Dear Community what even holds you in this game

[Commander_Justitia]

It's not talked about because that's not their intention with it. Obviously, this was their intention with FF11, but in FF14 there were a number of other reasons for it:

• AI was being developed for the NPCs for solo duties anyway. You could already see them working on it throughout Stormblood as the NPCs became really good at mechanics such as entering stack markers, spreading, etc. This culminated in a demonstration of the soon-to-be AI in Ghimlyt Dark.
• There were so many dungeons that people were waiting ages to get a queue pop. Not due to lack of people doing roulettes, but simply the sheer amount of dungeons was making any individual one harder to pop.
• A lot of FF players just play the single player FFs, and they want to lure them in by saying they can just do the story first, which is obviously a trap because along the way many of them will end up socializing and come out of their shell. That's how socializing is for a lot of people. They're afraid of it until they get pulled into a group - such as an FC, and a significant amount of FF14 players can relate to having been shy at first and then getting dragged into the social fabric of the game. It was a smart business strategy to do this when the technology was already being made for solo duties anyways.

Not sure what you describe as "AI". To me it is just scripts. We in gaming called any NPC simulating something like intelligence as AI in the past, but nowadays, it is not real AI like a model AI that can make their own decision based on the situation. A NPC will never go to a different spot to evade, it will always be the same in my experience.

And ehh too much handholding, it is a MMORPG, it is online with other players by design, it shouldn't cater so much to players playing solo the whole time.
Ofc it is smart when you expect less players in the future. But you get less players by having uninteresting same dungeon designs.

Mechanics have always been solvable by a computer in FFXIV. There are bots that clear ultimates. Most of the changes to dungeons were actually to make it intuitive/obvious to a new/returning player, whereas their old philosophy was to make it so you have to wait behind the purple line and discuss strategy

Yeah, they said it to make it more "intuitive for new players". I can't remember too many examples right now because I haven't played for months, but one example is copperbell mines - the slime boss mechanic is gone, it was such a simply mechanic, but "AI" anticipating where a tank brings the boss, is not reliable enough. So it got removed.
Same way the end boss used to have adds that break the wall to new adds to appear? Guess can't have that, too "dangerous" to new players. Yes, you went from using brain 10%, to mindlessly pressing buttons ignoring what ever happens, you cant die, you cant lose, just press your button like a bot.
One of my favorite bosses was the snowcloak 2nd boss. The snowball mechanic where you push it into the boss to instantly kill him more or less if executed well. Now that fight takes a few minutes, because it has become another mindless button smasher. NPCs don't know how to hit a snowball facing the boss at the right moment. They don't know if it is better to use a small or a big ball. That kind of decision making requires a human. Because SE didn't code for it. And instead of coding something so difficult, they just removed the mechanic.

Calling it more "intuitive/obvious" is really just an excuse for dumbing down dungeons for NPCs. As well as dumbing it down for casual players, who find out in a lvl80 mainstory end dungeon how to do aoe rotation, back then during shadowbringers expac...Instead of earlier.

You see the contradiction in what you said, right?

I noticed it when I wrote it, that it may sound that way. But still kept it. Because it doesn't contradict to me - I want the difficulty of the content and how we use skills to be higher, but I do not see a reason to make actual access to content difficult. Because that is not really a "difficulty" - it shouldn't exist once you have unlocked a duty. It is like an artificial resistance from doing it. Making players unsure if they are prepared enough, when they could just go and do it.

[Gwenkatsu]

(kinda funny they abandoned Jenylins and went back to the Gladiator characters)

That's another thing I dislike about the job quests so much - they constantly loose their focus (pre 30 everyone: "The Alacran, the Alacran, oh my god the Alacran - run!", post 30 everyone: "Alacran who? Never heard of them")

Red Mage tells not only a consistent story, but also a good one, with some nice little background info of the world and all. And you even get to visit one of the mage cities of eld (they reused raid assests for this quest, which I did not know back then, as I never did these raids ). So I hope you enjoy it!

[Aidorouge]

And ehh too much handholding, it is a MMORPG, it is online with other players by design, it shouldn't cater so much to players playing solo the whole time.
Ofc it is smart when you expect less players in the future. But you get less players by having uninteresting same dungeon designs.

Dungeon designs didn't really have anything to do with why Dynamis is a ghost town though, and if not for the ability to over-level/gear a piece of content and then unsync it, or fall back on Duty Support/Squadrons/Trusts, a lot of folks there would still be stuck trying to get Sastasha to pop most times of the day. I myself was forced to solo pretty much everything aside from Alliance Raids and some of the Stormblood trials because that's just how low population Dynamis was, and I didn't want to keep data center hopping just to clear the next MSQ dungeon/trial.

Given that Dynamis is the data center they try to goad new players to join, it wouldn't have looked good for the game to seem so dead that content was unplayable to progress the story, so having an alternative to (most) MSQ required content was necessary otherwise the few people still here would have left as well.

[TheDustyOne]

Not sure what you describe as "AI".

Let's not get too caught up in semantics over what's "real AI" or not. Jeeq is still using the term AI correctly regardless of modern computing using the term for general AI as opposed to games using scripted "AI". I wouldn't be opposed to it being called scripted intelligence (SI) instead, but everyone and their mother has been calling computer controlled characters AI for decades, so any other name for it would just be confusing at this point.

Semantics aside; I'm of the similar opinion that dungeons have less complex mechanics partly thanks to Duty Support/Trusts and their AI either not being able to handle them, or would lead to less interactive gameplay if they could. The 2nd Snowcloak boss being a good example you provided; it'd require the AI tank to decide a snowball to aim the boss at (it's not hard to decide to aim for a larger snowball, just tell the bot to aim for the snowball with the highest "size" value), and another AI bot to smack the snowball towards the boss when it's charging up its AoE (tell the bot to smack the ball with the biggest size value from an angle that aims at the boss). This isn't impossible to make, just cumbersome, and the end result really just lets the player not have to actually interact with the mechanic because the computer will do it for you.

I think Square just doesn't want to program for these unique mechanics rather than it being "impossible". Easier for them to just redesign the boss from the many design templates they probably rely on and call it a day.

The biggest problem with modern dungeon design though is just their current design directives and philosophy. They're too concerned with shoving a bunch of "think fast" AoEs where you can't stand still for 3 seconds, with which they'll justify obliterating caster design.

[JohnLakeside]

I'm at the Elpis portion of Endwalker and I decided to make a new character and replay everything from scratch. But this time around, I'm going to do all the side quests, all job quests, and beast tribe quests when its appropriate with respect to the main story. Doing side quests outside of their appropriate time periods really was immersion breaking and unsatisfying. I don't want to finish the Hydaelyn saga in Endwalker feeling like I still have unfinished business from the world and story as it existed in previous expansions. Doing the side quests from ARR or Stormblood, for example, just feels off when I'm already in Endwalker. It feels like I'm not really making an impact on the world because that time has passed.

I'm also curious about whether I will like Shadowbringers more on my second playthrough. I found it infuriatingly overrated when I first played it.

[Mawlzy]

The biggest problem with modern dungeon design though is just their current design directives and philosophy. They're too concerned with shoving a bunch of "think fast" AoEs where you can't stand still for 3 seconds, with which they'll justify obliterating caster design.

Thank you. Exactly this. And why PvP in this game is far superior to PvE.

I'm sure everyone agrees.

[george357]

i stay because i like the game not because people who do not pay my sub ask me why i stay this is all up to me and not them.

[Voidmage]

My main anchor is the story.
7.2 was good and showed me that they still can tell a good story if they get slapped in the face a bit and get down of their high horse. A good story makes me want to do quest and all to find out more and keeps me interested.
I also like things like mining to calm down, doing my roulette and just pushing my BLM gameplay even though I have fallen out of love with the raid design.
Then there is my character who after so many years is just important to me and I spend way too much time with glamour.

The game itself is mostly still the old one minus a good amount of the charm points sacrificed for streamlining and over reliance on DDR gameplay as well as an overbearing amount of raiding at the cost of other things right now.

The biggest reason for my dissatisfaction is actually how the community has changed and the devs respond to it.
Instant pulling tanks, a far more arrogant attitude in high end raids or the overly annoying guide war in PF to a point where even blind runs devolve into guide raiding after a few tries because the raids are designed with statics and guides in mind it seems.
Content creators who are so outside of normal reality in their static bubble they have no idea what they are talking about in parts minus a few and the devs completely catering and only listening to them.

Times have changed I guess where streaming and content that is marketable in videos is the most important thing nowadays.
I have honestly fallen out of love with video games as a whole only playing this one and some few others that are not AAA nowadays.

Also hot take but Hrothgar we’re a mistake and should have never been implemented.

[TaleraRistain]

Black Mage and Red Mage were both good in my book, while most of the DoH/DoL quest lines were horrible (can't remember the Culinarian one, it's been ages since I did them).

Did you do the alchemist quests? Those are Emotional Damage the Questline.

[Valence]

The biggest problem with modern dungeon design though is just their current design directives and philosophy. They're too concerned with shoving a bunch of "think fast" AoEs where you can't stand still for 3 seconds, with which they'll justify obliterating caster design.

I also suspect that in their systematic attempt to dramatically reduce or outright remove buffs and debuffs and other rpg elements from encounters, jobs and the game in general, they genuinely think that going for the "action/reaction" type of gameplay will reach more people and a bigger audience than things that actually require players to think actively. Ultimately I don't know whether it's true or not, but it's also betraying their core audience in the process and throwing the baby with the bathwater.