Do you think cost is an acceptable excuse regarding not getting FFXIV content?

[Mawlzy]

You can't have hypercasual content that is fun and engaging because, as Snow said, it's designed to be destroyed with little thought. All content becomes trivial if you remove the parts that makes it what it is. If you removed DPS checks, mandatory mitigation and coordination from Savage, you'd get boring slop. The same goes for Forked Tower. I think the devs designed it exactly the way they intended, but I wouldn't mind them giving hypercasuals a normal version.

But you can't have your cake and eat it, too. Either you enjoy the challenges of the video game and put in the required effort to overcome them, or you can grind mindless content without access barriers, or non-combat content. Or PvP.

Funny thing is, it is precisely doing the same thing over and over again, for example to prog savage, that makes it boring to many players.

In the broad player base of any MMO, there is no cookie cutter solution. Content of different commitment levels is required.

[Khryseis_Astra]

You can't have hypercasual content that is fun and engaging because, as Snow said, it's designed to be destroyed with little thought. All content becomes trivial if you remove the parts that makes it what it is. If you removed DPS checks, mandatory mitigation and coordination from Savage, you'd get boring slop. The same goes for Forked Tower. I think the devs designed it exactly the way they intended, but I wouldn't mind them giving hypercasuals a normal version.

But you can't have your cake and eat it, too. Either you enjoy the challenges of the video game and put in the required effort to overcome them, or you can grind mindless content without access barriers, or non-combat content. Or PvP.

I wouldn’t call CLL, Dalriada or DRN mindless content that was easy destroyed, at least not on release. What made it easy later on was the work you put in to increasing your mettle and collecting special actions.

Pretty much only things I would remove from FT to make a Normal mode, would be the three rez limit and the wipe mechs. And based on the comments about the puzzles, which leads me to believe they are solved by certain jobs using certain actions, then as I said, allow Normal mode to let you change jobs out of combat.

I don’t think casuals - or hyper casuals as you call them - are looking for a cake walk, just something less punishing and time consuming. Some people don’t play games for a challenge, they play to have fun. CLL, Dalriada and DRN were fun enough to both do with friends and randoms in a single session, as well as fun enough to be repeatable for rewards. Like the field notes and card which should have been in a Normal mode in the first place.

[Mawlzy]

I wouldn’t call CLL, Dalriada or DRN mindless content that was easy destroyed, at least not on release. What made it easy later on was the work you put in to increasing your mettle and collecting special actions.

Pretty much only things I would remove from FT to make a Normal mode, would be the three rez limit and the wipe mechs. And based on the comments about the puzzles, which leads me to believe they are solved by certain jobs using certain actions, then as I said, allow Normal mode to let you change jobs out of combat.

I don’t think casuals - or hyper casuals as you call them - are looking for a cake walk, just something less punishing and time consuming. Some people don’t play games for a challenge, they play to have fun. CLL, Dalriada and DRN were fun enough to both do with friends and randoms in a single session, as well as fun enough to be repeatable for rewards. Like the field notes and card which should have been in a Normal mode in the first place.

Frequently overlooked point that is central to so many discussions here.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Looking back at early weeks CLL, DRn, and Dal, couple of things that I think they can do to make FTB normal version would be:

• Remove death restrictions.
• Enable swapping PJs -outside combat-.
• Replace the 'mega trap' or at least reduce their radius.
• Some wipe mechanics are fine, but preferably not one that is asinine like snowball wild charges. Having soft enrages are more preferable than outright wipes though. Anybody recall wiping to colossus and Lyon in CLL? Or even, wiping to the 1 of the 3 adds in first Dalriada boss because they go super saiyan if you try to be cheeky and leave just one alive instead of 3 for too long?
• Enable raising at the entrance when wipe occurs, but do not subtract players' knowledge exp yet. Instead, for each 'raise at entrance', you get a stack of debuff that tells you how many times you do this, then once you exit the tower, the number of experience you lose will be determined by this stacks.

=====
Back to the topic though... I would probably say yes about 5 years ago. That is, until I realized this game also features their own cash shop - a friggin' subs based game.. we should've gotten access to majority of those items via in-game content. On top of that, there's also increased waiting time between patches, less contents given over time, dwindling quality checks, weird priorities, and so on.

Yeah, no. They had been better. They should be better.

[Supersnow845]

I wouldn’t call CLL, Dalriada or DRN mindless content that was easy destroyed, at least not on release. What made it easy later on was the work you put in to increasing your mettle and collecting special actions.

Pretty much only things I would remove from FT to make a Normal mode, would be the three rez limit and the wipe mechs. And based on the comments about the puzzles, which leads me to believe they are solved by certain jobs using certain actions, then as I said, allow Normal mode to let you change jobs out of combat.

I don’t think casuals - or hyper casuals as you call them - are looking for a cake walk, just something less punishing and time consuming. Some people don’t play games for a challenge, they play to have fun. CLL, Dalriada and DRN were fun enough to both do with friends and randoms in a single session, as well as fun enough to be repeatable for rewards. Like the field notes and card which should have been in a Normal mode in the first place.

I 100% think that forked should be given a normal

I also think giving forked a normal would make it look nothing like what current forked is and I think that’s a pretty important distinction

Just removing rezz restrictions and “wipe mechanics” would strip the content back to proverbially nothing

That’s more the point I was trying to make

[Gwenkatsu]

The same goes for Forked Tower. I think the devs designed it exactly the way they intended

So at that anime expo that happened, we got a few more details https://www.rpgsite.net/interview/17...ward-to-future Most of it is about the future but he did make a few comments on OC and FT.

"I do feel that Forked Tower: Blood was a misstep in development. It wasn't meant to be hardcore content, so to speak. The intention was that it might be more difficult at first, but over time more players might be willing to take on the challenge; yet, in the end we made it too difficult for players to even get into the raid in the first place. That's why we're making adjustments with 7.3, and why some of those adjustments were pushed even earlier than that. [...] That's why we're revising our roadmap to account for this feedback in patch 7.5." Yoshida also reflected that the team may have been putting too much focus on a player's individual responsibility, and how a single person's failure could have such a profound impact on the whole party. They regret that they weren't able to strike that balance they had intended for the content.

To me this somehow sounds as if FT was not what the devs wanted it to be.

[Drimn]

I think cost and mission creep at CS3 is an acceptable excuse from the dev team for the drop in quality. From a management standpoint, it's absolutely 100% inexcusable. SE higher-ups are killing the game that's bankrolling their presence in the West, because instead of investing in dev team quality, they're taking the talent they do have and spreading them paper-thin. How are you supposed to develop good content if you're burned out or unable to focus?

I don't know if they'll go under if Final Fantasy as a franchise stops being profitable, but I don't know how much budget Square Enix will have for game development if their entire line of business is going to be peddling Dragon Quest to nostalgic salarymen and franchising out Cloud and Y'shtola to whoever wants to do something with them.

[0blivion]

Snow put it a lot nicer than me, but yeah. Just removing res and job restrictions, as well as wipe mechanics, would make FT boring slop. You'd have to quite literally change the mechanics for them to be interesting to those not looking for a challenge, and make them more akin to DT normal modes where everything is random ground AoEs, sustained damage and Dawntrail text all over the place.

[PaulusHamsteru]

That would fly if this was F2P. So no, cost is not an acceptable excuse for a sub-based game, especially when we barely get any content.

[PercibelTheren]

For a company the size of SE? Absolutely not. FFXIV rakes in obscene amounts of money. If it is somehow underfunded, then the financials are being mismanaged to an insane degree.