Actual question, but what would actually bring you back to the game more, and are you guys actually going to preorder the next expansion?
Had a chat with a coworker and they are the type of person who will preorder the premium delux "Im a retard" packages for basically every game, and even he said he's giving 14 a wary miss to see if it'll be alright. So it must be rough if even the most dedicated consoomer is giving it a wary pass.
Something interesting.
Every expansion has been
+ New Area broken up into 6(ish) zones
+ 2 New Jobs, often needless
+ 5 New Dungeons, 3 New Trials
+ New Raid Series, New Alliance Raid Series
+ etc, etc
It's very formulaic and boring at this point and something I hope they're aware of given Dawntrail's flat landing so far. All I can hope is that they've been working hard on the next expansion because I'm not sure about several bombs in a row (I also did not like FFXV or FFXVI, despite them having some charm) and my attachment to the Final Fantasy series as a whole.
They've sanded down a lot of neat concepts because "it's too hard" but honestly some kind of major reset to bring those things back would be very welcome and would let them level-set on a lot of huge issues. My list core issues being...
- Classes/Jobs no longer feel like Classes/Jobs. Role Quests really hurt class fantasy and a lot of inter-role classes don't feel remarkably distinct outside of your Artifact Gear. Crafters suffer from this even worse as the class quests were the
only thing differentiating the class fantasy for them. I get why Role Quests are easier (it's one questline instead of ~4-6 different ones) but who gives a shit.
- In the same vein, but Class Quests should also feature much better Solo Duties, preferably 2 per "block" of quests. Even if it's just smoke and mirrors, DRG 50 and SAM 60 were cool as hell just in terms of the story of the fight (even if DRG 50 was weird as hell concurrent with HW).
- Crafting and Gathering need a shot in the arm badly. For Crafting making it a bit easier but with more variance in the steps would be nice and for Gathering it would be nice to have much better access to abilities instead of slamming Cordials down constantly.
- In the same vein but Items generally need to be better. The progression of a base item at Level X0, then X1 in a dungeon, X2 crafted, X3 dungeon (repeating until X9 where you're given your Artifact Set) is very boring.
- In the same vein, but checks in cutscenes and other quests for characters from other quests. Have the BSM quest be making weapons for the WAR trainers and have a small "Oh hey it's you guys" like they used to.
- I'd really like 0 new jobs unless they do something crazy with them but would prefer if they ran through the existing classes and fixed those up.
-- Much better QoL updates.
- The inability to upgrade an item in your inventory is maddening and the inability to unequip a weapon (which you need to do for Relic Steps or Upgrading Crafted Weapons or Upgrading Tomestone Weapons) is wild.
- The Duty Support doesn't extend to the handful of required MSQ trials, you can't use your Adventurer squad in Duty Support, you can't use your Retainers in Duty Support.
- Allowing multiple upgrade steps for armor/weapons, even if only specific ones. Or not having such a massive ilvl between intermittent patches.
- Figure out how to let people, doubly so solo people, queue for a roulette as multiple roles and then make faster parties based on the flexibility. WoW figured this out in 2006ish.
- Really wrangle down the amount of vendors and drop the costs of older gear and maybe put them into groups.
- A much better system for Glamour, storing gear, keeping track of gear, glamor plates, and dyes. I'm not a GameDev but I have no idea why they just aren't set as flags instead of being handled as real items like it's a core requirement that I'm actually able to
really equip my bunny outfit and not just a glamor.
They really would need to take an approach of "let's fix what's broken" instead of the usual approach of "Let's take the easy way out and also just throw some shit on top of this". I could probably write a hundred lines more and I'm sure many of the posters here could too, but it all boils down to just making changes to the game so it's better/faster/easier to actually engage with it.
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