Square Enix should retire the relic quests with Endwalker

[RitsukoSonoda]

FFXI would like a word with you. Many have been removed or at least toned way down now, but that game had some of the most grueling grinds I've ever seen in an MMO. Leveling was a grind, gearing was a grind, even raising your level cap could become a grind if you weren't lucky enough to chain crit Maat in your opening volley.

I completed a few of those along with the Aht Urgan mythics back in those days. The time commitment decreased dramatically when you have enough gil to just simply buy all the ancient currency and alexandrites needed from ppl's personal bazaars.

The thing I found most humorous in FFXI though was the amount of ways the game essentially just handed gil out to players, yet most players never did the activities tied to those income sources. Then complained about always being broke while obsessing over rare NM and HNM drops.

Leveling felt like a grind on the first job taken to cap. Which originally was 50. They then increased it a few times during The Rise of Zilart until settling on 75 for quite a few years. With better knowledge of the game and also better gear, leveling jobs after that first one was quite a bit easier and quicker. And I quite enjoyed sitting in towns wearing my Maat's Cap lol. His fight was kind of interesting in that it had 2 win triggers when doing it to increase your level cap. The first was to just KO him, The other was dependent on which job you were facing him as. However it appeared doing the rematches later with other jobs to eventually claim his hat only had the option of knocking his HP down.

However in response to the person you replied to, grinding has been present in FF games after 3. FF5 had a job system as well which encouraged grinding to level multiple jobs on characters to cross slot skills. FF6 had grinding to learn magic from Magicite, FF7 was materia and limit break upgrades, FF8 i don't think counts since you basically just needed to draw stacks of magic charges out then link them and beat the game at like lv 4, FF9 had skill learning from gear pieces which had to be found or purchased, 10 had the sphere grid system. Sure you could skip the grinds I mentioned on those titles, however doing so would just make the game exponentially harder for you or in some cases might turn a normal boss fight into a massive progression wall.

[Jojoya]

The relic being a grind makes it an MMO? Did you seriously type this? For FINAL FANTASY of all things that has some considerable grinds within their own single player RPG games?

Are you seriously so tunnel focused on relics as to think it's the entire picture instead of a single piece of it?

The other poster was wondering why SE thought the change to the relic system was needed. I provided a guess on my part that could explain it - it's one of many changes being made to make the game more solo friendly. Assuming nothing changes in 6.5, this will be the first relic that players could complete entirely solo during the same expansion the relic was introduced if they desired.

Is that a coincidence or was it intentionally planned that way? The most we can do is speculate.

It's not the only thing that has been changed and there are likely more changes yet to come.

Of course there is more to what makes a MMO a MMO but you're ignoring what YoshiP said during the Roadmap Live Letter - they do not want this game to be considered a MMO in the future. There are already some players that don't consider this to be a MMO because so much of it can be done solo.

If this game is being made so solo friendly that they are ripping out game staples to make them even more solo friendly (because none of the on patch relics required anything that wasn’t solo friendly unless you are going to count the roulettes which barely count) why am I still even paying a subscription

There are 14 mainline non MMO FF games and however many spin-offs and connections if I wanted a single player game I’d play one of those, what’s the point of having the design (and all the downsides that come from it) of an MMO if the game isn’t going to actually be an MMO, no matter how solo friendly it is MMO’s have downsides, no matter how good 14’s story is it will always be worse than playing a tight single player game that was designed that way

Which are some good questions to ponder.

Why should players who came here to play a MMO continue to subscribe if they're remaking the game for the sake of Final Fantasy players that want a solo game?

Can SE successfully blend the elements of solo and multiplayer into the game to satisfy both types of players?

For now I'm still enjoying the game and so I'm willing to wait things out a while to see what happens. I also can understand why some would choose to unsub at this point.

That wasn’t my point

I’m not asking why i choose to pay a subscription based on how much I enjoy the game, im asking what’s the point of an online subscription model when we are just getting functionally solo content anyway, make the patches cheap add ons to the expansion DLC’s and you are functionally in the same position

If you're talking about the cost perspective, I suppose that's going to depend on how many a player is already used to paying on their other games. $15/mo isn't that much compared to what some pay monthly on F2P cash shops, gacha lootboxes or additional DLCs in some cases.

It's on the individual player to determine if they're getting appropriate value for their money.

[Volgia]

Go back to the Live Letter with the 10 year Roadmap (think it was 68?). They don't want the game to be considered a MMORPG anymore because that has deterred many of the long time Final Fantasy fans from picking the game up. They want the game to be considered a RPG that can be played alone or with friends.

The point of the relic is there being a destination, and content being developed for said destination (Eureka, Bozja, or even re-doing old 24 mans and stuff to it), they decided to not develop the content and I am not a RP player to artificially create myself a journey instead of getting what they were supposed to deliver. I think this is even worse for people who have limited time to play.

Changing the game from an MMO to a live service FF single player game is another subject here. I think it takes guts to ask me to play a very mediocre single-player game experience because other FF fans don't like MMOs. They have 14 other games and spin-offs they can play if that were the case. We don't even have the option to experience the story with our friends unless it's done artificially.

To me these changes aren't being made with any kind of player in mind, it's made because they just didn't want to develop the content, or even to cut development cost. This redirection where they say that the community complained so they removed the content is getting old, because I think what most of the community wanted was to fix some jankyness not for the content/core mechanic to disappear.

As for "Adapt or move on", we should first complain to the developers that this isn't the direction we want, and if there's no change in Dawntrail then sure, Adapt or move on. But if you say nothing and keep a defeated stance really, nothing will change.

[Supersnow845]

The other thing to consider is is this change to a “live service single player FF game” even popular with the playerbase, they really only committed to this philosophy in EW (despite the 10 year old FF game first MMO second comments because they didn’t design the game like that pre EW) and EW is the only expansion that has lost players since it started

Furthermore the dev time dedicated to “future proofing” the MSQ has no tangible benefit to the current playerbase (making good dungeons worse and bad dungeons better roughly equals out), the length of the MSQ is as big of a block as it’s always been (no matter how much fat they cut out of ARR it’s just accepted that 14’s quest style combined with having 3 skills just isn’t fun whether there is 235 MSQ quests or 200) and the ever expanding free trial is influencing how many people chose to subscribe

TDLR: s anyone really benefitting or even asking for these changes or are they just happening because it’s easier for square to make IS than Bozja

[Ravenblade1979]

At what point do we just stop caring though. Lots of us love the old grind and the content is there to do it. I'm realizing that might be good enough as the manderville relic is meh anyways.

[Zairava]

At what point do we just stop caring though. Lots of us love the old grind and the content is there to do it. I'm realizing that might be good enough as the manderville relic is meh anyways.

At some point, yeah probably. I'm not giving up here though, nothing will ever improve that way. Needing to lean on content where 20/10, going on 30/20 levels of your kit are unusable isn't exactly a good thing.

[Ravenblade1979]

At some point, yeah probably. I'm not giving up here though, nothing will ever improve that way. Needing to lean on content where 20/10, going on 30/20 levels of your kit are unusable isn't exactly a good thing.

Stuff don't improve though. Not sure you have noticed that or they do but for the casuals lol.

[Zairava]

Stuff don't improve though. Not sure you have noticed that or they do but for the casuals lol.

I've noticed that a lot of stuff currently doesn't. That's why Dawntrail is essentially where my final decision comes to play of "come back for maybe a month on patch launch or 7.5 because the content had the same exact issues as Endwalker". It feels like potentially a lot of focus is being put into DT, so I'm holding out for better or worse.

[Atelier-Bagur]

You probably haven't played ff11 during the level 75 cap era that had so much grind it took months/years to get relics and various other endgame weapons/gear or even just to get to lvl 75. It could take over a year just to get a base relic from dynamis let alone the long process for each upgrade.

Oh my bad, I forgot to include the MMO

[Nebelheim]

Oh my bad, I forgot to include the MMO

FF11 and ff1-3 I would also consider the only semi/extreme hardcore in terms of grind but all the other single player games since after ff3 does seem to have got significantly easier. Even ff14 had decent long term grinds and somewhat hard content during arr and heavansward if you don't include 1.0 which was closer to ff11 style grind. But now ff14 seems to be catering more towards single player ff fans that sees the word mmo and hesitate to play.