Interview with YoshiP - PAX Aus 2024

[honest_psycho]

Fellas, I'm gonna be honest:
This game was a source of stability and sturcture for a few years now, and still do roullettes for the fun of it (got everything on lv100, mentor-mount, Tripletriad-mount, even the stupid Pteranodon so I did a lot)

Now, witnessing this absolute trainwreck of a story after investing that much time and effort into the game was not good for my mental well-being.
Of course I was trying to not let this 'drag' me down further (working on my games-backlog etc.)

But now I even see Yoshi-P himself join the ranks of people, who defend this story, this character...
There is no way in hell that he didn't see all the negative responses to Wuk Lamat.
I refuse to believe that he saw the endproduct and said "yep, this is great! Ship it!".

I REALLY hope, that he's just lying to save 'face' and not throw the writers under the bus (which he absolutely should btw.).

[Daralii]

Fellas, I'm gonna be honest:
This game was a source of stability and sturcture for a few years now, and still do roullettes for the fun of it (got everything on lv100, mentor-mount, Tripletriad-mount, even the stupid Pteranodon so I did a lot)

Now, witnessing this absolute trainwreck of a story after investing that much time and effort into the game was not good for my mental well-being.
Of course I was trying to not let this 'drag' me down further (working on my games-backlog etc.)

But now I even see Yoshi-P himself join the ranks of people, who defend this story, this character...
There is no way in hell that he didn't see all the negative responses to Wuk Lamat.
I refuse to believe that he saw the endproduct and said "yep, this is great! Ship it!".

I REALLY hope, that he's just lying to save 'face' and not throw the writers under the bus (which he absolutely should btw.).

He said previously that the reception is what he expected and that the main problem with Wuk's writing was that she didn't have enough confidence. "WE understand that this character is great, even if you don't" is seemingly the hill that they've chosen to die on, genuine or not.

[TaleraRistain]

He said previously that the reception is what he expected and that the main problem with Wuk's writing was that she didn't have enough confidence. "WE understand that this character is great, even if you don't" is seemingly the hill that they've chosen to die on, genuine or not.

Honestly wondering if there is some high-level executive meddling going on with someone telling them they have to make this character successful. They seem desperate for our opinions on her to change.

[VerdeLuck]

Honestly wondering if there is some high-level executive meddling going on with someone telling them they have to make this character successful. They seem desperate for our opinions on her to change.

Yoshi-P is the high level executive, he's on the board of directors.

[TaleraRistain]

Yoshi-P is the high level executive, he's on the board of directors.

I know, but possibly maybe the CEO or someone or something that has more influence.

[Raven2014]

Honestly wondering if there is some high-level executive meddling going on with someone telling them they have to make this character successful. They seem desperate for our opinions on her to change.

One thing is clear that WL is SOMEONE's favorite. Could be the writer's, could be Yoshi's (he said she's like a sister), could be some in the c-suits ... I don't think it's matter much tbh. What matter than in the last 30 years I have played a lot of games, watched a lot of movie and read a lot of books ... I can't recall a case when a character is obviously the favorite and it ends up well for that characters. Doesn't matter circumstance, role or even quality, they all end up being obnoxious one way or another.

[VerdeLuck]

Fellas, I'm gonna be honest:
This game was a source of stability and sturcture for a few years now, and still do roullettes for the fun of it (got everything on lv100, mentor-mount, Tripletriad-mount, even the stupid Pteranodon so I did a lot)

Now, witnessing this absolute trainwreck of a story after investing that much time and effort into the game was not good for my mental well-being.
Of course I was trying to not let this 'drag' me down further (working on my games-backlog etc.)

But now I even see Yoshi-P himself join the ranks of people, who defend this story, this character...
There is no way in hell that he didn't see all the negative responses to Wuk Lamat.
I refuse to believe that he saw the endproduct and said "yep, this is great! Ship it!".

I REALLY hope, that he's just lying to save 'face' and not throw the writers under the bus (which he absolutely should btw.).

From my perspective this seems like both Yoshida and his team put way too much stock into Wuk in the 10 year plan, they were really hoping this would be a grand slam character everyone would love, the next Graha Tia, the next Zenos, the next Haurchefaunt. The fact player very decidedly do not like her on every poll and in every metric shown, every time she gets even a slight feature in the back ground of a promotional image, that post on reddit/twitter explodes with 10x the comment all fighting each other, and so on tells them they were wrong. But they have an ego now, they're the great CS3, the best developers in SE and in MMOs, they know better than us. It seems like they took this personally and also are reluctant to change the story they had mapped out years in advance to allow for Wuk Lamat to fall into the background.

It's so weird to see an entirely different Yoshida from ARR coming into this game, at the start he was humble, took player opinion seriously, read the forums, changed entire sections ased on player feedback. Now we have a monolithic dev team who churns out templated content on a regular schedule and the story is planned out years in advance so if anything goes wrong, they have to power through it and there's no stopping it. We are at a crossroads, either Yoshi-P and the team get it in gear and fix longstanding issues and become more flexible again, or this game starts to fall off and we hit maintenance mode much faster than we anticipated.