General concerns with the Devs content philosophy

[Arkfrost]

Have you met the BLM Stormblood questline? The lore was great but the objectives were laughable. Literally 5 quests of "Go here, kill a thing. Great! Now go do that in different locations up to and including the final quest, which is more of the same but the thing you kill is a bit bigger than the other things"

Well, quest design in general was never so extremely diverse anyway, but my point is, that if they cut down the amount of quests they have to make, in turn they could at least flesh them out a little bit more. Maybe implement some minigames.

I personally don't play WoW, but a friend of mine showed me some common WoW sidequests and for example, there was that random quest where you had to basically play a round of candy crush with runes to solve a puzzle or one, where you were playing foldit with lines of magic to solve another one. That's the kind of diversity I'm hoping for, we could get in return for less quests. Maybe a minigame, where you have to shoot fireballs at targets as a Black Mage (you could even use the same system as the Air Force Gold Saucer game) or a minigame for PLD, where you have to use a magical shield to shield NPCs from projectiles kinda similar to the shield you use as a duty action on Agrias in the Orbonne Monastery.
Another great idea for the physical dps role quest would've been if you went on a Monster Hunter'esque quest to hunt down that large mob as the WoD, destroying parts of its body to weaken it and you see the model changing during the questline from your actions.

Another point is the story that was really interesting for the two questlines i did until now. There wasnt anything the same, no they where completly different story wise, just similar things happen at the same lvls but the story is totally different.

I have no issues with the story at all. It was great for melee DPS, however they could have made more individual stuff, like for example hunting that large mob from the storyline as the WoD, weakening it by destroying parts of his body (like horns, fangs, etc.) with subsequent quests.

I think role quests present a great opportunity for new story telling for the jobs while allowing the Dev's to keep up with the ever increasing number of jobs.
What I hope they do with them in 6.0 if they intend to keep them is have the jobs come together in larger plots.
For example, something so great that black and white mages need put aside their differences and pull together to stop the threat, Red mage has to being them together, bam, caster role quest, it works with new game plus as playing it as one of the 3 would give you a different perspective.
I think something like that would be interesting, would love to see Paladin's and DRK's having to coexist.

I completely agree with you in every aspect. Also, what you suggested with the caster questline would sound absolutely fantastic. Reminds me of what I suggested earlier as a Red Mage job quest, but even better and more fleshed out.

[MrKusakabe]

I love map editors since Command and Conquer: Red Alert from '96 or what that was. And when I see these ugly "floodfill" maps (huge areas get the same texture), I get the shivers. Usually, mappers flood-fill a certain area and then place "patches" of different kind on top of it (e.g. layers of dust, dirt, rubbish in city levels or patches of darker grass, higher grass, etc.) to add variation. First I thought it might be a render distance-thing, but even when I play in GTA2-mode (topdown camera) I note how often they appear to resort to floodfilling again. Many ARR maps, espeically the Gridania forest (good memories from 2013!) you had so many different patches: Straw near the camps, dirty tracks, moss... When I played Bless - yes, I did, and I enjoyed it kind of - the maps looked the same with all the floodfilled floors and massive mountains being floodfilled as if this is the first Unreal Engine again and you only have 8 MByte of VRAM with your VooDoo card, something deemed as Alpha/Beta status. Here we have an expensive game (expansion packs + monthly rental fees, sorry, "subscription" fees we pay the stuff that should be in said paid expansion pack in small brackets, called "Salami tactics") and this lacks so much.

Maybe it is because I map myself, but it often feels they went with a cheep terraforming tool and just moved all over the screen with the "Random Boulder brush" and call it a day..

Sincerely,

[Hazmick]

1) I really liked the role quests, they were all of a high quality and linked in to the MSQ/lore perfectly. Job quests were always hit and miss for me. Some were great (DRK) while others were...not so great (PLD).

2) I agree with your glam point, although I'm sure we didn't get Sophia and Zurvan weapons with SB's release. The former were from 4.5 and the latter are still missing.

3) I absolutely disagree with you regarding zones - I find every single ShB zone wonderful to look at and explore.

4) I'm on the fence about voicing. Sure, more would be great, but it would increase dev time and costs considerably. I don't have trouble reading things.

[ForteNightshade]

Then just make new job trainers on the First. Just to give you 5-second thoughts that would instantly come up as ideas for job quests:

This implies our jobs exist in the same capacity they do on the Source. Some could be outright extinct or sworn into secrecy—where its practitioners aren't keen to teaching someone entirely new to the First. And while that does sound intriguing, how do you tie it all into five quests? Furthermore, you then have to consider this only works for a handful of jobs before it starts becoming repetitive. No matter how you approach it, the logistics just don't make for a good story arc. I rather like how we, instead, learned more about the Warriors of Darkness.

[Seraphor]

This implies our jobs exist in the same capacity they do on the Source. Some could be outright extinct or sworn into secrecy—where its practitioners aren't keen to teaching someone entirely new to the First. And while that does sound intriguing, how do you tie it all into five quests? Furthermore, you then have to consider this only works for a handful of jobs before it starts becoming repetitive. No matter how you approach it, the logistics just don't make for a good story arc. I rather like how we, instead, learned more about the Warriors of Darkness.

Yeah I don't think I'd find it believable to see all of our jobs on the First in the same way.

Astrologian is specifically Sharlayan.
Machinist is specifically Ishgardian.
I wouldn't expect Red Mage to exist in the same capacity in Norvrandt.
Dragoon? What's a Dragon?

[Knahli]

I didn't feel the maps were lacking myself even if I admit that your screenshots portray it somewhat poorly. However, I do have a gripe and that is painted on doors. There is such an overwhelming lack of accessible buildings and it really bugs me. I don't need anything amazing, but access to most of the buildings, even if its just a tiny, generic room would make me so much happier.

Also that waterfall in Kholusia which has the one spot you can actually swim in the water? That was a missed opportunity to have a hidden cave behind it's base. Come onnnn.

[Arkfrost]

2) I agree with your glam point, although I'm sure we didn't get Sophia and Zurvan weapons with SB's release. The former were from 4.5 and the latter are still missing.

I wasn't talking about only the craftable variants, but the normal variants as well and we have the Zurvan and Sophia weapons for Samurai and Red Mage. I mean these ones:
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...m/d9fb11675aa/

4) I'm on the fence about voicing. Sure, more would be great, but it would increase dev time and costs considerably. I don't have trouble reading things.

How would it increase the dev time? You only need more voice actors and people supervising them.

This implies our jobs exist in the same capacity they do on the Source. Some could be outright extinct or sworn into secrecy—where its practitioners aren't keen to teaching someone entirely new to the First.

Yeah I don't think I'd find it believable to see all of our jobs on the First in the same way.

Sorry, but that is such a dumb argument. The same way you could argue, that Miqo'te should be gender locked, because according to the lore there aren't many male Miqo'te or that you aren't allowed to use the three sacred treasures from Japanese mythology (Yasakani no Magatama, Yata no Kagami, Kusanagi no Tsurugi) to summon a primal, because to summon a primal you need crystals... wait... that's how Susano was summoned... Oops.
The devs can bend and shape the lore like they want, since unlike WoW for example FFXIV doesn't have a pre-existing lore. All lore comes from FFXIV itself and the lorebooks are just written by Sharlayan scholars, who - as we already found out - were completely wrong in some aspects (light being umbral and not astral for example).

Astrologian is specifically Sharlayan.

*COUGH* GEOMANCERS ARE *COUGH* OTHARD'S ASTROLOGIANS *COUGH*

Machinist is specifically Ishgardian.

So? What about the mechanics in Twine? Why can't they help the WoL develop cool gadgets like the Automaton Queen via Talos tech?

I wouldn't expect Red Mage to exist in the same capacity in Norvrandt.

A special someone will not be very pleased that you forgot about her.

Dragoon? What's a Dragon?

Exactly. What's a Dragon?

[Seraphor]

If you don't want to care about the lore, that's fine....

A geomancer isn't an Astrologian.
A fencer isn't a Red Mage.

[Takamorisan]

I agree about the concern, but it ain't Designer Philosophy, its more financial administration. FFXIV team can do so much with the limited funding that SE hands to them. Sadly FFXIV gains and profits don't return 100% to the game production, its used to fund other SE projects. If 50% returned to FFXIV, the team would be huge.

[Addicted]

While I don't really care about the lack of voiced cutscenes, I agree with your first and third point. Both in quality and length, role quests are pretty much identical to regular job quests. Spaced every 2 levels, with bland objectives that you clear in 10 minutes. They added those roleplaying quests where you take control of another character but they were pretty basic. If you're going to condense 15 jobs worth of quests into 4, I'd expect an increase in both quality and/or length, and I got neither.

The empty zones were also something I noticed back when they previewed the zones and the Crystarium ended up being a big offender in that regard. Call me a contrarian but I found the small snippet of the Rapture tech demo the Crystarium was based on to look better than what we've got. Empty space isn't necessarily bad and it helps to create a sense of scale but in XIV it usually boils down to barren plains with very little in them, other than some rock formations and scattered shrubbery. Other than the odd bird shadow, XIV doesn't even have fauna to make the places feel more lived in (with the exception of the underwater zones where you can see fishes going about their business and even a giant shark). By this I mean stuff like birds perched atop tree branches, lizards going down tree trunks, packs of birds flying in the horizon, small critters running through the tall grass and so forth. They've added some NPCs that appear and perform certain actions when you get near a place, like browsing a shop's wares, but it does little to mitigate the feeling of desolation I get from most XIV zones. Probably why the Rak'tika map is my favourite this time around, it suffers the least from these issues in my eyes.