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

[Voidmage]

I feel like there's a distinct difference between casual content and busy work.

Collecting things like emotes, Triple Triad cards, barding, etc; vistas, verminion, completing all the entries in Varients, fate grinding, island sanctuary, these are a few things I consider casual content.

Mining 4000 times in a zone or finding 20000 pieces of Accursed Hoard to me is pure busywork. I know that's probably divisive since people will still point and say that mining that same few spots in Thanalan 4000 times is content since there's an achievement for it but I'll never be able to think of that as more than padding. I am glad that you and other hunters enjoy that sort of thing, I'll never rip on someone for liking what I don't.

Wha I would love to see is something like Genshin has.
Little mini trials in the overworld, small time challenges (like Bozja duels) like riding your Chocobo over obstacles.
These are fun little things in between, not that hard to implement and the rewards could be little things like Gil.
Just small things to give players a reason to go into those zones.

Hmm, maybe I should make a thread about those ideas…

[BakoolJaJa]

Wha I would love to see is something like Genshin has.
Little mini trials in the overworld, small time challenges (like Bozja duels) like riding your Chocobo over obstacles.
These are fun little things in between, not that hard to implement and the rewards could be little things like Gil.
Just small things to give players a reason to go into those zones.

Hmm, maybe I should make a thread about those ideas…

Or a certain other MMO that now has puzzles in the open world, treasures to find with neat quests to solve (that don't directly point you to the objective) and rewards ranging from things like pets (minions) to gear/materials/just story stuff, racing courses that let you fly across the entire locations trying to get medals and beat your own best score, delves that are solo friendly content that challenges you with fun little dungeons and mechanics like traps, resource management, rewarding you with anything from neat appearance shit to EVEN ENDGAME GEAR as an alternative to hardcore raiding, pet battles in the open world, etc etc.

Or we could look at any other game that has stuff to do in the actual world that isn't just picking up a quest and handing in a quest. So pretty much any game. Except ffxiv. Because for some reason, even 10 years and 5 expansions later, we are just not capable of evolving anything about the game.

[genuine_stranger]

Or a certain other MMO that now has puzzles in the open world, treasures to find with neat quests to solve (that don't directly point you to the objective) and rewards ranging from things like pets (minions) to gear/materials/just story stuff, racing courses that let you fly across the entire locations trying to get medals and beat your own best score, delves that are solo friendly content that challenges you with fun little dungeons and mechanics like traps, resource management, rewarding you with anything from neat appearance shit to EVEN ENDGAME GEAR as an alternative to hardcore raiding, pet battles in the open world, etc etc.

Or we could look at any other game that has stuff to do in the actual world that isn't just picking up a quest and handing in a quest. So pretty much any game. Except ffxiv. Because for some reason, even 10 years and 5 expansions later, we are just not capable of evolving anything about the game.

Sometimes I think this game is catered to cubicle workers who just want to log in, do a few dailies, and log out.

No time for fun in the overworld if you log out in an hour anyway, sleep, and go to your next 10-hour shift anyway.

[jameseoakes]

Sometimes I think this game is catered to cubicle workers who just want to log in, do a few dailies, and log out.

No time for fun in the overworld if you log out in an hour anyway, sleep, and go to your next 10-hour shift anyway.

Honstly I'd say this is the case and the game really doesn't seem to have any aspirations about trying to be more

[Zaniel]

Yoshi said they'd try new things when players demanded changes to what they considered stagnation of content, they'd fail at times in their attempts, and they'd learn from those failures to grow and get better. They're literally doing what we asked, they warned us we may not like some of these things, and they asked us to provide feedback so they could grow / change / continue to try new things.

The community collectively got what they wanted and now their angry it turned out as they were warned it could turn out as. Instead of giving them time to respond to feedback they're demanding someone(s) be fired be it a VA, a team of writers, or Yoshi. All of that is inexcusable and reeks of entitlement. Storm blood wasn't great, I dislike it as much as I'm not a fan of DT, but I'd never be so entitled to call for a person's job. They can give it another go, learn, get better, and hopefully give us another Shadowbringers.

This isn't "got what they wanted". No one asked for boring nonsensical plots for 8 year olds that ignored lore, every basic tenet of storytelling and turned characters into idiots.

Sure, no one should be roaring for people to be fired, that's being childish but by the same token the people who brought us Dawntrail are manifestly un-equipped to deliver on what's required for the FF14 MSQ. It really doesn't matter if it's their own lack of talent or poor supervision or outside influences, the only thing that matters is the horrible outcome. So the team need to go back and work out why all this happened and whatever that pain point is, address it. If that means people need to be reassigned and more experienced writers brought in, then that's what needs to happen.

Dawntrail's MSQ is such a disaster there is no "Oh let's try the same thing again, but harder" or "Let's just keep throwing at the wall and see if it works". Fix needed now, how CBU3 do this is up to them.

[Morphiana]

You're not getting a fix now no matter how much you want it now. That's not how timelines for development work. As they said, they've begun looking at the story for 8.0. 7.X patch story may be tweaked but the voice and animation work for much of the stuff coming soon is likely well underway. This is why it took WoW until the xpac after Shadowlands to correct many of the mistakes they made.

Yoshi said they'd make mistakes and learn from them. How you took that as "they'll just do more of the same but harder " is beyond me. If they did that with Stormblood then Shadowbringers would not have existed.

But I do agree DT is filled with mistakes from the story to the English VA studio delivering an underwhelming performance across the board at times. They said they'd try new things, make mistakes, and learn from the mistakes. They tried new things (going after a younger audience among other things), they made serious mistakes, now I'm going to watch and see if they uphold their promise of learning from those mistakes by utilizing player feedback.

[Rueby]

You're not getting a fix now no matter how much you want it now. That's not how timelines for development work. As they said, they've begun looking at the story for 8.0. 7.X patch story may be tweaked but the voice and animation work for much of the stuff coming soon is likely well underway. This is why it took WoW until the xpac after Shadowlands to correct many of the mistakes they made.

Yoshi said they'd make mistakes and learn from them. How you took that as "they'll just do more of the same but harder " is beyond me. If they did that with Stormblood then Shadowbringers would not have existed.

But I do agree DT is filled with mistakes from the story to the English VA studio delivering an underwhelming performance across the board at times. They said they'd try new things, make mistakes, and learn from the mistakes. They tried new things (going after a younger audience among other things), they made serious mistakes, now I'm going to watch and see if they uphold their promise of learning from those mistakes by utilizing player feedback.

I applaud your optimism. I wish I could share it but I can't.
I think if this expansion came without the graphical update, then I may have been alright with it yet I can't accept these changes to my character, the world, the eyestrain, and to top it off? Really bad MSQ with bad voice acting...I loved this game to bits, until post EW began....When I preordered and resubbed before DT I knew the MSQ may not be for me, all my favs died in EW, I never imagined my favorite game would be causing me headaches and physical pain.

I was helping someone power level BLU and I have a headache...in areas I never had headaches in before. DT was the expansion that made me seriously think about unsubbing and I feel honestly betrayed. The lighting in my house is busted, I can hardly play without fear of headaches, the MSQ is unbearable. At least the grass looks nice and the new areas look 'nice' but I can't enjoy it because everytime I move my eyes hurt.

I'm sorry but to me this is unacceptable. I effectively have 6 months of something that's hurting my eyes. I think if Wuk Lamat was as omnipresent in the trailer as she was in the MSQ, I doubt people would've been excited for DT.

I hope they fix the graphical issues, I don't think my eyes have it in them to wait 2 years. I stay to bump the eyestrain thread..

I'm done giving them the benefit of the doubt until I see changes. No pun intended.

[Raven2014]

It's not just Yoshi, but they also promoted/move Ishakawa and Kojima Fox away from the game, and these 3 are the pillars of the game. That's why now we had terrible localization, terrible writing, and the general direction just feel off. The people that supposed to replace them are either not up to the task, or too desperate to put their own stamp on the project that it shows.

Sinking ship? Hardly. Not yet anyway, but it's obvious some serious course correction need to happen. People like to link DT to 2.0 but I don;t think it's fair. Sure, if you compare it to today standard, 2.0 was not very good. But 10 years ago it was more than adequate. Remember 2.0 didn't have the benefit of a fair judgement either, it had to be good enough to make people forget and forgive the 1.0 launch, and it was good enough to become the most successful come back story in gaming ever. The point isn't really just about how DT compared to 2.0 and be relatively the same, the point is DT itself is well below average for a game released in the years 2024.

Disregarding that would be like talking about income without inflation adjustment. 12 years ago making 50k a year will get you very far where I live, because rent was only 600-800 a month. These days 50k doesn't mean much when rent had essential triple that. The person earning 50k/year now does not have the same wealth level as the person making 50k/year 10-12 years ago.

[ZXN]

Sometimes I think this game is catered to cubicle workers who just want to log in, do a few dailies, and log out.

No time for fun in the overworld if you log out in an hour anyway, sleep, and go to your next 10-hour shift anyway.

This is how I've felt since playing Endwalker. Everything during that expansion for me personally was just simple and boring and easy to do. I know FF14 is seen as the "casual" MMO but they kind of seem to take that a bit too literal sometimes and just either barely try or don't try at all. Even Yoshi-P said the standard required content put him to sleep, and hell it genuinely did put me to literal sleep sometimes. Endwalker felt like it was made for those 5 days a week 9-5 workers who only had about 2 or 3 hours a day to play, so they made the entire expansion more focused around being as "casual" as possible so the players who did work the 9-5's wouldn't feel stressed about the usual long grinds and whatnot. It's understandable since COVID was still pretty rampant back then, but it resulted in an expansion that caused quite a bit of a split between players who wanted the casual content to be harder and more engaging and players who were happy they could just blitz through everything without needing to use more then half a brain cell and not care, and of course it gave us the infamous "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate" line spoken by Yoshi-P.

While Dawntrail's story is.....a thing, the casual battle content currently ingame has been great so far and definitely a huge step up from Endwalker, and I am just hoping it stays that way or gets even better. We'll truly see once the alliance raids come out.

As for Overworld content: they CAN do better then just jumping puzzles, but there is just no reason for them to. Looking at the Final Fantasy Franchise, there are A LOT of minigames you can do in most of the games. Sure there ARE a pretty good amount of minigames in FF14, but they are either locked to the toybox in the Inn or The Gold Saucer. Overworld wise there is triple triad and the jump puzzles and that's really about it. Adding things that already exist in other Final Fantasy games would be nice, like putting in Chocobo Hot or Cold from FF9. Or they could expand on things that already exist in-game. For example the gold saucer already has Chocobo racing, so they could just find a way to make a single-player version of it and have you race on unique courses in the different areas and zones in each expansion on your company Chocobo [Or Amaro on the first if they wanted to do that extra step] to beat time trials or challenges for minion rewards or unique all glamour items. Hell they could even be somewhat "original" and do a bunch of minigames with the Kojin's Manta Ray in Tamamizu that you do under the water.

Unfortunately stuff like this is justnot even remotely on their radar as "things we should do in FF14" so I won't huff the copium and pretend overworld minigames that are not jump puzzles are going to happen anytime during this game's life.

[Voidmage]

Yoshi said they'd make mistakes and learn from them.

They said they'd try new things, make mistakes, and learn from the mistakes. They tried new things (going after a younger audience among other things), they made serious mistakes, now I'm going to watch and see if they uphold their promise of learning from those mistakes by utilizing player feedback.

Sorry to butcher your post but I want to respond to that.

I understand making mistakes, it is even important to make them.
But I think there are two major problems with those mistakes in DT and at least part of the reason for the anger.

Making such a huge gamble in the MSQ of all things without a real warning first (like „we will try a new approach on how to write a main character“) is just not good.
They didn‘t even give a warning of how much Wuk Lamat would be the MC, heck she wasn‘t even a topic until 6.55 and even after that nothing suggested this approach. Even the trailers and fanfests didn‘t imply as much.
They were far too mysterious about the female Hrothgar and kept Wuk Lamat far too long hidden.

The second is that it’s stupid to make succh an experiment of „look what sticks“ without a backup plan.
If they gonna experiment then the first two patches should be something entirely else instead of continuing that approach.
If the players would have been happy then they could have told them they will continue it, if not then they would have a plan B.
But waiting for 7.4 or at worst 8.0 before they change course… I don‘t know if that is healthy for the Dev-Player relationship.
Granted we don‘t know the patches yet but right now it seems they bet all their money on people loving the new approach and Wuk Lamat.

In my opinion it was a mistake to start such an experiment with the MSQ or at least without a proper warning.
This is a product people pay for and they expect a specific safety in what they can expect to get.

Their approach of „surprise the players at the last moment“ they usually do with the story backfired spectacularly this time because it wasn‘t the story itself they changed but the narrative.