Quote Originally Posted by kiotsukete View Post
I think DDR is a good analogy for the current state of FFXIV, even as a player who doesn’t do savage. When I recently returned to the game after leaving around the end of ShB, I was a little apprehensive about doing EW/DT normal trials/raids after being away for so long. Because in the past, you often used to have to look up guides and/or coordinate who was doing what ahead of time. But then I discovered all I had to do on newer content was just follow the designated “danger dorito”or “safety square” through the scripted steps to clear most fights on the first try.

Then I got Snowcloak on a roulette and was surprised they took out the snowballs on the 2nd boss fight. I later discovered they had also simplified a lot of the other older dungeons in the same way to eliminate/reduce party mechanics/coordination and remolded them to fit the current one-way corridors design paradigm. Players used to pause and explain mechanics or give directions on which way to go when they saw that first time bonus notification, but that doesn’t happen anymore now that even dungeons are down to just “follow the leader.”

I can somehow feel the dev team’s intention to make the game more easily accessible to new players and returners like me, and I sure don’t miss the times of repeated party wipes because one person in a key role couldn’t do their part correctly. These days even healers or tanks going down isn’t necessarily an automatic party wipe like it used to be. And maybe this is just how “contemporary” MMO design is now and I need to just get on with it. But I can’t help but feel like FFXIV has lost some of the magic that makes playing a MMO special and different from other games.
While I certainly do not miss some instances like old Toto Rak or Praetorium and whatnot due to their extremely poor replayability (they were obviously designed with first time experience in mind, and not for dailies), there has definitely been a pattern of streamlining every older mechanic and content, especially the quirky ones, into the generic DDR lego bricks we have everywhere now, be it stack markers, etc. It's definitely good to prepare new players for it since that's basically everything they'll be eating until the endgame and beyond those days, hell even savage since EW has almost every one of its mechanics built around stacks, partners, light party stacks, or spreads. And point blank AoE (chariot) vs donut (dynamo). Over and over and over with the unique mechanics happening in between. Party wides or busters are almost always of the exact same type and formula, requiring the same generic and repetitive mitigation solutions.

Everything is designed to work like a fast food venture where people can get in, and where they can just not talk to other players where other players act like glorified AIs, and where predictability of everything is key. XIV has always been scripted, but when you compare the ARR/HW model where enemy damage could crit, where autos were threatening and the boss ddin't stop for 80% of the time because casting long ass mechanics, where the boss wasn't constantly recentering itself to make sure the patterns remain the exact same no matter the tank you have, where a lot of encounter mechanics actually TALKED to the jobs and the battle system through attrition (and other features), to what we have now, yes, I'd dare say the game has become a different game for sure.

They do have tried a couple of new things in the recent expert dungeons with varying degrees of success, and in M2S as well, but it's very shy at best, and it still doesnt TALK to the job system because there is nothing left of a job system that has to be designed around the same blue and red lego encounter bricks with no other metric than where you do stand to solve a mechanic and not die and how much you can keep uptime and your rotation at the same time over a single metric that is damage.