let’s talk about it…
The Gamer Article: https://www.thegamer.com/final-fantasy-14-active-players-large-drop-below-1-million/
Hello everyone I am Jmulls of Jmulls Gaming and welcome to my little corner of the internet!
Walkthroughs, First Impressions, Critique and Reviews for all things video games, by someone who loves video games!
In today’s video, I talk about the state of Final Fantasy 14 Dawntrail.
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4:15 people say the same thing about One Piece it it gets good after 100 eps or more thats obviously bull! People complain about ARR saying its gets good in Heavensward, so why cant the same thing be said for DT??
-Boring job design
-Extremly repetitive mechanics in raids even in savage/ultimates
-Story mediocre after 6.0
-Horrible net code
-Outdated systems especially the glam
-Gearing is boring and meaningless (especially if you dont care about on patch ultimate)
-Overworld is dead and meaningless
-Addons and plugins get more and more OP and they dont moderate it. Crafting bots, auto combat rotation and even crazier stuff is normalized at this point…
– Pvp is garbage
I quit 3 days after 7.1, that was the last chance I gave them to save the game. I wont wait for 8.0 for the slight chance to be fixed. The spark is gone.
I have said it once and I will say it again, FF14's greatest enemy is Square Enix itself. The game is being used to pay for OTHER games in the company's catalogue, as well as blatantly terrible business decisions instead of putting as much of that money as possible BACK into the game by:
1. Hiring more devs, new blood, so that the ones working on it right now aren't so overworked and so they can start training new devs who will take over the reins one day. Yoshi-P and a lot of the people who saved the game are LEGENDS, but they won't be around forever.
2. Hire more good writers
3. Hire more technical people so they can finally fix the game's spaghetti code and actually fix issues like the outdated UI & menus, create instanced player housing, update the glamour system etc.
Okay, so we really do have to do this every expansion I guess. Yes the game is in a lull, and yes this one is more extreme than both Shadowbringers and Endwalker. This happens because content is sparse, and the reason content is sparse is because Square Enix intentionally leaves it open for people who don't play 10 hours a day to catch up with their alt jobs. Think of things like gacha games where they have to spit out content every 2 weeks, a lot of people fall off of them due to the intense pace and they do so a lot faster. I don't think FFXIV's content pace is great right now, but I'd rather they err on the side of caution and release too little rather than too much.
I do feel they have gone rather light on making significant changes to content though. Not in terms of the main combat system or story, but overall interaction with the world. The biggest change we probably had recently was the PvP overhaul in 6.1 but even that is tangential to our current DoW/DoM kits. We haven't really had a new way to play in a significant time, and I'd love to see them experiment more, so we can have a brand new thing like Chocobo Racing, Rival Wings, Mahjong, Lord of Vermllion, or even Triple Triad. One of the most beloved events of the last few years was the Valentione's Day event where it tethered two players together in a maze they had to avoid. Just bringing small silly things in more often would be great. Everything tends to get hyperfocused around what we currently have in the game rather than something new, and that has definitely led to a little bit of stagnation that can be improved. Talk of introducing the relic grind earlier is just silly, but adding something like an Endless horde gamemode using PvP abilities to name just an example, would do wonders for at least diversifying content a little more.
Ultimately, I really despise this song and dance. Every expansion there is always the panic that FF is losing players and it is entirely because the content is too spread out or it's not good enough quality, or it's not going to last long enough to be of value. And yet the game is still here. Yes a lot was advertised in Dawntrail's leadup that isn't in the game, but it wasn't like they hid when things would be released. They may not say which patch it's coming in, but it wasn't as if Beastmaster was being stuck in the teaser trailers, and we only had concept art for the Eureka/Bozja like because that's all they had at the time of those reveals. If you bought Dawntrail and 3 month's worth of sub expecting to be diving into a whole new zone 2 months after they dropped 6 zones, 100 story quests, 8 dungeons, 2 new jobs, 3 trials, 2 Extremes, and 4 Normal & Savage Raid fights, then that is a naivety I wish I could have. Give them time, and give yourself space if you need it. If you truly enjoy this game, then coming back with a fresh mind and a fresh head later down the line is a phenomenal idea that we as a community need to listen to more.
I like these dead times so I can catch up on other stuff lol.
Kinda hard to take anything The Gamer says seriously. That being said, the DT story sucked. I'll keep playing until the servers shut down, but a lot of people are more than willing to move on to greener pastures if FF14 can't keep delivering Shadowbringer and Endwalker caliber stories.
As much as i love this game, at this point i just want a new MMO with a better engine, net code, ect…
It does not matter how much content there is if the content feels hollow when your doing it.
Make final fantasy 11 free and I will change my mind
Maybe the fact that the MMO's world does not feel massive whatsoever is the problem
Im glad real feedback is finally being received better. The toxic positivity has been ruining the game the last several years. You literally couldn't say anything critiquey without being flamed.
The vocal minority is what got us here, jobs being dumbed down, systems being trivialized, and keeping the game in a state of super predictability. The story is what kept people around with rose tinted glasses on. Without the story being absolutely stellar, the games faults become more noticeable. Hopefully, this is a wake-up call for the Devs that they need to keep innovating to keep up with what players expect in games as newer games keep raising the standards.
I personally have no interest in this backwater country with a 'devastating' attack on the capital on the nation ment only a few dozen killed and less than 100 missing. That is not a capital, that is a village.
what I want to see. A dual wielding, plate wearing, tank (like how frost DKs were in wow before they Fed it up and made blood DKs tanks).
I dropped the game when they announced Endwalker's relic questline would be through a joke storyline. Instead of utliziing the gods and the zone they made for the raids, they instead decided to have the relics go through a questline that was supposed to be a joke. I was already not happy with the Endwalker MSQ, so the relics were just a nail in the coffin for me (also me just spamming Glare).
I see that SE is trying to nostalgia bate with bringing back the Arkangels and the Shadow Lord, from FFXI… a better MMO. The video just shows me that SE is out of ideas. The real Arkangel fight was brutal and required insane coordination. Shadowlord was a gamble and you only had one shot per Dynamis run to kill him… since you had to blow 2-hour abilities to kill him. I remember being the main Chainspell + Stun RDM for those. Good times.
Good. Maybe they will wake the f up and actually start innovating again. Though doubtful until the Japanese population starts complaining, thats their main audience.
Stop forcing players to go through countless hours of MSQ to be able to access current content.
This gate keeping is horrible, boring. Not everyone likes the story, it has all became such a formality that you have to go through before you can actually play the game. And when I say play I mean go through the same content disguised as something new since everything is so formulaic that you're basically doing the same thing every expansion.
Dang, it's like telling players to go play other games actually worked.
There is nothing to do so why play right now, the story is very boring right now too after the very poor .x patches of Endwalker
Start by fixing the stutters making the game unplayable since dawntrail release
Stop overcomplicating classes and their mechanics
Stop adding tons of unnecessary content for the sake of adding content. More is not always better.
I'm not gonna lie I have been playing ff14 since heavensward patch and the hydalean and zodiark saga was great then until dawntrail game was mixed to me and I never got the excitement. I think ff14 need alot changes there. Only reason I still play this game is because I own a housing (still limited) and it's still bad and story wise for new saga is a meh and never got interested.
While I think it was great to let writers with less experience have a chance at the MSQ, I fully believe there should have been more supervision on it. One of the writers did great with pixie tribe quests imo, but then that's all the MSQ felt like. A giant beast tribe questline. Aspects of the story felt so rushed, like Krile's parents, Erenville's mother. We just completely ignore Erenville when he's obviously hurting. Given the past, it seems out of character for our WoL to not care about his grief until one single moment near the very end. It made me hate even my own WoL, I felt heartless.
The fact Wuk Lamat was more annoying than Minfilia with the Waking Sands, is sad. I had hoped they learned from ARR, but it seems not. Coming from someone who mostly enjoyed ARR before the re-work. It had it's annoyances with repetition, but the world building was engaging to me. They keep saying "well this is building up for a new story and world". ARR did that, it was still better than this more than a decade later.
You may have touched on this, I'm only half way through, but the new chaotic raid. Yes I want to do it, though it may be a while until then. But even then, I was annoyed that they did a patch to implement it and all the drops a week before you could even do it. And they decide to do it on Christmas Eve?!! I always say Yoshi P, despite being a business man, as the type to care for players. Even pushing the release date for the new Elden Ring expansion, saying he knew people wanted to play it. So why release an anticipated raid on such an important holiday for people. If I hadn't spent so much time and money on this game, I'd have dropped it by now. Even my brother, who got me into it, barely plays. He gets on for MSQ, and lets his sub drop until more MSQ drops.
My biggest issue I have with FFXIV right now is that in most mmorpg's I enjoy being a crafter/gatherer because it allows you to do things like make or repair gear, etc. so things are more convenient, but FFXIV makes it a massive inconvenience just to gear and level crafters/gatherers. It might not seem like it to people that have been doing crafters/gatherers for years, but there is a massive barrier to entry for crafters/gatherers right now especially if you don't want to craft/gather 24/7 to sell stuff for a ton of gil, which is the only valid way to keep your crafter/gatherer gear up-to-date without spending an insane amount of time gathering literally thousands of materials to craft a handful of gear pieces, and that's not even including how bad the pentamelding is because on top of the materials you have to gather, you also have to spend hundreds of thousands of scrips on materia or other materials, which means even more gathering and crafting collectibles, just to be able to afford a measly handful of materia or materials that cost a ton of scrips for crafting the gear you need. For players like me that don't like playing into the market aspect of the game, but still enjoy having crafters/gatherers leveled and geared, it becomes an insane slog of a grind and the only other option would be to spend millions of gil that I don't have just to buy the materials, materia, and gear. Crafters/gatherers are just not fun whatsoever, but they are almost a necessity because it's a million times cheaper to make your own food, potions, and gear just to be able to play the game properly.
I also feel like the stat check on crafting items needs to be a lot more lenient and allow you to be able to make everything with the bare minimum gear for that tier, for example, anyone should be able to easily craft the highest difficulty items with scrip gear if they actually know how to use crafter skills and materia melds on crafter/gatherer gear should be entirely optional for people that want to fully optimize their crafting/gathering and not a requirement to craft the best items. Hell, they could even make it so that you can craft/gather the best stuff with scrip gear but at the same time have special items that don't affect actual normal gameplay (like housing items or other cosmetics) that DO require min/maxing your crafter/gatherer gear with pentamelds, but regular things required just to play the game the intended way, such as food, potions, and even basic battle gear, should not be locked behind min/maxing stats for crafter/gatherer gear, especially because some people want to be able to play the hardest endgame content without spending an ungodly amount of time grinding crafters/gatherers.
Dawntrail was a failure across the board. it would have been well written had they allowed for hashing of the story and not had pray return to wuk lamat all the time. 7.0 could have legit been the dawnservant race ending in her brother talking to the mysterious woman in the golden portal but they didn't. the novice writer wrecked it by making it a theatre style. you only need to watch the bomb train making montage to the song Smile to understand what i mean. the places you went were cool but sttory was super rushed. the company has lost touch. We ended on such a emotional high with Endwalker and were looking forward to a vacation and just being an adventurer. What we got: babysitting a shut in lioness who either by design or stupidity on the fathers part..barely knew anything about the land she wanted to rule over. then you got one head bro who obsessed with being better then his old man. 2 head trying to do the right thing the wrong way and cat boy who is so smitten with foreign tech that he was trying to force introduce it. you laughably could see who won the moment you met the contestants. the content since then has been absolute crap. the only redeeming factor is there was a difficulty increase in normal content but eden ultimate and now the chaotic have annoyed alot to no end. Dawntrail is the start of the fall of this game and if they don't correct their course, will lose more and more and quickly find their flagship game isn't and be in big trouble. mind you, given they got tencent involved in the mobile. thinking they going to try to monetize stuff.
I'm a casual player and I'm running out of old content to do. Crafters maxed out, multiple jobs maxed. I don't do Savage or harder difficulty things because I just don't feel like committing to it for now. I enjoy how cool the hard raids look and all but I really want more of those alternate gameplay features. That's what keeps me interested as I actually feel like I have other casual things to do rather than GRIND.
if youre a non raider playing this game the experience is even worse. I LOVE the alliance raids, was so excited for chaotic, then they said it was closer to savage difficulty and it killed all excitement I had for it and didn't even bother. They should've optimized it closer to EX level of difficulty as hardcore raiders already have savage and ultimates while casuals have….. nothing.
-add blitzball
-Fix netcode
-Ban the mods
-Bring back Sphene
-nerf Pictomancer
-buff my class
Everyone is gonna go play the mobile game because its already doing a lot of qol things that the main game is sorely missing
They need to get rid of Hit Detection.
It lines up with Japan's collapsing population. That country is going to be finished in 20 years
If "TheGamer" wrote it, it must be true
There's just nothing new or exciting to do, and it's been that way since Shadowbringers. 5 years of stagnation and repetitive content and content cycles. You'll never be surprised, you'll never be lost, you'll never make a wrong decision, you'll never be confused about anything. And now the saving grace of the "game," the story, sucks too.
Job pollentation – There is no gameplay that involves DoM, DoW, DoH, and DoL together. They are different instances of gameplay completely segmented from each other.
A focus on MMO – The most enjoyable time to play the game is when everyone is at the same part of the story and there's a bunch of people in zones. Afterwards there is no reason to be anywhere but in a hub.
PvP feels tacked on – There are no zones to attack other players. WoW made a living in this realm. They don't have to do all the zones, but maybe just 1 zone where it's constant. Maybe one to include the idea above? The only people that PvP are ones that actively queue specifically for it. A zone where GCs are divided into the open world would be fun.
Focus on the fun – If it isn't fun, it doesn't need to exist. Quest design has been click on this, talk to 3 people, talk to person, stand in spot. These are not fun. Halving the quests and doubling the exp helps. But if it isn't fun, don't include it.
Itemization – I won't beat this one, but I think they would benefit by ripping out gear altogether and focus on a glamour system where the items just show what you look like. The stats are meaningless and by default so is the gear progression.
delete wuk lamat fixed
Ill say it, the characters are just diet versions of other characters…
Wok Lamat is a caring leader for her people, Graha Tia without the charm
Selene wants to justify her methods for her people, Emet Selch without the charisma
How is it I like Bakool Ja Ja more after they revealed his back story and was able to relate to his childhood trama more than any of the new heroes
Befor i write several things that the game should address and fix or revert to how they were i would like to provide one element that for me should be considered talking of FF14, it is not an MMO RPG but it is an MMO Visual Novel, None of our choices have an impact on the story and not even on the dialogues and our characters are all the same just maybe geared differently according if we get or not the BiS, with the exception of the Blue mage all the characters brings the same skills same rotations and so the we have no choice on how to even roleplay them.
Besides that what should be fixed and what should be reverted to original, in my opinion:
1 – Crafting: used to be a challenging experience now it is just a copy this macro and run it 100 times. (downgraded in Shadowbringer) as a result the game aconomy is destroyed and the only things a bit worthy to be crafted are glamour items, Food/potions for raids and furnitures.
2 – Spacing of the patches: they used ot be delivered once every 2 months in ARR and HW then with covid they made them every 3 months, ok valid reason, now they are every 4,5 months which means every dungeon of the expert is there for 9 months and it is what we have to grind for the weekly tomes.
3 – Altenrative ways to level up: besides the few and not efficient roulettes and the grinding of the same dungeons. When you have 10 classes it is fine but when you have 20 and you need to repeat one dungoen 7 times with each class to go to the next one it is too much repetition. Also Leveling roulette gives almost no experience if you are level 90+ and get an ARR dungeon, Normal raid and High-Level Dungeon give no exp so they are pointless. And well the main no skip Main Scenario, playing since 2013 just makes me throw up when i really need to run it. And at some point also repeating the "lets not call them tribe quests" becomes something really boring.
4 – The stale Expansion Package formula Dungeon-Dungeon-Trial-Dungeon-Dungeon-Trial-Dungeon-Trial where also the dungeons are copies of themselves. Alexandria copies Dead Ends that copies Amaurot. So no surprise we already know what to expect.
5 – Quality of Life: Managing inventories, duplicated items, company and custom deliveries all takes tons of click. I counted 100-110 clicks to make the 6 item delivery to an NPC. And all those go in the menu get one thing then exit the menu entirely then open it again to go in a new tab and again, NPC vendors Company Turn ins or or upgrades of crafted armors in Eulmore, Raz-at-tan, Solution 9.
6 – Contents like Eureka are great I recently finished all my relics there and still people are playing that content and chatting and having fun. Bozja was stripped of that social element and is in fact a desert. All to block the "trains" which were fun and collaborative experiences.
7 – Frontline PVP: there is nothing more imbalanced a content where nothing matters, the spawn can favor a team the maps as well, and the way players fight eachotehr and gain bonuses that make them unstoppable favors the 2vs1 team all the time. Most of those matches are also arranged on Discord. The rewards are so high in exp and unique items that people tend to do them but as part of the weekly grind, and it is annoying to hear in the inteviews how liked is the pvp is becasue so many participate to it, considering that one map has been put on short maintenance for over a year and Rival Wings is a dead content becasue does not have any reward as Frontline.
8 – Rewards: The one item per week policy is becoming silly also all the drops are mostly useless and it si possible to do normal contents with gear that has bad stats and low item level anyway. Many are ugly and it si not fun to see in the livel letters YoshiP praise them for beauty, in italy we say "Every cockroach looks beautiful to his mom" and when i see items that clips with eachother or the hair (something solved easily in Lineage 2 that was a game of the middleages) or they are recoloring of things already used i horrify.
And also the drop system that favors new players lowering the rolls of veterans that have to repeat a content a million time even jsut for a Triple triad card.
9 – Seasonal events: they have become super uninspired and withthe only purpose of putting the old items in the mog station on sale. For huge costs and not even account wide.
10 – Cutscenes: Overused and not voiced especially in the crucial moments when the actors could add pathos to a critical situation.
11 – Music: Even if beautiful it is starting to feel they reuse some tracks too many times and are misplacing some others like in Tuliolal a Jaz music which i love but that is kind of the FF Brazil so Jaz is totally out placed.
There are many other issues, as you mentioned, the contents over advertised that arrive after one year or more or are incomplete and silly like the dual dyes where the second colors affects like 2 pixels.
I love this game or I woulds not have over 30k hours of playtime in 11 years, including those i went to sleep leaving the game on in some occasions. But i see how it is aging badly and makes me feel sad and more lonely as my friends are moving on and i am considering doing the same.
if you're bored with the casual content then try the harder content. The savage, extreme, ultimate, and new chaotic have been fantastic.
I stopped at dawn trail simply because I put so many years into the game…. After Endwalker, I was satisfied and felt no reason to play further since I beat the game essentially. Still love the game and wish them good luck
Maybe they should do less story focused content and stop taking agency away from the player to read shitty dialogue about boring shit no one gives a fuck about, I haven't even started DT yet and I don't think I ever will xD I've played up to post EW in this game over the course of 3 years, I have no lasting memories, the characters all talk like they're rocket scientists about crystal bullshit, the npcs I'm supposed to care about that aren't main characters just annoy the fuck out of me, but what annoys me the most is that there's hardly any gameplay doing the msq? I and I really don't get what all the fuss is about the story? It's more or less just filler with really shitty combat in the "open lifeless world". There's been evenings I've come and played this game till I'm about to go to sleep and I've done nothing but fucking read boring dialogue. Holy fuck, fuck this shitty garbage game, make it an mmo and forget the filler stories and make them shorter with more quality, give us a story that isn't so complex and big brain, those just aren't enjoyable, this game is just full of toxic positivity cause the community are so obsessed with Yoshi P. Thank God ffxi is still up and running as well as wow classic.
One of my main issues is how many good things are walled behind hard content and how absolutely everything has to be unlocked by sometimes as little as just talking to someone there's no reason to require talking to someone to unlock content, just give it to the player at that point, I also wish there was alternative method to getting savage or extreme stuff, or pvp stuff, just make the original way faster and the alternative way a little bit more grinding involved.
DT was bad, simple as. What most of us wanted to see was big flashing red alert lights and klaxons sounding at SE. We aren't seeing that, they're ignoring our complaints. So people are going to leave. Too many companies forgot about the carrot.
I have 7900hr in this game, i played since HW HC, did all Ultimate's on patch most savages Week 1. I stopped playing this game 3 months ago (lost my large house) and i dont even care. the game does not deserve my money anymore, tbh i should have quit in EW but i wanted to believe it will get better
I don't love 14 anymore. I won't pretend I do. I won't pretend to be fair. I gave this game years and I gave it money. And I got spit on for it.
The open world sucks. The story is a mixed bag. The combat is generic and every class is effectively the same within its role. The issues are too massive at this point and have been stagnating for so long that even if they fixed it all tomorrow I'd probably still not give them a second chance. Get bent, squeenix. Even your new titles are too safe and boring.
i want a better job/class system, or to it just to be improved upon. playing wow again like i have been ive forgotten how good it actually is. make armor not just nice to look at but to give effects to spells. its really cool to see with tier sets. thats not to say that it isnt fun now but it adds flavor, . it gives variety to the monotony. FF14 has a unmatched story period and i want to want to play it again but its just been so uninspired lately, the game needs to grow it scale
I’ll play until the servers go offline.
I think the thing that keeps me from hating DT and the rest of 14 is the fact that yknow you do something for 10 years eventually youre gonna end up with a stinker. I do genuinely think folks are overreacting
This raid tier was the easiest and most annoying thing to clear with people in PF than any of the other expansions for me. It really made me want to just quit. Tomestone didn't really help either with the amount of sweats checking it while in PF.
I found Dawntrail to be kind of dull until getting to the midpoint after the “ascension game” was over. The game and objectives just didn’t seem like level 90ish objectives. It was like doing ARR fetch with high level character. I actually went back and played ARR with a new character and just found it to be more interesting, with death and high stakes. I think that rather than force the universe-saving WOL to play adventurer and babysit a noob princess, it would be better to have the WOL retire to the island or something and have players start a new character in a spinoff story.
They could make some interesting stories by doing a spinoff in the unsundered world, or having a new adventurer in a future world where the WOL is an old hermetic sage such as the old Luke Skywalker, or even a future age where our WOL is a sort of legend of the past. You’d have to archive your character and all their quests and start anew. They could have the new WOL starting in a different place and working their way back to the old familiar areas over expansions, giving the developers time to redesign a future version of these places.
I think that there are so many players who want their WOL to have a romantic story, that having a “dating sidequest with X NPC” purchasable from mogstation might be profitable and interesting.
I really, really love the FFXIV story, but I’m not really great at the combat, so I will likely never be an endgame raider, and those additions just don’t interest me at all. I never want to try savage things synched because I don’t want to get yelled at by raid pros.
I feel that they have started to forget the lesson they learned from 1.0s failure. Don't take your playerbase for granted.
Im only keeping it is because I don't want to lose my ffxiv house