I hope Square doesn't keep deeming certain content unnecessary

[kaynide]

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Man my heart just isn't it into this project we're developing. I'm sure our customers and my team's lead will understand if I don't want to develop these features and just let me do whatever.

Pretty big leap there, sport.

Deciding as an entire dev team not to develop a very minor side story is by no means the same as single guy waffling and or melting into the floor.

[Lunalepsy]

This was a trend I had been noticing since before the pandemic; Square had been cutting out bits of content that were thought to have been precedent per the previous two expansions, likely because they had decided such content could've been cut without anyone caring. But it really does make the pack seem barren in retrospect when we consider that we had no side expert dungeons except for the two we got in 5.0, no deep dungeon, no Bozja until over halfway through the pack's life cycle, even the lack of a Tataru outfit at the end of 5.55's story was really disappointing.

I realize the people who care about these bits of content may be considered a minority. I'm sure me wanting more dungeons for expert roulette is a fringe opinion, and that a lot of people didn't notice the absence of a Tataru outfit. But that's what we all thought about crafters and gatherers too, and they introduced a brand new form of endgame content just for them, and it turned out to be a huge success. Likewise, I'm sure there's plenty of deep dungeon enthusiasts out there who were burned by not getting one this pack, and even if they're a small portion of the players, which I'm not a part of personally, it's understandable that they'd be upset. I know they are, because I've seen them voicing this quite often!

I understand that a lot had to get pushed back because of the pandemic, but a lot of this content trimming was planned from the very beginning. Is the solution for square to fire on all cylinders and try to push out every bit of content possible to satisfy every player? I can't say; I don't work in game development so I have no idea how hard that would be on them. But I hope they at least realize that they can't keep cutting content thinking no one will notice. Even if the majority is ambivalent on it, we still notice its absence.

You can't please anyone when you are the middle man.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Pretty big leap there, sport.

Deciding as an entire dev team not to develop a very minor side story is by no means the same as single guy waffling and or melting into the floor.

It would’ve been nice for them to have at least given us something else then if hildibrand was “stale.” Instead we lost out on both Hildibrand and Allied beast tribes and got nothing in return.

[kaynide]

It would’ve been nice for them to have at least given us something else then if hildibrand was “stale.” Instead we lost out on both Hildibrand and Allied beast tribes and got nothing in return.

That’s a fair point, and I’m not really sure what “replaced” the development time. Like, assuming something along the lines of “the Hildy story takes 100 hours of total dev time”. What was done instead in that 100 hour block? Viera/Hrothgar? Ocean fishing? The Hyper-Mecha-Gundam-Z instance? The optimization/code overhauls to prepare for PS5? Work on cross-world/cross-data center?

There was a lot of new stuff that appeared in the expansion that obviously needed a significant amount of dev time because it was built from the ground up as opposed to a copy paste like Deep Dungeon. Unfortunately a lot of this new stuff was very behind the scenes and not necessarily content we players can “do”, so it does feel like there was less done.

Of course we also lost a ton of hours to devs setting up home offices due to COVID-19, so while we didn’t get any playable content out of that, the devs did put down a lot of infrastructure to allow for working outside the main office. Again, not playable content, but it is time spent to improve the behind the scenes work on the game.


I guess my point is, time spent working on the game isn’t necessarily equal to an amount of consumable content.

[anhaato]

That’s a fair point, and I’m not really sure what “replaced” the development time. Like, assuming something along the lines of “the Hildy story takes 100 hours of total dev time”. What was done instead in that 100 hour block? Viera/Hrothgar? Ocean fishing? The Hyper-Mecha-Gundam-Z instance? The optimization/code overhauls to prepare for PS5? Work on cross-world/cross-data center?

There was a lot of new stuff that appeared in the expansion that obviously needed a significant amount of dev time because it was built from the ground up as opposed to a copy paste like Deep Dungeon. Unfortunately a lot of this new stuff was very behind the scenes and not necessarily content we players can “do”, so it does feel like there was less done.

We've heard that deep dungeon resources specifically were instead allocated to stuff like Ishgard, Bozja, and, most relevantly, island sanctuary. A deep dungeon would've released in 5.3... instead, that's when we got Bozja. Island sanctuary had been in development this whole time and is only just now being released for 6.0 which could potentially free up a ton of dev resources. While I usually think that new, deep forms of content are great to get... I think I'd survive if we didn't get one for 7.0, and they just stuck to what we were used to (after everything we already know we're getting) through 6.0. If the trade off is losing out on current pack content for something huge next pack, I think we've had enough of that.

[Silverneck]

Im happy about no more deep dungeons, I hope they dont ever bring them back. 2 is enough and they become terribly repetitive if you are leveling. The new system of it being part of Bozja is superior and honestly it should of been what was done with Eureka as well as older relic content will otherwise become a ghostland.

I also agreed with Yoshi P's decision on cutting the number of dungeons per patch. Dungeons aren't really all the top priority for most players, even if they add one having really cool sets for the glamor people and amazing setting for the gposers is better for the game long term imo. The 1 dungeon can get a cool armor set and the rest of the budget and go to stuff players care about. Like class balancing, mounts, ultimates, savages and just more wonderful side content quests that offer emotes, etc.

But that is just my opinion.

[Alleo]

Im happy about no more deep dungeons, I hope they dont ever bring them back. 2 is enough and they become terribly repetitive if you are leveling. The new system of it being part of Bozja is superior and honestly it should of been what was done with Eureka as well as older relic content will otherwise become a ghostland.

Why not both? The amount of people that play this game increases so honestly they should be able to bring us both content. And then those that enjoy Bozja like stuff can do theirs and those of us who likes deep dungeons can do that. And if they completely take out the relic from any of those contents and just do a questline that gives you a variety to choose from then people can simply run the instances that they enjoy.