completely gone off what Yoshi-P has said, which is repeated denials that this is the case and that they are separate teams and that it hasn't impacted FFXIV. I'd like to trust the person in charge of the entire unit to know better than anyone after all. From there, I have gone off any exceptions I've come across such as Soken and Koji as well as the Localization lead mentioning that one of their team members got snatched away to FF16.

I checked them out and most of them just say "Special Thanks" for FF16, while a few say "Supervisor" which sounds less time-consuming than actually being the lead. It makes sense for them to just check on or give advice to the team sitting right next to them.

One of them says they were a lead for FF14 on Heavensward but then became a supervisor on FF14 thereafter, and were a lead on FF16, so they were probably one of the ones that moved from FF14 to FF16 in Heavensward.

I appreciate that it's subjective and all, but as someone who endured Everquest's original Ragefire camp twice, Aglaia had me alt F4ing in boredom and frustration as a healer, the later fights were passable but Byregot was unforgivable trash. I imagine it could look cool to a spectator who had no idea what was actually happening and the floor gimmick was neat but man, don't make me tap the damage taken sign. It made Stone Sky Sea look exciting and by comparison, even Alte Roite was a decent boss because at least it did something.

Maybe the problem here isn't Aglaia, but healer design and how most content in the game, in general, does not challenge healers much.