FFXIV: Do Better

[lolnotacat]

Words...

No wonder I stopped playing most games and going to movies.

Sidenote; I work in mobile gaming and the dopamine hit, short attention span thing has been an issue for a while. Almost 10 years ago I worked on a very large Mobile Game and managed in-game events for monetization. After spending a lot of time with a couple designers to set up a fun and well thought out tournament event for the end of the year it was shot down. Why? I'll quote the product manager: "Your event would be fun, but it would be 'too fun' and cause players to spend less." That single experience has taught me more about the game industry and player behavior than almost all my other experiences combined. Want in-depth experiences? Buy them. They're out there, but usually not by AAA companies as they just don't make enough cash.

[Daralii]

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.

Weapon design in GW2 is very hit or miss, and a lot of the Secrets of the Obscure weapons were complete misses, niche, or pretty boring near-copies of existing things(I main engi, so that's the kind I got). What I've read says that spears are generally better but rely very heavily on the assumption you have Quickness to increase animation speed.

[Rekh]

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.

Instead of dumbing down and making simple games to attract people with 7-year old under-developed brains the better game developers design easy to learn but hard to master games like Elden Ring/Souls games and Baldur's gate.

That's what XIV had with heavensward and stormblood. Then we got shadowbringers and dark knight became warrior with a sword and it all got even more dumbed down in endwalker.

[SieyaM]

Not trying to gatekeep here, just saying that the term "gamer" has been diluted to the point where literally anyone who has even touched a game is considered one. It'd be like saying "I put a TV dinner in the microwave one time, so that makes me a chef."

This is a no true scotsman argument and a pretty bald faced one at that. Look I understand not wanting to include people because they only play puzzle games or what you might refer to as Candy Crush, but this quickly turns into excluding people because they don't play competitively at a professional level. Usually people who employ this argument think that only people they approve of personally should be allowed to have opinions on a matter and be heard, and anyone else just doesn't matter because they aren't as informed or invested.

[Kes13a]

This is a no true scotsman argument and a pretty bald faced one at that. Look I understand not wanting to include people because they only play puzzle games or what you might refer to as Candy Crush, but this quickly turns into excluding people because they don't play competitively at a professional level. Usually people who employ this argument think that only people they approve of personally should be allowed to have opinions on a matter and be heard, and anyone else just doesn't matter because they aren't as informed or invested.

if you are paying $15 a month, is competency at level cap an unreal expectation? no, I dont pay their subs, but they do and they should try to get something out of it, like... learning what they play.

[Rekh]

Weapon design in GW2 is very hit or miss, and a lot of the Secrets of the Obscure weapons were complete misses, niche, or pretty boring near-copies of existing things(I main engi, so that's the kind I got). What I've read says that spears are generally better but rely very heavily on the assumption you have Quickness to increase animation speed.

Well, unless you were doing CM (the equivalent of ultimates in XIV) most weapons/builds were viable in Secrets of obscure no matter what weapon you choose per class. There are still some weapon/weapon combinations that are so much better than anything else per class, yes, but mostly applies to legacy weapons that haven't gotten updated. For example, all the new weapons added in Secretes of obscure were really good, like the maces for Ranger and staff for Warrior.

[Mcg55ss]

But I don't want the door hit you.Can I have your gill

[SieyaM]

if you are paying $15 a month, is competency at level cap an unreal expectation? no, I dont pay their subs, but they do and they should try to get something out of it, like... learning what they play.

Ok, what does competency mean to you? How would a player of FFXIV display competence to you?

[1313]

They are right tho, people who want to see this game gets better are the minority, most people are either content with the current state or their personality is so embedded with the game that they see any criticism of the game as a criticism of them.

The game is most likely (Hope to be proven wrong here) doomed to getting worse with time.

i see it the same way, its been doomed since shb and it will fail. not immediately, but this direction is bad, has been bad all along, and we have said it for years, its their fault for not listening.

Kinda on the same boat...somehow...the "kick" of a new expansion didnt set in. Normally i would level every class to max...but now...got dancer,monk, scholar and Gunbreaker...and i dont even want to do roulettes anymore. Its gotten stale already...will i quit? Probably not since i bought a 6 month sub right before DT, because i thought that "spark" would set in...but after this msq...no. It didnt.

in shb and ew i was all over the game on the expansion launches, power leveling to max and crafting my ass off, running/building fc, farming all kinds of stuff, helping people, joining group activities etc etc. now.. i dont do roulettes. i dont really try. i end up afk and kicked for being idle, or in game chatting and doing nothing because theres such a major disconnect and lack of interesting things

[lolnotacat]

This is a no true scotsman argument and a pretty bald faced one at that. Look I understand not wanting to include people because they only play puzzle games or what you might refer to as Candy Crush, but this quickly turns into excluding people because they don't play competitively at a professional level. Usually people who employ this argument think that only people they approve of personally should be allowed to have opinions on a matter and be heard, and anyone else just doesn't matter because they aren't as informed or invested.

This is a false dichotomy. Players don't fall into Candy Crush or le epic no scope pro gamer. People who play games generally fall along a spectrum and there's a lot of overlap, but people do tend to play certain types of games. Isala is right that the term gamer has been diluted. My mom loves playing Farmville and Slot games. She would be included in the category of gamer by most of the organizations that put out those statistics because they're pushing a narrative.

If you want actual statistics on gamers, you need actual market research performed and you're not gonna get that because it's generally proprietary information and focuses on specific genre(s). For example, the company I worked for was a builder war game. It was 80% male in the 18-34 demo and 60% American.