Engaging Content is at an All-Time Low

[Supersnow845]

I feel like cosmic isn’t a flaw of content, it’s a flaw of the fact that there is only so much you can do with crafting

When you take a step back and look at cosmic, what it does and what it doesn’t do, what Phaenna fixed, little things that aussies changed it’s obvious they are taking feedback seriously and implementing it, the problem is simply there is only so much you can do with the games crafting system especially with Raphael.

Conversations I’ve had with people who already liked crafters before this basically all agree, cosmic is fantastic, it’s just crafter mains or people who really like second screening macros like they are playing RuneScape just aren’t a very large portion of the playerbase and with the absolutely catastrophic failure of OC people feel pushed into cosmic when it just isnt broad content

Square isn’t helping this by making it so cosmic gets updated every patch while OC rots and pilgrims; while good; is never getting updated again

Cosmic’s only real “failure” is too much time being dedicated to too few people

[Valence]

I don't get why they planned 4 full blown maps for cosmic. Because the story asked for a progression? We've been doing the same exact thing every time. There is nothing new (beyond dronebits lol). Nothing specific to each map to make them more unique and bring them onto themselves. Even the phase progressions are all the same and build the exact same modules over and over and over (cosmoliner, hydro and energy stations, mech hangars, etc).

If that was the extent of what was planned in terms of gameplay content, two maps at best would have sufficed. Ardorum would have just been a small map instance serving as base camp we could have probably set up in one or two phase progs or just a solo instance like the train station before Doomtrain. Phaenna could have been scrapped, Oizys would have been where we would actually have started following the story, stumbled on alien artifacts. And then the second map would have been the 4th one that has yet to come for a good finale.

But they needed more steps for their doh/dol relics, yet didn't want to assume responsibility for what it actually demanded in terms of investment.

[Derio]

I dont think Cosmic is a fail. However Cosmic and Occult just show that when two large scale open areas are created, both suffer from design perspectives. Occult is a bad version of Bozja and Cosmic while it is mostly fine is just a copy of Ishgard restoration but without the promise of new housing at the end.

[Jeeqbit]

I dont think Cosmic is a fail. However Cosmic and Occult just show that when two large scale open areas are created, both suffer from design perspectives. Occult is a bad version of Bozja and Cosmic while it is mostly fine is just a copy of Ishgard restoration but without the promise of new housing at the end.

It was still worth having both Cosmic and Occult because Endwalker felt like it had too much solo content. At least I feel like I'm playing an MMORPG again in Dawntrail, doing these large-scale events (Red Alerts, Mech Ops, Progression FATEs, CEs) regularly with hundreds of players there. It feels "massively multiplayer".

Both would of course benefit from more mechanical creativity. But do remember that they only discovered their internal problems around the time of Occult and Cosmic release, and said it would take around 8 months before we start to see their new design philosophy due to how the development cycle works. We should see if North Horn is just another copy and paste mechanically, or not.

[TeresaFortell]

Cosmic is uhhh, it is glorified levequests, and because of this reason, it feels like the actual collaborative effort has been a lot lower with this versus with Ishgard... EX+ recipes are dull because the underlying ability suite is dull... I know people routinely (and rightly) complain about combat job simplification, but the amount crafters were hit with this is absurd, there used to be a lot of agency to combat RNG... With Cosmic it feels like they wanted to add an exploratory element to it... But it's just utterly redundant because you just find yourself using the glorified hoverboard to travel everywhere.

It just feels like they are trying to streamline the system as much as humanly possible to ensure that in any given activity, no player can miss out on anything, and with this they've lost a massive amount of engagement factor.

Pretty much. I agree that the biggest issue in CE is that there is no similar location like Diadem where one could gather resources, so there are no incentives for people to be there other than to level their crafters or try to do EXs for either score or farming mounts. In the case of Ishgard Restoration, it could be considered evergreen content because resources would have to be gathered, which allows a market to revolve around buying and selling those resources. To this day, you can still find people doing it for that particular reason.

Once everyone finishes their relic tools and their mounts in Cosmic Exploration, there simply would not be any additional incentive for people to return to that content.

[HyperiusUltima]

Your mistake is thinking that the current design isn't completely intended. Look how quickly they respond to feedback like "add better events". They are listening. They're just not listening to you. If anything has gone unfixed at this point after years of feedback it's because they have zero intention of ever changing it. They are not interested in retaining gamers. They just want XIV to be a sterile safe adult daycare center where nothing interesting can ever happen.

The "intended experience" for Cosmic at the moment is really just it - Space. The biggest problem we have been running into since they constantly made large maps and is beginning to become a problem is that they are empty after a while. Remember what I said about how people are when they consume the content that's in front of them? That includes art and the world. While we do have the FATE system, it's not actually standing up on its own after 12 years - it's stagnating even with the Shared FATE system added since Shadowbringers, along with an incentive to keep farming Bicolors.

It needs something new - and in regards to Cosmic that something new really needs to be something that we're actively doing. Think about it! What if people could, I don't know, choose what project they want to do first? The Loporrits have been deciding all this for us, and while it's nice for some base things, it'd actually be more engaging if we as a community worked on said projects instead of "filling the bar" just to move to the next phase that they've preordained in their game design. Not to mention, having a choice also can provide impact on what can happen first. Build a Mech Hangar first for more mechs, or build more energy efficiency? It adds an extra layer - but it's not really expected at all out of this dev team to go the extra mile in Dawntrail unless we push them to do so, which really shouldn't be the case but is.

While all they can do is react to what feedback is saying, they're too busy already planning 8.0 in the background while current state of the game is unhealthy. However, I also think that the idea that they should retain their design philosophy for an expansion in terms of content is more ridiculous than it sounds. If anything, it mostly tells the player base "we're going to keep doing the same thing until we get to the next expansion where we can actually change things later instead of now, so please look forward to it".

[thrntnja]

My biggest gripe with Cosmic Exploration is the lack of actual exploration. I honestly enjoy it for the most part, even if it is essentially the same gameplay loop in each zone. I just wish there was more interaction with each planet. I thought the artifacts would give us that, and it just being a reskin of Accursed Hoard for crafters and gatherers was such an utter disappointment. I figured we'd at least get a lore book of sorts like the field ops do. There just needs to be more to tie players to those planets and make them feel like there's a reason why they're there and not somewhere else doing the same content.

I do wonder if doing OC + CE at the same time was a bit more than they could chew, so both are suffering for it ultimately. I do feel like maybe we should have gotten three zones for each instead of 4 for CE and 2 for OC and had them staggered.

[Alexus]

Hell, I'll just come out and say it: The only content keeping XIV alive right now is Player-driven Content. Your RPers, your social events, your clubs? All of those things are driving engagement.

I fully agree with this, and I just want to mention the extreme... irony of the whole situation - casual socialization is in fact the primary "driving force" for huge amount of players to keep logging into the game long after they ran out of "artificial tasks to complete" (or were not interested in such content in first place). Yet SE has always done everything possible to push even such people out of the game and into other games/virtual worlds, by refusing to introduce in-game social tools like a properly implemented, fully featured proximity voice chat (with appropriate controls to selectively mute individual players/mute everyone) or even very basic things like an "event board" specifically for people to advertise their "social venues/events" separately from Party Finder.

[Infindox]

I'm going to disagree and say there's far more to do in Dawntrail patches then Endwalker had. During Endwalker patches I frequently found myself wondering why I logged in and some weeks I didn't even bother to do weeklies.

That being said I really am disappointed at how OC turned out.

[Absurdity]

My biggest gripe with Cosmic Exploration is the lack of actual exploration. I honestly enjoy it for the most part, even if it is essentially the same gameplay loop in each zone. I just wish there was more interaction with each planet. I thought the artifacts would give us that, and it just being a reskin of Accursed Hoard for crafters and gatherers was such an utter disappointment. I figured we'd at least get a lore book of sorts like the field ops do. There just needs to be more to tie players to those planets and make them feel like there's a reason why they're there and not somewhere else doing the same content.

That's pretty much also my impression. As Supersnow said, cosmic is great if you just want to turn your brain off and macro craft while you do something else on your 2nd monitor, but that means all the work they put into the environment goes completely to waste.
They create these big, arguably nice looking, zones and then...you spend 20 hours sitting in the hub.

I'm going to disagree and say there's far more to do in Dawntrail patches then Endwalker had. During Endwalker patches I frequently found myself wondering why I logged in and some weeks I didn't even bother to do weeklies.

There is definitely "more to do" in Dawntrail, it's not even a debate. A lot of it is just doing the same thing we've been doing for 10+ years. It's fates, it's levequests, it's aoeing trash.
Pilgrim's Traverse brought some new things to the deep dungeon formula, I'll give them that (significantly better than Eureka Orthos). It just suffers from matchmaking issues now that the content is "old".