JP: Yoshi P should step down, FF14 is a sinking ship, in response to interview

[Morphiana]

Look at the very first post in this thread.
Not sure why that doesnt count as "feedback" to you.

They're not the only person here, we are 16 pages in, and I am not sure why you consider this demand acceptable. Even if they were the only person here, they devalue their own feedback by calling for someone's job based off a xpac's story being mixed in ratings while end game is just fine, and FF16 which while they may not like it, plenty of people certainly did.

It is entitled to demand someone's job over this. Again, if he had been asked to step down after Stormblood then Shadowbringers never would've been a thing. The greatest things sometimes come from tripping and getting back up, let him get back up.

Tone it down, his job and livelihood are your not play things to demand be broken after something like this.

Between this and people calling for Wuk Lamat's VA's job while completely ignoring most the VAs this xpac have flat moments and the VA studio's director / approach is what needs to be adjusted - It is shameful.

Be better.

[Dante131]

Hard disagree.

Look at all the reviews on Steam/Metacritic/anywhere else.

The main selling point of FF14 is the story, and it's marketed as the "story-MMO".
With a story this bad, a lot of people will jump ship in the long term. And honestly, I am very hesitand to recommend this to anyone, even if the MSQ including 6.0 was amazing imo.

This game is currently the only reason the company is even profitable, Square cannot afford to let some absolute talentless amateurs work on the most critical part of the game.

These writers need to go. I don't want this game to become World of Warcraft.

even if i am fully on your side i dont get why people in this forum always have to bring wow into the topic...
But for its defense the last expansion have a pretty nice story in my view.

[Drimn]

Another interview dropped, this time from a German gaming site. He seems to think a lot of the anger is culture war stuff or foreigners not understanding the Japanese-style writing that went into Wuk Lamat, and handwaves the pacing as the struggles of introducing a new world and new people (even though the stuff that was shown to us was puddle-thin and honestly kind of offensive).
That being said, it's a little odd for a German site to talk about Wuk Lamat's voice acting being a point of criticism when apparently the German voice actor for her was very good, but we are talking about games journalists, I suppose. Anything to redirect discussion from the game itself.
https://jpgames.de/2024/09/final-fan...-an-wuk-lamat/

The Japanese aren't taking this one well, either. Top comment is calling Yoshi P clueless.
https://ff14net.2chblog.jp/archives/61770304.html

[Archeron]

Yoshi has been bombing a lot lately it's not unreasonable to start questioning whether he's up to maintaining the game for another 10 years. We've been shipped a lot of excuses for the weak content he's delivered over the years. First it was covid, then it was a chip shortage, and now what is it? "The graphical update was big" "I didn't know what to do with ____" "I didn't know how the community would react to ____". He needs to address the core issues with this expansion, and stop putting out weak PR that just stokes the flames even further. This is a paid, monthly MMORPG which is unable to deliver things that even free 2 play games have figured out by now.

[AnimalsALot]

Another interview dropped, this time from a German gaming site. He seems to think a lot of the anger is culture war stuff or foreigners not understanding the Japanese-style writing that went into Wuk Lamat, and handwaves the pacing as the struggles of introducing a new world and new people (even though the stuff that was shown to us was puddle-thin and honestly kind of offensive).
That being said, it's a little odd for a German site to talk about Wuk Lamat's voice acting being a point of criticism when apparently the German voice actor for her was very good, but we are talking about games journalists, I suppose. Anything to redirect discussion from the game itself.
https://jpgames.de/2024/09/final-fan...-an-wuk-lamat/

The Japanese aren't taking this one well, either. Top comment is calling Yoshi P clueless.
https://ff14net.2chblog.jp/archives/61770304.html

2. Anonymous Adventurer
September 3, 2024 00:52
It's obvious that they're not even supervising properly anymore, so don't say anything unnecessary.
Just focus on overseas travel and idol business.

5. Anonymous Adventurer
September 3, 2024 00:54
Well, the difference in perspective is becoming apparent...

7. Anonymous Adventurer
September 3, 2024 00:54
>At the same time, there will likely be a lot of players who like her as a character.
????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

17. Anonymous Adventurer
September 3, 2024 00:58
I knew that their sensibilities were out of sync with the users, but
when they're this far apart I can't have any hopes for the future...
I guess there are only yes-men left on the inside now.

162. Anonymous Adventurer
September 3, 2024 01:52
>>1
"The way her character is designed is very Japanese"

Why do you always say she represents Japan as if she were the one?
What is Japanese about that beast?


Also there are actually just no positive comments that got above 10 likes lol.

[Drimn]

Yoshi has been bombing a lot lately it's not unreasonable to start questioning whether he's up to maintaining the game for another 10 years. We've been shipped a lot of excuses for the weak content he's delivered over the years. First it was covid, then it was a chip shortage, and now what is it? "The graphical update was big" "I didn't know what to do with ____" "I didn't know how the community would react to ____". He needs to address the core issues with this expansion, and stop putting out weak PR that just stokes the flames even further. This is a paid, monthly MMORPG which is unable to deliver things that even free 2 play games have figured out by now.

I'll cut him a little slack, the chip shortage was 100% unavoidable. The game ballooned in popularity while Taiwan, a huge producer of semiconductors, was getting hammered by covid and crypto was at its peak, meaning the dwindling supply of chips was getting bought up by GPU manufacturers so they can sell them to Bitcoin miners at high markup. It's more unfortunate that by the time they had the data centers ready to roll out, the streamers had bailed and the player base was down from its peak to the point that Dynamis really wasn't all that necessary.

[CuteBucket]

We've been shipped a lot of excuses for the weak content he's delivered over the years. First it was covid, then it was a chip shortage, and now what is it? "The graphical update was big" "I didn't know what to do with ____" "I didn't know how the community would react to ____".

What really sucks too is that I was completely with them and on board for those excuses, because they were valid excuses. Covid completely fucked the entire global workforce and economy, of course I was willing to cut them some slack on patch 5.3 being delayed and it cutting into some content they wanted to have. The chip shortage was a real problem all over the world, so that was also an entirely valid excuse. Hell, at the time in 2022 I was just desperately trying to get a new dishwasher of all things and couldn't due to the global chip shortage. There weren't enough damn chips to make anything electronic, which is a lot of stuff! Plus it was the height of all that NFT and crypto BS so that was also leeching the market dry. Most of the player base I saw at the time was completely understanding and patient with the team for that stuff.

But then the Endwalker patches wore on, and those excuses stopped working. Vaccines were now out and covid was getting better contained. The chip shortage stopped and I could finally get my broken dishwasher replaced and upgrade my old dying GPU. They couldn't keep blaming the pandemic for lackluster content.

I believe Yoshi-P can't say the real reason why content has been so bad, because he can't publicly speak ill of Square Enix. I refuse to believe that the concurrent development of FFXVI didn't hurt Endwalker and its patch cycles in some major ways. And now we hear it announced that CS3 is working on TWO new titles concurrent to XIV, because apparently corporate looked at how XIV and XVI worked an said "That was great, do that again and more of it." And now Yoshi-P is stuck having to come up with some other explanation that isn't that to why the team is having problems, because he can never say anything like, "Corporate gave us two more games to develop so we're down a lot of staff on XIV right now."

[Willemdarke]

They're not the only person here, we are 16 pages in, and I am not sure why you consider this demand acceptable.

And if you bothered to read said 16 pages, you might have noticed that no one (okay, let's say 1, just in case I've missed it) is actually calling for him to step down, but instead be more heavily involved again.

Get off your high horse. You won't get extra tomestones for defending Yoshi-P's honour.

And in the words of someone you may be familiar with:

Be better.

[Drimn]

And if you bothered to read said 16 pages, you might have noticed that no one (okay, let's say 1, just in case I've missed it) is actually calling for him to step down, but instead be more heavily involved again.

Get off your high horse. You won't get extra tomestones for defending Yoshi-P's honour.

And in the words of someone you may be familiar with:

I personally would like to think this is him being disengaged because he's got way too much on his plate, or just left the game in other hands because he mentally moved on post-EW, and that he's being fed information from people that may or may not have the game's best interests at heart. I'd like to think that, but I honestly don't know. I don't want him to step down because we saw what happened when Koji Fox and Ishikawa got promoted away from creative positions to managerial ones. Be very careful what you wish for if you go talking like that.

[Besudo]

This is a paid, monthly MMORPG which is unable to deliver things that even free 2 play games have figured out by now.

Your entire post is completely correct but I want to highlight this part.

It's so frustrating because people are already throwing around the line he said about taking a break. I don't want to take a break, I don't want to play more than one mmo. I want to play this game and have a reasonable enough amount of things to do in it, even if it's casual. It has been 62 days since DT release at this point and, outside of raiding, there's nothing to do. I've never felt so reluctantly bound to the game because of my house and staying subbed to not lose it.

I'm not saying it needs to be all riveting content but the game's shortcomings have been piling up and have finally come home to roost in DT now that the story isn't distracting enough from them. Small zones with no need or lure to do any exploration, meaning they're empty. Easy dungeons that are one and done unless you're leveling alts. Content that's never been repurposed or we've been told straight up that it's not getting more additions. The combat system that's slowly been eroded to the point that I feel like we're just going to shift to a Blade & Soul style system with no trinity so no one ever feels any pressure. The massive amount of MSQ that new players need to slog through just to get to where everyone else is. Raid tiers always being the same size and structure resulting in bland and boring.

This is the worst time for 14 to stumble. GW2 just put out housing for everyone as well as just normal content in their expac. WoW is regaining their reputation after the restructuring and HR issues as well as Shadowlands and I've seen a lot of excitement around War Within. The competitors have never looked so appealing.

It's okay to experiment with the story or possible ideas but the problem is that we still have nothing to do in the game. EW was just as flat and irritating, especially when we got the Varient Dungeons. How much time was put into that, content that died the second week after arrival each time? How did they not plan a better system to keep people engaging with it? I'm baffled that people still play FF11 when it's like 20 years old and have things to do when it's been 2 months into DT and we're already having people pull out the "oh well Yoshi said to go play other games when you're done!" How did we get here?

I just hope this entire situation is a wake up call to stop resting on their laurels. It was a cosmic alignment of irl situations that drove 14's numbers up dramatically (the wow exodus, covid lockdowns, etc) and I was happy that 14 was finally getting more attention. Yoshi doesn't necessarily need to step down but he and any of the people in charge of 14 need to step back and have a good long talk about what is going on with the game and stop being scared of negative feedback.