Concern on the current state of FFXIV, and future content

[AvalonBright]

With Eureka’s release, I’ve come to admit I am deeply concerned for the state of this game. There’s a lot of things I love about FFXIV, and a lot I dislike, but up until now I’ve often pushed the things I disliked aside and put up with them as they didn’t seriously detract from the game as a whole. But it’s at this point, with 4.25, that I am realizing this game has a serious development problem and as a fan who has been playing since 1.0, who saved up and bought a new PC strictly to run 1.0, someone who’s literally not unsubbed for a single month since ARR’s release, that deeply worries me.

It’s certainly a widespread meme that Square doesn’t put any of the money FFXIV makes back into the game itself. Naturally, it’s impossible to know if this is true at all, or if it is, to what degree. But the more patches come out in Stormblood, the more I’m wondering if this is less a meme and more truth than we’d like to admit.

Let’s put it into a current setting--but please, do not dismiss this thread as “just another Eureka hate thread”. I am simply using the most recent patch as a backdrop and culmination of where the current development environment has led us. We have been waiting seventeen months for Eureka to release. It has been delayed multiple times. We have been told we’re seeing less content, less dungeons, etc, all for the sake of more original content. Yet this. This, Eureka, is what we got, for all we gave up.

Now I am an old-school gamer. I spent many, many years on Phantasy Star Online, Ragnarok, Everquest, etc. Simply going around grinding thousands of mobs is not something I am unfamiliar with. But that doesn’t cut it anymore. Not without some effort in making the grind compelling, or a combat system that makes the wholesale slaughter across the island entertaining.

Even off the top of my head, I can think of a number of things that Eureka could have come with that would have improved it.

• Add a new Students of Baldesion daily hub. Find more survivors across the island, repower the aetheryte, discover the mystery of what happened to the Island in the first place. Dailies are a minimal form of content to be sure, but it’s still more compelling than what we got! Yet the fact Square still refuses to even look at the reputation system as anything but a vehicle for Beastmen means we missed the mark here.
  
• What about a FFXII style hunt board? One of the few positives I’ll say about Eureka is that it truly feels like an expedition. The island is mysterious, the backdrop is gorgeous, the monsters are dangerous. It’s easily one of the most beautiful zones Square’s created. Do something with it! Make us actually seek out targets that show up more than once every few hours! Do hunts RIGHT instead of the godawful Allied Seal system! Make hunts give meaningful, interesting rewards! Even go Monster Hunter-style and give us numerous mob-themed weapons and gear sets from the island instead of this cowboy business.
  
• Rewards for mapping out the areas gradually? Clever players have realized you can sneak around the entire island with Hide, but remove this and have us chart sections out for various benefits as we travel through the island. Add to the expedition feel!
  
• Sharlayan furnishings, woo! Fantastic, especially for lore nerds! But...why are they just a lame, random drop? Either figure out a way for players to gather while in combat jobs, or have merely interactable nodes in a different way, but new, rare materials! This island is from a part of the world we’ve never seen before! You’re telling me there’s no new flora to catalog, no useful beastie parts? New stuff, let us CRAFT IT!
  
• Relics! Make an interesting, themed storyline around the Island while we gather our relics up! Don’t give us the WORST RELIC GRIND YET! I heard people in Shout yesterday talking about the Relic grind always being terrible, so there’s no reason it shouldn’t be “Diadem 3.0 terrible” Why? Why are we okay with not taking Square to task for putting the bare minimum effort in these weapons?

“But Ashe, all of that would take development time!” Yes, that is my point. They had seventeen months of development time to do any number of these, or anything else, but they did nothing. Why it took seventeen months to test a Magia Board and create a grindable island with zero content is beyond me. Even the mob models aren’t new.

And this, finally, is why I am worried about the future of this game, and why this isn’t just “Yet another Eureka hate thread.” In Stormblood, as much as I enjoyed the MSQ, we’ve had less Jobs, no new Race, less dungeons, less content in general per patch, even less effort in raid environmental design--just compare the aesthetic surroundings of Alexander to the empty floating voids and singular arenas of Omega. We’re two patches in and we’ve received no major new, “original” content that we’ve been promised, beyond a new zone that accomplished absolutely nothing of compelling consequence. Even Hildibrand continues the Heavensward trend of no longer including new Trial content.

It’s well known when Yoshi took over the game, the development team played WoW to get a better sense of the genre. Yet, there is something people overlook--the WoW developers played during the development of ARR was Wrath and Cataclysm-era WoW. A WoW that was just barely beginning to step into the modern age, redoing the world, and reinvigorating the concept of questing beyond simply “Go here, kill/grab this, come back.”

Now, prefacing this with the fact I am no longer any major WoW fan--I play for the main storyline now and that’s it--the fact remains, FFXIV has almost entirely failed to innovate and push the limits of its capabilities while we see WoW trying new things almost constantly. Besides the misstep that was WoD, we’ve seen WoW go through Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, Legion, and now Battle for Azeroth. In all of these WoW has innovated, iterated on itself, and improved its basic form regularly.

When WoD was out, I laughed at a friend who still played the game, because I compared the anemic content patches to how much we saw in Heavensward. But now, as Stormblood’s initial hype trickles to a crawl, and Legion reinvigorated the WoW community, I have egg on my face. In Legion, we see further improvements on systems FFXIV Is still sorely missing, like a proper glamour wardrobe. We see fully voiced, properly crafted cutscenes, while we see the bare minimum of voiced content in FFXIV despite years and 2 expansions of being responsible for Square’s profit.

In Legion’s content patches we see not one, but four full, new zones, all complete with their own storylines, dungeons, daily quests, factions, and more--mounts, pets, etc to gather, and so on. We saw the intriguing method of weapon leveling with the Artifact system, even if it had its own missteps along the way. In Stormblood, we see the embarrassment that is Eureka, and again, the worst, soulless Relic weapon grind the developers have come up with yet.

I do love Yoshi-P. I love that he reinvigorated this game, that he gave it life, that he boosted it into being one of the most successful games of the genre. But I fear, more and more, where the future of this game lies. With Eureka more than ever, I worry that we’ll see the same old raid pattern, the same old Beast Tribe reputations, the same old MSQ/sidequest patch style, the same everything with no true, quality innovation. I worry about this development team being up to the task, and Square squandering what good they’ve got all for the sake of FFXV development and dumping more funds into FFVII:R.

FFXIV’s biggest draw at the moment is, in my opinion, its depth of worldbuilding and sense of believability. People like immersion in MMOs, often, and few, if any, manage to craft such a well done universe as Square has. FFXIV’s world is why I continue to stick with the game more than anything. It’s a home, a place that feels like something tangible, where games like WoW become “gamier” than ever with every update despite their breadth of content. But I am greatly worried that eventually this world isn’t going to be enough to make up for a development team that seems stuck in holding, and I beg Square to take a good, long look at where this game is going before 5.0, even 6.0, comes around, and it’s too late.

[Hyperia]

I am also very worried about their current course. I’ve already activated my wow account that was dormant for 4 years because of what you have said. For now, I’ve reduced my account to the minimum and hope to hear more but as of right now, the devs have been very noticeably absent from these forums. I also feel that all of their developers and money is bent redirected to VII and by promoting Yoshi to the board effectively muzzles him on complaining. I have the feeling that this game is taking a back burner to their other games and is on the downhill slide. I love this game and it pains me to see this happening but all good things...

[Mahri]

An extremely good post.

I love FFXIV to death, but the content formula's overall sameyness spells long-term decline. As much fun as I still have, throwing the utter regression that is Eureka into the midst of the predictable formula just emphasizes this. We know Square-Enix can do better, and hope that they will, because this game still has tons of potential longevity.

[MomomiMomi]

I've long felt that Yoshi-P's vision for the game is letting it stagnate. I know, everyone loves him, so I'll probably get some hate for this. He saved FF14, etc.. But then he did nothing with it. His vision for the game is one-dimensional.

I've been saying the same things since HW that a lot of people are saying here now. Everyone said "it's just the first expansion, give it time." Well, here we are in SB, and we're still playing ARR.

[Kaonis]

I've long felt that Yoshi-P's vision for the game is letting it stagnate. I know, everyone loves him, so I'll probably get some hate for this. He saved FF14, etc.. But then he did nothing with it. His vision for the game is one-dimensional.

I've been saying the same things since HW that a lot of people are saying here now. Everyone said "it's just the first expansion, give it time." Well, here we are in SB, and we're still playing ARR.

I'm right there with you. I was also making the same arguments back during HW, and that was before Diadem was even out and still presented some glimmer of hope. But you put it into words better than I could, "He did nothing with it". Its been 5 years and the game has gotten the fluff and spectacle of fights down, but the actual substance is missing without a shred of new systems in sight.

Its a shame this game is made from the same company that brought us XI. That team, for all their faults, creatively pushed what their engine could do. ToAU was centered around a mercenary theme, letting us do Assaults and Beseiged. Then later giving us Nyzul Isles, Salvage, and Einherjar. WoTG was themed around war and had the entire campaign system in place; everything from fighting battles to control areas from the enemy, to doing little dailies back in the city to help the effort. And this is not even touching other expansions or content like monstrosity.

Yes, not all of it hit; but for the life of me I can't think of anything that flopped as hard or was met with as much ire as Diadem and Eureka.

Meanwhile SB is all centered around the allied forces entering into open conflict with the empire. Outside the story this amounts to....nothing. No new system of liberating towns and bases on the front lines. No leve like system to support the war effort and bolster NPC defenses of said towns. We got exactly the same content we have always had. The same linear hallway dungeons. The same zergfest FATEs. The same timed dance routine bosses. And now this, an open world mob grind fest so you can grind levels so that you can maybe more efficiently grind the gear that follows the same ilvl routine we've had all along.

[Aylis]

I'm right there with you. I was also making the same arguments back during HW, and that was before Diadem was even out and still presented some glimmer of hope. But you put it into words better than I could, "He did nothing with it". Its been 5 years and the game has gotten the fluff and spectacle of fights down, but the actual substance is missing without a shred of new systems in sight.

A friend and I had talk sorta related to this he said to me "If only FFXIV had Wildstars housing, GW2's transmog system and the combat of Tera/BnS" My reply was "So what you're saying is...sell the rights of Final Fantasy to NCSoft?"
I've thought about how that could go, if SE colabed with Blizzard or NCSoft. SE can do the graphics, lore,setting, world and music. Things they know how to do well, and leave the actual game play side of things to the other side. Just how would FFXIV be then.

[Recaldy]

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

This. Seriously this.

[Sylvina]

I've long felt that Yoshi-P's vision for the game is letting it stagnate. I know, everyone loves him, so I'll probably get some hate for this. He saved FF14, etc.. But then he did nothing with it. His vision for the game is one-dimensional.

I've been saying the same things since HW that a lot of people are saying here now. Everyone said "it's just the first expansion, give it time." Well, here we are in SB, and we're still playing ARR.

The basic formula works. it just needs a little refinement and slight variation from time to time. and consistent worldbuilding. if it ain't broke don't fix it.

[AncientCrystal]

I've been concered long before Eureka, It's obvious to EVERY SINGLE PLAYER who is lv 70 thats theres barely ANYTHING to do outside Savage content. Challenging content with longevity that is. They don't EVER try to add anything to this game that's interesting other than POD floor 101+. Yoshi-P at this point should be let go and let someone who really want to move the game in a new direction take over. It's pathetic.

[Lord_Zlatan]

This thread needs more likes ^^