The invasion of Monster Hunter / Souls like mechanics

[Valence]

With the new release of the Monster Hunter crossover, it made me reminisce a little back from the times in Stormblood when the original crossover released - The Great Hunt, the Rathalos fight. It tried to do a lot of unusual or interesting things in order to model something closer to the experience one would find in the MH game franchise, but still rooted into the XIV gameplay system. So we couldn't heal (at least in phase 2), had to use potions, and everything relied on visual cues and telegraphs. Fair enough I thought, because that was supposed to be Monster Hunter after all.

But I also remember absolutely hating on that fight. I loathed it so much because it was miles away from what XIV was all about. It was trying to implement an action game into a MMO. Let's be fair, XIV has always had a couple of similar mechanics, the most and earliest notable one being Coincounter in Aurum Vale, or later the no telegraph no aggro dragon in ARR/HW which I appreciated for its uniqueness. Let's just say that the Rathalos fight was just taking everything similar and cranked it to over thousand in a pure concentration of DDR and dodge mechanics. It felt horrible for me and I couldn't imagine what XIV would be if it was choke full of similar encounters.

Well, turns out it is now. Everything is about watching out for visual cues, everything is about gotcha mechanics you have to eat in the face before figuring out how they work, everything is about running everywhere like frogs in a blender (©Mao). Worst of all, since SB/ShB the game has progressively and completely turned into a "stand in the correct spot or die" fiesta. We've lost almost everything that made XIV a RPG: no more increasing mechanics with enemies buffing themselves or the party having to manage growing threats, no more add management or dps checks, no more organically stat based mechanics, no more resource management beyond brainless job gauges, MP you could just remove like you removed TP after it stopped being significant in SB. No more resource scarcity and scrappy based gameplay, no more skill expression born out of organic battle system variables and boss designs, everything is now a binary do or die, if not outright body checks everywhere for harder content.

The designs you're implementing in casual content in DT isn't even getting the success you were hoping for with your "new and exciting encounter design". A lot of very casual players hate it. It's too binary to provide a good sliding scale of effort and it just gates some players, the very audience that content is aimed at. Why do you think they finally added AoEs to Coincounter with Duty Support? It was the boss that literally murdered sprouts again and again because they couldn't understand the visual cues or that the boss had any to begin with, and now you want to double down on that kind of design for the casual endgame, and wonder why it's messing with so many casuals??

All I'll say to the dev team, again: stop trying to be another game genre than what you are.

[Kohashi]

Let me say this. I am having a lot of fun reading the MHW forums about their experience with Omega. I guess now it's their time.

As for your last bit, how is collaborating with another game a bad thing? It's optional content, and if it ain't into that thing, fair, but you don't have to do it.

[Derio]

Let me say this. I am having a lot of fun reading the MHW forums about their experience with Omega. I guess now it's their time.

As for your last bit, how is collaborating with another game a bad thing? It's optional content, and if it ain't into that thing, fair, but you don't have to do it.

Its been their time. When Behemoth was released, MH still got the better end of the collab.

[Kohashi]

Its been their time. When Behemoth was released, MH still got the better end of the collab.

I mean... I agree... Omega is the cause of pain and sorrow for many.

I watched a few videos/ gifs, and the fight seems really fun in MHW. People panicking had me rolling.

[Valence]

Let me say this. I am having a lot of fun reading the MHW forums about their experience with Omega. I guess now it's their time.

As for your last bit, how is collaborating with another game a bad thing? It's optional content, and if it ain't into that thing, fair, but you don't have to do it.

I am frankly not sure what this has to do with anything laid out in the OP.

[AyumiCosplayGlam]

Optional content stops being optional when there is nothing else new.

This patch in a nutshell:
-Optional Trial
-Optional Deep Dungeon
-Optional Hildibrand
-Optional Beast Tribe Quest

Which means there is nothing to do in this patch unless you do the optional content, this to me dosn't seem like optional anymore.

Btw i strongly recommend doing the deep dungeon now because 2 weeks from now nobody will play it aside from the solo achievement hunters. Get the rewards from it now or say goodbye to them until a random mogtome event years down the line.

[hydralus]

There are people who complain the game has changed too much, there are people who complain the game hasn't changed enough. Thus, the world keeps spinning.

[Reimmi]

There are people who complain the game has changed too much, there are people who complain the game hasn't changed enough. Thus, the world keeps spinning.

Most people complaining about the game not changing enough aren't talking about encounter design
It's usually job design

[hydralus]

Most people complaining about the game not changing enough aren't talking about encounter design
It's usually job design

Funny because all I ever hear about job design is that it used to be good, which indicates there were changes made.

[Amarande]

Funny because all I ever hear about job design is that it used to be good, which indicates there were changes made.

Jobs used to have considerably more depth to them, the ones you see in Dawntrail are considerably simplified, a process that began with Shadowbringers for the most part (although Stormblood arguably drew first blood with the replacement of Cross Class skills with Role Actions).

There are a number of reasonable reasons for this, mind you:

* Game keeps adding more jobs. Meanwhile you still have the same number of slots in a party. Every slot type in an 8-player raid (assuming a normal party comp, so one shield+one regen healer, one of each of the three types of DPS+flex slot) has at least 2x as many jobs competing for that slot as there are slots, and since we get two new non-limited jobs every xpac, that just keeps growing. Since there's not nearly enough space for every job, every job has to be at least ok and there can't be too standout of a META. Nobody wants to be told "sorry, your job is no good right now, go level something else and try again" (especially at the pace modern raiding communities move and the "sorry, try again next season and rush it more" disregard they tend to have for those that fall behind). It is difficult to achieve this without making jobs increasingly samey, as hardcore players will find ways to leverage even little features into big matters (such as the Stormblood DRG-NIN-BRD meta that left only ONE slot for ALL other red jobs if you were serious about optimization).

* Certain job features (such as DoTs) proved problematic especially when the game started introducing ultra-optimization challenges (like Ultimates) and large-group content (like Forays), because there is a limit to how many buffs and debuffs the system can handle per combatant (similar to original WoW). This resulted in a large amount of pruning (eg healers being cut back to a single DoT) and reworking (SMN completely losing its flavor as a DoT job).

* The increasing rigidity of mechanics (since you can't "just eat an AoE, healers adjust" most of the time at serious level in this game like you usually can in other MMOs) requires jobs to be simple enough to work around them readily (and still keep up with the exponential buffing of the 2-minute-CD party buff design, which has also been a chronic issue mostly unique to XIV). Even Black Mage's timer system had to be done away with on this altar.

Simplify the jobs, and you need the mechanics to be more complex to compensate - but now we are hitting the limits with that (eg there's only so fast you can make the pace before server architecture and ping become deal breakers, and the increasing reliance on sensory overload and subtler visual cues that need to be picked up on much faster than it looks like creates issues for older and disabled players which is particularly troublesome in a genre in its golden years with an aging core audience) ...