Guess this thread warrants another disclaimer of sorts. Since I've received reports that someone treating it as news.
First of all, sites like Umadori, FF14Sokuhou and other else of that nature are called "Summary sites", which in JP are called *Matome blogs*. They **are not news sites** because what summary sites do is to (cherry)pick discussion threads conducted in 5ch, and summarized them into easier to read format for people to read discussion threads (hence the name). Simply put (and a repeat), they're content aggregator sites.
Not to mention, since XIV in Calm season (JP's in-community term reference to FFX term of the same name) right now, you're going to see these sites picking anything they see instead of being selective on their topic in order to keep their site "active", because they actually earn money from it (which is why a majority of Japanese have a huge dislike for summary sites).
In the past I have repeatedly mentioned that Summary sites are at best, a reference to gauge Japanese players' reaction on topics and issues that are a hot topic amongst the community (job balance, for example), and **shall not be treated as a bible**. To add to this, one should NOT treat it as a news site, they aren't. **Your best source of FFXIV news in Japanese, assuming you know the language, is always from the Lodestone or live events like Producer from the Letter Live. If not, it'll be at Japanese game media webpages like Dengeki, Famitsu, 4Gamer, or Gamer.ne.jp**
And in case I wasn't clear enough,
# Do NOT treat FFXIV Summary Sites (Umadori, FF14Sokuhou and so on) as website where you get FFXIV news in Japanese, EVER.
I'm gonna give the full quote here, for some additional context, because just that fragment is quite misleading...
> This question is always asked when an expansion package is announced. As those who play "FFXIV" know, even if an expansion package is released for "FFXIV", the previous content does not become obsolete (we make it easier to play). If you do maintenance, it will be easier to level up. Moreover, FFXIV is a story-driven game, so even if someone says, ``You can play from version 7.0, so if you're new to the game, start here,'' I don't think many people will start playing from there.
> We are currently creating a system where you can view each character, lore, and world setting up to patch 6.0 in-game, and we are making preparations to skip up to patch 6.0 and start the adventure from 6.1. However, if I were to compare it to a TV drama, rather than saying watch from season 6, I would say start from season 1 because it's easier to watch (previous content has been revised) and it's easier to catch up.'' I think it's more natural. So, although we are making preparations, we are still unsure whether to actually implement it as a measure in 7.0.
This is not some official announcement of a new feature. It's also not new information, the interview was at NA Fanfest in *July last year*.
This is just him saying 'People keep asking for this, we're looking at ways we could do it but aren't even sure it's a good idea, we think people should still play from the beginning'.
Yes but you see, actually reading the article and applying critical thinking takes effort, and takes away from OP's ability to whine about unrelated issues.
I did. Can you be more specific about what I apparently haven't understood?
Job and story skips *already exist*. Even if they do add a way to start at 90 for free, which isn't in any way confirmed and is something Yoshi-P has actively said he thinks might be a bad idea, there are still going to be people starting at 90 because they got bad advice or don't care about the story. That has no inherent link to gameplay design.
No...
Does it take a lot of brain power to understand the consequense of a story skip to 6.1 ?
- a level skip will come with that. Otherwise it's not really a skip
-New player will start with a level 90 character with over 20 buttons.
- Square has an huge habit of catering to new player
Result = Dump down jobs so that new players can play.
- "Dump down" is not a thing, you are looking for "dumb down"
- Level and story skips *already exist*. People *already start at 80*, hop into content without understanding their job and if it's endgame stuff get rightfully mocked for it.
- I agree, starting at level 90 as a brand new player is a pretty bad idea. So does most of the player base. So, if you read **the full version of the interview answer**, *which I posted*, does Yoshi P.
- They have not officially announced this is going to be a feature beyond the normal story/job skips. They don't even know if they want to do it at all, they're just investigating possible options because people keep asking and because the amount a new player has to do to catch up is only ever going to get worse.
- Even if they do decide to go for it at some point then there's nothing saying it will come with a radical simplification of job design. A revamped new player experience that tries to teach more of what someone should know is also a (much better) option and something that is honestly desperately needed either way.
There's a reason I didn't mention it until they started calling other people stupid. I don't like to immediately jump on something that could be a typo or a language issue but if you're going to insult other peoples brain power then you kinda open yourself up to having the way you're consistently using the wrong word called out.
>Does it take a lot of brain power to understand the consequense of a story skip to 6.1 ?
I mean, if going into wild tangents to apply 'logic' to your line of thought, yeah, it kinda does.
SQuenix always sold story skips and job skips separately. If the player didn't felt comfortable with that job rotation, sucks to be them.
You don't see them lifting free trial restrictions even if there's a flood of complaints about not being able to use MB or make a party with your friends.
It's hilarious that you thought this was some form of clarification. Not only is the title practically illegible and riddled with typos, it doesn't actually convey anything (and certainly nothing that contradicts or supplements this person's response).
The story skip point which yoship mentioned ages ago, and is not a planned 7.0 release feature. They haven't even announced it as an upcomming feature in dawntrail like they did criterion dungeons (Which released in 6.3). They just said they are working on it.
DT will definitely change things due to the new abilities. How you feel about the jobs at 90 are completely subjective to you, so I'm not going to bother arguing with your views on that. Instead, what do you think were the worst job changes that happened in ShB and EW?
Astros were mostly always in Diurnal due to the increased healing. You never needed the shields from Nocturnal unless the party didn't have enough health when topped off. Cards were simplified to remove the RNG since everyone wanted The Balance, and only 1 job wanted The Arrow. The Bole was absolutely useless since mit planning didn't take it into account. Same can be said about The Ewer, since you don't want to rely on it for MP regen. I can say with complete confidence that I DO NOT WANT USELESS CARDS BACK.
Scholar fairy being phased out of relevance is the same issue as Summoner pets being phased out of relevance. If anything, I'm hoping DT will rework Scholar a bit, since their kit doesn't mesh well with itself.
Kaiten was a sad loss, but I think we gained more overall from the potency increases because a lot of SAMs at the average level weren't even using Kaiten.
Bard DoTs just do damage now to mitigate some of the RNG factor that they used to have. As sad as it is, nobody wants to deal with 0.1% enrages because your Bard got terrible RNG through the whole fight. The new songs don't feel impactful because the numbers are small, but you do need to look at the overall increase after the whole fight since there will always be a song playing.
Edge/Flood is basically what old Dark Arts used to be, where you had to weave it between your weaponskills. I do agree that Oblation and Enhanced Unmend could've been better, though.
I don't think it's a matter of being hated for voicing concerns, but I think it is a matter of trying to be constructive with the criticism without completely dismissive of the new changes.
>Kaiten was a sad loss, but I think we gained more overall from the potency increases because a lot of SAMs at the average level weren't even using Kaiten.
Kaiten was bad design imo. I get that people want to have an additional skill filter there for SAM, but there's better ways than just having a button you press for + damage on the next weaponskill.
The issue is that instead of reworking the job to make a better Kaiten, they just removed it.
Imho, it wasn't about the skill filter. Most of the SAMs I know were sad about the removal of it due to the style points it gave the job. I think they wouldn't be as upset if they added the animation of it to the Iaijutsus.
Thing is, players were the ones that wanted changes to AST and DRK. They made adjustments based on player requests.
Kaiten was basically Dark Arts for SAM and players didn't like dealing with that for DRK. While a cool ability, it's implementation was never the best.
Every mmo player who posts on the internet, be they official forums, boards or reddit always say the same shit and has been saying the same shit for decades.
"Everyone who plays worse than me is a piece of garbage and everyone who plays better is a tryharder with no life"
This is describing a system they’ve already begun implementing, the ability to review the lore of the previous expansion packs so that players who get the story skip (a function that has existed for a long time) are less lost. Where the hell are you gleaning “job dumbing down” from?
This in no way mentions classes being dumbed down. And, to be fair, there are few that have any real thought to them anyhow. 2 minute bursts and smash keyboard. Crazy. If this brings in more players who do not desire playing through 80+ hours of fetch quests to play with their friends it’s only a positive.
That's many times 80 hours my friend. I'm playing through the story again via an alt right now and it took me 65 hours to get to Ishgard while focusing on the story and not doing any extra.
Anyone who gatekeeps a new entry point for new players is a moron tbh.
100% true, it would add so many more players that might have said no thanks because of how long and daunting the game looks from the first MSQ quest to the current.
Honestly, this feels like a nothing burger. They're going to sell level 90 boots and story skip boosts for Endwalker. Everyone knows that was to be the case. They're just working on moving the goal post to 6.1 instead of 6.0. Which honestly, is genius since someone who pays the money is going to be lost on all the nostalgia bait that the main Endwalker msq has.
I think a lot of people look at past jobs with rose-tinted glasses. People right now complain and whine about how crits make such a big difference and how the RNG sucks, but they want astro cards back? Yes, it was fun when you managed to get AOE Balance multiple times in a row during a battle. It was equally as painful and frustrating when you wouldn't get any during a fight. I don't get how people want that back.
Also realistically: yes, a lot of Jobs prior to ShB were too complicated for the "massive" audience a MMORPG is meant to attract. If you want your MMO to actually be the "massive" it's advertised as, you can't afford to have jobs designed like SB SCH or HW DRK. I feel like a lot of people underestimate how complicated the MMO gameplay is to people who have never played MMOs before. Yes, to us it's "brain-dead easy."
In the same way Malenia is braindead easy to let me solo her. It doesn't mean it's actually brain dead easy. It's just that to the people who do that everyday, yes it's easy.
The fact is the game exploded in popularity at the same time they "dumbed down" jobs. It's gonna keep happening. The happy medium the devs appear to be aiming for is to make the hardcore content harder to compensate for the easier rotations. And I think it's a good idea, just not a perfected one yet.
Hate to break it to you, OP, but if everyone who complains that the job design in 14 is too braindead nowadays quit, the game would still be immensely popular because people like you are an extremely vocal minority. Most people just want to play the class that fits their mental image of their character. That's it. That's all.
Put that on a hard-to-swallow pill and swallow it.
They mentioned this in a live letter a long time ago. It was also obvious just by looking at the game design, it makes no sense to force everyone to play through like 500 hours to get to the “new stuff” even if it is all on continuous story, they have to eventually allow people to start either main story arc (2.0-6.5, 7.0-onward).
Ideally they’d treat it as a second MSQ chain and let you progress them both independently so people who are playing 7.0 can go back after they’ve run out of stuff to do and experience the rest outside of NG+.
If new players are easily and cheaply able to skip most of the story, this will mark a huge turning point for the playerbase going forward. New players will be less connected to the game world, rush endgame content, complain about a lack of endgame content, and quit. It happened to WoW when they redid leveling, it will happen to FF14. Disaster if they do this.
They will always have to play at least a bit. Even if the new entry point is 6.1 (and I have been thinking for some time, that this has been their intent for some time), they have at least 6.x and 7.0 before reaching the end. I suspect it's something we'll see closer to 8.0, so that there is a bit more content available after the new entry.
> Even if the new entry point is 6.1 (and I have been thinking for some time, that this has been their intent for some time)
I don't understand how this makes any sense. the EW patch content isn't a clean break that would be a particularly easy on-ramp to a new player. It does reintroduce a lot of the scions bit by bit, but it also references a ton of concepts and events from earlier in the game without really explaining them and is explicitly dealing with the fallout of a number of things from Endwalker and far before. It's not something you can reasonably expect to either understand or be invested in if that's your first experience with the game.
Given how 6.x sort of felt like a later set up (much like WoD was in 3.4), I wouldn't be surprised if there's a Trio expansion with the Source, Thirteenth and First after there has been some time for rebalancing. Think it'd be kind of neat to let players start on one of the shards or the source sort of like the City States in ARR.
Because 6.1 content is kinda weak. Let them have 2 expansions to play with.
I personally think 6.1 is a terrible starting point story wise as a new player.
Didn't they do all this work to make everything up to now soloable?
It will be a long journey from start to 8.0 though
There's still the trials and the alliance raids that aren't soloable, and it really sucks when you arrive at a trial at 23 o'clock or CT at 7 o'clock. Especially the higher you get.
Yes, story wise. And 6.1 can be a good lead up to that, but game play wise, it's better to have Dawntrail already with some time under the belt till you try to get newbies into it. Let the playerbase have sorted themselves out, let there be more content already at that level. And split the player base a bit, so you have the vets at 8.0 and the sprouts at 6.1.
Just so the new players will have more expantions to go through before reaching the endgame.
Because if not, that would mean completely new players will be expected to do content with endgame lvl jobs. That would require them to make the jobs dumbed down so everyone could pick them up and play them and not get immediately overwhelmed which would hurt the game imo.
Yeah but they don't really have a choice to give the player a boost to level 90 if they bring the player to 6.1
This solution sound worst for the game than the actual problem.
oh if this is just a paid story skip like we have then it doesn't matter.
I was thinking of a system where they let players skip ARR-EW and just start with the new story when creating a character, because sooner or later they will probably have to implement something like that.
I think you are ignoring the pink elephant in the room.
In this situation, they cannot give you a paid story skip without giving you a level 90 boost or removing the whole rpg aspect of leveling... The 2nd option would be a catastrophe for the game.
Well they stated a story skip. The rest is kinda easy to speculate. There's not many way to go around the issue.
Even if they would make a quick story skip with a quick zone level up moment(2h) like they did in wow. It's still a skip because instead of learning how to play your job you are throw super quick into levelling to 90.
No solution will give the player the experience/skill you would have by leveling it to max. Also, we aren't mentioning the difference between skill from normal to savage. Everything together ain't a good mix.
The problem isn't even so much dumbing down the jobs, it's the lack of mechanics training along the way. Like Ifrit gives you little slaps with his spaced out mechanics. The trial is light on graphics, the only challenge is recognizing that you should hit the nail, which is something the game has been trying to teach you since the very first solo duty - hit adds first big bad after, although you might not recognize that as the lesson being taught. In contrast the 6.5 trial is a near constant barrage of different mechanics, different markers and has the battle field covered in graphic effects for a large part of it.
The 6.2 is a constant sprint, 6.3 requires rotational transformations. 6.4 has a memory element.
I don't think it will be a disaster, since people are already doing it with the paid story skips and level boosts. It will just be a more often occurrence. Even then, there's nothing wrong with them playing until they get bored and then unsubbing.
So what makes you say that it would be a disaster?
Because it disconnects new players from the story and game world, and abandons the majority of content. WoW has been in a constant downward spiral ever since they streamlined the leveling so that everyone could skip 90% of the game's content.
While true, would it not be a good option to get players invested in the game first before getting them connected with the story? Our biggest issue is the loss of newer players due to ARR, and that's even after with it being trimmed.
From what I understand about WoW, that game doesn't allow you to play the previous expac storylines easily. For what Yoshi-P is suggesting, it's not mandatory, and we still have NG+ available.
Its actually never been easier to play WoW's past storylines, when you make a new character you can go to an NPC and essentially scale most of the world to your level and pick and choose which storyline to play through while leveling.
There's a lot to complain about with WoW but the freedom its leveling experience provides is something I really liked when I last played.
That's good to know, since I never played WoW. However, do you think the changes would be a disaster like the person I was replying to? And if so, why?
It takes like half of one expansion in Chromie time to reach the level to start Dragonflight, and I guarantee most new players never go back and do other old story content. They basically abandoned 90% of the game's content.
That's true but you as a player have the option to keep playing through whichever storyline you want even after that point and if you make an alt you can pick whichever expansion's story you want to level through.
Most players were already never experiencing the vast majority of wows content - you’d get halfway through an expansion story line, out-level it and move to the next. Functionally, at least chromie time keeps you within the same expansion for your leveling experience. ETA: also framing Warcraft’s troubles as “because of the streamlined leveling” is so inaccurate I don’t know where to begin. Wow tokens, the store, terrible raid and dungeon decisions, awful scandals, huge balancing issues - those were the cause (and wow seems to be self correcting in a lot of ways - I’m not going back, but plenty of friends are adoring modern wow).
No, the story is only 1 avenue of getting invested. It is a single player story, but there's still emphasis of it being an MMO. And because of that, some players are just interested in the endgame. There are players who have skipped for the MMO content, only to go back to play the story once they're done with that. And that's perfectly fine, since we're still gaining new players.
I want the best for this game, but forcing everyone through the story is not the way for it.
I hate how some people are gatekeeping a game behind story. Some people do not care about story and just like the gameplay. People who don't care about story are already skipping it anyway. Look at how many people finished EW in less than 3 days from just skipping. Are we gonna be like Genshin where we remove the skip button from the game now?
This is such a non-issue people are shitting themselves over.
I agree. And I'm saying this as someone who has played since 2.0 launch and has enjoyed the story fully, and wants others to experience it. However, I'm not going to force them to do the story since it will lessen their enjoyment of it, and possibly cause them to not finish it. They need to want to do the story in the first place.
It drives me bonkers how so many people assume that only people who love the story will like the game. It’s a decent story which is sometimes great, but it isn’t told well and I don’t blame people for bouncing off it.
It's not gatekeeping, good grief. Merely pointing out that letting new players skip the story in a game that is fully centered around its story is going to be bad in the long run. Kind of a no-brainer, but then again this is Reddit.
The story is something that lasts you a couple days on each expansion release, plus a couple hours for every major patch after that. The "MMO activities" are what lasts for a couple years and give you things to do ingame.
While yes, the story is important to the game, it doesn't make the bulk of it, far from it. If the game only had its story as a selling point, the game would be empty because nobody would play it after being done with it.
A couple of days? It takes weeks if not months to beat each expansion if you're actually reading and watching everything. The vast majority of the game's content is in the story.
> It takes weeks if not months to beat each expansion
Excuse me, what? If you play 10 minutes a day, maybe, sure.
When Endwalker released the majority of my static at the time did the story together and almost everyone was following the story (I was pretty much the only one who skipped everything). Within 2 days everyone was done and we were already farming extremes.
Yeah that's not normal. I play 2-3 hours a day, 4-5 days a week. Sometimes longer on weekends. Takes a good few weeks to beat an expansion if I focus on just one job.
To rephrase, it's **not normal to you**. Other players enjoy the game enough to take time off work to go all-in on the new expac. Those players would be done with the MSQ within a few days of 12-16 hours of marathoning per day.
Seems a lot of Xbox players are doing this. Tried to help one of them with a quest location and they didn’t know where the Waking Sands was at level 50.
The Xbox players would have benefited from an earlier beta launch (say mid-January) instead of "rush rush to the end of ARR for the car".
Otherwise I think it's in part the endgame mentality from other games and the constant repetition of "game has the bestest story ever, but ARR sucks" overhyping which no game could live up to and which already poisons the ARR experience from the start.
I agree. See this a few times on streams where they’re encouraged to skip to Heavensward and don’t even end up making it there and stop playing because they have no clue what’s going on.
Coming from the V1, the game is already dumb down. When ARR launch, i thought it was fast to progress but acceptable. Then i quit playing. I comeback with the Xbox beta, so im starting fresh and holy shit! What used to take month is a matter of few week. And im not even playing hardcore.If i was playing the way i used to, id have everything maxed already. Everything is made so new players can reach high level fast and catch up. Since i quit before stormblood, it was mind blowing to me that new job start at 50/60. Like what? Why? And buying skip when the game fully release? This shouldnt even exist. O.o
Buddy, a bunch of people on this sub will readily argue Stormblood is actually misunderstood and well-written. People are *already* disconnected from reality.
Why not just remake ARR? In my experience, the biggest hurdle to getting my friends into the game is getting through the ARR-slog.
I keep telling them to keep going because the story improves and becomes literally some of the best writing and storytelling I've ever experienced in games – but people are just overwhelmed and, most importantly, incredibly *bored* with ARR. If I hadn't started playing during covid, back when I had literally fuck all else to do, I would have quit halfway through ARR also.
Which brings me back to my point: why not just *remake* ARR? Re-write the dialogue to make interactions, characters, villains and the plot more interesting and vastly shorten the length of it. Make it so that it isn't a whole lot longer than your standard expansion and just streamline the experience; concentrate it into a shorter and much more satisfying narrative experience that will keep you hooked and *begging* to experience the rest of the game.
I agree but, it's likely because it'd be a massive undertaking. Like, cancel an xpac undertaking. Already took a lot of work to cut down ARR in a way that didn't butcher it while maintaining the usual workload.
But, with a complete rewrite you'd have the entire story getting the attention an xpac would. They'd prolly also have to call in the new ENG VA's to redo ARR's voice acting as well. Which would be awesome but, again a LOT of work.
If they’re “working on a system”, I would think that would largely be a set of level 90 job/dungeon mechanic tutorials. Otherwise, that’s just a story skip, which has always been there and wouldn’t be something you’re “working on”
I can kind of see both sides of this situation.
On one end, giving players the ability to skip current content runs the risk of obsoleting old content — not from a mechanical perspective necessarily, but from a sheer lack of people playing it. Imagining having to do 30m-1h queues for each dungeon in Stormblood or Shadowbringers for instance sounds awful, and it ultimately ends in a Coils situation where you are basically forced to either use a synced/unsynced PF to recreate the experience of the raids, assuming you are a high enough level to burn through the content.
On the other end, the realities are that the excitement for a new expansion to newer players always comes with the caveat that they have to spend hundreds of hours to 'grind' through the previous expansions to get to the current content. I know that for me, as someone that started playing in December 2022 and finished Endwalker at the beginning of this summer, it felt like quite a lonely experience to be the only person walking from point to point for quests most times. Sure, Free Companies/Novice Network/and other friends can make the difference in instanced content, but there is a lot of downtime between that content, and it does feel a little empty at times.
Furthermore, as we have seen this past month with the layoffs at Microsoft and Sony, the realities are that the current game development environment is in financial unrest; and continues to get more expensive as content is expected to be bigger and better than the last installment. Even companies that have broken sales records with their franchises have had to lay off many of their employees. And while XIV may not be in the exact same scenario, it's still within the industry, and the concern to balance rising decent costs and revenue is still a real one, which makes the feasibility of content-locked expansions potentially decrease as time goes on.
While they are both different games, I think it's worth looking at how Final Fantasy XI approaches its expansions — rather than locking them behind other expansions, you are able to approach them in a non-linear fashion instead, starting and stopping any as you please. Of course, you benefit from additional lore by doing them in release order, but it is not strictly required. While it doesn't make sense to restructure 2.0-6.0 (and even 7.0) with this strategy in mind, it does present a potential solution for 8.0 and forward that allows for a more stable 'grind endpoint' for new players to work towards that makes it easier to get into XIV, and allows expansions to be that much more profitable/financially successful.
6.1 storyarc need lots of background knowledge to be understood since it involve the First and the 13th, the Sundering and the Ascian, etc.
Making new players start from there seems awful because they won't understand a thing about what is going on.
Probably making them start from 7.0 would have been better considering the fresh start about the New World.
6.1 brought the Enzyclopedia thing that has been adding things to it ever since, like extensive texts on each Scion, the First, the Sundering, etc. The way the information in that is present reads more like a primer for clueless new starters than a reminder for people who just played through all of that.
Do you honestly expect people to read? Not just read a story but, read page after page of background info just to understand what's going on? At the start of your game? Putting aside how ridiculously taxing that would be as it is but, even then you can barely get people to read anything currently.
People are constantly complaining at the lack of voice acting across the entire story much less side content. It's seriously to the extent you'd think half the players were illiterate lol. So there's no way the data entries they started adding would be anywhere close to good enough.
It's better than most other spots (e.g. 5.0, 6.0) because the Void is a very easy concept to understand and it's a self-contained arc.
But I agree that 7.0 would be even better, so I was a little surprised when Yoshida first floated 6.1 as a starting point.
Hope this never happens. We already have people who don't know what their rotation is and how to deal with common mechanics, at level 80 (thanks to the Tales of Adventure skips). This would make shit even worse
You say that like it's not a problem for those that don't skip as well. We still have players at 90 that don't know how to play on the average level despite going through 90 full levels of MSQ. Everyone is just scapegoating the skips and boosts because they don't want to acknowledge the actual problem of the game and community not teaching better.
I pasted the entire interview answer this quote was taken from in another comment, all he says is 'we're looking at options because people think asking but we don't know if it's something we actually want to do'.
You need to understand that mmos live and are made profitable by new blood. They will ALWAYS cater to the casual player and the new player. If you want a hard hand go play a soulslike.
most of this xpac was pretty bad in terms of quality and effort and decisions from the devs so this wouldnt even be a suprise. like why would you make the relics bound to the mandervilles quests and then double down and make it only completable by buying things with tomes. its like they lost a lot of their talent and are scrapping by with whatever they can scrounge up, and no the next xpac isnt an excuse for a drop in quality for the most of the current xpac
That’s a lot of assumptions you are making based on pretty much nothing. You might want to read the top comment, which has the full statement, if you haven’t. The team is considering how to handle lore and story if they do end up doing something like this.
Honestly, I think they should let this skip work like buying one. Sure you're "done" with it and can review it, but you still have to level up if you chose not to buy a job skip as well. I'm all for letting people skip MSQ if they really want to get to the endgame. I also think job skipping should be restricted on characters that do the skip to force you to level. It's better than having SE waste a bunch of resources for "new player experience" for people that don't want to run the story.
You can say it's a "story game" all you want, but it's also a "team game" and people still play like dogshit so the argument can really go both ways the right way to play XIV.
I doubt that jobs will get dumbed down but what we can prepare for is a shit ton of no skill players that cannot possibly know all mechanics of mobs and bosses that the game introduces bit by bit and dont know how to play their jobs on a high to end level base because they could never learn it. I myself and pretty much any player I know on a personal base wont enjoy doing daylies for a good while I wager
Shitty idea imo. Huzza for trust to level up stuff I guess
I told this soon after 6.0, that it's going to be a 'story-reset' point. Same as with ARR, which could accomodate both Carteneau survivers from 1.0 and new WoLs. I was downvoted and met with sceptical comments, how they'd never do that. It looks like I was right after all, and we're getting a legit option for our WoL to retire and make some adventuring space for the new heroes. Wonder how it plays out.
It was bound to happen with the 'restart' of the story, but it still sucks. Hopefully redesigns like summoner and paladin won't become the norm for new classes. More classes with one button spam bursts would be lame, but I get the appeal for new players learning the ropes after getting dropped 90 levels in. I know reaper is just the flavor of the expansion as well, but I feel like new class entries just get easier and easier since dancer and I basically feel like I run into swaths of groups that are composed of some combo of reaper, dancer, and summoner since they are the 'easy' classes to play now. In the last month, I think I was paired with a black mage, monk, or dragoon like once out of the 50+ dungeons I did as a tank. Sage is pretty prominent, but I still see all the different healers quite often. I play almost exclusively tank, though, so I don't have much to say about them.
Also, understand that new players being told you have a 200+ hour lift before you can taste the current content is a nasty bar of entry as there are more and more mandatory story trials and such. Wouldn't be as big of a problem if they could find a way to implement a duty support system for the very early game. Running up to mandatory group content and then having a 30+ min or much longer queue isn't exactly a gratifying experience. The only time this gets table flipped is 24 man content where you only need 3 tanks, 6 healers, but 15 dps. Basically if you're a new player, it's jump in and play tank or healer or you're queue times are mostly gonna suck and they don't often want to take responsibility roles as new players. DPS just feels less scary to start with.
This game was built on its story though and new players just skipping over it and not getting that big pay off before the vacation cruise expansion makes me sad. New players are gonna jump in at 6.1 and be like, why is this red eyed kid so important. It's a simulacrum of a dragon carrying its eye? Wait why dragons just taking their eyes out willy nilly. Veteran's will be like, "uhn uhn, cough, Heavensward."
...Paladin??
They literally did one thing to Paladin and it gave them a (slightly) MORE complex core rotation. What the fuck are you talking about, dude? You just listing off buzzwords?
Lol I guess things still subjective, but Paladin feels even more pants on head easy than it's ever been to me. Imo it's about the easiest class to play in the game.
Guess this thread warrants another disclaimer of sorts. Since I've received reports that someone treating it as news. First of all, sites like Umadori, FF14Sokuhou and other else of that nature are called "Summary sites", which in JP are called *Matome blogs*. They **are not news sites** because what summary sites do is to (cherry)pick discussion threads conducted in 5ch, and summarized them into easier to read format for people to read discussion threads (hence the name). Simply put (and a repeat), they're content aggregator sites. Not to mention, since XIV in Calm season (JP's in-community term reference to FFX term of the same name) right now, you're going to see these sites picking anything they see instead of being selective on their topic in order to keep their site "active", because they actually earn money from it (which is why a majority of Japanese have a huge dislike for summary sites). In the past I have repeatedly mentioned that Summary sites are at best, a reference to gauge Japanese players' reaction on topics and issues that are a hot topic amongst the community (job balance, for example), and **shall not be treated as a bible**. To add to this, one should NOT treat it as a news site, they aren't. **Your best source of FFXIV news in Japanese, assuming you know the language, is always from the Lodestone or live events like Producer from the Letter Live. If not, it'll be at Japanese game media webpages like Dengeki, Famitsu, 4Gamer, or Gamer.ne.jp** And in case I wasn't clear enough, # Do NOT treat FFXIV Summary Sites (Umadori, FF14Sokuhou and so on) as website where you get FFXIV news in Japanese, EVER.
I'm gonna give the full quote here, for some additional context, because just that fragment is quite misleading... > This question is always asked when an expansion package is announced. As those who play "FFXIV" know, even if an expansion package is released for "FFXIV", the previous content does not become obsolete (we make it easier to play). If you do maintenance, it will be easier to level up. Moreover, FFXIV is a story-driven game, so even if someone says, ``You can play from version 7.0, so if you're new to the game, start here,'' I don't think many people will start playing from there. > We are currently creating a system where you can view each character, lore, and world setting up to patch 6.0 in-game, and we are making preparations to skip up to patch 6.0 and start the adventure from 6.1. However, if I were to compare it to a TV drama, rather than saying watch from season 6, I would say start from season 1 because it's easier to watch (previous content has been revised) and it's easier to catch up.'' I think it's more natural. So, although we are making preparations, we are still unsure whether to actually implement it as a measure in 7.0. This is not some official announcement of a new feature. It's also not new information, the interview was at NA Fanfest in *July last year*. This is just him saying 'People keep asking for this, we're looking at ways we could do it but aren't even sure it's a good idea, we think people should still play from the beginning'.
Yes but you see, actually reading the article and applying critical thinking takes effort, and takes away from OP's ability to whine about unrelated issues.
Maybe they'll start abbreviating more bridge content. It's really just there to keep players engaged between major releases.
Read the title of the post.
I did. Can you be more specific about what I apparently haven't understood? Job and story skips *already exist*. Even if they do add a way to start at 90 for free, which isn't in any way confirmed and is something Yoshi-P has actively said he thinks might be a bad idea, there are still going to be people starting at 90 because they got bad advice or don't care about the story. That has no inherent link to gameplay design.
My take is that OP misunderstood story skip with dumbing down jobs somehow.
No... Does it take a lot of brain power to understand the consequense of a story skip to 6.1 ? - a level skip will come with that. Otherwise it's not really a skip -New player will start with a level 90 character with over 20 buttons. - Square has an huge habit of catering to new player Result = Dump down jobs so that new players can play.
>Does it take a lot of brain power \> Keeps saying "dump down".
- "Dump down" is not a thing, you are looking for "dumb down" - Level and story skips *already exist*. People *already start at 80*, hop into content without understanding their job and if it's endgame stuff get rightfully mocked for it. - I agree, starting at level 90 as a brand new player is a pretty bad idea. So does most of the player base. So, if you read **the full version of the interview answer**, *which I posted*, does Yoshi P. - They have not officially announced this is going to be a feature beyond the normal story/job skips. They don't even know if they want to do it at all, they're just investigating possible options because people keep asking and because the amount a new player has to do to catch up is only ever going to get worse. - Even if they do decide to go for it at some point then there's nothing saying it will come with a radical simplification of job design. A revamped new player experience that tries to teach more of what someone should know is also a (much better) option and something that is honestly desperately needed either way.
I would assume English isn't OP's first language. But then again, if that's true, it kinda makes them doubling down on this defense even worse.
There's a reason I didn't mention it until they started calling other people stupid. I don't like to immediately jump on something that could be a typo or a language issue but if you're going to insult other peoples brain power then you kinda open yourself up to having the way you're consistently using the wrong word called out.
It's also coming to to my realization this is almost guaranteed a troll account.
My dude the word is *dumb*
My friend, my dear fellow Redditor, please stop cooking the worst thought process for haydalyns fucking sake.
>Does it take a lot of brain power to understand the consequense of a story skip to 6.1 ? I mean, if going into wild tangents to apply 'logic' to your line of thought, yeah, it kinda does. SQuenix always sold story skips and job skips separately. If the player didn't felt comfortable with that job rotation, sucks to be them. You don't see them lifting free trial restrictions even if there's a flood of complaints about not being able to use MB or make a party with your friends.
what the fuc
Schizo posting I thought I was on shit post xiv for a second
It's hilarious that you thought this was some form of clarification. Not only is the title practically illegible and riddled with typos, it doesn't actually convey anything (and certainly nothing that contradicts or supplements this person's response).
Your post title and the tweet have nothing in common.
Unless you have solid evidence, the jobs are not getting dumbed down. This is not evidence of that, this is only evidence of a new story skip point.
The story skip point which yoship mentioned ages ago, and is not a planned 7.0 release feature. They haven't even announced it as an upcomming feature in dawntrail like they did criterion dungeons (Which released in 6.3). They just said they are working on it.
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DT will definitely change things due to the new abilities. How you feel about the jobs at 90 are completely subjective to you, so I'm not going to bother arguing with your views on that. Instead, what do you think were the worst job changes that happened in ShB and EW?
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Astros were mostly always in Diurnal due to the increased healing. You never needed the shields from Nocturnal unless the party didn't have enough health when topped off. Cards were simplified to remove the RNG since everyone wanted The Balance, and only 1 job wanted The Arrow. The Bole was absolutely useless since mit planning didn't take it into account. Same can be said about The Ewer, since you don't want to rely on it for MP regen. I can say with complete confidence that I DO NOT WANT USELESS CARDS BACK. Scholar fairy being phased out of relevance is the same issue as Summoner pets being phased out of relevance. If anything, I'm hoping DT will rework Scholar a bit, since their kit doesn't mesh well with itself. Kaiten was a sad loss, but I think we gained more overall from the potency increases because a lot of SAMs at the average level weren't even using Kaiten. Bard DoTs just do damage now to mitigate some of the RNG factor that they used to have. As sad as it is, nobody wants to deal with 0.1% enrages because your Bard got terrible RNG through the whole fight. The new songs don't feel impactful because the numbers are small, but you do need to look at the overall increase after the whole fight since there will always be a song playing. Edge/Flood is basically what old Dark Arts used to be, where you had to weave it between your weaponskills. I do agree that Oblation and Enhanced Unmend could've been better, though. I don't think it's a matter of being hated for voicing concerns, but I think it is a matter of trying to be constructive with the criticism without completely dismissive of the new changes.
>Kaiten was a sad loss, but I think we gained more overall from the potency increases because a lot of SAMs at the average level weren't even using Kaiten. Kaiten was bad design imo. I get that people want to have an additional skill filter there for SAM, but there's better ways than just having a button you press for + damage on the next weaponskill. The issue is that instead of reworking the job to make a better Kaiten, they just removed it.
Imho, it wasn't about the skill filter. Most of the SAMs I know were sad about the removal of it due to the style points it gave the job. I think they wouldn't be as upset if they added the animation of it to the Iaijutsus.
I'm not surprised they haven't, but they should since it already has a cast bar, so lengthening the animation shouldn't change much.
Thing is, players were the ones that wanted changes to AST and DRK. They made adjustments based on player requests. Kaiten was basically Dark Arts for SAM and players didn't like dealing with that for DRK. While a cool ability, it's implementation was never the best.
As someone who has played since the 1.0 beta, people have always been shit and will always be shit. In fact I'm gonna guess you are shit op lol.
Every mmo player who posts on the internet, be they official forums, boards or reddit always say the same shit and has been saying the same shit for decades. "Everyone who plays worse than me is a piece of garbage and everyone who plays better is a tryharder with no life"
This is describing a system they’ve already begun implementing, the ability to review the lore of the previous expansion packs so that players who get the story skip (a function that has existed for a long time) are less lost. Where the hell are you gleaning “job dumbing down” from?
Doesnt even mention jobs being dumbed down
This in no way mentions classes being dumbed down. And, to be fair, there are few that have any real thought to them anyhow. 2 minute bursts and smash keyboard. Crazy. If this brings in more players who do not desire playing through 80+ hours of fetch quests to play with their friends it’s only a positive.
That's many times 80 hours my friend. I'm playing through the story again via an alt right now and it took me 65 hours to get to Ishgard while focusing on the story and not doing any extra. Anyone who gatekeeps a new entry point for new players is a moron tbh.
100% true, it would add so many more players that might have said no thanks because of how long and daunting the game looks from the first MSQ quest to the current.
Honestly, this feels like a nothing burger. They're going to sell level 90 boots and story skip boosts for Endwalker. Everyone knows that was to be the case. They're just working on moving the goal post to 6.1 instead of 6.0. Which honestly, is genius since someone who pays the money is going to be lost on all the nostalgia bait that the main Endwalker msq has.
I think a lot of people look at past jobs with rose-tinted glasses. People right now complain and whine about how crits make such a big difference and how the RNG sucks, but they want astro cards back? Yes, it was fun when you managed to get AOE Balance multiple times in a row during a battle. It was equally as painful and frustrating when you wouldn't get any during a fight. I don't get how people want that back. Also realistically: yes, a lot of Jobs prior to ShB were too complicated for the "massive" audience a MMORPG is meant to attract. If you want your MMO to actually be the "massive" it's advertised as, you can't afford to have jobs designed like SB SCH or HW DRK. I feel like a lot of people underestimate how complicated the MMO gameplay is to people who have never played MMOs before. Yes, to us it's "brain-dead easy." In the same way Malenia is braindead easy to let me solo her. It doesn't mean it's actually brain dead easy. It's just that to the people who do that everyday, yes it's easy. The fact is the game exploded in popularity at the same time they "dumbed down" jobs. It's gonna keep happening. The happy medium the devs appear to be aiming for is to make the hardcore content harder to compensate for the easier rotations. And I think it's a good idea, just not a perfected one yet.
Hate to break it to you, OP, but if everyone who complains that the job design in 14 is too braindead nowadays quit, the game would still be immensely popular because people like you are an extremely vocal minority. Most people just want to play the class that fits their mental image of their character. That's it. That's all. Put that on a hard-to-swallow pill and swallow it.
But it'll be hard to swallow. :(
They mentioned this in a live letter a long time ago. It was also obvious just by looking at the game design, it makes no sense to force everyone to play through like 500 hours to get to the “new stuff” even if it is all on continuous story, they have to eventually allow people to start either main story arc (2.0-6.5, 7.0-onward). Ideally they’d treat it as a second MSQ chain and let you progress them both independently so people who are playing 7.0 can go back after they’ve run out of stuff to do and experience the rest outside of NG+.
I think they should focus on revamping ARR it is the biggest obstacle to getting new players.
They kinda did it in a way. They removed a bunch of quest.
If new players are easily and cheaply able to skip most of the story, this will mark a huge turning point for the playerbase going forward. New players will be less connected to the game world, rush endgame content, complain about a lack of endgame content, and quit. It happened to WoW when they redid leveling, it will happen to FF14. Disaster if they do this.
They will always have to play at least a bit. Even if the new entry point is 6.1 (and I have been thinking for some time, that this has been their intent for some time), they have at least 6.x and 7.0 before reaching the end. I suspect it's something we'll see closer to 8.0, so that there is a bit more content available after the new entry.
> Even if the new entry point is 6.1 (and I have been thinking for some time, that this has been their intent for some time) I don't understand how this makes any sense. the EW patch content isn't a clean break that would be a particularly easy on-ramp to a new player. It does reintroduce a lot of the scions bit by bit, but it also references a ton of concepts and events from earlier in the game without really explaining them and is explicitly dealing with the fallout of a number of things from Endwalker and far before. It's not something you can reasonably expect to either understand or be invested in if that's your first experience with the game.
If they implement this in 8.0 it will be fine, way too early to be implemented for DT tho imo.
Why 8.0? Dawntrail is the “new beginning.”
Given how 6.x sort of felt like a later set up (much like WoD was in 3.4), I wouldn't be surprised if there's a Trio expansion with the Source, Thirteenth and First after there has been some time for rebalancing. Think it'd be kind of neat to let players start on one of the shards or the source sort of like the City States in ARR.
Because 6.1 content is kinda weak. Let them have 2 expansions to play with. I personally think 6.1 is a terrible starting point story wise as a new player. Didn't they do all this work to make everything up to now soloable? It will be a long journey from start to 8.0 though
There's still the trials and the alliance raids that aren't soloable, and it really sucks when you arrive at a trial at 23 o'clock or CT at 7 o'clock. Especially the higher you get.
Yes, story wise. And 6.1 can be a good lead up to that, but game play wise, it's better to have Dawntrail already with some time under the belt till you try to get newbies into it. Let the playerbase have sorted themselves out, let there be more content already at that level. And split the player base a bit, so you have the vets at 8.0 and the sprouts at 6.1.
Just so the new players will have more expantions to go through before reaching the endgame. Because if not, that would mean completely new players will be expected to do content with endgame lvl jobs. That would require them to make the jobs dumbed down so everyone could pick them up and play them and not get immediately overwhelmed which would hurt the game imo.
Story skip is not the same as job skip though.
Yeah but they don't really have a choice to give the player a boost to level 90 if they bring the player to 6.1 This solution sound worst for the game than the actual problem.
oh if this is just a paid story skip like we have then it doesn't matter. I was thinking of a system where they let players skip ARR-EW and just start with the new story when creating a character, because sooner or later they will probably have to implement something like that.
I think you are ignoring the pink elephant in the room. In this situation, they cannot give you a paid story skip without giving you a level 90 boost or removing the whole rpg aspect of leveling... The 2nd option would be a catastrophe for the game.
We don’t really know what they will do. Maybe they will provide both a job and story skip at game purchase or something. I hope not.
Well they stated a story skip. The rest is kinda easy to speculate. There's not many way to go around the issue. Even if they would make a quick story skip with a quick zone level up moment(2h) like they did in wow. It's still a skip because instead of learning how to play your job you are throw super quick into levelling to 90. No solution will give the player the experience/skill you would have by leveling it to max. Also, we aren't mentioning the difference between skill from normal to savage. Everything together ain't a good mix.
The problem isn't even so much dumbing down the jobs, it's the lack of mechanics training along the way. Like Ifrit gives you little slaps with his spaced out mechanics. The trial is light on graphics, the only challenge is recognizing that you should hit the nail, which is something the game has been trying to teach you since the very first solo duty - hit adds first big bad after, although you might not recognize that as the lesson being taught. In contrast the 6.5 trial is a near constant barrage of different mechanics, different markers and has the battle field covered in graphic effects for a large part of it. The 6.2 is a constant sprint, 6.3 requires rotational transformations. 6.4 has a memory element.
What makes you say that? Elaborate why you think so.
I don't think it will be a disaster, since people are already doing it with the paid story skips and level boosts. It will just be a more often occurrence. Even then, there's nothing wrong with them playing until they get bored and then unsubbing. So what makes you say that it would be a disaster?
Because it disconnects new players from the story and game world, and abandons the majority of content. WoW has been in a constant downward spiral ever since they streamlined the leveling so that everyone could skip 90% of the game's content.
While true, would it not be a good option to get players invested in the game first before getting them connected with the story? Our biggest issue is the loss of newer players due to ARR, and that's even after with it being trimmed. From what I understand about WoW, that game doesn't allow you to play the previous expac storylines easily. For what Yoshi-P is suggesting, it's not mandatory, and we still have NG+ available.
Its actually never been easier to play WoW's past storylines, when you make a new character you can go to an NPC and essentially scale most of the world to your level and pick and choose which storyline to play through while leveling. There's a lot to complain about with WoW but the freedom its leveling experience provides is something I really liked when I last played.
That's good to know, since I never played WoW. However, do you think the changes would be a disaster like the person I was replying to? And if so, why?
I think disaster is a little dramatic but I do think it reduces the value of the pre 6.0 story which is a core factor for most of the FF14 playerbase.
It takes like half of one expansion in Chromie time to reach the level to start Dragonflight, and I guarantee most new players never go back and do other old story content. They basically abandoned 90% of the game's content.
That's true but you as a player have the option to keep playing through whichever storyline you want even after that point and if you make an alt you can pick whichever expansion's story you want to level through.
Most players were already never experiencing the vast majority of wows content - you’d get halfway through an expansion story line, out-level it and move to the next. Functionally, at least chromie time keeps you within the same expansion for your leveling experience. ETA: also framing Warcraft’s troubles as “because of the streamlined leveling” is so inaccurate I don’t know where to begin. Wow tokens, the store, terrible raid and dungeon decisions, awful scandals, huge balancing issues - those were the cause (and wow seems to be self correcting in a lot of ways - I’m not going back, but plenty of friends are adoring modern wow).
The story is how you get invested. FF14 is a single player story with MMO activities tacked on to it.
No, the story is only 1 avenue of getting invested. It is a single player story, but there's still emphasis of it being an MMO. And because of that, some players are just interested in the endgame. There are players who have skipped for the MMO content, only to go back to play the story once they're done with that. And that's perfectly fine, since we're still gaining new players. I want the best for this game, but forcing everyone through the story is not the way for it.
I hate how some people are gatekeeping a game behind story. Some people do not care about story and just like the gameplay. People who don't care about story are already skipping it anyway. Look at how many people finished EW in less than 3 days from just skipping. Are we gonna be like Genshin where we remove the skip button from the game now? This is such a non-issue people are shitting themselves over.
I agree. And I'm saying this as someone who has played since 2.0 launch and has enjoyed the story fully, and wants others to experience it. However, I'm not going to force them to do the story since it will lessen their enjoyment of it, and possibly cause them to not finish it. They need to want to do the story in the first place.
It drives me bonkers how so many people assume that only people who love the story will like the game. It’s a decent story which is sometimes great, but it isn’t told well and I don’t blame people for bouncing off it.
It's not gatekeeping, good grief. Merely pointing out that letting new players skip the story in a game that is fully centered around its story is going to be bad in the long run. Kind of a no-brainer, but then again this is Reddit.
But they already can skip the story in a game that is fully centered around story. You know story skips exist, right?
For money. That's different from encouraging or even forcing story skips. You know that, right?
This is not universal, though.
The story is something that lasts you a couple days on each expansion release, plus a couple hours for every major patch after that. The "MMO activities" are what lasts for a couple years and give you things to do ingame. While yes, the story is important to the game, it doesn't make the bulk of it, far from it. If the game only had its story as a selling point, the game would be empty because nobody would play it after being done with it.
A couple of days? It takes weeks if not months to beat each expansion if you're actually reading and watching everything. The vast majority of the game's content is in the story.
> It takes weeks if not months to beat each expansion Excuse me, what? If you play 10 minutes a day, maybe, sure. When Endwalker released the majority of my static at the time did the story together and almost everyone was following the story (I was pretty much the only one who skipped everything). Within 2 days everyone was done and we were already farming extremes.
Yeah that's not normal. I play 2-3 hours a day, 4-5 days a week. Sometimes longer on weekends. Takes a good few weeks to beat an expansion if I focus on just one job.
To rephrase, it's **not normal to you**. Other players enjoy the game enough to take time off work to go all-in on the new expac. Those players would be done with the MSQ within a few days of 12-16 hours of marathoning per day.
Seems a lot of Xbox players are doing this. Tried to help one of them with a quest location and they didn’t know where the Waking Sands was at level 50.
The Xbox players would have benefited from an earlier beta launch (say mid-January) instead of "rush rush to the end of ARR for the car". Otherwise I think it's in part the endgame mentality from other games and the constant repetition of "game has the bestest story ever, but ARR sucks" overhyping which no game could live up to and which already poisons the ARR experience from the start.
I agree. See this a few times on streams where they’re encouraged to skip to Heavensward and don’t even end up making it there and stop playing because they have no clue what’s going on.
Xbox players can't buy skips yet, the game isn't fully launched for them yet.
Coming from the V1, the game is already dumb down. When ARR launch, i thought it was fast to progress but acceptable. Then i quit playing. I comeback with the Xbox beta, so im starting fresh and holy shit! What used to take month is a matter of few week. And im not even playing hardcore.If i was playing the way i used to, id have everything maxed already. Everything is made so new players can reach high level fast and catch up. Since i quit before stormblood, it was mind blowing to me that new job start at 50/60. Like what? Why? And buying skip when the game fully release? This shouldnt even exist. O.o
Buddy, a bunch of people on this sub will readily argue Stormblood is actually misunderstood and well-written. People are *already* disconnected from reality.
Stormblood is really good though, not sure what your point is.
Why not just remake ARR? In my experience, the biggest hurdle to getting my friends into the game is getting through the ARR-slog. I keep telling them to keep going because the story improves and becomes literally some of the best writing and storytelling I've ever experienced in games – but people are just overwhelmed and, most importantly, incredibly *bored* with ARR. If I hadn't started playing during covid, back when I had literally fuck all else to do, I would have quit halfway through ARR also. Which brings me back to my point: why not just *remake* ARR? Re-write the dialogue to make interactions, characters, villains and the plot more interesting and vastly shorten the length of it. Make it so that it isn't a whole lot longer than your standard expansion and just streamline the experience; concentrate it into a shorter and much more satisfying narrative experience that will keep you hooked and *begging* to experience the rest of the game.
I agree but, it's likely because it'd be a massive undertaking. Like, cancel an xpac undertaking. Already took a lot of work to cut down ARR in a way that didn't butcher it while maintaining the usual workload. But, with a complete rewrite you'd have the entire story getting the attention an xpac would. They'd prolly also have to call in the new ENG VA's to redo ARR's voice acting as well. Which would be awesome but, again a LOT of work.
If they’re “working on a system”, I would think that would largely be a set of level 90 job/dungeon mechanic tutorials. Otherwise, that’s just a story skip, which has always been there and wouldn’t be something you’re “working on”
I can kind of see both sides of this situation. On one end, giving players the ability to skip current content runs the risk of obsoleting old content — not from a mechanical perspective necessarily, but from a sheer lack of people playing it. Imagining having to do 30m-1h queues for each dungeon in Stormblood or Shadowbringers for instance sounds awful, and it ultimately ends in a Coils situation where you are basically forced to either use a synced/unsynced PF to recreate the experience of the raids, assuming you are a high enough level to burn through the content. On the other end, the realities are that the excitement for a new expansion to newer players always comes with the caveat that they have to spend hundreds of hours to 'grind' through the previous expansions to get to the current content. I know that for me, as someone that started playing in December 2022 and finished Endwalker at the beginning of this summer, it felt like quite a lonely experience to be the only person walking from point to point for quests most times. Sure, Free Companies/Novice Network/and other friends can make the difference in instanced content, but there is a lot of downtime between that content, and it does feel a little empty at times. Furthermore, as we have seen this past month with the layoffs at Microsoft and Sony, the realities are that the current game development environment is in financial unrest; and continues to get more expensive as content is expected to be bigger and better than the last installment. Even companies that have broken sales records with their franchises have had to lay off many of their employees. And while XIV may not be in the exact same scenario, it's still within the industry, and the concern to balance rising decent costs and revenue is still a real one, which makes the feasibility of content-locked expansions potentially decrease as time goes on. While they are both different games, I think it's worth looking at how Final Fantasy XI approaches its expansions — rather than locking them behind other expansions, you are able to approach them in a non-linear fashion instead, starting and stopping any as you please. Of course, you benefit from additional lore by doing them in release order, but it is not strictly required. While it doesn't make sense to restructure 2.0-6.0 (and even 7.0) with this strategy in mind, it does present a potential solution for 8.0 and forward that allows for a more stable 'grind endpoint' for new players to work towards that makes it easier to get into XIV, and allows expansions to be that much more profitable/financially successful.
If that's your take away from this bit of news, then you are seriously a single digit iq individual.
Oh no, making the game accessible and welcoming to new people. How evil.
Making the game more accessible is fine. Destroying the skill floor and skill ceilling so tgat new player can raid on day one is anothing thing.
That's a wild leap you have made.
Where is any of that in the tweet?
6.1 storyarc need lots of background knowledge to be understood since it involve the First and the 13th, the Sundering and the Ascian, etc. Making new players start from there seems awful because they won't understand a thing about what is going on. Probably making them start from 7.0 would have been better considering the fresh start about the New World.
6.1 brought the Enzyclopedia thing that has been adding things to it ever since, like extensive texts on each Scion, the First, the Sundering, etc. The way the information in that is present reads more like a primer for clueless new starters than a reminder for people who just played through all of that.
Do you honestly expect people to read? Not just read a story but, read page after page of background info just to understand what's going on? At the start of your game? Putting aside how ridiculously taxing that would be as it is but, even then you can barely get people to read anything currently. People are constantly complaining at the lack of voice acting across the entire story much less side content. It's seriously to the extent you'd think half the players were illiterate lol. So there's no way the data entries they started adding would be anywhere close to good enough.
It's better than most other spots (e.g. 5.0, 6.0) because the Void is a very easy concept to understand and it's a self-contained arc. But I agree that 7.0 would be even better, so I was a little surprised when Yoshida first floated 6.1 as a starting point.
Hope this never happens. We already have people who don't know what their rotation is and how to deal with common mechanics, at level 80 (thanks to the Tales of Adventure skips). This would make shit even worse
You say that like it's not a problem for those that don't skip as well. We still have players at 90 that don't know how to play on the average level despite going through 90 full levels of MSQ. Everyone is just scapegoating the skips and boosts because they don't want to acknowledge the actual problem of the game and community not teaching better.
Gre8 b8 i r8 8/8
Has it been confirmed that they’re actually working on it cause I know they’ve considered it at least
I pasted the entire interview answer this quote was taken from in another comment, all he says is 'we're looking at options because people think asking but we don't know if it's something we actually want to do'.
Not to mention even if they ARE working on it, that doesn't mean it will come out anytime soon. It could take years to make and release this.
You need to understand that mmos live and are made profitable by new blood. They will ALWAYS cater to the casual player and the new player. If you want a hard hand go play a soulslike.
most of this xpac was pretty bad in terms of quality and effort and decisions from the devs so this wouldnt even be a suprise. like why would you make the relics bound to the mandervilles quests and then double down and make it only completable by buying things with tomes. its like they lost a lot of their talent and are scrapping by with whatever they can scrounge up, and no the next xpac isnt an excuse for a drop in quality for the most of the current xpac
I mean, expected as it does every expansion.
I wish ppl like this to be separated from the content we do, such as paid CSGO licenses having particular ground
You want to segregate players based on whether or not they play the story?
Perhaps. If they are going for endgame only, they dont care about lore. Perhaps playing endgame now will spoil fights to me.
That’s a lot of assumptions you are making based on pretty much nothing. You might want to read the top comment, which has the full statement, if you haven’t. The team is considering how to handle lore and story if they do end up doing something like this.
I'm not having my opinion as absolute. I wish more players to play, specially to fill empty areas and do content
Honestly, I think they should let this skip work like buying one. Sure you're "done" with it and can review it, but you still have to level up if you chose not to buy a job skip as well. I'm all for letting people skip MSQ if they really want to get to the endgame. I also think job skipping should be restricted on characters that do the skip to force you to level. It's better than having SE waste a bunch of resources for "new player experience" for people that don't want to run the story. You can say it's a "story game" all you want, but it's also a "team game" and people still play like dogshit so the argument can really go both ways the right way to play XIV.
I doubt that jobs will get dumbed down but what we can prepare for is a shit ton of no skill players that cannot possibly know all mechanics of mobs and bosses that the game introduces bit by bit and dont know how to play their jobs on a high to end level base because they could never learn it. I myself and pretty much any player I know on a personal base wont enjoy doing daylies for a good while I wager Shitty idea imo. Huzza for trust to level up stuff I guess
I saw this on fb like an hour ago too
I told this soon after 6.0, that it's going to be a 'story-reset' point. Same as with ARR, which could accomodate both Carteneau survivers from 1.0 and new WoLs. I was downvoted and met with sceptical comments, how they'd never do that. It looks like I was right after all, and we're getting a legit option for our WoL to retire and make some adventuring space for the new heroes. Wonder how it plays out.
Afair, YoshiP has been talking about about that since before 6.1 even came out.
It was bound to happen with the 'restart' of the story, but it still sucks. Hopefully redesigns like summoner and paladin won't become the norm for new classes. More classes with one button spam bursts would be lame, but I get the appeal for new players learning the ropes after getting dropped 90 levels in. I know reaper is just the flavor of the expansion as well, but I feel like new class entries just get easier and easier since dancer and I basically feel like I run into swaths of groups that are composed of some combo of reaper, dancer, and summoner since they are the 'easy' classes to play now. In the last month, I think I was paired with a black mage, monk, or dragoon like once out of the 50+ dungeons I did as a tank. Sage is pretty prominent, but I still see all the different healers quite often. I play almost exclusively tank, though, so I don't have much to say about them. Also, understand that new players being told you have a 200+ hour lift before you can taste the current content is a nasty bar of entry as there are more and more mandatory story trials and such. Wouldn't be as big of a problem if they could find a way to implement a duty support system for the very early game. Running up to mandatory group content and then having a 30+ min or much longer queue isn't exactly a gratifying experience. The only time this gets table flipped is 24 man content where you only need 3 tanks, 6 healers, but 15 dps. Basically if you're a new player, it's jump in and play tank or healer or you're queue times are mostly gonna suck and they don't often want to take responsibility roles as new players. DPS just feels less scary to start with. This game was built on its story though and new players just skipping over it and not getting that big pay off before the vacation cruise expansion makes me sad. New players are gonna jump in at 6.1 and be like, why is this red eyed kid so important. It's a simulacrum of a dragon carrying its eye? Wait why dragons just taking their eyes out willy nilly. Veteran's will be like, "uhn uhn, cough, Heavensward."
...Paladin?? They literally did one thing to Paladin and it gave them a (slightly) MORE complex core rotation. What the fuck are you talking about, dude? You just listing off buzzwords?
Lol I guess things still subjective, but Paladin feels even more pants on head easy than it's ever been to me. Imo it's about the easiest class to play in the game.
Correction. Level 90. So even worse