Anemos wins round 1... Bozja Southern Front is so much worse

[RTX3080]

I didn't expect a regression but here we are. There are so many things wrong with Bozja that I don't even know what to say.

1. Anemos looked far prettier than BSF. In Anemos there is a huge variety of landscapes - forests, hidden ravines, murky caves, freshwater everywhere... In BSF the landscape is just ruined cities and WW1 trenches... At least the Rank 10 critical engagement looks nice enough. Everything else though... URGH.. murky brown

2. For some reason it's not even optimal to do the relic within BSF. So what is the point of doing BSF if it's faster to do the relic outside? Please MASSIVELY increase the drop rate of the relic items because in Anemos every single NM gave you crystals.

3. Cutscenes, cutscenes... Everywhere. Why the heck are there so many cutscenes? It completely disrupts the flow of BSF and I have to spend so much time watching cutscenes that I missed so many critical engagements. Make the cutscenes shorter!! No one cares about the story.

4. Red Chocobo and Castrum is too damn difficult! Have you ever seen a wipe in Eureka because I sure haven't. How did these two fights pass QA?

5. 1v1 fights. You usually see around 20 people queueing for the 1v1 and only one person gets selected. So you only have a 5% chance to do the 1v1 challenge? Why are we adding RNG on top of RNG?

6. Purple Hrothgars. Why do NPC Hrothgars look like Joker clowns? Give them normal brown/dark skin please. Who the heck thought purple Hrothgars or green Hrothgars looked attractive?

7. BSF takes 4 hours to complete. Anemos took 2 days. We're getting far, far less content...

8. You have to do Castrum Lacus Litore 165 times to get a full set of relic armor. Is Square Enix crazy?



Rating:

Anemos: 7/10
Bozja Southern Front: 5/10

Let's see if Square Enix can improve next round.

[Kaliesto]

No one cares about the story? Honestly this doesn't sound like the MMORPG for you then.

[Enla]

No one cares about the story? Honestly this doesn't sound like the MMORPG for you then.

He's a troll. He's just poking proverbial bee's nests to see which one incites enough anger to suit his trolling purposes. If he gets a topic successfully off the ground he'll go back to his corner, satiated for the next week before doing it all over again.

[Raltar]

His comments on story aside, he makes very good points.

[Cilia]

His comments on story aside, he makes very good points.

Not so sure about that. I only touched it so far as I needed to go do the weapon upgrade questline (60 FATEs in one sitting is a bit excessive, and getting a Mt. Gulg run with all greenhorns took forever, so I'll finish it up tomorrow), but...

-Anemos was meant to be a mysterious wilderness. That it would be "prettier" than BSF is to be expected, given the latter is literally a warzone.
-I agree it's silly to make the weapon easier to do outside the new content, but at least that means the people who want to actually do BSF are there to do it instead of people who DON'T want to do it being forced to slog through hours and hours of gameplay they don't like for their glowy weapon. (Instead they just have to slog through hours of gameplay! So much better.)
-Considering the story was written by Yasumi Matsuno, you should be expecting lots of cutscenes. He did the Return to Ivalice alliance raids too, and those similarly had lots and lots of cutscenes compared to the others (or at least the cutscenes were longer). Given this game's niche among MMORPGs is that it's one of if not the most story-driven one out there, expect story heavy content... with long cutscenes if Matsuno is involved, apparently. (The devs are Matsuno's fanboys, y'know...)
-Haven't barely set foot on the battlefield so I can't comment on Red Comet or the Castrum... whatever it's called. Just remember Piccolo's advice and DODGE!
-I fail to see a problem with the 1v1 fights and not always getting it. Like housing it's a luxury, not a right.
-Hrothgar could always be those funny colors; whether you find them aesthetically pleasing or not is irrelevant. I don't care for them myself, but that's not a ding against the experience in BSF.

Well known troll, I should have the discipline to ignore it but here I am.

[Snowborn]

Not so sure about that. I only touched it so far as I needed to go do the weapon upgrade questline (60 FATEs in one sitting is a bit excessive, and getting a Mt. Gulg run with all greenhorns took forever, so I'll finish it up tomorrow), but...

-Anemos was meant to be a mysterious wilderness. That it would be "prettier" than BSF is to be expected, given the latter is literally a warzone.

You make it sound like Square had no choice but to make that decision and that it has to be ugly as a result. Go play Battlefield V and tell me warzones have to be ugly.

-Haven't barely set foot on the battlefield so I can't comment on Red Comet or the Castrum... whatever it's called. Just remember Piccolo's advice and DODGE!

I can't believe you're commenting without having done the content.

His points don't even really scratch the surface of the problems. Anemos had a ton of new and interesting mob designs. It required you to play differently. The critical engagements in Bozja are just trials you could find anywhere else in the game (and quite often are largely copied from other pieces of content). On the whole, Bozja is immensely uninspired.

[Sforze]

He's a troll. He's just poking proverbial bee's nests to see which one incites enough anger to suit his trolling purposes. If he gets a topic successfully off the ground he'll go back to his corner, satiated for the next week before doing it all over again.

Could you be more specific as to what part of his post was trolling? Someone saying critical things about content you enjoy doesn't make them a troll; if you disagree, articulate it. If it just makes you upset to hear negative things, I'd say that's more on you than him.

I happen to agree with his points.

1. The pacing is deceptive. The faster pace feels good at first, but that also means you burn through the same handful of skirmishes that pop up in your current zone very, very quickly in a short period of time. The repetition really starts to set in fast.
2. The map is small and very starkly gated, which makes it feel even smaller. And because the pacing is faster, there's also no reason to dip into lower-level zones generally since you don't have much time to kill, meaning you're running the same short loop for hours.
3. The visuals ARE ugly. It's visually samey and monotonous to look at. The physical geography and landscape is uninteresting, there's not much to see or wonder at. The mobs populating the land are all recycled from other areas of the game. Look, The Last of Us (both of them) was set in an apocalyptic wasteland and still managed visually arresting and interesting environments. Check out fields from WWII. It is very much possible to make something dramatic, war-torn, and also fascinating to explore.
4. There are some very strange choices made that feel needlessly cumbersome and don't seem to add much to the experience: needing to speak to an NPC to rank up, the RNG on top of RNG that is duels, the loss of mettle when you die regardless of whether or not you get raised, the I-V monster ranking system??, the difficulty of CEs...

The cost he points out for gear is ground we've tread before in the past. This is not the first time they've pulled these pricing shenanigans that require an unreasonable amount of time input for middling results (Unreal trials and their milquetoast rewards come to mind). The relic is billed as content you can do for fun/for people who don't want to do hardcore raiding to get top-level gear...but if you're actually going to go to the trouble of grinding Bozja to 10+ and THEN run Castrum 165 times, you'd probably save yourself a lot of time just learning to raid instead. Why spend dev time on rewards that players ultimately look at and decide is cool, but not worth the time?

All in all, I'd say this was C+ content. I understand their hesitance to repeat the same mistakes of Eureka, since its reputation never really improved in spite of the fixes they made, but I don't think this was it.

[Seraphor]

I didn't expect a regression but here we are. There are so many things wrong with Bozja that I don't even know what to say.
2. For some reason it's not even optimal to do the relic within BSF. So what is the point of doing BSF if it's faster to do the relic outside? Please MASSIVELY increase the drop rate of the relic items because in Anemos every single NM gave you crystals.

The point is, playing Bozja will get you one relic weapon, more of less. You're playing new content and getting your relic weapon while you're at it.
You're not going to want to do this again for any subsequent weapons though are you...

7. BSF takes 4 hours to complete. Anemos took 2 days. We're getting far, far less content...

BSF is definitely way more content than Anemos. You're confusing grinding for content.

8. You have to do Castrum Lacus Litore 165 times to get a full set of relic armor. Is Square Enix crazy?

This is accurate or is he trolling?

[Naoki34]

1. Anemos looked far prettier than BSF. In Anemos there is a huge variety of landscapes - forests, hidden ravines, murky caves, freshwater everywhere... In BSF the landscape is just ruined cities and WW1 trenches... At least the Rank 10 critical engagement looks nice enough. Everything else though... URGH.. murky brown

It's a no man's land between Garlemald and Eorzea, what else does it look like?

You've skip all the dialogue and cutscene admit it.

[Seraphor]

It's a no man's land between Garlemald and Eorzea, what else does it look like?

You've skip all the dialogue and cutscene admit it.

Technically, it's between Garlemald and Othard.