The more time goes on, the more people feel disgruntled with the gam’es progression. Let’s see what we can do about that, shall we?
Final Fantasy XIV: Online is property of Square Enix. I have no claim to it.
FFXIV Mods Issue Article: https://kotaku.com/ff14-stalking-mod-playerscope-account-id-yoshida-1851747079
Zepla DT Critique Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1bcp-rjOBo&t=1475s
Time Stamps:
1:06 Improve Responding to the Community
5:47 Class System
12:09 Fix the Duty Finder
14:24 Fix the Writing (For the love of God!)
18:14 New Characters are Needed
20:55 Veteran Rewards
23:35 Conclusion
source
Okay one thing right off the bat: you ain't getting talents in FF14. They're an impossible to balance nightmare in MMOs and the bane of WoW designers' existence. Get that out of your head.
Pre video thought: one thing I haven’t seen much if any folk mention is the fact everyone comes together under Wuk Lamat when she becomes dawn servant.
What happened to the sizeable support of Zoreal Ja? Did they just immediately jump ship when he lost the Rite? Also presumably they know his aims right? Doesn’t that mean there’s a sizeable chunk of Tural that want war?
If only the dev team wasn't so petrified of letting players make a 'wrong' choice with their job/playstyle. Alternate playstyles and rotations are removed as soon as possible, gear customization is simplified into nearly binary choices. The only class where you can make meaningful choices about it's build will forever stay 'limited' because the idea that someone could bring in that 'wrong' spell list into a queued duty terrifies the team.
There are loads of mmo's that make incredible use of skill trees, skill, or gear customization that borrowing from literally any of them would almost certainly make ff14 a more interesting game. If the game is going to forever have endless vertical progression, at least make it interesting. Or maybe it's high time they changed focus and went horizontal. Almost anything at this point would be an improvement! I know Yoshi P has stated they wanted to make job identity a more important focus in 8.0, but I have significant doubts. They make major changes to maybe three jobs per expac cycle, but all of them need work, and they have the money to do it.
While it sounds cool to have custom varied builds for a class, the issue is when it comes to raiding there will be a "meta" and a best in slot build. If someone wanted to play around with a non -meta build in pf they would instantly be kicked. Lost Ark is varied like this and people deliberately check player's build before allowing them into a party, and if their gear isn't meta or near best in slot they are denied entry to the parties.
Yes this is a huge issue.
Devs actually listening to feedback being a negative due to Toxic positivity.
People mass complain about something, then the community makes mass comments in support of that thing in retaliation; resulting in square just seeing constant praise of that thing.
On the opposite side for example, complaints are also heard, resulting in no eureka/bozja in Endwalker.
I know how to improve the experience… Play another game. 🤣 FFVII on PC, nice interlude.
Durantes a voice needed and wanted. Great videos as always, this game really needs to innovate and change.
As someone who played both Guild Wars 2 and FF, I'd say the way GW2 has you play the story is far superior from a gameplay perspective, but the story itself is much worse. The strength of the narrative and the characters really do matter a lot, even if the gameplay is just clicking through the dialogue. If they fix that, I'd say the majority of the players will be back on board
FFXIV had a better story back in Stormblood, No Ascians playing center stage. It was just War and Conflict. Oppression and Liberation. The ruby sea sucked but everything after was good. It kept its head looking forward and straight, not aiming for Evangelion it was more like Gundam and Black Lagoon.
Zenos is still their best written character to this day. He's actually Agent Smith looking for freedom in a world designed to bore him. That's so amazing.
As far as we can praise Shadowbringers it was the moment when the downfall of 14 started, they oversimplified crafting turning it into full automation task. They also added craftable items into chests obtained while questing making the crafters even more useless.
They added Bozja that fixed some issues of Eureka but removed the social part and this is why now Bozja is a desert while Eureka is still a social event where people go and have time to chat while grinding.
Also to fix the limit of buttons on Controller they removed many skills killing Dark Knight and Scholar, the last one was my main since ARR and become unrecognizable that i did not manage to use it anymore and never went back except to quickly level it and forget it until next expansion. Having also leveled over the years all teh classes i can see that they are all the same role wise, i position the same skills in the same positions of the bars and even though animations are different the results are the same.
Diadem was fully reconstructed having become useless but in a way that become another dead content out of very many and it is mostly the playground for bots. The issue is that each content has a quick end and is never renewed even if it is there.
Since then slowly the game more repetitive and a packaged experience instead of something new, now tehy are also adding contents slowly and bit by bit over 4,5 months and all those contents get exhausted in a very short time making them useless and forgettable.
I totally agree also with you that roulette format has to be split in parts and with all the new classes more options to leveling and rewards should be present. Running the same leveling dungeons even those of the newest expansion over and over again to reach the level cap of every class makes them feel annoying at some point rather than challenging.
One more thing is also that some features added seem to be completely thrown in the game with no rational thinking. They added the crafting tree but that one that should help to find the materials to craft in retainers and FC Chest close down as soon as you open a retainer or the chest and you need to reopen them finding again the item you wanted to craft.
The book of Khloe they could have added a button to open directly the window of the required duty and not open another window and search everywhere.
Tehre are just two examples of things that could be fixed to add quality of life indead ot making the game just a billion of mouse move and click when really not needed.
There is so much more to add but it seems that even the little things are not taken in consideration since too long that starting with little would already seem an improvement.
It's not a coincidence that since they hired a DEI consultant for the english version, this expansion is so hated.
I'll take Eureka and Bozja over a fucking hunt train grind. Jesus Christ that was awful. Eureka and Bozja felt like an MMO experience at least. Something a little quicker perhaps would be better. Oh well too little too late im back on WoW and enjoying it so much more than FFXIV. It feels like an actual MMO.
Point 4: It is staggering how much better HW and SB are compared to DT. I just recently finished my NG+ runs of both and I was left in awe at how good these stories were. The "Several cutscenes will play in sequence" used to mean we were in for something earth shattering and exciting. Now it just means that we have to sit through tens of minutes of Wuk Lamat just yapping. There's no guarantee for the quality of storytelling we had previously.
I wish they could do something about how much harder high latency makes it to play well. Stuck playing cross-continent makes a bunch of jobs feel impossible due to the amount of dropped GCD from trying to weave OGCD. being informed there's mods that solve this problem reignited me about the issue
Allegedly Ishikawa had enough material to last until 8.0, but unfortunately was told to "just wrap it up in 6.0" which is why everything got fucked. Absolutely unacceptable.
Also didn't help that even though Ishikawa COOKED with ShB, leadership was allegedly not happy with how Hydaelyn was portrayed ("y-you made her look bad!!") which is why Venat is so poorly portrayed in EW. They literally just tried to take everything back by forcing it on you instead of rolling with it.
you covered pretty much all my greviances. I think a time skip with us being scattered would be awesome! Maybe we spend 1-2 expansions bouncing between reflections to stop the more severe bits of chaos, knowing our home is in safe hands.
great points, wish people would have common sense and just know we want the best for the health of the game
The problem is that SE only listens to sweaty raiders and will balance everything into the ground. The game is unbelievably stagnant but at least we're getting another Ultimate that the vast majority doesn't care about.
Great video, thanks
Plainly put: Take ideas from WoW for FF14. Like the system they have where you can some points off a stat on a gear and put it somewhere else to go with your playstyle. Or have more personal gameplay like the delves you can mess around and your skill rather then 'DPS everything down as fast as you can'. Hell, look at other MMOs for world events where you get a zone that opens up for that time of the year and only that time of the year. Make it feel meaningful as you can show you've been attending to stuff to get rare items from there. Along with that, just have tokens for events that doesn't go bad when it ends to save up for later.
I've been watching your videos for a while and enjoy them thoroughly.. I JUST realised your sub count and I'm shocked dude.. @xion0713 is right, FF14 DOES need critical voices in the community
My only problem with Bozja was the field note drop rates. I'm a huge FFXII fan, so I wanted the mount from gathering all of them. The grind for it was so painful. I sat for 4 days waiting on the one fate that dropped the last note I needed.to drop the damn thing.
I think the two things that need to change most is CBU3's fear of letting players fail during early game and leveling and the community's need to optimize the fun out of the game. Until the world feels dangerous, it'll continue to be boring. People are going to to continue to be crap at their jobs until you force them to have to use more of their buttons while leveling. Good games give you situations early on to use the abilities as you get them so you gain familiarity with them as you grow. FFXIV does a poor job of this because you can get through the vast majority of the story content spamming 3-4 buttons on each class.
To the second point, it won't matter if CBU3 gives players build choice if the community is so against anyone using anything outside of the optimal one. I always played with a friend who was an Astro main from it's release onwards. There were numerous times where people refused to play through dungeons with us because he was "in the wrong sect" back when there were 2 astro stances. It's not that he wasn't keeping everyone alive, he had no issue with that. It was because it wasn't the "correct" way to play. Until you beat the need to optimize out of the community's head, there will never be any options no matter how many you offer. It's the very reason everything is so streamlined in the game.
Also, you got Wuk Lamat as a new character…… do you really want more new characters? 🤣
I agree heavily on the new blood, they dropped the ball with so many characters in DT, I like your idea of dissapearing for a bit and the Scions moving on, though considering its partially her obsession, Y'stola will likely come along, maybe Urianger. Both are the more wiser actually scholarly types of the Scions they'd be a boon for understanding whatever new realms we end up in with the maguffin chalice we got.
Suggestions on new blood for the source however, Julles should become a recurring character, the Garlean soldier who the twins befriended, whom went on to befriend Zero who also needs to come back at some point. I was OBSESSED with the role quests in Shadowbringers and the arc with potentially fixing the void, Unukalhai and Cyella needed more than a mere passing mention to Zero at the end and them getting some additional dialogue during the EW patches if you checked up on them. We shouldn't be done with the Void, even if its no longer gonna be the void in the long run.
Heck Yeah! Screw the sprouts! 🪴
Improving class system is no1 that will reattract my attention to game again. Like
And honestly i don't care if it broke raid system. I mean, people would be min-maxing and parsing always, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't have unusal and/or fun abilites and talents (and gear set bonuses), for example like "mind controlling" of Shadow Priest from WoW
Then try to add more open world content and/or redo hunt system
This way game will roll up back on a hill even with mediocre story i believe
Im also not a fan of meteion. I thought she was pretty lame actually and brought down the story for me. And I thought I might be alone in that cause all my friends and seemingly most people online really loved everything about endwalker. I'm glad to come across this channel!
I was really hoping we'd have some more ideological sparring this expansion with scions working with different claimants. But we only got a taste of that with Koana and then just kinda brushed away. The scions felt completely useless storywise. And the one who actually had a connection, Krile, we barely got anything from her and some of it was resolved off screen.
Content wise we desperately need more of these expansion features to actually launch with the expansion. It baffles me that they advertised things like beast master limited job, cosmic exploration, etc. And we aren't getting it for almost a year after release. This is my first expansion launch, and I've learned it's basically always been this way. I can't believe they haven't gotten more pushback for this content release schedule for years.
My sub is running out soon and I will watch the MSQ on a stream to decide, if I go back or wait until 7.3 or 7.4 to see changes to the writing (since it's written in stone so far).
I hope they fired the writers and everyone involved in this garbage.
If the story had been on Heavensward-level, I would not care about the gameplay issues.
Zenos should have been our vegeta
About the Hildebrand family lineage being aliens, I believe they clarified that somewhere down the line, the descendent did not have his own kids, so they are just that freakish on their own.
Class customization + more interesting stats on gear would be so awesome! They treat players like lazy/dumb sheeps
Stormblood is OBJECTIVELY the best FF14 expansion, hate or love the story but the overall PACKAGE from 4.0-4.5 has been super elite. Zenos and Tsukoyomi as our villains were dope (I miss Zenos), the MSQ trials, the 4 lords raids, the Omega raids, Eureka, HoH, god damn IVALICE (best alliance till this day) post patch MSQ story (buildup to SHB was FIRE!), job uniqueness, interesting dungeons and locales, a fun yet challenging learning curve for all that content. My best time has definitely been during Stormblood, I saw the cracks in SHB and EW exposed the stagnation of 14. DT just killed me off and I unsubbed.
The greatest sin about Endwalker will be how little the actual events had in the overall significance of the story of FFXIV. You're gonna expect me to believe that the multiverse-affecting wave of Dynamis just decided to spare Tuliyolal from its effects? Yeah. Sure. Okay.
The best way to improve it, it's by downloading wow and playing that instead 😊
They removed all the fun from so many jobs.
People don't like Hildebrand? I thought his questline was hilarious
Gear is one of the worst. Each class needs it own materia set up but they allow you only one set of the gear so you have to choose which class to use. They need to expand the armory and separate all the armor from each other instead of lumping it in by class.
Events need better rewards. Right now the events are extremely lack luster and the prizes for said events are also bad. They are starting to focus once more now in mog shop which is really disheartening
@21:53
Holy fucking shit based take.
Theres definitely a problem with the game but i also dont think players know whats best i definitely dont miss old school mmo design. Can it be more interesting than now? Yes but it can also be more annoying too. I dont miss cleric stance. I dont miss kaitin. I dont miss needing ninja for smoke bomb.
No for the game to be better they have to listen less to players and be inspired to do things on their own.
Otherwise this push and pull with casual vs hardcore will constantly continue. Job homogenization will go back and forth.
Optimization will always make sets obsolete anyways.
Most of party finder cannot even handle of jobs got harder😂 they can barely play theor jobs now
Another thing that no one brings up is the copy-pasted NPCs in a "crowd" doing the exact same emotes in sync. That is something that I'd excuse in an indie game. But in a full priced expansion with monthly sub? Hell no! I really dont feel that my sub money is going back into the game's dev. Like seriously, they couldnt even randomize the character appearance data for a crowd? with 2 dye channels on each glam, they couldnt randomize the dyes on their outfits. And they couldnt bother to stagger the emotes for the crowd to not make it look cheap and in sync? The standards in their QA has definitely nose-dived in this expansion.
Also, regarding the rewards, this game feels like a bad luck simulator to me.. Any glam, coffer, mount you want to farm, you have to pray to rng-esus to drop and then hope to win the roll on it. According to steam, I have clocked 12.5K hours in this game, and this is first time ever that I'm considering demolishing my M house so that I dont feel blackmailed to stay subbed.
Sweet Baby mentioned. Gotta throw the whole video away now. Ya'll be acting like this one VERY small company is singlehandedly destroying the games industry. Just be a bigot bro. Can't take ya'll seriously at all.
Damn really hard to take anything you say seriously anymore for even entertaining that stuff like sweet baby is a factor in 14's backslide.
They really need to add more stuff to do with Chocobos. As an avid bird trainer, I find that once you get your perfect stallion for the races there's not much you can do but lvl up other ppl's companions at a very slow pace. Since DT had FF9 references they should have brought back the worldwide treasure hunting from that game. Seeing XIV's version of Chocobo Heaven would be a nice bonus if they ever decided to include it.
The first step to improving FFXIV is to fire Yoshi-P.
Wait… wait wait wait wait wait… people are blaming Sweet Baby Inc as a part of the problem?
Just… no.
Look, I get that there's a subsection of the gaming community that is looking for any opportunity to blame that consulting firm for all of gaming's woes. Heck, some of that criticism might even be warranted…
… but not at Square. We're talking about a gaming company that effectively shut itself off from the rest of the global market that only deals with developers (and consultants) who speak Japanese. To suggest that some random, small time consulting firm is influencing these kinds of decisions is ludicrous. Square has no reason to speak to them, and in many cases, has no means of speaking to them because of the language barrier. They won't even hire people onto their staff who don't speak Japanese fluently.
Otherwise… yeah, your videos have a lot of great points. This one is no exception.
Currently FF14 has a lot of flaws, some of them are the result of longer term stuff like the stale gearing, job balancing ect and others like dawntrail's beyond lackluster story and 'content' which Endwalker was also at fault for with the lacking on actually anything to do side. I've literally not touched the game since finishing the MSQ back during early access as I was just that done with it, Wuk's bland ride put the final nail in for me sadly and I may revisit around the .5 patch or something.
I dont agree with all your points however, one being the last thing about veteran rewards, dunno if you played back during like HW time but they used to give glams like the cloud, squall and zidane stuff for being subbed a certain amount of time, stuff like that is a nice bonus but I doubt for most its gonna make them play and for those who do really want it being time gated because they joined later it feels really shit seeing people with it and knowing you cant get it no matter what you do until you reach a milestone, at which point theres likely to be another thing there ect, its just a different flavor of FOMO which sucks.
From what I heard they have got good encounters with stuff now, the harder core people are eating good but having played most of EW i cant tell you how much I dont want to run the same max level dungeons over and over again especially if its just for the sake of grinding the next ilevel tier of gear just so I can grind the next ilevel tier of gear the next patch and just glam over it anyway, I doubt many people on the casual end even look at the stats or anything because it just doesnt matter, we need a little more customization in the itemization really, we need drops somewhere to actually be something you want, something exciting and not just numbers.
Most importantly of course we need a better story for the story based MMO
This MIGHT be an unpopular opinion but, story and writing quality aside, I would preffer if the aim was now AT LEAST 50% Story and 50% Gameplay, the world map during MSQ is just there to walk to the next story spot, the monsters might as well not even be there since they don't pose a threat at all. It'd be cool also if you could do story duties with a party (Not added to duty finder, just they happen to accomodate for up to 4 players at least if you're playing with friends). MSQ feels too detached from the MMO experience, there's barely any hype IMO to play with friends on day 1 because… it's just everyone sitting and watching their cut-scenes and maybe just taking them for a dungeon every 5 hours or so. A
Veteran rewards. God that felt like a punch to the gut when i heard those words. Like the cherry on top of the long since melted ice cream sundae.