Quote Originally Posted by Ceridwen View Post
I really don't believe this is catering to casuals, either. I'm certainly not hardcore - but I want a class with some depth nonetheless. I find, say, Dancer & Machinist painful at times. And I'm finding Samurai tedious now, too. The cone aoe was better - I'd be satisfied with getting Kaiten back, but I really don't like standing on the tank when positioning was so much more *logical.*
I feel like they've redefined "casual" to mean the most basic bottom-of-the-barrel player who might conceivably be interested in FF14. All the additions to the game that have opened up a wholly single-player-focused approach tells me that they are making a concerted drive to bring an entirely new class of player into the game.

I get this, from a business perspective. You want the reach of the product to grow, to bring in more money. I just don't think it's going to go as well as they think it will because, as another developer at another company once said, gamers are smart; they can tell if they're in for a game or not and they'll figure that out pretty quickly. Making the onboarding process of your game even more streamlined or accessible won't bring enough new people into the game to justify the workload. Either a gamer wants to play your game or they don't, so your goal as a developer should be providing those kinds of people, the ones who are in for your game regardless, with the content that will keep them coming back.

SE seems to be engaging in this "race to the bottom" in terms of expecting a certain level of skill or effort from their players, and I can't imagine that this is anything less than a corporate executive-driven choice. While I don't have anything against make a game accessible to a wider audience, if it's done so at the expense of your established - and quite loyal - player base, then we have a problem.

In a lot of ways (not every way, but a lot) it seems as if they are putting the cart before the horse. They're putting the monetary gain ahead of the game quality, instead of focusing on putting out a quality product and trusting that the monetary gain will come steadily from there. It's a mistake that more and more corporations seem to be making nowadays, with the emphasis on chasing short-term profit at the expense of long-term stability. SE's bungling of their western IP's in their misbegotten efforts to chase the NFT dragon is further evidence that the decisions being made at an executive level are not robust ones that bring mutual benefit for the customer AND company, but are purely company-centric with an eye to extract as much profit from the consumer as possible.

It's an untenable situation because if there's one demo you don't fuck with it's loyal gamer fans. I pray that my reading of the situation is wrong, but at least as far as statements made by Matsuda go, it's clear that there is a major disconnect between reality and what SE leadership believe to be reality.