Engaging Content is at an All-Time Low

[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.

[Valence]

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".

I don't know, I'm not interacting with those hundreds of players. They're just background noise unfortunately.

[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.

[Yodada]

Well, good Job design (doesnt matter if Combat or Crafter) would make every content automatically more engaging.

Unfortunately Square seems to die on the hill of simplification. This only makes the problems that have plagued the content since Heavensward even more apparent.

[CCheshire]

As someone who is a super casual player, I actually liked OC's release because it had decent rewards and I collected all the PJ stones along with leveling a few to max level despite knowing how I'd never do FT1 because of lack of my personal skill for high-end content. Then I liked the novel exp of wandering around the locations and teleport spots and finding random personal chests was fun for a few hours even if most rewards had been recycled from other Field ops too. The new map itself was colorful and diverse mobs were entertaining more than Eureka and Bozja too, even if it's p boring after a few days but I was an tank so nothing could kill me out of the blue too during CE was useful.

Also, the next part I first tried the Cosmo Exploration despite not really into crafting in-game at the 3rd new planet so I did as many gold missions as possible, joined the Red Alerts, Mech ops, and even made it on time during an upgrade mission for the base by chance and helped. It was not that compelling exp for me so I gave up grinding the Cosmo tokens since I was p bored and you needed so many of them for the shop glams that I bought them the mp along with any affordable tradable items. I mean, I accept it's not for me, but it was a creative and interesting experiment for everyone and I found it worthwhile to unlock it and farm tokens for the 3x exclusive frames.

There're all kinds of new content that I'm not really interested in, like the CC/PVP, IS, fate farming, and high-end content, so I'm more open to lifestyle content which I find is much more accessible to casual players like I am too.

Finally, I'm slowly grinding for pastes by doing 2x EXDR and 1x Capped rous instead of going mad and doing like 10 Leveling rous daily because honestly the latter is super miserable and not worth the suffering if I didn't also need the exp for alt jobs.

[Xapapetsu]

I would say try savage but healers are at an all time low, I've been in PF for the last 5 hours only finished M9S and M10S, with a total of 3 parties because it takes an hour for a single healer to join.

[Supersnow845]

Can’t imagine why the role that plays like cookie clicker when things go well and gets yelled at when the DPS presses feint 1 time in 14 minutes is unpopular

[theunhappypotato]

i think the content in DT is leagues above the snoozefest endwalker was, OC is still abit eh but i hope they fix it with north horn but overall fun whise DT is pretty awesome, when it comes to narrative, the slog that was ARR and HW burned me out so much i ended up skipping through the entire story so i can play with my friends so no comment there

[ovIm]

Quite frankly, Dawntrail marks the first time in over 10 years that I have unsubscribed from the game. The raids this game has to offer have changed into something I dislike playing years ago by this point (the way the fights are designed is boring to me.). Occult Crescent, which I was really looking forward to, since Bozja managed to capture me for a long, long time, turned out to be a bust, as we all know. Expert Dungeons got reduced from 3 every patch to 1 over the years, the new Deep Dungeon failed to keep me engaged, and I can't even bring myself to enjoy PVP any longer because the netcode makes a lot of it more frustrating than it needs to be. Most of the people on my friend list have quit by now, too. The world feels empty, and unless you enjoy the Shadowbringers Raid design paradigm, there is little to no meaningful endgame content for you.

I'm most likely still going to check up on the devs announcements for 8.0 during the fan fests, see if there is something there that catches me again.