This is Part 1 of Xeno’s Reaction to @NamesLynx ‘s video regarding the Downfall of Final Fantasy 14. Was Endwalker the worst FFXIV expansion? Is the game dying? Xeno disagrees.
Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB9grCmKi9g
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#Xeno #FFXIV #endwalker
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Man is gonna regret deleting that character one day.
I think the point about recent content not being creative was the reuse of mechanics/animations. If you look at DSR, like 90% of the fight is reused assets. It's just that the way they made those assets interact with each other was extremely creative that bred fun and engaging to do mechanics. p1, the only thing new is the ground that is around the bridge to make the arena. The Knights are from the MSQ, their attacks are from the dungeon vault, their animations didn't change. P2 is literally thordan using the knights to combat you, every single animation from this fight, except the meteor baits has been recycled from the extreme with the exception of the 3 tank buster slashes. P3, nidstinien Is also a bunch of assets from the extreme, a bunch of towers that get placed by 1s, taken by the 3s, then 1s take the 2s towers, and after the 3s drop their towers the 2s take the lateral towers with south 1 taking the south 3 tower, all of these animations have already been used at some part of the game. p4 is the eyes that also extracted visuals from the extreme while fighting nidstinien. p5, has ucob mechanics mixed in the with the knights of the round and a purple animated thordan which i don't remember ever seeing anywhere else in the game. p6 is the 2 lore important wyrms. Hraesvalgr animations was reused from sohr khai hrae. I've never seen a Nidhogg kept in the air midfight but probably using sohr khai's hraesvalgr's skeleton as their animations seem to be similar. P7 is very unique in boss design, in fact one of the very few things that is unique looking in DSR. The exaflares i guess are very different from the standard ucob exaflare, akh morn stacks are just the nidhogg dark akh morn which had a red and black hue and the standard bahamut akh morn animations and gigaflares are massive explosions on 3 parts of the arena. What Lynx says about the mechanics being reused is valid, but he never mentions that the creativity doesn't come from mechanics/animations being reused, it comes from how well those animations are merged into creating different combinations of how mechanics will play out. SQE having an vast pool of assets they are most certainly going to know how to combo everything up to make something new, kind of how in the binding of isaac your builds, despite using always the same items, have different effects because item combinations are different in every run, except the devs are carefully selecting how they combine everything. No matter what people say, we will continue to see reused assets, boss designs, animations, stacks, spreads, pairs, role stacks, 3 men stacks, 6men stacks, chariots, dynamos, buff passes, 1,2,3,4 men towers, defamation, aggravated assaults, aoe baits, wild charges and i cba to remember every single thing. It's really a matter of accepting that this is what the game is. Not a single video on youtube is going to change that. Hell, community feedback is so weak against their stubborness to implement a decent reason to actually do criterion/savage dungeons, a video is just a way of venting i guess.
he thinks 24 USD mount is overpriced? wait till he knows about PoE 80 USD skins and 480 USD yearly packs
LOL all these people in the comments who are taking offense at the Lynx video, are precisely validating what he is saying
FF14 just end the 10yeaars story
Now it make new 10 years need some base
Ithink 1.0 is boring just same now in6.5
You sound a little biased in this vid xeno
Im gonna be honest i wasnt a huge fan of Xeno’s content before now but its actually wild how level headed you are considering all the clips ive seen lol.
Its so odd…every time I still long in, there is a 10 to 20 person que.
As I listened to this guy all I could think about was 'imagine if the devs and Yoshi all sat in a room and invited him in to listen to his opinions and feedback and THIS is how he addressed them – with THAT tone'. He clearly has something going on in his head that has impacted his gameplay and he has an emotional hangup about it, because he talks like a snarky condescending POS and he hurts any half decent point he may happen to make. (Oh, and the fact he says he deleted his character after thousands of hours, instead of just not resubbing, is a clear indication he had an emotional spaz out about something. That's unhinged.)
17:15 it was literally 1/1 (hard) dungeons 5 extra in hw 2 extra in sb. It was just asset reuse
I love when Xeno tries to talk sense to people who can't be reasoned with. Most people in this world are half-retarded, so you just let them eat their own boogers, and cry
Lost Ark lul, where all mechanics are "okay so we took the boss away so you can play this little minigame" and "if it glows blue, counter it x times in a row" or should I say… move and counter?
I think one aspect that both of you maybe didn’t consider is why they aren’t making the glass bigger. The reality is, there are development bottlenecks limiting how much they can scale up the scope. When you double the content, it baseline doubles the work at every point of the dev pipeline. Some of those junctions in the pipe cant handle that increased load. Take music for example. New content needs new music. I don’t think Soken even can possibly work harder than he already is. Man composed and arranged the score of shadowbringers from a hospital bed while fighting cancer. And you cant really part out his workload to get more music produced. The quality and vision needs to remain consistent and unified or fans will notice and take issue. Any fan of DOOM can tell you that. I think part of why we have this formulaic schedule is because they are already pushing those bottlenecks close to the limit of what they can handle. I think we saw that with Endwalker. Overall loved it but it had parts that were a bit lacking and other parts that felt like filler. I agree with the acceptance, if only because I think this is the reality of the most they can push out. I’m honestly just happy with how creative they’ve been with raid mechanics, and their willingness to try new ideas like island sanctuary (even though I consider that a bit of a mark missed). Lot of fun overall and still the best MMO I’ve played.
All I'm going to agree on out of everything that person said is that yes, boss fights are somewhat boring, but not because of the mechanics, but because they are WAY too scripted and leave little room for improvisation and adaptability. They need to let the boss perform mechanics freely during each "phase" of the fight (based on boss HP) instead of always the same boring stuff of starting out with raidwise -> tankbuster -> mechanic 1 -> raidwide.. and so on. Let the order of the mechanics be random AND each mechanic have variations ESPECIALLY in Savage and Ultimates.
I actually think original video has a point about xiv mechanics being kinda samey, but thr guy explains his point so horribly wrong. The platform example is from Guild Wars 2's Qadeem , and that is genuinely one of the most creative mmo raids I have experienced. XIV does it's one thing well, which is the stated "stand and let things resolve", but other mmos put interesting twists on reoccurring mechanics throughout an encounter. In the Qadeem fight you need a person to have a spec'd kiting build to solo adds from getting to the raid boss and empowering them, there is no mechanic similar to that in XIV, as far as I've seen. (I could be wrong, I'm the definition of a midcore player so I might not know of a fight that does so.) But that is just an example of a single mechanic that requires a player to play a raid completely differently and think of the encounter from a different mindset than those who have to "stand there and let it resolve".
Idk man I'm just a Guild Wars 2 fan boy, I saw the first Qadeem fight and started poggin out of my mind. It's a fantastic encounter.
This is like someone who broke up with the game, bitter that the game still succeeds then made a video about some echo chamber he looked up then over generalized whatever his complaints like “stand and let things resolve” = “solving mechanics”
"Stand and let thing resolve" Shows a mechanic where you have to kill things before they resolve. Genius editing there guy.
hide behind rock 🥱
jump into hole 🤯
Man, idk what Lynx's point is. But this video has done nothing but made me want to hop back into the game to tackle a lot of the raids I've missed out on due to other things going on.
FF 14 is already done as a game. They will bleed it out now.
Think my problem with fight design is: Once you've done an ultimate savage is less interesting. But that's fine, you can't expect every fight to be an ultimate fight.
But I do agree with Protean tho. I'm so done with proteans.
What I've also noticed is that a lot of savage raids do mechanics with the having close to 100% uptime in mind (in later expansions), while other games might do things like you gotta jump on that platform and do a bit of parcouring without hitting your damage buttons (and losing dps).
While there's an argument to be made for these mechanics it's not something you can do in very fight, cause it would get boring quickly.
Calling the eyeball fight (deltascape 2) a hight mechanic boss is a bit of a stretch. You press one duty action button at the correct time, that's not really a "mechanic", it's boring. And people probably didn't like it because it fucked their rotation tbh.
Xeno's cup analogy of FFXIV feels like it should be 20% big dick and 75% casual.
The only time content like dungeons feels like it is at an appropriate level is when it is on release date and people are undergeared.
Because of health issues, I've not taken the time to do ultimate fights, so I've put my game time in other aspects of the game. Enjoying the story, doing levelling, crafting, gathering, savage raid when it was possible, deep dungeon party and solo runs, eureka, bozja, getting relics. and I can wholeheartedly say that Endwalker has just been a massive disappointment.
"Game is for everyone", sure but I realised that the game is no longer for me. Which pains me because I love this game's world.
– Story: It ruins lore and story from earlier in the game. It's flashy and pretty, but overall it's like Demon Slayer. Shallow with music that will pull at your heartstrings.
– Normal raid: Mixed bag
– Savage raid: Mixed bag, my static got burnt out before we could clear the 4th fight in the first two tiers, and I didn't have time or health to attempt the final tier.
– Alliance Raid: they claimed it would be as difficult as the Ivalice series, that was a lie. Week 1 people were doing memeruns because of how easy they are.
– (Ex) Trials: Mostly disappointing, with 1-2 exceptions.
– Island Sanctuary? Insulting content that isolates you from players instead of bringing people together. It would have been such great content, if people actually could cooperate, or had a reason to visit another island!
– Relic? Enjoy your godawful Manderville cutscenes. EW Manderville is the first time I've ever skipped a cutscene in FFXIV.
– Criterion? Clear the easy mode in 1 day for a mount, and then realise how pathetic the rewards are for normal and """savage""" is, and lose the motivation to continuing them. Tried doing them blind with friends, but it's so ridiculously punishing. It took us ages to clear the first criterion, and we just lost our motivation for the second criterion.
– Eureka Orthos? It had some nice ideas but overall horrible. They didn't understand what made deep dungeons good. The amount of mechanics in that DD with 1-shot mechanics that you have no idea of knowing about blind is insanely high. There's even an enemy that can just straight up kill you out of combat with its roar if you turn the corner at a bad time. Like what??
– Dungeons? Mostly boring and really easy, especially once you are done levelling. Worst offender being "expert dungeons", which are the worst dungeons in the game
– Crafting/gathering? Feels mostly pointless because it's so oversaturated anyway, that unless you are on one of those near-empty servers, you might as well not bother
– Beast tribes? Uber Eats, Cafe for the despairing, and moon bunnies. The cafe was alright. I hated the writing for the elephants, and I just didn't care much for the bunnies.
– The open world? Once you finish story, it's mostly empty. Everything interesting is shuffled into instances.
– Treasure maps? It gets real tedious once you've done a handful of runs, with all the forced cutscenes and jebaiting.
There's probably more I could think of for this part of the video, but lets be real, nobody gonna read this wall anyway
I hate door boss, from experience it ruined my static that's my only complain about the raid scene
I'm what I think people would label a "casual" player. I've never done a duty harder than normal difficulty, I don't care about grinding top-end gear, I don't play the game in a minmaxy sort of way. I love the game's writing and its world. I love the MSQ to absolute bits. As I was doing it I stopped to do every major side story series (normal raids, alliance raids, Eureka, will get to Bozja eventually, that good stuff) and since catching up to the MSQ I've been slowly doing roulettes to level my alternate jobs so I can go through job stories (I then get them to 90 out of a sense of sunk cost, but that's beside the point). I spent ages getting every DoH and DoL class to max so I could see their stories. Outside the MSQ taking a bit of a dip after Endwalker (which is to be expected, Endwalker was the freaking end of a 10 year long saga, you're going to get a little worse to follow that up), I'm ecstatic with the state of the game and its newest updates, the storytelling's great, roulettes are fun, it's like a dream come true. I chafe a bit about being called a "casual" when I've almost got 2.5k hours in the game at this point and I show no sign of stopping, but fine.
I get pretty annoyed when people who only care about the aspects of the game that make it unique pretend the game's dying and getting bad. FFXIV is unique among MMOs because of its focus on story and the way it caters to players who don't want to smash their head against an Ultimate wall like myself. I'm fully willing to believe that the game's pretty bad right now for hardcore players. That sucks, and it's fine if they complain about that, just as I'd complain if the story went to shit in a patch with fantastic raid content. My problem is that framing those as "the game's bad, it's dying, it's garbage" is just not accurate. The game's really, really good for players like me, FFXIV right now is the MMO I've wanted to exist since I first tried WoW and which I got incredibly disappointed in The Old Republic for not being. If the next patch fixed all the issues raiders had but had absolutely awful story content and I put out a video about how that means the game's dead now I'd be rightfully laughed out of the room.
I'm willing to bet too that there's a lot more players who play the game the way I do than hardcore players would guess. The game's marketed as a classic Final Fantasy RPG that happens to be online, it's openly trying to attract players like me. We matter, my experience with the game matters, and I find it really obnoxious to pretend like the only way to play the game that deserves attention is the super-hardcore way, especially when you have stuff like Yoshi-P literally telling you to unsubscribe, stop giving them money, and take a break for a few months if you think there's not enough content. The message often seems to be "the game should cater more to the super-hardcore raiders, screw the casual players!" when the whole reason I play it is because it's the only MMO that seems to care about the experience of players who want to play the game the way I want. There's a million MMOs out there which cater to hardcore raiders, and it feels like they want the only one that caters to me to stop doing that.
Wall of text, whatever, I've been finding these takes more and more often and I find them incredibly annoying, I just wanted to vent.
I spend 17.5 hours a day on this game 8 days every week and there’s nothing to do 😢
BG3 left me wanting more from this game 😂 I got on for 6.5 MSQ and not having all the cutscenes voiced just seemed so odd
Kind of a weird take to bring up 'interesting' WoW boss mechanics to show stuff that FF doesn't want to or can't do because, yeah, WoW has tons of 'creative' boss fights with weird arenas and crazy gimmicks, but this is not all positive. There are dozens upon dozens of bosses in WoW that people HATE. Bosses that people even hated during prog. Mechanics where after the first pull you know you're in for a miserable time.
There's some bangers in WoW, absolutely, but people like to forget how many trash bosses there are. Trash as in both pushover trash and garbage trash. I hated raiding in WoW because of how much time you waste on boring and annoying nonsense. And also, there are a bunch of mechanics that are reused over and over and over again in WoW as well. It often looks more innovative than it actually is because of how drastically different bosses can be visually and in terms of how the arena looks and is laid out. And obviously that is an additional twist that FF doesn't have but you're still often times just doing the same things again and again.
It just feels too easy, it’s like they dipped their toe in making extreme trials harder with Barb, but then decided since causals probably thought it was too hard, made the rest of them dead easy. We cleared Zeromus with so many deaths and didn’t even see enrage, it was disappointing
I thought p10s and p12s p2 had some of the most creative and cranial puzzles I’ve seen in an mmo. Too bad it isn’t jump into hole and let thing resolve???
I honestly feel like Lynx's opinions is just compilation of other people's thoughts and the parts that are actually are his opinion is the utter shit he speaks. I haven't played in like 4 months because I got life to live. The timing of the video kind of speaks for itself
.
I think that downfall guy is burned about Final Fantasy epicness. Even myself I feel overwhelmed with some bosses, that ominous chore music and all the flashy lights, and sometimes I just wanna chase goblins in a lowborn village like a dnd quest, but even for being a player with thousand of hours or a casual one that plays only on patch day to see the story continuation and enjoy aesthetics of new trials, I’m happy with my few hours a day of final fantasy. It is fun at is is, even if they’re are things to improve.
I am not sure if anyone has pointed out in the comments but I did notice some things with Lynx's vid/Channel that may confirm some thoughts Xeno said at 36:11 why he could be so bitter about the game.
1. Yes, he stopped making videos for like 1-2 years on FF14 despite being pretty active in helping how to tank and other stuff on Youtube n FF14.
2. He has another channel he made to have different content to FF14 (But is also pretty dead too, you can find it on his channels tab) and his most recent video was from 1 year ago stating why he was quitting FF14 for good and that one of the reasons why was about his Raid group that he played for years broke down with drama etc. and fell apart and soured the game for him.
3. ^Another reason in that same video from 2nd point is he didn't want to do the youtube grind anymore or do repeated type of videos for the game.
So it makes me believe the reason on the video is similar to what Xeno pointed out on why the video feels bitter. Specifically:
– To storm in n ride the wave of the "downfall of FF14" videos after taking 2 year break.
– Having his raid group crumble and die and made him not want to play the game anymore. (Something negative happened in game)
– They were realizing that their content will become repeated and they hate doing that for Youtube so they ditched it for a long time. (Negative happen to their content)
I'm actually happy that they have a fixed schedules for contents to drop since there are a lot of others games out there that keep releasing contents non-stop to the point that doing the contents starting to feel like it is a tedious thing to do. XIV allows me to do things at my own pace without feeling rushed to finish certain things. I was a casual since late ARR and I've only tried savage raiding like late Eden Verse tier and overall I'm actually having fun with game mechanics excluding connection issues to the server because that's likely a problem on my end.
Also!! if they are complaining about no counter mechanics in this game, isn't that the point of stun and also interrupt? (Correct me if I'm wrong) Sure, not all content has it but I'm pretty sure in dsr, there's a mechanic that can be interrupt but then again I haven't clear a single ultimate raid so I can't say much about it so I'll leave it at that.
(also sorry English is not my first language)
thank you for always making these kind of contents, I really like watching them 😀
have a nice day!
Man. I learned a lot from Lynx old videos. But this video of his was awful. "Stand there and let it resolve" is the same energy as ppl saying sports are just "hit the ball" "shoot the ball" etc.
I think another thing a lot of people forget about the content is that Yoshida was also fully tied to the development of FFXVI as well, so I’m sure there was some level of cutback for content because of that split attention.
"Stand and let thing Resolve" is one of the dumbest things that guy said. Oversimplifying anything is really stupid lol
I've played MMOs since this kid was a 1 year old, and whenever i hear someone say "maintaining the difficulty" That is utter complete rubbish. 99% of the time.
Classic WoW was supposed to be difficult, then when people went back to play it they realized its super easy. Because people actually get better at games the more they play.
Whenever i hear someone thinking they're criticizing a game based on its difficulty, they haven't seen modern WoW to Classic WoW. the game alienates players. Its BAD and WRONG advice.
This kid fails to factor in nostalgia and peoples ability to improve. FF14 has very simple mechanics, there is a ceiling to what you can do with simple mechanics. You cant add in "randomness" but this will just alienate players and dying to BS mechanics isn't fun.
Felt weird to me that Xeno is tired of hearing about the game dying each expansion at the very start. He kinda started it on accident this time around.
I started FFXIV when 5.3 just came out. Following creators a tad more after 6.0 dropped and stopping around when all the "funny" ones slowed down uploading (Quazii, Larryzaur, etc.). Seen a bit of Zepla and Xeno here and there but I'm not watching a whole lot since mid-2023.
So, to me, when people started shitting about the game dying is when Youtube started recommending videos about that. And the first and longest lasting ones where Xeno's talking about how empty Endwalker was and Zepla's reacting to Xeno and kinda approving.
They didn't say the game was shit. But they rightfully complained about an issue that mainly concernes the most dedicated playerbase and it had clearly negative undertones.
From the perspective of a simpleton like me, who would allegedly only look at the top of reddit or youtube and never digs down or constructs their own opinion, which is the majority of a midly invested audience, they rung the bell about FFXIV's dawnfall (even tho they didn't, but the jump cross the line can be made way too easily). And we all know that when the biggest creators are talking about something, the great thing for one's channel in the algorhythm is to follow suite and overreact.
Hence, why I was a bit surprise by what seemed like a Xeno pretty oblivious to his own influence on the matter he critisized.
Will edit this if he adresses it during the video.
EDIT: Didn't adress it. But I'm editing anyway because I think I have examples of what the guy asked for at the end of the video.
I'm not a raider so of course don't hesitate to correct me with arguments and all. But when I see a mechanic in FFXIV, I see my character as a dot and the arena as a 2D plane. As long as my dot is placed in the right spot (for some mechanics) or is drawing the right line (for the others), I survive. If I learned my rotation, then finding the safespot is the only task I have in mind at first. And when safe-spot is found, all I have to do is adapt rotation to clear the DPS check. And every new mechanic technically asks "only" for that.
But FFXIV has done other things that can't be resolved like that. Cerberus, in WoD, asks of you to interact with something (chains). Cerberus and A4 played with side-arenas (belly for cerberus, which asked to move the dot for some interactions to be able to access). The Fuath boss in Il Mheg asks you to move your dot quickly and precisely for the whole bridge mechanic. Alexander had vehicules (I'll comment that at the end^^). And I'd even call upon the second boss of Halatali, which could've used the height of the sides of the arena with more pizzazz if not for the fences.
As Xeno rightly pointed out, the mechanics are what's become the core of raiding right now. And I would arguee that such complexity could be improved with concepts of height management, interactions with things, with some randomised logic added to it (à la randomized color buff from Wanderer's Palace (Hard) second boss) or even some actually fun vehicules.
One might remind that vehicules in Alexander were hated. Well the game has changed since then. As Xeno himself pointed out : raiders are better, and mechanics have gained in importance. Who's to say a harcorde complex change of gameplay is still off-limits now?
On the same note, some would evoke Twintania cheese to advocate against heights. Well, I'd say the devs have become way better in encounter design by now. Instead of giving us a cheese, they could ask of us that we drag adds below or above certain points in the arena or other reasons which could be interesting as well. Except if the game still is unable to view our characters in something other than a 2D plane. Then it's a sad but inarguable technical limitation.
Back in WoW days, people used to say every time a new MMO was coming out "this is going to be the "WoW Killer". But it never happened. What did happen, Blizzard listened to bad player feedback from nostalgic people who are no longer in their teens anymore about how life used to be much better back then and now WoW just alienates new players. I see the same thing here, right now. However Xenosys, you get it, we can't always have things the way we want them, because it isn't good for the game as a whole.
As a FFVIX gamer from the other side of the house, my best moments were while doing fashion, FC photos, and decoration errors/ingenuity. FFXIV is great but can do MORE. Some days I enjoy the easy content when I am brain dead from school. BUT I WANT a HARD version of the dungeon, like in ARR there were Easy and Hard modes that added more context to the dungeon. The game felt more alive and difficult and I had a blast ACTUALLY trying as a healer to keep my team alive. Also, we need 200-400 more housing spaces in Larges inside and 40 more outside. AND more season clothing and decoration. Why we being so stingy? Why cant we wear more NPC clothing?
"Stand and let mechanic resolve" and "Find the safe spot" is an extreme simplification of the game. It's the same kind of simplification as saying first person shooters is simply point and click, and that runescape is nothing more than point and click. Yes, the vast majority of combat mechanics in their most fundamental form is find the safe spot and stand in the safe spot. Regardless if the unsafe spot is a donut, a circle, a rectangle or square, a triangle, or any other shape.
This is so fundamental every single mmorpg has it. WoW called it don't stand in shit.
Now maybe there is an argument with less unique mechanics in future raids, I'm not entirely sure if that was case. It's still a much better argument than "mmorpgs are boring because it's just find the safe spot". I didn't pay much attention to that detail. I do recall AAR, heavensward, and stormblood alliance raids having quite a few different unique mechanics. I've only done shadowbringer alliance raids once so far, I don't remember enough details to comment on those ones.
Statements like this makes me think there's an inability or extreme hindrance on the guy's ability to enjoy the game. Possibly due to burnout.