Thread: JP interviews [pre-6.5]

From: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus...ws_65_edition/

It's that time again, patch leadup time, time for me to machine translate articles and paraphrase them to give you all vaguely correct interpretations of what Yoshi says. This time we have Famitsu and Dengenki. I'll just go through what I personally feel is relevant stuff to bring up, but do see the full articles for all the context.

There's "more stuff" planned for the gap between 6.55 and 7.0 than they covered at NA Fan Fest. They'll talk more about it at the EU one. They need to spread out announcements and stuff since there are 3 Fan Fests again now.

Zero as a character was planned from the start of Endwalker, but was left as a patch-only thing. One of the first main characters developed just through patch content. Different writers write different patch scenarios though, so they've needed some oversight from Oda and Ishikawa to keep things consistent.

Zeromus will be a more "physical" fight instead of a "brain-training" fight (Note: These are machine learning translation terms that come up all the time when talking about XIV interviews. The closest thing is that brain-training means "puzzle-y"). Yoshi did have to ask for them to amp it up a bit during production, though.

They've changed up their pre-production process for fights since 6.0. Now section leaders just do a preliminary check where they give feedback about the fight concepts and mechanic ideas, and then a final check once everything is done to make sure it all works and the numbers are good. In the past, leaders were a lot more hands on with iterative feedback which was a huge workload (for Yoshi in particular).

His Zermous Extreme feedback was that it was a bit too "honest" and to amp it up a bit.

Asura will be implemented as a trial in-game some time after JP Fan Fest.

Yojimbo (back in 2019 Fan Fest) was seen as too hard for a Fan Fest trial due to the situation you're put in there (control scheme, UI, strangers, unfamiliar job), so they re-evaluated what their goals were for Asura and felt that the completion rate was where they wanted it to be this time.

The last Alliance Raid might be stronger than usual this time.

Both the scenario writer and battle team for Myths of the Realm were made up mostly of younger/newer people.

They have adjusted the rewards of Alliance Raid Roulette to be consistent with how much time you'd spend in a given instance to make up for the ilevel-cheese removal.

Yoshi and some development staff did feel bad at times for changing/removing mechanics for Trust support, but felt that it was important both in terms of maintainability and playability in the future as well as giving a better on-boarding process should 4 new players all match into the same dungeon.

Trust implementation and management was very hard and usually took a skilled veteran on the development team to do.

No concrete plans on making old 8-man content doable with Trusts. It's easier to do Trusts for 4-man content, so some of those fights might have to be made 4-man if it ever happened, but Yoshi feels strongly about having the final boss trials always be 8-man. No firm decisions here yet.

Their data says a huge number of people have engaged with Variant Dungeons in their own way.

The 6.51 Criterion dungeon will receive an increase in rewards compared to the past two. They will consider feedback on this before determining the 7.x Criterion rewards.

There will be a title for clearing all 3 Criterion dungeons from 6.x, but they are considering how else they could reward that to see if they can get it in in time.

6.55's relic step will be tomes again.

They settled on tomes due to looking at data for how many weapons were made by players in past relic content. Yoshi acknowledges though that: "However, there are some people who say that this reinforcement method is ``sloppy'', so it's difficult... Some people may dislike doing elaborate things like the old weapon enhancement content, while others may feel that the enhancement methods like this one are not enough. I think this is probably not compatible."

They settled on tomes as these days playing multiple jobs is much more common, and they think tomes being something that naturally accumulates as you play makes it best suit your individual playstyle.

The Manderville Relics have the highest completion rate of any relic so far. The more elaborate they make the relic content/grind, the fewer people make one.

There is an inherent conflict between people that "enjoy weapon enhancement as content" and people that "want a system that makes it easy to obtain weapons". Satisfying both is very hard.

They will take feedback into account for 7.x's relic series.

The crafter/gatherer relic final step will be difficult, but not required for any 6.x crafts.

PvP iteration will continue into 7.x, including CC, Frontlines, and Rival Wings.

Island Sanctuary will get small updates in 7.0, but there are no plans for that to continue through 7.x. They have other lifestyle content in mind instead. If feedback is different, they might reconsider.

The Allied Beast Tribe catboy will show up again.

Getting Phil on stage was not easy, but Yoshi really wanted it since Phil was one of Microsoft's biggest advocates for getting XIV on the platform.

The Fall Guys collab will be limited time, periodic content and not a permanent fixture.

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There's "more stuff" planned for the gap between 6.55 and 7.0 than they covered at NA Fan Fest.

I am extremely skeptical these will have much substance at all, perhaps a new Leap of Faith map at best, but we shall see.

They've changed up their pre-production process for fights since 6.0. Now section leaders just do a preliminary check where they give feedback about the fight concepts and mechanic ideas, and then a final check once everything is done to make sure it all works and the numbers are good. In the past, leaders were a lot more hands on with iterative feedback which was a huge workload (for Yoshi in particular).

I think this is an extremely bad decision, and it is perhaps why the raids feel so unexciting and even why it is so buggy at times (like TOP). (And sorry but as customers I don't think "huge workload" is a valid excuse; improve your management process or hire more people then instead of reducing your work).

Both the scenario writer and battle team for Myths of the Realm were made up mostly of younger/newer people.

This sounds harsh but I don't think they did a good job. The raids were very, very bland, and Euphrosyne in particular is the most boring alliance raid, possibly even more boring than Syrcus Tower in terms of mechanical complexity and innovation.

Yoshi and some development staff did feel bad at times for changing/removing mechanics for Trust support, but felt that it was important both in terms of maintainability and playability in the future as well as giving a better on-boarding process should 4 new players all match into the same dungeon.

Then those 4 players can have fun wiping a few times and figuring out the fight. This is a video game, not a visual novel. Failure should be a thing in video games, as long as the player can eventually succeed. The changes to these dungeons mean that failure is now not even a remote possibility.

They settled on tomes due to looking at data for how many weapons were made by players in past relic content. Yoshi acknowledges though that: "However, there are some people who say that this reinforcement method is ``sloppy'', so it's difficult... Some people may dislike doing elaborate things like the old weapon enhancement content, while others may feel that the enhancement methods like this one are not enough. I think this is probably not compatible."

They settled on tomes as these days playing multiple jobs is much more common, and they think tomes being something that naturally accumulates as you play makes it best suit your individual playstyle.

The Manderville Relics have the highest completion rate of any relic so far. The more elaborate they make the relic content/grind, the fewer people make one.

There is an inherent conflict between people that "enjoy weapon enhancement as content" and people that "want a system that makes it easy to obtain weapons". Satisfying both is very hard.

They will take feedback into account for 7.x's relic series.

Disappointing. What is the problem of having fewer people making a relic? It should be something you are proud of, not some welfare check you receive. Should we also give Savage weapons to everyone now for 1000 tomes? Or let everyone get <The Necromancer> by doing PotD 51-60 5 times? While getting a relic does not take combat skill, it does take effort, and effort is apparently not something that SE wants to reward nowadays.

"Want a system that makes it easy to obtain weapons". That is called tomestone weapons, which are higher ilvl than relics until the last patch of the expansion.

And it means that there isn't much hope for 7.x's relic series to be better, since they are adamant about their position being correct.

The Fall Guys collab will be limited time, periodic content and not a permanent fixture.

I think this is extremely disappointing, but I understand there are possible licensing concerns.

And finally, a comment from the Reddit thread that is prescient:

This is not the first time they've used player engagement as a metric for successful content and it won't be the last. Yoshi-P has mentioned in the past that he sees more players completing the content as a good thing, which I guess is obviously fair, but the flipside of that is that completion rates are always directly correlated with a lack of effort required. If your only metric is player engagement, then the most logical thing to do is to turn the effort required to 0 and maximize your perceived success.

I already didn't have any high expectations with Dawntrail, but reading this made me extremely concerned about the future with the next expansion.

Also. Lol @ Island Sanctuary. What an absolute waste of dev time that was.

Thank you.

This sounds harsh but I don't think they did a good job. The raids were very, very bland, and Euphrosyne in particular is the most boring alliance raid, possibly even more boring than Syrcus Tower in terms of mechanical complexity and innovation.

Honestly, alliance raids have been bad since after Orbone Monastery. I don't what happened between Stormblood and Shadowbringers, but boss mechanics in general started having way too much focus on animation cues and arena cleaves while not caring that there are 23 people in the group, they almost never use that fact to create mechanics.

• They settled on tomes due to looking at data for how many weapons were made by players in past relic content. Yoshi acknowledges though that: "However, there are some people who say that this reinforcement method is ``sloppy'', so it's difficult... Some people may dislike doing elaborate things like the old weapon enhancement content, while others may feel that the enhancement methods like this one are not enough. I think this is probably not compatible."
  
• They settled on tomes as these days playing multiple jobs is much more common, and they think tomes being something that naturally accumulates as you play makes it best suit your individual playstyle.
  
• The Manderville Relics have the highest completion rate of any relic so far. The more elaborate they make the relic content/grind, the fewer people make one.
  
• There is an inherent conflict between people that "enjoy weapon enhancement as content" and people that "want a system that makes it easy to obtain weapons". Satisfying both is very hard.
  
• They will take feedback into account for 7.x's relic series.

I'm not surprised it's tomes for the last step given Endwalker. I'm just going to get straight to it because this infuriated me.

I'm not sure how somebody wouldn't expect far, far more relic acquisitions with it being this way. There is literally ZERO extra effort involved. Do your roulettes, gg.

Our own methods? Like what? Do your daily roulettes or run the same easy msq dungeons hundreds of times, and no, the job design currently does not make up for it. The other content released in Endwalker doesn't give enough to justify doing them, and no one is running them outside of friend groups because there's close to no longevity with criterion as of current patch, and deep dungeon does not give enough exp to make people queue for it except for completion.

We already have what's supposed to be considered tome weapons. If there has to be a weapon obtainable through tomes this easily, make it that one. Tome cap or no tome cap.

If you really want to have a path like this available for players who don't want the grind. Simply make it an option. Not the only option, but an option. There's many of us who enjoy the grind to get them. If there isn't any sense of accomplishment from getting them, then it feels like there's no point other than it just being some weapon that glows.

• There's "more stuff" planned for the gap between 6.55 and 7.0 than they covered at NA Fan Fest. They'll talk more about it at the EU one. They need to spread out announcements and stuff since there are 3 Fan Fests again now.
  
• They have adjusted the rewards of Alliance Raid Roulette to be consistent with how much time you'd spend in a given instance to make up for the ilevel-cheese removal.
  
• The last Alliance Raid might be stronger than usual this time.
  
• Their data says a huge number of people have engaged with Variant Dungeons in their own way.
  
• The 6.51 Criterion dungeon will receive an increase in rewards compared to the past two. They will consider feedback on this before determining the 7.x Criterion rewards.
  
• There will be a title for clearing all 3 Criterion dungeons from 6.x, but they are considering how else they could reward that to see if they can get it in in time.
  
• PvP iteration will continue into 7.x, including CC, Frontlines, and Rival Wings.
  
• The Fall Guys collab will be limited time, periodic content and not a permanent fixture.

These, however, are good to hear.

I'm interested to see what's in store between 6.55 and 7.0 to hold us over, especially knowing the trial will be released sometime after JP fanfest now.

I hope the new alliance is more challenging than Aglaia, at least. Please don't release an alliance raid as easy as Euphrosyne again.

I've been waiting for the exp rewards being adjusted in alliance raid roulette for what feels like forever, I'm happy with decision. Thank you for removing IL cheese as well.

Criterion feedback being noted and seeing that the feedback is actually being heard, considered worked upon is wonderful, I've been enjoying the details on these subjects regardless of if I'm happy with the statements or not. The insight is invaluable and I'd like it to continue.

I'm happy that the pvp changes are here to stay, I've been enjoying it much more since they launched. Please add crowd control resist in frontlines, though. I don't mind when jobs have quirks to them like DRK's pull, but if I literally do not have the resources to survive because they can just abuse it and delete my entire alliance in a fraction of a second due to pre-mades, it becomes unfun.

I'm a little disappointed the fall guys collaboration isn't going to stay, but I can understand why it won't be.