I need to vent about my disappointment in Bozja. What even happened here?

[Naoki34]

Just to start, if you love this content, then power to you. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Maybe I'll enjoy it more too one day... just, off the top, my first impressions are shock at how bad it is?

Like ... the zone is by far the worst zone I've ever seen in the game. It's no where near Eureka or any expansion zone. It's just a muddy flat field. Literally it looks like it could run on the PS2 except it looks no where near as pretty as anything in FFXI, so maybe it's like an upscaled PS1 game from a long since defunct company that tried 3D or something. How did this even begin to pass quality checks?

And the whole thing is just FATE grinding ... which ok, fine, but we have that in the open world. What exactly does this add? And the boss fights are just big blob fests with one hit kills. It feels like lazy design. And the story quests are barely anything other than drab still scene dialogue. The opening quests with Cid set such a high bar and now it's all such an afterthought.

Maybe there's a great payoff at some point. Maybe it gets better. I love this game overall, and I'm not trying to say otherwise. In fact, I'm only so shocked at how bad this content is because this game usually sets the bar so much higher. It feels like it's from a different game because of how shockingly poor the quality is by comparison to everything around it ... like .. what even happened here?

I am also disappointed that the relics are going this way, but I have decided not to comment.

I'm too shy!

[StriderShinryu]

I liked the concept of Bozja/Zadnor and absolutely feel that DR is possibly the best large group content they've ever done, but I can't argue that the zones themselves were all that great. Both were just ugly and unpleasant to spend time in. Sure it was thematically appropriate but it was still sort of "bleh" as a player. I didn't hate the FATE grind based content but it did feel lacking in variety with no real side objectives or extra stuff to do, and the balancing (especially in Zadnor) felt really out of whack with some FATEs literally doing down in seconds and NPCs literally soloing others. It was literally a challenge just to get to some of them before they finished and/or you could get any worthwhile credit on them.

[Shin96]

I honestly enjoyed Eureka more. Bozja became a piece of content I grew to dislike fairly quickly. I'd prefer for them to design the new content after Eureka and with no teleportation.

The designs for the final step are underwhelming to me. Just glad I have to never revisit Bozja luckily.

[_Pigzig]

It didn't even felt like a battlefield. Just a barren wasteland where all the fighting was already done and we are just there to clean up quick. You know what looks like a true battlefield? The last stormblood dungeon, that would been the right aesthetic to go for not this patch of always looking the same mud.

this paragraph applies to everything
that one dungeon is one of the only battlefields in the whole of FFXIV. I wish we got battlefields like that at the START of stormblood

[Deceptus]

this paragraph applies to everything
that one dungeon is one of the only battlefields in the whole of FFXIV. I wish we got battlefields like that at the START of stormblood

Pagthl'an is the only battlefield?

Heroes Gauntlet and Ghymlit Dark would like a word

[NefarioCall]

I think partly I set my expectations too high ... but like I was kind of hoping for ACTUAL trenches, you know? I get why they probably wanted to make it easy to run across the map quickly to the nearest fate, but I feel like this would have been perfectly suited for corridors. This could have been something like running through deep trenches from stronghold to stronghold. Main enemy camps where the critical engagements would take place in the middle of the camp surrounded by structures. Like a kind of open world dungeon with some branching paths and beating the critical engagement releases the crystal shard at that location and opens the next story quest and part of the map.

Instead it's like, big swath east over mud, slightly up, big swath west over mud, slightly up, big swath east over mud lol.

[Stormfur]

If we could have the ambience of Eureka with the fates of Bozja, I think it would be as close to it gets to actually "having a good time grinding"

[SamSmoot]

I gave up on it pretty soon. The regular mobs were too difficult to solo, so I just had to ride around looking for ones already active. The boss ones were impossible to get into, so they didn't exist for me. I managed to just get into the second area through the gate in the north, but quit doing it shortly afterward.
Actually, this is one reason I returned to WoW to do the Shadowlands expansion.

[Sathona]

Just to start, if you love this content, then power to you. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Maybe I'll enjoy it more too one day... just, off the top, my first impressions are shock at how bad it is?

Like ... the zone is by far the worst zone I've ever seen in the game. It's no where near Eureka or any expansion zone. It's just a muddy flat field.

ok

/10letters

[FoxyAreku]

Bozja is pretty horrible and I blame it for shadowbringers being the worst expansion content wise(relax, the story was great, talking purely in content). They really should have put those resources elsewhere if they couldn't have given us even half the zones/content that eureka had.

The gameplay is better than eureka at least but it's so much shorter and still manages to be pretty bad outside of the castrums.