FFXIV: Do Better

[DynnDiablos]

Bye felicia.

[1313]

OH don't worry! Dawntrail doesn't actually have playable content! it's just a visual novel!

[CerusSerenade]

Watch my level sit at 90 and eat my nouliths.

91 Gunbreaker and 81 Viper. Seems you've done plenty of playing already.

I guess a week was a massive overshot.

[GrizzlyTank]

Twitch is a terrible metric, I've never watched streaming for this game. Hell, I only watch one streamer at all.

FFXIV in particular is one of those games you watch after you've experienced it yourself. Hence why multiple of the more story happy streamers waited with starting the story.

[koko-on-da-forumz]

FFXIV in particular is one of those games you watch after you've experienced it yourself. Hence why multiple of the more story happy streamers waited with starting the story.

why

This game is so simple, why would anyone spend even MORE time watching an influencer dork do it? Are they stupid?

[Azlith]

No need to worry OP, if you wanna play through the msq then your in luck! You don't actually play the game while watching the MSQ.

[GrizzlyTank]

why

This game is so simple, why would anyone spend even MORE time watching an influencer dork do it? Are they stupid?

Same reason people listen to radio hosts. Or watching their family or friends play games. It's entertaining.

[Rekh]

I've personally enjoyed every job I have played so far. Well... maybe not Scholar, but that may just be because it's not for me. But I'm loving the direction the devs are taking with job design.

Objectively, job design got better in dawntrail, so I give square enix a lot of credit for that. Specially with the new jobs, Pictomancer's the most fun I've had in terms of job design probably ever.

The issue is still the roles design, every tank's essentially the same job; same with healer.

The trash pull to walls are unfortunately still there, there's a few dungeons that choose a different way of designing the dungeon like the level 91 dungeon, but the others continue the same old pattern of 2 trash mobs between 3 bosses. You can't be doing this same design forever, you need to shake things up.

Meanwhile in Guild wars 2 every "job" is getting a spear weapon in their upcoming expansion in august and they all play differently. Same with their battle content encounters; every piece of content is thematically designed to be unique in terms of what you do in those encounters and how enemies approach the encounter against you.

The level 91 dungeon is a ray of hope, it's what square enix is capable of when they don't copy paste game design. Hopefully there's more of that in the future.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

I've seen that study before, but there is a lot that it doesn't take into account. It doesn't go into the fact that games themselves have stopped asking gamers to think, to chase the "wider audience", nor does it go into the fact that anyone with a phone and Candy Crush can also consider themselves a gamer.

Speaking as a former game dev that had access to internal play statistics & player habits on the games I worked on, games have stopped asking players to think because players wanted to stop thinking. It wasn't just an immediate halt, even at our company we noticed every game we developed with more simplistic systems and cheap dopamine skinner-box techniques were becoming more popular and profitable instead of any project with complex systems and genuine in-game feedback reward systems, so our company's game development shifted over years accordingly to more simplified experiences and streamlined game systems.

Game development will go where the money is, and its not even the 'Anyone with a phone' people you want to highlight that's causing the major shift either. Every AAA game studio has come to the realization after countless data analyzation that an ever-growing majority of gamers are simply looking for relaxing experiences with quick, cheap adrenaline hits rather than intricate, complex game experiences that reward logical thinking. The study even rightfully points this out that even the film industry is noticing the same trend of a decreasing attention span and desire to cognitively think by reducing the average time any single shot remains on screen way down.

[GrizzlyTank]

Speaking as a former game dev that had access to internal play statistics & player habits on the games I worked on, games have stopped asking players to think because players wanted to stop thinking. It wasn't just an immediate halt, even at our company we noticed every game we developed with more simplistic systems and cheap dopamine skinner-box techniques were becoming more popular and profitable instead of any project with complex systems and genuine in-game feedback reward systems, so our company's game development shifted over years accordingly to more simplified experiences and streamlined game systems.

Case in point. Dawntrail monk, who's rotation didn't even survive before the first savage raid was released before the devs reworked it again to match more like it was previously which was simpler.