Allegedly Ishikawa had enough material to last until 8.0, but unfortunately was told to "just wrap it up in 6.0" which is why everything got fucked. Absolutely unacceptable. Also didn't help that even though Ishikawa COOKED with ShB, leadership was allegedly not happy with how Hydaelyn was portrayed ("y-you made her look bad!!") which is why Venat is so poorly portrayed in EW. They literally just tried to take everything back by forcing it on you instead of rolling with it.
I feel like I've seen nothing BUT critical voices about Dawntrail on youtube. WHICH IS GOOD, but yeah. Not really seeing any toxic positivity people here.
@tristenj1992 i think the sacred cow status of ff14 died with dawntrail Folks seem more willing to accept criticisms now compared to before which is very good, probably the best thing DT gave us
Point 4: It is staggering how much better HW and SB are compared to DT. I just recently finished my NG+ runs of both and I was left in awe at how good these stories were. The "Several cutscenes will play in sequence" used to mean we were in for something earth shattering and exciting. Now it just means that we have to sit through tens of minutes of Wuk Lamat just yapping. There's no guarantee for the quality of storytelling we had previously.
The greatest sin about Endwalker will be how little the actual events had in the overall significance of the story of FFXIV. You're gonna expect me to believe that the multiverse-affecting wave of Dynamis just decided to spare Tuliyolal from its effects? Yeah. Sure. Okay.
Given their involvement in other projects and the decisions made regarding story and characters in those games, I wouldn't be surprised if Wuk Lamat turned out to be the product of Sweet Baby's influence.
Im also not a fan of meteion. I thought she was pretty lame actually and brought down the story for me. And I thought I might be alone in that cause all my friends and seemingly most people online really loved everything about endwalker. I'm glad to come across this channel! I was really hoping we'd have some more ideological sparring this expansion with scions working with different claimants. But we only got a taste of that with Koana and then just kinda brushed away. The scions felt completely useless storywise. And the one who actually had a connection, Krile, we barely got anything from her and some of it was resolved off screen. Content wise we desperately need more of these expansion features to actually launch with the expansion. It baffles me that they advertised things like beast master limited job, cosmic exploration, etc. And we aren't getting it for almost a year after release. This is my first expansion launch, and I've learned it's basically always been this way. I can't believe they haven't gotten more pushback for this content release schedule for years.
Pre video thought: one thing I haven’t seen much if any folk mention is the fact everyone comes together under Wuk Lamat when she becomes dawn servant. What happened to the sizeable support of Zoreal Ja? Did they just immediately jump ship when he lost the Rite? Also presumably they know his aims right? Doesn’t that mean there’s a sizeable chunk of Tural that want war?
Honestly even a simple "thank you" for being with the game for so long would be enough for me at this point. Thank you for being here before the game blew up in Shb or something now that the veteran rewards were scrapped because newer players would miss out (I don't blame newer players for this). Sometimes it feels like the devs only want the Shb onward joiners and actually dislike that there are players who still remember the old job design, shorter patch cycles or just the "old cozy feeling". I know it's a stupid mindset but it's something I think about sometimes.
A huge flaw I've seen is just the stagnant leveling system. It's exactly the same, year over year. When they do throw out good ideas, they're quickly abandoned. The island sanctuary is one of them. I really enjoyed it, and it's dead. What about the GC squad you get? That hasn't seen ANY real updates. No new adventurers to recruit, they're all the same ancient ones. I'd love to do quests with them, like the trust system. I'd MUCH rather run dungeons, FATEs, anything with my squad, over a bunch of NPC story people. I don't even like most of them. I quit in 7.1, shittrail was just too much to take. The worst writing I've seen outside the bargain basement on Steam (Don't go, it's scary), and bait and switch crap. Lulu had a really good idea for what Dawntrail could/should have been, and even fixed Wuk Lmao. I mean, is it really that hard? The problem we all face is simple, the Japanese mentality. They do nothing in small fashion, it's always seemingly overreacting. I hate to say it, but take a damn page or two from WoW. There's a LOT of shit to do in that game, and FF...just doens't have it anymore. It's tired, it's boring, it's formulaic to a fault. We, as customers, deserve better than this. POST NOTE: why the hell can modders fix things SE can't? Viera/Hrothgar with hats? They said YEARS ago they'd fix it...and nothing. I'm sick and tired of the broken promises, the outright lies to our faces as consumers. I"m sorry to say, but SE deserves to crash and burn after LOLTrail. I said it. Burn baby burn, then maybe you'll rise like in 2.0. Maybe.
What was even the point of the IS? The promising options like npc visits and customization, psuedo housing, etc didn’t go far enough, and the content is basically ‘done’ once you get what you want out of it. Not enough focus is being applied to content that will maintain player engagement.
The hats are a matter of principle at this point. It's been asked for so long and so persistently that I refuse to take SE seriously until they fix hats.
you covered pretty much all my greviances. I think a time skip with us being scattered would be awesome! Maybe we spend 1-2 expansions bouncing between reflections to stop the more severe bits of chaos, knowing our home is in safe hands.
We could have had a succession story that split between three valid heirs, showing how each of them has something valuable to offer. We could have learned about them, split our time, and had a cast to build on for the future. Instead, we got Wuk Lamat. Did you see that chart that measured the number of lines per character in the MSQ? Wuk Lamat is #3 after one expansion. She had more lines in Dawntrail than Alisae did all the way through Shadowbringers. Krile's #1 word is "Wuk Lamat" throughout the entire game (not just DT). They could have gone with a new story and a new cast, but they focused on one character who was cheapened by childish writing. (Poor Zoraal Ja should have been so much more. In my rewrite idea that I brainstormed, he becomes a vital hero along with his siblings.) Your idea of going to a reflection and having time pass will never be accepted. I would love to see time pass and the dynamic to change - GROW THE TWINS UP ALREADY! - but they would have to actually commit to locking people into another reflection in the MSQ. None of that crap in ShB where "time just so happens to flow the same right now" as soon as we appear. 19:41 "The Loporrits could be slowly introducing their technology to the planet, leading to new revolutions and developments." - *INTRODUCING THE NEW VIBRATING CARROT! IT DOESN'T GET SOGGY NO MATTER HOW WET YOU GET IT!*
Where you say Shadowbringera is an anomaly, I can identify exactly how: it is one of the expansions where Yoshida meddled the least. With Endwalker being excessively meddled in, to the point that Ishikawa said she had material that could have stretched between 6.x to 8.0, for the Hydaelyn and Zodiark plot. Endwalker was not the way it was because of Ishikawa, but because Yoshida meddled and mandated many of the most problematic elements of the plot. Yoshida himself is the issue.
Scholar players 100% complained a lot back then which caused them to lose buttons. Now, I ain't going to say that its on them but Square should've removed a few healing oGCDs because I personally think the original vision of it being an aggressive healer is extremely charming. But overall, Scholars got screwed over by both themselves and Square while Samurais lost their button for absolutely no reason. I have not seen a single Samurai complain about their buttons. They need to overhaul gearing as other MMOs offer a variety of gears to build your perfect little adventurer. Old World of Warcraft was so damn satisfying as there were multiple instances you could run and get different kinds of gears from different sets that would be "Best in Slot" but it allowed you to play a variety of things instead of just Arcadion & Sphene EX. They have to introduce more endgame content to give variety, it usually always just defaults to the current Savage tier we are in which doesn't really work well. Granted, Chaotic Alliance Raids is a step in the right direction but we need MORE. The idea of gearsets for specific skills sounds radical, I am down for them to experiment with that. It sounds somewhat similar to Classic WoW's Season of Discovery and that one is an absolute baller. Jobs also need an overhaul. I'll keep it real, most jobs feel the same with the exception of Pictomancer because of how unique of a caster it is compared to the rest of the cast. It feels like every other job has lost something of its own identity as the game progressed, this was happening in Stormblood & Shadowbringers but became more noticable during Endwalker. I think they are trying to give them an identity but that one is shared among the roles they fulfil in a group. They gotta retrace their steps and see what went wrong, giving back DoTs to jobs like Summoner and Scholar would be fantastic but also making some of them stand out among the rest to entice using them for content outside of levelling. I think Square is afraid of backlash hence why they aren't experimenting every expansion or major patch unlike, for example: Valve with Dota 2. They are simplifying things like jobs, rotations, etc. but in return making the content we get a bit harder. I will die on that hill and say that DT had incredible encounter design, that is the one thing they did right. It's just that things are so boring to press. I have no excitement anymore when I press my summons as Summoner, raising my shield while playing Paladin isn't thrilling either, it's just not as cool anymore. Seriously, back when I levelled Paladin as my only job and went through with it during story, I got excited when I got to level 70. Nothing made me smile as much as using Passage of Arms when I acquired it the first time. Getting to 80 had a somewhat similar, yet weaker reaction from me and I just didn't feel it anymore in Endwalker. I want that excitement back when I reach a big threshold again in levelling. Levelling doesn't feel like an adventure anymore to me, it feels like a chore. Everything this game offers me is a chore. I hope they can fix things, take feedback and suggestions from players and that the next expansion has me and many more people excited again.
It's been 6 years and Im still not over how they gutted Scholar from 4.55 to 5.0. Like jesus christ it is egregious asfk, I would have been fine with them making some minor streamlines, you can make like miasma a 1.5s cast and remove miasma 2 to make way for other skills. But no, they went scorched earth and just nuked the job from orbit whilist not improving pet AI until Endwalker.
I agree on normal difficulty encounter design being better than... maybe ever?... but there's a problem with gearing. You can instantly get good gear and trivialize the majority of DT content. First day is hard, definitely. But as soon as half the party is picking up even a little bit of good gear and understands the fights, they're no longer tough at all. Tanks don't have to struggle with aggro in mobs, making DPS super boring. Tanks have so many mits and healers have so many SUPER SPELLS that mobs are jokes now (especially with gearing). Tank grabs everyone, sits in one spot, and everybody just whacks the mobs until done. There is no dynamic gameplay (everything works on timers and is VERY predictable to the point that I don't get any enjoyment out of the rote memorization in Extreme/Savage), you just do stand in the same place every time. Valigarmanda's only dynamic change is which phase it goes into first - the phases themselves are static. Zoraal Ja is 100% static. Cloud of Darkness seemed to be a bit less static, but I only had a day before my sub ran out and I hated that a single dead person would screw up the fight, so I didn't stay long. You don't even need to position bosses anymore - they just warp to the middle for every attack. And on top of all that, jobs all play so similarly that there's no enjoyment to be gained from learning them (and as this video points out, the game does a TERRIBLE job of teaching you how stuff works).
As someone who played both Guild Wars 2 and FF, I'd say the way GW2 has you play the story is far superior from a gameplay perspective, but the story itself is much worse. The strength of the narrative and the characters really do matter a lot, even if the gameplay is just clicking through the dialogue. If they fix that, I'd say the majority of the players will be back on board
It's so wild how GW2 has so many incredibly wonderful ideas about how an mmo can be and still be successful, but they are consistently done dirty by their writing team.
"Dawntrail need to not exist." TRUE! I do think FFXIV can take some ideas off of SWTOR going forward: Treat the Scions like SWTOR treats companions, people to help you that you can summon into dungeons but don't get shoe-horned into the story. Do a 5,10, 15 year skip like you said, the last thing FFXIV wants to run into is world-ending thing after world-ending thing to where you wonder why the world isn't destroyed yet, and all the threats seem to just HAPPEN in a small period of time. World of Warcraft currently has that problem. Gonna also be that gooner that thinks they should allow romance options with the scions, put a personal investment into these characters.
I don't expect SE will listen until they lose enough of their income stream. I tried to express my concerns many times and was ignored and even warned I was disrupting the community. For this reason I closed my account and don't intend to play FFXIV ever again. If SE wants to cater to the ERP community and "socially anxious" while ignoring and silencing the players who came to play an MMORPG they can do that. However, I won't be paying for such a product.
I have social anxiety and yet I agree with you 100%, they need to stop treating their MMORPG as if the people logging in don't understand what they're playing. Stop playing it ultra safe with stagnant content.
@@ridleyroid9060 That's cool and you're cool. You get it. I used to get social anxiety in MMORPGs but I understood it was holding me back from what I wanted to do so I worked on it rather than trying to get the game to go more single player. What I really wanted was to engage with the players in the game but I was afraid people wouldn't accept me. So I started gradually engaging with the other players. Some people were friendly and some people were not friendly. I guess with the exposure to my fear for long enough, I overcame it. I never wanted the game designers to make it more single player friendly. I wanted to engage with the other players who were enjoying a well designed MMORPG.
Funny a lot of the stuff you ask for is what FF11 had and I’m sure this was originally going to have as the same producer had worked on both(1.0) but because of the ambition and lack of console power he was forced to retire. We had the merit points system, when you hit the original cap you could have the exp go towards points to specialize your class which was stuff like lower countdowns on certain skills or even new abilities you wouldn’t get just from leveling. A lot of the game was meant to be grindy just like the old one but a huge majority of the original player base grew up and no long have a he free time like when they were in HS or college. I think it really dumbed down because the loudest were those who didn’t like it, which is why no one who liked the set ups for classes saw it coming, they were too busy playing the game to be on a forum seeing the complaints. A lot of people couldn’t play 1.0 because the PC requirements were high for the time, most of my friends only switch from 11 when AAR dropped ps3
My conspiracy theory is that "The players asked for this" followed by a terrible change is just code for Square Enix execs demanding more and influencing game direction because they can't give their cash cow more than a small indie budget. Then again, this is the development team that repeatedly bends over backwards to appease a tiny minority of angry players without any regard for how the other 99% will feel when they make some changes, so...
Another thing that no one brings up is the copy-pasted NPCs in a "crowd" doing the exact same emotes in sync. That is something that I'd excuse in an indie game. But in a full priced expansion with monthly sub? Hell no! I really dont feel that my sub money is going back into the game's dev. Like seriously, they couldnt even randomize the character appearance data for a crowd? with 2 dye channels on each glam, they couldnt randomize the dyes on their outfits. And they couldnt bother to stagger the emotes for the crowd to not make it look cheap and in sync? The standards in their QA has definitely nose-dived in this expansion. Also, regarding the rewards, this game feels like a bad luck simulator to me.. Any glam, coffer, mount you want to farm, you have to pray to rng-esus to drop and then hope to win the roll on it. According to steam, I have clocked 12.5K hours in this game, and this is first time ever that I'm considering demolishing my M house so that I dont feel blackmailed to stay subbed.
we sort of had extra skills with things like stone skin, protect and cleric stance being things you unlocked by levelling other jobs. They should have doubled down on the system making some generic and some situational that could alter raid or trial mechanics if a person thought to use it (maybe even 'if you use this ability when the boss casts 'x' ability ' the fight becomes harder with altered patterns but the drop rate for the ex mount increases), SE is being way too safe with ffxiv rn
These are my thoughts exactly. They’re so terrified of disrupting the current balance, when in reality, most players would be absolutely okay with a period of imbalance between jobs if it meant bringing job identity back. I wish they would realize that it’s okay to temporarily break the balance to improve overall design. Balancing can always be done after necessary and interesting changes are made.
Gear is one of the worst. Each class needs it own materia set up but they allow you only one set of the gear so you have to choose which class to use. They need to expand the armory and separate all the armor from each other instead of lumping it in by class. Events need better rewards. Right now the events are extremely lack luster and the prizes for said events are also bad. They are starting to focus once more now in mog shop which is really disheartening
They really need to add more stuff to do with Chocobos. As an avid bird trainer, I find that once you get your perfect stallion for the races there's not much you can do but lvl up other ppl's companions at a very slow pace. Since DT had FF9 references they should have brought back the worldwide treasure hunting from that game. Seeing XIV's version of Chocobo Heaven would be a nice bonus if they ever decided to include it.
FFXIV had a better story back in Stormblood, No Ascians playing center stage. It was just War and Conflict. Oppression and Liberation. The ruby sea sucked but everything after was good. It kept its head looking forward and straight, not aiming for Evangelion it was more like Gundam and Black Lagoon. Zenos is still their best written character to this day. He's actually Agent Smith looking for freedom in a world designed to bore him. That's so amazing.
The reason they cull skills like Kaiten is because it raises the skill ceiling and they have to have everyone play on a similiar level, if you have people who are better at a class then you give the community an excuse to exclude people, but they do that already for the most mundane of things so what the hell do I know. But yeah, this is why DoTs, ground AoEs, positionals, and a bunch of other things got gutted, and that will suddenly 'fix' people not excluding one another. Jokes on them, now people dont exclude based on skill they just exclude based on class 😂
After having an expansion to calm down and play SAM, I think I might agree with the Kaiten cut in the end. As satisfying as it was to use, the current iteration of SAM has a fair bit of OGCDs and skill morphs. Combine that with the latency issues in the game, and weaving in Kaiten in between all the other skills without clipping into other skills could be difficult. The removal of plunge was just uncalled for though. Given how much DT poorly copies earlier expansions like SHB, one might think that a dev on the team has a grudge against anything associated with Ishikawa.
@cobalt968 Oh, for sure, there are cuts that are needed. Yeah, the uhh Plunge and I can not remember the GNB one Divider? Breaker? That just seems silly. My gripe is how all the tanks and all the healers are more or less the exact same thing.. well, especially the tanks.
I feel that Wuk Lamat is just a symptom of the problem ravaging FFXIV. So far she has 3k lines in Dawntrail, that's 50% of how many lines Heavensward needed to tell its story. Everything in the game is just too stagnant, and the devs have gotten complacent with their "packaging" of the game. Combat needs a shake-up. As an example, try thinking of how many times you get to interrupt an enemy cast inside a dungeon - or how often a debuff that should be removed with Esuna appears. Most things are not a threat whatsoever, and are just animated training dummies. As an experiment, I took 3 friends into Ampador Keep but with minimum item level - and it was actually intense. I have never healed that much before, but we still cleared in 18-19 minutes. Which just tells me that player power will stay high almost regardless, it's just a question of how much punishment the WoL can endure. Bosses need to be scary, and use abilities that should be interrupted more often and throw out tank busters - maybe it's even time for bosses to crit again (Go into Coils of Bahamut if you wanna experience how that feels. You could get hit by a critical auto-attack and then immediately a tank-buster, terrifying with min-item level) The overworld as mentioned in the video needs to be more filled with things to do, so that we have a reason to walk on the ground other than fates and treasure maps. It's ridiculous how pointless the overworld feels for the most part. You don't even grind mobs for certain items anymore to craft. Even crafting is uninteresting, there isn't even any fun gimmicky things to craft like a potion that transforms you into something else for a short time. Gear is uninteresting, I get more joy from getting a pair of green boots with good stats in WoW at level 20 than a savage loot drop in FFXIV. There needs to be more interesting stats, so players can actually do something interesting with it. Loot system needs to change too, you can't have a weekly loot system and limited tomestones in an mmo that tries to make you play as many jobs as possible. There also needs to be more long-term content that has replay value. Island Sanctuary would actually be still relevant if it had been something you could either do solo or with others - and with the already existing gathering and crafting jobs.... Variant Dungeon became irrelvant in 1 day, and there's no incentive for players to return. Criterion Dungeon was a step in the right direction, but the difficulty curve starts off way too high, especially when there's also a Savage version. Personally speaking, the only places were I still get some joy from FFXIV was Eureka, where it finally felt like I was playing an mmo again - and deep dungeons, where you're not dancing to the devs' whims, but instead reacting to what's given to you and trying your best to survive the odds.
I don't know why non western companies should entertain those clowns. I rather see the whole video game industry crash than let SBI influence game development.
I hope you'll keep making tons of videos. Unlike everyone jumping on the 'Dawntrail Bad' bandwagon, you point out massive issues in the game prior to that, both story and gameplay, great stuff.
I always wish the moment we zenos meteion they should have had us collapse in front of ppl and do a time skip to explain how tbe world had to recover from final days and the wol in a coma like state due to the heavy fighting and use of dynamis and the flame of life it could have set some ideas of the world coping and use comming to months later. Hell as cheesy as this is they could've written a whole ass anmesia arc and had the scions leave to find a way to restore our memories as a reboot for new allies, and we retain our combat due to crystal storing our combat memories. Something at least.
I still like it, but I think most of the modern Hildibrand quest lines lack heart. It’s just unmitigated silliness most of the time. Even ARR Hildibrand had some stakes to it, and was tied into lore bits that were eventually expanded upon.
Yes this is a huge issue. Devs actually listening to feedback being a negative due to Toxic positivity. People mass complain about something, then the community makes mass comments in support of that thing in retaliation; resulting in square just seeing constant praise of that thing. On the opposite side for example, complaints are also heard, resulting in no eureka/bozja in Endwalker.
Less cutscenes more game. Overhaul gearing system. Less gatekeeping on high end gear that is obsolete every odd patch. Overhaul to Job design that makes jobs differentiate from each other. None of this every job plays the same garbage. PERSONAL LIMIT BREAK GAUGE. Overhaul combat to be more skill based as opposed to just playing team jump rope. Design content that isn't handcuffed to raids. Meaningful rewards to earn ingame instead of throwing them on the cash shop. Better world building instead of success coasting on references from past FFs. Overhaul old zones with new questlines to revitalize the world instead of letting it remain stagnant. Every expansion. Airship and Boat cruises that let us bask in the ambience of the game world instead of a fade to black scene. Unlimit Limited jobs if there is no good reason to limit them. Level sync should only scale stats and not lock out abilities. Bring back Job Quests. Gatherers want to hit rocks and trees and catch actual fish. Not click on the White Dot. Update Chocobo systsem and Grand Company ranks. Better story for the story driven MMO. Give the game more funding instead of funneling it to other projects doomed to fail. Would be a good start.
holy hell ive been saying this for years and felt like i was crazy for being the only one to see how bland the game is. yes its gotten worse and classes have become more homogenized over the years but these issues have ALWAYS been here.
You aren’t wrong about the main writer for DT, I think the part you are missing tho is that this is the first time he has been THE MAIN WRITER. Everything before this has been collaborated on and you can SMELL the difference between this and Pandaemonium. This is literally like George Lucas and Star Wars. The first trilogy (4,5,6) were great. Even if you aren’t a fan of Star Wars you can still admit they were fun. Back then everything was a collaborative effort. Then 1,2 & 3 came around, George had complete creative control and…well we know how that ended. That’s Dawntrail.
I have a suggestion on the classes. If they’re worried about making things balanced then give us multiple types of combos. Bring back old skills and focus on the class identity. Give us enough skills that we have the ability to customize the skill bars. If it’s a question on gear then make it so that the gear we have that works for our class then buffs those benefits as well. That way if you want to be a pseudo tank as a DPS then you can but you have to select the right skills. It would make the loadout bars that we have even more useful as we could make a class for each thing. Of course that doesn’t mean every class has to be able to do the same thing. Some classes could be a DPS and Healer or Healer and Tank, or DPS and Tank. Though I would like to see more uniformed class identity. Not everything needs to be the same
I wish they could do something about how much harder high latency makes it to play well. Stuck playing cross-continent makes a bunch of jobs feel impossible due to the amount of dropped GCD from trying to weave OGCD. being informed there's mods that solve this problem reignited me about the issue
I agree heavily on the new blood, they dropped the ball with so many characters in DT, I like your idea of dissapearing for a bit and the Scions moving on, though considering its partially her obsession, Y'stola will likely come along, maybe Urianger. Both are the more wiser actually scholarly types of the Scions they'd be a boon for understanding whatever new realms we end up in with the maguffin chalice we got. Suggestions on new blood for the source however, Julles should become a recurring character, the Garlean soldier who the twins befriended, whom went on to befriend Zero who also needs to come back at some point. I was OBSESSED with the role quests in Shadowbringers and the arc with potentially fixing the void, Unukalhai and Cyella needed more than a mere passing mention to Zero at the end and them getting some additional dialogue during the EW patches if you checked up on them. We shouldn't be done with the Void, even if its no longer gonna be the void in the long run.
If only the dev team wasn't so petrified of letting players make a 'wrong' choice with their job/playstyle. Alternate playstyles and rotations are removed as soon as possible, gear customization is simplified into nearly binary choices. The only class where you can make meaningful choices about it's build will forever stay 'limited' because the idea that someone could bring in that 'wrong' spell list into a queued duty terrifies the team. There are loads of mmo's that make incredible use of skill trees, skill, or gear customization that borrowing from literally any of them would almost certainly make ff14 a more interesting game. If the game is going to forever have endless vertical progression, at least make it interesting. Or maybe it's high time they changed focus and went horizontal. Almost anything at this point would be an improvement! I know Yoshi P has stated they wanted to make job identity a more important focus in 8.0, but I have significant doubts. They make major changes to maybe three jobs per expac cycle, but all of them need work, and they have the money to do it.
Please name these mmo for me. When people say something like loads of mmos? I'm sry what mmos theres only like a few mmos worth talking about, wow/ff14/osrs/eso where are these loads of mmos poping off with all of these "choices". Players constantly talk about this idea of "choice" but for some reason those mmos are barely played so make it make sense please? Going to a build site to find your M+ build isnt making a choice lmao. Guys the bdo site says to craft fallen god armor omg im making a choice.
@@XT91 'Only a few mmo's worth talking about' Oh, so the only mmo's with any interesting or valid mechanical ideas are the ones with hundreds of thousands or millions of active players in the modern day? Not a single other mmo is worth talking about at all? Because that's a pretty asinine. The genre has had hundreds of games in it, and while only a few of them might be played by the majority of the mmo audience today that doesn't mean that there are no other games 'worth talking about.' Tens of thousands of active players is not 'barely played.' There are plenty of second tier mmos that have a smaller, but healthy playerbase and lots of interesting ideas. Oh, but you're not here to make honest discussion are you? You're here to make wild claims not even backed by your own examples. OSRS has huge diversity of choice in armor, weapons, and playstyle. People do seasonal runs, and challenge runs, and hardcore characters all the time because there's tons of way of playing the game different that are just as enjoyable. WoW has a long history with it's trait trees and gear where choices in your build mattered to fluctuating degrees. To point purely to modern and make the ass backwards claim that build diversity has been exactly the same throughout the game's entire history is so mind numbingly stupid, it really makes me question if you've even touched a single one of the games you're talking about. Even your assertion that metaslave, min-maxed builds are the only 'valid' choice is so wildly up your own ass, it's incredible. Every game that has choice in build will ALWAYS have an 'optimal' loadout. That's just how the mechanic works in principle. If you have choices, one of those choices will lead to the highest damage. That does NOT mean that absolutely no other choice is a valid pick depending on individual skill, team comp, specific fight, or any number of other factors. I mean you don't even have to look beyond ff14 to see that's true. The SINGLE job in the game where you can choose your hotbar, and even in the metaslave spell loadouts, the last 2-6 spells lots are flex spots. Even on the likes of icy veins. Choice matters. Period. Hard stop. No if, ands, or buts. Choice makes games more interesting, no mater where specifically it's found, and chucklefucks like you claiming that only metaslave builds matter only drag down the conversation FF14 is so badly in need of. Now get the fuck out of my sight.
@@emeraldguy10 Yea not another mmo is worth talking about I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that people want these things when they don't uplift none of these mmos in this category. So imma just treat it as the shallow platitudes that it is. I didn't assert anything I said the idea that people care about choice is just nonsense. If you want me to care ever about this point do make one of these mmos pop off more than the 30 days when it launch. OSRS the one exception does not make the rule. And I only point to modern retail wow cause again that's the only version that matters. That's why I don't talk in abstracts like back in my day in EQ we like this and this. Cause no one gives a shit about EQ in 1999 in 2025. There are only a few mmos worth talking about and I hope square doesn't listen to people who thinks some unknown mmo with 5k people who can pick between option 1 or option 2 when making a irrelevant skill choice is some kind of profound game design.
The problem is that SE only listens to sweaty raiders and will balance everything into the ground. The game is unbelievably stagnant but at least we're getting another Ultimate that the vast majority doesn't care about.
I can deal with a shit story, for me it's a one and done and I'll never look back on it. What I can't deal with is the lack of anything of substantial worth to do outside of raiding. When you've gotten the bosses down on farm it's over relatively quickly, what is there to do outside of that? Maps? Hunt Trains? Hunt Trains are brain dead boring content, and Maps I will give credit because they're just fun fuck around have some beers content with the FC but even that only lasts so long. Why aren't they releasing at least step one of the relic weapons on expansion launch? Why is it that we're having to wait 8-10 months to get anything outside of the normal routine content in this expansion? You should be launching a new expansion with at least one of the new things Shades Triangle, Cosmic Exploration, etc.
I really liked that you got relics with tomestones, I could finally get a relic weapon, I'll never get to get any others because of their horrendous grind. Bozja grinding is miserable when you join late, nobody ever wants to run events in the first part of the zone, you know, the only one you have access to, so you can't even progress when joining on your own. Still, SE is terrible with changing and simplifying the game, seeming to only listen to a very tiny minority. Someone went digging to find anyone complaining about a specific skill change once and only found one post about it, yet somehow SE thought that's enough to change how a class works, it's crazy. Watching some videos on the game's history, there used to be way more complexity to classes, what we have now is so samey and all for the sake of savage/unreal balance, the content that maybe 1% of the playerbase engages in. It'd be really cool if classes were less balanced and more actually fun and unique. It's good for things to be overpowered, if every class is overpowered in some way, that is also a kind of balance and you get fun out of it. Actually having builds would be great too. 9:20 Secret World Legends has a healing-tank-DPS triangle where you can manually adjust your stat distribution within it at any point, which means you can have a healer spec and swap to full DPS distribution to easily clear mobs in the open world, or a balance of DPS-tank to go through the story without spending ages killing things. The gear grind is both tedious and pointless, your stat totals grow higher with your levels and gear stats which translates to you never feeling stronger, you can never get 50% crit chance, not even close, and materia barely makes a difference unless you only go for one stat, and even then the increase is tiny (I like crit chance, for healer crit barriers).
My only problem with Bozja was the field note drop rates. I'm a huge FFXII fan, so I wanted the mount from gathering all of them. The grind for it was so painful. I sat for 4 days waiting on the one fate that dropped the last note I needed.to drop the damn thing. I think the two things that need to change most is CBU3's fear of letting players fail during early game and leveling and the community's need to optimize the fun out of the game. Until the world feels dangerous, it'll continue to be boring. People are going to to continue to be crap at their jobs until you force them to have to use more of their buttons while leveling. Good games give you situations early on to use the abilities as you get them so you gain familiarity with them as you grow. FFXIV does a poor job of this because you can get through the vast majority of the story content spamming 3-4 buttons on each class. To the second point, it won't matter if CBU3 gives players build choice if the community is so against anyone using anything outside of the optimal one. I always played with a friend who was an Astro main from it's release onwards. There were numerous times where people refused to play through dungeons with us because he was "in the wrong sect" back when there were 2 astro stances. It's not that he wasn't keeping everyone alive, he had no issue with that. It was because it wasn't the "correct" way to play. Until you beat the need to optimize out of the community's head, there will never be any options no matter how many you offer. It's the very reason everything is so streamlined in the game. Also, you got Wuk Lamat as a new character...... do you really want more new characters? 🤣
They can't add more roulettes since they forgot how to code it. The only reasonable explanation for how no new content gets a roulette. Criterion/Variant. Crystal Conflict. I truly believe they can't figure out how to add additional menu items in for roulette duty finder.
I want to see relic armor that you have to work for. Maybe not be as hardcore as GW2's legendary sets - although never having to work for armor ever again is nice; this only works with a game with horizontal progression, and FFXIV is vertical - but something where it's not just handed to you. I want another ARR relic quest for gear - just...maybe without the books. I want syncing to be like in WoW where, once you unlock a skill, you keep it no matter what level you get dropped to. Square should just sync the potency of skills, not take them away. I'd be fine with Sastasha twice a week if I could do my entire fking rotation. That way we'd also LOOK as impressive as our lvl100 selves, and give the sprouts something to be in awe of. I'm not a big fan of skill-trees because we will inevitably get shoe-horned into the BiS path if we want to be allowed to go into certain endgame content. It would definitely be nice to have some more class identity though. DRK, for example, had a neat bit with Dark Mind being resistance against magic attacks...that could've been cool, if anything in savage hit with magic. Maybe what they could do instead is create something like WoW's spec-trees, where - for example - tanks could choose between higher health pools, better damage mitigation, or better party defense. Healers could pick whether they were shield, regen, or pure healer (like how Astro used to have sects.) DPS could pick DoT management, glass-cannon, or balanced. Ranged could prioritize being support-minded or selfish-dps. Casters could even have a bit where they can pick between being straight-up DPS-spec'd or being debuff-bots (making mobs more vulnerable) or even heal-support, and maybe even giving them pets/minions to manage; SMN, for example, could switch between being a 'summon egi to do a big ouch at once' and 'summon one kind of egi to stick around' and there'd be egi better for bosses vs. trash, and you could freely swap between them. There could also be a system like what EverQuest has where you can supplement yourself with (literally) THOUSANDS of alternate-ability points where you can gain everything from cool skins, crafting buffs, being able to hold your breath under water better, reduced rez-sickness times, once-a-day or even once-a-week personal buffs that help you in the overworld, etc. Something else GW2 did that I thought was really cool was making certain mounts available only after a massive time-sink unlock-quest. Having to work as hard as I did to get the goddamn Skyscale in PoF was a TRIUMPH and I loved it. Mounts also have skill trees of their own to unlock, and this could incentivize activity in old-world content.
i loved your channel since the zodiark video, keep it dude! i love your views! ive been wanting more interesting gear since ARR, but and the balancing stuff i understand, but there's no sense of any sort of "build" outside of gcd and crit stat. it's so bad. give me a gear set that gives me sharpcast back bro.... my old thunder... pwease....
If Square changed the gearing setup in the way you described to give players more agency and options in their builds, wouldn't the community still just min/max the "best" build making it into the meta build for each job? Then everyone would aim for that build and ignore the other options because it would make their contribution in a fight "lesser" if they didn't. Party finders would then be set up for high end content that prohibit entry to jobs unless they have followed a specific build set up that gives maximum potency. Even now if you don't know and execute your job's SPECIFIC opener and rotation well enough in a fight, other players will be upset with you! Am I missing something here?
This will happen on the highest level, but I don't think it's going to be that bad with casuals (unless they also add timed fights or smth). Look at how it works in wow - low mythic keys, low rating pvp, lfr/normal pretty much require you only showing up, and at least in my experience parties are not that difficult to find (would be even easier if wow didn't push competitive crap so much, but whatever). And wow's community is MUCH less accepting in general. Most people wouldn't care about minmaxing, they already don't.
@xviii5780 I'm a casual and I would still want the best build I could get. Even now, I have started using Pictomancer, not because it is my favourite job to play, but because it does the most damage. Rather than restructure job builds/balancing I would much rather they overhaul the UI and introduce some modern quality of life features. (Also, I enjoyed Hildebrand and would like to play more of that content - please don't attack me...)
While it sounds cool to have custom varied builds for a class, the issue is when it comes to raiding there will be a "meta" and a best in slot build. If someone wanted to play around with a non -meta build in pf they would instantly be kicked. Lost Ark is varied like this and people deliberately check player's build before allowing them into a party, and if their gear isn't meta or near best in slot they are denied entry to the parties.
This is indeed the case in many games but it does not systematically lock you out of higher lvl content if you can switch between builds easily. Gw2 did that for example, so long as you had certain skills unlocked it Costa you nothing to switch between builds, so you could play your class the way you wanted solo, and switch to a meta build for raids. All guilds/FCs are also quite casual and still do high end duty (slower, with some wipes, but they do and they have fun), and they might be open to non-meta build (I rather hope so anyway)
Who cares what the raid scene's metaslaves specifically want in their builds? There's always going to be people like that. Hell, there are people like that today int he game over gear combination and meteria slotting even though ilevel is 98% of your damage cap in ff14. If we continue to pretend that what is always the most toxic part of every mmo community are the ones we should cater the entire game to, you get modern ff14. There are other aspects of the game. There is content other than savage raids and Ultimates. Why can't we have '''''wrong'''' choices there? Why can't we be allowed to make the non-optimal choice in the first place? Why can't there be more niche build options for other content?
The thing that got me to finally unsub was how much the community in general has gone downhill in the last few years. I'm not sure the cause, or if it's maybe just my DC, but people have just stopped talking in duties, or are just downright toxic. I'd be curious to see if anyone else has noticed this?
I have but I noticed the change when they included Xbox players. I’m not trying to out all of Xbox here, but I will say the change was very noticeable when that happened
I would have no problem with the earlier roulettes, if the content in them were the same difficulty as they were on release. Or at least a little closer. We shouldn't be finishing bosses in 30 seconds. I don't care how long ago the content was released. When I was still raiding, I started only doing expert roulette and then logging off until raid time. The rest of them aren't worth it, and are more likely to put me to sleep. Also Monster Hunter Wilds out here making XIV's character creator look like picking out your favorite m&m color.
Dawntrail needs a Link's Awakening Retcon or make Woke Lamat some fragment of a new Universal threat that shows its true colors/ Reality bending power when you refuse her "fantasy" (FF9 Final Boss theme queues here)
Hear me out If you're going to have an MMO and you want it to have staying power with the fly by night crowd who will NEVER raid or do anything beyond the easy stuff put out the expansion relevant MMO grind content shit out FIRST As a raider, I can hold my tears in while waiting for the next ultimate or whatever
Destiny 2 has the same problem: they're so focused on raids, because raiders are loud and do the hardest content, that the company forgets that most people don't raid and never will.
The msq should get harder the further in. I’m been playing for a year and a half and it’s so nice that dt was “tougher” I’m into raiding now and so tired of the east duty dungeons
I'd love to see something like a "Automatic" and "manual" mode for the classes and skills. We could have a button that changes the modes. Automatic would work like Viper's skills and like how the 1 2 3s work in PvP. Just a single button for the casual players square is catering to. Meanwhile, manual mode would have you press all the buttons for your rotation. They could also give a potency bouns as a reward for learning your classes. So if you want to go into end game content like ultimates savage or chaotic raids you have to learn your buttons. Add some more skills as another bonus for learning your class.
If they double downed on Hildibrand quest line. Why the fk is it not fully VAed. Like the hildi story is fun but do they actually think people enjoy mimes? I guess they can pull out the insufficient resources card just like they always did. Also them claiming this game as a story base game while not fully VAed the MSQ is such a joke. Pissed me the fk out when the incompetent team give that pity same excuse every single time.
As far as we can praise Shadowbringers it was the moment when the downfall of 14 started, they oversimplified crafting turning it into full automation task. They also added craftable items into chests obtained while questing making the crafters even more useless. They added Bozja that fixed some issues of Eureka but removed the social part and this is why now Bozja is a desert while Eureka is still a social event where people go and have time to chat while grinding. Also to fix the limit of buttons on Controller they removed many skills killing Dark Knight and Scholar, the last one was my main since ARR and become unrecognizable that i did not manage to use it anymore and never went back except to quickly level it and forget it until next expansion. Having also leveled over the years all teh classes i can see that they are all the same role wise, i position the same skills in the same positions of the bars and even though animations are different the results are the same. Diadem was fully reconstructed having become useless but in a way that become another dead content out of very many and it is mostly the playground for bots. The issue is that each content has a quick end and is never renewed even if it is there. Since then slowly the game more repetitive and a packaged experience instead of something new, now tehy are also adding contents slowly and bit by bit over 4,5 months and all those contents get exhausted in a very short time making them useless and forgettable. I totally agree also with you that roulette format has to be split in parts and with all the new classes more options to leveling and rewards should be present. Running the same leveling dungeons even those of the newest expansion over and over again to reach the level cap of every class makes them feel annoying at some point rather than challenging. One more thing is also that some features added seem to be completely thrown in the game with no rational thinking. They added the crafting tree but that one that should help to find the materials to craft in retainers and FC Chest close down as soon as you open a retainer or the chest and you need to reopen them finding again the item you wanted to craft. The book of Khloe they could have added a button to open directly the window of the required duty and not open another window and search everywhere. Tehre are just two examples of things that could be fixed to add quality of life indead ot making the game just a billion of mouse move and click when really not needed. There is so much more to add but it seems that even the little things are not taken in consideration since too long that starting with little would already seem an improvement.
They are extremely reactive to people who are not enjoying difficult or time drains so they nerf it. Completely dropped the ball with working with DEI companies also. Gmes just gone to absolute shit with dawntrail.. hopefully they fix all this but i doubt it yoshi P is tone deaf as fuck
Stormblood is OBJECTIVELY the best FF14 expansion, hate or love the story but the overall PACKAGE from 4.0-4.5 has been super elite. Zenos and Tsukoyomi as our villains were dope (I miss Zenos), the MSQ trials, the 4 lords raids, the Omega raids, Eureka, HoH, god damn IVALICE (best alliance till this day) post patch MSQ story (buildup to SHB was FIRE!), job uniqueness, interesting dungeons and locales, a fun yet challenging learning curve for all that content. My best time has definitely been during Stormblood, I saw the cracks in SHB and EW exposed the stagnation of 14. DT just killed me off and I unsubbed.
Improving class system is no1 that will reattract my attention to game again. Like And honestly i don't care if it broke raid system. I mean, people would be min-maxing and parsing always, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't have unusal and/or fun abilites and talents (and gear set bonuses), for example like "mind controlling" of Shadow Priest from WoW Then try to add more open world content and/or redo hunt system This way game will roll up back on a hill even with mediocre story i believe
Heck, FFXIV DID have good and optional abilites (like choosed talents) for example for Black Mage, when you could flow your mana to heals in StB This kinda shows how just 1 button could've, in theory, tip the scales to choose which job you will bring on your raid
My sub is running out soon and I will watch the MSQ on a stream to decide, if I go back or wait until 7.3 or 7.4 to see changes to the writing (since it's written in stone so far). I hope they fired the writers and everyone involved in this garbage. If the story had been on Heavensward-level, I would not care about the gameplay issues.
Theres definitely a problem with the game but i also dont think players know whats best i definitely dont miss old school mmo design. Can it be more interesting than now? Yes but it can also be more annoying too. I dont miss cleric stance. I dont miss kaitin. I dont miss needing ninja for smoke bomb. No for the game to be better they have to listen less to players and be inspired to do things on their own. Otherwise this push and pull with casual vs hardcore will constantly continue. Job homogenization will go back and forth. Optimization will always make sets obsolete anyways. Most of party finder cannot even handle of jobs got harder😂 they can barely play theor jobs now
Okay one thing right off the bat: you ain't getting talents in FF14. They're an impossible to balance nightmare in MMOs and the bane of WoW designers' existence. Get that out of your head.
Like in your own example, literally anybody who doesn't pick the max DPS talent build for Samurai is getting tossed out of raids. I know you're just a FF14 guy but this has been a thing in MMOs for literal decades, you should ideally present ideas that aren't a Torment Nexus for everybody involved
yawn, what a stupid comment, the job of a business is to retain customers, saying go play something else only hinders 14 since it relies on subs. Now Yoshi is saying STAY lol so your "take a break" shtick is dead.
Wait... wait wait wait wait wait... people are blaming Sweet Baby Inc as a part of the problem? Just... no. Look, I get that there's a subsection of the gaming community that is looking for any opportunity to blame that consulting firm for all of gaming's woes. Heck, some of that criticism might even be warranted... ... but not at Square. We're talking about a gaming company that effectively shut itself off from the rest of the global market that only deals with developers (and consultants) who speak Japanese. To suggest that some random, small time consulting firm is influencing these kinds of decisions is ludicrous. Square has no reason to speak to them, and in many cases, has no *means* of speaking to them because of the language barrier. They won't even hire people onto their staff who don't speak Japanese fluently. Otherwise... yeah, your videos have a lot of great points. This one is no exception.
You're not going to get SE to make the game the way you want it. You're better off finding the game you want to play. That was what ultimately made me quit FFXIV for good.
Sweet Baby mentioned. Gotta throw the whole video away now. Ya'll be acting like this one VERY small company is singlehandedly destroying the games industry. Just be a bigot bro. Can't take ya'll seriously at all.
Unfortunately a vast majority of players agree that DT is one of the absolute worst expansions they’ve ever played. SBI is a problem though and I’d personally like to see less of their involvement in developing games that we love.
@@Onii_Chan_Kenobifree hint kiddo: doing that "y'all" thing just outs you as an out of touch Twitter scold. It doesn't make you sound folksy or sensible, it just makes people wonder if your Manic Panic dye job is blue, purple, or hot pink.
Funny a lot of the stuff you ask for is what FF11 had and I’m sure this was originally going to have as the same producer had worked on both(1.0) but because of the ambition and lack of console power he was forced to retire. We had the merit points system, when you hit the original cap you could have the exp go towards points to specialize your class which was stuff like lower countdowns on certain skills or even new abilities you wouldn’t get just from leveling. A lot of the game was meant to be grindy just like the old one but a huge majority of the original player base grew up and no long have a he free time like when they were in HS or college. I think it really dumbed down because the loudest were those who didn’t like it, which is why no one who liked the set ups for classes saw it coming, they were too busy playing the game to be on a forum seeing the complaints. A lot of people couldn’t play 1.0 because the PC requirements were high for the time, most of my friends only switch from 11 when AAR dropped on ps3.
Allegedly Ishikawa had enough material to last until 8.0, but unfortunately was told to "just wrap it up in 6.0" which is why everything got fucked. Absolutely unacceptable.
Also didn't help that even though Ishikawa COOKED with ShB, leadership was allegedly not happy with how Hydaelyn was portrayed ("y-you made her look bad!!") which is why Venat is so poorly portrayed in EW. They literally just tried to take everything back by forcing it on you instead of rolling with it.
I'm glad to see your channel doing well FF14 desperately needs critical voices in the community
I feel like I've seen nothing BUT critical voices about Dawntrail on youtube. WHICH IS GOOD, but yeah. Not really seeing any toxic positivity people here.
@@tristenj1992Dawntrail deserves it. It's fucking terrible.
@tristenj1992 i think the sacred cow status of ff14 died with dawntrail
Folks seem more willing to accept criticisms now compared to before which is very good, probably the best thing DT gave us
Point 4: It is staggering how much better HW and SB are compared to DT. I just recently finished my NG+ runs of both and I was left in awe at how good these stories were. The "Several cutscenes will play in sequence" used to mean we were in for something earth shattering and exciting. Now it just means that we have to sit through tens of minutes of Wuk Lamat just yapping. There's no guarantee for the quality of storytelling we had previously.
The greatest sin about Endwalker will be how little the actual events had in the overall significance of the story of FFXIV. You're gonna expect me to believe that the multiverse-affecting wave of Dynamis just decided to spare Tuliyolal from its effects? Yeah. Sure. Okay.
Given their involvement in other projects and the decisions made regarding story and characters in those games, I wouldn't be surprised if Wuk Lamat turned out to be the product of Sweet Baby's influence.
She has to be. She just HAS to be, there's no other logical explanation for a character THIS poorly written in a JRPG.
she blatantly is.
Im also not a fan of meteion. I thought she was pretty lame actually and brought down the story for me. And I thought I might be alone in that cause all my friends and seemingly most people online really loved everything about endwalker. I'm glad to come across this channel!
I was really hoping we'd have some more ideological sparring this expansion with scions working with different claimants. But we only got a taste of that with Koana and then just kinda brushed away. The scions felt completely useless storywise. And the one who actually had a connection, Krile, we barely got anything from her and some of it was resolved off screen.
Content wise we desperately need more of these expansion features to actually launch with the expansion. It baffles me that they advertised things like beast master limited job, cosmic exploration, etc. And we aren't getting it for almost a year after release. This is my first expansion launch, and I've learned it's basically always been this way. I can't believe they haven't gotten more pushback for this content release schedule for years.
Pre video thought: one thing I haven’t seen much if any folk mention is the fact everyone comes together under Wuk Lamat when she becomes dawn servant.
What happened to the sizeable support of Zoreal Ja? Did they just immediately jump ship when he lost the Rite? Also presumably they know his aims right? Doesn’t that mean there’s a sizeable chunk of Tural that want war?
@21:53
Holy fucking shit based take.
Honestly even a simple "thank you" for being with the game for so long would be enough for me at this point.
Thank you for being here before the game blew up in Shb or something now that the veteran rewards were scrapped because newer players would miss out (I don't blame newer players for this).
Sometimes it feels like the devs only want the Shb onward joiners and actually dislike that there are players who still remember the old job design, shorter patch cycles or just the "old cozy feeling".
I know it's a stupid mindset but it's something I think about sometimes.
A huge flaw I've seen is just the stagnant leveling system. It's exactly the same, year over year. When they do throw out good ideas, they're quickly abandoned. The island sanctuary is one of them. I really enjoyed it, and it's dead. What about the GC squad you get? That hasn't seen ANY real updates. No new adventurers to recruit, they're all the same ancient ones. I'd love to do quests with them, like the trust system. I'd MUCH rather run dungeons, FATEs, anything with my squad, over a bunch of NPC story people. I don't even like most of them. I quit in 7.1, shittrail was just too much to take. The worst writing I've seen outside the bargain basement on Steam (Don't go, it's scary), and bait and switch crap. Lulu had a really good idea for what Dawntrail could/should have been, and even fixed Wuk Lmao. I mean, is it really that hard? The problem we all face is simple, the Japanese mentality. They do nothing in small fashion, it's always seemingly overreacting. I hate to say it, but take a damn page or two from WoW. There's a LOT of shit to do in that game, and FF...just doens't have it anymore. It's tired, it's boring, it's formulaic to a fault. We, as customers, deserve better than this. POST NOTE: why the hell can modders fix things SE can't? Viera/Hrothgar with hats? They said YEARS ago they'd fix it...and nothing. I'm sick and tired of the broken promises, the outright lies to our faces as consumers. I"m sorry to say, but SE deserves to crash and burn after LOLTrail. I said it. Burn baby burn, then maybe you'll rise like in 2.0. Maybe.
What was even the point of the IS? The promising options like npc visits and customization, psuedo housing, etc didn’t go far enough, and the content is basically ‘done’ once you get what you want out of it. Not enough focus is being applied to content that will maintain player engagement.
The hats are a matter of principle at this point. It's been asked for so long and so persistently that I refuse to take SE seriously until they fix hats.
See I hated the island...not my thing at all. 😆
you covered pretty much all my greviances. I think a time skip with us being scattered would be awesome! Maybe we spend 1-2 expansions bouncing between reflections to stop the more severe bits of chaos, knowing our home is in safe hands.
We could have had a succession story that split between three valid heirs, showing how each of them has something valuable to offer. We could have learned about them, split our time, and had a cast to build on for the future. Instead, we got Wuk Lamat. Did you see that chart that measured the number of lines per character in the MSQ? Wuk Lamat is #3 after one expansion. She had more lines in Dawntrail than Alisae did all the way through Shadowbringers. Krile's #1 word is "Wuk Lamat" throughout the entire game (not just DT). They could have gone with a new story and a new cast, but they focused on one character who was cheapened by childish writing. (Poor Zoraal Ja should have been so much more. In my rewrite idea that I brainstormed, he becomes a vital hero along with his siblings.)
Your idea of going to a reflection and having time pass will never be accepted. I would love to see time pass and the dynamic to change - GROW THE TWINS UP ALREADY! - but they would have to actually commit to locking people into another reflection in the MSQ. None of that crap in ShB where "time just so happens to flow the same right now" as soon as we appear.
19:41 "The Loporrits could be slowly introducing their technology to the planet, leading to new revolutions and developments." - *INTRODUCING THE NEW VIBRATING CARROT! IT DOESN'T GET SOGGY NO MATTER HOW WET YOU GET IT!*
Where you say Shadowbringera is an anomaly, I can identify exactly how: it is one of the expansions where Yoshida meddled the least. With Endwalker being excessively meddled in, to the point that Ishikawa said she had material that could have stretched between 6.x to 8.0, for the Hydaelyn and Zodiark plot.
Endwalker was not the way it was because of Ishikawa, but because Yoshida meddled and mandated many of the most problematic elements of the plot.
Yoshida himself is the issue.
This!
Man knows how to run a studio, not write a story, but boy does that not stop him from doing so anyway! Yoshi P please.
Yes I agree Yoshida needs to go.......
Yup endwalker walked everything she did back and it sucks
Your videos are cathartic as heck.
Oh boy Monotone Angry Story man is back, time to watch, lmao! Loving these videos though, for real.
Heck Yeah! Screw the sprouts! 🪴
Scholar players 100% complained a lot back then which caused them to lose buttons. Now, I ain't going to say that its on them but Square should've removed a few healing oGCDs because I personally think the original vision of it being an aggressive healer is extremely charming. But overall, Scholars got screwed over by both themselves and Square while Samurais lost their button for absolutely no reason. I have not seen a single Samurai complain about their buttons.
They need to overhaul gearing as other MMOs offer a variety of gears to build your perfect little adventurer. Old World of Warcraft was so damn satisfying as there were multiple instances you could run and get different kinds of gears from different sets that would be "Best in Slot" but it allowed you to play a variety of things instead of just Arcadion & Sphene EX. They have to introduce more endgame content to give variety, it usually always just defaults to the current Savage tier we are in which doesn't really work well. Granted, Chaotic Alliance Raids is a step in the right direction but we need MORE. The idea of gearsets for specific skills sounds radical, I am down for them to experiment with that. It sounds somewhat similar to Classic WoW's Season of Discovery and that one is an absolute baller.
Jobs also need an overhaul. I'll keep it real, most jobs feel the same with the exception of Pictomancer because of how unique of a caster it is compared to the rest of the cast. It feels like every other job has lost something of its own identity as the game progressed, this was happening in Stormblood & Shadowbringers but became more noticable during Endwalker. I think they are trying to give them an identity but that one is shared among the roles they fulfil in a group. They gotta retrace their steps and see what went wrong, giving back DoTs to jobs like Summoner and Scholar would be fantastic but also making some of them stand out among the rest to entice using them for content outside of levelling.
I think Square is afraid of backlash hence why they aren't experimenting every expansion or major patch unlike, for example: Valve with Dota 2. They are simplifying things like jobs, rotations, etc. but in return making the content we get a bit harder. I will die on that hill and say that DT had incredible encounter design, that is the one thing they did right. It's just that things are so boring to press. I have no excitement anymore when I press my summons as Summoner, raising my shield while playing Paladin isn't thrilling either, it's just not as cool anymore. Seriously, back when I levelled Paladin as my only job and went through with it during story, I got excited when I got to level 70. Nothing made me smile as much as using Passage of Arms when I acquired it the first time. Getting to 80 had a somewhat similar, yet weaker reaction from me and I just didn't feel it anymore in Endwalker.
I want that excitement back when I reach a big threshold again in levelling. Levelling doesn't feel like an adventure anymore to me, it feels like a chore. Everything this game offers me is a chore. I hope they can fix things, take feedback and suggestions from players and that the next expansion has me and many more people excited again.
It's been 6 years and Im still not over how they gutted Scholar from 4.55 to 5.0. Like jesus christ it is egregious asfk, I would have been fine with them making some minor streamlines, you can make like miasma a 1.5s cast and remove miasma 2 to make way for other skills. But no, they went scorched earth and just nuked the job from orbit whilist not improving pet AI until Endwalker.
I agree on normal difficulty encounter design being better than... maybe ever?... but there's a problem with gearing. You can instantly get good gear and trivialize the majority of DT content. First day is hard, definitely. But as soon as half the party is picking up even a little bit of good gear and understands the fights, they're no longer tough at all. Tanks don't have to struggle with aggro in mobs, making DPS super boring. Tanks have so many mits and healers have so many SUPER SPELLS that mobs are jokes now (especially with gearing). Tank grabs everyone, sits in one spot, and everybody just whacks the mobs until done.
There is no dynamic gameplay (everything works on timers and is VERY predictable to the point that I don't get any enjoyment out of the rote memorization in Extreme/Savage), you just do stand in the same place every time. Valigarmanda's only dynamic change is which phase it goes into first - the phases themselves are static. Zoraal Ja is 100% static. Cloud of Darkness seemed to be a bit less static, but I only had a day before my sub ran out and I hated that a single dead person would screw up the fight, so I didn't stay long. You don't even need to position bosses anymore - they just warp to the middle for every attack.
And on top of all that, jobs all play so similarly that there's no enjoyment to be gained from learning them (and as this video points out, the game does a TERRIBLE job of teaching you how stuff works).
As someone who played both Guild Wars 2 and FF, I'd say the way GW2 has you play the story is far superior from a gameplay perspective, but the story itself is much worse. The strength of the narrative and the characters really do matter a lot, even if the gameplay is just clicking through the dialogue. If they fix that, I'd say the majority of the players will be back on board
It needs to feel more like an actual MMO like WoW does honestly.
It's so wild how GW2 has so many incredibly wonderful ideas about how an mmo can be and still be successful, but they are consistently done dirty by their writing team.
"Dawntrail need to not exist." TRUE!
I do think FFXIV can take some ideas off of SWTOR going forward: Treat the Scions like SWTOR treats companions, people to help you that you can summon into dungeons but don't get shoe-horned into the story. Do a 5,10, 15 year skip like you said, the last thing FFXIV wants to run into is world-ending thing after world-ending thing to where you wonder why the world isn't destroyed yet, and all the threats seem to just HAPPEN in a small period of time. World of Warcraft currently has that problem. Gonna also be that gooner that thinks they should allow romance options with the scions, put a personal investment into these characters.
The time skip will be FFXVII I have a feeling.....
I don't expect SE will listen until they lose enough of their income stream. I tried to express my concerns many times and was ignored and even warned I was disrupting the community. For this reason I closed my account and don't intend to play FFXIV ever again. If SE wants to cater to the ERP community and "socially anxious" while ignoring and silencing the players who came to play an MMORPG they can do that. However, I won't be paying for such a product.
I have social anxiety and yet I agree with you 100%, they need to stop treating their MMORPG as if the people logging in don't understand what they're playing. Stop playing it ultra safe with stagnant content.
@@ridleyroid9060 That's cool and you're cool. You get it. I used to get social anxiety in MMORPGs but I understood it was holding me back from what I wanted to do so I worked on it rather than trying to get the game to go more single player. What I really wanted was to engage with the players in the game but I was afraid people wouldn't accept me. So I started gradually engaging with the other players. Some people were friendly and some people were not friendly. I guess with the exposure to my fear for long enough, I overcame it. I never wanted the game designers to make it more single player friendly. I wanted to engage with the other players who were enjoying a well designed MMORPG.
I've heard numbers have collapsed, which is a bit of a problem considering WoW has largely gotten it together
Pretty much once income goes down they will look into the community concerns. They have grown too complacent
Funny a lot of the stuff you ask for is what FF11 had and I’m sure this was originally going to have as the same producer had worked on both(1.0) but because of the ambition and lack of console power he was forced to retire. We had the merit points system, when you hit the original cap you could have the exp go towards points to specialize your class which was stuff like lower countdowns on certain skills or even new abilities you wouldn’t get just from leveling. A lot of the game was meant to be grindy just like the old one but a huge majority of the original player base grew up and no long have a he free time like when they were in HS or college. I think it really dumbed down because the loudest were those who didn’t like it, which is why no one who liked the set ups for classes saw it coming, they were too busy playing the game to be on a forum seeing the complaints. A lot of people couldn’t play 1.0 because the PC requirements were high for the time, most of my friends only switch from 11 when AAR dropped ps3
My conspiracy theory is that "The players asked for this" followed by a terrible change is just code for Square Enix execs demanding more and influencing game direction because they can't give their cash cow more than a small indie budget.
Then again, this is the development team that repeatedly bends over backwards to appease a tiny minority of angry players without any regard for how the other 99% will feel when they make some changes, so...
Another thing that no one brings up is the copy-pasted NPCs in a "crowd" doing the exact same emotes in sync. That is something that I'd excuse in an indie game. But in a full priced expansion with monthly sub? Hell no! I really dont feel that my sub money is going back into the game's dev. Like seriously, they couldnt even randomize the character appearance data for a crowd? with 2 dye channels on each glam, they couldnt randomize the dyes on their outfits. And they couldnt bother to stagger the emotes for the crowd to not make it look cheap and in sync? The standards in their QA has definitely nose-dived in this expansion.
Also, regarding the rewards, this game feels like a bad luck simulator to me.. Any glam, coffer, mount you want to farm, you have to pray to rng-esus to drop and then hope to win the roll on it. According to steam, I have clocked 12.5K hours in this game, and this is first time ever that I'm considering demolishing my M house so that I dont feel blackmailed to stay subbed.
we sort of had extra skills with things like stone skin, protect and cleric stance being things you unlocked by levelling other jobs. They should have doubled down on the system making some generic and some situational that could alter raid or trial mechanics if a person thought to use it (maybe even 'if you use this ability when the boss casts 'x' ability ' the fight becomes harder with altered patterns but the drop rate for the ex mount increases), SE is being way too safe with ffxiv rn
These are my thoughts exactly. They’re so terrified of disrupting the current balance, when in reality, most players would be absolutely okay with a period of imbalance between jobs if it meant bringing job identity back.
I wish they would realize that it’s okay to temporarily break the balance to improve overall design. Balancing can always be done after necessary and interesting changes are made.
Gear is one of the worst. Each class needs it own materia set up but they allow you only one set of the gear so you have to choose which class to use. They need to expand the armory and separate all the armor from each other instead of lumping it in by class.
Events need better rewards. Right now the events are extremely lack luster and the prizes for said events are also bad. They are starting to focus once more now in mog shop which is really disheartening
They really need to add more stuff to do with Chocobos. As an avid bird trainer, I find that once you get your perfect stallion for the races there's not much you can do but lvl up other ppl's companions at a very slow pace. Since DT had FF9 references they should have brought back the worldwide treasure hunting from that game. Seeing XIV's version of Chocobo Heaven would be a nice bonus if they ever decided to include it.
They removed all the fun from so many jobs.
FFXIV had a better story back in Stormblood, No Ascians playing center stage. It was just War and Conflict. Oppression and Liberation. The ruby sea sucked but everything after was good. It kept its head looking forward and straight, not aiming for Evangelion it was more like Gundam and Black Lagoon.
Zenos is still their best written character to this day. He's actually Agent Smith looking for freedom in a world designed to bore him. That's so amazing.
I loved SB's story, very grounded and far more coherent than what we had since EW with time travel slop.
The reason they cull skills like Kaiten is because it raises the skill ceiling and they have to have everyone play on a similiar level, if you have people who are better at a class then you give the community an excuse to exclude people, but they do that already for the most mundane of things so what the hell do I know.
But yeah, this is why DoTs, ground AoEs, positionals, and a bunch of other things got gutted, and that will suddenly 'fix' people not excluding one another.
Jokes on them, now people dont exclude based on skill they just exclude based on class 😂
Picto or Bust is real and tragic
After having an expansion to calm down and play SAM, I think I might agree with the Kaiten cut in the end. As satisfying as it was to use, the current iteration of SAM has a fair bit of OGCDs and skill morphs. Combine that with the latency issues in the game, and weaving in Kaiten in between all the other skills without clipping into other skills could be difficult.
The removal of plunge was just uncalled for though. Given how much DT poorly copies earlier expansions like SHB, one might think that a dev on the team has a grudge against anything associated with Ishikawa.
@cobalt968 Oh, for sure, there are cuts that are needed.
Yeah, the uhh Plunge and I can not remember the GNB one Divider? Breaker? That just seems silly.
My gripe is how all the tanks and all the healers are more or less the exact same thing.. well, especially the tanks.
tbh i wish there was a place to teach you ur rotation for higher levels.. idk when to use what cuz i suck.
I feel that Wuk Lamat is just a symptom of the problem ravaging FFXIV.
So far she has 3k lines in Dawntrail, that's 50% of how many lines Heavensward needed to tell its story.
Everything in the game is just too stagnant, and the devs have gotten complacent with their "packaging" of the game.
Combat needs a shake-up. As an example, try thinking of how many times you get to interrupt an enemy cast inside a dungeon - or how often a debuff that should be removed with Esuna appears.
Most things are not a threat whatsoever, and are just animated training dummies.
As an experiment, I took 3 friends into Ampador Keep but with minimum item level - and it was actually intense. I have never healed that much before, but we still cleared in 18-19 minutes.
Which just tells me that player power will stay high almost regardless, it's just a question of how much punishment the WoL can endure.
Bosses need to be scary, and use abilities that should be interrupted more often and throw out tank busters - maybe it's even time for bosses to crit again (Go into Coils of Bahamut if you wanna experience how that feels. You could get hit by a critical auto-attack and then immediately a tank-buster, terrifying with min-item level)
The overworld as mentioned in the video needs to be more filled with things to do, so that we have a reason to walk on the ground other than fates and treasure maps. It's ridiculous how pointless the overworld feels for the most part. You don't even grind mobs for certain items anymore to craft.
Even crafting is uninteresting, there isn't even any fun gimmicky things to craft like a potion that transforms you into something else for a short time.
Gear is uninteresting, I get more joy from getting a pair of green boots with good stats in WoW at level 20 than a savage loot drop in FFXIV. There needs to be more interesting stats, so players can actually do something interesting with it.
Loot system needs to change too, you can't have a weekly loot system and limited tomestones in an mmo that tries to make you play as many jobs as possible.
There also needs to be more long-term content that has replay value.
Island Sanctuary would actually be still relevant if it had been something you could either do solo or with others - and with the already existing gathering and crafting jobs....
Variant Dungeon became irrelvant in 1 day, and there's no incentive for players to return.
Criterion Dungeon was a step in the right direction, but the difficulty curve starts off way too high, especially when there's also a Savage version.
Personally speaking, the only places were I still get some joy from FFXIV was Eureka, where it finally felt like I was playing an mmo again - and deep dungeons, where you're not dancing to the devs' whims, but instead reacting to what's given to you and trying your best to survive the odds.
Sweet Baby Inc has been destroying a lot of video games
Tell tale sign that they should just stop
I don't know why non western companies should entertain those clowns. I rather see the whole video game industry crash than let SBI influence game development.
I hope you'll keep making tons of videos. Unlike everyone jumping on the 'Dawntrail Bad' bandwagon, you point out massive issues in the game prior to that, both story and gameplay, great stuff.
I always wish the moment we zenos meteion they should have had us collapse in front of ppl and do a time skip to explain how tbe world had to recover from final days and the wol in a coma like state due to the heavy fighting and use of dynamis and the flame of life it could have set some ideas of the world coping and use comming to months later. Hell as cheesy as this is they could've written a whole ass anmesia arc and had the scions leave to find a way to restore our memories as a reboot for new allies, and we retain our combat due to crystal storing our combat memories. Something at least.
People don't like Hildebrand? I thought his questline was hilarious
I still like it, but I think most of the modern Hildibrand quest lines lack heart. It’s just unmitigated silliness most of the time. Even ARR Hildibrand had some stakes to it, and was tied into lore bits that were eventually expanded upon.
Yes this is a huge issue.
Devs actually listening to feedback being a negative due to Toxic positivity.
People mass complain about something, then the community makes mass comments in support of that thing in retaliation; resulting in square just seeing constant praise of that thing.
On the opposite side for example, complaints are also heard, resulting in no eureka/bozja in Endwalker.
Great video, thanks
Less cutscenes more game.
Overhaul gearing system. Less gatekeeping on high end gear that is obsolete every odd patch.
Overhaul to Job design that makes jobs differentiate from each other. None of this every job plays the same garbage.
PERSONAL LIMIT BREAK GAUGE.
Overhaul combat to be more skill based as opposed to just playing team jump rope.
Design content that isn't handcuffed to raids.
Meaningful rewards to earn ingame instead of throwing them on the cash shop.
Better world building instead of success coasting on references from past FFs.
Overhaul old zones with new questlines to revitalize the world instead of letting it remain stagnant. Every expansion.
Airship and Boat cruises that let us bask in the ambience of the game world instead of a fade to black scene.
Unlimit Limited jobs if there is no good reason to limit them.
Level sync should only scale stats and not lock out abilities.
Bring back Job Quests.
Gatherers want to hit rocks and trees and catch actual fish. Not click on the White Dot.
Update Chocobo systsem and Grand Company ranks.
Better story for the story driven MMO.
Give the game more funding instead of funneling it to other projects doomed to fail.
Would be a good start.
holy hell ive been saying this for years and felt like i was crazy for being the only one to see how bland the game is. yes its gotten worse and classes have become more homogenized over the years but these issues have ALWAYS been here.
You aren’t wrong about the main writer for DT, I think the part you are missing tho is that this is the first time he has been THE MAIN WRITER. Everything before this has been collaborated on and you can SMELL the difference between this and Pandaemonium. This is literally like George Lucas and Star Wars. The first trilogy (4,5,6) were great. Even if you aren’t a fan of Star Wars you can still admit they were fun. Back then everything was a collaborative effort. Then 1,2 & 3 came around, George had complete creative control and…well we know how that ended. That’s Dawntrail.
Durantes a voice needed and wanted. Great videos as always, this game really needs to innovate and change.
FFXIV's gear system is so ripe for tiered gearsets (2-piece, 5 piece, full set, etc.) It's such a shame they haven't done this already
I have a suggestion on the classes. If they’re worried about making things balanced then give us multiple types of combos. Bring back old skills and focus on the class identity. Give us enough skills that we have the ability to customize the skill bars.
If it’s a question on gear then make it so that the gear we have that works for our class then buffs those benefits as well. That way if you want to be a pseudo tank as a DPS then you can but you have to select the right skills. It would make the loadout bars that we have even more useful as we could make a class for each thing. Of course that doesn’t mean every class has to be able to do the same thing. Some classes could be a DPS and Healer or Healer and Tank, or DPS and Tank.
Though I would like to see more uniformed class identity. Not everything needs to be the same
I wish they could do something about how much harder high latency makes it to play well. Stuck playing cross-continent makes a bunch of jobs feel impossible due to the amount of dropped GCD from trying to weave OGCD. being informed there's mods that solve this problem reignited me about the issue
great points, wish people would have common sense and just know we want the best for the health of the game
Great video, your type of content is much need in FF14
The game really need more love
i think u been blowing up since the silent part of the game or a good bunch of it has similar grievances with the game
I agree heavily on the new blood, they dropped the ball with so many characters in DT, I like your idea of dissapearing for a bit and the Scions moving on, though considering its partially her obsession, Y'stola will likely come along, maybe Urianger. Both are the more wiser actually scholarly types of the Scions they'd be a boon for understanding whatever new realms we end up in with the maguffin chalice we got.
Suggestions on new blood for the source however, Julles should become a recurring character, the Garlean soldier who the twins befriended, whom went on to befriend Zero who also needs to come back at some point. I was OBSESSED with the role quests in Shadowbringers and the arc with potentially fixing the void, Unukalhai and Cyella needed more than a mere passing mention to Zero at the end and them getting some additional dialogue during the EW patches if you checked up on them. We shouldn't be done with the Void, even if its no longer gonna be the void in the long run.
Last time I was rhis early I hadn't spoke to Wuk Lamat yet
Watching this video to pass the time for this long queue time I have for DPS.
SBI is a major red flag. An even bigger issue is all the people simping over Tencent's mobile game.
If only the dev team wasn't so petrified of letting players make a 'wrong' choice with their job/playstyle. Alternate playstyles and rotations are removed as soon as possible, gear customization is simplified into nearly binary choices. The only class where you can make meaningful choices about it's build will forever stay 'limited' because the idea that someone could bring in that 'wrong' spell list into a queued duty terrifies the team.
There are loads of mmo's that make incredible use of skill trees, skill, or gear customization that borrowing from literally any of them would almost certainly make ff14 a more interesting game. If the game is going to forever have endless vertical progression, at least make it interesting. Or maybe it's high time they changed focus and went horizontal. Almost anything at this point would be an improvement! I know Yoshi P has stated they wanted to make job identity a more important focus in 8.0, but I have significant doubts. They make major changes to maybe three jobs per expac cycle, but all of them need work, and they have the money to do it.
Please name these mmo for me. When people say something like loads of mmos? I'm sry what mmos theres only like a few mmos worth talking about, wow/ff14/osrs/eso where are these loads of mmos poping off with all of these "choices". Players constantly talk about this idea of "choice" but for some reason those mmos are barely played so make it make sense please?
Going to a build site to find your M+ build isnt making a choice lmao. Guys the bdo site says to craft fallen god armor omg im making a choice.
@@XT91 'Only a few mmo's worth talking about'
Oh, so the only mmo's with any interesting or valid mechanical ideas are the ones with hundreds of thousands or millions of active players in the modern day? Not a single other mmo is worth talking about at all? Because that's a pretty asinine. The genre has had hundreds of games in it, and while only a few of them might be played by the majority of the mmo audience today that doesn't mean that there are no other games 'worth talking about.'
Tens of thousands of active players is not 'barely played.' There are plenty of second tier mmos that have a smaller, but healthy playerbase and lots of interesting ideas.
Oh, but you're not here to make honest discussion are you? You're here to make wild claims not even backed by your own examples. OSRS has huge diversity of choice in armor, weapons, and playstyle. People do seasonal runs, and challenge runs, and hardcore characters all the time because there's tons of way of playing the game different that are just as enjoyable. WoW has a long history with it's trait trees and gear where choices in your build mattered to fluctuating degrees. To point purely to modern and make the ass backwards claim that build diversity has been exactly the same throughout the game's entire history is so mind numbingly stupid, it really makes me question if you've even touched a single one of the games you're talking about.
Even your assertion that metaslave, min-maxed builds are the only 'valid' choice is so wildly up your own ass, it's incredible. Every game that has choice in build will ALWAYS have an 'optimal' loadout. That's just how the mechanic works in principle. If you have choices, one of those choices will lead to the highest damage. That does NOT mean that absolutely no other choice is a valid pick depending on individual skill, team comp, specific fight, or any number of other factors. I mean you don't even have to look beyond ff14 to see that's true. The SINGLE job in the game where you can choose your hotbar, and even in the metaslave spell loadouts, the last 2-6 spells lots are flex spots. Even on the likes of icy veins.
Choice matters. Period. Hard stop. No if, ands, or buts. Choice makes games more interesting, no mater where specifically it's found, and chucklefucks like you claiming that only metaslave builds matter only drag down the conversation FF14 is so badly in need of. Now get the fuck out of my sight.
@@emeraldguy10 Yea not another mmo is worth talking about I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that people want these things when they don't uplift none of these mmos in this category. So imma just treat it as the shallow platitudes that it is. I didn't assert anything I said the idea that people care about choice is just nonsense. If you want me to care ever about this point do make one of these mmos pop off more than the 30 days when it launch.
OSRS the one exception does not make the rule. And I only point to modern retail wow cause again that's the only version that matters. That's why I don't talk in abstracts like back in my day in EQ we like this and this. Cause no one gives a shit about EQ in 1999 in 2025. There are only a few mmos worth talking about and I hope square doesn't listen to people who thinks some unknown mmo with 5k people who can pick between option 1 or option 2 when making a irrelevant skill choice is some kind of profound game design.
The problem is that SE only listens to sweaty raiders and will balance everything into the ground. The game is unbelievably stagnant but at least we're getting another Ultimate that the vast majority doesn't care about.
I love ya videos dude , please make more of them when ya can .❤
I can deal with a shit story, for me it's a one and done and I'll never look back on it. What I can't deal with is the lack of anything of substantial worth to do outside of raiding. When you've gotten the bosses down on farm it's over relatively quickly, what is there to do outside of that? Maps? Hunt Trains? Hunt Trains are brain dead boring content, and Maps I will give credit because they're just fun fuck around have some beers content with the FC but even that only lasts so long.
Why aren't they releasing at least step one of the relic weapons on expansion launch? Why is it that we're having to wait 8-10 months to get anything outside of the normal routine content in this expansion? You should be launching a new expansion with at least one of the new things Shades Triangle, Cosmic Exploration, etc.
I really liked that you got relics with tomestones, I could finally get a relic weapon, I'll never get to get any others because of their horrendous grind. Bozja grinding is miserable when you join late, nobody ever wants to run events in the first part of the zone, you know, the only one you have access to, so you can't even progress when joining on your own. Still, SE is terrible with changing and simplifying the game, seeming to only listen to a very tiny minority. Someone went digging to find anyone complaining about a specific skill change once and only found one post about it, yet somehow SE thought that's enough to change how a class works, it's crazy.
Watching some videos on the game's history, there used to be way more complexity to classes, what we have now is so samey and all for the sake of savage/unreal balance, the content that maybe 1% of the playerbase engages in. It'd be really cool if classes were less balanced and more actually fun and unique. It's good for things to be overpowered, if every class is overpowered in some way, that is also a kind of balance and you get fun out of it. Actually having builds would be great too.
9:20 Secret World Legends has a healing-tank-DPS triangle where you can manually adjust your stat distribution within it at any point, which means you can have a healer spec and swap to full DPS distribution to easily clear mobs in the open world, or a balance of DPS-tank to go through the story without spending ages killing things.
The gear grind is both tedious and pointless, your stat totals grow higher with your levels and gear stats which translates to you never feeling stronger, you can never get 50% crit chance, not even close, and materia barely makes a difference unless you only go for one stat, and even then the increase is tiny (I like crit chance, for healer crit barriers).
My only problem with Bozja was the field note drop rates. I'm a huge FFXII fan, so I wanted the mount from gathering all of them. The grind for it was so painful. I sat for 4 days waiting on the one fate that dropped the last note I needed.to drop the damn thing.
I think the two things that need to change most is CBU3's fear of letting players fail during early game and leveling and the community's need to optimize the fun out of the game. Until the world feels dangerous, it'll continue to be boring. People are going to to continue to be crap at their jobs until you force them to have to use more of their buttons while leveling. Good games give you situations early on to use the abilities as you get them so you gain familiarity with them as you grow. FFXIV does a poor job of this because you can get through the vast majority of the story content spamming 3-4 buttons on each class.
To the second point, it won't matter if CBU3 gives players build choice if the community is so against anyone using anything outside of the optimal one. I always played with a friend who was an Astro main from it's release onwards. There were numerous times where people refused to play through dungeons with us because he was "in the wrong sect" back when there were 2 astro stances. It's not that he wasn't keeping everyone alive, he had no issue with that. It was because it wasn't the "correct" way to play. Until you beat the need to optimize out of the community's head, there will never be any options no matter how many you offer. It's the very reason everything is so streamlined in the game.
Also, you got Wuk Lamat as a new character...... do you really want more new characters? 🤣
They can't add more roulettes since they forgot how to code it. The only reasonable explanation for how no new content gets a roulette. Criterion/Variant. Crystal Conflict. I truly believe they can't figure out how to add additional menu items in for roulette duty finder.
Class customization + more interesting stats on gear would be so awesome! They treat players like lazy/dumb sheeps
I want to see relic armor that you have to work for. Maybe not be as hardcore as GW2's legendary sets - although never having to work for armor ever again is nice; this only works with a game with horizontal progression, and FFXIV is vertical - but something where it's not just handed to you. I want another ARR relic quest for gear - just...maybe without the books.
I want syncing to be like in WoW where, once you unlock a skill, you keep it no matter what level you get dropped to. Square should just sync the potency of skills, not take them away. I'd be fine with Sastasha twice a week if I could do my entire fking rotation. That way we'd also LOOK as impressive as our lvl100 selves, and give the sprouts something to be in awe of.
I'm not a big fan of skill-trees because we will inevitably get shoe-horned into the BiS path if we want to be allowed to go into certain endgame content. It would definitely be nice to have some more class identity though. DRK, for example, had a neat bit with Dark Mind being resistance against magic attacks...that could've been cool, if anything in savage hit with magic. Maybe what they could do instead is create something like WoW's spec-trees, where - for example - tanks could choose between higher health pools, better damage mitigation, or better party defense. Healers could pick whether they were shield, regen, or pure healer (like how Astro used to have sects.) DPS could pick DoT management, glass-cannon, or balanced. Ranged could prioritize being support-minded or selfish-dps. Casters could even have a bit where they can pick between being straight-up DPS-spec'd or being debuff-bots (making mobs more vulnerable) or even heal-support, and maybe even giving them pets/minions to manage; SMN, for example, could switch between being a 'summon egi to do a big ouch at once' and 'summon one kind of egi to stick around' and there'd be egi better for bosses vs. trash, and you could freely swap between them.
There could also be a system like what EverQuest has where you can supplement yourself with (literally) THOUSANDS of alternate-ability points where you can gain everything from cool skins, crafting buffs, being able to hold your breath under water better, reduced rez-sickness times, once-a-day or even once-a-week personal buffs that help you in the overworld, etc.
Something else GW2 did that I thought was really cool was making certain mounts available only after a massive time-sink unlock-quest. Having to work as hard as I did to get the goddamn Skyscale in PoF was a TRIUMPH and I loved it. Mounts also have skill trees of their own to unlock, and this could incentivize activity in old-world content.
i loved your channel since the zodiark video, keep it dude! i love your views! ive been wanting more interesting gear since ARR, but and the balancing stuff i understand, but there's no sense of any sort of "build" outside of gcd and crit stat. it's so bad. give me a gear set that gives me sharpcast back bro.... my old thunder... pwease....
If Square changed the gearing setup in the way you described to give players more agency and options in their builds, wouldn't the community still just min/max the "best" build making it into the meta build for each job? Then everyone would aim for that build and ignore the other options because it would make their contribution in a fight "lesser" if they didn't. Party finders would then be set up for high end content that prohibit entry to jobs unless they have followed a specific build set up that gives maximum potency. Even now if you don't know and execute your job's SPECIFIC opener and rotation well enough in a fight, other players will be upset with you! Am I missing something here?
This will happen on the highest level, but I don't think it's going to be that bad with casuals (unless they also add timed fights or smth). Look at how it works in wow - low mythic keys, low rating pvp, lfr/normal pretty much require you only showing up, and at least in my experience parties are not that difficult to find (would be even easier if wow didn't push competitive crap so much, but whatever). And wow's community is MUCH less accepting in general. Most people wouldn't care about minmaxing, they already don't.
@xviii5780 I'm a casual and I would still want the best build I could get. Even now, I have started using Pictomancer, not because it is my favourite job to play, but because it does the most damage.
Rather than restructure job builds/balancing I would much rather they overhaul the UI and introduce some modern quality of life features.
(Also, I enjoyed Hildebrand and would like to play more of that content - please don't attack me...)
No. Some people would do that but 90% would wear nonsensical combinations that do nothing of value.
It's not a coincidence that since they hired a DEI consultant for the english version, this expansion is so hated.
They need to replace that pink haired activist as their lead eng localizer and her terrible voice acting friend Sena Bryer.
While it sounds cool to have custom varied builds for a class, the issue is when it comes to raiding there will be a "meta" and a best in slot build. If someone wanted to play around with a non -meta build in pf they would instantly be kicked. Lost Ark is varied like this and people deliberately check player's build before allowing them into a party, and if their gear isn't meta or near best in slot they are denied entry to the parties.
This is indeed the case in many games but it does not systematically lock you out of higher lvl content if you can switch between builds easily. Gw2 did that for example, so long as you had certain skills unlocked it Costa you nothing to switch between builds, so you could play your class the way you wanted solo, and switch to a meta build for raids.
All guilds/FCs are also quite casual and still do high end duty (slower, with some wipes, but they do and they have fun), and they might be open to non-meta build (I rather hope so anyway)
Who cares what the raid scene's metaslaves specifically want in their builds? There's always going to be people like that. Hell, there are people like that today int he game over gear combination and meteria slotting even though ilevel is 98% of your damage cap in ff14. If we continue to pretend that what is always the most toxic part of every mmo community are the ones we should cater the entire game to, you get modern ff14.
There are other aspects of the game. There is content other than savage raids and Ultimates. Why can't we have '''''wrong'''' choices there? Why can't we be allowed to make the non-optimal choice in the first place? Why can't there be more niche build options for other content?
The thing that got me to finally unsub was how much the community in general has gone downhill in the last few years. I'm not sure the cause, or if it's maybe just my DC, but people have just stopped talking in duties, or are just downright toxic. I'd be curious to see if anyone else has noticed this?
I have but I noticed the change when they included Xbox players. I’m not trying to out all of Xbox here, but I will say the change was very noticeable when that happened
The first step to improving FFXIV is to fire Yoshi-P.
I despised Hildibrand. Now that it is required content I will never do it again on my alts
For real. I absolutely abhor Hildebrand stuff, but sadly people seem to enjoy it 🤷♀️
Lol i like hildebrand but I have to agree with this....its the same problem with crystal tower.
I would have no problem with the earlier roulettes, if the content in them were the same difficulty as they were on release. Or at least a little closer. We shouldn't be finishing bosses in 30 seconds. I don't care how long ago the content was released. When I was still raiding, I started only doing expert roulette and then logging off until raid time. The rest of them aren't worth it, and are more likely to put me to sleep.
Also Monster Hunter Wilds out here making XIV's character creator look like picking out your favorite m&m color.
Zenos should have been our vegeta
Dawntrail needs a Link's Awakening Retcon or make Woke Lamat some fragment of a new Universal threat that shows its true colors/ Reality bending power when you refuse her "fantasy" (FF9 Final Boss theme queues here)
Hear me out
If you're going to have an MMO and you want it to have staying power with the fly by night crowd who will NEVER raid or do anything beyond the easy stuff put out the expansion relevant MMO grind content shit out FIRST
As a raider, I can hold my tears in while waiting for the next ultimate or whatever
Destiny 2 has the same problem: they're so focused on raids, because raiders are loud and do the hardest content, that the company forgets that most people don't raid and never will.
The best way to improve it, it's by downloading wow and playing that instead 😊
The msq should get harder the further in. I’m been playing for a year and a half and it’s so nice that dt was “tougher” I’m into raiding now and so tired of the east duty dungeons
I'd love to see something like a "Automatic" and "manual" mode for the classes and skills. We could have a button that changes the modes. Automatic would work like Viper's skills and like how the 1 2 3s work in PvP. Just a single button for the casual players square is catering to.
Meanwhile, manual mode would have you press all the buttons for your rotation. They could also give a potency bouns as a reward for learning your classes. So if you want to go into end game content like ultimates savage or chaotic raids you have to learn your buttons. Add some more skills as another bonus for learning your class.
Yes! Separate the “High Level” dungeons 🙄
If they double downed on Hildibrand quest line. Why the fk is it not fully VAed. Like the hildi story is fun but do they actually think people enjoy mimes? I guess they can pull out the insufficient resources card just like they always did. Also them claiming this game as a story base game while not fully VAed the MSQ is such a joke. Pissed me the fk out when the incompetent team give that pity same excuse every single time.
As far as we can praise Shadowbringers it was the moment when the downfall of 14 started, they oversimplified crafting turning it into full automation task. They also added craftable items into chests obtained while questing making the crafters even more useless.
They added Bozja that fixed some issues of Eureka but removed the social part and this is why now Bozja is a desert while Eureka is still a social event where people go and have time to chat while grinding.
Also to fix the limit of buttons on Controller they removed many skills killing Dark Knight and Scholar, the last one was my main since ARR and become unrecognizable that i did not manage to use it anymore and never went back except to quickly level it and forget it until next expansion. Having also leveled over the years all teh classes i can see that they are all the same role wise, i position the same skills in the same positions of the bars and even though animations are different the results are the same.
Diadem was fully reconstructed having become useless but in a way that become another dead content out of very many and it is mostly the playground for bots. The issue is that each content has a quick end and is never renewed even if it is there.
Since then slowly the game more repetitive and a packaged experience instead of something new, now tehy are also adding contents slowly and bit by bit over 4,5 months and all those contents get exhausted in a very short time making them useless and forgettable.
I totally agree also with you that roulette format has to be split in parts and with all the new classes more options to leveling and rewards should be present. Running the same leveling dungeons even those of the newest expansion over and over again to reach the level cap of every class makes them feel annoying at some point rather than challenging.
One more thing is also that some features added seem to be completely thrown in the game with no rational thinking. They added the crafting tree but that one that should help to find the materials to craft in retainers and FC Chest close down as soon as you open a retainer or the chest and you need to reopen them finding again the item you wanted to craft.
The book of Khloe they could have added a button to open directly the window of the required duty and not open another window and search everywhere.
Tehre are just two examples of things that could be fixed to add quality of life indead ot making the game just a billion of mouse move and click when really not needed.
There is so much more to add but it seems that even the little things are not taken in consideration since too long that starting with little would already seem an improvement.
Like ONEPUNCHMAN, FF14 needs a rewrite......😢or maybe three....
They are extremely reactive to people who are not enjoying difficult or time drains so they nerf it.
Completely dropped the ball with working with DEI companies also.
Gmes just gone to absolute shit with dawntrail.. hopefully they fix all this but i doubt it yoshi P is tone deaf as fuck
Stormblood is OBJECTIVELY the best FF14 expansion, hate or love the story but the overall PACKAGE from 4.0-4.5 has been super elite. Zenos and Tsukoyomi as our villains were dope (I miss Zenos), the MSQ trials, the 4 lords raids, the Omega raids, Eureka, HoH, god damn IVALICE (best alliance till this day) post patch MSQ story (buildup to SHB was FIRE!), job uniqueness, interesting dungeons and locales, a fun yet challenging learning curve for all that content. My best time has definitely been during Stormblood, I saw the cracks in SHB and EW exposed the stagnation of 14. DT just killed me off and I unsubbed.
Improving class system is no1 that will reattract my attention to game again. Like
And honestly i don't care if it broke raid system. I mean, people would be min-maxing and parsing always, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't have unusal and/or fun abilites and talents (and gear set bonuses), for example like "mind controlling" of Shadow Priest from WoW
Then try to add more open world content and/or redo hunt system
This way game will roll up back on a hill even with mediocre story i believe
Heck, FFXIV DID have good and optional abilites (like choosed talents) for example for Black Mage, when you could flow your mana to heals in StB
This kinda shows how just 1 button could've, in theory, tip the scales to choose which job you will bring on your raid
My sub is running out soon and I will watch the MSQ on a stream to decide, if I go back or wait until 7.3 or 7.4 to see changes to the writing (since it's written in stone so far).
I hope they fired the writers and everyone involved in this garbage.
If the story had been on Heavensward-level, I would not care about the gameplay issues.
Theres definitely a problem with the game but i also dont think players know whats best i definitely dont miss old school mmo design. Can it be more interesting than now? Yes but it can also be more annoying too. I dont miss cleric stance. I dont miss kaitin. I dont miss needing ninja for smoke bomb.
No for the game to be better they have to listen less to players and be inspired to do things on their own.
Otherwise this push and pull with casual vs hardcore will constantly continue. Job homogenization will go back and forth.
Optimization will always make sets obsolete anyways.
Most of party finder cannot even handle of jobs got harder😂 they can barely play theor jobs now
Okay one thing right off the bat: you ain't getting talents in FF14. They're an impossible to balance nightmare in MMOs and the bane of WoW designers' existence. Get that out of your head.
Like in your own example, literally anybody who doesn't pick the max DPS talent build for Samurai is getting tossed out of raids. I know you're just a FF14 guy but this has been a thing in MMOs for literal decades, you should ideally present ideas that aren't a Torment Nexus for everybody involved
Damn really hard to take anything you say seriously anymore for even entertaining that stuff like sweet baby is a factor in 14's backslide.
Right, because nothing else was covered in this video 🙄🙄
I know how to improve the experience… Play another game. 🤣 FFVII on PC, nice interlude.
yawn, what a stupid comment, the job of a business is to retain customers, saying go play something else only hinders 14 since it relies on subs. Now Yoshi is saying STAY lol so your "take a break" shtick is dead.
Wait... wait wait wait wait wait... people are blaming Sweet Baby Inc as a part of the problem?
Just... no.
Look, I get that there's a subsection of the gaming community that is looking for any opportunity to blame that consulting firm for all of gaming's woes. Heck, some of that criticism might even be warranted...
... but not at Square. We're talking about a gaming company that effectively shut itself off from the rest of the global market that only deals with developers (and consultants) who speak Japanese. To suggest that some random, small time consulting firm is influencing these kinds of decisions is ludicrous. Square has no reason to speak to them, and in many cases, has no *means* of speaking to them because of the language barrier. They won't even hire people onto their staff who don't speak Japanese fluently.
Otherwise... yeah, your videos have a lot of great points. This one is no exception.
But yes, Eureka 2. NORMIES, BEGONE! DEGENS, BURN!
You're not going to get SE to make the game the way you want it. You're better off finding the game you want to play. That was what ultimately made me quit FFXIV for good.
Sweet Baby mentioned. Gotta throw the whole video away now. Ya'll be acting like this one VERY small company is singlehandedly destroying the games industry. Just be a bigot bro. Can't take ya'll seriously at all.
Right because that’s the ONLY thing mentioned in this video 🙄🙄🙄
First
Oh it's a sweet baby inc complainer ok. Fake video
Right, because there’s nothing else this video covers 🙄
Bye agent
Ew. I liked the video right up until you started whining about Sweet Baby Inc and trashing on Dawntrail like it's a 4chan post.
Unfortunately a vast majority of players agree that DT is one of the absolute worst expansions they’ve ever played. SBI is a problem though and I’d personally like to see less of their involvement in developing games that we love.
go cry elsewhere then, it's clear Square were using SBI and it hindered their profits.
@VantaBlack216
I dunno who you're talking to I'll talk about it right here. Yall are a bunch of children not knowing a damn thing about the situation.
@ SBI didn't flop several games in a row! Nope! Nothing to see here! /s
@@Onii_Chan_Kenobifree hint kiddo: doing that "y'all" thing just outs you as an out of touch Twitter scold. It doesn't make you sound folksy or sensible, it just makes people wonder if your Manic Panic dye job is blue, purple, or hot pink.
Funny a lot of the stuff you ask for is what FF11 had and I’m sure this was originally going to have as the same producer had worked on both(1.0) but because of the ambition and lack of console power he was forced to retire. We had the merit points system, when you hit the original cap you could have the exp go towards points to specialize your class which was stuff like lower countdowns on certain skills or even new abilities you wouldn’t get just from leveling. A lot of the game was meant to be grindy just like the old one but a huge majority of the original player base grew up and no long have a he free time like when they were in HS or college. I think it really dumbed down because the loudest were those who didn’t like it, which is why no one who liked the set ups for classes saw it coming, they were too busy playing the game to be on a forum seeing the complaints. A lot of people couldn’t play 1.0 because the PC requirements were high for the time, most of my friends only switch from 11 when AAR dropped on ps3.