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.