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Players who enjoy Final Fantasy XIV for it's position as a less stressful MMO experience may be surprised to hear that game director Naoki Yoshida (otherwise known as Yoshi-P) has expressed regrets over making the game so comfortable over the years.
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mmorpg junkie since 1999
I don't think changing it back would ever go well with the playerbase now though, as much as a subset of us wish it.. especially the folk who were 1.0 survivors. Maybe rolling things back to how they were in Stormblood but without TP and keeping the QoL skill changes (like AoE at low levels).
Maybe a "classic" version of FFXIV could exist one day. A 1.0 server for those of us who miss (or missed) it is my dream; private servers are still pretty much just a sightseeing experience.
Yoshi-P said that he regreted not taking challenge into account and that there are parts of the game that feel like are platformers without holes. And then goes on to say that this isn't a very fair experience to players because while some content may feel too easy, engaging with more of the game presents larger and more difficult challenges that at times then feel very different and unfairly difficult.
And its true. Theres difficulty spikes like crazy all through the game.
But Yoshi-P said his issue was with not preparing the player for those difficulties, not that there isn't any. And going forward he wanted to introduce a way to better prepare players for challenges that lay ahead
You are confusing FFXIV with Phantasy Star Online 2 NGS.
The game got too unchallenging because it was PLAYERS who kept complaining the game was "too hard" and SE listened to them. The same mistake that Blizzard made for WoW. I mostly did PvP in FFXIV and players on my datacenter kept complaining about how hard it was to beat me and my team. We were essentially just farming the server for points and not too long after, abilities got nerfed, Wolves Den arena became a joke and Frontlines was an "everyone gets a trophy" free for all.
Not too long after, me and ally friends quit FFXIV because it was no longer challenging because they took all of it away to make it an even playing field for everyone else.
I saw this coming a million miles away and I was just a player. I find it weird how Yoshi P didn't. As an Astrologian would say, it was in the cards.
Agreed. I don't see it as difficulty, but mostly just convoluted than containing any real difficulty. Every fight is like a game of Simon Says. Cone on the ground, move for a cleave. Arrow on someone's head, stack on them to distribute the damage. Every boss has the same indicators to let you know of an incoming ability. Now pile about a dozen different mechanics like that onto one boss and they call that "difficulty". Don't move in time or do what the indicator says, you take damage and a debuff and/or die. Same thing over and over. Every boss.
I came from WoW where nothing was marked and you had to look at the boss and notice its movements, or have a timer, to know which mechanic was incoming next. And even then it was only sometimes. I always shunned FFXIV for those boss move indicators because they made things too easy.
Uh ok, why the plug? If I may add, the music is what I also find memoriable. Very few games I care about the music, but some of the Final Fantasy games just have wonderful music. Another JRPG that had music I remember is LUnar, and Lunar2. There has never been a better JRPG, in my opinion. It covers everything from likeable characters to finding the robe of eyes in a weird ancient dungeon.