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.

[Enla]

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.

Stick around the forum for awhile and you'll see precisely what I mean about them being a troll. This is just one of five linked accounts the op posts on to stir controversy and debate. Occasionally they post something insightful but I'd argue it often is akin to a broken clock being right twice in a day rather than by design. When you've seen this same person constantly revive old posts and flood the front page with them, post gay-baiting threads they stole from reddit that actively foster an air of hostility towards people of the LGBTQIA+, get banned more times than you can count before coming back shortly thereafter, and generally foster a presence on the forums that has done far more harm than good, then yes it gets VERY hard to take them seriously.

Also I never stated my views on the content itself or how I perceived his criticism. So I have no idea where you're getting that I'm mad about him criticizing the content from?

[Vyrerus]

Warzones can be pretty, look at these not currently active areas where WWI +WWII battles were fought.

Bozja is not meant to be pretty. It's an active warzone where high explosives akin to nukes have gone off. Look at the way the buildings are melted just past the Rank 5 aethereyte. It's supposed to be gritty, that's their aim. If they'd wanted to do beautiful high fantasy warzone, then they could have, but they're sticking with more brutal visuals for a reason.

The map is relatively small because the rate at which Skirmishes and CEs spawn is very fast when there are a lot of active participants in the zone. You literally won't be able to keep up with all of them, but you don't need to worry about keeping up with all of them, because the rewards across them are mostly universal. Once you know which ones are tied to CEs that are tied to duels, you can focus on those in particular to try and get into the duels. The CE fights and the duel fights are highly engaging because they are deadly, so it's not a snorefest either.

They reuse enemies everywhere in this game. Eureka used and reused enemies across every single zone, and only introduced a few new monsters here and there. Bozja has introduced the fox liger, among other things, and has introduced some palette swapped raid bosses as CE bosses ( The Patriot).

As for the insane tedium/grind/wait for the haste gear... it's really no different than having the completely randomized ultra rare drops from Eureka. None of them were required to clear even the Baldesion Arsenal. Never needed the 6th or 7th magicite stuff neither. It was all just bonus stuff, so if this is your favorite content ever, you can have the statistical edge on everyone else for your time investment.

The other stuff you label as odd choices has to do with Bozja's theme over other stuff. Its theme is war and military service. The threat of constant mettle loss is to make you want to improve and not die. Even then, it's not much of a loss for a single death. You can't rank down.

I don't think it's perfect. The joke that skirmishes are just another Fates rehash is spot on, but I view Bozja as leaps and bounds beyond Eureka in terms of engagement and fun. And I liked Eureka too. Enough to do it all the way to Hydatos on three separate characters. The gameplay for Bozja is much improved over it, particularly Lost actions vs. Mnemes. I love being able to sport around 3 or 4 phoenix downs on top of my buff/extra actions buttons. I love that I don't have to go back to the base camp to rearrange them for use every single time either.

I give Bozja an A-. B+ at worst. 87/100 easy The only things really holding it back are things like... taking 200k damage from a single DOT tic in a duel. I think that's a little much personally, but it may be rank dependent.

[Sforze]

Snip

I'm combining a few responses here for brevity:

1. Shooters have been portraying active battlefields for a long time now, so we're not reinventing the wheel here. The textures, color, contrast, topography -- it's not good. Nier raids take place in rusted-out factories and still manage to make it look worth exploring. I'm not asking for a high fantasy battlefield, what I'd prefer is better art direction/execution on the current concept. I can appreciate that you're assuming the best that the choices here are for thematic consistency, but the landscape is nonsensical in its own right. There are trenches that nobody is seen fighting in that carve through sparse land. Why are they there? There aren't even NPCs in them to make it feel like they have some kind of immersive point. You see wild animal mobs chilling next to a bunch of warmachina out in the field -- isn't that a little weird? Even losing mettle for dying doesn't really serve the theme under the right light; if soldiers die in war IRL, they're granted highest honors and called heroes, not considered cowards or people who just needed to get good.

Ultimately, the things I pointed out were not the *only* choices available to them if their intent was, in fact, to stick to the theme. There are many ways to solve narrative and design problems, and I question the solutions they landed on.

2. Duels aren't what I'd call 'highly engaging' considering most players won't be doing them, there's no way to consistently see/enter them to gain experience with mechanics, and you have to have a particular set of actions to survive at least some of them on the off-chance you DO get in. Maybe we're using different definitions of 'engaging' here, but you can basically ignore duels entirely since it's two layers of lottery to see who gets to lose mettle in front of an audience. The concept is interesting, but not like this.

3. I don't think there is any advantage to grinding out haste gear for the amount of time they're asking in return, and that's the problem. I *loved* Eureka, but once I've grinded enough to be wearing Asodes/Cassie earrings/whatever else, I'm pretty much done with the content, there's no real incentive to go back and revisit, and none of it carries forward to anything else. My general complaint was that they routinely seem to overtax items with time/price points that simply do not match the benefits they give at the time they give them. They devalue much of their own content and many of their own rewards, with Unreal trials being an example, as I said earlier. You can grind and grind Restoration and...they give you a title for your efforts. I expect them to pad some of their content to hit certain playtime benchmarks, but it feels more than ever that they're doing it in a way that is just plainly onerous.

You like the content and I'm not trying to change that opinion, but I'm not sure there's much that will sway me, either.