Are the developers of XIV out of touch?

[GrumbleBeard]

Watching the recent live letter I found myself feeling the same as all the others. Questions come up about things like more character creator options, new races, etc and are met with the same answers. "sorry too hard pls understand". Then they move on to the stuff they ARE working on. A collaboration event that seems cool but will likely be short lived. Mogstation exclusive items like Cloud's ugly, immersion breaking motorcycle. Things that may be nice for a time, but nothing substantial. Things that don't really get people excited anymore.
In MMOs, your character is the most important aspect. You spend most of your time getting gear for your character. Changing how they look to suit your tastes. Making your self insert or perfect waifu. Yet we've never received more character creator options since the games inception. It's only the second expansion and already it is too difficult for them to make a new race. We are down to only 2 jobs an expansion because muh tank/healer balance 2 hard. Each patch takes longer and longer and has less content.
I can only speak for myself, but I hope at some point they take a step back and check their priorities. Take a moment to read the forums and see what people want. Things that will keep people playing, so maybe I can log in for once to more than an empty friends list and dead linkshells.

[Enla]

SE is a small indie company, adjust your expectations accordingly.

[TaleraRistain]

SE is a small indie company, adjust your expectations accordingly.

...please tell me this is sarcasm.

[zztoluca]

...please tell me this is sarcasm.

Its a joke.

[Rufalus]

I would be interested in stopping the cycle of alternating 3-parter raid series on odd and even numbered patches that last 2 years together.

Instead start doing different unique raids on each patch that are not part of a series chain. That way people who don't like certain themes can look forward to something entirely different each patch.

Start mixing loot around instead of trials almost always giving weapons, alliance raid always giving armor, etc.

[Aerlana]

*snip*

This is the matter of Final Fantasy XIV, but not only for raids...
We all know what will mainly be in 4.4, but we are waiting after 4.35 and 4.36
3.0 and 4.0 are same, so much of us are thinking 5.0 will be a third time the same thing.


And who would say i am dumb thinking the 4.2 will get 4 raid8 bosses, with a story that follow the 5.0 raid8. New tomestone, 2 dongeon (1 fully new, and 1 that is a rework from a "old" one) and primal? and Sure, some Hildibrand quests! How surprising
Even for Itemlevels we can see a patern that allow us to have idea of the ilvl we will be able to get at 5.4...

Yoshida found a recipe that is clearly not bad. and use it everytime. The Dev Team need to understand we want to have some real surprise. But when we know what we will get on each patches before they spoke about it... How get surprise?

yes, no one thought the room of the new POTD would be bigger, No one know who will be the 5.1 primal (we just know we will get one) but and all those things just aesthetic matter? The game can have wonderfull music, perfect stories, magnificient ennemies and environnement, it wont change anything about the boring feeling...

[KaldeaSahaline]

Last time I ran dungeons in WoW, they were also pretty linear. Some do allow for doing some bosses in a random order, but many are just as linear. I also don't see them as being any more or any less deep - you have trash to deal with, occasionally with a mechanic that needs to be handled, and then bosses with 3-4 major mechanics.

Very true that MOST are linear. However, that's a big difference from ALL. For instance, Legion has 13 dungeons (I don't count VH), of which almost a third of them have open ended design. Not only that, but even in linear dungeons there's often some clever navigation and not a literal hallway.

Regarding Depth there are things like:

• Meta Achievements
• Optional events/paths
• Scaleability impacting how encounters go

Not sure where you're getting that dungeons in FFXIV are identical in layout either - pretty sure each map is different. Often linear (as often as WoW's are, especially post-Vanilla content - the ones from the classic game are the only ones that really had the open variation, but that kind of design has been missing from new dungeons for about 11 years now), but that's nothing new for either MMO.

They're all just hallways. You know it. I know it. The only ones that aren't are the 1.0 dungeons. Remind me again, how well are they received by the community? Have there been any since ARR?

Speaking of identical - funny that of the two games, only one offers dungeons that are the "hard mode" of previous versions that are literally the same location, with the exact same bosses (occasionally you get that one extra tucked in a corner) and trash, and where everything just now hits harder and bosses maybe get a new ability or two...versus reimaginings of the location into a sort of "sequel" version of the dungeon that often leads to new spots on the map and has brand new bosses.

Can't argue with that. It's a good feature.

That all being said, you've missed the context of my comment, which was related to the amount of content (given that the person I was quoting specifically mocked what they saw as a decline with the suggestion that we'd be getting one new dungeon and one fight in savage, it's exceptionally clear they are talking about amount).

I didn't miss it, I just didn't think discussing strictly quantity as a good discussion point. I felt that if FF14 released every single dungeon boss from SB and made them savage raid bosses with no retuning people could say oh you have more bosses than WoW, but really there'd be a staggering quality difference. (To be fair I wasn't super impressed this expansion with raid boss design outside of maybe 10 or so total examples).

Speaking strictly personally - I feel like there is a decline in content (even though I don't think there actually is). If that makes sense. It feels worse than it did before, because the same thing that worked 4 years ago, isn't exciting enough to keep working today, again all IMO.

As for the UE4 upgrade comment - I admit that I did undersell the effort on the part of the developer needed, but that was in response to what I feel was an overselling on your part. Bringing up that they are updating to a new engine, in a thread where talking about making upgrades to a game are common, and NOT clarifying that it's not an in-house engine and that another developer made the engine they are working with (in both cases, UE3 and UE4) implies that SQEX is holding back on us by not doing something similar.

It's tough to quantify. As someone with experience working with a staggering legacy codebase of a fortune 500 company I know some of the issues SE runs into. That said, I also know that having control over the engine behind the scenes allows for a ton of insight into how to improve/update/replace it. Improving an outsourced solution is not always as easy. I don't have enough info to draw a conclusion either way unfortunately, but wanted to point out that another company is doing it, and that it was a requested feature for a while now.

[GrumbleBeard]

I would be interested in stopping the cycle of alternating 3-parter raid series on odd and even numbered patches that last 2 years together.

Instead start doing different unique raids on each patch that are not part of a series chain. That way people who don't like certain themes can look forward to something entirely different each patch.

Start mixing loot around instead of trials almost always giving weapons, alliance raid always giving armor, etc.

This would be great. When 4.0 released and the ananta primal dropped accessories I thought maybe they were going to begin switching things up a bit, but it see,s to have been a one time thing.

[SinisterJoints]

SE is a small indie company, adjust your expectations accordingly.

literally the dumbest reply Ive ever seen. Especially since SE is a multibillion company. Lol at your salt