Are we destroying "our own" game?

[Tunda]

Nah, we're now pivoting into wasting sub/cash shop money on absolutely trash-tier AI games :>
Destroying the game? If anything, I get the feeling we're desperately trying to save it from one of the worst managements I've seen in a video game company with so many huge, beloved IPs.
SE did sell Crystal Dynamics and Eidos recently for raise funds do dump on the NFT disaster and rubbish like Forspoken- releasing some cool ips like Tomb Raider and Legacy of Kain from the SE oubliette. Sometimes, I wonder if selling the FF ip wouldn't be a blessing. Other than EA and Activision, not sure any other company is as bad as SE, especially after the new CEO landed that amazing New Year's letter outlining the plan to intensify their "investment" in technologies such as "AI, cloud and blockchain". SE is so cooked it's not even funny, they replace one clueless CEO who sunk money in dumb junk with another that triples down on the same dumb stuff. You can't make this up lol

CBU3 is lifting this company from dying..

CBU1 and CBU2 latterly creating 2D games in 2024

If CBU3 trying to create new IP i think it would look even better than FF ip

they have everything to make bad games to good games

FF16 and FF14 is the best in FF entire franchise
they could double down with new IP and it would be a win game

[Amenara]

Thankfully for me, EW's post patch content really dropped my caring about the MSQ and to me DT's MSQ was better than 6.x so it was fine, not great, not terrible. Thankfully the gameplay is what is going to keep me logging in and the dungeons/trials so far have been great and Viper is a lot of fun, though we will see if that still is a thing after Tuesday.

I don't think players are destroying the game, I just think players are expecting the same quality of story as we got in ShB and EW (the 6.0 story at least) with a completely new set of writers. I think the writing director should have kept her writers on a shorter leash and controlled the writing more, assuming this isn't what she wanted, but at the same time I think the gameplay content outside of the story has the potential to be another SB in quality and quantity. It all depends on what people weight their enjoyment on.

[Chrome_Aerial]

destroying? idk. changing? yes.
but thats also cuz of the WoW migration. lots of those toxic people changed ff14 enviroment.
lots of those players have different views on what makes an mmo good.
the devs account for alot of the feedback. hence why raids and trials got better since endwalker but dungeons were neglected half the time and felt too easy.
i assume things here but that was mainly cause of the loud WoW players who are into raiding and less into story and dungeons. to appeal to those the raids been made quite fun and challenging (fuck P7 in particular lol)
but i don't think the game is being destroyed. its just changing in a rapid pace to what the audience want and the audience is NOT only FF fanboys and fangirls anymore. we got people from other MMO's as well who are now part of our community. and to incorporate those the best we can is to acccept change.

fcourse not all changes is something we should accept or like. we can't have the devs appease newcomers alone and neglect us veterans. but consider that change is a constant. wether you like it or not its going to happen one way or another.
change along with or be left behind

[KisaiTenshi]

Nah, we're now pivoting into wasting sub/cash shop money on absolutely trash-tier AI games :>
Destroying the game? If anything, I get the feeling we're desperately trying to save it from one of the worst managements I've seen in a video game company with so many huge, beloved IPs.
SE did sell Crystal Dynamics and Eidos recently for raise funds do dump on the NFT disaster and rubbish like Forspoken- releasing some cool ips like Tomb Raider and Legacy of Kain from the SE oubliette. Sometimes, I wonder if selling the FF ip wouldn't be a blessing. Other than EA and Activision, not sure any other company is as bad as SE, especially after the new CEO landed that amazing New Year's letter outlining the plan to intensify their "investment" in technologies such as "AI, cloud and blockchain". SE is so cooked it's not even funny, they replace one clueless CEO who sunk money in dumb junk with another that triples down on the same dumb stuff. You can't make this up lol

*pfft* What?

EA, Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard are all worse than any Japanese company by miles and miles. Japanese companies think NFT's and cryptocoins are still going to be a thing because they just see it as more Gacha-lootbox stuff that people will buy that they have to put no effort into. Who buys this stuff? Presumably the same people buying skins/costumes in games like fortnite. But they aren't betting the farm on it. Square Enix, if anything, repeatedly has tripped and faceplanted itself into manure every time it's tried to do a gacha game. It needs to go back to what it's good at, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Not MMORPG's, Not trendy Souls-like games, Not battle-royale PvP games. Just do RPG's because that's what they are good at. They can not ride the FF7 IP forever.

The reality is that all those buzzwords, web3, cryptocoins, NFT, generative AI, are synonymous with "scam" right now. When a company says they are investing in this stuff, it's raised a company death flag.

[_ly]

It's more like square ruining our game. Wuk Lamat was written someone who would eat glue. Motivations of Zoraal ja make no sense (and he's there because the writers forgot that endwalker happened). Whoever wrote the expansion should be degraded to writing npc quibs. Also the voice of wuk lamat was really bad in en.

[Bazs9]

I feel like I need to put my two cents in, in case the dev team is lurking these forums. I started playing in 2.0, and played all expansions, never skipping a single cutscene. I greatly enjoyed the story up to Dawntrail, and considered FF XIV my favorite videogame after finishing the Endwalker MSQ.

Yet right now I find myself leveling a Warrior all the way from 50, just to avoid having to click on the the next lvl 99 MSQ in Dawntrail... This has never, *ever* happened to me, I practically could not stop playing until I finished the main story in all of the previous expansions.

While leveling WAR I had to go through the SHB tank role quests. It was both refreshing and heartbreaking to see how that relatively short and simple questline was so much more engaging and rewarding than the entire MSQ of Dawntrail so far - and I am very close to the end of it.

FF XIV Team, please take a hard look on the story and writing (and voice acting for that matter) - without these, this game loses its unique charm which so many of us love.

[Galvuu]

*pfft* What?

EA, Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard are all worse than any Japanese company by miles and miles. Japanese companies think NFT's and cryptocoins are still going to be a thing because they just see it as more Gacha-lootbox stuff that people will buy that they have to put no effort into. Who buys this stuff? Presumably the same people buying skins/costumes in games like fortnite. But they aren't betting the farm on it. Square Enix, if anything, repeatedly has tripped and faceplanted itself into manure every time it's tried to do a gacha game. It needs to go back to what it's good at, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Not MMORPG's, Not trendy Souls-like games, Not battle-royale PvP games. Just do RPG's because that's what they are good at. They can not ride the FF7 IP forever.

The reality is that all those buzzwords, web3, cryptocoins, NFT, generative AI, are synonymous with "scam" right now. When a company says they are investing in this stuff, it's raised a company death flag.

I mean... I did say "other than EA and Activision". I forgot about Ubisoft. But I don't think they're worse- I think they're basically the same. It's different flavors of the same dung-pie- SE is exploring these things as a way to make an exploitative quick buck with minimal investment, which is kinda the kinda crap mtx and battle passes do. You said it yourself- they keep wasting money and resources on these trend-chasing predatory cash-grabs instead of investing in quality games and revamping their workflow/creative processes that have clearly started to become lacking (see: Dawntrail).
That New Year's letter really crushed my hopes that SE would turn for the better. And lets not forget junk like Chocobo Racing GP- SE is trying to dip into the mtx bullshit too. They're just dogwater at it.

[OgruMogru]

Were the passengers on the Titanic responsible for steering the boat they were on into an iceberg?

[KisaiTenshi]

I mean... I did say "other than EA and Activision". I forgot about Ubisoft. But I don't think they're worse- I think they're basically the same. It's different flavors of the same dung-pie- SE is exploring these things as a way to make an exploitative quick buck with minimal investment, which is kinda the kinda crap mtx and battle passes do. You said it yourself- they keep wasting money and resources on these trend-chasing predatory cash-grabs instead of investing in quality games and revamping their workflow/creative processes that have clearly started to become lacking (see: Dawntrail).
That New Year's letter really crushed my hopes that SE would turn for the better. And lets not forget junk like Chocobo Racing GP- SE is trying to dip into the mtx bullshit too. They're just dogwater at it.

Western game companies do not have the luxury of developing a game only to shut it down 9 months later when it doesn't print money. They burn the game/film/project for tax-write offs. But they really should be required to release anything "burned for tax writeoffs" into the public domain.

Japanese game companies do seem to have the luxury to do this because Japanese customers don't seem to care that much about preserving anything. Without opening another can of worms, it's been mostly westerners trying to preserve Japanese games even when the developer can not be bothered to.
https://www.theverge.com/24094441/fi...on-square-enix

Even people who keep talking about 1.0, it's not that they so much want "1.0" to come back in a playable way, but that they see all the wasted cutscenes and lore that are completely inaccessible without looking through youtube, and had SE just made 1.0 run offline (it uses the same game engine as FF13) that would have at least given players a way to see those pieces of the lore without having to resort to other methods. I still have my 1.0 disc, obviously I can't play it. MMO games that are true MMO's can't ever be preserved fully. While gacha-MMO's are almost entirely client-sided games and the only thing they need to be online for is the gacha shop, and a way to exchange player data when there is a PvP mode.

[SongOfTheWind]

Japanese game companies do seem to have the luxury to do this because Japanese customers don't seem to care that much about preserving anything. Without opening another can of worms, it's been mostly westerners trying to preserve Japanese games even when the developer can not be bothered to.
https://www.theverge.com/24094441/fi...on-square-enix

I find this claim quite disingenuous. Starting from generalisation of “Japanese customers” and then claiming that SE didn’t care, while even in the article you linked it stated that they uploaded huge cutscenes playlist on YouTube, missing battle cutscenes, which in some cases made it difficult to follow, sure, but the attempt was made. The hero of the story who collected all of them is obviously a westerner in a western media outlet. But there are other accounts having YT video collections for story games in Japanese, it’s not smth only “westerners” do.