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I am glad I read some sense on some comments here, at least the gloom has not spread to everyone…
Some bullet points I believe to be true:
– Game does have long content draughts, at least from Endwalker.
– People should not force their time on the game if the content is not interesing for them. Stop playing until content you care for comes back (don't be anchored to the housing system, get an appartament).
– I also wished more content I liked made me want to play the game everyday, but for now it's not like that. If Square thinks us not keeping our sub up all months is still good enough money for them, nothing will change. If they think they should be making more money, content schedules will change. Simple.
– CONTENT CREATORS are not just STREAMERS of the game. They create content from it. I only remember Asmongold's glamour competition when he played. You could do weekly events to keep yourself and people interested/hyped up in the game.
Or you could just stop playing if you don't wanna do that and just wanna stream yourself. But I don't believe exagerating the flaws of the game or the development cycles is doing anyone any good.
long patch cycles came into being imho bc them wanting to focus on quality instead of quantity (ah yes SE the "small indie game company") at the end of Stormblood effective from Shadowbringers (worked well for ShB but started showing signs by EW)
… which resulted along with the "world-wide situation out of hand in 2020+" and then being longer justified
bc of the DT graphical overhaul (to some degree … [I was surprised past expansion gear was NOT updated and is on their ~"gradual"~ rollout] ).
– Apart from community made content one of the last things to make people sub every other month is the house demolition timer of 45 days.
-~-what people probs at least want is good story (ShB/EW) and then amount of combat content (aside from raids of course) of SB/ShB
<<but with better long-term pacing of content releasing>> {patches like 7.X3 ; 7.X5; 7.X8 idk <.< }
including but not limited to :
– side story arc 3 trials (Byakko; Suzaku; Seiryu);
– Eureka/Bozja/Delubrum
-deep dungeons (palace of the dead; heaven on high; eureka orthos)
– unreal trials
(-variant dungeons?)
~side note: weird length for long patch cycle is seasonal events still having the run-time of SB/ShB but having so little content
… while the pre-patch moogle-tome grind events got longer run-time since EW.
There is NOTHING meaningful to do in either game! FFXIV is my Main MMORPG & WoW is the game I go to every now & then! I am playing the games from extensively long list of games I need to catch up on!
FF14 will keep suffering for as long as Enix keeps taking the funds it generates and pissing them away on other projects that underperform
Dawntrail killed the FF14 hype train.
Also naming all the new characters, creatures, and locations these names that just sound like gibberish and just variations of the same word, I couldn’t really connect to where I was and who we are talking about. I kept losing track of the story and what people were referencing cuz it’s all Zoojaja wachachkilapu, baloojaja, just kind of left sitting there at the end of MSQ like, well that cyberpunk city is cool and so where do I go now? Well maybe they will push the “eureka style” content sooner rather than later, surely….. right?
Been playing since 5.5. I still find things to do in the game, but it is shrinking. But as someone who does not want to be no lifer on this game anymore I have enjoyed being able to break off for other stuff. I was playing catch up for most of Endwalker as far as achievments go. It no longer feels that way. There are a lot of things outside of FFXIV that I enjoy and I am glad to finally have time for it. A raid tier that's not so obnoxiously difficult (not for me personally, but for the brain damaged out there, apparently so) that it takes a whole week just for a single raid's reclear (please never another p10s. I can't do bonds 3 memes anymore.) Dungeons being the pushover that they always are unless you play dark knight and have the kind of luck I have in solo queue for healers.
I think the boredom stems from no-lifing the game for too long. I have gotten a lot of stuff done outside the game that I've wanted or needed to do thanks to the significantly reduction of obnoxiousness, and hope it continues in that direction. Why? Because progressing your character in an MMO should not feel like a 2nd job, and that's what it felt like during the Abyssos and Anabaseios raid tiers. So, overall, Dawntrail has actually been a breath of fresh air, just not entirely for FFXIV.
This has been an ongoing issue for a LONG time with this game. Yoshi P tends to over promise, and under deliver. Dawntrail has many grave sins, first not living up to expectations with a poorly written story, but second delivering zero midcore content on launch for casual players to do. Obviously everyone is going to quit, why would you stick around to do more of the same? Most of the other problems FFXIV is facing is not unique to Dawntrail. The good will Yoshi P has is starting to dry up.
you know this might be a hot take and hell it might not even save what's going on but i always felt that this game needed content/objectives for older zones that still give you meaningful rewards like current tomes ect, for example bojza is pretty dead now but what if there was weekly or daily content there let's say for doing the raid or a set amount of fates that gives you a reward at the end like current tomes or maybe even something more exciting, something akin to mogpendium maybe but for actual current gear….of course this would not do much for people who are already raiders but i think it would give life to old zones while still allowing people to get good gear.
Im sad I deleted it from my pc, there is absolutely nothing to do 😢, step it up yoshi P
My plan is to sub for a month once every year. Might struggle with iLVL requirements for the patch contents but otherwise I doubt I'm missing much
It's ok, you can say you didn't like it. You can say the game has problems. No one can hurt you.
DT doesn't have a content problem, it has a release schedule issue. Imagine if they had tribals, unreal, and 24 man savage a month after savage and in 7.1 they added the next tribe and added another map. The hc and twitch audience will be happy with the ultimate, mid core would still be on 24 man savage if the rewards are great and would have the new extreme. They are releasing more content in DT than any other expansion, but it is so back loaded.
Tbf wow has also become extremely formulaic. Its just dishing it out at a much faster rate.
I love how she's still AFK-ing in Sharlayan instead of swapping to Tuliyolal.
As much as I love Tuli, the music can get old when you listen to it for too long. It demands a bit too much attention to be enjoyed, and can't really fade into background ambience like other BGMs.
Sharlayan is still my favorite city in the game. The music especially gives off a mysterious yet comforting vibe that I'll happily sing along to idly.
I hate Solution 9 like you wouldn't believe. Not so much the music or visuals, solid 5/10 there. More just what happens involving the people who live there in the story, and how there's no real sign of resolution in 7.0
Even Eulmore had their moment of "With Vauthry gone, we'll begin down the path to making our city more compassionate, and equitable." Which made me feel fine to call Eulmore a decent city to stay in. They expanded further on these intentions in the patch content to the point where we got to see Chai-Nuzz really put in the work.
Meanwhile, the denizens of Solution 9 willingly wear a regulator which automatically makes them forget about everyone who dies around them, which is morbid enough. It also contains stolen souls to cheat death with. It's just disturbing. I only hope that these issues are resolved in the main story. I'd rather these serious issues not be confined to just the raid series.
I started playing ZZZ and have essentially completely dropped FF14 for now. What I've learnt from Hoyoverse games is that given a people a reason to login everyday, even if for 5 to 20 minutes is not some type of crime.
FF14's greatest enemy is Square Enix itself. I mean, remember when in 2022/2023 the CEO invested 500 million dollars into NFTs? And that's just an example I can remember off the top of my head.
The game unironically IS financing stupid business decisions. Because I guarantee you most of the money is NOT being put back into FF14 itself.
The fact that the content schedule and the rate at which they provide long-requested changes hasn't sped up or improved is a slap in the face too.
I am all for improving the game's systems, updating old content to be more in line with the later game, making it more accesible etc. I will defend post-MSQ Endwalker until the day I die because it was easily one of the BEST expansions ever for the game's overall health.
But I think the reason people are mad is because Dawntrail is basically Stormblood all over again. Just without the mercy of having actually interesting characters & conflicts to motivate you until you get into the damn Raid series in post-MSQ. Dawntrail is legitimately the first time since ARR where you were tempted to straight up skip dialogue cause you're tired of reading a novel instead of playing the damn game
Damn, Zep is still AFKing in Sharlayn instead of the new hub cities. This is pretty telling
Single-player game: Story > gameplay.
MMO: gameplay > story.
You can only get the impact of the story once. An MMO is meant to be repeated and you'll engage a lot with the gameplay.
i'm dealing with irl i'm in a living crisis having little time ffxiv due to barely activity is a good thing has been helping me. this reminds me during warlords of draenor day lack of patches. i am about to get a decent job and on my way getting housing. i do like the story of dawn trail i am doing msq on my eu alt and lala alt my character atm my main is just sitting there since i can't dj anymore. i just hope yoshi p see this and wake up. i've been in wow since legion. seen little familiar content drought.
it was just so lacking in content for me I didn't mind the story it was decent enough but I am so bored.
And then we received the 7.1 patch content cycle schedule this morning and all of this guy's whining is just more whining. Zzzzz you can't put everything out in the first patch of the expansion. Higher content volume and diversity is coming this expac and it has barely started.
Even the 7.1 trailer today, I felt nothing. This is sad, DT did serious damage to the game I loved.
You know you are in bad shape as a game when Guild wars 2 has more content x.x
I love dawntrail because minecraft is pretty good
More creators stepping out. More going to come in.
My issue is high fantasy going into scifi feels.
I'm no streamer and don't know the extent of the content creation proccess, but if you're focusing on one title you're limiting your potential for successful returns from your streams. It's the same issue but flipside for us leisure players. "Why isn't the game engaging me all the time??" "It isn't fun like it used to". This next comment is more for the newer player than we veteran players. While some games carry more weight towards action and graphics and the like, Square Enix has ever liked to focus on story more than anything else. To prove my point you only need to look at the Trust system SE has added to allow players completion of the majority of the normal content without interaction with other players. This being said, the game is like a JRPG with MMO qualities if you should wish to use them. Next, I would like to address this story direction SE likes to use. Whether team size is an issue, I couldn't say. However, the utility of writing a story requires planning. If the latest expansion was released rushedly everyone would complain how poorly the plot unfolded. I describe the art of storytelling as "peaks and valleys". Again for you newer players, SE just resolved a 10 year old story arc in the Endwalker expansion. What players easily expect with each expansion is the next big dopamine rush. Whether it's in a character, a story beat or theme, we tend tend to get excited. And we were given all these. But it still wasn't enough. We're in new territory with this new story. Where it'll go, we'll have to wait and watch. It has a lot of potential for many things. We're in a valley right now in this story. I feel the next exciting peak is yet to come.
As someone who only played Dawntrail for fun and not for any kind of job or content creation… I had an absolute blast start to finish. After the masterpiece of Endwalker, I needed an emotional break, and I adored the relaxing vacation and my WoL being the gentle mentor to Wuk Lamat. It was so touching and fun, and when things got SERIOUS I loved how my WoL took off the gloves and showed everyone what fighting a real Master Adventurer is like!! "Bitch you don't have just me to worry about, my friends are DRAGONS!". I loved it!
The struggles of being a content creator are outside of my experience, but I do empathize with your struggles none the less. Your feelings and concerns are valid and important!
As someone who, before FFXIV, played WoW through Cata's rough run, the content drought that was WoD, and is now starting to come back after the double disaster thar was both BFA and SL, it's normal for an MMO, especially a massively popular MMO to have low points. It's simply not possible to pump out 100% bangers every single expansion. MMOs are by nature experimental because they are live games that survive years or even decades through twists and turns as audiences and expectations change over the years. Sometimes experiments fail, but that's kind of the how its goes for MMOs. FFXIV will come out the other side. I have faith in the leadership and creatives behind it. If WoW is still around after the shitstorm it just went through, FFXIV can get over this too.
Regrettably, as a today’s live letter it’s clear things are not getting better anytime soon.
This is what happens when you fail to allocate funding properly.
Instead of spending the money needed to keep FFXIV (one of their cash cows) successful, evolving, expanding and interesting, they threw it toward other projects that ended up failing.
After such huge losses as they've seen from those failed projects, I doubt that they have the money to do what is needed to keep people interested in FFXIV in the long run.
It's the same boring formulae and instead of the game becoming bigger with every expansion, they've kept it much the same, thinking that it was enough to do the bare minimum and its not enough to keep people interested and seeing as the story won't be bringing people back this time, I think it's time for them to be a little worried.
They've gotten lazy and taken their customers for granted and it shows.
Honestly I don't think anything will change with the current team working on FF14. They have gotten themselves to a point where they are comfortable with what they are doing and aren't doing anything to change the formula or innovate. You look at what WoW has done in DF and TWW and see them completely revamping the talent system for every job and adding in hero talents as something they haven't tried before. We have had the same exact combat for the past 3 expansions with little changes to rotations and little ingenuity as you get a couple active skills which are just new animations on old skills plus one or two new buttons and a couple passives which are mostly invisible to you. The open world has no use to anyone outside of watching netflix and gathering and doing your fates for every zone to unlock whatever few rewards you want for doing that. Hunt trains are about the only reason to venture outside of a city after that and even then it is teleport to boss and repeat until complete then go sit in town again. Until SE realizes that they have no creativity with the game anymore and spends the money to completely revitalize all of it I just think it will be on a slow decline until they put it in maintenance mode like FF11 is in.
Our patch cycles have gotten one and a half months longer for "quality and polish" and the devs supposedly have a higher budget then ever, but…that really hasn't been showing.
If the content had to suffer as badly as it did for the marginal improvements the graphics update brought, I'd rather they have just not implemented it at all.
critiscm is so important n i feel like the ff14 community shuts it down but when you love something you want it to be better
1.35 days until ur house gets demolished or fc gets taken over there needs to be a time limit i understand but 35 days is just subbing every month and people defend it that way ur forced to come back to the game
2.people defend 15 dollars a month in sub as supporting the devs or not expensive when there is an active cash shop other services and expansions you buy ppl make it out that SE is poor getting pressured to play a 15 dollar a month game every month is about 180 dollars a year some ppl cant just sub when they want because they have very important things in game that forces them to i dont think this fixes the housing market at all tbh.
Just spitballing, but I think in addition to all the structural issues that FFXIV has from its development cycle and content, but also the game is in a creative lull in a sense. The hydealyn and Zodiark arc was this hugely explosive story, and we're kind of back to the section that is ARR. The boring foundational setup. We're watching concrete dry basically. Meanwhile at the time of DT, there's an explosion of shiny new games to distract us from watching this foundation get built. Action people got things like Armored Core, Elden Ring DLC, Helldivers for coop with their friends, and now Monster Hunter! Crafters and gatherers have resource management games like Satisfactory and Factorio Space Age to literally fill their careers with things to do. New RPGs that have come out. Dragon Age Veilguard, Metaphor is popping off, or even casual like the new Zelda game. I know for sure at least in terms of NEW HYPE, Satisfactory, and Factorio are likely not to have anything. The RPGs generally have a lower hype on their DLCs than their initial releases, and unless the action games do yearly releases (which would rapidly bring about genre fatigue), they'll also take a break next year. However, just THIS YEAR (and Q1 2025), they're going to have a hard time with all the new stuff that's come out this quarter and Christmas. Unfortunately, because the expansion has come out at such a dense year, in 2 years when they release the next expansion, it's kind of up in the air if new material and hype will compete for attention with FFXIV (My bets are on that it won't be so competitive, but that's assuming all these latest games kind of settle down with their respective player bases).
cool
And all of our genuine critiques as to why Dawntrail has greatly impacted the game is silenced by people just calling us bigots. Then those people give 2x positive feedback instead because they feel in competition to us; resulting in no constructive feedback at all actually reaching the devs. Dont you love that.
tbh i think you're all thinking too damn hard about it. 14 is a perfectly fine mmo. go play some others and deal with their grind and monetization schemes and get back to me on how that feels in a few months
I think FF16 had a big impact on Danwtrail’s development, as YoshiP split his time between the two projects and was simply not around for sufficient DT quality control.
The writing in DT is objectively of a lower quality than most of the previous expansions. With a few moments (Krile/Erenville’s backstory) that feel like they were written with care and attention to detail, and actually tie into some previously established FF14 lore (lalafells’ disappearance from the Southern Seas). The rest of the story feels like it was AI generated, with a suffocating hyperfocus on one character in particular (meow), which no other 14 expansion has done.
The DT battle content is solid, if a little repetitive. So it’s clear that the expansion suffered more from B-team writing which makes me wonder if senior writers were pulled off the 14 team to work on 16? Regardless, more varied dungeon content and pacing is definately something SE can improve upon for 14 in the future.
I think most people would agree that Endwalker would have been a good ending for FF14, and I would have actually been prepared to wait for a new FF MMO — effectively a next-gen version of FF14. It’s clear to see that SE used the graphical update to “future-proof” 14 for the next 10 years, but the game needs more than up res visuals to keep it healthy. It needs reinvested budget (a lot of which is generated from 14 itself), a dedicated writing team and serious director oversight to ensure all forthcoming expansions and updates meet an agreed-upon quality standard.
A word to streamers: you choose to play only one game, don’t blame SE for your lack of content diversification.
Oof imagine playing a game as a job "content creator", you guys have it so hard milking views and money. FFXIV has tons of stuff to do, just nothing that your able to make money off of. Sad days ahead indeed.
I’m still sad to see good content creators and people like yourselves and so many other putting the sole blame of lack of exciting content on SE. Having one source of news or being a specific content news outlet has never lasted over the years. You have put your eggs in one basket and expect the chicken(SE) to keep providing for you. Yes the game lacks in so many ways and performs well in others. But it was never created to be exciting all the time, nothing can provide that kind of excitement on the long term and it was just a matter of time for the golden egg to become rotten.
I’m no expert in your field but I also acknowledge that there is not one business model that didn’t had to evolve over time to stay successful. If you are making streaming your profession, you should see at least that.
I wish you all the best, I truly do and hope you open your eyes that the demography of gamers, the type of games and all the multiple games out there are evolving and if you decide to stick with one game are a subset, be ready to weather the down times.
Good luck
My problem with ff14 is this currently, and it is kind of a nuanced issue so please bear with me for a moment.
They say that this game is intended to be played in such a way tha you do not have to stay subbed and devote all your time just to it. Thats fantastic. And i think a lot of what this video is talking about is the struggle of making a streaming career out of a game that is intended to be played only once in a while.
HOWEVER. If you you arent doing content literally the week it is released then you dont really get to have the intended experience it was designed for, because even if the level is synced, the gear is not. I cant unsub from ff14 for two years and then come back and play through every thing i missed and truly enjoy it because what i will experience outside of the story (which i genuinely love, even dawntrail) will be neutered. I must stay subbed so when the new raid drops i get to experience the fight as intended. If im even two weeks late, then the bosses will be so optimized by players and their damage will be so outmatched by the gear that entire mechs will be skipped. That sucks. Im a parent and have a full time job. I need to have content that is still engaging outside of just savage because i just will not always have time for savage raiding. Even then savage fights have the same issue.
So while I would love to take a break from this game, i cant if i want the truly intended experience that you can only get from doing it on release.
Why do they let gear affect their fights like this? It is already possible to sync your gear to minilvl. Why is that not just the default? Crystal tower would be so much more fun to get in roulettes if every boss didnt melt in a matter of seconds because the level is synced to 50 but the gear is still 100.
SPHEEEEEN LISTEN TO MEEEE!!!
Gods i hope ex3 doesn't have any cats in it…
Yes, play other games. It there nothing else you guys can do as content creators? Why keep on and on about ffxiv and it not providing you what you need in your streaming career. If that is the case you probably need to be creative and find something new and just move forward.
If you would have told me during Shadowbringers or even early Endwalker that I would cancel my FFXIV sub to go play WOW again after having quit years ago I would have laughed at you, yet here we are…
I just think FF14 players that didnt came from WoW are freaking out because DT was the first flop FF14 had, WoW players are quite used to xpacs flopping, no big deal, we wait for the next to come back
But as content creation, I dont think SE, or ANY mmo dev gives a single damn about it, CCs are not the target audience, nor it should be, game is finite, so running out of things to do after a decade of playing its not only normal, but completly expected at this point
About DT itself, I didnt like it, droppped and unsub as soon as I finished MSQ, I'll come back in the last patch to catchup and thats it until next xpac
About MMOs in general, feeling like a chore is the endgame of every mmo under the sun, its a full time job for those who want to be on the very top, but yes, FF14 has a content draught problem, it launches with way less than it should.
Bottomline is, not CCs, move to another games and see that life exists outside The Source, who knows, maybe you are hearing the voice of Azeroth once again?
Oh please cry me a river, FFXIV has alot of problems in design and philosophy ,but the idea that FFXIV should provide every single unique player 1000s of hours specific content that they enjoy every patch is a ridicolous request. Whats so wrong in playing and trying other games, it blows my mind that someone says that content drought is that you CANT play 10 hours a day for 4 months and every single second of it HAS to be incredibly engaging and fresh just for YOU. And whats so wrong about content being Formulalic. Makes me sick that peopel say that "we know we are getting 2 extremes and 1 8-man raid at launch so its automatically boring", whats the solution here they start throwing curve balls, Ultimate at launch and all 3 8-man raid tiers in 7.4 or maybe in 7.38.
Maybe 7.1 gets 1 extreme or 6 extremes, who knows, Maybe they decide no extremes at all for Dawntrail becuz thats exciting? Each expansion might get 4 zones or 10 zones, maybe Dawntrail should launched with 2 zones that are slightly bigger, thats exciting right and each quest should have "kill 10 mobs" and each zones should get mandatory FATE rank 4 grind with 50 hour/ or daily Rep grind requirment to continue story. So it would feel engaging. So unless you start working on content day 1, you wont make it out of 7.0 before 7.1.
Dawntrails Disney-esque MSW sucked, it was "meh" probably to capture younger audience, I played through it, took me like 3-4 days. Its fine, you still have rest of the expansion to enjoy unless you are done with 7.0 then move on. But I hate that this damn community is that it rates expansions based on MSQ alone when its literally the smallest piece of content in the GAME. Its basically just to unlock stuff with lore glued on it.
There are so many other great games to enjoy. "Absence makes heart grow fonder" or whatever the saying is. Go play other MMO new expansion launches GW2:Janthir Wilds, ESO: Golden Road or WoW: War Within, all were good launches with ton of content, each of those are like at least 100 hours of fu. And for the love of content, FFXIV will truly die if they start catering the game around Streamers/ content creators, look what happened with WoW. And War withing again is slowly turning into grindfest that requires you to commit as if you had fulltime job.
As a Legacy player who has been playing on and off for over 10 years, I can see things both ways. However, I think the majority of the people who play do not experience the same issues with the game that streamers who make a living off playing experience. Capitalism dictates that you must play the content that will appeal to the most amount of people, otherwise it's not worth your time. However, that content may only appeal to like 30% of the player base. There's still a large wealth of content out there that may have 10% or 5% or 15% appeal. For example, the Blue Mage Academy has one of the biggest discords in FFXIV. Blue Mage Content isn't that popular, but for maybe 5% of the player base, the content is invaluable. There's also a streamer who goes out there attempting to get every achievement. Watching him has encouraged me to start a little hunt of my own. Now I am actively hunting for cards, even though I had never done that before. I find myself watching YouTube videos on tournaments and card rules.
I think Square Enix has a difficult job to do. It has to create content for those who have the time to dedicate to gameplay as if it were a paid job, but it also has to create content for those of us who only have a few hours a week to play… and it has to do it on a paid subscription model. Perhaps they can do better to strike a balance.
FFXIV is a game for people to play, not a platform for streamers to make money. Thus streamers and content creators starts to make negative click bait content which is sad to see.
Gaming content creators should realize first and foremost that they are gamers first and content creators second. If they feel like they are not happy with a game anymore then they should just be clear and transparent with their viewers if they still want to continue or move on to another game. Maybe forget all about it for now and I'm pretty sure they will miss the game at some point. I've been doing the same to ff14 and other games and I've never been in a healthier relationship.