Future direction of FFXIV

[StriderShinryu]

I wouldn't say a complete overhaul is needed, but I do think the game could use a breath of fresh air. I'd personally love to see forward progression in the game slowed for a while so that development time and resources could be spent on addressing the long term health of the game.

While the 4 month constant update schedule always means there's something right around the corner to look forward to, it also means the developers are locked into a rigourous, tightly scheduled development march that doesn't leave enough room for being really creative or for addressing some of the underlying issues that the game has faced for years now. The best we get is band-aid fixes that they can slot into the regular development schedule as time and staff are available, and only in things surface level enough to be created while the game is seeing completely active development. Frankly, with the end of the current story arc this would have been the perfect time to do it. Put out fun little side stories and combat instances but essentially go into at least partial rebuild mode with much of the rest. It may not seem like much now but 10+ years on, the cracks that exist now are going to be massive fissures.

[CrimsonGunner]

as things goes on , i don't see the healer role staying in the game and might even be abandoned/deleted later down the line.(both by devs and players)
they don't seems to address any of their issues, make bad implementation of their skills and leave it there for an entire expansion, healers among themselves are poorly balance to the point that identical skills(identical in every aspect of design and potencies) have 1 job cast them faster and less mp while another have them cast slower and cost much more mp(looking at ast and whm) not to mention current design is 1 button press most of the time when no healing is required which is most of the time in casual content(going from level 1-90 having only 1 dps button and 1 dot through the entire leveling experience), while having said content be done without a healer role in a party easily right now and such issue was not even addressed by the devs with evidences showing relevant content can be done without them (including current harder content that should not have been cleared without healers).

[Jeeqbit]

while having said content be done without said role easily right now and it was not even addressed by the devs with evidences showing it can be done(including current content that should not have been cleared without healers).

I've done a lot of dungeons with 4 DPS before. The distinction between roles is not designed for them to be required but for them to be desirable, because in some dungeons 4 DPS can be very challenging.

[CrimsonGunner]

I've done a lot of dungeons with 4 DPS before. The distinction between roles is not designed for them to be required but for them to be desirable, because in some dungeons 4 DPS can be very challenging.

its not just 4 ppl dungeons, you have plenty of videos showing trials/normal raids and even savage raids being done without healers(sync) and its not just old content but right now EW relevant dungeons and every other old content when they were relevant.

[Mapleine]

It was a great Final Fantasy game and I absolutely enjoyed my time with it over the past eight years.

That said the tale is over, everything has reset and we're still on Heavensward's rather plain end game so currently it all feels a bit empty... Thus we dwell on things! As much as I love this game my biggest pet peeve is the smoke screen a chunk of the community applies to the games issues.

As always the content is good, great even but the spread is just miserable. It is simply unreasonable to try and manage an end game group with four bosses, no dungeons and no other form of content or growth.

I'm also dreading if 7.0 is just another JRPG on the stack with no new starting point or ability reshuffle or other changes. Boom is over and I can't imagine further erosion from keeping both a poor early and late game experience. "Just play these five full length Final Fantasy games while spamming Unleash for 300 hours until Yoshi P says you can have a second button!" cannot be the future. The team is better than this and Square needs to loosen the purse strings.

So personally I am looking forward to new things but I do worry about the future without foundation repair and a hard look at end game. Also, before someone hits me with it: Yoshi P's "you can quit whenever!" has always been PR nonsense to anyone who actually plays. We have caps, we have lockouts, Ultimates need a large BiS grind, houses fall down, etc.

We've been running Cataclysm's end game reward structure since ARR launched and they've never taken a moment to account for the job system either. Eight years later and I still do anything for an alt job.

[Jeeqbit]

As always the content is good, great even but the spread is just miserable. It is simply unreasonable to try and manage an end game group with four bosses, no dungeons and no other form of content or growth.

There are also at least 2 extreme trials to farm 99 times and occasionally an ultimate.

It's intentional that it alternates between 1 raiding patch (6.0, 6.2, 6.4) and 1 casual player patch (6.1, 6.3, 6.5), because both types of players exist and Yoshi-P wants to cater to both.

The people who really enjoy this game enjoy both the raiding content and the casual content. When you only play a certain piece of content and not everything else, of course you will experience long gaps of time where you are bored unless you play other games.

How ever I will say they need to stop giving into to some player feed back particularly from NA. IMO a good example of this is the introduction of soloing the story from 1 - 90 through a newly implemented trust system. This takes a lot of dev time for something to appease what I would consider a smaller portion of the player base. I could understand if the game was designed differently or if this was to ensure new players could complete the story.

The Trust system is not being implemented to "appease a small portion of the player base". In fact, it is being implemented into ARR to convince millions of people who play the single player FF games to try out this game by telling them it is soloable.

[Fhaerron]

its not just 4 ppl dungeons, you have plenty of videos showing trials/normal raids and even savage raids being done without healers(sync) and its not just old content but right now EW relevant dungeons and every other old content when they were relevant.

That reminded me when Diamond weapon EX came out, it was done by 8 tanks.

[HisShadowX]

So I am old enough to remember when there was thousands of Final Fantasy Fan sites. When heart attack man and his Quest team took over there was a war between the old Final Fantasy Staff and Heart Attack Man's quest team. As you all might not know Heart Attack Man created Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story. Well FFT was good Vagrant Story and FF12 was not.

His universe would come and go and he would claim to take back his universe and even made a Kickstarter in which he collected money and never made a game.

Regardless of how you feel about Vaan as looking like a femboy which the character looked even more femme before his redesign FFXII/FF12 so divided fans even the hardcore fans who loved FF12 couldnt help but notice all the fan sites dying out or shrinking.

Heart Attack Man was the first to try and insert his views and story and try to hijack the Final Fantasy Series but he was not the last.

Zipperman famous for FF7 helped create FF13 and FF15 (Which was supposed to be a side story to FF13)

People famously rejected Zipperman's hallway simulator Final Fantasy XIII and someone worse then even Jar Jar Binks, Lightening. Because customers did not take to lightening Zipperman and Square thought it would be a good idea to create more characters with tons of zippers as he is famous for and to try to shove Lightening down our throats and threaten us if we did not buy there would be no more Final Fantasy.

One thing Zipperman and Heart Attack Man had in common other then almost destroying the Series they famously tried to redefine what Final Fantasy was and blamed no one liking their games on people not understanding Japanese RPGs.

Basically, their generation took over and claimed JRPGs were always stories with little exploration and a straight path. I'm old enough to remember Final Fantasy games being famous for choosing who is in your party and exploring the worlds and towns in an airship or ship.

If Yoshi P left I would be scared someone else taking over and ruining this company all over again. Zipperman is a great developer, but he needs to be managed rather than allowed to do what he wants.

[IdowhatIwant]

So I am old enough to remember when there was thousands of Final Fantasy Fan sites. When heart attack man and his Quest team took over there was a war between the old Final Fantasy Staff and Heart Attack Man's quest team. As you all might not know Heart Attack Man created Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story. Well FFT was good Vagrant Story and FF12 was not.

His universe would come and go and he would claim to take back his universe and even made a Kickstarter in which he collected money and never made a game.

Regardless of how you feel about Vaan as looking like a femboy which the character looked even more femme before his redesign FFXII/FF12 so divided fans even the hardcore fans who loved FF12 couldnt help but notice all the fan sites dying out or shrinking.

Heart Attack Man was the first to try and insert his views and story and try to hijack the Final Fantasy Series but he was not the last.

Zipperman famous for FF7 helped create FF13 and FF15 (Which was supposed to be a side story to FF13)

People famously rejected Zipperman's hallway simulator Final Fantasy XIII and someone worse then even Jar Jar Binks, Lightening. Because customers did not take to lightening Zipperman and Square thought it would be a good idea to create more characters with tons of zippers as he is famous for and to try to shove Lightening down our throats and threaten us if we did not buy there would be no more Final Fantasy.

One thing Zipperman and Heart Attack Man had in common other then almost destroying the Series they famously tried to redefine what Final Fantasy was and blamed no one liking their games on people not understanding Japanese RPGs.

Basically, their generation took over and claimed JRPGs were always stories with little exploration and a straight path. I'm old enough to remember Final Fantasy games being famous for choosing who is in your party and exploring the worlds and towns in an airship or ship.

If Yoshi P left I would be scared someone else taking over and ruining this company all over again. Zipperman is a great developer, but he needs to be managed rather than allowed to do what he wants.

Yeah I remember the first time I dropped acid.

This is exactly how I feel about it. I've been playing the game because the story was fairly good in SHB and I also enjoyed HW and SB, with the PVE being decent, but I did not enjoy EW's story conclusion, so that just leaves the PVE aspects. I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt for now to see what comes in the future but the game would benefit from some competition. But there were still aspects I loved about WoW, like its racial lore and class design and some of the stuff you mention, which I don't really get out of this game... equally WoW is too much of a mess to return to it. So I bide my time waiting for another MMO while just using this to burn spare time.

I would say try lost ark, but Amazon done made it to pay to win past a certain point that it is easy to get burnt out fast with the little content it has in it to progress towards end game.

[Yencat]

I'd rather see them add more new people with fresh ideas than replace the current ones.

All things considered I'm pretty happy with the game, I don't love every decision they make now but I doubt I'd love every decision a new crew makes either so I see little sense in just replacing everyone.