Why is the game going down every expasion?

[LilithGardenia]

Simple answer is profit. Making it easier to develop by following a set pattern or having classes dumbed down. They lose subs because of this yes, but the amount they save in money from less development is worth more than the amount they lose in subs. Nearly all questions on this forum can be answered with profit.

True but I feel like someone has to question them so they themselves think deeply of this is the best path because they don’t treat us as customers but cows that they can milk fir profit’s sake

[MonsutaMan]

Why is the game going down every expansion?

XI was kinda the same way.

ROTZ: Peak
COP: Great
ToA: Great
WotG: Solid
Abyssea: People hated it.....but Abyssea was only second to RotZ imo. Can literally bring any job, to any event.
SoA: Not well received because it felt thrown together due to XIV falling flat, A$$ out. They needed to go back to ol' reliable (XI); XV was a few years away...

Ask any XI fan, most of them will say SoA was the worst expansion.

[Catwho]

Ask any XI fan, most of them will say SoA was the worst expansion.

Like Dawntrail, SoA's story just wasn't engaging and didn't click for most people, but unlike DT, SoA also suffered from an incredibly annoying, boring, difficult battle system out in the woods that made no sense. I hated that system so much. At least Abyssea's battle content was grindable in a good way.

The main character was Yet Another Princess - I can't even remember her name. (Arciela?) All the political weakness of Nanamo, and none of the charm. I didn't hate her. I didn't like her either. I felt nothing for her. She was just... lame.

[TheDustyOne]

I respectfully disagree - because we can clearly see the end result of your argument. We have ended up with roles who all are expected to do DPS, and since there is no longer any meaningful separation of tank\healer\dps\support, jobs now get so so much self-healing or damage\debuffs we might as well just replace all the dungeons with one-mans and call it day. What's even the point of having a party with different "roles"?

This is largely down to fight design than job design. Not enough incoming damage means that both tanks and healers aren't able to perform their role, so why bring the extra defence and healing when there's nothing to defend against and heal? Healers had more healing to do back in HW and SB when we had more damage buttons than they do now, and because we have less healing to do now, what do we fill that time with? More DPS. If you want healers to feel more like healers, it doesn't matter if they have 2 or 20 DPS skills, enough incoming damage will make them heal, whether they have 2 healing buttons or 20. Likewise with tanks and tanking; the loss of aggro management, even if good parties largely made circle-shirking easy to do, is what made tanks into blue DPS.

Fights like Barbariccia I think are something of a gold standard we could look towards for this; small streams of constant incoming damage (even if the fight itself doesn't actually do a lot of damage) gives a constant sense of danger that just doing a large raidwide doesn't achieve. Square may be insistent on DDR fights, but they shouldn't forget mandatory damage moments like heal checks, mitigation checks, etc. Those are just as much part of the dance of combat as moving out of the orange circles. Unfortunately most of their heal checks are really just mitigation checks, so I'm not even sure if they know how to consistently design them.

I don't know when this attitude shifted, but it was pretty recently, because I don't remember ever hearing complaints in FFXI that jobs like White Mage didn't do enough damage in enough interesting ways. It certainly wasn't expected - if it happened it was a bonus. Loads of complaints over there, but killing the uniqueness of each role was never an actual player request.

Different games have different expectations. FFXI has subjobing, so a WHM could very well just use Black Magic if they wanted. Not to mention a larger amount of buffs to upkeep, debuffs to think about, and party composition as a whole is more important in XI than here. The principle however remains the same; when your primary job is done, you need to fill that time with something, and in this game, that typically means DPS. I wouldn't mind if Square decided on buff upkeep, crowd control, etc. but it has to be something that is always available when the primary role is fulfilled.

Part of the problem is limiting party size to 4 - to this day I have no idea why they made this design decision. It means you HAVE to limit the party to 1 tank 1 healer and 2 DPS instead of tank, healer, mix of DPS and support as we liked when we had 6 man parties in XI.

I can take it or leave it when it comes to party size; more than 4 would be nice, but that's what full party content is for anyway.

The other part is an aversion to the hard work of balancing. Teams are getting so squeezed and talent is getting shed left and right - it's no wonder so many of these tasks seem out of reach for the team that's left... So we get systems that are a shadow of what they were in this game's predecessor.

That I can kinda agree with, but even the smaller team of HW and SB were able to achieve great things. I think it has more to do with their current design philosophy rather than team size, but I can agree that Square should bring in some extra talent, not only to ease workloads, but also to provide fresh outside perspectives.

[LilithGardenia]

Has it? I haven't seen Dawntrail's JP script to compare it, but the English localization has been bad since ARR. It's hard to imagine it getting much worse.

You’re not wrong about it being bad since ARR cause it’s just bad quality and people are eating it up but not thinking about what they just experienced through the bad localization

[LilithGardenia]

It's simple. The devs forgot that the 5 roles are supposed to approach the game in 5 very different ways, even if they softly overlap with each other. While there has been homogenization issues dating back to ARR, the second the devs forced everyone to do every mechanic the same way, which started being the norm in mid-ShB, the devs lost the ability to have both diverse class and encounter design.

This in turn forces them to homogenize classes that can't do the ever-stricter encounter design, which in turn dilutes any differences the classes have both between roles and each other. Compound this with a desire to make every class have something 'new' while forgetting to prune old stuff in each expansion and you get situations like BLM's leveling experience or GNB getting a third cartridge for some reason as the devs slowly draw the class further from its relatively perfect launch state.

It's like the devs are stuck in some sort of demented loop where the only solution is dragging the game more and more into the extremes, and people either love the extremes, or leave.

Your first paragraph summarizes the issue since ARR

[LilithGardenia]

I kind of regret it but I skipped all the story this patch just to get into the new dungeon and raids. DT main story only had a couple of interesting parts mainly Shaolani (I absolutely love the western theme and wish they did more with it) and the solution 9 stuff while the rest of the content was an absolute slog of boring story and pointless dialogue. I'm gonna get recaps from now on until things start sounding a lot more interesting.

I skipped after I got to a point I couldn’t stand the bad writing in this story since the beginning.They screw the WOL and their next adventure plus poor Krile,they screw her badly in this expansion and I don’t know how they’ll recover from this filler expansion that had potential

[LilithGardenia]

In regards to the job identity criticisms, it largely has to do with attitudes like these:







Effectively this ends up sounding like:

Different jobs within a role aren't allowed to do things in a way that's different from the other jobs in that role, because that might mean it has certain downsides, upsides, and quirks that set it apart. Roles are only ever meant to be something set in stone and never have deviations in how they function.

When Square listens to this, we get things like the ShB gutting to healers where they lost their DPS buttons. After all, they're *healers* and should be *healing*. It also leads to Warrior losing Onslaughts gauge interactions because it wasn't something you mindlessly pressed on cooldown like the other tanks.

When I play WHM, I'm not just player a healer; I'm playing a job that has mastery over the natural elements, and at higher levels, attunes to light aspected spells. Why does my gameplay then only consist of casting Glare and occasional lilies? Why not have a suite of earth, water, and wind spells that charge up light themed spells to show that mastery of elements? SCH wasn't just a healer that would throw big shields on teammates, but a master of diseases and tactics, able to both cure and cause them, and spread them with Bane. A lot of these motifs and mechanics are lost when you decide that they should only have minimal actions outside of healing, and there's only so many ways to fill an HP bar in interesting ways.

Tanks have 2 problems; extremely homogenous, and practically invincible. The Onslaught example is just one, but most of the tank kits have 1-to-1 analogues that have so little deviation and flavour that you can learn one tank and you've effectively learned all of them outside of the DPS rotation. The sheer amount of raw defence, healing power, and lack of threatening damage from enemies means that it's hard for tanks to actually achieve a fail state outside of high end content.

You make an excellent point on Whm.What was the point of Whm going through the process in their story to learn about their nature path and their unique ways to heal through nature.I agree also with what they have done to tanks.We are too beefy and I sometimes wonder why we have healers when we got so much healing abilities that I think Yoshi might delete all healers in the future

[LilithGardenia]

Its because the devs fail in a lot of aspects:

- worldbuilding
- their own lore
- cant pick a lane with what aesthetic they want
- people wanting class identity
- people wanting QoL more than once every 4 years
- people wanting open world mmo stuff to do
- and a plethora of other issues like honest communication on what they cant and can do

I agree that the lore got destroyed who knows when because the ascians got change into something else and Hydaelyn too.I didn’t liked endwalker because they did the cheese plot of time travel and so much bs that the only reason I like Endwalker was because of the design of the ancients and Venat.The story was a joke

[LilithGardenia]

Was very clunky back in ARR, HW & SB but was more interesting overall.

While ShB is on of my most fav time in the game it also started the downhill of how the jobs feel.

I enjoyed and love Shadowbringer,the best expansion imho