Dawntrail released with a lot of drama. Players were divided, was the new, higher difficulty appropriate or was Square Enix alienating casual players?
CHAPTERS:
0:00 – Intro
0:43 – The “Too Easy” Problem
2:53 – The “Too Hard” Problem
4:20 – Resolving The Paradox
7:18 – FFXIV is not Monster Hunter
9:11 – Different Strokes…
9:59 – In Defense Of The Devs
10:45 – Outro
source
Barely finished this before FRU – I hope that doesn't impact the video negatively. I wish everyone good luck who attempt FRU right away.
I feel like the biggest killer of new players in EW and in DT are not disabling FULL BATTLE EFFECTS, since if you try doing a lvl 90 or lvl 100 alliance raid with full battle effects then you will be blinded and will die to mechanics that you were unable to see under 5 different explosions and personally i managed to get quite far in the game with just playing a TANK since i could survive pretty much everything so i barely learned from my mistakes and even today i have 3158 tenacity so i can just stand in AOE´s and ignore all incoming damage 😀
Oh my god I hate cure 1 so much. A few days ago I was tanking in Dohn Mheg and we kept wiping to the trash mobs because the white mage wouldn't holy and would instead just spam cure 1. I told them not to do that and the 2 DPS players who were in the same FC as them straight up told me "it's just a game" and "you were rude". Unsurprisingly the dragoon player also didn't do any positionals whatsoever and all the bosses took forever. I bet the black mage was pressing random buttons too but I couldn't tell because I have others' attack effects turned off. 3 years ago if you were in a Shadowbringers dungeon and you didn't know how to play the game you'd be actively griefing, but with every new expansion it seems the bar of expectations get lower and lower.
This was the first savage tier I completed. This is also the first expansion where some of the dungeon and trial bosses have made me want to jump off a cliff. And that Alliance raid… holy crap.
Pharos Sirius mental scars finally healing in the dev team after all these years
Its just evident they don't know how to do it. The hall of the novice "challenging" tutorial is a joke. Its no doubt way too slow, too hand holdy and treat players like idiots. Rather than designing a way to appeal to both experienced and inexperience players, players who can learn quick and player who can learn slow, it just forces everyone to do it slow and throw barely any challenge.
They ought to have created it in a way where the tutorial is much faster, and repeatable if needed. They should create more challenges, each with tighter timing and positioning requirements. You do not need to clear all levels to complete the challenge, but it allows new players to start off with familiar markers and slowly combine different things together. New players might fail, and that is fine. It gives players an aspiration on clearing harder and harder challenges with more back to back mechanics in a safe environment.
Instead, we get something that barely teaches a new player anything.
Free cure is an old mechanic leftover from a time when players had to actively regulate their main stats and mp levels. There was no default 10000mp for all jobs. Your mp was directly linked to your stats and its was up to you how much you had. Some players chose to have massive mp pools with much smaller heal and damage numbers while others chose to have much smaller mp pools that they would have to maintain with ethers and juice (ether still has the same function of providing a quick hit of mp but juice used to give an mp or hp regen feature depending on the type of juice). If you went with the low mp but massive output build that was huffing ether drinking juices and spamming shroud a cure 1 was effective enough to be usable in content. I remember cure 2 being worth 75% of your tanks health while cure 1 was worth 50% if your build was right. They just did a bad job of optimization if they wanted this mechanic to remain viable.
Having to explain that 60×5 potency is better than 80 potency.
The difficulty shouldn't spike, it should be a gradual increase IMO. Have npcs ask for Esuna and heals (even in fates when you can't heal them with AoE heals or tank for them with aoe tank skills.) There is so many little instance that could throw players a tip but it doesn't and then you wonder why you get such a hard time the first time you do some duties. Good difficulty is when the game allows the difficulty to match the learning curve. FF14 doesn't, it's "let other people carry you through trials and if you fail a duty you can instantly select a very easy mode." Thus learning nothing at all.
They're not difficulty spikes in dungeons, they're soft gear checks.
Hands down the best breakdown of the issues we are facing in the game out there.
I still don’t understand people complaining that DT MSQ content is too hard. I definitely consider myself a casual player. I only do normal versions of raids just for the story, I don’t farm them for gear, I don’t do savage, have never attempted an ultimate, and I found nothing in DT that was too difficult. That said, I’ve only just started the 8 man raids for DT, and haven’t started the 24 yet. But as MSQ goes, and even the optional level 100 dungeons, it’s been occasionally challenging, but not that hard, such that, as a casual, I feel overwhelmed.
This is the only video I have watched so far that nails exactly what I think is wrong with the game. Doing something as small as putting dps checks in casual content would go leagues to teach mechanics
Git gud.
Problem with how the game plays atm is that for the past 2 expantions they have deliberately worked to stagnate and homoginized how jobs play and now are gonna have to walk all that back somehow wich is why even Yoshi-p has said the next expantion is the "job identity" expantion in their pursuit to appease everyone they ended up appeasing no one
My problem here is you either “don’t step on the orange puddle” or “memorize 34 attack patterns with assigned light party, counterclockwise while keeping uptime, while you also run southeast with your assigned party member”. There is just no in between.
I love Bozja/Eureka, the issue is we get one exploration zone every 86 years and it’s normally introduced later on the expansion, if anything.
My solution would be introducing an exploration zone at the beginning of an expansion and build on it throughout the whole cycle, that way midcore players have something to do and grind all the time.
Ik your name from pf… You pfed dsr and top didn't you?
Remember there is a difference between a casual player
and a braindead player
A casual player in 14 still know how to do the basic mechanic and some challenges still needed to keep playing the game
A braindead player just wants to get the easiest content so they don't need to use their brain to think. Usually, they ignore basic mechanics or stack together a 2x stack marker.
and the one who is yapping Dawntrail is too hard to prove that around 30% ish of 14 players are braindead players in this generation and I am happy YoshiP brought a GIANT HAMMER on them
as a relativly new player (playing for about a month) who buyed a story skip to DT because i hate questing. im not gonna lie, i was struggling quite a lot once i reached about lvl 70 content in my leveling process (my first class is paladin). i did the tutorials at lvl 15 and 49, and i think they dont do a particular good job at teaching. i was very happy about being teached some of the markers at lvl 49 but i think its not enough and even too late. some of the mechanics appeared in content way earlier, and the later content has so many more mechanics not even mentioned.
i dont consider myself casual, i consume quite a lot of content and in particular for tanks i watched a lot of videos to get an idea wat id like to play and wat rotations etc are supposed to look like. i also watched plenty content and talked to people ingame who claim dat all the dungeons and story related content is supposedly braindead easy which kinda makes me question if im just god awful because since lvl 70ish content im genuinly being very challenged. in certain fights i even get 3 or 4 vuln stacks and i try my best to learn. especially with some of the telegraphs i just cant see them no matter how hard i try to look for them. i really try to learn, but things are very hectic between trying to play in a way dat even resembles a rotation, dealing with mechanics as well as looking out for party members to support them if needed (i guess more a paladin thing with intervene/covers/clemency/divine veil if needed)
the point i wanna get to, i think a lot of people underestimate content when theyve already been playing for a super long time. and im not saying dat content is too hard, i actually love running dungeons and trying to improve. but i feel like the community does a huge disservice claiming how 'piss easy' the game is no matter where you look when things really arent. when you dont have hundreds if not thousands of hours of battle content time invested.
If you want to compare FFXIV to another game it would be useful if you explained what the actual difficulty spikes are, instead of pointing out that they exist. You could exchange monster hunter with literally any other game right now and just claiming that they exist. Please think about people who didn't play monster hunter, when doing something like this.
Also, I think comparing FFXIV to monster isn't good. MH is mostly a singleplayer experience. You can carefully curate what the player is engaging with at what time and in what intensity.
FF gets harder gradually. And you could argue that these "frustrating experiences" are exactly the dungeons that "force the player to improve". Classes give you new abilities, new tools to use and to practise in 5 dungeons per expansion, and all the harder dungeons/trials you mentioned are either at the end of the expansion, or even in the post content of it. It's not the case that you step out of gridania and suddenly you are facing this ice dragon. Or Golbez.
I honestly hope they keep the dungeons as they are in dawntrail. They raised the bar now and people might finally understand that they have to press buttons, move their character and use their brain.
Dawntrail was a failure. Full Stop.
Every other piece of content in the game is dumbed down to be uber casual, and the only other option they give you for difficulty is balls to the walls you better have a degree in physics and 7 other people who are willing to slam into the wall with you or you lose. I just want a ramp into that stuff, not, choosing between nothing mattering or everything mattering.
This is the best video on this topic I've seen. This topic has been extremely divisive, and I've been treated like a troll for even beginning to criticize how difficulty is handled in this game. I think your assessment is accurate and brave.
My only issues with dawntrail are mostly job related Warrior feels so damn good/smooth compared to the other tanks, and that they took Monk behind the shed and broke its fucking legs. Im not a fan of the balls or the stupid upgrade to the riddles but thats a skill issue on my part i guess. Shrug
The biggest difficulty spike I experienced as a new player (just finished ARR story) was stone vigil for a few reasons
1. Lvl sync to 43, nearly every job is missing very important buttons at this level SCH doesn’t have art of war for instance, no tank apart from WAR has invulnerability
2. If you go straight there using the MSQ you will be severely under geared, probably wearing lv 32-35 stuff, as a tank you will die trying to do the “normal” pull that you see al tutorials doing if your healer is not on the ball. And heaters will have trouble healing a tank doing the large pulls that dungeon has cause everything hits so hard.
It’s my least favourite dungeon I have experienced so far by a long shot
Learning is okay if people let you learn new mechanics and not be mean a*holes bc of it. I played before shadowbringers started and elitists who are hating on casuals are getting more and more. This is not WOW! You don't need mods or big pp numbers on some websites: DO YOUR JOB! DON'T GRIEF OTHERS or be an assh*le. If I can help people through something it makes me feel good. New dungeons or new people learn mechanics. And not everyone is able bodied. Read your tooltips, learn your rotation and prog fights by trying to use your braincells – and that's it. The world doesn't revolve around cheaters/modders (I mean the bad kind of mods, not the aesthetics) and the 10% who seriously need to TOUCH GRASS! (I play the game vanilla for years and stopped pvp also bc it's getting ridiculous!) – It's cool if you're faster in learning mechanics than others! But please be patient with people who need longer. (My 2 healer braincells need TIME to adjust.) – The last raid tier fcked my hand so bad that whenever i play longer ad got back in the groove I am in extreme pain. – I'm not perfect and I know my job, but if people like me don't raid anymore and just do the dungeons we shouldn't get flamd if it's the FIRST time we're in this fcking dungeon and die to a one hit mechanic. HOLY SHIT.
I'm kind of in the camp that the MSQ portions of the game should be kept mostly trivial and accessible to the largest amount of players possible, while the optional end-game i.e. max level content should be where people go to look for a challenge. That being said, all players should understand things like stack markers and that they need to dodge AoEs. The biggest issue to me, isn't just that players are not given a proper tutorial or that they have no incentive to learn more efficient play, but that playing the game at lowers levels actually FEELS so different from playing at max level. If the lower levels were made to be better tutorial for end-game content, it may help people feel more prepared for it, but this runs the risk of making things feel stale or samey, not to mention that end-game content is constantly shifting and being added. It's a difficult balancing act to be sure.
So there's an issue with this video and it's the whole thing really. The 'difficulty' thing and the 'outside resources' is an MMO thing as a whole. Not XIV, not GW2, not WoW, not Runescape, not EQ, but MMOs as a whole genre is like this, because it's intended to be community based. Things are discovered, normalized and utilized by the community, for the community, not by the devs. People expecting an ENTIRELY ONLINE EXPERIENCE to hand them information (when things are written in detail) of what their abilities do. Instead of READING this information, they refuse to use these tools and are shocked to find out at 100 that Lucid recovers MP or that sheltron is mitigation.
People cry and complain that the "MMO" aspect of XIV is dead when it's still alive and well, just not how it used to be. We still as a community need to show each other how to do things and learn how to do things.
What i think they should add for new players is a system that teaches you your class. At certain levels you have to take on job quests and while yes they have tool tips for the skills, I think they need to implement into the quest of the job instead of 'heres a side story of why job exists and new skills read your tool tips'.
The forums are like 60% trolls, I wouldn’t take them too seriously.
I kinda disagree on the wiping making learning nothing. Like in the burn, you see exactly what the aoes do, so after you wipe, it’s pretty clear what killed you, and when the boss does the exact same thing next pull, you know what to do to avoid it.
I do agree that Ff14 should have a more consistent difficulty curve though.
There's no way Amaurot or The Burn were ever considered hard content, please say sike right now
CONTENT DOESNT NEED TO BE HARD IT NEEDS TO BE ENGAGING. THE TWO CONCEPTS ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.
They need to change how scripting works in fights this is why its predictable and boring.
Also job wise. More buttons doesnt mean better it and dumping my big skills in burst windows is very boring
You're lv100, act like it
There are "fair battles" where I clearly understand what did kill me and how to avoid it next time => learning. And then there are other fights/duties where I even can't see what the npc entourage expects from me (e.g. Alisaie's Sword of Light marker is white text on a white glow effect not aligned with her actual sword and obfuscated by a myriad of battle fx around you) => frustration.
Another observation: The red mage job quests were hard, so I was afraid of the lvl 80 role quest => but I succeeded in the first try. On the other hand my gunbreaker had an easy life in the job quests but I still fail on the lvl 80 role quest. (Someone on youtube does it with ease, having >100k HP. Now I'm curious how to get such high stats while synched to ilvl 420…)
And yes: the msq in long parts does not require you to learn much and when the sudden frustrating spikes appear, then it's difficult to get the core of the "lesson".
I agree with a lot of what you say, only thing is that even back in ShB I don't recall anyone considering the Burn or Amaurot genuinely difficult, there's just a couple of mechanics you need to memorize, but they weren't more challenging than any DT dungeons, and I think Dead Ends does have a few mechanics that'll mess you up the first time but they don't require much more thinking than any DT dungeon. But I do like the direction of more consistantly challenging dungeons as opposed to really easy ones, I hope they'll keep it up!