Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

[Tanner Glass]

If we're talking dream 8.0 wishlists - they really just need to revamp the engine.

I recently leveled SGE - which suffers from the same problem as early DRK - there's a button you constantly need to hit and it's fucking finnicky because the game struggles with you trying to do too many actions at once. As much as I like to shit on World of Warcraft, but the game engine in WoW never really shit itself when mashing through multiple commands at once (aka Trinket + Trinket + Action + Item inside of .4 seconds) and the last time I cared about that was 2006.

It doesn't have to have the exact snappiness of WoW - but feeling so bad despite being ~20 years older is wild. I also don't understand the design decision of recognizing that Dark Arts was unfun but then put Eukrasia in. They have a test center - no one said "this actually kind of sucks to use can we make it faster or something".

 

[electrician's apprentice]

That is actually horrifying. I know DT is the lowest that FFXIV has ever been, but the fact that the game has been abandoned SO HARD is just lunacy. I'm actually starting to wonder if it'll actually be able to recover; remember that all of the new players or people that otherwise haven't gone through all of the new content will have to go through DT's stuff, unless they end up finding a way for people to skip it.

It really is something to see just how a single expansion can seriously fuck up a game.

I started playing at endwalker so I wasn't here for stromblood, was it anything like this?

 

[Brandy [◉'']]

I think we can more or less agree that Dawntrail has done quite a number on the popularity of the game, so it might be worth looking at what their goals in Dawntrail were. Since Yoshida likes to give interviews, we can probably get a good idea just following his comments. As far as I remember he said

-Dawntrail will be very experimental and they are ready to test content that some people might not enjoy
I will never understand how you can have that mindset. In which business can you go and say "we consciously will release a product we know parts of our customer base will not enjoy"

-Dawntrail will be the start for a narrative arc that will last the next 10 years
They need to change that. I know Ishikawa managed to salvage a lot of shit SB did, but I feel so negative about Tural and everyone there that I don't want to see anyone from there again. if Calyx actually turns out to be the big bad for the next 8 years I am out.

-Yoshida wanted Wuk Lamat to be a very attractive character (originally a male Hrothgar) and was very sad that they couldn't show her strengths in the MSQ
I don't even know, how can anyone look at the script of DT and think that will be a very interesting character? Also, kinda funny that Wuk started as a guy...

-He wants to stress the player more, since EW was being gentle combat wise to the player
Probably the biggest reason DT is floundering imo. A game needs to be fun not stressful. This is such a fantastically retarded raider take, this never seems to work. You need a good baseline that is fun or at the very least makes your playerbase feel good about doing the content. Ozma also said that he thinks combat content should 'feel rewarding at the end' which yeah, that design choice sure shows. Things like Job identity and fun don't seem to factor into any of that

-Resources/cost/manpower
You can throw 5 designers and their teams at a single savage tier, but a normal mode for FT was not possible. This seems like a management fail in prioritising which content is important.

 

[Kane Lives]

-He wants to stress the player more, since EW was being gentle combat wise to the player

???

EW continued the trend of ever so gently increasing the difficulty in normal dungeons/trials that started in ShB. It was certainly not gentle to the casualcore crowd considering how much bitching I heard about Zot when it first came out. Also that one solo quest in Garlemald that every forumnigger bitched about. (Of course complaints stopped once gear made it trivial).

 

[Brandy [◉'']]

???

EW continued the trend of ever so gently increasing the difficulty in normal dungeons/trials that started in ShB. It was certainly not gentle to the casualcore crowd considering how much bitching I heard about Zot when it first came out. Also that one solo quest in Garlemald that every forumnigger bitched about. (Of course complaints stopped once gear made it trivial).

>https://www.pcgamesn.com/final-fantasy-xiv/yoshida-stress-free

"I have once again realized that we must continue to provide players with surprises that go beyond their imaginations. In that sense, I actually have some regrets," Yoshida says when looking back at this year's Tokyo Fan Fest ahead of Dawntrail. "As we continue to operate FF14, we have tried to make it more comfortable and stress-free for players to enjoy, but when I think back on the past ten years, I think we may have gone a bit too far in that regard."

"For example, if you're playing a side-scrolling action game and there aren't even any holes where you'll miss if you fall, then of course there won't be any stress," Yoshida tells Famitsu in their interview. "But at the same time, it loses its fun. Speaking of FF14, I would like to return to this part a little bit in the future. If we do that, I think we will be able to provide everyone with a challenge in a better sense than ever before."

This is really a chip on his shoulder, he keeps bringing this up how they went too gentle on the players in EW.

 

[Pigeon Enthusiast]

This is really a chip on his shoulder, he keeps bringing this up how they went too gentle on the players in EW.

Pretty sure he's referring to one of the most repeated complaints about fight design in EW's raids: way too many arena-sized hitboxes and it not feeling any sort of rewarding when the fight just gave you perma-uptime on the glorified striking dummies for free.

That's one of the biggest changes they've made to how raid fights have been designed in DT, so.

 

[John Roguelike]

I will never understand how you can have that mindset. In which business can you go and say "we consciously will release a product we know parts of our customer base will not enjoy"

Unfortunately, this is just how games operate. You have to appeal to as many people as possible, but sometimes that just means not catering to a minority of players. MMOs probably especially follow this due to being live service games where things are constantly tweaked, and audiejces constantly change, such as what happened with the WoW exodus.

Then again, a lot of these tweaks are things nobody asked for, a waste of money, bad in the long term, or even just seem to be banking on people coming back when something they like is released, like Occult Crescent.

What a baffling company.

 

[Troon Whisperer]

I started playing at endwalker so I wasn't here for stromblood, was it anything like this?

Not to this extent, from my experience the people who bitched about Stormblood but would generally come back for each patch, then go back to playing other games, only to return and resume from around 4.4/4.5 once the Shadowbringers hype train started up. I'm in a lot of discords for the Elemental DC and people were still discussing the game, paying attention to live letters, shitposting and generally still being connected to the community, but right now everything is dead, no static recruitment, no pug discussions, no game discussion, no shitposting, nothing. Just a massive ghost town.

 

[Well Intentioned]

Then again, a lot of these tweaks are things nobody asked for, a waste of money, bad in the long term, or even just seem to be banking on people coming back when something they like is released, like Occult Crescent.

OC has fallen off of a cliff. Primetime there'd usually be a few instances going and now it seems to be like 1 on Aether.

 

[Xerxes IX]

-Dawntrail will be very experimental and they are ready to test content that some people might not enjoy
I will never understand how you can have that mindset. In which business can you go and say "we consciously will release a product we know parts of our customer base will not enjoy"

Somehow they fucked up and managed to make the game both experimental and formulaic and complacent.

unless they end up finding a way for people to skip it.

You guys remember the leadup to 7.0 when they said they were considering an option for fresh characters to skip to Dawntrail? I bet that's been pushed down low on the priority list if it was ever going to be implemented at all.

 

[John Roguelike]

OC has fallen off of a cliff. Primetime there'd usually be a few instances going and now it seems to be like 1 on Aether.

What's wrong with it? I was considering rejoining because it's similar to bozja and I liked bozja.

 

[Pigeon Enthusiast]

What's wrong with it? I was considering rejoining because it's similar to bozja and I liked bozja.

Lack of any feeling of progression, lack of rewards, the general player activity decrease and the fact that the next patch will be dead on arrival, the fact that the main attraction (Forked Tower) for why you should bother grinding in there at all is complete ass to get into...

Pick your poison, really.

 

[SuffahWhorse]

How about instead of making the game more "Stressful" or more "Easy" he just makes the game more FUN?

 

[John Roguelike]

Lack of any feeling of progression, lack of rewards, the general player activity decrease and the fact that the next patch will be dead on arrival, the fact that the main attraction (Forked Tower) for why you should bother grinding in there at all is complete ass to get into...

Pick your poison, really.

Are the fights at least challenging and fun? I know they dont tell much in the way of story.

 

[TerribleUser09]

Could you tell me what is so appealing in this game, except major content for furries and lolicons?

 

[John Roguelike]

Could you tell me what is so appealing in this game, except major content for furries and lolicons?

There is a lot that is good. Art direction and story are very good for a video game, top-notch for an MMO, until recently. Gameplay gets old after a while, but is very fun until then. The soundtrack is excellent, as well as highly varied, and the entire game feels like a final fantasy game compared to the more "recent" ones such as ff13 and 15, with probably one of the most developed worlds in a final fantasy game ever, barring maybe 11. Many of the gameplay mechanics circumvent or prevent a lot of the complaints people had with WoW over the years, so many WoWfugees decided to make it their new forever game, for better or worse. What makes so many people, such as in this thread, so mad is probably that the game should legitimately be near perfect, but has so many issues that keep it from that that seem like they should be easy fixes or adjustments, but the devs don't go for it, probably to keep appealing to normies and possibly due to being inexplicably undermanned/underfunded.

There is a free trial that basically gets you 100+ hours of content. I would recommend diving into that to see if you like it or not, but it is a pretty big time sink before you get to the first expansion, where things get especially good. Before that, ARR is okay, but not great.

 

[Well Intentioned]

What's wrong with it? I was considering rejoining because it's similar to bozja and I liked bozja.

I'll preface by saying I've (mostly) enjoyed OC but that it does have issues.

There's a few reasons, in my opinion.

Spoiler: Occult Crescent Autism

The biggest one would be the implementation of Forked Tower. I don't know what they thinking (although Whorse is probably close with the 'catering to raid trannys' mentality), but creating a rather hard zone with no real way to organize or PF things that is Savage-tier difficulty is just asking for trouble.

Part of why Bozja had such longevity is that you had Castrum and Dalriada, which you could just queue up for in the fucking instance and it wasn't balls grindingly hard for the casual player who can only play 15 minutes a week. Then you had Delubrum and DRS which were outside of the instance and could be planned for accordingly.

One that is kinda ignored is the dev team completely fucked up the loot tables for the treasure coffers (these pop up randomly around the zone and can contain anything from a Demimateria to mounts like the Bozja raptor or glam things like the Urban Boots or Coat) so people were going apeshit at launch. Now? Rewards are far more tepid.

The next reason is that the overall zone itself just feels sort of half polished and unfinished. Part of why people really liked Bozja is that there was an ongoing story throughout the zone. I don't mean from Point A --> B --> C --> D --> Raid or whatever, but there were little interactions and things going on between NPCs in FATEs and the overall zone had a lot of character.

OC, in comparison, all the CEs (save one, technically two, I guess) are basically all automatons (pots, statues, etc.) with no real character or reason to give a shit about them.

This is compounded with the other systems that are in there. There are 2 different 'goodie' activities to do in OC. The first are the Magic Pots, which function like the Bunny Fates in Eureka (if you aren't familiar -- basically you do a special fate, and you basically play a game of Hot or Cold while trying to find a hidden treasure chest by feeding the Magic Pot an Elixir and having him tell you to go in a direction) which have a couple of decent rewards (the /twirl emote being the big one.)

The other one, though, are the Carrots. There are half-eaten carrots lying around the entire zone. You can loot a Carrot of Fortune (or whatever it is called) from the regular Bronze Chests in the zone. Not the regular Silver Chests and not the Pot Chests. Just the regular Bronze chests. If you get one, use it around a half-eaten carrot.

(The droprate is ridiculously low with subpar rewards (the Carrots are selling for 2 million on Aether right now, and the rewards you get are 300K gil and some materia, usually.))

It feels like there should've been more interaction between the regular chests, the Pot Chests and the Bunny chests, but as it stands, they're super grindy with minimal in the way of rewards.

The Phantom Job system has also annoyed a lot of people (although, IMO, they're retards for expecting anything super fancy beyond it being a different way of presenting the Logogram/Lost Actions system from the prior zones. I was hoping they'd be fleshing it out or expanding it a bit more but it doesn't look like it) because they're generally just secondary abilities or buffs that don't really fundamentally change things (much like how Logograms/Lost Actions do.)

I like the Phantom Job system, and I like the flavor the various jobs have, with various jobs having a support ability (eg, Phantom Geomancer has a Float ability which is needed in Forked Tower and trivializes one of the CEs.)

On top of that, the actual grind for the Relic is 'too tedious' and people are bitching and complaining about how long it is taking to complete shit. I think the droprates are about fine for the Maguffins, but the retards dislike OC because 'it not dropping item'.

Finally, if the zone wasn't grindy enough, there's two separate currencies which require you to either do FATEs/CEs or grind regular mobs. Both are required for unlocking all gear, phantom jobs, etc.

On top of that, there's no real chase items from FATEs, Forked Tower, etc. outside of a couple of phantom jobs from CEs. This is minor, but if there's no real incentive to plug away at shit for some sort of reward, they gonna tune out. Eureka had various FFXI glam items drop from mobs, chests, FATEs, etc. and Bozja had the raptor from Dal and I think a few other things, plus Duels.

That said, I do really like all the flavorful touches they've done with the zone, with callbacks to FF5, there are some really nice glams (if that's your thing), the shark mount is fun, etc.

There's a lot to like, but it is bogged down with a lot of tedium and what feels like unfinished crap. Once people get their crack rocks for their relic, there's no real reason to stick around.

 

[Fcret]

I started playing at endwalker so I wasn't here for stromblood, was it anything like this?

Early stormblood was mired with server and performance problems. The story was generally weak (Lyse was kind of like a Wuk-Lamat although far less oppressive to the narrative) but you also had a lot of excellent characters like Yotsuyu and Zenos that evened things out. The population going into Stormblood though wasn't nearly as high as the one going into Dawntrail so the fall off feels way more extreme.

A big difference (and one that I think will trigger the "oh shit" alarms at SE) is that Stormblood actually recovered a lot of ground by 4.3 and the game was actually breaking playercount records again going into 4.4 and 4.5 (I joined during 4.5 and you consistently could not get into certain worlds due to queues). I don't think Dawntrail is going to be able to pull this off - Yoshi-P and co. brought out a blitz of new features and major reworks in the SB patch cycle (stuff like Mahjong, Eureka, Ultimate, unrestricted role actions, major deemphasization of TP, streamlined crafter leveling, etc.). The current team doesn't seem anywhere close to agile enough to pull off the flurry of features that'd mend this game's reputation.

The game needs to be in "all hands on deck" mode again with 3 month patch cycles and devs hauling ass to respond quickly to player feedback. But that's not going to happen because CBU3 is now too big and bloated to do it.

Also I'd take issue with anyone blaming the game's current state on the gcbtw. The devs don't give a shit about feedback from gaijin. It's the complacency and passivity of the JP playerbase that's gotten us here. Nearly every thing that would have been a long-term positive for this game that the EN playerbase embraced (Bozja is the big one that comes to mind) was shat upon by the JP playerbase for being too new and different and not fitting into their "log on to FFXIV, read a macro, and dodge floor circles" paradigm of what this game should be.

 

[Brandy [◉'']]

There's a few reasons, in my opinion.

Excellent writeup!

I would like to add: The CEs are kinda shit in a sense that it forces a huge sway of people to play tank. It is very, very unforgiving and as opposed to Bozja you can't imbibe an Elixir to get some passive mitigation. Vulns don't drop and as a DPS getting hit once or twice basically means you are dead. Yes, it forces people to group up, but even in that 75% of the people are playing tank because the stress of having to perfectly do everything is just not what they are looking for in content like OC. As tank on the other hand you can ignore mechanics, stand in AoE for uptime or outright ignore combat gimmicks like the Trade Turtle. In turn, this means that CEs take way, way longer than they need to because tank DPS still quite low.
I have been playing SAM recently and the amount of times I get to tank the mob because non of the 20+ tanks around me use stance is quite frustrating.

 

[Pigeon Enthusiast]

The Phantom Job system has also annoyed a lot of people (although, IMO, they're retards for expecting anything super fancy beyond it being a different way of presenting the Logogram/Lost Actions system from the prior zones. I was hoping they'd be fleshing it out or expanding it a bit more but it doesn't look like it) because they're generally just secondary abilities or buffs that don't really fundamentally change things (much like how Logograms/Lost Actions do.)

I like the Phantom Job system, and I like the flavor the various jobs have, with various jobs having a support ability (eg, Phantom Geomancer has a Float ability which is needed in Forked Tower and trivializes one of the CEs.)

I only really have two complaints about the phantom jobs: that playing a maxed one where you actually have the fun actions unlocked is essentially XP waste, and that you can't mix and match them in any way. A good bit of the fun with Lost Actions in Bozja was stacking up goofy buff combos to see how cracked you could get, at least for me.

Speaking of, they really should have added some equivalent to the lifesteal/mit elixirs from Bozja. Having to play tank because it's so insanely much more survivable, compared to DPS who have 0 sustain and just get beaten to death by unavoidable damage or healers that instantly explode if they put one toe wrong, just feels needlessly limiting.