Is it time to Sunset FFXIV?

[Supersnow845]

14 is not in a position it needs to be sunset. Think RuneScape 3 has been “dying” for 15 years and has been overtaken by a game that’s functionally nostalgia bait for its own fanbase (OSRS) yet it’s still not even close to being sunset. It still has years of planned content ahead of it. 14 has had one bad expansion and a few sequential expansions of relatively stale design

HOWEVER

The game does seem to be reaching a point where if it doesn’t innovate in some way it’s going to experience a mass exodus soon. The “go play other games” mantra is tired and old at this point, telling someone who WANTS to play the game but simply has no content to do to go play other games doesn’t fix the problem and calling it burnout is just a flat lie

I’d say the game is getting decently close to a precipice but it’ll be totally fine if I can be pulled back by the end of 7.0, people in the future will just see it as a little poor speed bump like shadowlands. We haven’t hit our “evolution of combat” phase yet

[Archeron]

FFXIV doesn't innovate. The game is stagnant, they're not taking risks. It's the same formula every time. Linear story, meaningless dialogue options. Six zones, Two cities, Duties at levels _1, _3, _5, _7, _9, _0. Literally EVERYTHING down to fates, aether currents, quests - It's a carbon copy of the last expansion. This time with an insulting story with a "Mary Sue" stealing the spotlight at every oppurtunity, and our favorite characters being shoved aside. The difference this time being that SE has no excuses for what they've delivered. They had ample time, and resources to make Dawntrail something fantastic. Something amazing. Something new, exciting. But they chose to present us with another rinse and repeat expansion.

They need to take risks. Innovate on what they've built. Throw the formula that's been used for the last several expansions out the window. Dawntrail was supposed to be a new beginning. Why not implement meaningful dialogue choices? How about seperate pathways the story can take before they ultimately all meet up at the end? Why not break the 6 zone, 2 city formula? There are so many things they could do, but won't. They're just not interested in taking risks, and it's making the game stagnant, and stale. Ontop of that, the patches (Especially during Endwalker) were devoid of meaningful content. Patch 6.3, for a casual player may as well have been an insult for all the content it added, or lack thereof. Hope you were looking forward to another Island Sanctuary update! Wheee! When you experience these patches, and how light they are on content, you struggle to justify staying subscribed to this game (Especially if you're a veteran player with thousands of hours). The week PR responses they've given out suggest that they don't even understand why the community has issues with Dawntrail to begin with. They just aren't equipped to improve the game if you asked me.

The reality is that our feedback is not being considered by the dev team, and the only way to send a message to them, is by sending the message to their shareholders and exectuvies. Vote with your wallet. If the sub isn't worth your money anymore, unsub. If you don't want to unsubscribe , but still send a message, make sure the subsciption is the ONLY thing you are paying them for. No mogstation, no merchandise, don't attend live events, and ignore their live streams. When social media engagement drops off, that is a big warning sign that their game is really dropping off.

I don't think they even have the resources to produce another MMORPG, XIV is all we've got for the near and distant future.

[Sotaris]

Snip

I have to agree. I mean what has really changed since like Stormblood, I think it was around here they dropped the 2 HM dungeons per patch (or was it during HW?).
Since then it been copying same formula more or less.

I'm not even burned out on 14 after playing it to 8-9 years. The gameplay just isnt fun anymore, housing isn't fun anymore, longterm grind isn't there anymore, I have to wait 1+ year for content I might be interested as a non-raider.
Story become stale post ARR ark.

I know what the defender will say so save your typing.

[Avoidy]

Imagine if you had a plant in your living room that crapped gold and all you had to do was barely water it three times a year. Would you throw it out, or would you keep giving it the bare minimum and enjoy your money printing machine?
Yeah, from a purely artistic and creative standpoint, the well's looking pretty dry. But the guys capable of sunsetting this game aren't paid to care about those lofty things. All they care about is moneyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

[Sotaris]

A lot of the 2.0 code is based on 1.0 since they both share the same engine, sort of.
1.0 used the infamous Luminous engine and 2.0 uses a altered 2.0 version of it, shares a lot with it.
Wherever they replaced it without communicating it, I can't say. I don't work at SE. I suspect they still use components from it, other parts is replaced since they was able to do some form of graphical overhaul this expansion.

That they can't change things due to 2.0 code is proof to me, someone who been working as a developer for the past decade that they rushed, took an old codebase to get 2.0 out on the market as soon as possible instead of doing it right from the start. We see it at most companies so SE isn't unique in this. It was just a matter of time before their legacy spaghetti to bite them.

I'd call that technical debt, since they can't do massive changes without having to rewrite a lot of the legacy, even if Yoshida don't think it is. Might just be a difference of labels.

[Jeeqbit]

1.0 used the infamous Luminous engine

It used Crystal Tools.

2.0 uses a altered 2.0 version of it, shares a lot with it.

2.0 uses an altered version of the Luminous Engine. As far as I know and observed, FF16 appeared to use it too.

Whether it borrowed any code from Crystal Tools, I can't say because I haven't worked with any of these... but they are supposed to be completely separate engines and that was the supposed to be the entire point of switching.

[Thayos]

This game's failings all boil down to the lack of itemization combined with its rapidly vertical progression. Devs can only introduce a limited amount of new gear to keep the playerbase from gearing up too quickly, which relegates non-raiding rewards to cosmetics/furniture/junk that doesn't really appeal to most gamers. So even when the Devs attempt to make new content, people just aren't interested because the rewards aren't there, because the itemization isn't there & because things are obsoleted so rapidly anyway.

With a more horizontal structure (more itemization options and/or hitting the brakes on rapid vertical progression) the devs would have a much easier time getting players excited about new content.

I remember back in the Final Fantasy XI days when the release of patch notes (and data mining!) was viewed as a major community event. Players couldn't wait to comb through the scores of new items to see which ones might incrementally improve their stats by even the smallest amounts. Nobody expected new items that would dramatically obsolete older items. It was all about the smallest ticks of improvement, giving people goals to chase without making the previous rounds of gear completely invalid. (The little secret of FFXI was that anything could be beaten with auction house gear, and the fancy drops you got from Sky/Sea/Dynamis/etc. just helped you beat things faster or with different party makeups.)

I'm enjoying FFXIV for what it is -- a game I log into and play for a little bit maybe two nights/week -- but I frequently long for what it could be. For a game that tries so hard to cater to casual players, there's a shocking lack of social (Free Company) battle content that would allow people to build the kinds of connections that made previous MMORPGs so special. At this point I have little faith that this game will ever be more than it is right now.

[Elissar]

I would like to say a thing...we are not even on late expansion (x.3+) and i am already unable to find MSQ dungeon party on duty finder...
Second dungeon Worqor Zormor is taking >16min as DPS.

[Hyperia]

I'm thinking that they need to consider a soft reset of the game by using shard travel as the tool.

How I would propose they do it is that we travel to another shard, everything goes well, we kill the bad guy, save the people, happy ending and then when we return, something happens with the transfer. We end up in Eorzia centuries in the future where we have moved from history into legend, and nobody believes we are who we say we are. If they are really desperate to bring some of our friends along, they can go to sleep in the Crystal Tower until we return.

The old zones would remain as we would "remember them" but story wise, they are behind us, and we would only use the new zones for story progression. They could easily fit the entirety of ARR and some of HW and SB into a single expansion due to larger, expanded zones. All of our abilities would be reworked because of the shard and time travel, allowing for everything to be rebalanced, and reset.

This would not require a rebuild of the game, it would allow them to fix most of the outstanding issues and allow them a creative reset to get themselves out of the boxes they have placed themselves into. The zones would be much larger and incorporate all the older zones into single larger zones.

Proposed zones for the expansion:
1. The shard we go to, just a single zone for now
2. The Black Shroud
3. Thanalan
4. Vylbrand
5. Coerthis
6. Gyr Abania

As it is now, things are a bit of a mess but they can fix things if they put a lot of effort into it.

[CNitsah]

They can do all the changes gameplay wise, add other way to gear yourself, add new zones, etc... if they don't add content with longevity, it's gonna get worse, people will continue to leave once the novelty will fade. That's the one thing they have to acknowledge, the number one FFXIV problem before the story the job balance the pvp problems,... is the lack of new engagement content with shelf life.