I appreciate the Cutter's Cry change even though I am not sure why they are wasting dev time on that.
To make it doable by trusts. Knowing Japanese corporate behavior, they're doubling down on "simplify it" and "make everything able to be done solo" as their idea of how to regain subscribers... as opposed to leading reasons as to why the game is hemorrhaging them.
Yeah, but I don't think they're doing it because they just love those loyal FF players and want to satisfy them. I think it's a strategy to try to recover from some headcount drops, using this as a pretext to try to tap into people who just want single-player games. I'm just imagining how this is justified in monthly reports.
Not only that, but how early do you hit level cap these days? You'll probably play the entire second half pf the story content at cap, not even getting new buttons to play with.
As a new player, I hit my first level 100 just before starting Endwalker. For normies who just do MSQ I'd wager you'd maybe get 50% through EW.
The only things even worth mentioning were already basically default dalamud plugins, chat bubbles and cast bar under overheads (which people have been using for 5+ years). Embarrassing.
Incredibly fast if you stick to one job. Pre-shadowbringers, even.
They still run FF11.
Just wanted to mention Bardam's is actually the first dungeon where SB gear is better than HW tomegear so that often adds to the pinch. W2Ws are usually fine for me there, but I'll admit it's rare I end up with DF tanks now, especially when I avoid roulettes these days aside from Expert. I've had more rando tanks struggle with Holminster than I have Bardam's, usually WARs who are allergic to RI because reasons.
Yes and? FF11 is exactly what I described. It got it's final expansion in 2015, with a small story only update in 2020. A player can play through most of it solo with NPCs and there's a small crew maintaining the game. FF14 will reach the same point once Yoshi-p's second 10 year plan fails half way through.
I have waited 3 hours for EW trials before while leveling an alt. Yes, it does get very annoying.
The one gremlin with this thinking is that the process started at the peak of the game's popularity in Endwalker. If I were to take a cynical approach, I'd argue that they figured they had Mission Accomplished getting mainstream appeal with MMO players due to the success of ShB (they really seemed to have learnt all the wrong lessons from that expansion) and decided to start looking at where else they could pillage for revenue.
I don't think there's a "wrong" approach per se but converting Prae and Castrum into solo duties (like Cape Westwind was) would go a long way. You can remove MSQ Roulette and just spilt the rewards into Leveling Roulette and Trial Roulette (Trial Roulette being not worth doing at the moment). I would do the following if I was in charge.
Too hard
If they ditch Wuk Lamat it’ll automatically be better but only slightly.
Writing a heavensward tier story is too hard for them these days.
Too late imo. Wuk Lmao is baked into the story like a shitstain that never quite goes away. And I doubt they'd be kind enough to give her the Nationstate Leaders' Retirement Home treatment either.
If she joins the (not) scions at the end of 7.3, I’m gonna do a backflip off a cliff.
