The developers of Final Fantasy XIV need to make a change. Let’s talk about why the raids shouldn’t be optional content anymore. Maybe they will make this change for 7.0 and new expansion?
FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER: @Stout_Helm
JOIN MY DISCORD: https://discord.gg/AqRPzRPWWX
Got a suggestion for the next video? Leave it in the comments!
#ffxiv #finalfantasyxiv #ff14
source
God no. We already have enough bads in the queue. Forcing people to do things that they don't want to do will just put more bads in the queue.
In advance of Endwalker, we were specifically told that the Omega raids would offer some lore, but the devs left it to individual decision to go learn it.
Keep it optional! Those who are lore whores will do the content. Those who don't care won't.
Nice vid I heavily agree. We got 1 of the best characters in the game from the crystal tower, imagine if someone else was the exarch, how much less great his character and reveal would be
make them mandatory to save roulettes. there's no way a 95% chance of crystal tower is a good experience for players
Honestly the Eden raid are looking like they might need to be required soon too, and the role quests tbh (though I understand not making that a requirement, it is WILD how much important stuff is behind them)
As a solo player I cannot recomend making in madatory. The reason is using duty finder for Omga was hell for me. Each one took at minium an hour to get people to play sometimes longer. I feel they need to do a better job letting people know about the raids instead. I didn't know about The Void Ark saga until I watched a YouTube video. If a person is a lore nut like me they will do them as long as they are aware of them.
One thing to note is that the post-EW 6.0 trials have all been tied into the MSQ. Previously, with the Warring Triad, the auspicious beasts, and the Weapon trials were all side content. Now, I feel like the devs are trying to nudge players into the 8-man content more firmly than before. I do wonder if the devs will find a way to add the raids into the MSQ for 7.0 now that they've added the post-MSQ trials back into the storyline.
TBH I would be ok with another crystal tower situation. Even if I dislike the alliance raid called ''Who cares of the realm''. Let's be honest the heavenward trial will be probably mandatory for next expansion.
I'm beginning to wonder, from just how MSQ lore-relevant Eden and Pandaemonium are (and their stated concerns on accessibility for everyone), if SE isn't going to go with a majority-accessible path going forward by writing the MSQ and dialogue assuming that you have played optional content (even if you haven't), because of how much time it would take to keep track of every permutation of completed content. SWTOR had so much early optional content that by the time of Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne, they gave up and just treated the dialogue and options as if you had done everything including the optional stuff ( depending on who was coding that dialogue tree, they might have given you an extra dialogue option to say "I forgot, refresh my memory?"). ESO just outright lampshades that stuff ("Oh, yeah, you chose to sacrifice me, but I got better! No hard feelings!" No, seriously, that is almost literally what an early major character says upon a reintroduction two expansions later where they are a central NPC).
Respectfully disagree dont make me do content i dont want nor have interest in.imo its the fastest way to turn some people away i can agree alot of story related stuff is hidden behind optional content and alot of it is good but i think the msq does a decent job of keeping me engaged and gives me a good idea on what's going on. The only alliance raid i really payed attention to where the neir raids and thats not even close to being related to the story i just found it interesting. If i have interest in past content/story there are recourses to do so and it doesn't help the fact that alot of content isnt VA granted i understand why but its also a big turn away for me since im dyslexic. i also think the leveling process in itself is REALLY bad and to add something else that's mandatory will only worsen the experience imo. Instead i think they should make this content more accessible or rather easier to identify since alot of the quest that arent msq are kinda jumbled together and hard to find sometimes and i believe they should also make older content relevant give people MORE of a reason to do them rather than just lore to also help que times for the people that actually want to do them kinda like how unlocking ultimate's work you basically have to do older savage raid floors to unlock it. As a raider id love to see some sort of different raid tier that involves doing old raids as if they came out day one and making the rewards relevant like a raid tier revamp when current savage is mostly done since i would LOVE to do both sigmascape, early Eden and the alexander series. I love that this game gives me the freedom to do what i want when i want and id like to keep it that way.
I'm going to be honest final fantasy 14 is my favorite game but I hate the raids and I would have never beat the game if they forced me to do the raids. I just find the raids to feel super padded and the encounters are just over complicated instead of making them truly difficult. They need to find away to give you the story from these raids without forcing people to play them in my opinion. The vast majority of players are not raiding, and forcing people to do stuff they don't want to will never make sense and will only hurt the game and it's player counts.
No this would be a bad change. I think at most they should change Coils of Bahamut by making the current normal "Hard" mode right underneath Savage while making a normal mode version to slot into the roulettes. While I see where you are coming from it is a place of knowing the quality of the story telling in XIV. Unless they fully remade ARR and got the new English cast to redub it and added voice acting to all of those raids to make it so there are not gaps in quality I am not for this. Also the already bad gameplay to cutscene ratio would increase with it as they also have to deal with the MSQ patches which do not provide new locations to take in.
Forcing people to play content they may not want to play is never the way. Options are always good and they always have the option to play if they want and not play if they don't care about that content. Choice is always better than force.
I agree, especially with Coils still not being tied into the Story WHILE being tied directly into the Story. It blows my mind, especially when I saw they made Crystal Tower mandatory, that was the perfect time to implement Coils imho.
Edit: I'd go as far as to say the Alliance Raids should be implemented into the MSQ as well(besides Nier for Obvious Reasons. I love Nier/Drakengard, but it has no ties to XIV's story/world. It was just fanservice that I thoroughly enjoyed). Or maybe do something with a "flashy" notification via Two Cards pop up over the Screen showing 2 Paths: Continue the Original Path, or Alliance Story Path, when the player hits those patches where those Alliance Raids & Normal Raids were implemented. Gives the illusion of Choice and of "branching pathways" imo and that illusion almost always makes a game feel/play better
I am a new player and this has come to my mind multiple times. All of the old "optional" content is abandoned, even using party finder.
For someone who likes to do raiding, it kinda sucks. The only raids that you get to experience if you buy the game today, are the newer ones, after a long time of MSQ, and the gap will only become wider as new expansions come.
I don't agree with "forcing" players but I think if proper incentive is added, older players would do this; for cosmetics, weeklies, dailies, extra currency, tabs, titles, a shinier crown before their name, with a sword and a shield this time…
You can't complete daily duty roulette solo right? Then weekly wondrous tails that have raids in there as missions, should be done through a synched party too.
I think what kills me the most is knowing that whatever Raid content, non-msq trials, or beast tribes I do they will never be mentioned or made relevant later on in the story.
In a story that really tied every single bit of its characters and plot points up in the final chapters of Endwalker, it sucked that more then half of the content I did in my time playing will never be mentioned in the grand scheme of things because it was designed to be optional from the start.
1. Hell yeah, make the raids mandatory. We could use some different raids in our roulettes besides Crystal Tower.
2. Rework Coils of Bahamut so it can be part of the raid roulettes. The fact that the most plausible way to finish that story is by finding a max level player willing to unsync for you is infuriating.
Man, I understand the sentiment, a lot, and I personally wouldn't mind that change too much, but this is a terrible idea when put into the perspective of the development team.
Remember when they made CT required content because it was just too important to the story? Yes, obviously you do, you mentioned it. Do you remember the community's reaction?
OVERWHELMINGLY negative.
So overwhelmingly negative in fact, that I could have sworn the developers said something along the lines of they weren't going to do that again because of how negative the reception was.
Guess what the community's reaction will be if more raids are made mandatory, especially Coils since it's still technically ARR content, which was specifically trimmed down to avoid being as long as it used to be and is still complained about for being a slog.
Overwhelmingly negative. Perhaps even more negative than before, because again, I could have sworn the development team said they weren't going to do that again when responding to all that backlash the first time around.
I've played all the raids so far. I find them all very fun (except the Nier ones tbh, feels just a little too far removed from FF14's general vibe for my taste), and I love the lore that we get out of them. But at NO point in the MSQ did I ever think "gee, I'm so glad I did (insert raid) so I understand what's going on." The only time during the MSQ I ever saw a raid directly, explicitly referenced aside from CT and their little teaser trailers at the end of each expansion's main story, was freaking Zenos with a throwaway soliloquy line in Stormblood calling us "Bahamut's conqueror." And at that point, it would be far easier to just change the line to "Eorzea's champion" or even "The Echo" or something more appropriate for Zenos to say about us anyways.
Now, do playing the currently optional raids make the story more enjoyable?
Yes. I'd personally agree with that, and I'd encourage players to go out and play the raids when they have the chance. All the raids are fun and interesting (except maybe the Nier ones imo). My personal favorite would be the Alexander raids from HW, which, as far as I can tell, is never referenced again.
Is playing the currently optional raids a requirement to understand and enjoy the story?
No. Not even a little bit.
So, if the story can already be enjoyed and understood, there is no reason to invite the same kind of community backlash that happened with CT becoming mandatory, especially for no immediate payoff somewhere else.
With CT and patch 5.3, you as a player needed to have completed the CT raids for the ending of 5.3 to make any sense at all. That was why it was made mandatory, not just because of the lore tie-in, but because of a direct plot tie-in. All the other raids only amount to lore snippets here and there when it comes to the MSQ.
I'm sure the developers want people to play those raids, because starting at the end of EW, they we start seeing implicit references to the Omega raids and even some tiny hints back towards Eden.
Curious players will find and play those raids, likely enjoy extra knowledge about the lore surrounding the world and story, and encourage others to play them, perhaps by making entertaining lore videos about them.
Incurious players will continue along without a second thought and won't find their enjoyment of the story diminished for it.
Meanwhile if they make the raids mandatory…
Those same curious players will probably mostly still stick around. Some might leave, but that would probably be a small number.
but the incurious ones? Far more of them are going to leave, complaining about game length, or que times, or just being forced to do something they weren't being forced to do before. And the unfortunate truth of the matter is, that second group is far larger in number than the first one.
TL;DR: It's a financial hit the devs have no good reason to take, because the part of the player base that would react positively to this change are almost all already able to play these raids whenever they want, and probably aren't going to leave over it not changing. Meanwhile, there is a significant portion of the player base that likely will give up and leave if the raids are made mandatory, namely the people who didn't do them and just wanted to focus on the story. There's just not enough of a net-benefit to justify that risk.
I think this change would be ABSURDLY unpopular, and that people like us are blind to that because we're the type that are doing this stuff voluntarily anyway. To us, 'do Omega before Shadowbringers' isn't even an ask, because we did that on reflex for fun.
But the people who haven't done it? They don't want MORE barriers in front of them before getting to the content people have actually recommended to them. Crystal Tower is loathed in large part because it's mandatory now (of course, it's not exactly standing up for itself well).
WHAT!? They only made Crystal Tower mandatory in 5.3!!!???? WTF, I would have thought they'd decide that the instant they were set on what the Shadowbringers story would be about. Why did they ever release Shadowbringers WITHOUT Crystal Tower required??? That's stupid, if you ask me.
And yes, I would like to agree that all the Raids and Alliance Raids should be mandatory. Yeah, some players might not like it right away, but you only have to do it the one time and then you're done. I think a lot of players who shy away from this content might be afraid of whatever they perceive "raiding" to be, as in some kind of "hardcore" content where they will get screamed at and harassed if they don't perform well enough. But anyone who actually plays this stuff knows: it's not like that at all. I think it would be good for the game if more players could experience this content, see the cool encounters, learn more about mechanics and also get more out of the lore and story of FFXIV.
That said, the Coil of Bahamut raids are a mess. You have LONG cutscenes DURING the raids, which is a big no-no and needs to be adjusted. Also, the voiced dialogue in the cutscenes toward the end of the series is without a doubt the WORST voice acting in the entire game. It is an abomination, and it needs to be redone. Finally, the difficulty/complexity of the normal-mode content should be toned down a little. It's too demanding for random Duty Finder or roulette group to clear reasonably, as is. It's possible that could change if ALL players had to clear it and we regularly got practice with it in roulettes, but still, it doesn't match the difficulty level we see in normal-mode raids in the expansions. The devs clearly had a different kind of vision for what normal raids were about, in ARR, and it didn't pan out.
I recall, I did the crystal tower because friends told me that it had some relevance to the xpack.
I'd sy just make them all mandatory and put coils into the raid roulette, at least people would be like "oh, it¿s been YEARS since I did this!"
I've got fibromyalgia and arthritis in my fingers and hands, and I realize, of course, I'm an edge case, but I can't do things like the 8-person raids very easily — mechanics past what are in expert dungeon bosses are super difficult and, frankly, painful, for me. If it weren't for the grace of bumming 10 minutes every major patch off some good friends to bring along with me as ringers for the trial fight to make up for my vuln-stack-collecting self to the rest of the team, I'd likely still have the boss from The Dying Gasp story mode t-bagging me instead of past my ceremonial one clear of The Voidcast Dais story mode and done with 6.4's MSQ.
The fights in stuff like Eden and Omega and Pandaemonium are not trivial, and there're 12 fights each. I recognize that there's a practically unlimited amount of time to do them in, but it's still forcing a LOT of difficult content on people that may not be up for it. Again, I know I'm an edge case as a disabled player, but we're out there and if we want the story for those raids, Youtube is a thing. Just saying…
Good take
I understand your point but making them mandatory is just absolute agony. Imagine having to run through Coils after all of ARR. How much more do you want to prevent people from breaking out of the most unfun section of the game? Yeah, sure, they can probably adjust some things to make it less grindy but you already have to go through the first Alliance Raid to progress the story… which is fine in itself but not after barely making it out of ARR. Having another mandatory questline just kills the last bit of strenght people may have had after finally seeing some teasing of HW.
and please for the love of god buff the crystal tower bosses. its not really a boss when it melts within less than a minute :/
The Pandaemonium raids also referenced the Ivalice storyline too. I loved that alliance series and it gets referenced so often still, from Bozja, Zandor, and now Panda.
I beat EW last year doing relatively little side content raidwise and enjoyed it. Then, i made an alt and took my time to do a 100% completionist playthrough where i did just about every job, raid, and side quest and realized full well the scale of things i missed out on. Msq tie ins aside, seeing references to or recurring npcs in various questlines really expanded the world and made it feel alive. Although i originally disliked alliance raids and 8 man trials, by sb i was wanting more of it. They ended up being excellent ways to develope secondary charas that dont get a lot of screen time as well.
Regardless of whether you liked it or not, being forced to go through YorHa is something I would not wish on my enemies. Particularly as it contributed nothing at all to XIV's world and lore. (Before I get blasted, I do love the Nier games).
However, I reckon there's a balance that can be struck. If you did the Ivalice content, you get a bonus scene at the end of Pandaemonium which is super relevant to the games' lore. The balance can be struck when the next MSQ storyline is confirmed and has a connection to previous content. The devs clearly want new players to get through the MSQ as succinctly as possible, and I think required 8/24 player raids are a bit of an obstacle.
Pandaemonium could end up being mandatory content going forward, but the conclusion leaves it so that it doesn't leave much of a mark on the status quo if you missed it. There has to be some reward to be earned for investing in "side-content" like the extra cutscene in Aporia if you did Ivalice, or P12s second phase. I think players need incentive to chase these things rather than them being mandatory.
That's just me, though!
I remember in the lead-up to the release of Shadowbringers, the devs were heavily hinting that players should go and finish the Crystal Tower raid series. They made it mandatory in 5.3 because the way the MSQ ends would have run up against a hard paradox if you hadn’t completed CT. So far, I haven’t even seen them make hints about completing some optional content, which is unfortunate. I feel like we’ll be seeing Ryne in 6.5, and having Gaia be missing from this will feel weird.
I understand where you're coming from, and I do empathize , but the thing is that people who want the lore WILL seek them out, and they WILL do those content, hell I know of lore nerds who did DSR groups just to "see what would it have been". That's the beauty of FFXIV's model, you can if you want, but you don't have to; if you want to sink your teeth into the lore of the land, you can, and you'll more likely than not fall deeper in love with the game, but if you are purely a casual fan (think about the people who know what the Avengers are, but can barely list who the members), and more than likely don't really care, that's fine too. Are they missing out? Yeah, but again, that's up to them to engage in.
I have played for over 2 years and have done all trials (except coils) up till the start of endwalker, i have always seen the trials and alliance raids as a reward for completing the expansion and they are fun since you get to show off your glam and then get all the commends, aaww yeah
Ps. Im only 50% done with endwalker since i accidentally farmed 2: "300 frontline pvp win tittles" for myself and that takes a long time
Tomorrow and Tomorrow very good music choice
New player here, I had to buy a story skip just for crystal tower cause for 2 days no one queued up for the last raid so this is probably not a good idea.
I need to know if Themis is the son of Venat.
While not outright forcing us to do the content, it feels like they are at least pushing us to do it to unlock other new things.
Want the previous Relic weapons? Better of done Ivalice!
New Relics? Hildebrand!
Here is a while questline, Tatarus Grand Adventure. Want any lore or glams? Start unlocking them old raids and trial series or you will miss out.
So it feels like a sort of comprimise… but I agree, some things are definatly being held back. Look how much extra info about the 13th is missed out if somone hasnt done both the Warring Triad raids from Heavensward, and done all the Shadowbringers role quests.
YES! this is the way
100% agree! Raids, Alliance Raids and even Trial Series are REALLY important for the story! And Coils are straight up best part of ARR!
Yes, but I dont feel the same with the Nier ones.
I'll bite, as someone who started playing a month after EW launched. Yes, there are bits of story well worth the effort of doing the current and old raids as well as a lot of other optional content from optional trials to job quests to Bozja to tribal quests. I'd encourage anyone to do as much of that content as they like.
But there's no way it would work making all the raids mandatory for new players. It's already daunting to go through the MSQ, which took me about 6 months first time around (I liked it enough to play through it all again). Like many, I got frustrated finding I was stuck in an expansion for a half dozen patches worth of MSQ after the credits rolled. I was not happy about not being able to accept the next MSQ quest until I did Crystal Tower, just when I thought I was FINALLY nearly done with ARR. Yes, it made a huge difference in terms of enjoying Shadowbringers and it was good to make it mandatory. I wouldn't think that about the other raids.
New players just have more than enough to do already. I think the problem SE will face, if they keep producing expansions, is that at some point the game will crumble under the weight of all those expansions – that there will just be too much MSQ to reasonably expect anyone to play through it all. Who knows what expansion will break the camel's back in terms of new players not buying in to a game with who knows how many hours of story to get to current content. But I think SE will have to look at reducing mandatory content, perhaps by streamlining the old MSQ, rather than increasing mandatory content.
No, raids being optional was a major draw to 14, while I do play all the normal raids, I appreciate that it was not shoved down my throat like in WoW, let players do what they want, the raids add to the msq, but is not needed.
This is a complicated issue. Also there will be spoilers below, so be warned. Spoilers for just about all of FFXIV. I love the raids, but I also make alts and would hate to get them all full completion. I think it's also interesting when and why they make raids mandatory, because it isn't /Just/ crystal tower, it's also the four archfiends. You might say "But the archfiends are MSQ" to which I will say that's the point. Every ex pack we get 3 tiers of normal raid, 3 alliance raids, and 3 optional trials, each with their own self contained plot going on. In EW we haven't gotten a trial series, but we have gotten the same number of trials, and I think EW might be worse for it. By bundling the patch msq and the trial series together it feels like less content, and it's hard to separate out which bits would belong to what half of their content. Vrtra and Golbez are very clearly patch msq, and The hecteye talking about the archfiends are very clearly part of the trial series, but what about Zero and the dungeons? Fell court could easily be mapped to Hells Lid, or Anamnesis Anyder. You can say it doesn't matter and that content is content, but rather than getting two separate stories that each have unique themes and plots, we get one that is twice the size, and that sucks if you don't like what the current story is doing. ShB had it's grand build up of the Fandanial and the towers, and it had a sick homage to gundam and some old ff bosses. EW has Zero, and the void.
Ok, but what if they kept making these stories as they had, self contained bubbles, but just made them mandatory? Alright where do we draw the line? You say just raids, but some of the best stories are trial series, and the waring triad series is a prerequisite for the void story on the first, one that seems like it is begging to interact with msq content. What about Eureka and Bozja? Are we going to ask that for 7.0 people run island sanctuary to max, so that players aren't lost when Hyllfyr invites the WoL to a getaway on his island? The only mandatory raid we have now is crystal tower, and it wasn't made mandatory until 5.3, and I think that's telling. Shadow bringers doesn't actually change all that much if you haven't run it. The only plot hole is G'Raha not being sealed away, but you want to know what /is/ narratively affected by not running it? End walker. A big reveal early on in EW is that Fandaniel was Amaon from the crystal tower. I think that Yoshi P and crew looked at the G'Raha reveal, saw how it didn't hit for some people, and then looked at the Amon reveal, and thought "We should preempt this." Why do I think it's about Amon and not the crystal tower itself? Because the crystal tower is only one third of the important information needed to justify the shenanigan's in ShB. If they wanted to make sure everyone 'got it' they would also make Omega and Alexander mandatory. The devs know that if people want context they will do the side content, the only time it is mandatory, is if specific characters are involved, and even then, only if they are critically important to understand.
I was leveling an alt for raiding and basically went through ew having done no side content. The call back scene at the docks was hilarious, because it actually didn't change, sure a few characters were replaced by faceless npcs, and it wouldn't have hit as hard, but it works fine because the main focus was on people that were in the msq. Omega isn't required for EW even though it is super relevant. Gaia is referenced in the EW patches off hand, and Eden isn't mandatory. I think the only reason they will make a piece of MSQ mandatory is if they are staking an emotional beat on it. Otherwise they'll just assume you know where someone came from, or hand wave it.
personally with how the game is right now, I don't think making the raids mandatory is needed. The ivalice raids only really lead to bozja things and I think for that its cool. Omega and alexander raids add to endwalker and shadowbringers but not enough that I feel players should be forced to play them. Omega especially is mostly a random collection of mediocre jokes and references to other FF games. Pandemonium and myths are maybe ones I could see argued should be mandatory
i really think making them mandatory will just do more to force people to pay ridiculous amounts of money to actually get to play the newer content, and having done the entire msq now 6 times, and maybe will make another character some day, having to do almost all content in the game in order to reach the end would be horrible