Are we expecting TO MUCH from 8.0?

[Hyperia]

To the question "Are we expecting too much for 8.0?"

I believe not. In ARR, they managed to bring back this game alive after a disaster.

Now, the dev team, while they did an amazing stroy in EW, almost killed the game by making it too easy and boring to play. DT had some steps in the right directions, but it's again just them "trying to be safe" and not daring to do new things or to ask too much from the players. They also try to keep a "3 month for patch release" model on a 4-5 months patch release, making players wait and wait for content. Add to that one of the worst story where your character was like just a sidekick, and you get one of the worst and most boring expansion of the history of XIV.

For many players like myself, 8.0 will be the reason if they keep their sub or if they are done for good with XIV. Not only the game has to be good and innovative again, and not just a 50 hours of cutscene where I do nothing, but it also need to have a better calendar, patch release and engaging content on the following patches.

I was forgiving the devs for EW and DT, mostly because of nostalgia of how good the game used to be, but if they fail a 3rd time to deliver, then I'm done with XIV.

So, are we expecting too much? No, we are just expecting the game to be good and fun again, if it's not, we'll simply carry on and play other games.

They need to remember the lessons they so painfully learned from 1.x to 2.0, go look at your slides you used to show players.
They need to remember to communicate with us like they used to instead of, what is essentially, press releases and little interaction with the community.
They need to no longer operate on the concept of "it worked before, let's do it again" over and over and over. Most of DT was rubber stamped with little to no upper management oversight because they were assigned to other projects. They overstretched Yoshi, his leadership team and the developers way too much, making other games instead of maintaining and improving XIV.

If the future of SE depends on the future of XIV, then act like it and deliver.

The post EW patches and most of DT nearly caused me to cancel my sub, let my house go and walk away. I'm giving them one last shot with 8.0, as long as it's delivered fairly soon, Dec 26 / Jan 27. Anything later than that and, well... I left WoW to come to XIV because of a terrible content drought... I don't want to do it again.

[hynaku]

Wouldn't mind if it didn't have a story to it and just had lots of engaging fun quests and lots of activities to do.

[AlliciaCapulet]

Wouldn't mind if it didn't have a story to it and just had lots of engaging fun quests and lots of activities to do.

I don't mind having a story quest, as long as I feel usefull and that I feel connected to the goal of the MSQ... which was not the case for the super long cinematic that was DT.

I don't mind having fun or cute moment like an Alpaca that spit in the face of someone... But, with moderation. I like to feel I'm needed.

DT MSQ was mainly a boring long cutscene that went like :

"-Speak with Wuk Lamat
-Move to X,Y and speak with Wuk Lamat
-Follow Wuk Lamat and speak with her
-Speak again with Wuk Lamat
-Oh no! A thing that we need to continue is broken. Please, go gather a piece of rock somewhere while we fix it.
-Thank you for the piece of rock ! Because of your effort, the thing is now fixed ! Speak with Wuk Lamat
-Follow Wuk Lamat and speak with her
-Speak with Wuk Lamat
..."

That kind of story is boring. If the people that write the story wants us to feel that, for example, the train is broken and you can't do anything... Well, let me help on 3-4 quests to fix it, and not just with gathering 1 or 2 piece of wood and hop, it's now fixed. I want to feel that I really helped, that I did something. Having a NPC asking me to move a crate for whatever lame reason is a bad quest. But, having to fix something, or search something, if it's not happening too often, it's a good quest to make us feel that we actually gather the mats and do the fix.

Oh, and having 80% of the objective that are "Speak with Wuk Lamat"... that's a very bad writing.

So, I really hope that the 8.0 story will be better.

[AlliciaCapulet]

DT MSQ was mainly a boring long cutscene that went like :

"-Speak with Wuk Lamat
-Move to X,Y and speak with Wuk Lamat
-Follow Wuk Lamat and speak with her
-Speak again with Wuk Lamat
-Oh no! A thing that we need to continue is broken. Please, go gather a piece of rock somewhere while we fix it.
-Thank you for the piece of rock ! Because of your effort, the thing is now fixed ! Speak with Wuk Lamat
-Follow Wuk Lamat and speak with her
-Speak with Wuk Lamat
..."

Oh and don't forget. Speak with Wuk Lamat.

[SekiaTa1ga]

I care way more about content and design philosophy than I do story in FFXIV. With that said, I don't think FFXIV has had a healthy design philosophy in a long time and the story was really the only reason alot of people tended to overlook it. Now that the story sucked in DT, it's taken blinders off of people's eyes and they can see the actual gameplay for what it is, stale. They litter the game with fetch quests or running from point A to point B and then after all of that slog, the reward is an extremely formulaic dungeon that's composed of 2 trash mobs per hallway with a boss at the end, all while making jobs homogenized to the point where there's almost no satisfaction anymore in picking a main job; job identity is ruined.

Honestly the only good thing about DT has been The Arcadion.

I don't have high expectations for 8.0 because I don't think Square even considers some of the problems with the game as actual problems. The most I can hope for personally is they role back some of these awful Job changes/choices, but at this point I feel like even something as simple as that is an ask.

[Reginald_Cain]

If we're getting another dragon for summoner in 8.0 it should use fire blast , hit the stage like a Charizard, blaze like a Charizard, rage like a Charizard, big bodied Charizard! -Genwunner Rap Music.

[Daralii]

I care way more about content and design philosophy than I do story in FFXIV. With that said, I don't think FFXIV has had a healthy design philosophy in a long time and the story was really the only reason alot of people tended to overlook it. Now that the story sucked in DT, it's taken blinders off of people's eyes and they can see the actual gameplay for what it is, stale. They litter the game with fetch quests or running from point A to point B and then after all of that slog, the reward is an extremely formulaic dungeon that's composed of 2 trash mobs per hallway with a boss at the end, all while making jobs homogenized to the point where there's almost no satisfaction anymore in picking a main job; job identity is ruined.

Honestly the only good thing about DT has been The Arcadion.

I don't have high expectations for 8.0 because I don't think Square even considers some of the problems with the game as actual problems. The most I can hope for personally is they role back some of these awful Job changes/choices, but at this point I feel like even something as simple as that is an ask.

Rolling back the job changes would require loosening or abandoning the 2-minute rule, and that would require coming up with a new (old) design process for high-end fights, which the entire game has been made to revolve around. That's more work than they've shown they're willing to put in.

[Hyperia]

Rolling back the job changes would require loosening or abandoning the 2-minute rule, and that would require coming up with a new (old) design process for high-end fights, which the entire game has been made to revolve around. That's more work than they've shown they're willing to put in.

The job changes that have been done to us were asks by the battle team. Why? Because job actions that require complex and satisfying rotations, having to think about what to use and where, gets in the way of fast paced raids and ultimates.

Ultimates dictate job balance, what we use and the pace of what we use them. Savage has some consideration but all other content is not a factor in job design anymore.

[RedLolly]

The 2-minute meta has given a strong base in design for high level play, but made jobs play pretty samey because everything now has to comfortably fall into that two minute buff window.

The problem there is in practice, lower skilled players can complete the less difficult content with the current tool kit, and plenty of us on that lower, casual end found some points of the base difficulty and reaction speed of Dawntrail a sharp jump from what we're accustomed to.

I'm so mixed on Dawntrail's combat. Some absolutely jaw dropping fights with lots of creative ideas, but the push towards flash, speed, and everything hitting like a speeding bullet train has hurt the base of players that are those MSQ Andies and RP'ers that keep the lights on. Dawntrail's base MSQ content is harder, but apparently the EX and Savage stuff is easier, and the devs have repeatedly tried new difficulty formats to experiment with.

But instead of funneling players up to the more difficult and more extravagant fights, they've only succeeded in making most players less happy with the content we got and the new experimental stuff like Chaotic and Quantum have failed. We all know release timing annihilated the Cloud of Darkness Chaotic in the west, but Forked Tower (another 24-man savage) was also an unmitigated failure to the point JP players were actually boycotting it. And did anyone actually do anything between zero and maxing out Quantum? No one had any desire to fool around with the scaling system because it was pointless. You either want it difficult or you don't.

They've also made fights have far fewer opportunities to recover from mistakes by making 3 out of 4 attacks one shot kills or by stacking raidwides in rapid succession. It can be pretty demoralizing if you're trying to learn mechanics and you can't pick up and process your errors because you're dying so much your first attempt.

[SekiaTa1ga]

The 2-minute meta has given a strong base in design for high level play, but made jobs play pretty samey because everything now has to comfortably fall into that two minute buff window.

The problem there is in practice, lower skilled players can complete the less difficult content with the current tool kit, and plenty of us on that lower, casual end found some points of the base difficulty and reaction speed of Dawntrail a sharp jump from what we're accustomed to.

I'm so mixed on Dawntrail's combat. Some absolutely jaw dropping fights with lots of creative ideas, but the push towards flash, speed, and everything hitting like a speeding bullet train has hurt the base of players that are those MSQ Andies and RP'ers that keep the lights on. Dawntrail's base MSQ content is harder, but apparently the EX and Savage stuff is easier, and the devs have repeatedly tried new difficulty formats to experiment with.

But instead of funneling players up to the more difficult and more extravagant fights, they've only succeeded in making most players less happy with the content we got and the new experimental stuff like Chaotic and Quantum have failed. We all know release timing annihilated the Cloud of Darkness Chaotic in the west, but Forked Tower (another 24-man savage) was also an unmitigated failure to the point JP players were actually boycotting it. And did anyone actually do anything between zero and maxing out Quantum? No one had any desire to fool around with the scaling system because it was pointless. You either want it difficult or you don't.

They've also made fights have far fewer opportunities to recover from mistakes by making 3 out of 4 attacks one shot kills or by stacking raidwides in rapid succession. It can be pretty demoralizing if you're trying to learn mechanics and you can't pick up and process your errors because you're dying so much your first attempt.

The two minute meta is lazy and something I never understood, ESPECIALLY when it comes to high level play. High level players in almost every other game would be against the dumbing down of strategy and mechanics, but FFXIV 'high level' actually just involves people wanting to increase their damage without much thought put into it. Figure out how to optimally use buffs in this fight? Nah, just make it so we can blow everything on odd and even windows. It's actually insane to me the more I think about it.

I wish they'd get rid of the 2 minute rotation and heal the schism between high end content and everything else. Extremes only go so far, they need to integrate challenging content in an organic way into the base game instead of just opt in extremes and savage/ultimates.