JP: Yoshi P should step down, FF14 is a sinking ship, in response to interview

[Willemdarke]

Be honest the only thing wrong has been the story, the gameplay has been fine as far as I have played. It's the story of DT that was not a hit and that's something that can be fixed by changing writers or bring back Ishikawa

While I don't think Yoshi should step down, the story isn't the only issue.

Overall job design is at an all time low. They fix problems for some jobs, while introducing the exact same problems to other jobs. The two minute meta has led to a near universal homogenisation of how jobs play over the course of their rotation. Unlike virtually every other RPG game, there's no talent system or any other form of customisation or skill expression. In fact, they actively remove things that deviate from the baseline, like non-standard BLM.

There's literally no new type of content to play at max level. Your day-to-day play is identical to two or even 4 years ago. Roulettes once a day, maybe an Extreme or a Savage prog once or twice a week. Why is the Eureka-equivalent not available at launch? Or a variant dungeon? Or the new deep dungeon? Aside from the MSQ and 4 raid bosses (who use majority repurposed old mechanics) what has the team been doing this whole time? Have all resources really been spent on old Duty Support and the graphics update?

They know the issues - why do we have to wait for 8.0 for jobs to be fixed? Why do we have to wait for 7.2+ for reward distribution to be increased? Why is midcore content, which was sorely missing from EW not available at launch? Why are the housing and glamour systems still convoluted? Why was there no PTR for the graphics update, so people can give feedback sooner than a month before launch, when it's too late to fix most things? Why is character customisation still so limited even after the update?

There are so many more issues with the game, we just love it too much to admit them until we are at a breaking point.

Yeah, I don't think Yoshi should go (yet) as he's done a lot of good over the years, but it's so evident that he and his team have been stretched too thin, doing FF16 in parallel with 14 and now the rumoured FF9R, that he's clearly not putting enough attention and management into the game anymore, on top of many senior people like Ishikawa being promoted away, leaving the juniors to fail to pick up the slack.

[Benjo]

Original article which the JP blog is based on:
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/final-...no-not-really/

This being a game, it's a form of entertainment, and you'll always see some form of mixed response to entertainment. A second factor is that with Endwalker, we reached a big climax to a long-standing, spanning story. To a certain extent I had already predicted that we would have some sort of mixed response this time. So If the question is whether I was shocked in a big way, the answer is no, not really.

The concept was journeying to a new land—we would be going to a new continent where we'd be seeing new cultures, new races, and characters … because of that, both in the development team and also from my side, we had this concept in mind in terms of cleanly and very attentively introducing these new aspects to the player.

There were some people who thought that some of the tempo in the main scenario was slow. And they wanted to get through to more thrilling parts of the plot at a faster pace.
We did see feedback from people who wanted to tackle the battle content faster. So because we saw that type of feedback we will take that on board as a learning process and experience.

We depicted Wuk Lamat as someone who had a bit of a complex towards her parents and also towards her siblings, and because of that lack of confidence, I think that also contributed to the slow pace and the feeling of frustration.

If we had maybe portrayed her as more of a confident character, maybe we would not have encountered that kind of situation. So in that regard, I feel that we did something quite bad for Wuk Lamat as a character. And taking on this experience, it made me realise that it's important to consider those things when it comes to showcasing the character to the players.

About the Scions:
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/final-...in-the-future/

We wanted to showcase all of the Scions, but we also wanted to showcase new characters, and we wanted to see what would be the response. We wanted to see whether people would be like, 'Oh no, we don't want any more Scions, please, just get rid of them'. Or, on the other hand, people might be saying, 'hey, we want our Scions back.' … So we thought that we would need to do this [eventually]. And so in that sense, it was a challenge that we took on. As expected, there were some people who were arguing that they wanted to see the Scions more in the spotlight, and there were also others who said that they wanted the scions to take a step down and not be the focus. So in that regard, I felt that we had a lot of lessons which we gained [from Dawntrail]. People didn't want the scions to be shown in a half-hearted way.

For example, a possibility for the next story is that the Warrior of Light goes out on a journey on their own. Alternatively, the team "could forgo having new characters" entirely, instead having "all of the Scions grouped together and working together, moving forward.
As I mentioned before, showcasing some characters in a half-baked way is definitely not a good thing. So moving forward, we would like to be more dramatic in the way we create the story.

G'raha is a super popular character, so I myself am very aware of the kind of reaction we could get if we had an expansion where he doesn't make an appearance. But having said that, if a character doesn't appear in one expansion, that doesn't mean they will never appear again. Rather, we are considering doing things in a certain order. So maybe in a given expansion, such and such a character will be the focus, and then in the next expansion, another group of characters will be the focus ... I think the possibility of going down this route is the highest.

[Astronema]

Sweet baby stink and corps had their hands in DT. Such a large drop in quality can only be attributed to a lack of funds and budget or outside pressure and interference.

[LilaIronman]

I would not say, that it is a sinking ship.

https://steamdb.info/app/39210/charts/#1y







Cheers

Steam charts don't mean anything anyway, it does not count the standalone game launcher

[Willemdarke]

I would not say, that it is a sinking ship.

https://steamdb.info/app/39210/charts/#1y







Cheers

You don't think losing the entire "new expansion hype" player spike in just 2 months and returning to the content droughts lull numbers is bad?

[Larirawiel]

You don't think losing the entire "new expansion hype" player spike in just 2 months and returning to the content droughts lull numbers is bad?

No. Because it is normal and happened already in FF14 and it happens in other healthy games too. The ship would be sinking if the numbers would go far under the EW numbers.



Cheers

[ninjaminja]

Bad troll attempt by op

[Gullis]

if i had a penny for everytime I heard about sinking ships, I probably could have bought an actual ship.

[ninjaminja]

You don't think losing the entire "new expansion hype" player spike in just 2 months and returning to the content droughts lull numbers is bad?

That has always been the trend for every expansion of every other mmorpg game .plz come up with concrete ideas instead of debunked theories

[Willemdarke]

No. Because it is normal and happened already in FF14 and it happens in other healthy games too. The ship would be sinking if the numbers would go far under the EW numbers.



Cheers

I didn't say it's a sinking ship, just that it is bad.

As we can see from the graph, player numbers were steadily increasing throughout ShB's lifespan, reaching their peak with EW's launch. Since then numbers have been in decline, raising slightly during content drops only to dip back down right away.

A healthy game would be growing, like in ShB, not losing all hype immediately after an expansion launch.