Concern on the current state of FFXIV, and future content

[Asiren]

I’m no stranger to grinding for relic weapons. I grinded two Zeta weapons before 3.0, one Lux weapon before 4.0, and before I quit FFXI, got two Abyssea relics. I’m in the process of working on two more Lux weapons.

Of all things to take from FFXI, the exp party grind was not it. We don’t even get the flashy skillchains and magic bursts to make things occasionally interesting. Nope, just the same exp penalties if your party members were not around the same levels, no Reraise to let you raise yourself without imposing on anyone, and no Sneak Oils and Prism Powders to allow you to Sneak and Invisible past monsters.

Heck, even FFXI effectively got rid of the exp penalties due to wide level differences thanks to level sync. Yes, this was the original reason why level sync was added to FFXI, and was very much well loved for it. No more exp gain penalties just because your lowest leveled member was 5 levels below your highest leveled member.

If I wanted to play FFXI, I would re-sub to FFXI. You know what Eureka reminds me of?

The FFXI Seekers of Adoulin expansion which I hated enough to quit FFXI completely. It has the exact same feel of being incomplete. It also has the exact same “let’s explore this island with dangerous mobs that can kill you” except Seekers of Adoulin actually had new monster models and also added two more jobs to FFXI… Geomancer and Rune Fencer.

There’s still potential for it to be fun, but it needs a lot of work to make it more exciting. FFXI’s Abyssea had a system where you had to figure out the right weapon skill or spell to try to “stagger” the mob making incapable of attacking or casting spells. You didn’t burn the mob down because you’d get next to no drops if you didn’t stagger it. FFXI’s default combat system had skillchains and magic bursts which I have yet to see anywhere else in any other game.

The amount of grief-ing I saw last night in Eureka was really hurtful. There was one player trying to MPK my party (only 4 members) by aggroing mobs and then running around us hoping that we would do an accidental AoE to get aggro right in the area where we were trying to complete Krile’s level 3 quest. It was night, so there were ghosts out. This didn’t happen in FFXI because you’d get a bad reputation, and you would get kicked out of parties for it. It was less than 24 hours since the patch was released and already people are being quite mean.

It happened again when we had a full wipe on a NM fate (not just my party, pretty much everyone at the fate died) due to the two chimeras being allowed to run rampant along with people aggro-ing the nearby mindflayers. What was the purpose of causing the entire instance to wipe when we were down to less than 10 minutes left on the fate?

One last thing… The drop rate needs to be fixed. In the time it took me to get to level 4, I got 11 protean crystals. In that same amount of time (about 2.5 hours), my husband only got 1 protean crystal. We went in together, spent the same amount of time, yet, I got 11 and he got just 1. There’s no reason to make that drop rate that bad.

[Final-Fantasy]

They shouldn't have even made this game to begin with. Instead, they should have built on what they already had, Final Fantasy XI Online.

It could have been updated as World of Warcraft was, for example.

However, I enjoy Eureka.

[Recaldy]

Well, here we are in SB, and we're still playing ARR.

This. Seriously this.

[Eisenhower]

They had seventeen months of development time [...]

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but if it were me I wouldn't announce Eureka until it was a bit into development so that I'd know that things would get implemented. So odds are SE's been at it for longer than that (alternatively, Yoshi dropped this bomb and then let the team start, but that feels like a dick move).

content that has longevity. [...]

At this point, I'm convinced that the XIV team either labours under a very different definition of "longevity" than what vocal parts of the playerbase considers as such - or they're simply unable to produce such content, be it due to skill or engine limitations.

Regarding Eureka I am shocked (well, I guess not that shocked) that we have been presented with a piece of content that flaunts exploration and adventure, yet provides maybe one or two hours worth of said exploration before devolving into a slow and simplistic grind. Both iterations of Diadem had the same issue (in my eyes), along with airship exploratory voyages - which is arguably stretched out due to long-ass mission timers - and submarine voyages. The aforementioned content can all be labelled as having "longevity" if we consider how much time we are supposed to dedicate to each task. An amount of time dictated by the sheer number of things player must make their way through in order to reach the end goal. Unfortunately, the journeys in these cases are at least to me not enjoyable enough to warrant replay for the sake of re-experiencing said journey.

I'd rather have longevity in the sense that content is fun enough to play that I don't mind going back to it even when the rewards are outdated, just for the sake of playing it.

It's easy being an armchair developer with no regard to budget, planning, or time. Yet from that comfortable armchair I find that the blatant solution that perhaps doesn't fix, though definitely would alleviate the above chores would be a degree of randomness. The example that pushes itself to the forefront is random maps.

Fully procedurally generated maps for each instance is no doubt beyond the capabilities of the XIV engine, but we know for a fact that procedural stitching of tiles isn't - we've all seen the Palace of the Dead. If stitching large tiles encompassing areas as big as the islands we saw in the Diadem is too much, then at least shuffle and deal us a random map from a set of static maps with different layouts. Look to how the Diablo series provide novelty for players running the same zone/rift over and over again through map variance. That should serve as a good example.

Such randomness - be it tiles or maps - gives us at least some variation, or sense of exploration as we enter this type of content repeatedly. There's plenty of other kinds of randomness that should by all accounts have already made it into this game: random monster attributes and abilities (as compared to cranking numbers to 11), randomly stitched repeatable tasks/challenges/rewards (instead of getting 5000+ tokens from flat-out farming), randomly stitched relic steps (actually I think the Anima weapons had a bit of this). The list can go on.

Point is, the XIV team can and should do a lot better than this. There are a plenthora of other games out there from which they can sample ideas. They shouldn't be afraid to make use of what works.

[Penthea]

Something new, that we hadn't seen before. Something that would be engaging and so far unseen in XIV.

Vague as all heck and not even true since as many people have said this is the same old stuff in a slightly different (albeit aesthetically pleasing) package.

Right, I recall this vagueness too. Which was why I was wondering why so many players were under the impression that something mindblowing was coming, as I didn't remember SE saying anything of the sort.

I expected similar to something we already have because mmos tend to keep their content somewhat consistent so that classes work properly and players won't have issues interacting with it. Even POTD wasn't completely new. Bosses are bosses, mobs are mobs and classes act the same as the rest of the game. The core elements that drove it are things player already were familiar with. This is what I expected from Eureka and this is what we got.

If people don't like it fair enough. You can still dislike something you expected. But I think people who expected something out of this world set themselves up for disappointment, not SE.

[Faeon]

Right, I recall this vagueness too. Which was why I was wondering why so many players were under the impression that something mindblowing was coming, as I didn't remember SE saying anything of the sort.

I expected similar to something we already have because mmos tend to keep their content somewhat consistent so that classes work properly and players won't have issues interacting with it. Even POTD wasn't completely new. Bosses are bosses, mobs are mobs and classes act the same as the rest of the game. The core elements that drove it are things player already were familiar with. This is what I expected from Eureka and this is what we got.

If people don't like it fair enough. You can still dislike something you expected. But I think people who expected something out of this world set themselves up for disappointment, not SE.

I kinda agree with this, I think that the player base is expecting something mind-blowing, a new concept that is not the regular content or additions to this game. I highly dought that they will go all out and change the whole state of the game. I too find myself getting tired of the same old trend and are not sure if I would pick up the next expansion.

I also wonder what the player base is wanting in this game now, to me it seems that they almost want another reboot, re-envisions to the game. I don't know if it is budget or lack of vision and not wanting to take risks on SE's side. But with the current trend now it is just going to be the same old cycles and grind and as much as I would also like to see meaningful raid content that is not just one super primal encounter I have come to just not get excited anymore or looking forward to something as it will be the same old content.

[polyphonica]

I also wonder what the player base is wanting in this game now, to me it seems that they almost want another reboot, re-envisions to the game. I don't know if it is budget or lack of vision and not wanting to take risks on SE's side. But with the current trend now it is just going to be the same old cycles and grind and as much as I would also like to see meaningful raid content that is not just one super primal encounter I have come to just not get excited anymore or looking forward to something as it will be the same old content.

The problem is that the formula they have is still working for them. According to Square Enix, every expansion has grown the game's playerbase more than the last. According to the latest player survey, there are more active players playing now than at the similar point in the HW patch cycle. So when you have a working system, it's very hard to be the one who's like "you know what we need now? to reinvent the wheel again." The biggest contribution Yoshi-P made to this game wasn't exactly the directorial decisions, but to create a stable and sustainable content development cycle that delivers proven results, both during the remake process and after that. That same "stable system" is also what leads to this overall "stagnation" in perceived creativity. (And one might argue that every time they try to stray outside the stable system, the community hasn't reacted terribly well.) After the failure that was 1.x and the cost to rebuild, I think Square Enix just wants FFXIV to remain a stable money-maker for as long as possible, and this makes them very risk-adverse. (Of course, I'm sure they also realize that nothing will continue to grow forever.)

Personally, I suspect we will see one more expansion that follows this model, because Yoshi-P himself commented that the current story arc they have planned for the overall game goes through 5.x. After that, it would not surprise me at all to see Yoshi-P step back from the part of his role and bring in some new staff to start taking over bit by bit (perhaps eventually moving to Executive Producer). That might also be when you start seeing some deviation from the formula to some degree. But even then, I think this game really has found its overall identity, for better or worse, and it's better to continue expecting the "stable system" rather than any major reinvention, since that's really what "saved the game" to them.

[Vhailor]

I kinda agree with this, I think that the player base is expecting something mind-blowing, a new concept that is not the regular content or additions to this game. I highly dought that they will go all out and change the whole state of the game. I too find myself getting tired of the same old trend and are not sure if I would pick up the next expansion.

In fairness, SE has slowly cut down the number of dungeons created for each content cycle, and implied that this will allow them to focus on other more creative content / QoL improvements.

I think it's fair to say that, as we look at Eureka, the delays involved, the supposed extra cycles that SE had to spend, and the utter lack of any other real QoL improvements since 4.0 (unless you want to count the ridiculously limited and poorly-implemented Glamour Dresser scenario), the question on a lot of players' minds is: where did these extra cycles go?

I know for me, that's actually one of the worst parts. I see SE raking in more cash than ever, going off their quarterly business reports. I see the cash shop better-supported than ever. I see less content each update cycle. I see the Relic weapon grind getting delayed repeatedly. I'm struggling to see any sort of long-term benefit to players, here. I'm not seeing a larger development team; I'm not seeing a more creative development team; I'm not seeing more and better QoL fixes; I'm not seeing ambitious work being undertaken on FFXIV's problematic back-end architecture. I'm not even seeing improved efforts to communicate with the player base.

Now, maybe all of these things are coming down the pipes, but thus far, we have received no sign of them. And that has made Eureka an especially bitter pill to swallow - because SE's decisions have implicitly built this up into something big, something worth waiting for. And it really, really wasn't.

[Penthea]

The doom and gloom over this is insane. So much of this thread is "Eureka isn't what I wanted it to be so I think the entire game is doomed now."

This reminds me of the Shirogane launch. So many players claiming the whole game sucks because they didn't get a house.

It's fine to dislike something or be disappointed but thinking the whole game is going under its a bit much.

[Vhailor]

The doom and gloom over this is insane. So much of this thread is "Eureka isn't what I wanted it to be so I think the entire game is doomed now."

This reminds me of the Shirogane launch. So many players claiming the whole game sucks because they didn't get a house.

It's fine to dislike something or be disappointed but thinking the whole game is going under its a bit much.

Eureka is the icing on the cake that is the 'game is going under' argument. There have been long-running concerns about the game's direction and stale update cycles since Heavensward. Eureka was viewed as a potential, long-awaited step in the right direction. Its astonishing lack of inspiration and creativity is, therefore, dredging up all of the old arguments that players like myself have done our best to suppress since 4.0 released - an effort, might I add, that was done out of respect for SE's development team, out of respect for their need for more time in regards to Eureka. So, now, the gloves are off again - but Eureka is the spark, not the powder keg.

Are you even reading people's posts in their entirety?