The Reason Why FFXIV Is No Longer Fun/Exciting

[TheDustyOne]

This final point IMHO often gets overlooked. People often ties replayability to rewards but that’s ignoring the actual process to get said reward. It is to no wonder that players nowadays are so reward-centric that they very often are obsessed to ‘shorten’ their gameplay so much just to quickly get their reward & get out, never touching the content anymore. Because why wouldn’t they? Rewards are one-time. Gameplay is garbage, focusing at one very narrow, specific subtype of player while leaving the rest dead in the ditch.

In game design, there's what is called intrinsic reward and extrinsic reward. Intrinsic reward is internal; the feeling of satisfaction of fighting the boss well, learning and mastering a fight just because that fight is fun, replaying it because goshdarnit I want to try out a different strategy or I feel I could do something better this time around. Extrinsic reward of course is the external factor; you're doing this fight for the gear, the glamour, the minion, etc.

You ultimately need both, the extrinsic rewards motivates you to do the fight in the first place, but the intrinsic rewards is what ultimately makes the game engaging, those are the dopamine hits from playing well. But to achieve it, you need depth, plenty of choices that can affect how you perform future plays, failure states (otherwise "correct" plays have no meaning), risk vs reward, etc.

The reason I think people only care about the extrinsic rewards you mentioned is because there's no intrinsic reward to care about. We do the content just enough to get all the rewards and stop bothering after that. The moment things like player expression and interesting choices get made, it's easier to shoot that down and say "that'll be hard to balance; you'll get a meta where everyone goes for the best choice anyway; people will just use the safe strategy and ignore the hard one (or vice versa)." But in my opinion, the content that ages best are things like Eureka and Bozja where there is some level of player agency in say, what Lost Actions you can bring, Logos actions, stat potions that can potentially change your role in combat, sub-jobs, etc. Despite my issues with Occult Crescent, I still had fun taking Time Mage as my sub-job just because I liked how well it synergized with Red Mage, using Oracle and ignoring the damage penalty of that one spell it has using Hallowed Ground on Paladin, etc. Those are fun, that's the player expression part of intrinsic reward done right.

[Veritas-Ancora]

You ultimately need both, the extrinsic rewards motivates you to do the fight in the first place, but the intrinsic rewards is what ultimately makes the game engaging, those are the dopamine hits from playing well. But to achieve it, you need depth, plenty of choices that can affect how you perform future plays, failure states (otherwise "correct" plays have no meaning), risk vs reward, etc.

The reason I think people only care about the extrinsic rewards you mentioned is because there's no intrinsic reward to care about. We do the content just enough to get all the rewards and stop bothering after that. The moment things like player expression and interesting choices get made, it's easier to shoot that down and say "that'll be hard to balance; you'll get a meta where everyone goes for the best choice anyway; people will just use the safe strategy and ignore the hard one (or vice versa)." But in my opinion, the content that ages best are things like Eureka and Bozja where there is some level of player agency in say, what Lost Actions you can bring, Logos actions, stat potions that can potentially change your role in combat, sub-jobs, etc. Despite my issues with Occult Crescent, I still had fun taking Time Mage as my sub-job just because I liked how well it synergized with Red Mage, using Oracle and ignoring the damage penalty of that one spell it has using Hallowed Ground on Paladin, etc. Those are fun, that's the player expression part of intrinsic reward done right.

I totally agree with you about Eureka. People still roll their eyes when I say that Eureka was the best content that XIV has ever come out with, but I find it true specifically for this reason. I loved encountering the bosses and having different techniques to take them down. The elemental system was excellent and made you want to level it (whereas in Occult Crescent, I don't see the intrinsic or extrinsic reward in getting all of the jobs capped).

[TheDustyOne]

... (whereas in Occult Crescent, I don't see the intrinsic or extrinsic reward in getting all of the jobs capped).

You don't really "see" intrinsic rewards as much as you "feel" them. They also have a habit of being rather subjective in how rewarding they can feel, and it's the reason why someone can love Eureka but hate OC or Bozja. As for the extrinsic part of getting jobs capped, that would be things like the achievements you unlock (are there achievements for levelling them? I can't remember), the passive buffs you get that do a blanket damage and defence increase, the skill buffs that last half an hour, and of course the rest of the sub-jobs abilities to experiment with. The extrinsic rewards are very easy to notice since that's usually the reason why you would want to do the content to begin with, it's just a matter of whether they feel rewarding enough for your time spent, and the more boring and/or tedious something is to do (which is to say, whether it feels intrinsically rewarding or not), the better the extrinsic reward needs to be to make up for it.