How's Ultimate?

[RiyahArp]

You do realize those doing ultimate had no content for 1,5 year to do? And u're telling them about no content?

And after this, they still will have no content to do. The difference is they will raid log in a week instead of a day. And people will stop talking about this the moment any one group beats it, because the question of who will beat this first is really the only matter of interest to it. You can't make content for that group with any longevity short of making it literally impossible, and every single bit of "hard" content in this game massively falls off in interest a couple of weeks after release, and needs constant refreshing to get people to do it.

[KaivaC]

Ultimate or not, there would not be more content in 4.1 anyway.
3.1, story, 2 dungeons, raid24, Lord of verminion, Diadem, beast tribe , 1 EX. (nothing later in 3.15 except relic and 1 side quest)
4.1, story, 1 dungeons, raid24, GC dungeons with your squad, new map stuff harder, Delivery quest, beast tribe, side quest, 1 EX, Ultimate, Shirogane. (4.15 rivals wing, perform, Eureka, relic?)

(ultimate or not, they have decide to stop doing more dungeons in 4.1 4.3 and 4.5 patch way before)

Basically, more stuff in 4.1 than 3.1.

Thank you for adding this. To say that we have less content is ridiculous. It feels empty...but that's only because some of the biggest complainers here are going through so much content within a week and then whine that they have nothing to do. Blaming Ultimate on the lack of content is just troll bait - except the troll believes the ridiculous statements they are posting.

[RiyahArp]

Thank you for adding this. To say that we have less content is ridiculous. It feels empty...but that's only because some of the biggest complainers here are going through so much content within a week and then whine that they have nothing to do. Blaming Ultimate on the lack of content is just troll bait - except the troll believes the ridiculous statements they are posting.

Squadrons: useless. I had all jobs at 60 at the start of the expansion, and I have tanks and healers, so there's no appeal to taking longer to run through a pre-50 dungeon for no reward beyond a couple of emotes. It's actually worse than squadron's original launch because there is no real long term point to doing them. In a meta sense, squadrons are just players beta testing square enix companion AI for the time when the game goes majority solo for its low level content, but we are doing it as "content."

Delivery quests: take five minutes to craft 6 items. Turn them in once per week for scrips. I get more longevity out of doing the daily cacpot than I do it.

New map stuff/canals: same as HW content, same issues (boring, mostly done for artificially scarce optional items, rewards are pure rng). Actually worse because now its stacking rng just to get the "new" content.

Beast tribe: the same things we have been doing since ARR with no creativity. The tribes were getting tired in HW, with the Moogles at least something different by being a new crafting tribe, but how many times does SE expect us to click on nodes and use a mount's special ability on them, or kill a small amount of enemies? They have the same problem as SB FATES, it;s the same tired formula with slightly better exp rewards.

the ex fights are on par for HW release, and at best had slightly more longevity than them. Even now Susano and Lakshimi are dead, same as Bis and ravana.

Shirogane...come on, that was one day of grabbing a house.

***

SB is bad because too much of it is the same as HW, but slightly worse (albeit with better rewards.) You do the same things you did more or less exactly in HW, down to the same timer and pattern. Leveling a job in SB hasn't changed in any way, there is nothing new like POTD to add variety. Leveling a craft is the same way, just quicker since leves are so much more potent now post 60. The big innovation in SB was redesigning jobs because they reached their maximum threshold of buttons and they couldn't add new abilities and keep them playable for most of the playerbase.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Also, please...the actual asset creation is the smallest part of creating a fight. The length of development is about balancing the fight as it is played, to prevent bugs, people cheating, the fight breaking the servers due to memory leaks, the fight actually being within human reflex time and capabilities, the time it took to think of and layout the attacks they wanted, and to conceive of the level of difficulty in terms of game mechanics. They didn't give this to an intern and told him to make a hard fight, which he coded in a weekend. Stuff like this is the experimental content they talked about when they reduced the amount of dungeons we'd get in a patch cycle, and even the experimental content they do give is sparse.

You act like this took ample time away from something else. Do you have any experience to claim such or are you assuming? The devs themselves said Ultimate had no impact on us only having a single dungeon, but let's assume it did. Who really cares? Yes, let's have another dull dungeon where no one cares about mechanics, tanks pull everything and nothing requires any real challenge because things barely tickle. If they actually changed things up in regards to dungeon I might care. Alas, they don't. So I'm far more interested in Ultimate, personally, even if I may never clear it.

[Nestama]

It's a total waste of resources.

By that logic, Turn 5, 9 and 13 (maybe even 12) were a waste of resources.

[KaivaC]

snip

So instead of essentially saying everything is useless, why don't you take a break and wait until 4.2? That's what quite a few people do...they take a break once they are done with whatever they wanted to do with a certain patch, and then they take a break from it. If what's available doesn't interest you, I don't see why not just take a break for a few months. Lakshmi and Susano have been around for 4 months...so yeah, of course they will be dead at this point with all the farm parties that have occurred over them prior to Omega being dropped. I actually enjoy squadrons and quite a few others also enjoy it, so it's your opinion that it's useless. You want to talk about patch 4.1 as a whole and get a full blown discussion over it, make a thread about it. I am just mostly contending the complaints against Ultimate in this thread.

[heynowjose]

It's not something people are going to grow into doing, or be reused later on for any content even unsynced.

This will end up worse than 1v1 pvp for long term usefulness.

The problem is this right here. People keep looking at Ultimate as though it is content made to be "useful", if I may borrow your word. It's not. It's purely a challenge for those who've requested one.

The same way other parts of the game have been changed/added because of the requests of the more casual players. (And for the record I'm one of those casual palyers. I've beaten everything but Delta4 and I don't plan to any time soon lol And ultimate doesn't bother me at all. It's not meant for me)

This content is just that. A challenge. The reward is beating it. That's it. It's not meant to help casual players progress further, or be played for years on end, or help keep you busy until the next patch. It's only meant to give a challenge to players who've mastered all other content.

[Ameela]

This content is just that. A challenge. The reward is beating it. That's it. It's not meant to help casual players progress further, or be played for years on end, or help keep you busy until the next patch. It's only meant to give a challenge to players who've mastered all other content.

And there's nothing wrong with that.
The reason games like Dark Souls, Devil May Cry and Cuphead (for a more recent example) are popular is because people like the challenge those games provide.

It doesn't need to be useful, you might only play the game for gearing up and progressing but there are others who actually just like playing for fun, and if it takes fights like Unending Coil for that then who are you to take that away from them?

[Miste]

To all the people complaining that Ultimate exists...

This game is not catered to you and you alone.

If everyone could just be like "I don't like X so X shouldn't exist" this game would lose money.

This is normal for a MMO, they have tons of different kinds of content in order to cater to tons of different kinds of players. The game isn't meant to cater 100% to one type of player.

Person A likes leveling, questing, and dungeons so they play.
Person B likes savage raids and difficult content so they play.
Person C likes gathering and crafting and working the market board so they play.
Person D likes RP and housing so they play.

I mean I don't like PVP in this game much should I say it shouldn't exist just because I don't like it?
I don't RP either so should we remove housing and all RP elements to the game and delete Balmung just because I don't like it? ( just a joke don't lynch me D: )

Oh and btw this is from someone who doesn't have access to ultimate either. My static is pretty casual and we are still working on the last bit of getting Neo Exdeath down.

I also probably would never put in the time and effort needed to clear Ultimate either since I am lazy, but it is there for people who love that kind of challenge even if I am not one of them.

[Rhais]

What happened to the actual point of this thread? I've just read through page after page discussing the merits or lack thereof of creating content of this nature, but very little on the question posed in the original post. So how is ultimate?